Death at Fournier Downs #2
For some reason, Audrey always felt guilty when people spoke of her “love match” with Philip.
He’d whisked in at the eleventh hour, stealing Audrey from Bainbury with all the flare of a man in love.
But it hadn’t been love between her and Philip; it had been a safe agreement between longtime friends.
Besides, Philip was a duke. Even Audrey’s mother could not complain…at least, not publicly.
Audrey pushed Fortuna onward, into the woodland, around trees, trying to spot her friend again. Soon, she pulled on the reins, discouraged.
“I think we’ve lost her,” she told Fortuna. Her stomach twisted with worry. Charlotte had to have been running fast to have disappeared so quickly. Ladies never run.
Not unless they are in trouble.
A curl of unease worked its way through her, and she tried to ignore her instinct.
“Let’s keep on,” she said to Fortuna, leading her mount forward again. There was a trail ahead that would take them back to the stables at Fournier House. Perhaps that had been Charlotte’s destination?
A scream rent the air, followed immediately by the shrill ruckus of ravens cawing. Audrey whipped around in her saddle. The ravens were still at it, their cries coming from deeper in the woods. Heart pounding, mind racing, Audrey tugged Fortuna’s traces and started in the direction of the birds.
“Charlotte!” she shouted as Fortuna wove between trees. Something had happened. Her friend was in some kind of danger. Had she crossed paths with a wild boar protecting its piglets? Or a lynx, or some other wildcat?
The ravens beat their wings, darting overhead through the thick green foliage.
Audrey aimed Fortuna in their direction.
Soon, the alders, pines, and white beams began to thin.
Fortuna deftly leaped over a downed pine and Audrey drew her to a hard stop.
Ten yards ahead, the land dropped off into a craggy open pit.
This was the old citrine quarry, one of Philip’s ancestor’s enterprises that had not withstood the test of time.
Audrey breathed heavily, the utter stillness of the wood unsettling.
A single, sharp caw from a branch above jolted down her spine.
A lone raven spread its wings and leaped into flight, soaring over the quarry’s edge.
With shaking legs and arms, Audrey dismounted.
She held the leather traces a few moments longer than necessary.
“Charlotte?” she called, though her choppy breaths made her voice sound wheezy.
She didn’t want to go to the edge. Didn’t want to look down into the open pit where, if memory served, blocks of rock lay scattered as scree at the base of the abandoned quarry. Intuition loomed like the black belly of a rain cloud.
Audrey could mount her horse and ride back for Fournier House.
She could gather a group of footmen and stable boys and lead them back here, and they could then search for Charlotte together.
But she knew in her heart that would be cowardly.
Last April, she hadn’t backed down once on her quest to prove Philip’s innocence. It had nearly gotten her killed.
“Stay,” she told Fortuna, and then with as much false nerve as she could gather, went to the edge of the quarry. The drop was at least a hundred feet.
Audrey swallowed a scream and covered her mouth. Far below, Lady Charlotte, the Countess of Bainbury, lay broken. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t moving. Her red hair had fanned around her like a halo of radiant light in a sacred painting. Blood splashed the rocks near her head.
Behind Audrey, a stick snapped. She dropped her hands from her mouth and turned, but it was only a pair of red squirrels skittered up a tree, chirping at one another.
Fortuna loped toward her mistress, perhaps sensing need.
Audrey, her legs weak, took her by the traces gratefully, and mounted swiftly.
“Come, hurry,” she whispered, the sensation that she was not alone in these woods crackling along her skin with rushed impatience. “We have to get help.”
She dug in her heels and rode back toward the path to Fournier House, her eyes stinging with tears. It would be too little, too late. There could be no help for Charlotte now.
“Cor, is there anything out here what’s not grass, sheep, and trees?”
Seated on the bench across from Hugh Marsden, the young street urchin stared out the carriage window with a sneer of disgust.
“Are you really complaining about the countryside, Sir?” Hugh asked, suppressing a grin.
It wouldn’t do to let the boy know that he found him more amusing than he did vexatious.
Hugh had asked Sir to come along with him into Hertfordshire for practical reasons, but he couldn’t deny that getting him out of London for a week or so would be good timing.
