Chapter 20
"It is easy to be brave from a safe distance."
—Aesop
“What is happening here?” Peregrine lifted his voice to be heard. “You! Compose yourself!” he hurled at the guard.
Thorne shot a grateful glance at Perry as the guard turned to face him.
“This boy,” the guard hissed, “is the reason why a man is dead!”
“Hold your tongue. You shame your colours, speaking to a child so,” Thorne snarled at him.
“Let us not forget that child, Sir Nathaniel, lured a man away from his post so that an assassin could enter. We are lucky only one man is dead!”
A scuff of boots on the floor heralded Hodges’s arrival, but Perry didn’t turn. He was watching Sammy, who sniffled miserably behind Thorne’s back. The guard’s words—however harsh—seemed to be true.
“Leave us,” Peregrine commanded the guard. “Finish sweeping the house. I want everyone to be certain beyond doubt that the intruder is not still here.” He waited while the sullen guard left the room, and then he turned to Thorne. “Is my sister all right?”
“I left her in a room with your valet in the hallway outside. He said he was capable with a gun,” Thorne said softly.
Perry nodded tiredly, pulling his gloves off and stowing them in his pocket before pinching the bridge of his nose between his middle fingers. His breath burned hot against the palms of his hands. “Charity said you are uncommonly skilled at tracking. Can you…?”
“Aye,” Thorne murmured. “I’ll see if I can find a sign of someone leaving.”
“Thank you.” Perry said honestly, gripping the man’s arm briefly as he passed. “We won’t harm Sammy.”
“I realise you won’t, Fitzroy.” Thorne slipped out the door, leaving via the front to circle around the house.
Hodges, however, was a tight coil of frustration. “Sammy,” he said finally. “What did you do?”
The boy, surprisingly, was staring at Peregrine instead of his uncle. Gauging his reactions. Seeking a new protector now that Thorne was gone, perhaps. Peregrine might be lord of the manor, to be sure, but the boy looking to him instead of the uncle he adored unsettled him.
“It’s all right,” he told the boy, with no trace of anger in his voice. “Just tell us what happened.”
Sammy swallowed a few times, tears dripping down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, m’lord. I didn’t want to help him get inside. But he said he’d kill my ma and the babes if I didn’t let him in. I still didn’t believe him. But he told where she lived, and what they look like.”
Hodges jerked as if struck. “He threatened Martha and your siblings?”
“Everyone who might be used as an opening to the household,” Perry murmured. “We need to send them away.”
His driver looked pained. “Send ’em where? Martha’s got no one but me.”
“Then we’ll bring them here.” It wouldn't be as safe as sending them away, but they couldn’t be left where they were. “They can’t be used as leverage against us if they’re here.”
His breath left him in a rush as Sammy flung himself against his chest, winding him. “I’m sorry, Lord Fitzroy! I didn’t know what else to do,” the boy cried. “I didn’t see Uncle Will or anybody, and I thought—I thought—”
“It’s all right, Sammy,” he told the boy, bringing his hands around to the boy’s shoulders.
“I thought he was just here to take your sister back,” Sammy whimpered. “If I let him in he’d take her and nobody’d get hurt.”
Sammy was nearly a boy grown, but he was a boy still.
Too young to reckon all the costs of such actions, but old enough to grasp that Edmunds’s death had been abetted by him.
Peregrine hesitated, drowning in the memory of the last time he had comforted a child.
It had been his sister, because Marian didn’t believe in showing reassurance or indulging such a weakness.
“Listen to me,” Peregrine told him patiently, rubbing the boy’s arms. “He was determined to do this foul deed. Even if you had not aided that man, he likely would have hurt someone else to get the job done. The guard. Your uncle. You. That man alone bears the blame for Edmunds death—not you. Do you understand?”
“But maybe if I had—”
“You decided to try to ensure the least amount of harm was done to others and protect your family. There was nothing else you could do. It is a hard truth to learn, Sammy, that sometimes you cannot protect everyone.”
The boy swallowed hard, his eyes darting towards Will Hodges, who nodded.
“Did you see the man leave, Sammy?” Hodges asked him. “Can you describe him?”
The boy nodded and told them about a man with a thick, ropy scar beneath one eye who had told him to convince the guard to leave the back entrance. Sammy said he had climbed out from one of the windows on the first floor from the approximate location of Edmunds’s room.
