Chapter Thirty-Two
The Falstone steward, Mr. Hayworth, was in Adam’s book room when he arrived there minutes after changing his bloody clothing. Barton had told him the steward wished to speak to him.
“I hope you have some information for me regarding the pack.” Adam didn’t bother with a greeting but crossed directly to his desk.
Hayworth nodded, hat clutched in his hands. He took a seat when Adam indicated he should. “My boy and I have been riding through Falstone Forest the past few days. There are signs of poaching, Your Grace. A lot of poaching.”
“Then the pack is having trouble finding game?”
“Expanding their hunting grounds,” Hayworth confirmed.
“Even in the worst of winters, they haven’t attacked riders nor approached the castle gates,” Adam said. “They did both today.”
Hayworth repeated his signature nod. It didn’t always mean “yes”; generally he meant simply to acknowledge a statement. “Bein’ more aggressive, ’specially toward people, ain’t a good sign in wild animals.”
“Believe me, Hayworth, I am acutely aware of that.”
“I have a suggestion, Your Grace, for pushing the pack back into the forest.”
“Make your suggestion.”
“First we have to cut back the poaching. Guards along the road would help and might keep the pack from the gates.”
“Unless the pack simply devours the guards,” Adam said.
“A few lures would pull ’em back into the forest. There’s more game on the north end. Once the pack realizes that, they’ll stay there.”
“How do we make the pack discover as much?”
“Smell,” Hayworth answered. “Wolves have keen noses.”
The idea had merit. Hound dogs were trained using scent.
“It is worth an attempt, at least,” Adam said. “There are, of course, two tenant cottages as well as your own in Falstone Forest. Find a path that bypasses those.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“John Handly, Your Grace,” Barton announced from the door.
Adam looked up. John looked deucedly uncomfortable. He’d outrun a pack of attacking wolves while leading a lame horse without so much as paling, but place him inside one of the family rooms of the castle, and he looked ready to faint.
“Come in, John.” Adam used a tone that required obedience.
He entered a step or two but stood, head lowered, as near the door as possible.
“What is it?” Adam asked.
John would not have come to the castle nor allowed himself to be shown inside—neither would Barton have led him to the book room—if his message were not urgent.
“Atlas, Yer Grace,” John muttered.
“What about Atlas?” Had the horse’s injuries proven fatal already? Persephone would be heartbroken. Adam felt something of an ache in his own chest. He’d seen Atlas defend Persephone in that forest. He no doubt had saved her life.
“I think I know . . . I have an idea why the pack attacked him.”
“Other than his being in the forest in the dead of winter?”
John nodded.
“What have you discovered?”
“We was cleaning his wounds and couldn’t help noticing a strange smell, Yer Grace.”
“Smell?” That was odd.
“Rather like, well, like a cut of bacon.”
“Bacon?” Hayworth echoed Adam’s response.
“Yes, Yer Grace. And I’m wondering if that might be why the wolves attacked Atlas.
They didn’t bother with me and my horse, neither you and Zeus.
Not really, considering how intent they was on Atlas.
Her Grace might have picked up some of that smell, and that’d be why the pack seemed interested in her, but not as much as Atlas. ”
“You spoke of smells, Hayworth.” Adam looked at his steward. “Would bacon be a luring smell?”
Hayworth nodded in confirmation.
“How does a horse come to smell like a cut of meat?” Adam asked John.
“All I can think is one of the stable boys didn’t wash up good after breakfast or was holdin’ on to a piece of bacon in his pocket or sommat, wantin’ to eat it later and got the smell on the horse or saddle or sommat like ’at.
” John’s accent always grew cruder when he was upset.
Slovenliness among his staff would be upsetting to the man who prided himself on his stable.
“That might account for a slight smell. You seemed to indicate it was stronger than that.”
John raised his hands in a gesture of frustrated confusion. He was obviously at a loss to fully explain it.
“Did the pack ever enter the walls?” Adam asked.
