Chapter Twenty-Three
“It is a trap, Neil. You know it is a trap,” Simon argued, voice fraying with a panic he could no longer disguise. “You cannot even think of going alone. We must inform the authorities at once.”
Neil said nothing for a long moment. Time had become elastic since Simon had come crashing back into the house, cradling Jenny like a fainting thing and shouting of kidnap and murder and Lord Bramwell.
In truth, only hours—mere hours—had passed.
The ransom note had arrived half an hour since, thrust into his hands by a wide-eyed urchin who had no notion of the dread he carried.
Neil’s fury, white-hot in his veins, had not subsided. He was beginning to think it never would.
The fury that burned through Neil’s veins had not ebbed.
If anything, it smouldered hotter the longer he stared at the letter.
Jenny lay upstairs, tended by the physician and Aunt Harriet; Lord and Lady Farendale had retired in terror with their daughter.
Neil kept forgetting that they were here at all. He supposed that it no longer mattered.
The ransom note was spread out on the desk between him and Simon. Two curls of hair, bound with twine, lay beside the letter. One curl was thick and glossy, a rich chestnut colour, and the other was thinner and paler.
One was Maggie’s. The other was Emma’s. Proof, the note claimed.
Neil stared at the locks as if they held some living cry.
A curl of hair proved nothing, he told himself.
Hair could be taken from the dead as readily as from the living.
The thought made his stomach roll; he was obliged to turn from the desk and stare out through the rain-beaded window until the room stopped tilting.
It was raining—again—water sluicing down the glass. The lawn below had become a sodden mire, tracks of frantic feet marring the turf; searchers had tramped every inch. Carriage marks were found in the lane behind the wood: a plausible route of escape. Plausible, and horribly insufficient.
But the note answered the most urgent question—to where?—with an ugly neatness.