No, it’s a fever raging through him; Magnus is delirious. Even the Earl of Carrowe doesn’t deserve to die like that.
Isabella shook her head in disbelief and all her blood seemed to rush to her head as Magnus’s words echoed in her ears like the crack of doom. Murder? Her ears were deceiving her or Magnus was raving. He was so torn and tortured by the awful situation he was caught up in that his mind had been turned. Yes, that was it; he must be suffering from brain fever. She was praying the doctor would come and save his sanity before it was too late when his next muttered sentence disillusioned her.
‘I found my father done to death, Wulf. He was murdered, foully murdered,’ Magnus was saying and Wulf muttered something soothing she didn’t catch because she was too busy lingering on the gruff rumble of his voice like a besotted debutante while poor Magnus was in the grip of horror. ‘Foully murdered,’ he echoed his own words as if he couldn’t stop now he’d got to Wulf and told him his terrible news.
‘So you said,’ his brother said coolly. ‘Tell us where and how the Earl died, Gus, before the sawbones gets here and pours laudanum down your throat. We’ll not get even this much sense out of you for hours after that.’
She heard Magnus chuckle and could even imagine him smiling weakly, so perhaps Wulf understood him after all. She was suddenly glad they were as close as they were. They, too, had shared a harsh childhood and deserved something more than bitter memories out of it. For some reason the old lord had only seemed to care about his two eldest children. After half a year of trying to avoid her future father-in-law, she’d concluded he blamed his younger children for the disaster his marriage turned into. Isabella shuddered at the thought of being imprisoned in such a marriage herself and wondered how Lady Carrowe stopped herself from murdering him long ago. No! She mustn’t even think such things. Tempted to rock back and forth on her beam to comfort herself, she shook her head at the very idea Lady Carrowe had put a knife into her husband. If she was going to do that, she would have done it when Wulf was born and the man denounced him.
‘He must have come back home that night after his usual debauch and we didn’t even know it,’ Magnus was saying. ‘We found him in the morning and by that time he was long gone, Wulf. He was sitting in the Small Drawing Room with his eyes wide open and staring at us as if he’d met the devil. Remember how it was called the Red Room before Mama had it painted white to try to make it seem less gloomy? Heaven knows it’s red again now,’ Magnus reported with a dash of hysteria in his deep voice again, as if he was remembering the sight of his murdered father and might truly run mad if they weren’t careful how they teased this terrible story out of him.
Shivering like a greyhound in a thunderstorm now, Isabella felt her heart stutter at the terrible ring of truth in his words. Now she couldn’t shake off the awful image of the Earl staring into the pit of hell while his lifeblood drained out of him.
‘I have to suppose he was stabbed, then, since there was so much blood,’ his brother was saying as if they were discussing the weather.
Isabella shook her head; how could Wulf be so calm about a soul being snuffed out so horribly? Even if it was the Earl’s. Surely he had a spark of pity in him for a life ended so violently? He’d be a lesser man if he didn’t and she didn’t want him to be somehow. He might be the most contrary, abrasive and downright annoying man she’d ever met and she was almost sure she didn’t like him, but she didn’t want him to be smaller than she’d thought when he stepped out of the shadows on that dratted terrace at Haile Carr.
‘Maybe he was, but we couldn’t see a knife,’ Magnus was saying more steadily now, so she must listen instead of thinking uncomfortable thoughts she could dwell on later. She would have tried to soothe and calm him, but Wulf obviously knew truths this brutal couldn’t be wrapped in clean linen. She supposed she ought to respect him for knowing better.
‘From what little I could see before Mama had hysterics and I had to carry her to her bedchamber, he could have been stabbed as well, Wulf,’ Magnus said, ‘but he had certainly been hit on the head. That plaster bust of Ovid he used to throw his hat on when he came home drunk was lying broken and bloody by his chair. The side of his head was beaten in and he was covered in his own gore.’
‘You’re certain it was him?’
‘Even I’m not fool enough to ride here on a maybe, Wulf, and before you ask me, yes, I made sure he was dead and didn’t leave Mama and the girls alone in that house with his corpse. The sight of him lying in his chair like butcher’s meat will haunt me to my dying day, so heaven knows what it’ll do to poor Theodora, who found him first and ran to get me. I have to get back to them instead of cosseting myself like a Bath breakdown, they need me.’
