Chapter 21 #2
“Well then, let’s go to it while the light is still good,” said Damien with a grin. “Got your telescope too?”
Benedict produced it from his pocket, along with a large piece of thin, folded paper.
“Lady Esher gave me a map of all the paths on the estate too,” he told his friend. “Tonight, we only investigate the orchard, shoot a few rabbits and pick some apples. If Ashbourne is coming here regularly to stalk Louisa, however, I do intend to soon discover his route and confront him.”
The two men chatted companionably about Scotland as they strolled out of the house with their guns and took the path down to the orchards.
Benedict kept his eyes peeled as he walked, doubting that Ashbourne would have taken any path so easily visible from the house, but not wanting to be lulled into a state of distraction.
“Louisa must have been about here when she first realized someone else was there,” observed Benedict, stopping and looking about with narrowed eyes. “This is the largest apple tree near the statue of Hercules, I believe.”
Damien walked around the statue of the mythical hero wrestling with a lion and nodded thoughtfully.
“This is where she saw him?”
“Only a flash of coat, but yes.”
“We won’t find any footprints, you know,” Damien warned, after his inspection yielded nothing. “The weather has been too fine and the ground is dry."
“Footprints are not the only clues,” stated Benedict, who had been circling the trunk of the rather sizable old apple tree and now hunkered down to examine a small pile of something at its base that might easily have been taken for some insect casts or animal droppings at first glance. “Come and look at this.”
Damien strolled over and crouched down beside his friend.
“What am I looking at?” he asked blankly. “I have little knowledge of the natural world, Benedict.”
“But you do have good knowledge of the smoking room at Brooks’s and other clubs, even though you are not a cigar connoisseur yourself,” Benedict told him, now dipping his fingers into the crumbly substance and raising it to his nostrils.
“Cigar ash?” asked Damien and Benedict nodded, before wiping his hand on the grass and standing.
“Yes, our intruder stood here for some time, smoking a leisurely cigar before Lady Louisa happened upon him,” Benedict thought aloud. “What do you think the chances are that Lord Ashbourne is an aficionado of the tobacco leaf?”
“Fairly high, I should say,” Damien answered grimly. “But how could he know she would come out today?”
“He didn’t,” replied Benedict, a bleaker and more detailed picture of Lord Ashbourne forming in his head at every moment.
“He is deliberately lurking around Rosemere for his own peculiar pleasure, at God only knows what hours of the day or night. Louisa coming along when she did was only a bonus for him. I dare say his damned telescope provides him glimpses enough of her otherwise.”
As Benedict talked, he took the map that Lady Esher had provided from his pocket and found the spot where they were standing, before looking up again to take his bearings.
“From the Huxley estate, there are two obvious routes he might have taken to get here,” he surmised.
“Presuming that he stuck to the paths,” pointed out Damien.
“Indeed, he may not have done,” acknowledged Benedict, “but we must begin somewhere. Now, this path goes through the fields where the cattle graze, I think, and this one around the hill where the old folly stands.”
“Which one first?”
“The folly,” Benedict replied with a certainty that surprised him as much as it surprised Damien.
“A hill is a good vantage point for a man who likes to spy upon people, isn’t it?
I dare say that Ashbourne does not make so free of Rosemere when you or I, or even the gamekeepers or other male servants are around. ”
“If you hadn’t been born into the peerage, you might have been an acclaimed thief-taker,” jested his friend as they shouldered their guns and set off along the path towards the folly. “You put yourself so easily into the mind of the ill-intentioned.”
“I suppose I do,” agreed Benedict shortly, reflecting silently to himself that developing such strong awareness and insight around ones environment and household members was the only way to survive a childhood such as his.
It took twenty minutes to reach the hill where the folly stood. They circled it first, noting signs of some regular ascent on the far side of the hill, furthest from Rosemere, despite the main path on the near side.
“Someone doesn’t want to be seen coming up here,” pronounced Benedict as they made their own way to the top. “Lady Esher said that no one uses the folly these days. Louisa and Seraphine used to play in it when they were young but since they’ve grown-up, it just sits here.”
“As follies are intended to do,” said Damien with a wry smile, as they reached the top of the hill. “That is their entire purpose.”
Benedict almost laughed but then felt his jaw tighten again on observing several more small piles of cigar ash around the outside of the folly, all of which must have been dropped there since the last heavy rain. This was evidently a favorite spot for the unwelcome watcher.
“No dust,” he noted, approaching and examining the dark metal handles on the heavy wooden doors. “That either speaks well for the assiduity of Lady Esher’s groundsmen, or…”
Pushing and holding one door open and indicating for Damien to do the same with the other, the two men let the sunlight pour into the empty folly.
There was certainly enough dust inside, both on the floor and the stone seating around the narrow upper window gaps, sparkling motes dancing in the sunbeams.
Amidst the dust lay the tracks of footprints, crossing and recrossing in every direction, overlying and blurring one another. The dust on the seats was disturbed too, as if someone had sat or kneeled in many of them recently, especially those facing Rosemere.
“…or there is a regular visitor to the folly,” Damien completed Benedict’s broken sentence.
Nodding, Benedict pointed to the slatted window gaps.
“Just the right height for a tall man with a telescope, aren’t they?”
Anger pulsed in him with every heartbeat.
How dare Lord Ashbourne trespass like this upon the Rosemere estate and household?
How dare he spy upon its ladies? What on earth could he hope to gain by such outrageous behavior?
Frightening a young lady in the orchard was hardly likely to endear any would-be suitor, and in any case, Louisa was already publicly promised to Benedict.
“I cannot have this,” added Benedict, letting the door go and stepping outside again.
“The man must be deranged,” Damien remarked, shaking his head. “What are you going to do?”
“Whatever I have to do to keep Louisa safe,” replied Benedict.
“Then you do have feelings for your bride-to-be?” his friend put to him. “I know what you told me but seeing you together these past few days, I did wonder whether…”
“I cannot give Louisa love, but I will give her protection,” Benedict interrupted, cutting off Damien’s words that he did not want to hear and marching away down the hill.