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T hey had searched everywhere. Scoured every inch of the grounds and the surrounding countryside. Nothing had passed through one of their road blocks and nobody had seen a blasted thing. To all intents and purposes, Thea and her aunt had disappeared off the face of the earth.

As Leatham and Warriner turned their horses back to the hall to regroup with the others to plan their next move, Gray couldn’t bring himself to turn back. She was close. He could sense her.

‘It’ll be dark soon. We won’t find her in the dark without lanterns.’ Leatham’s accurate assessment was unwelcome.

‘You go back and get lanterns. I’m going to check the grounds again.’

‘Gray—this is madness. We are going round in circles. If she was here, we’d have found her if...’ His friend’s voice trailed off. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Gray had been wrestling the awful possibility to the back of his mind since the search had started. If she was still alive. ‘I’m not suggesting we give up. I know how much she means to you. I’m just suggesting we take a break and fetch lanterns.’

Fetch?

Before pausing to reconsider the unlikely idea that had popped into his head, Gray kicked his horse towards Kirton House, leaving his friends to trail clueless in his wake. Trefor had a nose for Thea. He adored her. Was besotted. He always knew where to find her.

He burst through the door to find his dog jumping with excitement. ‘Trefor—fetch Thea!’

The dog tilted his head and Gray repeated his desperate instruction again, swiping away the errant tear which was making its way down his cheek. As if understanding his master was heartbroken, Trefor nuzzled his hand. Licked it. ‘Please fetch Thea, boy. Fetch Thea!’

Finally, the animal seemed to have an epiphany and dashed out the door, his black nose inches from the ground. Miraculously, he started moving and Gray followed, trying not to hope, but praying for a miracle regardless. When they came within sight of Gislingham Hall, Trefor sped up and then bounded towards the door.

He was sat patiently on the threshold as the three friends finally caught up with him. His tail wagging. Proud of himself that he had understood such an important instruction, while not understanding it at all.

‘It was worth a try.’ He felt Warriner’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s get those lanterns.’ His friend’s enforced optimism was not mirrored on his face.

Inside the house, it appeared everyone was back and, judging by the grim expressions, nobody had located her. Someone pressed a glass into his hand. ‘We’ll find her.’ Harriet’s voice, lacking its usual certainty, cut through the silence of the room. ‘Remember, Thea is fearless.’

She was. She’d been braver than him. And now, thanks to him, she was in danger. His eyes wandered around the room. Gislingham sat with Bertie, utterly distraught. Hadleigh, Warriner and Leatham in the corner, talking in hushed voices. Trying to spare him from hearing the potential truth. Harriet...

‘What the blazes!’ Lord Fennimore almost fell over Trefor, who was sat in the middle of the room. ‘Why does that blasted dog always sniff the air?’

‘Come here, boy.’ But Trefor refused to budge. His head was tilted back, his shiny black nostrils were twitching and he was inhaling deeply almost as if he was in a trance. ‘Trefor!’ Gray patted his thigh. ‘Come here, boy.’

Instead of obeying, the dog began to bark. Agitated and pawing the ground, he stared at Gray for several seconds, then he was off like a shot down the stairs, barking all the way. Trying not to hope, Gray followed him to the Viscountess’s sitting room, watched the dog circle the room with his nose to the rug, then sit and whine outside one of the concealed servants’ doors in the panelling.

Praying for a miracle, he pulled it open. ‘Fetch Thea, boy!’ He watched transfixed as the dog hurtled along the passageway as if he knew exactly where he was going, when Gray knew for a fact neither of them had ever set foot here before. ‘This way!’ he bellowed the instruction to Hadleigh, who had followed them downstairs. ‘Bring lanterns! And guns!’

Alone, Gray followed his dog, trying not to get impatient each time the animal paused and quietly sniffed the air, instead making a fuss of him while repeating the command, Fetch Thea , in case he got waylaid by any other scent or distraction as he was prone to do. At the boundary of the spitting Colonel Purbeck’s vast estate, Trefor sat, then began to pace a slow circle, his sensitive nose never leaving the ground.

As the others all arrived bearing light and weapons, and, in the Viscount’s case, canes, he motioned for them to stay well back, not wanting their scents to contaminate whatever trace of Thea’s intoxicating jasmine remained.

After an eternity, during which Gray’s heart loudly hammered in his head because he was too frightened to breath out, Trefor set off again. He ran for a good quarter of a mile towards the strange house, then Gray watched the animal disappear down what appeared to be a genuine pothole.

Caro froze at the sound of an animal’s whining. ‘What’s that?’

‘A fox, I think.’ Or, please God, a dog. A black one with floppy ears and an irritating, deceitful master who Thea had been silently willing to find her since she had been frogmarched out of Caro’s cloying, soulless sitting room. Now that it was dark outside her aunt was becoming more twitchy, craning her ears at every sound and constantly unlocking the heavy oak door, checking outside for her rescuers.

