Page 27

“Do we know you?” Jude asked.

She lifted her veil, and Jude heard Maggie mirror his gasp.

They never caught Lady Tabitha, though she’d left a note confessing her plan to murder her brother and uncle. The magistrate had discovered it during a search of the house, and immediately sent out a party to capture the woman. But he had been unsuccessful. Some said she’d escaped to France, others said she’d gone to the America. But they were all wrong. For here she stood in Jude’s drawing room.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Lady Tabitha said. “I’ll be leaving England soon, but I could not go without seeing you first, Lord Cadwell.”

“Me? Why?” Jude asked.

“It’s about my sister, Theodora.”

Jude stepped in front of Maggie. “Please, if you are here for vengeance, keep my wife out of it. She had nothing to…”

“I’m not here for vengeance,” she said. “I’ve had my vengeance against the man who killed my sister.”

Jude was shocked at how well-spoken and calm Lady Tabitha sounded—just like when he’d known her in her youth. But that was before Theodora’s death—before Lady Tabitha went mad.

“What are you saying?” Jude asked. He could hear the tremble in his own voice.

“That day you dueled with my brother the first time, it wasn’t your gun that hit Theodora. It was Tobias’s.”

“No, you’re wrong. I saw her…you saw her.” He couldn’t finish his sentence. The image of Theodora running toward her brother in an effort to get him to drop his pistol and then tumbling to the ground. “My bullet hit her in the back. It went right through her.”

“No. Tobias’s bullet hit her in the stomach and went right through her. It narrowly missed me. I was behind her, remember?”

He recalled Lady Tabitha’s screams and the anguished look on her face, but the rest was all Theodora. All he had ever seen since that day was her limp body, lying in a pool of dark-red blood.

“Tobias bragged about it many times. He’d talk about how she was a harlot for marrying you and how she deserved to die. He’d outwitted you, and his only regret was that your peers acquitted you. He wanted to see you hang. He hated you. I hated him for what he’d done to Theodora. I hated being a prisoner in his house. He fed me powerful plants every day for years—ones that would make me see the strangest things and fill me with fear and fury. I’d spit and rage and tear at my hair to try and get away from the creatures that tormented my mind. But the worst monster of all was my brother. I thought I’d be his prisoner forever. Then, one day, not long before you arrived in Dorset, he moved me to our uncle’s house without explanation. That’s when everything changed.”

“But how did you get away from your caretaker, Mrs. Norris?” Maggie asked.

“Mrs. Norris developed a penchant for brandy. I think Dorset bored her, or maybe it was my uncle’s house of horrors that sent her to the bottle. Either way, she let her guard down. Escaping her wasn’t difficult.”

“And the pistol?” Maggie said.

“A young redhead gave it to me. She’s the one who told me about the duel too. My uncle’s favorite, I believe. She had special privileges. He trusted her with the keys to the rooms. She arranged for two of the girls to keep the footmen at the gates occupied, while I hid in the garden and waited.”

“Then you didn’t kill any of the footmen?”

She shook her head. “The girls gave them some sort of herb that made rendered them unconscious, at least for a while—enough time for everyone to escape.”

“I…I don’t know what to believe,” Jude said, still feeling the shock of what Tabitha had told him. He’d lived with the guilt of Theodora’s death for so long that he could not trust this new information.

“Believe me,” Tabitha said. “Tobias was an evil man, as was my uncle. He killed Theodora. I hated him. That is why I left the note, confessing what I had done. I wanted the world to know who killed him. And I’m sorry you had to live with the guilt of his sin for so long. And now that I’ve set everything right, it’s time for me to go.” With those words she turned and left. Jude was too stunned to try to stop her.

“Lady Tabitha wasn’t mad,” Maggie said, gazing after the woman in disbelief. “The poor creature. Imagine being imprisoned by your own brother, forced to take substances that made her see things, and then made to listen to him brag about what he’d done to their sister…” She turned to Jude and touched his arm. “And to you.”

Jude heard the anger and heartbreak in her voice, but he was still too stunned to feel any outrage. He walked in a daze to the sofa and sank into the soft leather.

“Jude,” Maggie said, coming to sit beside him. “Are you—”

“Shh,” he said, pulling her close, “let’s not talk. Let’s just sit here for a moment.”

She rested her head against his chest, and Jude closed his eyes, taking in Maggie’s sweet rose scent. He breathed deeply and a sense of peace wash over him. For the first time in years, he felt free to love wholly again.