The Secret Pearl(122)

“I’ll take you back to that inn,” he said. “You can rest there.”

They were inside the carriage again, without her having any memory of having walked there.

“I didn’t know it would be like this,” she said. “At first I did not think a great deal about him. I was too concerned about myself. I did not even have many nightmares. And then I thought that perhaps he had deserved what happened, though I was sorry. And in the last week I have known that I must come here, must see his last resting place. But I did not know it would be like this.” Her hands were over her face.

“You will be able to lie down and rest soon,” he said. His arms were about her. One hand had loosened the strings of her bonnet and tossed it aside. He had her head cradled on his shoulder, his fingers smoothing through her hair. He was murmuring to her.

“I didn’t want him to die,” she said. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

He secured two rooms for them at the posting inn, rooms far larger and better-appointed than those they had occupied the night before. There was a private parlor between them.

“I want you to lie down for an hour,” he said, leading her into one of the bedchambers, taking her by the arms, and seating her on the bed. “We will have a late dinner together. I want you to sleep.”

She obeyed the pressure of his hands and lay back against the pillows. He removed her shoes for her. She felt numb, still not quite in touch with reality.

“You will want to remove your dress, perhaps, when I have left,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I have a few calls to make,” he said. “I will be back.”

“Yes,” she said. It did not occur to her to wonder on whom he would be paying calls in a part of the country that was quite strange to him. She closed her eyes.

And felt his lips touch hers briefly before he left the room.

She must have slept, she thought. It felt as if she had been gone for a very long time, though she was still wearing her dress, she saw, and he was standing over her as he had been when she had closed her eyes. And indeed there was a candle burning in the room, and darkness beyond the windows.

“I thought you would have given me up for lost long ago,” he said. “I thought you would have eaten and sent my dinner away cold already. Have you been sleeping all this time?”

She looked at him, dazed. The right side of his mouth was curved into a smile. His dark eyes sparkled down into hers. She was lying on an inn bed, she thought, the Duke of Ridgeway standing over her.

“I have some good news for you,” he said. “You had better not stand up until you have heard what it is. Or even sit up, for that matter.”

“Good news?” she said.

“You have not killed anyone,” he said. “By deliberate intent or by accident or by any other means. You did not kill Hobson. The man is still alive somewhere, doubtless with a great deal of Brocklehurst’s money in his pockets.”

She stared up at him, at the strange bizarre dream that had just walked into her sleep.

“The only thing that is buried in the cemetery here,” he said, “is a coffin filled with stones. It seems that our man was merely stunned by the hearthstone, Fleur. You are quite, quite free, my love—free of the noose and free of your conscience.”





THEY DINED VERY LATE. THE DUKE HAD NOT expected to be gone quite so long, and Fleur had not expected to sleep so deeply.

“I really did not expect that anything would be done until tomorrow at the earliest,” he told her as they sat down to eat in their private parlor. “I reckoned without the curiosity and zeal of Sir Quentin Dowd.” Sir Quentin, he had told her, was the local magistrate. “I believe he would have dug up the whole graveyard single-handed if there had been no servants on hand and if I had been unable to show him the exact grave.”

“But what made you suspect it? I don’t understand.” That was a phrase she seemed to have repeated many times in the course of the day, Fleur thought.

“Why would one not wish to have a man buried either in the place where he died and was known or in the place where his family lived?” he said. “Your cousin seemed to have had a choice, and yet chose neither. In fact, he went literally out of his way to have the burial carried out in a strange place, where neither of them was known.”

“Someone might have wanted to see the body?” she said.

“I would imagine his family would have insisted on it,” he said. “And perhaps a few of the servants at Heron House or Hobson’s friends in the neighborhood would have expressed the wish too. Your cousin could not risk that happening. He did not cover his tracks well, of course, and he told conflicting stories to various people. But then, I suppose he did not expect that anyone would be curious enough to do any careful investigating. Eat up.”