“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 15

Adrian found the dogs alive and the gates open and his wife gone.

It was the open gates that he could not make fit. Everything else he could read: the wet prints on the terrace steps, the lamp oil in the corridor, the poker on its side by the bed and the small dark smear on the doorframe where something or someone had caught the edge of a hand. All of that was a picture with a shape.

But the gates were open, and the dogs were alive.

“Fenwick,” Theo said, from behind him. “It has to be. Wren could not walk this estate in the dark without getting lost in the rose walk, let alone find his way to the kennels.”

“He would not have needed to.” Adrian picked up the lamp the man had dropped. It was a common brass thing, cheap, unmarked — not from this house. “He knew where the dogs were because someone told him. And he knew where I sleep.”

Theo said nothing.

“What time is it?”

“Half past three.”

Adrian stood in the doorway of his own bedroom, holding a stranger’s lamp, and forced himself to be a man who was thinking rather than a man who was drowning. It took more than he had.

“She is not to be found by me losing my mind,” he said out loud, to himself, in a voice that did not entirely obey him. “What do we know?”

“We know they took her as leverage, not as a target.”

“Because if they wanted her dead they would have done it in the room and saved themselves the carriage.”

“Yes.” Theo’s face was tight. “And we know they cannot hold her far away, because the further they carry her the more witnesses they collect.”

“So it is somewhere on the estate. Or just off it.”

Adrian went down the stairs four at a time.

The search was conducted in the way of people who have never had to search for anything before, which is to say badly and by lamplight. They went through the stables and found the bay still boxed and the boy Jem asleep in the hay. They went through the outbuildings and found nothing but a broken cart and eleven sleeping chickens. At four o’clock Theo took four men and the carriage and went to the village to wake the constable.

At half past four, alone in the hall, Adrian found the letter.

It had been slid under the library door and it lay white on the dark boards, folded once, addressed to him in a hand he recognized from a letter written thirty years earlier and read the night before.

Sinclair — Bring the necklace and the papers it contained to the old mill at Wren’s Corner. Come alone. If I see a second man or a second horse, you will not see her again. You have until first light, after which I will assume you have made your choice.

C.

Adrian read it twice, the way he read everything.

Then he went out to the stable, and saddled his own horse, and woke Jem to tell him he was going out, and told him also — very clearly, in the calm flat voice of a man giving instructions he fully intends to have obeyed — that in one quarter of an hour he was to run to the village and tell his master’s cousin that the Duke had gone north to Wren’s Corner, and that he was not alone no matter what he had said.

And then he rode out into the rain, because he was not going to be a man who obeyed.

The mill stood where the river bent around a shoulder of birch wood — a roofless shell of stone with one wall leaning out over the water and a great wheel standing dead against the sky, dripping.

Clara was inside.

He saw her from the ridge: a small figure lashed to a chair in the open center of the floor, head down, hair loose and black with rain, skirts spread in a pool on the flagstones. There were two men at the door, standing under the arch where the mill’s own crumbling masonry gave them shelter, and both of them had their collars up and their faces turned against the weather.

Adrian dismounted in the birches and went the rest of the way on foot.

He had not expected that he would be afraid.

He had been afraid in his life: at nineteen, in a street in a foreign city, when a knife came out of the dark and the crowd did not move; at eleven, at the top of the north stair, when his mother’s voice broke in the middle of a sentence and never entirely went back together. He knew the taste of it. He had thought he was prepared.

He was not prepared. What he felt, crouched in wet birch scrub with rain running into his collar, was not that old metallic fear of what might happen to him. It was a mortal, animal panic that had no bottom to it, and it was for someone else.

There is no version of the rest of my life in which she is not in it, he thought, quite clearly, in the middle of the mud. There is no version. It cannot be done.

He went in.

Theo came out of the dark at a run, forty yards behind him, and later neither of them could explain how he had got there so quickly; Adrian had a private theory, which he never voiced, that his cousin had disobeyed him from the very start.

Cranmere was standing at the back of the mill where the lantern light did not reach, holding a stick, wearing the coat he had worn to his father’s funeral.

“You came alone,” he said.

“You said to.”

“I said to, and I did not believe you would, which is why I brought my secretary.” The old man moved forward. He looked smaller here, in the rain, out of his drawing room and away from his fire. “Where is it?”

Adrian held up the necklace, chain swinging.

“It is here. Let her go.”

“Papers first.”

“No.”

The two men at the door stirred.

