Chapter Six
“Is he dead?” April whispered.
In her young life, she had seen death in all its forms, many of them violent. In truth, she was more used to such things than Piers and took them in her stride. Except she stood shivering beside the body, both arms around her abdomen.
Piers straightened to stand between her and the body. “You should not see this.”
“I have seen it. He looks dead.”
Piers quickly crouched down, feeling for a pulse in the footman’s wrist, and then at the base of his throat.
His breath caught. “He’s still alive. Just. Take the lantern while I try to lift him...”
The footman was no light weight, but with some difficulty, Piers managed to gather him into his arms like a baby and rise, staggering, with Edward over his shoulder. With April lighting the way ahead, they somehow made it back to the house, and inside through the kitchen door.
There, she led the way to what looked like a housekeeper’s sitting room. Piers was about to unburden himself onto the small sofa there, when he realized April was opening another door to a room beyond.
“Put him in here,” she said. “I think it’s where the housekeeper sleeps.”
As gently as he could manage with his screaming shoulder muscles, Piers dropped the footman onto the housekeeper’s bed while April lit a lamp and some candles.
Edward groaned. Piers glanced at him in some relief to see that his eyes were now closed. He found the footman’s pulse again with some difficulty and then straightened.
Ignoring the ache in his shoulder and his slightly wobbly knees, Piers said, “I’ll go and wake Fosterson.”
April nodded. He felt guilty leaving her there when she should be in bed herself, but he knew she would not leave the injured man while she could help him.
Easing his shoulder, Piers ran up the servants’ stairs and tried to recall which room was Fosterston’s. Hoping he didn’t disturb the Hubbles or Claudia by mistake, he scratched at the likeliest door and went in.
“Fosterson.” Piers shone his light on the bed, but there was no one in it.
Instead, someone moved by the window.
“Withy?” came Fosterson’s humorous voice. “What the devil?”
“Got a patient for you,” Piers said briefly. “I’m not sure he’ll live.”
“Just what I need to start my brilliant career—a patient who dies on me.” Despite the callous words, Fosterson moved quickly, swiping up his familiar medical bag from the desk and striding toward the door. “Where?”
“Kitchen,” Piers said, leading the way.
They found April in the housekeeper’s bedroom with a bowl of warm water, gently cleaning the ugly head wound. Edward appeared to be oblivious.
April stood up at once, to make way. Taking her place without fuss, Fosterson inspected the wound.
“Could you possibly manage some more hot water?” he said. “And fresh cloths and bandages?”
“I’ll try,” April said, flitting away.
“He is still alive,” Fosterson remarked, drawing up the patient’s eyelids. “But only just. What happened?”
“I have no idea,” Piers admitted. “We found him lying on the path that leads to the summer house.”
Fosterson’s probing fingers stilled for an instant. “Where you and your lady wife just happened to be taking a stroll in your dressing gowns, in the middle of a cloudy night.”
“Something like that,” Piers said, while Fosterson continued with his poking and prodding.
“Nothing else appears to be damaged or broken,” Fosterson said. “I would say he lost consciousness and fell without a struggle. There’s very little dirt on his hands, so it doesn’t look as if he tried to save himself. The only dirt is on his face and his clothes.”
“Would he have got an injury like that simply by falling?” Piers asked.
“Possibly. It would depend what he fell on and with how much force.”
April came back in with a fresh bowl of water. Piers picked up the used, bloody bowl to make way for it, and frowned. Dipping his finger into the gory bowl, he brought it out with a small splinter of wood attached. He transferred it to his handkerchief.
“He just fell on grass,” Piers said. “Unless he was moved. There are no trees on that side of the track... Could he have been hit with a wooden club of some kind?”
“More likely,” Fosterson said, still cleaning the wound with some care. “Something certainly struck him with force enough to dent his skull.”
“Will he recover?” April asked, placing a neat pile of cloths and bandages on the table beside the water.
“I don’t know. Even if he lives, there could well be damage to his brain. I’ll need to stitch this...”
When the wound was dealt with, and Edward’s hands and face washed, Piers persuaded April to go up to bed while he helped Fosterson to wrestle Edward out of his clothes and into the clean night shirt Fosterson seemed to carry in his bag for such emergencies.
“What were you doing out there?” Fosterson asked. “A romantic marital tryst?”