Not only were the rookeries in London little more than rank stink pits at this time of the summer, in the last few months the street gangs had been ramping up in violence.
Sir had come around with a few black eyes, and though the lad wouldn’t breathe a word about what happened, Hugh could easily guess.
Sir had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the gangs; unfortunately, gangs didn’t generally like being refused.
Sir sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. “Strange, is all. There’s too much sky if ye ask me.”
“And not enough pockets to pick, I imagine,” Basil, Hugh’s valet, muttered.
“Aw, come off it, Baz, ye know I don’t do that trick no more.”
Basil gave a roll of his eyes and adjusted his spectacles. He’d insisted on joining Hugh, even though he’d been told it wasn’t necessary. Multiple times.
“I will not have you presenting yourself to a viscountess without a properly tied cravat,” the aggravated valet had said.
After that, Hugh didn’t put up much more of an argument.
Basil was serious when it came to cravats.
The man ran Hugh’s household and small staff, which included a cook, Mrs. Peets and a maid, Greta, who came in a few times a week to tidy and do the wash.
Basil also hadn’t had a holiday in ages, and Hugh suspected he wanted a bit of fresh country air now that London’s own had turned humid and stale.
Not that this would be any sort of a holiday. A woman was dead. Her mother believed there had been some foul play.
Yesterday, Hugh, a principal officer at Bow Street, had been called into Chief Magistrate Sir Gabriel Poston’s office. The magistrate slapped a letter onto his desk and gestured toward it in his rough, no-nonsense fashion.
“You’ve been hired to investigate a death.” He’d gone on to explain what little the letter had provided.
Lady Bainbury, the Countess of Bainbury, had been found dead. Her husband, the earl, was claiming it was an accident. The countess’s mother, Lady Prescott, refused to believe it. She had been advised to send for Officer Hugh Marsden by none other than Her Grace, the Duchess of Fournier.
Audrey.
Her name, written in black ink scrawl, had loosened something inside his chest, something tight and constricted. Like a fist clenched for too long, the muscles were reluctant to release.
Hugh had set the letter back on the desk and told the magistrate to find someone else.
“This lady what we’re visiting,” Sir began as the hired coach and four rumbled and shook down a post road toward Greely Park. “She’s a viscountess?”
Hugh’s pocket watch read half four. They should be arriving any moment now. He slipped the watch back into his waistcoat pocket and fought rising irritation. It wasn’t Sir he was irritated with but himself.
“Yes, Viscountess Prescott. But we are not visiting. I am. You and Basil will wait with the carriage while I interview her ladyship.”
Sir groaned and slumped down in the seat like a petulant child. If he wasn’t the smartest, scrappiest, most resourceful urchin Hugh had ever known, he would have left him in London.
Basil swept away a clod of dirt that had floated in through the open window and landed on his cuff. “I sincerely hope there are acceptable accommodations in Low Heath.”
Hugh knew next to nothing of the village closest to Greely Park, Lady Prescott’s estate. Just that it was in Hertfordshire. If it was anything like the other villages along the post road, it would have a posting inn and tavern, and a stable, at the very least.
“Hopefully we don’t have to stay on for long. A few days at the most to sort things out,” Hugh said.
Sir Gabriel would be having himself a grand chuckle right now, he imagined. He’d refused to have another officer summoned for the job. Your duchess is asking for you, Marsden, he’d said. The last thing I need is her hoity toity self, storming in here, asking why I sent the wrong man.
Had the Duchess of Fournier been in London, there was no doubt she would have done just that.
Last April, he’d had a devil of a time keeping her from getting herself killed during her unorthodox investigation into Belladora Lovejoy’s murder.
She’d been shot in the shoulder just before the true killer was caught, and Hugh had felt a barbed friction under his skin for days after.
Frustrated, bloody angry, and blissfully relieved.
Once Audrey and the duke left for Hertfordshire, that friction faded slowly. Arresting thieves and burglars, drunkards with tempers, and run-of-the-mill murderers, had buried the memories of that remarkable case, in which Hugh had arrested the wrong man—something that still pricked like a thorn.
“No doubt you want to return by Friday evening,” Basil said, arching a brow.