Chapter 27 #3
‘We were in the country at the time, but Charles drove down to Cambridgeshire. I will never know what was said, or exactly what happened, but when I returned home from visiting friends, I found Miles collapsed near the stables. Charles must have tracked him down there. He had stabbed him. Miles was weak with loss of blood and had been trying to get to the house. I could not comprehend what had happened. There was so much blood, Lara.’ Abby’s hands were shaking as she spoke, ‘I cradled him in my lap and tried to staunch the bleeding but he was frantic and it seemed he wanted to communicate something to me. Much of what he tried to say to me I could not hear. As I was talking to him, I was also crying out for help, but what I suddenly realised was he was gasping the name “Charles” and was desperately trying to tell me that someone must warn Henry.’
Abigail stopped talking and leant forward placing her palms flat on the stone floor of the flower shop as if in some way this action might ground her or stop her falling further into despair.
She was half kneeling, half crouching and she was openly weeping.
In one swift movement Abby stood up and started pacing as if the methodical movement would soothe her.
‘I have never been so frightened. I now knew what Charles had done and that he was now going to find Uncle Henry. That dear, sweet man. I shouted and shouted for Miles’s groom and after what seemed like hours he came running from his room above the stable.
I told him to stay with Miles and to call for someone to fetch the doctor. ’
Abby stopped pacing and looked at Lara in despair.
‘I think I knew it was too late for Miles, I think I knew he was already dead.’ She resumed her pacing, ‘I saddled Balthazar. I did not dare trust anyone else with the message. I could not put them in danger.’ Abby ran a hand over her eyes.
‘Before I got beyond the park, I was brought down by a wire that had been strung up across the gates. Charles knew that if Miles had the chance to tell me about his threat to Henry that I would go to him.’
As an aside Abby observed, in something approaching her normal tone, ‘I do so hate to be predictable.’
Abby went on, ‘I do not think Henry was ever really Charles’s intended victim.
He wanted to take his revenge on myself and Miles.
I was throttled as I hit the wire. I do believe Balthazar tried to save me, but in the crashing fall that followed his whole weight landed on me.
At the same time he broke his leg. I did not know up until that point that a horse could scream. Thankfully, I cannot recall any more.’
Abby stopped pacing and appeared to regain some of her usual poise. She sat on the stool by the workbench. Her hand was only trembling slightly as she smoothed her hair.
Lara rose from her cross-legged position on the floor to sit beside her. She felt the need to be physically close to her Kindred Spirit. ‘How do you know what happened next?’ she asked.
‘I have pieced that together over the passing years. A bit of information here, a reported conversation there,’ Abby explained.
‘So what happened?’ Lara needed to know the end of her story.
‘Charles removed the tripwire and he placed the knife that he had used to kill Miles beside me. I was of course covered in Miles’s blood. He also put one of my foolish and fanciful letters to him in the pocket of my gown.’
‘So did people really believe you had killed Miles?’ Lara was horrified.
‘I think they thought the evidence was overwhelming, especially when the servants confirmed that they had heard Miles and I arguing. I presume people believed we were fighting over Charles as no one else knew about my urgent desire to help Emma. Also I had made every effort to be seen as independent and headstrong as possible, so it was perhaps understandable.’ Abby, after 192 years, seemed resigned to people jumping to the wrong conclusion.
She added thoughtfully, ‘I do sometimes wonder if it was the combination of two murders that went unavenged, Miles and mine, that was so powerful as to bring me back as a Kindred Spirit.’
‘But surely people who knew you must have known it wasn’t true,’ Lara exclaimed.
‘Not many people did know. The deaths were hushed up as accidents. There was no proof to contradict what looked like a crime of passion. Charles had gone to great efforts not to be recognised when he rode down and his mistress in London said he had been with her all evening. I suspect some felt that my accident was a better outcome than my hanging,’ Abby said sadly, thinking of Thomas.
‘Oh, Abby,’ was all Lara could say.
‘I feel sure that Uncle Henry would never have believed it of me,’ Abby reflected. ‘I think Emma believed it to be an accident. She never had to know the truth. Which is a blessing.’
‘But your mother would not have believed it, surely! You know how upset she was, you told me she tore down her glass houses,’ Lara recalled.
‘Yes, I expect you are right,’ Abby said. ‘I hope you are right. It is just sometimes I wonder if she destroyed them because she was so angry at what she believed I had done.’
Lara did her best to reassure Abby. But after a while she realised that if Abby had not resolved this in her own mind after 192 years there was little she could add to convince her now.