Chapter 26
As the minutes on the clock ticked by, it was difficult to say who grew more restless: Ben or Achilles.
While he’d spent much of the carriage ride from London dreaming of a comfortable seat—or better yet, a bed—he now found it torture to sit still.
His dreams in the carriage had of course involved Violet. How he would invite her into his bedchamber. Help her remove her traveling dress. See her sprawled across his counterpane.
However, Violet wasn’t here. Her sister’s letters had put an immediate end to any thoughts of relaxation or intimacy, and there was no clear time period for when the possibility might return.
She’d insisted on attending to the matter alone, saying it was likely nothing serious, and he hadn’t wanted to force his presence where it wasn’t needed.
If there was one thing he’d learned about Violet over the past weeks, it was that she knew her own mind.
Had he been right, though, to let her go alone when there was a chance of more serious trouble than she’d anticipated?
God, he missed his days at Cambridge when the answers he required existed in books.
But far more significantly, he missed his wife.
Achilles, apparently, disagreed with Ben’s choice to remain in the study and wait, for he’d spent the past quarter hour pacing the floor and whimpering.
Ben tried to console him with scratches behind the ears, but no sooner would the dog drop to his haunches beside Ben’s desk chair than he’d be up and circling the room once more.
With a sigh, Ben tossed aside the ledger he’d been trying—and failing—to read, whistling to the disgruntled creature. “Shall we go for a walk?”
Achilles had already been for a walk in the garden after his dinner, so he shouldn’t feel disgruntled on that account. However, mention of another outing made him perk up instantly, and he padded to the door, giving an impatient whine.
Ben followed with due haste, although he didn’t know why he rushed. Running wouldn’t make Violet come home any quicker or render him any less anxious about why she stayed away. Then again, perhaps a spurt of fresh air would help clear his head—to the extent such a thing was possible.
He let Achilles take the lead, for the elderly dog moved with purpose, giving only the briefest pauses to glance back and ensure Ben accompanied him all the way to the front door.
“Yes, I’m here.” Ben’s attempt at sounding reassuring was so pitiful that even a dog was apt to disbelieve it. “Let’s go, then.”
He swung open the door, Achilles slipping outside the instant the aperture became wide enough and hurrying down the steps. Ben, though, lingered on the doorstep, taking a quick breath. The air contained an odd, sharp smell.
The smell of smoke.
He rushed to the edge of the landing, his eyes darting up to the evening sky.
The setting sun had become a glowing orange ball, the surrounding clouds a vivid pink.
Yet in the midst of the picturesque scene, dark swirls of smoke billowed upward, as if an artist had overturned an inkpot upon his masterpiece.
A pit formed in his stomach while his mind raced to generate a map. The smoke was too far east to originate from Aldercombe land, which meant …
Oh, Christ, which meant it had to come from Watley instead. From the direction Violet would be riding home. From the place she may have stopped.
He whirled to push the door back open, bellowing for a footman to see to Achilles. Then, he took off at a run, bounding toward the stables.
He made it only a little more than halfway before a stableboy came racing up to meet him, his youthful face flushed and harried.
“A fire’s broke out in Watley Hall!” the boy shouted, pointing erratically in the general direction of the catastrophe. “The whole roof’s ablaze. A footman just came with the news.”
A fire at Watley. In the house itself. Damn it, why had Ben let Violet go off alone? She may not even be on Watley property, of course. But she could be. And that was enough to make his heart slam against his ribs.
“Go to the house and inform Pearce. I’ll tell everyone in the stables that they are to go to Watley and offer assistance with battling the fire.
” Ben scrabbled for composure, fighting to maintain the dimmest scrap of rational thought while his mind screamed danger, screamed panic, screamed Violet, Violet, Violet. “But first, I need a horse.”
Given the speed at which Ben traveled, the journey to Watley must have taken only minutes. Nonetheless, each moment that slipped by without Violet in his sight felt more like an hour. An eternity.
Even in his haste, he’d scanned both the road and fields, desperate for any sign of golden curls and a dusty blue carriage dress.
He’d encountered no one, though, but a few anxious laborers.
Had discovered nothing as he approached Watley but the thickening of smoke and the appearance of brilliant flames painting the sky.
Nothing, that was, until he got close enough to witness the chaotic scene in the back garden.
A line of shouting people threw water on flames that were already beyond control, while a group of horrified aristocrats congregated near the lake.
Despite the commotion, though, his gaze flicked to, and then held, a spot in the distance, where a dappled horse grazed.
While it was impossible to make out every detail about the creature from this far away, and there was no way to achieve complete certainty without further inspection, he knew. He knew with a sureness that turned his blood to ice and punched him in the gut: this was Violet’s horse.
He jumped down and secured his own gelding within a matter of seconds, hurtling toward the mess that was Watley’s back garden. His eyes flew over the scene, frantic to catch even a glimpse of the familiar figure who filled his world with brightness.
However, amidst the hazy, noxious landscape, no such figure appeared. There was no one in the bucket brigade but servants he didn’t recognize. No one in the cluster of idle toffs but Denham and his apparent party guests.
With his chest on the verge of splitting open, Ben raced up to the lordling, who was surveying the destruction of his home like a spectator might watch a play at the theater. “Where is my wife?” Ben demanded. “Was she here this evening?”
He barked the words, his alarm far too great to try for any sort of levelness. Yet Denham was silent, seemingly oblivious to anything but the flames whose light was reflected in his pupils.
“Damn it, Denham, answer me!” It took everything Ben had not to shake the man senseless. Did he have no bloody concept of how urgent this was?
Each second of silence boiled Ben’s blood, made nausea churn in his gut. Until finally, the lordling spoke in a low rasp. “She’s inside.”
“What?” Ben roared, his breath, his heart, everything stopping before suddenly kicking back into motion at triple the speed.
“With Arabella,” he muttered, the name stuttering off his tongue as if he didn’t quite comprehend it.
Ben grabbed the lordling by the cravat, forcing the man to look him in the face. “Where inside?”
Denham’s skin was pallid, his expression vacant. “I don’t know.”
With a snarl, Ben shoved him away and turned toward the blazing house, the glow of the flames stinging his eyes.
He’d been in Violet’s position before. Thanks to a barn fire when he was a child, he knew what it felt like to have smoke siphon the air from his lungs. Knew the terror that came when flames closed in and there was no obvious escape route. When one could do nothing but pray for rescue.
His head screamed danger, warning him away from ever returning to that sort of peril. Yet his heart cried something different.
It was his heart that drove him toward the flames.
His heart that paid no heed to caution, not where his wife was concerned, because it knew how shattered it would be without her.
His heart that led him up the terrace steps and pushed him into the smoke-filled house with no other thought but Violet.