He was obliged to call out several more times, before the sound of running feet at last answered him. They came from the side of the mansion, and belonged, he saw in a moment, not to either of the stable boys, but to one of the maids.
“My lord!” she gasped, as she caught sight of him. “Oh, my lord, thank goodness you are come!”
Quick alarm gripped him. Keeping hold of the horse’s rein, he moved forward. “What is amiss, girl?”
“Her ladyship!”
Raith’s heart stopped. With a claw-like hand, he seized the maid’s arm as she came up. “What has happened to her ladyship?”
Wincing, the girl panted out her frantic news. “Gone, my lord!”
Hoarsely, his mind blank, he repeated it. “Gone?”
“Aye, sir. Mr Kirkham — he found the front door open. He asked us all if we done it. Only no one didn’t know nothing about it, my lord. Then Mrs Fawley, she thought of her ladyship. Joan went looking for her, my lord, and she weren’t nowhere to be found. Every one of us has been out this half-hour and more, searching.”
Raith heard her with a mind incapable of any form of action. Only one solid thought drummed insistently in his head. Rosina had left him.
Vaguely he noted the maid’s round eyes popping at him. He must seem a very ninny. But her amazement was differently explained. “You’ve gone all white, my lord.”
Raith made an effort to pull himself together. He held out the bridle. “Take this. Where are they looking?”
The maid accepted the horse’s rein from him, and pointed towards the front of the house. “All the way along the woods, my lord.”
A sudden distant shout arrested Raith’s attention. He strode forward a few steps, and heard answering calls. The maid, he found, had kept pace beside him, leading the horse.
“Likely they’ve found her, sir!”
“Keep hold of my horse! I’ll send one of the boys directly.” Then he was running.
He was operating on the instinct of command, the long years of campaigning shifting into play. An officer in battle did not think. He took an instant survey and acted. Raith met the oncoming figures of his servants, and took in what they said without stopping to consider what they meant, or to bandy unnecessary words.
He barked orders, handing away his whip, hat and gloves. With effortless remembrance, he sent someone to attend to the needs of his horse back at the stables. Then he followed without question the direction indicated towards the apparent whereabouts of his wife.
But unlike a charge in the field, where the same burst of energy was demanded by the exigencies of warfare, he was driven here by an undercurrent of desperate need because Rosina’s safety was in question. When at last he came upon the woeful figure, huddled in a heap against the trunk of a tree, he froze for an instant of stopped time, torn between relief and dread.
She was shivering, and her hair had come loose. But she panted as if with heat, and the black eyes were glazed. She was bent forward over herself, her hands hugging her stomach. Then he saw the blood.
