“And so you did?”
“What else could I do? She refused to talk to me anymore. When I went back last Saturday, they told me she was no longer there.” He brought up both hands to scrub them across his face, his shoulders hunched. “I thought they were lying—that she just didn’t want to see me again. But a part of me was terrified something must have happened to her.”
“What made you think that?”
Cedric knotted the fingers of his hands together, as if he were in prayer. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling I had.” He hesitated. “I remember this one time in Spain, just before Ciudad Rodrigo. A fellow by the name of Hobbs took out a patrol. They were late coming back. We’d had one of those bloody awful rains that can come up out of nowhere in the Peninsula. Everyone was convinced they’d just used the storm as an excuse to spend the afternoon in a bodega somewhere.”
“But you didn’t think so?”
“No.” Cedric stared off across the gardens. “They’d been ambushed. We found them not two miles outside camp. They’d been set upon by peasants with pitchforks and scythes.” His face contorted with the memory. “They were literally ripped apart.”
Both men were silent for a moment, lost in visions of the past, of men bloodied and torn by cannon fire and bayonets as well as by pitchforks and scythes. Sebastian said, “Did you tell Lord Fairchild that you’d found your sister?”
Cedric let out a sound that was like a laugh, only devoid of all humor. “My father?” He shook his head. “My father isn’t well. It would kill him, if he knew what had happened to Rachel.”
“Sometimes not knowing is worse than knowing.”
“Not this time.”
Chapter 32
Hero gently closed the door to her mother’s room and paused in the hall for a moment, her hand still on the knob, a weight of sadness pressing down on her. Lady knob, a weight of sadness pressing down on her. Lady Jarvis had reacted badly to last night’s incident. Sometimes she worked herself up into such a state that it lasted for weeks.
Her hand slipping off the knob, Hero was just turning away when her father came up to her. “How is your mother?” he asked. There was neither warmth nor caring in the question.
“Resting. Dr. Ross has dosed her liberally with laudanum. She should sleep the rest of the day.”
Lord Jarvis’s lips thinned into the pained expression he inevitably assumed whenever the topic under discussion was his wife. “That’s a relief.” His eyes narrowed as he studied Hero’s face. “You’re certain you’re all right?”
“Thanks to you teaching me to keep a steady finger on the trigger.”
Father and daughter shared a private smile. His smile faded quickly. “I’ve dismissed the two footmen you and your mother had with you last night.”
“It wasn’t their fault.”
“Of course it was their fault,” said Lord Jarvis. “I didn’t send you into the country with three armed men to have you come back covered in some highwayman’s gore.”
Hero opened her mouth, then shut it.
“Coachman John tells me you took the injured highwayman to Paul Gibson’s surgery near Tower Hill. Why?”
“I doubted the practitioners of Harley Street would appreciate the delivery of a bloody highwayman at midnight. And if I’d simply taken him to Bow Street, he’d have died.”
“The man still lives?”
“Last I heard, yes.”
“Good. Then he can be made to talk.”
Hero felt a chill prickle down her spine. She’d heard dark rumors of the methods employed by Lord Jarvis’s henchmen to make people talk. “Papa—”
Jarvis raised his hand, stopping her. “These men are connected to what happened last Monday, aren’t they?”
“It would seem so, yes.”
He was so good at hiding his thoughts and feelings that even Hero often had a difficult time reading him. She was both shocked and touched when he suddenly said, “I’m concerned about you, Hero. You’re all I have left.”
“I’ll be careful,” she promised. Reaching up, she brushed her father’s cheek with a kiss and turned toward the stairs.
But she was aware of him still standing in the hall, watching her.
Jarvis was in the small chamber he reserved for mixing snuff when his butler ushered Colonel Epson-Smith into the room.
“You wanted to see me, my lord?” asked the Colonel.
“What I want is to see this unpleasantness brought to an end. Quickly.” Jarvis added a pinch of macouba to
