Another hour passed before Nicholas stirred.
“You’re in your own bed,” Charles said. “He’s gone.”
Nicholas frowned. It took effort to open his eyes; he blinked at them, went to move, and winced. His eyes widened. “He stabbed me.”
“Twice.” Charles’s tone was caustic. “What possessed you to tackle him alone?”
Nicholas grimaced. “I didn’t think it through-there wasn’t time.”
Charles sighed. “What happened?”
“I was sitting in a chair in the hall, waiting-”
“Why there?” Charles asked, perplexed.
“Because I reasoned he’d go to the library, and I could see the library door from there. I didn’t think he’d come through the window. The first I knew of him was a great crash-he’d smashed one of the display cases.”
“Hmm.” Charles’s eyes narrowed. “What happened next? How much do you recall?”
“I rushed in-he saw me and swore, but I was on him in a flash. We tussled, fell.” Nicholas’s gaze grew distant. “It was so dark. It was more guesswork than science, grappling, rolling-then he flung me back, and stabbed me.” He paused, then continued, “Then he stabbed me again. It felt so cold…” After a moment, Nicholas looked at Charles. “I heard a shout, but it seemed to come from a long way away.”
“That was me-I was in the doorway.”
“I must have fainted. What happened next?”
“He threw the knife at me”-Charles glanced severely at Penny-“at
“He got away?”
“The shrubbery is too damned close to the house-it’s the perfect escape route.” Charles studied Nicholas’s face. “I need you to tell me all you can remember about your attacker.”
Nicholas nodded; gingerly, he eased up in the bed.
Charles rose and went to help him, stacking the pillows behind his back. “You’ve lost a fair amount of blood- you’ll be weak for a day or so, and those wounds will pull like the devil as they heal, but you were lucky-he didn’t have time to be as professionally vicious as he’d have liked.”
Penny rose and poured the tisane; when Nicholas was settled again, she handed him the cup. “It’s Em’s special recipe. It’ll help.”
Nicholas accepted the cup, sipped gratefully. Slipped back into his thoughts.
“So?” Charles prompted, returning to sit on the arm of Penny’s chair.
Nicholas grimaced. “I couldn’t see anything of his face-he had a scarf tied over his nose and mouth. In the dark, I couldn’t get any idea of his eyes, and he wore a hat jammed low-it didn’t come off.”
“Don’t think of features-you wrestled with him. How did he feel to you-old, young, supple, strong?”
Nicholas blinked; his expression grew distant. “Youngish, but not that much younger than I. Quite strong- leanish.”
“How tall?”
Nicholas looked at Charles. “Not as tall as you. More my height, maybe an inch or so taller.” He paused, then asked, “Did you see anything-anything to identify him?”
“Not specifically, but I believe we can cross Yarrow and Swaley off our lists. From what we both observed, Swaley’s too short, and there’s no way a man of Yarrow’s weight could have moved as your attacker did. I agree with your youngish-younger than you or me-and leanish, too, although on that I’m less clear.” Charles leveled his gaze on Nicholas’s face. “Now think back-you said he swore when you entered the library. What did he sound like?”
“He was swearing even before he saw me-he seemed enraged about the pillboxes.”
“Well, then?”
Nicholas’s grimace was self-deprecatory. “It was all in French-fluent, and…well, if you work with people who speak multiple languages, you realize they sound different in one tongue versus another.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how he would sound in English.”
Charles humphed, but nodded. “Carmichael, Fothergill, or Gerond, then.”
“But from what you said before, Fothergill and Carmichael are unlikely.” Nicholas handed his empty cup back to Penny. “And it was very fluent French.”
Charles shook his head. “Don’t build too much on that. I swear in very fluent French, too. As for the rest, ‘unlikely’ isn’t definite. Those three are all still suspects.”
Nicholas fell silent.
Penny studied him, then looked at Charles. He was thinking, furiously, not about what they’d learned, but about how to learn more. He was weighing his options; she knew the look.
After a long moment, he refocused on Nicholas, who met his gaze.
“When are you going to tell me-us-what’s going on?”
When Nicholas’s lips merely tightened, Charles went on, “If I hadn’t decided to come down and check the doors and windows, I would never have been in time to stop his next blow, one that would very likely have ended your life. And no, I’m not telling you that so you’ll feel grateful. I want you to understand how serious this is. This man has killed, not once but twice that we know of, and he will kill again. He has no compunction whatever. Who knows who it might be next time? Figgs, perhaps-she tended your wounds. Or Em, who made the tisane. Or Norris. Or Penny.”
His voice had grown progessively colder. When he said her name, even though she’d guessed it was coming, Penny had to fight to quell a shiver.
When Nicholas glanced down at his hands, lying atop the covers, and said nothing, Charles continued in the same, coldly judgmental tone, “You said you’d reasoned he’d make for the library, and that he was swearing over the pillboxes. Am I right in guessing that you believed the pillboxes would be part of his target?” He stopped, waited.
“Yes,” Nicholas eventually said. Closing his eyes, he rested his head back on the piled pillows.
“I assume you thought that because he’d gone after Mary-she was the downstairs tweeny, so she was responsible for dusting in the library.”
Eyes still closed, Nicholas nodded.
Charles studied him, then looked at Penny. Mouthed what he wanted her to say. She nodded and sat forward.
“Nicholas, we know of the pillboxes in the priest hole.”
His eyes jerked open; he stared at her. “You know…?”
He looked at Charles, who nodded.
“Not easy to explain, not at all.”
Nicholas sighed, and dropped his head back once more. He stared at the canopy over the bed.
“The thing I can’t fathom,” Charles went on, “is how the pillboxes fit with our theory of revenge. No one could have known…”
He paused. He’d been speaking his thoughts as they occurred, as he followed the train, yet hearing it aloud… suddenly he saw the light. “Not quite true, of course. The one group who most definitely would have known about the pillboxes is those who handed them over-the French.”
Fixing his gaze on Nicholas, he felt the jigsaw shift, saw the difficult pieces slide smoothly into place. But he was still missing one major piece.
Nicholas had a stubborn look on his face-one Charles actually recognized; it was very like Penny’s intransigent mask.
“Very well.” Settling back, he watched Nicholas. “This is what I know so far. Your father and Penny’s set up some scheme decades ago passing secrets to the French. The French paid in pillboxes. The secrets were delivered mostly verbally to a contact from a French lugger who met one of the Selbornes out in the Channel. The Smollets arranged the meetings using their yacht and the appropriate signal flags, then Penny’s father and later Granville would go out with one of the smuggling gangs, meet the French, effect the transfer, and come away with a pillbox.
“A very neat exchange for everyone concerned, except the soliders who died in the wars.” He was unable to keep the icy contempt from his voice.