‘It’s a long way from midnight. They won’t be here yet. Why don’t you sit down?’ They were apparently coming along the brook, an irony that was not lost on Thea, and would smuggle Caro out on the water. A plan that had been made over a year ago. A plan that had been rehearsed repeatedly. How could such things happen in such a quiet corner of Suffolk and someone with as suspicious a nature as Thea’s not notice? Clearly, she had atrocious instincts all around.

Caro began to pace again, her finger never leaving the trigger. ‘I hate foxes. I wish the damn thing would shut up.’ Absently she tossed the heavy key on the rickety table where the only lamp burned. The key Thea had been desperate to get her hands on since they had arrived. ‘They’ll be here! It’s more than their scurvy lives are worth to double-cross me! They know that.’ Another mantra the woman kept repeating, as if reassuring herself of her own power. ‘I’ll have the lot of them killed!’ She pulled out the timepiece again, stared at the dial and then snapped it shut, oblivious to the scant few inches Thea had managed to move closer to the table in the brief bit of time. ‘They’ll be here. They’ll be here.’

The animal whined again and her aunt instinctively started towards the door to investigate, allowing Thea to shuffle closer to the key.

‘Not so fast, dearest!’ The barrel raised again as her aunt spotted what she was up to. ‘Sit still and stop being a nuisance, there’s a good girl.’ The key disappeared back into her pocket again accompanied by a smug smile.

‘Gray will come for me.’ Despite wanting to hate him, Thea knew that in her bones. ‘His men have probably blocked every road. They will search every property.’ At least that is what she guessed government agents did. ‘They’ll have boats on the water, too. I’ve never seen so many Excise Men.’

‘He’ll be too busy clapping your uncle and his molly in irons to give you a second thought and, by the time he does, I’ll be long gone. You were a means to an end, dearest.’

True, but aspects of his behaviour last night kept niggling. The fervency. The selfless passion. He had thoroughly adored every inch of her and not allowed her to repay him. The intense emotion swirling in those troubled, wolf-like eyes. Almost as if he hated himself for lying.

Just remember I love you. Always. No matter what. No matter how dire things are or how bad they seem.

Well, things were about as dire as it was possible for them to be, so dire that she was now clinging on to the pathetic hope that he at least cared enough about her to come looking. In the meantime, all she had to do was stay alive and find a way to get either that key or the gun.

‘If Gray doesn’t come, then Mr Hargreaves will. He’s in love with me.’ Seeing as patience, cunning and obedience had failed to give her any chance to escape, she might as well try riling Caro. The woman was already quite irrational. In anger, she might make a mistake and provide an opening. Thea knew only too well how irrationally an angry mind behaved. ‘He told me so only last week at your garden party. He wants to marry me. Which is odd, considering he warms your bed, don’t you think? Perhaps it’s your age that’s putting him off?’ A gentle kick in her Achilles heel. ‘Men always prefer a younger woman. Especially as they all want to sire a son.’

‘Shut up!’

‘Why? I have nothing to lose, do I? Seeing as you are going to kill me regardless, I might as well be honest in my final hours. I have no cause to spare your feelings now, nor am I particularly inclined to. Let’s face it, you were a means to an end to Mr Hargreaves. He wanted a way to get close to me and your pathetic desperation to be adored by any man in possession of a pulse allowed him to do it. He mentioned he hated your wrinkles...’

‘I said shut up!’ Her aunt had stalked forward, the pistol pointed menacingly. Refusing to be cowed any longer, and mindful that she couldn’t make any sort of move glued to the floor, Thea stood defiantly.

‘Do you know you’re pitied by all our neighbours? They all whisper about you behind your back. The poor barren Viscountess. How sad . Nothing going for her except that once- pretty face. If only they knew the whole truth. That the only way you could get any man to marry you was by blackmail! Do your loyal men know that? I’ll bet none of them turns up to save you. Why would they? You were nothing but a means to an end.’

As Caro lunged, Thea went for the gun, holding her aunt’s arm to the side to avoid getting shot. She felt the other woman’s fingers in her hair, felt them twist and pull hard, heard the ominous click before the trigger was squeezed, then saw bright light as her head was smashed against the wall.

Except the bright light never went. Out of it came Gray. He barrelled into her aunt and sent her sprawling on the floor amid what sounded like frantic barking alongside the ominous gunshot.

Thea couldn’t see what happened next through the streaming army that followed him into the icehouse. Lanterns, noise, more barking as she swayed, struggling to focus on the sea of moving faces swarming in front of her.

‘We’ve got her!’ A stranger. Her aunt’s howl as she struggled. Muffled as they overpowered her.

Trefor’s pitiful howling.

‘Good grief, is that blood?’ Her uncle.

‘He’s wounded!’ Lord Fennimore. ‘Leatham! Get a physician!’

Finally, the scene came sharply into view.

Gray. Face down. Unmoving.

Time stood still.