Chapter
Twenty-Two

Will Harvey couldn’t believe his eyes.

Lady Elizabeth Clarke, standing on his doorstep in the middle of the night as though she’d come for—

Oh, who knew what she had come for? Nor did he give her time to tell him before he grabbed hold of her arm, all but yanking her inside and then shutting the door and latching it firmly behind her.

“You silly girl!” he couldn’t stop himself from saying. “Don’t you realize yet that it’s not safe out there?”

“Of course I realize that,” she said, shaking him off. “Why do you imagine I ran all the way? Now do you think you might turn on a light or something? It is rather dark in here.”

Will grudgingly obliged, although there was no light to be turned on, only candles to be lit; there was no electricity in the cottages.

Now that there was some illumination, Will wondered what Lady Elizabeth saw as she looked around the small cottage. His aunt had tried to make it a home for them, in and around the rest of her other work on their plot of land, but he knew it was no doubt meaner than any home the youngest daughter of the house had ever been in. Why, Will had been in the kitchen of the abbey earlier, so very many hours earlier, and he had to admit that his family home couldn’t compare in terms of fineness even to that.

Oh, well. He certainly wouldn’t apologize for it. Who cared if she didn’t like it? He hadn’t invited her here in the first place!

“First you call me Lady Elizabeth, then it’s ‘you silly girl,’” she said. “How about we split the difference and make it Lizzy?”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“Oh, do try!” Lizzy urged. “It will be impossible to have this conversation with you if you don’t!”

Will’s aunt had been known to sleep through just about anything. Jessamine Harvey had slept through the knock at the door and their initial exchange of words. But once Lizzy raised her voice, even Auntie couldn’t sleep through that.

“What’s going on?” his aunt said, rubbing at her eyes as she came out of her room in her threadbare white dressing gown.

The cottage only had two bedrooms, his and the one his aunt had shared with his uncle until his death, to go with the one larger room that included kitchen area and sitting area.

“Oh, Your Ladyship!” his aunt said. “Would you care for some tea?”

Leave it to Auntie. You’d think she’d be ruffled and rattled by any visitor in the middle of the night, particularly this visitor, and yet here she was behaving as though being called on thusly was a daily occurrence for her.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Lady Elizabeth said, “but please, call me Lizzy. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble for me, Lizzy. Will can get the fire going again in an instant.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“And would you care for a biscuit with that?”

“Yes, now that I think about it, I think that tea and a biscuit would be just lovely.”

As his aunt busied herself with heating this and getting a small plate for that, and he lit the fire, he looked at Lady Elizabeth—fine, Lizzy—more closely, and he could see that she didn’t want tea or a biscuit at all. She’d already refused the first before his aunt pressed her. So what had changed her mind? Perhaps, he conceded grudgingly, she’d seen that refusing Auntie’s hospitality—even if the acceptance of it meant a diminishment in the Harvey family’s own meager supplies—would offend his aunt too much, and it was an offense she didn’t want to give.

It was possible he was mistaken, but was she being kind?

“Oh, this is lovely,” Lizzy said, taking a hurried sip when she’d been handed a cup, “perfectly hot, too.”

He knew it wasn’t—the lovely part. His aunt, for all her strengths as a human being, made perfectly wretched tea. Although how a person could foul up tea, he’d never been able to figure out.

“Do you mind if I sit down somewhere?” Lizzy asked. “Only, I had such a long run.”

“Of course, of course,” Auntie said. “Take the chair closest to the fire.”

He saw Lizzy hesitate. Perhaps she didn’t want to take their very best? But then, no doubt again concluding that refusal was the greater crime, she accepted.

His aunt sat in the overstuffed chair across from her and he settled on the arm of that.

“Now you must tell us,” Auntie said. “Why are you here and what can we do for you?”

“Yes,” Will said urgently, no longer able to contain the question that had been burning inside him since first finding her on his doorstep, “is Kate all right?”

“Kate?” Lizzy drew back in puzzlement. “Why would you think it’s something to do with Kate? She’s fine. Or at least she was last time I saw her.” Lizzy leaned forward, turning her attention to Will’s aunt as he breathed an internal sigh of relief.

“It’s just so awful!” Lizzy cried out. “Did Will tell you what happened today?”

“Of course he did, pet. That must have been horrible for you.” Here Auntie leaned forward and grasped one of Lizzy’s delicate hands in both of her work-roughened ones.

He marveled at his aunt: calling Lizzy, a daughter of the estate, “pet”; touching her as though she were Annie Mason, the farmer’s widow who was their closest neighbor, come by for a cry after some loss. But then, that was his aunt all over. If Queen Mary came to the door in need of something, Auntie would treat her just the same.

