the corridor rug outside Leonora’s door.
She wasn’t there now.
Leonora knew it even before, tugging her wrapper around her, she eased open her door and looked.
At empty space.
Faint light from the stairhead reached down the corridor; she hesitated, then, pulling her wrapper firmly about her, headed for the stairs.
She remembered Henrietta’s low growl before the hound had gone off. It might have been in response to a cat crossing the back garden. Then again…
What if Mountford was trying to break in again?
What if he harmed Henrietta?
Her heart leapt. She’d had the hound since she was a tiny scrap of fur; Henrietta was in truth her closest confidante, the silent recipient of hundreds of secrets.
Gliding wraithlike down the stairs, she told herself not to be silly. It would be a cat. There were lots of cats in Montrose Place. Maybe two cats, and that was why Henrietta hadn’t yet come back upstairs.
She reached the bottom of the main stairs and debated whether to light a candle. Belowstairs would be black; she might even stumble over Henrietta, who would expect her to see her.
Stopping by the side table at the back of the front hall, she used the tinderbox left there to strike a match and light one of the candles left waiting. Picking up the simple candlestick, she pushed through the green baize door.
Holding the candle high, she walked down the corridor. The walls leapt out at her as the candlelight touched them, but all seemed familiar, normal. Her slippers slapping on the cold tile, she passed the butler’s pantry and the housekeeper’s room, then came to the short flight of stairs leading down to the kitchens.
She paused and looked down. All below was inky black, except for patches of faint moonlight slanting in through the kitchen windows and through the small fanlight above the back door. In the diffuse light from the latter, she could just make out the shaggy outline of Henrietta; the hound was curled up against the corridor wall, her head on her paws.
“Henrietta?” Straining her eyes, Leonora peered down.
Henrietta didn’t move, didn’t twitch.
Something was wrong. Henrietta wasn’t that young. Greatly fearing the hound had suffered a seizure, Leonora grabbed up her trailing night rail and rushed down the stairs.
“Henriet—
She stopped on the last stair, mouth agape, face-to-face with the man who had stepped from the black shadows to meet her.
Candlelight flickered over his black-avised face; his lips curled in a snarl.
Pain exploded in the back of her skull. She dropped the candle, pitched forward as all light extinguished and everything went black.
For an instant, she thought it was simply the candle going out, then from a great distance she heard Henrietta start to howl. To bay. The most horrible, bloodcurdling sound in the world.
She tried to open her eyes and couldn’t.
Pain knifed through her head. The black intensified and dragged her down.
Returning to consciousness wasn’t pleasant. For some considerable time, she hung back, hovered in that land that was neither here nor there, while voices washed over her, concerned, some sharp with anger, others with fear.
Henrietta was there, at her side. The hound whined and licked her fingers. The rough caress drew her inexorably back, through the mists, into the real world.
She tried to open her eyes. Her lids were inordinately heavy; her lashes fluttered. Weakly, she raised a hand, and realized there was a wide bandage circling her head.
All talk abruptly ceased.
“She’s awake!”
That came from Harriet. Her maid rushed to her side, took her hand, patted it. “Don’t you fret. The doctor’s been, and he says you’ll be good as new in no time.”
Leaving her hand limp in Harriet’s clasp, she digested that.
“Are you all right, sis?”
Jeremy sounded strangely shaken; he seemed to be hovering close by. She was lying stretched out, her feet elevated higher than her head, on a chaise…she must be in the parlor.
A heavy hand awkwardly patted her knee. “Just rest, my dear,” Humphrey advised. “Heaven knows what the world is coming to, but…” His voice quavered and trailed away.
An instant later came a rough growl, “She’ll do better if you don’t crowd her.”
Tristan.
She opened her eyes, looked straight at him, standing beyond the end of the chaise.
His face was more rigidly set than she’d ever seen it; the cast of his patrician features screamed a warning to any who knew him.
His blazing eyes were warning enough to anyone at all.
She blinked. Didn’t shift her gaze. “What happened?”
“You were hit on the head.”
“That much I’d gathered.” She glanced at Henrietta;the hound pushed closer. “I went down to look for Henrietta. She’d gone downstairs but hadn’t come back. She usually does.”
“So you went after her.”
She looked back at Tristan. “I thought something might have happened. And it had.” She looked back at Henrietta, frowned. “She was by the back door, but she didn’t move…”
“She was drugged. Laudanum in port, trickled under the back door.”
She reached for Henrietta, palmed the shaggy face, looked into the bright brown eyes.
Tristan shifted. “She’s fully recovered—lucky for you, whoever it was didn’t use enough to do more than make her snooze.”
She dragged in a breath, winced when her head ached sharply. Looked again at Tristan. “It was Mountford. I came face-to-face with him at the bottom of the stairs.”
For one instant, she thought he would actually snarl; the violence she glimpsed in him, that flowed across his features was frightening. Even more so because part of that aggression was directed, quite definitely, at her.
Her revelation had shocked the others; they were all looking at her, not Tristan.
“Who’s Mountford?” Jeremy demanded. He looked from Leonora to Tristan. “What is this about?”
Leonora sighed. “It’s about the burglar—he’s the man I saw at the bottom of our garden.”
That piece of information had Jeremy’s and Humphrey’s jaws dropping. They were horrified—doubly so because not even they could any longer close their eyes, pretend the man was a figment of her imagination. Imagination hadn’t drugged Henrietta nor cracked Leonora’s skull. Forced to acknowledge reality, they exclaimed, they declared.
The noise was all too much. She closed her eyes and slipped gratefully away.
Tristan felt like a violin string stretched to snapping point, but when he saw Leonora’s eyes close, saw her brow and features smooth into the blankness of unconsciousness, he dragged in a breath, swallowed his demons, and got the others out of the room without roaring at them.
They went, but reluctantly. Yet after all he’d heard, all he’d learned, to his mind they’d forfeited any right they might have had to watch over her. Even her maid, devoted though she seemed.
He sent her to prepare a tisane, then returned to stand looking down at Leonora. She was still pale, but her skin was no longer deathly white as it had been when he’d first reached her side.
Jeremy, no doubt prodded by incipient guilt, had had the sense to send a footman next door; Gasthorpe had taken charge, sending one footman flying to Green Street, and another for the doctor he’d been instructed was the one always to summon. Jonas Pringle was a veteran of the Peninsula campaigns; he could treat knife and gunshot wounds without turning a hair. A knock on the head was a minor affair, but his assurance, backed by experience, had been what Tristan had needed.
Only that had kept him marginally civilized.