Peregrine turned back to Hodges. “We need to finish closing ranks. Ready the big carriage. We will go pick up your sister, her children, and the duchess. And Will—” Perry paused to stress how very important this part was.
“Check everything. All the tack. The undercarriage. I would not put it past this man to have conducted some other sabotage while he was here.”
“Hmph,” the man agreed, shifting uneasily. “Give me half an hour to check over everything proper with Dawson.”
“Go find Sir Nathaniel and tell him what you told me. All right? I want him to hear what this man looks like. I want you to help him see if he can spot the man’s tracks,” he told Sammy next, so that the boy could do something helpful.
Sammy wiped his eyes with the backs of his sleeves and dashed off.
Perry stood still for a moment, reining in frustrated anger. Then he pushed up the stairs, two at a time, marching towards the room that Edmunds had been put in. The door was closed on the macabre setting it contained, but Peregrine pushed it open, taking it in from the doorway.
Edmunds lay flat on his back on the bed, his legs dangling over one side.
The old butler’s throat had been cut, forcefully and thoroughly.
Judging by the uninterrupted spray of blood on the wall and floor, his killer had held Edmunds upright from behind while he did the deed, likely pushing him back onto the bed as the man died and the flow ebbed.
As if the manner of his death wasn’t somehow message enough, the killer had sliced through Edmunds’s coat and shirt to expose his chest afterwards, carving the word “TRAITOR” into his flesh.
Perry stared down at the body. His emotions were a confused muddle—mostly anger, frustration and shame.
Some would say Edmunds had earned this death a dozen times over for what he had done for the Fitzroy family over his lifetime. But seeing the old butler cut down like this didn’t seem just—not when Perry was alive, not when he had also done so much wrong. It was a hypocrisy.
There was no sadness. Did he need more proof of how tarnished his soul still was if he could stare down at the body of a man he had known his entire life and suffer so little grief?
When Hodges had confronted him on the bridge, after the fire, he had told Perry that in protecting Charity, he would find his path towards atonement.
This was evidence that he still had a ways to go.
His mother was right. Feelings made everything so damned complicated.
“Blast it,” hissed Peregrine through his teeth, stepping over the damp floorboards as he made his way to the window standing open.
Sticking his head out, he saw Sir Nathaniel standing below with Sammy, pointing to the torn grass and deep divots left in the ground, and a trail so faint it would be easy to miss leading towards a stand of trees.
Peregrine lifted his face to the ceiling, trying to keep his temper in check.
Then he crossed the room again, staring down at Edmunds’s face, pale and slack in death.
As much anger as he had held towards the man for what he had done to Charity, Edmunds being killed in his house smarted.
Another person whom he had promised to protect and failed; one of the last of the dwindling pieces of evidence of his mother’s crimes destroyed.
Lark must have told his mother that Edmunds was alive when he had mentioned the butler during their ride last week. It would have taken little effort to deduce where he was likely being held.
It didn’t surprise him at all that his mother would eliminate Edmunds. What did surprise him, however, was that his sister was, apparently, still here.
Why would the sell-sword decide to infiltrate the house, kill the old butler, and then leave Lark?
He was about to turn and find Quinn and his sister when something half stuck beneath Edmunds’ body caught his eye. A battered, smudged, and folded piece of parchment, by the look of it. High-quality paper—the kind that might be at a hotel like the Pulteney.
9 o’clock in the morning, beneath the willow. You may bring the duchess only. We have much to discuss.
The note was in his mother’s hand. He’d recognise it anywhere. Was she planning to bargain for Lark? Or something else?
After Hodges ensured that the carriage would be safe, they set out for Atholl House first, taking Owens and Sammy with them.
Perry had left Thorne to mind the guards and set Quinn and Croft to help mind the house and his sister in case Edmunds’s killer had planned to stage a second attack now that there were fewer sentries.
He would speak with Lark when he returned.
First, he wanted to make sure he got to Sammy’s mother and Charity before someone else did.
Charity, fortunately, had already been planning on temporarily vacating the house.
She listened as Peregrine explained briefly what had happened, gave Miller instructions to ride for the estate with luggage, and suggested that Pritchard send as many of the women servants as he could to stay elsewhere for the next week.
Before they departed, she disappeared upstairs and returned with a small cloth bag in her hand.