‘Lie back down, you idiot, you’re exhausted. I’ll look after them until you’re rested and fit to help—you’re too ill to be any use to them now, Gus. We’re both going to need our full strength to deal with what comes next. I’ve wished him dead in the past but never thought I’d see this day.’
‘Don’t say that, Wulf,’ Magnus said a little more strongly. ‘Someone might hear and think you had a hand in his murder. And think how happy he’d be to drag you down with him, even if he had to die to do it.’
‘You’re right,’ Wulf admitted and Isabella could imagine him frowning. ‘Don’t expect me to pretend I’m sorry he’s gone, though,’ he added gruffly.
‘That’s too much to ask, but we’ll all be suspects now. You’d best keep a still tongue if you don’t want it to be more than an unproven suspicion we wanted him to die sooner rather than later.’
‘Everyone knows I hated him, Gus. Shuttleworth and Kenton aren’t the sort of men to grasp the first straw of suspicion that drifts their way,’ Wulf argued and Isabella silently nodded her agreement.
‘FitzDevelin’s right, Haile—you’re going to need all the friends you can get, so you’d best not offend us,’ Edmund said, sounding as calm and steady as if these two unlikely visitors had called in to pass the time of day.
‘We need to leave as soon as we can so you keep you and yours safe from this grim business,’ Wulf added.
‘I can’t lie about like this when we’re needed at home,’ Isabella heard Magnus fretting and was glad he wasn’t absorbed in his own miserable situation for the moment, even if it was for such a terrible reason.
‘If we can borrow a carriage to get to London all the sooner, I’ll be grateful to you, Lord Shuttleworth. I shall send it back as soon as we can hire a decent vehicle and hopefully your family will hardly notice the horses have gone before they’re back again.’
‘You don’t know our families like we do if you think that, FitzDevelin, but you’re welcome to borrow my travelling carriage and a fast team the moment your brother is declared fit to travel. In the meantime, we three should prepare ourselves for a hard ride.’
Edmund sounded doubtful about it even as he spoke. As well he might with Kate in such an advanced state of pregnancy, Isabella thought, wishing she was down there and allowed a say in their plans. She had been Magnus’s fiancée for half a year and knew the Countess of Carrowe and her younger daughters as well as any outsider. So she, too, must return to town only hours after she had arrived in the country. Edmund had to stay here with Kate, but there was nothing much Isabella could do to help her sister once Kate was in labour. A single lady wouldn’t be allowed into the room to hold her sister’s hand while she laboured with doctors, midwives and an experienced mother of six on hand.
‘Can’t stay here, must go back,’ she heard Magnus mutter distractedly.
‘You’re in no fit state to go anywhere,’ Sir Hugh Kenton argued briskly. ‘And there’s no question of you leaving your wife when she’s about to give birth either, Shuttleworth. I’m the best person to go back to town with FitzDevelin and your job will be to keep Haile here and his identity a secret until he’s fit to travel. I have experience of such dark matters and at least I can help FitzDevelin and the Countess untangle their affairs, so stop playing the dutiful lord, Edmund, and remember Kate needs you here.’
Isabella recalled how scandal had dogged Hugh for years after he had been suspected of murdering his first wife. The Navy decided to dispense with his services so he became a merchant captain for Isabella’s brother-in-law Kit. He was still in Kit’s service when he met Louise in some wild and scandalous manner they refused to discuss even now. As a result of his past, there was very little Hugh didn’t know about false witnesses and the sort of vicious rumours that could blacken an innocent man’s name. Of course he was the right person to help the Hailes, but so was she. Lady Carrowe was living in a broken-down, barely habitable mansion her husband had been plundering for years to fund his extravagant lifestyle. Then there were her younger daughters; their slender hopes of a decent marriage could be snuffed out by this latest scandal if it wasn’t handled very carefully. Isabella might as well make herself useful to the Haile girls and their mother and she was sure she could stay out of the way of Magnus and Wulf if she tried hard enough.
‘It’s true; I shouldn’t leave my wife,’ Edmund admitted at last, ‘but you’ll need help to get your family out of this mess without a great deal of scandal and danger, FitzDevelin. Don’t turn Kenton’s offer down because you’re too stiff-necked to accept help.’
‘I know a good deal about danger and my mother and sisters are used to scandal; they have me to thank for that,’ Wulf replied with bitter irony.
