Cody held his palm up, refusing the offer. “I take it the poison is out of her system.”
Brandon inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke slowly. “Yes. She’s weak now, but that is more the effect of Martha’s physic than any lingering effects of the poison. Martha believes she will be well by morning. Aurora’s fortunate she was able to taste the poison so quickly, else she may have drained her glass. Who can say how much more she needed to drink before she was beyond help?”
Shannon had no answer for the rhetorical question he posed. She went to Brandon’s side. “You’ve cut yourself,” she said, touching her finger to a long, ugly scratch on his jaw.
“Have I?” He lifted his palm and felt the scratch. “It must have happened when I set Aurora on her bed. I think she caught me with her ring.”
Shannon took a kerchief from beneath the fall of lace at her elbow and erased the trace of blood from Brandon’s jaw. “Please, come, sit down. You look as if you are ready to drop. Was it very bad?”
“Bad enough,” Brandon said tersely, taking a seat at the table. “She had convulsions.”
Shannon slipped a saucer for Brandon’s ashes in front of him. “Convulsions? A seizure, you mean?”
He nodded. “I don’t understand it,” he said softly, speaking as if no one else were in the room. “I was so certain…I thought after the fall…But this? To go so far? It doesn’t seem possible.”
Cody put his hand on his brother’s arm. “What are you saying, Bran? What doesn’t seem possible?”
“What? Oh, nothing. It’s of no consequence.”
Cody started to say something, but the quick negative shake of Shannon’s head warned him against it. He slumped back in his chair.
“Will you send someone for Sir James?” she asked.
“On the morrow, if Aurora wishes. I doubt anything will come of his presence.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” sighed Cody. “We must catch the culprit ourselves. It is the only way to prove our innocence.”
Brandon ground out his cheroot. “How is Clara?”
“She’s sleeping now,” Shannon answered. “She doesn’t really understand what happened. She only knows that her mother was very ill. What she witnessed frightened her.”
Robert and Molly Whittaker chose that moment to return to the dining room. “Aurora’s resting comfortably,” Robert said. “Molly and I will take our leave now.”
Brandon stood. “Who is with her?”
“Martha. She plans to spend the night in Aurora’s bedchamber.”
He took a step forward. “Aurora’s wrong, Dr. Whittaker,” Brandon said evenly. “She knows as little about who poisoned her as Cody and I. The accusation she flung at my head is a false one.”
Dr. Whittaker’s thin face was impassive. “She told me upstairs that you planned this to force my hand.”
“Force your hand?”
“Frighten me into granting the divorce lest you kill your wife instead.”
“That’s absurd! I don’t want Aurora dead!”
“Neither do I,” he said solemnly. “Your wife does not want a divorce, Brandon. She has opened her heart, admitted her sins, and begged forgiveness.” For a heartbeat his eyes shifted to Shannon. “Perhaps it is time you do the same before another of God’s commandments is broken.” He took his wife by the elbow. “We will see ourselves out. Come, Molly.”
Brandon did not move until he heard the outer door close, then he took Aurora’s glass from the table and flung it violently across the room. Droplets of white wine, like tears, slid slowly down the wall and were given sound by the sob Shannon could not bite back.
The scarlet plumein her riding hat dipped and swayed as Aurora dismounted in front of the former trysting cottage of William Fleming and Hannah Grant. She secured Pilgrim to a broken fence post at the side of the cabin before letting herself in the cabin’s only door at the front.
Parker glanced up from polishing his rifle stock as Aurora swept in the room. He regarded her lazily, his heavy lids half-closed, one brow arched upward in surprise or amusement. “You’re looking well,” he said. “I confess I had not expected to see you this soon, or perhaps I have miscounted the days. Wasn’t it just above a week ago that you were poisoned?”
Aurora tore off her riding gloves and threw them on the table in front of Parker. “How did you know when it happened? Oh, never mind. I doubt that you’ll tell me the truth anyway.” She glanced around the dreary cabin, wondering, not for the first time, how Parker could like spending so much time in it. It seemed ridiculous when he had known all the comforts of Belletraine that he should actually appear to enjoy laying his own fires in the stone hearth, or preparing his food on a spit he had fashioned himself. The single bed, with its feather tick lumpy and matted from the damp, stood against one log wall. Parker had evidently risen not long ago, because he hadn’t attempted to straighten the quilts and blankets that were scattered on the bed. It was the only thing in the room that was not in order. Parker had meticulously arranged his kettles and skillets from largest to smallest on the hearth’s broad mantel, and his few items of clothing were hung on large nails he had driven into the wall at the foot of the bed. His scrupulous neatness grated on her nerves. There was an obsessive quality about Parker that never failed to give Aurora pause.
“I wasn’t certain if you would be here. So often it seems I ride out and you are elsewhere.” Aurora warmed her hands by the fire, then turned her back on it and lifted her skirts to take the chill from her backside. “It occurs to me that there should be more honesty between us, Parker. If there is someone at the folly who is in your employ, then I should know who it is. We are, after all, working together.”
