Page 10 of A Lady’s Guide to Murder

CHAPTER 9

A Fugitive Duchess

Bareback and astride, Henrietta galloped along the riverbank towards Twyford, her hair blowing behind her, her skirts whipping around her legs. For a fortnight, she’d yearned for a ride and she didn’t enjoy the gallop any less simply because it was a fugitive’s flight. There was nothing like exercise for organising her thoughts and there had never been a time in her life when her mind had been in more desperate need of organising.

In the moments when Hawke had stared at her in the parlour, before he’d turned to look at the river, she’d accepted the truth. Edmund had been poisoned. Her father and brother had been concealing that from her, and if she hadn’t been living in a fog of grief and anxiety she would have realised it sooner.

She also realised exactly what Edmund had been trying to say just before he died. Not ‘my dear sweet killed me’, as Hawke thought, but also not a disconnected jumble, as she’d assumed. Edmund had been trying to tell her he had ingested poison in his wine. At last, she understood.

But who would have killed him? And why? And how to uncover such a truth, when all the circumstantial evidence was stacked against her ?

By going on the run she would appear even guiltier, but the stakes were too high for passivity. She must discover the real killer. She would not climb the gallows for the crime of another.

Her thoughts flew as fast as her horse’s hooves. It was Edmund’s glass of wine – not the bottle – that had been poisoned. The bottle had been opened in the library by Edmund himself. He hadn’t drunk any wine or eaten anything after their visitors had left. Which meant that the killer was one of the three men in the library.

Perceval certainly had motive. Marlow might have. In both of those cases, Henrietta could believe she might even have been framed, for neither would shed a tear if she were hanged in his stead. And what about James Beaucastle? She couldn’t dismiss any possibilities.

She composed a mental list of suspects and motives as she approached the Bath Road, and turned back towards London.

There was Perceval, Edmund’s heir, ever in need of money, who hated both her and Edmund, and who clearly believed he’d gain immense wealth and power from Edmund’s death. Moreover, he’d been so very shocked and furious about the contents of the will …

Then there was Lord Marlow, Edmund’s political rival. Perhaps the viscount hadn’t been as pleased with the private meeting as Edmund had thought. Furthermore, Marlow had despised Henrietta ever since the day after the garden tryst, when he’d arrived at Severn House expecting bedsport, only to be dismissed instead. Powerful men didn’t like being spurned. They didn’t forget it, either.

And then there was James Beaucastle, whose name Edmund had uttered immediately after mentioning the poison. There was no love lost between Henrietta and James, and he and Edmund had quarrelled dreadfully the day before Edmund’s death.

After a moment’s more reflection, she decided to start her investigation with James, since his estate was an easy distance. But first, she must disguise herself.

On the edge of the Maidenhead Thicket, two miles back towards London along the Bath Road, stood a respectable but shabby hostelry catering to labourers and farmers. Three years earlier, a torrential downpour had forced Henrietta and Edmund to spend the night under its roof. The innkeeper and his wife had been so overcome by the presence of a duke and duchess at their establishment, they’d outdone themselves to make Edmund and Henrietta comfortable, despite reassurances that warm food and dry sheets alone would be adequate. The next day, Edmund had repaid them so generously they’d wept over his hands and on two or three occasions afterwards, he and Henrietta had stopped for a cup of tea, much to the delight of the innkeeper, his wife and their grown daughter, who was around Henrietta’s age.

This was the inn to which she now fled, knowing the innkeeper would aid her. Once she was effectively disguised in the daughter’s clothes, with her wedding ring on a string round her neck and tucked into her bodice to conceal her identity, and her carriage horse exchanged for a sturdy cob and saddle from the innkeeper’s stables, she’d travel along the Bath Road towards the lowering sun. There would be no need to rush, since she wanted it to be well past dark before she arrived at the home of James Beaucastle. And in disguise, neither magistrate nor that horrid journalist would ever find her.

From a thicket of trees, Theo watched Henrietta Percy reemerge from the small stone inn about a half an hour after she’d entered it.

He raised his eyebrows at the sight he beheld, for the duchess had transformed herself into a country maiden. A straw bonnet topped her long blonde waves, still loose down her back. Her silk mourning gown was gone; in its place she wore a cornflower-blue frock with embroidered daisies along its scooped neckline. Its hem was some inches too short, displaying her elegant black half-boots. She hadn’t changed them, but as she walked towards the stable she stepped in mud and muck, possibly to disguise the fine workmanship of her footwear.

Theo shook his head in reluctant admiration. Henrietta Percy was a clever one, he’d give her that. He would have recognised her anywhere, of course, but he doubted it would enter anyone else’s imagination that this golden-haired girl was the Duchess of Severn.

But gone was any shred of his sympathy for the woman. It seemed all too likely that she was a villainess, out to save her own beautiful skin rather than face the consequences of what she had done.

As she vanished into the stable, he took a deep breath. He couldn’t allow his assumptions to dull his attentiveness. He must be alert. What did the duchess intend to do next? Run to an accomplice, perhaps? Bolt to a lover? Flee to France or America?

Whatever her plan, he would be there to witness it.

By the time she exited the stable astride a stout brown horse, now with a saddle, he was back on his own mount, reins gathered and ready to follow wherever she went. He let her get a solid lead down the Bath Road, to the west, because, thanks to his hawkish eye, he needn’t follow too closely.

She’d never know he was there until he chose to reveal himself.