“Mr. Martin?”
“You remember, Mr. Lewis Martin, the Bow Street Runner?”
“The friend of our Uncle Aidan,” Lakehurst clarified. Then he laughed. “I remember that bone-shaker horse he rode when we realized you and the other ladies could be in trouble!”
“Yes,” Gwinnie said.
Lakehurst looked at her and thought he detected a slight pink on her cheeks. Was that from the sun, or was she blushing at the mention of the Bow Street Runner? “You’ve been in the sun too long, Gwinnie, even with your bonnet. You’re starting to burn,” Lakehurst said, gruffly, dismissing the idea of Mr. Martin and his sister.
“We should hurry back to Malmsby House. I don’t want to play at a concert with a bright red face. I would clash terribly with my hair,” she quipped lightly.
“Do you have one tonight?”
“Yes. A musicale performance for Lord and Lady Dunwittie. Last of the season.”
“Ugh. Dull set,” he said.
“Yes, but we get to play anything we want. Some of the requests from the hosts of our other musicale performances are horrid.” She scrunched her face in distaste. Lakehurst laughed.
“And my players could use the money to see them through a quiet summer,” she added.
They turned the corner onto the street that ran before Malmsby House.
“I’m going to go in through the mews,” Lakehurst said. “Don’t want to have to answer any of Grandmother’s questions, which she is bound to have.”
“I agree. I’ll go with you,” Gwinnie said.
They stepped into the cool confines of the mews lane and made their way to the back entrance to Malmsby House.
“I feel like a naughty child sneaking into the house,” Gwinnie said.
Lakehurst laughed. “But our intentions are good.”
Gwinnie slid him a sideways glance. “Are they? Is purposefully avoiding Grandmother good?”
“Matter of interpretation, my dear sister. Simply a matter of interpretation.”
CHAPTERFOUR
More Questions, Few Answers
“But, Mama! Mama!” Alex wailed. He twisted within this mother’s grasp. “Mama!” he yowled, tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks.
All around them, people stared at Cassandra and her son. Cassandra marched resolutely on, neither looking to the right, nor left, nor attempting to calm Alex. Her own mind was in a whirl of emotion. If she’d been six years old, she’d likely be howling as well, she thought.
But she wasn’t. Her lips compressed in a thin line against her own tears. She hitched her son up in her arms higher, then reached up to pull the mourning veil she’d had gathered up on her bonnet brim back down over her face.
She could not believe Lord Lakehurst had written that book!
He had to have been there. He had to have been! Even if he didn’t kill Richard himself, his participation in their sick rites made him culpable. Especially as the others who’d been there had disappeared like wraiths in the night when the monster, that spawn of Satan, stabbed Richard. Richard had died draped across her. It seemed like hours before Carlyle, the oldest Darkford family retainer, found her, tied to the stone altar, in pain, covered in her husband's blood, and nearly hysterical with worry for her son whom, after he’d fallen asleep, she’d shut in the priest’s hole in the upstairs sitting room for his protection.
Richard had ordered the staff away that night while he’d had his entertainment. Typically, she and Alex visited Baron and Lady Loftbridge on the nights of her husband’s parties. She and Lady Loftbridge had become friends during their London season and had been delighted to discover their married homes would be nearby. She and Alex had planned to stay the night with the family in Wells until shortly before they were to leave, a message arrived to tell them not to come. There was an illness in the Loftbridge household.
Thinking she and Alex had nowhere to go, her husband had advised her to stay in her suite of rooms with the doors locked and to keep Alex with her. His friends could become rowdy, he’d explained apologetically, and in the throes of celebrations, were wont to lose theveneerof society they typically wore, he’d told her with his wry grin.
“My Lady,” an out-of-breath Dulcie said as she ran to catch up with Cassandra. “Do you want me to take his little lordship?” she asked. “’Tis not seemly for you to be carrying the child.”
Cassandra paused to look back at her. “That will not be necessary,” she said crisply. She saw a man in a heavy greatcoat behind them. She frowned as she turned back and hurried on to the Darkford townhouse. Odd. She’d seen the same man sitting in the park. She noticed him because of his coat, an article of clothing surely too heavy for one of the first warm days they’d had this unusually cool and rainy June.