“There are strange noises in this house, either from inside or out. We went to investigate the out.”
“The puzzles you spoke about,” Fosterson remarked, rising and pulling the covers properly over his patient. “It’s as well you’re incurably inquisitive. If he hadn’t been found before morning, I think he’d be dead.”
“Can you tell when the injury occurred?”
Fosterson shrugged. “Not very long ago, I’d say. I suspect you didn’t miss his assailant—if assailant there was—by very long.”
The implication of danger to himself and, more importantly, April was not lost on Piers. The guilt was already wrapped around him.
“We have got into some bad habits, April and I,” he said vaguely.
Fosterson gripped his shoulder for a moment. “Go to bed, Withy. You saved his life. I’ll sit with him now until the servants get up. If he survives until morning, we might need to consider a nurse.”
Piers nodded. “Thanks,” he said and left the room.
Since his boots had been hurting his bare feet, he had already removed them and now carried them up the servants’ stairs with him. He was so absorbed in his own speculations that he almost ran into the girl at the top of the stairs.
She gasped, smothering a shriek with her free hand. The other was carrying a tiny stump of candle in a cracked saucer.
“Oh, my lord, you scared the wits out of me!” she whispered.
It was one of the maids, fully dressed. She was the taller, plumper one.
“Becky,” he said. “What are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, my lord, and there’s so much to do that... Is everything well, sir? Are you ill?”
“No, I’m fine. There’s been an accident, though. Edward is hurt, and Dr. Fosterson is with him.”
The girl’s eyes were huge in her white face. “Hurt? Badly?”
“The doctor will tell us tomorrow. You should go back to bed and rest. Now,” he added as she continued to stare at him unmoving.
She swallowed. “Yes, my lord.”
She turned and walked back toward the attic door.
Piers watched her until he heard the door close, and the tiny glow of her candle vanished.
As he dragged himself and his boots along the corridor to his and April’s rooms, he paused to blink at the alcove table, which now boasted two tall, silver candlesticks. Complete with candles.
“This is a madhouse,” he said, closing April’s bedchamber door behind him. “No one ever sleeps. The candlesticks are back, and the maid Becky is up and dressed at...” He picked his watch off the dressing table. “Ten minutes past three in the morning.”
“Had she dressed?” April asked from the bed, where she was sitting up, looking warm and pretty by the glow of the lamp. “Or had she just not undressed?”
“Good question.” Piers thought about it. Even in the dim candlelight, her cap had not been crisp, and there had been a stain of some kind on her apron. “I think she hadn’t been to bed.” He frowned. “Neither had Fosterson.”
“Nor Edward, nor his attacker, I suspect.”
Piers dropped his boots, took off his robe and cast it in the vague direction of the foot of the bed.
Then he climbed under the covers and drew April down beside him.
“We’ll think about it in the morning.” He caressed her cheek softly, then slid his hand downward to rest on the small bump of baby. “Are you both well?”
“Yes,” she said decisively, covering his hand with hers.
They were silent for some time. Sleep beckoned.
Then April said, “I hope Edward is...”
***
DESPITE HIS DISTURBED night, Piers snapped into wakefulness at dawn. It bothered him that Edward might already be dead. And it bothered him that evidence on the ground where he was attacked might already have vanished under weather or passing traffic.
Before April’s pregnancy, he would have wakened her, and they would have gone together. He missed that, though not for the world would he disturb her now. She was sleeping so deeply and peacefully that he was distracted by inconvenient tenderness for his wife and their unborn child.
Forcing himself, he slipped out of bed, collecting boots and clothes on the way, and crept toward his own room.
As he passed, he thought he heard a whisper from the direction of the chimney and veered closer.
It was a very odd noise, like the buzzing from a distant beehive.
Thoughtfully, he walked on to his chamber for a hasty wash before climbing into fresh clothes.
His view from the lightening window told him that last night’s cloud had not so far brought rain. Only the glistening of dew lay on the ground.
After pulling on his boots, he hesitated.
His two quizzing glasses lay on the dressing table, unworn and unused since coming to Temperley House.
The glasses had begun as an affectation of the viscount persona he had invented to get himself through the transition of what he had been to what he must become, part of the protective armour he had needed to face an alien world.
There were different lenses in each glass so that he could use one for reading and the other for seeing into the distance.
In fact, they had proved quite useful over the months, especially in their investigations.