Her Saving Grace (26 page)

Nate followed as quickly as he dared and when they got onto the heath, he urged his horse to a gallop. Damaris was galloping too but his horse was faster and although it took a while, he managed to catch up with her. He leaned over and took hold of her horse’
s reins close to the bit, pulling backwards until the horse slowed.

Damaris urged the horse
on, digging her heels into his flanks but with Nate pulling back on his bit, he was confused and anxious, which caused him to rear up, almost striking Nate with a hoof and nearly unseating his rider.

Afraid
that Damaris might be thrown, Nate let go of the reins but the danger seemed to have jolted her out of whatever trance she was in and she sat meekly in the saddle, her features a mask of pain.

Nathaniel knew that the horses needed a rest after galloping for so long. Thankfully he knew these lands well, having
ridden across the heath hundreds of times as a child, so although they were off course, he knew the way home.

“Come on, there’s a stream not far from here where we can rest the horses” he said, guiding Casabian to the east. Damaris followed.

By the time they reached the stream, Casabian had his breath back and Nate stopped at the edge. He dismounted and left Casabian to drink as he approached Damaris, knowing that his horse was well schooled and wouldn’t wander far.

He helped Damaris down and let her horse make his own way to the
water, as he turned Damaris to face him. Her hat had fallen loose during the gallop, allowing her hair to hang free. The breeze pushed strands over her face, which he tucked behind her ears.

“Please, tell me what’s wrong.”

She looked into his eyes and as tears streamed down her face, she said, “I know who killed my father.”

Nathaniel held her as sobs
racked her frame, gently stroking her back and soothing her as best he could. While he desperately wanted to know what she had discovered, he wouldn’t press her until she was ready. As her tears finally subsided, she pulled away and looked up at him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Whatever for?” he asked.

“Running away like that.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not sure I was thinking at all, to be honest.”

“Hush, there is no harm done.” He pulled his handkerchief out and dried her tears.

She took a deep breath and once her cheeks were dry, began her tale.

“I’m not quite sure where to start,” she admitted, trying to form her muddled thoughts into some sort of
order.

“Start at the beginning,” he
suggested.

“All right. I suppose it starts with Christopher. After he returned from university, he was appointed the
Clerk of the Justices, working for your predecessor, Lord Dickinson. After that, he claimed that he invested a small inheritance from our grandmother and used the funds from that to keep himself. He and father often argued, father called him feckless and said that he needed a proper position but Christopher never left home, although he spent a few days each week in London, supposedly managing his business affairs. You said that your predecessor appointed Smyth, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Just about the time that O’Grady stopped being arrested for his crimes?”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s probably a fair assumption that until his death, Lord Dickinson was involved in the conspiracy with Smyth and O’Grady.”

“We have no proof but yes, it’s likely.”

“The bill of sale for the forged painting was from C Howard, Christopher Howard, not Charles, to Mr J Coiquaud. Coiquaud is Hortense’s family name.”

“So you think that using forged paintings-”

“Or no paintings, they could have just sold a blank canvas.”

“All right, so selling the paintings to a Frenchman was a way to cover the payments they received for selling secrets?”

“I think so, yes.”

“So where did these secrets come from? You can't believe that your father was involved?”

“I don’t, at least not knowingly, but Christopher could have used his contacts to obtain information from Father’s friends or as you suggested once, O’Grady could have used his women to elicit secrets from patrons during pillow talk. Dickinson may even have had his own sources in the War Office, but didn’t have a way to sell them without Christopher’s help.”

He nodded as he considered
her theory. “It makes sense, but why didn’t you consider your brother a suspect before now?”

“Because Christopher
was only Clerk of the Justices for a year and even then, he paid a lawyer to act in his stead most of the time. Even if I had considered him, well, he’s family! I know he and my father didn’t get on but murder?” she took a deep breath to try and calm her emotions.

Nate resumed stroking her back, trying to relax her.

