Prudence hunched up a shoulder until it nearly brushed her ear and gave him a coy, sideways glance. “I thought perhaps you would see more clearly if she wasn’t at your side every moment, tempting you to sin.”
“If you left Willa in the rose garden, she would have returned to the castle by now.”
“Must you go after her?” Then, after a glance at his face, “Perhaps she’s twisted her ankle.”
“Did you injure her?”
“Certainly not,” Prudence said, her voice taking on a peevish tone. “She was in the rose garden with that animal of hers. We had … words and look what happened.” Her eyes flashed with rage. “That dreadful little creature lifted its tail and—and urinated on me! On my feet!”
“Sweetpea must have felt threatened.”
“I should have broken its neck,” Prudence said with venom. “Miss Ffynche chased after that animal when it ran away.”
Alaric looked at her, a hard look with menace behind it.
“I kicked it,” Prudence said sulkily. “After which, I left Miss Ffynche in the rose garden, searching for her filthy animal.”
Alaric had no reason to believe a single word she said, but he might as well search the rose garden. “Do not leave this room,” he ordered.
“How could I?” Prudence demanded, dropping back into her chair and slipping her feet into the water. “I reek, thanks to that horrid animal!”
In the hallway, Alaric stopped a footman and instructed him to stand outside Prudence’s door and not allow her to stir from the room. Then he ran downstairs and out of the castle to the rose garden.
It was deserted. The house-party guests were in their bedchambers, engaged in lengthy preparations for the evening meal.
Significantly, the garden smelled just as it should, though the scent of roses seemed sickening to him now. If Sweetpea had sprayed Prudence here, the smell would linger.
Prudence had lied.
As he moved between the beds, trying to decide where to look next, he suddenly noticed that the door leading out to Lindow Moss was ajar.
Throughout the chaotic years of his childhood and youth, almost no rules had been in force for him and his siblings. One rule, however, was inviolable: the door leading to the Moss was to remain securely closed at all times for the safety of the duke’s children.
That hadn’t stopped them from exploring the bog, but they always, always closed the door behind them. Now, as he stared at the half-open door, he felt a deep uneasiness.
Surely Willa wouldn’t have followed Sweetpea down the path into the bog.
If she had stayed on the path, she was almost certainly safe. They would find her. If she had ventured into Lindow Moss, she was in peril, and there was no time to waste. It only took a second to make up his mind: He pushed the door fully open and surveyed the undulating peat sea.
Before it claimed Horatius, the Moss had simply existed, a part of his world. Now it seemed animate … malevolent.
Planks rocked slightly under his feet as he walked, his eyes searching in every direction for any sign of Willa. If Prudence had pushed her from the path into the bog after Sweetpea’s defensive volley, the planks would smell, but the only odor was the stink of peat.
Willa would never leave the path on her own. His heart thudded a dark rhythm in his chest as the wooden path zigzagged, following sturdy ground.
Then he caught it. It was just a whiff, traveling on a faint breeze. He stopped and turned in a circle, trying to identify the direction of the odor. The castle was almost out of sight, a spot on the horizon with the sun sinking above it.
He’d lost the odor entirely, so he strode on, willing another breeze to come. Some moments later he caught another whiff and then the smell grew ever more pungent until he spotted a small black-and-white animal on the edge of the path.
Alaric’s heart bounded. He crouched down and Sweetpea ran straight to him and launched herself into his hands. She stank to high heaven, but she was alive and evidently unhurt. Her paws were muddy, so she must have ventured off the plank but been smart enough to get herself back on and wait for help.
She had been lucky not to have been discovered by a hawk. Thinking of that, Alaric tucked her into his pocket.
Willa was lost in Lindow Moss. He was certain now. The truth of it clawed at his chest. Could Prudence have struck her on the head? Dragged her body into the bog? He refused to lose another person to this infernal place.
They had never found Horatius’s body; the bog hole where his horse was mired fed a swift running river under the Moss. Sometimes bodies reemerged, but most didn’t, trapped below the surface and never seen again.
He turned again, even more slowly, and peered across the bog.
