Chapter
Sixteen

“I think I might be able to help you out there,” said Raymond Allen.

The duke had surprised himself by being the first on the scene, the first to arrive after hearing Lizzy scream, running toward potential danger rather than in the direction that sheer common sense dictated, which would be to run away from it, preferably as far as possible. He’d never thought himself to be a particularly valorous man; in fact, he knew that he was not. But then, he supposed, damsel in distress and all that. Even a timid man must sometimes do what one must.

What didn’t surprise him was that having spoken up, he was now being ignored.

He watched as the others approached the corpse, joining the doctor with varying degrees of trepidation.

“The color of his blood,” Lady Elizabeth said, sounding confused. “Can that be quite right?”

“How do you mean?” Dr. Webb said. “What do you think is wrong with it?”

“Only,” Lady Elizabeth said, still sounding confused, “when I cut my finger or some such, the blood that comes out is a much more lively vivid red, while his is dull as rust, the color of a brick, almost like what blood looks like after it’s completely dried and it’s no longer so…lively.”

“Ah, I see what you mean,” Dr. Webb said, looking briefly confused himself before hardening his expression into something more decisive. “Still, I’m sure it’s all quite normal.”

“But how can that be?” Lady Elizabeth pressed.

“Head wounds, you know,” Dr. Webb said authoritatively. “They are different from any other kinds of wounds.”

“So you’ve seen this before?”

“Well, no. I’ve never actually had any patients who were shot in the head before, but I suspect that if I had, they would look exactly like this.”

And the duke suspected, or was beginning to, that the medical man might not quite know what he was talking about.

“But that smell,” Lady Elizabeth went on, covering her nose.

“That is the smell of decomposition, my dear,” Dr. Webb said.

“So quickly?” Lady Elizabeth asked skeptically. “Because I’ve seen a few recently dead things before, and—”

“As I said already—head wounds. They are quite different than—”

“Oh, look!” Lady Katherine said. “The man has livery on. Could he be one of ours?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” her father said. “But if so, which one could it be?”

“He’s not one of yours,” the duke said. And then, when no one appeared to hear him, “I said, he’s not one of yours!” he practically shouted.

“He’s not?” Lady Katherine said, looking surprised, and the duke wondered what surprised her more: that someone had contradicted her and her father, or that he was still there. “Who is he, then?”

“I believe that must be Parker,” the duke said, reluctant now to come too near.

“Parker?” Lady Katherine said. “And who is he when he’s at home?”

“My valet,” the duke said. “Or, at least, he was.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, “you’d mentioned something at breakfast about his disappearing.” She moved closer still to the headless corpse, seemingly not put off in the ways most of the others were. “But how can you be so sure?”

“Because the livery is all wrong,” the duke said, gesturing vaguely with his fingers. “Or, if not all wrong, there are certainly differences.” He enumerated what those distinctions were: a slightly different-colored this, a slightly different cut of that, and so forth.

“I suppose you’re right,” Lady Katherine said. “His livery is all dusty and dirty—not typically the Porthampton Abbey way. But are you quite sure he is not one of ours?”

A part of him couldn’t believe they were having this discussion. She obviously didn’t pay enough attention to her own footmen to notice the differences between hers and this one.

“Quite sure,” he asserted vehemently.

“Seems such a shame,” she said. “He decides to leave service and then he winds up like this?”

“None of this would have happened,” Will Harvey spoke up, addressing his words to the earl, “if you’d listened to my warning.” As though suddenly realizing to whom he was addressing his remarks, he added a hasty, “Sir.”

“And what exactly was that warning again?” the duke asked.

“Yes,” Benedict Clarke said, “I should like to know, too. If there is some sort of threat here, we should all be informed.”

“I told His Lordship,” Will Harvey said, “that I was concerned after what had happened with my uncle; you know, being dead, then not, and then dead again. My concern was that, having happened once, it could—”

“Yes!” Lizzy cried eagerly, snapping her fingers at the stable boy. “I’m sure that’s why I reacted how I did!”

“How do you mean, Lizzy?” her father asked.

“Well, when the man, when this Parker started stumbling toward me after Kate was safely out of the way, I was practically frozen with fear. And then I saw those eyes—I could barely move, I was so terrified. I suppose a part of me must have remembered then; you know, what we’d heard last night at dinner: that Will’s aunt finally killed his uncle with a shot through the head. I guess that must be why I shot there and not at some other part of his person. When he just kept coming at me, all I could think was ‘Just shoot him in the head! That should do the trick! Just shoot him in the head!’”

“Once again,” Lady Katherine said, “I feel compelled to say good show, Lizzy!”

“Thank you,” Lady Elizabeth said. “But what about the threat?”

“What threat?” the earl asked.

“What Will described,” Lady Elizabeth said. “Don’t you think that this”—she gestured toward the dead man—“is just like what happened with Will’s uncle?”

“But Ezra Harvey had his heart or some such ripped out first, before being shot by his wife later,” the earl objected.

The duke wondered that they could speak so graphically and heartlessly about the fate of Will’s relative with Will standing right there among them. When the duke shifted his gaze in that direction, it surprised him to notice that Lady Katherine was looking with concern at the stable boy as well. But for his part, the stable boy kept his gaze dead forward, his jaw hard.

“I don’t see that at all, the idea of this being at all like that,” the earl went on, turning to the doctor for confirmation. “Doctor?”

The doctor squinted some more at the corpse before concluding, “I quite agree with you, my lord. We all know that what your stable boy described happening with his own family—dead, not dead, dead again—can’t happen medically. And as for this…”

“So there’s no threat?” the earl demanded.

“None that I can detect,” Dr. Webb said with a shrug.

“But I saw him!” Lady Elizabeth said. “I saw him with my own eyes! There was something really wrong with him!”

“I know what you think you saw,” the doctor said, “and I believe that you believe that you saw it. But such things are simply not possible. This poor fellow, well, who will ever really know what happened to him? Perhaps he left the duke’s service because he decided he’d had enough of working for the upper classes. And then, perhaps, he came back here, bitter, determined to take his vengeance upon the upper classes. No doubt, that murderous impulse was what you saw in his eyes. But beyond that speculation?” The doctor shrugged. “We cannot guess what was in his mind because he is no longer here for us to ask. All we can be certain of is that, whatever you’re thinking this is, Lady Elizabeth, it’s not that.”

“W-will I hang for this?” Lady Elizabeth asked.

“Pardon?”

“I killed a man, didn’t I?”

“Don’t be absurd,” her father said. “Clarkes don’t hang! Besides, anyone can see it was a case of self-defense. You felt you and your sister were threatened, and you merely acted upon that threat.”

“And as for those eyes,” Dr. Webb said, “I suppose it’s a good thing you’ve pretty much obliterated them with that straight shot of yours, so now they can no longer devil you.”

The duke felt himself experiencing astonishment and outrage on Lady Elizabeth’s behalf. The medical man had been so dismissive of her, and even her own father had been to a certain extent—why, they’d practically patted her on the head!

He was about to voice some of his own thoughts on the matter, in Lady Elizabeth’s defense. He might tell them that in the short time Parker had been in his service, nothing about the man had indicated he harbored any murderous impulses. On the contrary. Parker had been, in his experience, mostly just mild and bland and not a terribly good worker.

But he never got the chance, because Lady Katherine was saying, “Well, that’s settled, then.” And now, to his astonishment, she was raising the hem of the split-back jacket of her hunting costume a bit as she stepped right over the headless corpse before throwing over her shoulder, “Isn’t anyone else ready for lunch?”