Chapter Twenty #3
“No, my lord. Not right away. It wasn’t my place, was it? It was ’tween a husband and wife. It would have been more than my life was worth to have crossed him when he was in one of his moods.”
“So you did…nothing?” Gideon’s lips curled in a sneer.
“That’s right,” Owenby retorted defiantly. “I just waited. It wasn’t my place.”
“When did you enter the room?” Rochford asked before Gideon could lash out at the man.
“Well, after she screamed,” he said. “There was some more yelling, and I heard him tell her he’d never let her go.
And then she let out this cry. Something like, ‘No!’ or ‘Go!’ or maybe it was just his name.
I don’t remember. Then she screamed and—and then there was this thud, and some…
more thuds. I didn’t know what had happened, so I went to the door and, well, then he jerked open the door and saw me. And he pulled me into the room.”
The small man hesitated, his gaze flickering from one man to the other anxiously.
Finally he went on. “I saw her lying there on the floor. There was a chair turned over—I think that was the first thud I heard. And Lady Selene—she was lyin’ on the floor, on her side, and—and I could see she was all limp.
Her head—there was blood all over one side of her head.
She’d fallen onto the hearth—her head, at least. The rest of her was on the carpet.
But I could see that she was dead.” He shivered a little at the memory. “She was staring straight at me, like.”
“He had hit her with her clock?”
Owenby nodded. “Yeah, it wasn’t very big. He must have picked it up and knocked her in the head with it. And then, I think when she fell, he—he hit her another time or two.”
The valet crossed his arms in front of him and glared at Gideon. “It wasn’t his fault!”
“Not his fault?” Gideon exploded. “He beat her to death!”
“She drove him to it,” Owenby fired back. “She made him mad with jealousy. He knew she was sleeping with his brother—oh, yes, I knew it, too. It was clear the way they was always looking at each other.”
“But Lord Jasper wasn’t even there,” Irene pointed out. “He had left for the army some months prior to that.”
“I think it was his letters what set his lordship off. He must have been writing her, and Lord Cecil found them.”
“So he killed her?” Rochford asked in disbelief.
“He didn’t mean to,” Owenby said staunchly. “He lost his head. He said to me, ‘Owenby, I think I’ve killed her. I don’t know what happened. I just picked this up and—’” He paused and repeated, “He didn’t mean to do it.”
“Well, clearly he meant all the rest of it,” Gideon growled. “He was thinking well enough to come up with an elaborate plan.”
“I thought of most of it, sir,” Owenby corrected him, not without a hint of pride.
“I told him he should just pretend that she ran away. But he said that would be too big a scandal, he couldn’t do that.
And—and then he said we could pretend she was abducted.
So that’s what we did. I wrapped her up in her dressing gown that was lying out on the bed, and I wrapped one or two of her petticoats around her head.
And I cleaned up the blood on the hearth with some more petticoats.
Then I wrapped up that clock in her nightgown, and we took her downstairs. ”
“You took her down to the caves?” Rochford asked incredulously. “All that way? At night?”
“Not then, sir,” he replied. “There wasn’t time. I carried her through the garden and out to the ruins. I stashed her body there, put a few rocks in front of it. And then I came back and took the boy. I took him—I took him to this man I knew.”
“In London?” Gideon asked. “You took me to London?”
“No! Not all the way to London. Just to Chipping Camden. There was a chap there that took children you didn’t want. And anybody else, either. He wasn’t above knocking a fella on the head and taking him to an impress gang. So I took the boy there.”
He did not look at Gideon as he said these last few words, as if refusing to look could somehow help him to separate the boy he had given to a child-thief from the man standing in front of him.
Owenby shrugged. “Then I came back, and we did what we’d planned.
Lord Cecil acted like they had been kidnapped.
And he pretended to give me that necklace and sent me off to deal with the abductors.
But I—I went to the ruins instead, and got her and took her to the caves.
And I walled her up, so nobody could stumble on her accidentally.
And Lord Cecil, he forbade people going there whenever he could, said it was dangerous. ”
The three of them looked at Owenby. Irene felt numbed by the man’s matter-of-fact recital of Lady Selene’s murder. She glanced at Gideon, who also seemed drained. His fury, she thought, had worn itself out, crashing into a kind of cold despair in the face of the valet’s story.
“But it still does not make sense,” Irene protested. “Why did he have you take Gideon away?” Irene asked. “Why would Lord Cecil get rid of his only son? His heir?”
“The boy saw him. He woke up, I guess at the sound of the voices. The nursery’s just above her ladyship’s room.
And he walked in on them. He saw Lord Cecil hit his mother.
And he started screaming, too. That’s…that’s really when I decided to see what was happening.
Lord Cecil knocked him away, trying to shut him up.
He was afraid he would waken the household.
It knocked him out. And when I came back, well, the boy was still asleep.
I think—I think maybe Lord Cecil gave him some laudanum.
You know, to keep him asleep. And he told me I would have to get rid of the boy, too, on account of he’d seen…
what he’d seen. He couldn’t stay there, where he might decide any day to tell everybody what had happened. ”
“But his own son!” Irene exclaimed.
“What did it matter anyway?” the valet snarled.
He looked at Gideon with something close to hate.
“From the day he married her, she had never been faithful to him. His brother wasn’t the first, just the last. She had a string of lovers, that one.
” He stared at Gideon, his loathing almost palpable.
“You think you’re something, don’t you? Well, you’re wrong.
You’re no one, you hear me? You’re not the earl’s son. ”