“If I can be said to hate anyone, Nate, it’s my mother but even so, I would never dream of harming her. It simply didn’t occur to me that-”

“Ssh,” he soothed. “It’s all right, I understand and I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She smiled up at him, although it was rather teary. “It’s not you who has upset me. I still can't quite believe he would be a party to Father’s murder, despite the mounting evidence.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t his choice,” Nate tried to console her. He believed her brother to be cold blooded enough to do it
, but there was plenty of time for the truth of her brother’s betrayal to sink in. “There must still be conspirators that we don’t know about. Someone arranged for Smyth and O’Grady to be killed,” he reminded her, “and your brother was still in France then.”

“Yes, I realise that and I’ve been thinking. Other than an abortionist, who else would know how to use pennyroyal?”

“A doctor or nurse, I suppose.”

“That’s what I was thinking too
and I realised, Dr Worthington is the half-brother of Walter Dickinson.”

“My predecessor,” Nate finished. He wasn’t as close to the doctor as Damaris was to her brother but still, the idea that a man he had looked up to and trusted might be involved in this, sickened him.

“Are you sure they’re related? There’s 20 years between them, at least.”

“Worthington’s mother was Marie Goodman. She married Viscount Dickinson when she was
fifteen and he forty, he had been married twice before but did not produce an heir. Marie bore him only one child, but it was a son. Some speculate that the boy is not even his but there is no proof that she was unfaithful. When he died fourteen years after they married, she married a commoner, albeit a wealthy merchant, Saul Worthington. They had six children, four sons, of which Dr Worthington is the youngest. The elder sons inherited the lion’s share of the estate, so Worthington chose a profession to keep him.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because Dr Worthington was our family’s physician and very friendly with both my parents, although especially my mother, who would invite him to dine during the week, while father was in London. I learned most of this from dinner conversation, once I was old enough to join them.”

Nathaniel was reeling, not only from the betrayal but her seeming encyclopaedic knowledge.

“I’m sorry.” She told him sincerely.

“This is not your fault, darling, and if it’s true, I have been betrayed by a friend, while your brother committed patricide. I think your problems outweigh mine.”

“Does it have to be a competition?” she asked. “Can't we both give and receive comfort?”

She asked so innocently that it warmed his heart. She was such a contradiction,
bold yet bashful, rash but shy, fiercely intelligent and yet at times naive, beautiful but often artless.

He tightened his arms around her and found a smile.

“Of course we can.” He leaned down and kissed her tenderly. His passions were close to being inflamed once more, but he knew that Damaris wasn’t in the mood for passion, not so soon after discovering her brother’s betrayal, so he ended the kiss before his emotions became too intense.

“We should get back,” she said, and he wondered if he might have been wrong, if she was feeling as desirous as he. Still, they were in the middle of the heath, which really wasn’t where he wanted their first time to be.

“Yes, of course. Still, I suggest we take it slow, the horses must be weary and we’re already halfway home.”

She blushed, realising that her antics were the reason the horses were tired.

They mounted and set the horses to a brisk walk, which enabled them to talk as they rode.

“Are you sure about Worthington?” Nathaniel asked.

“Well, no but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. He’s been delaying his findings since the beginning and had you not been there when my note arrived, he might well have passed the body off as someone else, like Smyth did. He must have contacted my brother immediately the body was found, which is how Christopher managed to return to England so quickly. Plus, he has easy access to pennyroyal through his profession and knows how to use it.”

“It’s an unusual choice
of poison though,” he argued.

“True. He could have used it because he didn’t think anyone would think of it, or
simply because he had it to hand. Then again, we did speculate that the killer used it to warn other conspirators off talking.”

“Well we know O’Grady was poisoned by a woman, so there must be at least one other person.”

“Also true,” she agreed.

Something about the doctor
’s involvement just didn’t sit right with Nathaniel, although he was well aware that he didn’t want to believe it, which could be affecting his judgement. Still, the doctor hadn’t seemed at all hesitant to identify the body when Damaris’ note arrived; indeed it had been the doctor’s careful sifting of the dirt with the body which had found the engraved wedding ring; the first clue they had to his identity.