Still, he half expected Lizzy to recoil at her touch, as he’d sensed Kate doing as he lay on top of her earlier in the day, protecting her. Not that it had been like that at first. At first Kate hadn’t seemed to mind the contact at all, nor had he, if reluctant truth be told. In fact, it had almost seemed as though she were pressing into him, which hardly seemed necessary, since he was already on top of her, pressing her into the ground. Despite the danger at hand, he’d enjoyed the sensation of close contact very much indeed. But then she’d cooled and…

Well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

What did Lizzy see when she looked at his aunt with her prematurely grizzled gray hair?

But rather than what he’d half expected, Lizzy leaned forward, too, placing her other hand on top of his aunt’s.

“Thank you for saying that!” Lizzy said. “That’s why I came here. I knew Will would understand. And I suppose if I’d taken the time to stop and think about it, I’d have realized that you’d understand, too, given what you’ve been through.”

“Of course we do,” Auntie said.

“That man,” Lizzy said, “the one I killed today, he was already dead.”

“I believe you. I saw it myself with my Ezra.”

“But how is such a thing possible?” Lizzy said.

“I don’t know.” Auntie shook her head.

“And the toughest part,” Lizzy said, “well, maybe not the toughest, but still very bad, is that no one up at the house is taking this seriously, or almost no one. Even Dr. Webb—”

“I saw that doctor,” Will said, “heard him, too. You expect more from a medical man. You expect him to be more, I don’t know, open-minded, maybe even to have an idea or two about what might be going on.”

“Well,” Lizzy said with a laugh that was only the tiniest bit bitter, “if we’re expecting that, then clearly we’re expecting too much from Dr. Webb! Perhaps some other medical man—”

“But the way he dismissed you!” Will said, now feeling outrage on her behalf. “When you were the one who saw—”

“Just like I did with Ezra,” Auntie put in.

“First,” Will said, “there was just the one.”

“And now,” Lizzy said, “there’ve been two. And where there’s two…”

She let her voice trail off, perhaps reluctant to finish the thought herself. So Will did it for her.

“There could be more,” he said. “Which is why I was so upset that you’d come here, at night, like this. We’re safe enough inside, or at least so far we’ve been, with the doors closed. But out there…?”

It was his turn to let a thought lie.

“But don’t you see?” Lizzy said. “I felt I had to come! To at least talk to someone who would understand, someone who would believe me, because there’s no point in trying to talk to them.”

“We understand, pet,” Auntie said, “and we do believe you. But it will be morning soon. Hadn’t you better get back before they notice you’ve gone?”

“I didn’t think about the time,” Lizzy said, looking mortified. “How awful of me, to keep you up late, interrupting your sleep when you have your own life to attend to in the morning.”

“I don’t mind,” Auntie said. “I’m no longer sleeping as well as I once did. Hadn’t you better walk her home, Will? She came all this way by herself. She mustn’t go home that way, too.”

Will excused himself to his bedroom, grabbed a thing or two, and returned.

“What’s that?” Lizzy said, pointing to the pistol in his hand.

“A pistol,” he answered.

“Yes, I know that. But what is it for?”

“Insurance.”

…

If they were living in normal times, Will might have relished the opportunity to walk a pretty girl home. He’d have taken the long way, strolling at the most leisurely pace possible so that he might prolong the pleasure of having her at his side.

But these were not normal times, so instead he found himself rushing, protectively holding her hand as he hurried her along, racing against the house waking up and discovering that the youngest daughter had spent a part of the night down in the small cottage of the stable boy, racing against whatever might be there outside with them.

Not to mention, as a daughter of the house, Lizzy was not for him. And besides, she was Lizzy.

“But what do you think it is?” Lizzy whispered. “Dead, not dead, dead again—what is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Will said. “I’m not a doctor.”

“And the one we have is all but useless.”

“Maybe it’s some new disease,” Will said, “something the world has never seen before.”

“Maybe,” Lizzy said doubtfully, as though she were unsure just what to think. “Anyway, we’re close enough.”

Porthampton Abbey lay not far ahead.

“You should leave me here,” Lizzy said. “If someone does see me coming, better that they see me alone.”

“All right.” He jutted his chin toward the abbey. “I’ll stand watch until you’re safely inside.”

“But Will?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t listen to what my father said. I know he sent you away yesterday and told you not to come back before today. And for all I know, he’ll send you away again! But don’t listen to him. Find a way to be here. We need you here. I need someone here, someone who understands.”

“All right,” Will said simply again.

Lizzy started to leave him, but he stopped her. He couldn’t believe he’d nearly forgotten the most important part.

“Here,” he said, laying something in her hands, the other thing he’d grabbed from his room back at the cottage.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s a pistol.”

“Yes, I do know that, but—”

“Keep it on your person, Lizzy. Keep it on your person at all times, especially whenever you go out of doors.”

He watched her look at the gun for a long moment, realization sinking in, before she shifted her gaze up to his.

“It’s your insurance,” he told her.