Chapter Six #2
As she moved, she took the lantern from Grissy and, still shading it with her cloak, glanced hastily around.
They were in a bare stone room with one small window high above the door.
A wooden chair stood against that wall, but no guard sat in it.
Against the wall to the left were the bars of a cell, the only one in the room.
Beside it was another closed door that led, presumably, to the stairs up to the house that Kate had glimpsed this afternoon.
She let her cloak fall away from the lantern, while Grissy carefully closed the outer door behind them. Kate advanced on the bars to the cell. The lantern showed her two pallets in there, one on either side. One was bare. The other seemed to contain a pile of rumpled blankets.
But even as she looked, the pile moved suddenly, resolving into a man who sprang up in one fluid movement, blinking in the lantern light and staring at her.
“Kate?”
“Of course it’s me, you blithering idiot,” Kate said crossly. “You’ve caused us enough trouble and we can’t stay long, so start telling me the truth, Rupert. What the devil happened between you and Dinah Fenn?”
Rupert began to laugh.
*
Thanks to a stove at the far end of the room, which was still warm, the prison was not too cold.
Grissy sat on the chair by the door, listening for sounds of any approach.
Kate sat on the floor by the cell bars, and on the other side, Rupert lowered himself to sit close to her, his long legs bent at the knees on either side of his chin.
“Shouldn’t there be a guard?” she asked. “Where is he?”
“He’ll come back in the morning. I suppose there’s no point in his being here, since I can’t exactly leave.”
“They hang the key outside, and that’s probably the key to your cell right by Grissy’s head.”
“Evening, Grissy,” Rupert called cheerfully. “I thought it must be you.”
Grissy muttered something about no one else being that daft, though Kate noticed she still spared Rupert a quick smile.
“You could leave now,” she said to Rupert.
“No, I can’t.”
Kate sighed. “I knew you’d say that. But you should consider it. You could just vanish into the night and no one would ever find the mysterious curate.”
The old Rupert would at least have been tempted. But the man behind the bars didn’t even smile. “I want to keep my position here.”
Kate scowled. “Then, since you won’t let me tell Lord Winster, the only solution is to find out who did kill Dinah. Because otherwise, they’ll let you hang, Rupert.”
Not that she would let that happen. Winster would be informed long before such an event, but she needed to say something to shock Rupert out of his fatalistic righteousness.
He eyed her uneasily. “You shouldn’t get involved, Kate. There’s a killer in that house. Or somewhere close by.”
“I do think the house is most likely,” she said, frowning. “I had a look this afternoon around the outside wall of the courtyard garden, and it would be a difficult climb. I couldn’t do it.”
“Could I?” Rupert asked with interest.
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “But surely no one from outside would have climbed over there on the off chance of Dinah’s appearing in that precise location?
Unless she disturbed a burglar who’d just climbed over?
Or she’d made another assignation with someone else.
Or told them about the one with you, in which case, he’d have known you were in the orangery and would likely have seen his murdering her. ”
“Only I didn’t, did I?” Rupert spoke lightly, but she heard the edge of bleakness. And guilt.
“For what it’s worth, I believe it happened by the bushes and the biggest plain tree, quite in shadow.
She didn’t cry out, so the killer must have silenced her somehow, possibly with a hand over her mouth, so I doubt you would have seen much, even if you’d been staring at the precise spot with your ears flapping.
From the sedate way she was lying, she must have been lowered gently to the ground before the killer escaped.
Dr. Paxton said her death would have been quick, and I think the murderer was both being silent and stealthy.
” She caught his suddenly bleak gaze. “But was there a reason you didn’t look out there? Go out there?”
“Only that I expected her to come from inside the house, not through the garden. And I suppose I was thinking.”
“About her?” Kate asked, trying not to care.
“No. I’d already decided the best thing to do about her—providing she agreed, of course.”
“Then what on earth was distracting you?”
His lips quirked. “Oh, this and that.”
Hardly satisfactory. “You’re not helping,” she said severely. “So what was your grand plan for Dinah?”
“Marry her to Jack Irwin the coachman. He has a cottage by the carriage house, and she might still have picked up odd bits of work from the house—sewing, that sort of thing—so that she could have worked around the baby.”
Kate was impressed. “Ha! So that was why Lewis and Jack Irwin were quarreling!”
“Who is Lewis?”
“One of the footmen at the court. He was besotted with Dinah, but I don’t think he knew she was with child, so I doubt he was the father.”
“He wasn’t,” Rupert said distractedly.
Kate sat up. “Was Jack the coachman?”
“No. But he wanted a wife and he had noticed Dinah.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Kate murmured. “Was he willing to take on another man’s child?”
“He said so. I believed him.”
“Who was the real father?”
Rupert’s lips stretched. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Then how do you expect me to find out who killed her?”
“I don’t.”
“Then who else is going to get you out of this mess?” she demanded. “You’re not. Your father’s not. Who else does that leave? God?”
To her annoyance, he actually seemed to consider the last suggestion. “I doubt it. If God actually troubles himself with such trivialities—which I’m not sure I believe—it would be as a test of my worthiness. I’m not doing too well, am I?”
“No,” she said baldly. “And I think you underestimate Chadbon’s will, which is all based on the political and the greater good, not that of a promiscuous maid or a quixotic curate!”
“Ouch,” Rupert said.
“Tell me about Dinah. Did you really meet her in a public house?”
“Yes. We had a good time together whenever she could get away.”
Something twisted inside her. She ignored it. “Did Dinah think you would marry her?”
“Lord, no. To be fair, she wasn’t unrealistic enough to expect me to. She just liked to…live.”
The muscles of his throat worked, and she remembered his odd manner on the night of the murder. He hadn’t just been shocked. He had been grieved.
“Did you go to Brussels to forget her?” she asked suddenly.
He didn’t have to think about that. “Of course not. I went for a laugh. And to avoid my father, who was trying to set up a meeting for me with the archbishop.” His smile faded, leaving his eyes distant, almost desolate.
She leaned her forehead against the bars. “What happened in Brussels?”
“Waterloo.” He sounded surprised. “It was only a few miles away, you know. I never knew such suffering was possible.”
He wasn’t looking at her but at his hands—and seeing something else entirely. Something she could never imagine, and he would never tell her. And yet she began to understand.
On impulse, she reached through the bars and touched his hand. “That is how you found your vocation?”
He glanced up. “I’m not sure you could call it anything so grand as a vocation. But I made a difference to the dying and it was worth doing.”
I don’t like death.
No wonder, Kate thought. “Did they all die?”
“A horrific number. But no, not all.” He swallowed again and looked away. “Some needed help to get through the next few hours, or days, and that too was worth doing. I’m still not a good man, but I feel I could be. I want to be.”