It Happened One Autumn (Wallflowers #2)(98)

“Yes, milord.”

Striding to his study, where Hunt had been questioning the servants one at a time, Marcus entered the room without knocking. He saw Hunt seated at the broad mahogany desk, his chair angled to face a housemaid who perched on the other chair. She struggled to her feet at the sight of Marcus, and managed to bob a nervous curtsy. “Sit,” he said tersely, and whether it was his tone, his harsh expression, or merely his presence, she burst into tears. Marcus’s alert gaze shot to Simon Hunt, who was staring at the housemaid with a calm, terrible tenacity.

“My lord,” Hunt said quietly, his gaze unswerving from the maid’s streaming countenance as she wept into her sleeve, “after interviewing this young woman—Gertie— for some minutes, it has become apparent that she may have some useful information to share regarding Miss Bowman’s undisclosed errand this morning, and her subsequent disappearance. However, I believe that a fear of being dismissed may be inducing Gertie to hold her silence. If you, as her employer, might provide some guarantee—”

“You won’t be dismissed,” Marcus said to the maid in a hard voice, “if you tell me your information at this very moment. Otherwise, not only will you find yourself dismissed, I will see to it that you are prosecuted as an accessory to Miss Bowman’s disappearance.”

Gertie stared at him with bulging eyes, her weeping fading rapidly as she answered with a terrified stutter. “M-mi lord…I-I was sent to give Miss Bowman a message this morning, but I weren’t supposed to tell no one…she was to meet in secret, in Butterfly Court…and she said if I was to say a word of it, I would be sacked—”

“Sent by whom?” Marcus demanded, his blood teeming with fury. “To meet with whom? Tell me, damn it!”

“I was sent by the countess,” Gertie whispered, appearing awestruck by whatever it was she saw in his face. “By Lady Westcliff, milord.”

Before the last word had left her lips, Marcus had left the room, charging toward the grand staircase in murderous fury.

“Westcliff!” Simon Hunt bellowed, following him at a dead run. “Westcliff …damn you, wait…”

Marcus only quickened his pace, taking the stairs three at a time. More than anyone on earth, he knew what the countess was capable of …and his soul was smothered in a black cloud of horror at the knowledge that—one way or another—he might already have lost Lillian.

CHAPTER 24

Lillian was aware of being jostled with irritating repetition. Slowly she comprehended that she was being conveyed in a carriage, swaying and jolting over the road at high speed. A terrible smell saturated everything…some kind of potent solvent, like turpentine. Stirring in confusion, she realized that her ear was pressed hard against an unyielding pillow stuffed with some highly condensed substance. She felt so horribly ill, as if she had been poisoned. With each breath she took, her throat burned. Nausea spread through her in repeated waves. She moaned in protest, while her clouded mind worked to disentangle itself from unpleasant dreams.

Cracking her eyes open, she saw something above her…a face that seemed to dart out at her and disappear at random. She tried to ask something, to find out what was happening, but her brain seemed to have been disconnected from the rest of her body, and though she was vaguely aware of speaking, the words that came from her mouth were gibberish.

“Shhh…” A long-fingered hand moved over her head, massaging her scalp and temples. “Rest. You’ll come out of it soon, darling. Just rest, and breathe.”

Confused, Lillian closed her eyes and tried to harness her brain into some fragile imitation of its usual process. After a while, she connected the voice to an image. “Sainvincen…” she mumbled, her tongue not quite moving properly in her mouth.

“Yes, love.”

Her first lurching impulse was one of relief. A friend. Someone who would help her. But the relief turned hollow as her instincts shuffled in restless warning, and she rolled her head on what turned out to be St. Vincent’s thigh. The nauseating smell overwhelmed her…it was in her nose and on her face, the fumes stinging her eyes, and she lifted her fingers to claw at her skin in an instinctive attempt to scratch it off.

St. Vincent caught her wrists, murmuring, “No, no…I’ll help you. Put your hands down, love. There’s a good girl. Drink some of this. Only a sip, or it won’t stay down.” The nozzle of something—a flask, a skin, a bottle, perhaps—pressed against her lips, and cool water trickled into her mouth. She swallowed gratefully, and held still as a damp cloth moved over her cheeks and nose and jaw.

“Poor sweet,” St. Vincent murmured, wiping her throat, then moving to her forehead. “The idiot who brought you to me must have given you twice as much ether as was needed. You should have awakened long before now.”

Ether. The idiot who brought you to me …The first glimmer of understanding came to her, and Lillian stared up at him hazily, perceiving only the lean outlines of his face and the color of his hair, dark gold like the gilding of an antique Slavic icon. “Can’t see…” she whispered.

“That should improve in a few minutes.”

“Ether…” Lillian puzzled over the word, which sounded familiar. She had encountered it before, in some apothecary shop or another. Ether…sweet vitriol…used as an intoxicant, and occasionally as an aid to medical procedures. “Why?” she asked, uncertain if her uncontrollable trembling was the result of ether poisoning, or the realization that she was lying helpless in the arms of an enemy.