Clara lifted her head.

She looked awful — a bruise coming up along her jaw, rain-soaked, one sleeve torn at the shoulder. And her eyes were open and clear and entirely, furiously awake, and she was looking straight at her husband, and she shook her head, once, and mouthed something he could not read and did not need to.

Don’t.

“I can see her,” Adrian said pleasantly. “You have not hurt her worse than you had to. That was sensible of you, because I want you to understand what happens if I walk out of here without her.”

“You are in no position to describe consequences, Sinclair.”

“I am in the only position that matters.” Adrian stepped into the lantern light and let the old man see his face. “I have the ledgers. I have the letter from Gideon Hale. I have a living witness in a shop in another county who has written a sworn statement, signed and witnessed, and which is currently in the hands of a solicitor in London. And I have, in my waistcoat, the list out of this necklace, with your family name on it, underlined twice, in a dead man’s hand.”

Cranmere went very still.

“Give me the necklace,” he said, “and I will burn the claim against the will. You have my word.”

“Your word.”

“Yes.”

“Say his name,” Adrian said.

The rain drummed on the broken roof.

“Gideon Hale,” Adrian said. “Say it. Say what you did. In front of her, and in front of your man, and in front of the sky. That is the whole price. That is all you have to pay, and it is not one hundredth of what you owe.”

For a moment — for one moment — the old man’s face came apart. Something moved behind the garden of it, something old and tired and almost grateful.

Then he said, “No.”

“Then we will do it the long way,” Adrian said, “and you will die in the middle of it.”

And that was when Theo hit the water wheel.

Nobody ever worked out exactly what he did or why it worked; the wheel was dead, the race was choked, and the whole structure had been one hard frost from collapse for a decade. But Theo had spent his boyhood doing precisely this kind of thing in precisely this kind of ruin, and he found the pin, and he pulled it, and nine feet of wet oak shifted an inch and a half with a scream of rust.

Every man in the mill turned toward the noise.

The lantern fell.

Adrian was already moving.

He went through the first man with the flat of his forearm and the second with his shoulder, and Wren — the secretary, the old coat, the man who had stood in this room in wet wool and done what he was told — dropped his lamp and ran for the door rather than lift a hand. The floor was burning where the oil had gone, in a thin bright spreading line along the flagstones.

Clara had already tipped her chair sideways.

She hit the ground hard on her shoulder and rolled, and the ropes were slack enough at the wrists that she got one hand free, and then Adrian was there, hauling her upright, cutting the rest with a knife he did not remember drawing.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Go.”

They ran out through the fire and the ruin and the rain, and behind them Cranmere was standing in the middle of the floor of his own crime, in his funeral coat, not moving, not calling out, watching them go.

Theo met them thirty yards down the track with both horses and a face like a man who had aged four years in ten minutes.

“The constable?” Adrian said.

“Coming. Two miles behind me, with six men and a cart.”

“Good.”

“He will be too late.”

“He will be exactly on time,” Adrian said, “because we are going to go back and hold that man until he arrives.”

They did.

Cranmere was arrested before dawn in the burned-out shell of Wren’s Corner mill, standing in the wet with his stick in his hand, and he said nothing at all on the ride into the village — not one word, not even his name.

The claim against the will collapsed in eleven days.

It collapsed because the list came out, and the ledgers came out, and Fenwick came out — eighty-one years old, in a hired chaise, in a hired suit, sitting in a solicitor’s office for four hours and signing his name to every page. It collapsed because the Duke of Ashbourne did not need to prove murder to prove fraud, and because when the Lord Chancellor’s clerk eventually read the file, he wrote one line in the margin that was later much quoted in the county:

The estate appears to have been systematically plundered for a period of eleven years by parties now before the court. There is no question for this court to try. There is only a question for the Crown.

What the Crown did about it took two more years and never quite arrived. Edmund Cranmere, Viscount Cranmere, was eighty-seven when he died in a warm room with a fire in it, which was what he had predicted all along, and which he had also, in the end, come to want.

Clara and Adrian went to see him once, in the second year, in the house at the end of the drive. He was in the same chair. He did not apologize. But when Clara stood up to leave, in the doorway, he said — in a voice so low she nearly missed it, so low that Adrian, at the window, did not hear it at all —

“Gideon Hale was the only honest man I ever employed.”

And Clara stood there for a long moment with her hand on the door.

“Then you should have said his name when you had the chance,” she said.

She never told her husband. It did not seem worth carrying home.