“No, Yer Grace,” John said. “They stayed just outside the gate for a while but then went back into the forest.”
“That is a good sign, Your Grace,” Hayworth said. “They haven’t grown more aggressive, it would seem. They were just too tempted to resist.”
“Talk with your staff,” Adam instructed John. “Find out how this happened. If it had anything to do with the attack, I do not want the same mistake to occur again.”
“Yes, Yer Grace.” John bowed and quit the room in an enormous hurry.
Hayworth took his leave next, promising to report to Adam in a day’s time with a specific plan for dealing with the pack.
Adam propped his elbows on the desk and rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.
Could something as simple as poor washing after breakfast have led to such a grueling ordeal?
It hardly seemed possible. How many times had Adam gone for a ride after having kidneys or ham at breakfast?
There was no guarantee he had been thorough enough in his ablutions to completely eradicate any lingering aroma. Yet the pack had never attacked him.
He interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on his clasped hands, thinking.
John had been right on one count: the pack had been decidedly more interested in Atlas than any of the others.
Even Persephone, who had been in the midst of the fray, had sustained more injuries from her fall than from the pack, though that had been an instant from changing when Adam arrived.
The pack had returned to the forest. Adam remembered this information quite suddenly. He got instantly to his feet and crossed to the book room doors. He made his way to the first-floor landing. Either Barton or a footman would be positioned at the front door.
A footman.
Adam thought a moment before recalling the man’s name. “Joseph.”
He looked up.
“Inform Barton that I wish him to send for Mr. Johns in Sifton.” If the pack no longer posed a threat, the apothecary ought to be brought in.
Joseph, the footman, offered a bow and left to deliver the message.
“Adam?” That was Mother’s voice, oddly choked and broken.
He turned around to see her standing just outside the doors of the informal drawing room, balled-up handkerchief in her hands and actual tears on her face. Tears? Adam had never seen his mother cry. Not once in all his life.
“What is it?” Anxiety touched his tone.
“Could I speak with you? Please?” Where was the pitying tone? She addressed him almost as if he were a grown man.
Adam was decidedly uneasy. He moved warily into the drawing room, keeping one eye trained on Mother. She was acting strange: fidgety, nervous.
“Perhaps you should sit down,” Adam suggested.
“I am so sorry, Adam. I know you wished me to help with Persephone.” She seemed to pale a little further. “I am sure I let you down. You must be so disappointed . . .” Her voice broke. Mother took several gulps of air.
“Sit down, Mother.” Adam cupped her elbow with his hand and guided her to a seat.
She smiled shakily at him. “Sometimes you are so like your father,” she said, her eyes misted, “the dear man.”
Adam’s eyes must have grown to twice their size. Mother had never compared him to his father. He would not have been able, until that moment, to guess whether she would consider a likeness a positive or a negative trait.
“Are you quite well, Mother?” Adam watched her with increasing alarm.
“Oh.” She waved a hand, though her face was a study in overset emotions. “I had hoped you would never discover my most mortifying flaw.”
“Flaw?”
“I have always been . . . been horrible in the sickroom. Horrible, Adam!” She wiped at her eyes.
“Even as a child, one of my siblings would come down with a cold, and I would fret our poor nurse into a fit of nerves. My mother always told me it would be different when I was a mother—that some maternal instinct would take over.”
Adam was completely lost. Mother quite obviously needed soothing. “There was a great deal of blood, earlier, with Persephone. I do not blame you for not being up to the task.”
“But I am certain I only made the situation worse.” Mother rose to her feet once more and began pacing as she wiped and dabbed with a shaking hand. “I always did.”
“Did?” Adam could hardly believe what he was seeing. Mother was ever calm and collected, undisturbed by anything. The poor woman looked on the verge of collapse.
Poor woman. Adam shook his head.
“The second surgeon actually sent me to the vicarage for two days,” Mother said, a sob making the last few words difficult to discern. “Banished from my own home. From my poor boy.”
“Wait.” Adam froze. “Banished? The second surgeon?”
