I wondered if breathing was part of that. I then saw the sudden change in the boar’s stance. It pawed the ground sending clumps of bloodied sod and flesh into the air, then charged.
The silence of the forest exploded in a series of loud shots as Brodie fired—once, twice, three times and still the boar charged.
It caught me at the knees and rolled me as he fired twice more, followed by the sound of thrashing through the elder brush just beyond where I lay. Then silence.
Brodie moved past me, followed that bloody path into the underbrush, then returned.
“Is it dead?” I barely recognized my own voice.
“Are ye hurt?” Brodie returned the revolver to the waist of his trousers. But I barely heard him.
“Is it dead?” I demanded.
“Are ye hurt?”
He was there, kneeling beside me, hands at my arms as if he would shake a response from me.
“No!” I shouted, then tried to push him away with that sudden need to get away from the blood and gore.
He held on. “Are ye certain yer not injured? Mikaela?” Urgent this time, pulling me back from the fear and the blood and gore.
I nodded. “I’m certain.” Although my skirt had not fared as well, and I realized just how dangerous the encounter had been at the long tear in the fabric, no doubt caused as the boar charged.
That dark gaze met mine, and I saw something else there—fear.
“Aye,” he eventually replied. “Let’s get ye on yer feet. We need to get back to the manor.”
I glanced past him at the carcass of the boar, bloodied from bullet wounds along with remnants of that body nearby, those beady eyes still staring quite dead now.
I was wobbly and started to shake. Brodie pulled me against him.
“I’ve got ye.”
He held onto me, his beard brushing my cheek.
“Ye are a troublesome baggage, Mikaela Forsythe.” The hand that stroked my hair shook slightly.
“I’ve been told that.”
We stood there for several moments, holding on to each other in the silence of the forest.
“Yer certain ye are all right?” he asked again. “Can ye stand?”
I assured him that I could, then glanced past him to that mutilated body.
“Sir Collingwood?”
“So, it would seem from what is left of him.”
He went to the body then, crouched down, and made several observations in spite of the condition of the body.
“He’s been dead verra likely since that night he was found to be missing. However, it would seem that the beast that attacked ye was not what killed him.”
There was the distinct odor, the body already beginning to decay. Or, what was left of it. It did seem that the boar wasn’t particular about that.
He lifted the edge of Sir Collingwood’s jacket. “Knife wounds, several of them, undoubtedly the cause of death. And then the body was left for the animals to have their way, perhaps with the hope it would never be found.”
That changed everything as far as our inquiry was concerned.