Fifty yards from where he stood, a straw hat was floating in the water.
For one sickening moment, he pictured Willa still wearing the hat, her face—all of her—beneath the surface of the Moss.
Agony wrenched his gut before logic overruled his imagination: Willa was not under the hat. She had fled into the bog, doubtless in the face of some threat of Prudence’s.
Alaric stepped off the plank.
She had left the hat as a sign for him, clever girl. Now that he was actually in the bog, his pulse steadied. Willa may have been fleeing from Prudence, but she was cool-headed. She would never run blindly.
She had dropped her hat to give him a starting point, and she trusted him to understand what she would do next. There was no question but that she would run toward the peat cutter’s hut visible in the distance.
Bending over, he spied the imprint of a small heel. Breath exploded out of his lungs. Thank God, her shoes had heels; it would make it easier to track her.
He kept going, examining every tuft of moss or grass carefully. At some point Willa stopped running and began moving more deliberately, which made it harder to follow her, as her feet struck the bog with less force. Paradoxically, her caution put her in greater danger: bog walkers should always keep one foot in the air.
Several times he found she’d had to retrace her steps, looking for solid ground. He followed the faint traces of her footprints. At one point, he came upon a scrap of white lace snagged on a gorse twig. When he found another, and then a third, he knew she’d deliberately planted the scraps to guide him.
The lace trail was heartening, but ice still ran through his veins. It would be so easy for Willa to make a fatal mistake.
She started along a bright ribbon of sedge grass. Following it, he followed her. The deep part of his soul knew that he would follow her anywhere. For all the days of his life, the blades of grass that bent under her foot would bend under his as well.
She kept going, turning and twisting on her way to the hut. He was having more and more trouble following her path; the light was fading and he kept losing her trail.
All the same, hope was pounding through him now. The low walls of the peat cutter’s hut were coming closer and closer.
Five minutes later he reached the moss-covered door. He thrust it open without knocking.
The hut was deserted.
Chapter Thirty-two
Alaric’s heart sank as he looked around the small dark room. There was a pallet to the side, so he knelt and shaped the rough blankets into a nest. He plucked Sweetpea from his pocket and put her in it.
She looked up at him, eyes bright.
“I’ll be back,” he promised. “I’ll be back for you, Sweetpea.”
She made a churring sound and curled up, her tail flopping over her nose. Alaric shut the door behind him, stepping into the darkening landscape.
Somehow he’d missed her. He’d made a mistake. He refused to imagine that he missed her because she had fallen into the bog, sunk without a trace.
Not Willa. Not his Willa. She was no Horatius, impaired by alcohol and trying to save his horse like a great, crusading ass.
All the same, panic raged through his veins, accompanied by fury at the filthy bog that had taken Horatius and put Willa in danger.
As he searched the horizon, looking for any sign of her, two lapwings flew over the peat in a mating dance, circling and falling back again, whirling up into the dark blue sky.
When they were boys, he and his brothers had been forbidden to enter Lindow Moss—so naturally, he, Horatius, Parth, and North treated it like their personal playground. He knew this land. Yet he hadn’t gone near Lindow Moss since Horatius’s death.
As his eyes followed the swooping flight of the lapwings, he realized that Horatius wouldn’t approve. As the eldest son and future Duke of Lindow, Horatius had claimed the bog as his own.
He would have scorned Alaric for pretending it didn’t exist. For shunning the place. No one loved tales of their ancestor, the first Lindow to conquer the bog, more than Horatius.
Abruptly, the words of a Meskwaki wise man came back to Alaric: “We love the land that is ours. We are part of the land. If we fear it, it will swallow us.”
He had spent eight months living with native peoples in the Americas, hunting with them, dancing with them, eating with them. He had learned from them that blades of grass have a language of their own.
But at that moment Alaric grasped that the more important lesson was that this was his land. He was one of the Wildes of Lindow Moss. This land was his family’s, and had been for centuries. His land would talk to him. But not if he deemed it a violent entity aiming to murder the woman he loved.
Taking another deep breath, he let the perfume of peat and wildflowers sink into his skin. His land. His bog. His moss.