“I am certain I made it worse. I was so nervous, so concerned through the first one—”
“The first surgery?” Adam pressed.
She nodded and continued. “And I didn’t get better.
Worse, in fact. The second surgeon sent me away.
The next few insisted I be gone before they even arrived.
And . . . and . . .” She very nearly wailed.
“I was grateful to go. Happy to. What kind of an unnatural mother wishes to leave her child at such a time?”
Mother dropped onto a sofa, crying loudly.
Adam sat, too. All the times she’d left before Adam’s surgeries, she’d done so at the surgeon’s request—no, requirement, if her retelling wasn’t exaggerated. Could her eagerness to go really have been an indisposition toward the sickroom?
She always had come back once he was well into his recovery, after all difficulties and dangers had passed.
But there had been other times when she had left Falstone, times unconnected to illness or surgeries or injuries.
At least that was how he remembered it. Perhaps he’d had a stomach illness or a head cold and simply didn’t remember it.
Adam couldn’t recall Father being ill during that time.
“Your Grace?” a voice politely inquired from the doorway.
Didn’t anyone in this house realize he had a great deal on his mind? Every few minutes, it seemed, someone was vying for his time.
“What?” he snapped.
The young maid at the door shrunk back a little. Adam recognized her—the maid who’d provided him with fresh water to clean his hands and words of encouragement during the ordeal caring for Persephone.
“Her Grace is asking for you,” the maid said. “She seems anxious.”
Adam was on his feet before she’d finished the first sentence. “Excuse me, Mother,” he said as he crossed the room.
The little maid stood at the door as Adam passed through it, eyes cast down and expression hurt.
“I am sorry for snapping at you,” Adam said, hardly believing he was apologizing to anyone, let alone a chambermaid. “I have had a very trying day.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she answered quietly.
“Thank you?” Adam asked as he walked toward the stairs that lead to the second story, the maid following.
“For apologizing,” she said. “I know you don’t have to, probably aren’t supposed to, even.”
Adam shrugged. “Probably not.”
“You know, you’re not much like people think you are.”
“How is that?” Adam asked, beginning to regret his slip in rigidity.
“You’re supposed to be fearsome and unkind, but I ain’t never seen a man care for his wife the way you did for Her Grace. And you apologize to someone who really ought to be beneath your notice. It’s not what people would expect from the Duke of Kielder.”
“Then perhaps you would be so kind as to keep that a secret from the masses.” His tone had lightened a bit, his mood actually improving after such a short conversation.
“Yes, Your Grace.” The maid curtsied as they reached the door to Persephone’s sitting room. “If you don’t tell Mrs. Smithson I been talking to you instead of disappearing like I’m supposed to.”
“What is your name?” Adam asked.
“Fanny Hartly, Your Grace.”
“Hartly? Jeb Hartly—?”
“My pa’s uncle.”
“I will keep your secret, Fanny Hartly, if you will keep mine.”
She smiled, the same uneven smile all the Hartlys seemed to have.
Adam found Persephone awake when he entered the room. She was sitting up, something that surprised him to no end. She would have been more than justified in remaining prostrate in bed for days. Adam discovered with each passing day just how many ways he’d underestimated her.
The look in her eyes stopped him in his tracks. She looked worried, afraid, even.
Adam sat on the edge of her bed. When had that become a favorite place of his to perch? “What is it, Persephone?”
“I have been thinking back on my ride.” She spoke quietly.
“Surely that can wait until you are more fully recovered.” He allowed his fingers to inch closer to hers. He wanted to hold her hand but didn’t dare reach out, knowing she’d pulled back the last time.
“There were some strange things, Adam.”
He brushed his fingertips along hers. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Things I thought at first were just oddities, but . . .” She shifted, wincing at what must have been a sharp stab of pain, no doubt in her leg. “But there are too many to be coincidences.”
“What do you mean?” Something in her tone told Adam that Persephone was in deadly earnest.
“What happened today,” she said, “I don’t believe was an accident.”