Still, there did seem to be an awful lot of coincidences stacking up, which looked bad for him.

“I think we need to keep this to ourselves,” Damaris said, pulling him out of his reverie.

“Oh?”

“We have a lot of suspicions but no proof and if we get ahead of ourselves, all our suspects could flee.”

Her words reminded him of an earlier conversation. “What about Sondham, do you still think he is involved?”

“He could still be a part of the conspiracy; while we have no new reasons to suspect his involvement, we also haven’t found anything to prove his innocence.”

“So, how do we proceed?”

They talked through various ideas but fatigue was dulling their senses and as they approached the estate, they both decided to talk again tomorrow. They wouldn’t exactly have a good night’s rest behind them but Nate had told his mother what they would be doing, so although they were normally early risers, she knew to let them sleep in until nine or ten o’clock, which wasn’t unusual among the gentry.

With any luck,
Christopher and Hortense would be late risers, and might never need to know what time Nathaniel and Damaris arose.

The sweat on the horses had dried on the walk home and they would be groomed first thing in the morning, so they were able to put
them back in their stalls and simply return the saddles and bridles to the tack room. They entered the house through the servants’ entrance at the rear, locking the door behind them again and returning the key to its hook by the door, then they climbed the servants’ stairs to the first floor and paused before they headed to their respective rooms. He stole a kiss.

“I love you, Mari,” he said, surprised to hear himself utter the words but not regretting them.

She smiled. “I... Thank you. And, I care for you too.”

It wasn’t a declaration of undying love, but it would do for now.

They shared another kiss then separated, albeit reluctantly.

He paused in his doorway and watched her leave, pleased when she tu
rned back before rounding the corner to her own room.

As he pulled
the covers over himself, a part of Nate hoped that Damaris might steal into his room again but given that it was already five o’clock, and the servants would be rising in another hour and a half, he suspected that she was far too practical to visit him that night. He was right but given that he was asleep thirty seconds later, it didn’t make an awful lot of difference.

***

Damaris awoke at half past nine and for a few blissful moments, she didn’t remember that her brother had killed her father. She was used to not getting very much sleep, so even her four and a half hours left her feeling relatively rested.

She stretched, then rang the bell for
the maid to bring hot water and it was only as she swung her legs out of bed, catching sight of the clock on the mantle, that she realised how late it was, which reminded her of the events of last night.

She almost
felt as if she were suffocating, the pain of Christopher’s betrayal smothering her new found happiness.

She realised that this feeling was actually very familiar to her, and that it was her happiness which was odd. Before
she met Nathaniel, she was hard pressed to remember when exactly she had last been happy.

Her studies gave her a sense of accomplishment and when her experiments
proved that her theories were correct, of achievement, but now she realised that it was no longer enough.

As she washed, she considered the reasons for her change in temperament and had to admit that Nathaniel was the biggest reason. He had shown her that life could still be worth living and that despite everything she had already suffered, some things were still worth risking her heart for.

She smiled as she thought of Nate’s final words to her last night, that he loved her, and her reply, albeit somewhat hesitant and unsure.

She also wanted to spend some time with Ella today and intended to take her for a walk in the gardens. She had read to her before bed last night but given her la
te night antics, it felt like days rather than hours since she had seen the girl.

She had Nate (and his mother) to thank for Ella’s presence in her life for without their cajoling, she would never have taken the girl in.

She was a little concerned at what Ella’s refusal to speak might mean, that she could possibly be a dumb mute, but the child seemed engaged when Damaris was with her, and her retardation could simply be because no one had taken the time to talk to her. Thomas had possessed quite a vocabulary by the age of four but then, people interacted with him all day, so she vowed not to worry about Ella for at least a few weeks. She knew she had to prepare herself for the possibility that the girl might never talk, and she had no intention of turning the girl away if she did turn out to be slow but she hoped, for Ella’s sake, that any damage her start in life might have done wasn’t permanent.