Page 50 of The Wordsworth Key (Regency Secrets #3)

‘I met the two boys you sent. We’d better hurry. The doctor will be anxious to know you are safe.’

Dora got up and brushed off her skirts. ‘Hadn’t we better wait for help to arrive for Mr Barton?’

Langhorne gave a dismissive glance at the tent. ‘He looks safe enough. Let me take you to the shore and I’ll come back and show the stretcher team where to find him. They’re gathering at Birthwaite– it is only a few minutes’ sail from here. This isn’t the place for a lady.’

She rubbed her arms, uncertain. He seemed strangely unruffled by having just shot his friend. There was something distinctly ‘off’ about him. ‘I’m not sure that’s the best course of action.’

‘If you’re so worried, let me check on Barton. I’m sure he can be left for a short while but if you want reassurance…’

In her gut, Dora knew she didn’t want Langhorne anywhere near the vulnerable man. Her instinct was that he wasn’t innocent, that the radical young men had been plotting something that had gone awry. Until she could work out who was at fault, she had better get him away from here.

‘No, no, you’re right. If you would be so kind as to transport me to the shore, you can fetch the medical team.’ And she would have others to appeal to for help.

He nodded. ‘Good. I’m glad you see reason.’ He kneeled and put the rifle next to Knotte. ‘We won’t need that, will we? Not now the killer is dead.’

‘I… er… suppose not.’ Despite him surrendering his weapon, all her alarm bells were ringing; her one fixed idea was to remove him from where Barton lay in his fever dreams.

‘Lead the way.’ She followed Langhorne to where he had tethered his boat, her mind revolving like the bobbin on a spinning wheel collecting the threads together. If Langhorne was involved in this, she wondered how many of the friends had been part of the plot.

‘Where did Knotte get the tent, do you think?’ she asked as Langhorne walked along the branch to get into his boat.

‘Lieutenant Crawford lent it to him. He knows Knotte sometimes sleeps out as he couldn’t afford an inn.’

‘Do you think he knows Mr Knotte was hiding Mr Barton from everyone?’

‘I doubt Crawford could keep a secret like that, but we must ask him. Mind the step.’ He handed her into the boat.

She agreed with him on that. Crawford would’ve told Cooper at the very least, but neither of them seemed interested in Wordsworth’s poetry and she believed that a genuine ignorance.

It couldn’t be them patterning attacks after an autobiographical poem they’d never read.

Moss? Unless he was playing the role of agent provocateur, he was theoretically trying to stop the attacks, not carry them out. That left…

Langhorne pushed off from the island and began calmly rowing. ‘Everything all right, my dear?’

‘Yes, thank you for rescuing me.’ No, it bloody wasn’t.

He’d just coolly shot his friend. Either he had just killed his co-conspirator or he was the only murderer in the crew.

It was always hard to believe that the beast lay beneath the veneer of civilisation, but the signs were there, weren’t they?

Of the circle, Langhorne was the one who pushed the furthest in jokes and in his approaches to women.

He was crude and, now she thought about it, angry.

She remembered his remarks about their college days.

She had thought Knotte might bear a grudge being on the lowest rung of student, but perhaps it was the one in the middle, seeing the rich swan around in their fancy robes and flaunting their privileges, that bore the greatest animus?

He was the one whose father had taken the biggest drop in social prestige; Knotte by contrast was likely grateful for his chance to rise.

The dropped rifle by Knotte’s body suddenly made new sense now.

Langhorne was staging it so that everything could be blamed on the man he’d put beyond speaking.

She could imagine what he’d tell the rescue party on the shore– oh, the poor madman, killing his friends, trying to drown Barton; Knotte had been confused, unstable; he’d ended it all by topping himself. Case closed.

But that meant she was now a loose end as she’d witnessed the shooting. Her insides turned to ice: she was in a boat with a murderer who would not hesitate to get rid of her. She really had done it now; Jacob was going to be furious.

‘What is going on in that pretty head of yours?’ asked Langhorne. He pulled hard on the rudder, spinning them in the direction of the middle of the lake, not the bank.

As much as she wanted to give in to her terror, that would get her nowhere.

Was there anything to be gained by pretending to be ignorant?

Or could she brazen this out? An ignorant Dora still needed drowning; a worldly Dora, one who presented herself as knowing but hardened to murder, an ally, might stand a chance.

Dora gave him a cynical smile and prayed she was making the right choice. ‘I was merely wondering, sir, how you managed to attack them all and lay the blame on Mr Knotte?’