It was true, though, wasn’t it? He’d lived where he wasn’t wanted until he was old enough to run away and at an age when he should have been dreaming of wild adventures rather than facing them daily as he fought to survive on the streets. He was a strong man and the Haile family needed one now more than ever; no wonder his brother had ridden here so frantically to fetch Wulf back. Feeling uncomfortably disloyal, she reminded herself Magnus had been through his own private hell and a long illness these last few months, so it was little wonder he was felled by this heavy blow on top of all the others.
‘I suspect you’re the least of their worries right now, FitzDevelin. Time to stop harping on the past and get on with the present now your stepfather is dead and his killer is at large,’ Hugh warned.
Isabella shivered, listening even harder for anything she could catch through feet of dusty air and a crumbling ceiling.
‘And your mother and sisters need you,’ Hugh continued.
‘I promised to do everything I could to get you back to London by tomorrow morning, Wulf,’ Magnus said restlessly, as it was his fault they weren’t on the road already.
‘I can ride all night if I have to,’ Wulf said dismissively. Isabella could imagine him doing it as well, despite the punishing ride he must have had to get here already, driven to confront her with her sins and bully her to take Magnus back and marry him. At least no self-respecting highwayman would hold up such an angry man for fear of being mown down as if as unimportant as a fly on a horse’s ear, primed pistols or no.
‘Start now,’ his brother urged breathlessly, ‘I’ll follow when I can, but you’ll be far more use than I am right now, Wulf.’
Silence descended while the men tried not to agree out loud and Isabella plotted her own hasty departure from Cravenhill Park and the rural peace and quiet she’d come here to find. If she stayed, news of Magnus’s presence would leak out and the local gossips would seize on it as a sign of reconciliation in the teeth of the biggest scandal to hit the Hailes for centuries. She needed to get to London before the polite world had a chance to write off the Haile ladies for good this time.
‘Give me half an hour and we’ll set out together, FitzDevelin,’ Hugh said so firmly she knew Wulf might as well accept his company as eat his dust all the way back to town, since Hugh could afford the best horses and he couldn’t.
‘My thanks, then, Sir Hugh. I hope you’ll return here once I’ve got my mother and sisters out of that dusty old mausoleum and away from the gossips.’
‘No, don’t make them hide away as if they’re guilty of something, you great manly idiot,’ Isabella actually muttered under her voice before shaking her head at her own stupidity. It was high time she crept away and got on with frustrating all their well-meant masculine plans. She wriggled precariously around on her beam to face the door again, then shuffled along until she got to dusty floorboards and could take to hands and knees while the men were busy arguing about who was going where and what they were doing when they got there. They didn’t seem suspicious of the sounds of an old building restless on ancient foundations and she knew enough to insist on returning to London now, whatever arguments Edmund thought up to stop her.
Isabella glanced down at her dusty person and undid her knotted skirts. At least they would cover grimy petticoats and her once-white pantalettes, but neither would ever be the same again. Even if her underpinnings were boiled for hours to get them white again, the lace was damaged. The last few minutes would have been much trickier if she had to twist about on a beam with nothing to keep her knees from the splinters. Dirty feet and torn stockings were bad enough, she decided as she shuffled her shoes back on at the far end of the interconnected rooms. Now all she wanted was to get back to her room unseen and wash off the dust of ages before making her rapid departure.
Had Hugh and Wulf gone yet or were they still waiting for the doctor? She stole along makeshift corridors added long after this part of the house was built, musing how folk managed to live hugger-mugger in such times. The very idea of one room opening off another struck her as absurdly intimate, but maybe everyday life was more intimate in a rich man’s house back then. Wulf FitzDevelin’s latest intrusion into her life seemed to have made her think about things she usually accepted as everyday parts of life she didn’t even need to wonder about. Perhaps she needed his abrasive scorn of fine ladies to make her question how her life ran along so smoothly she rarely questioned the rights and wrongs of it.
Somehow she found her way through the warren of rooms back to the main house without having to go back the way she’d come and risk them knowing she had heard most of what they had said. Now all she need do was explain her hasty departure to Kate and Louise, persuade her maid to pack everything she’d only just finished unpacking and retrace the journey they’d only just completed.
* * *
During the three frustrating days it had taken Isabella to journey from Herefordshire to London at a respectable pace, so nobody could accuse her of unladylike haste, she had far too much time to think. So much for her resolution to change the way she lived when they had to crawl along because she didn’t want to draw attention to her return to the capital by doing it at the same breakneck speed Hugh and Wulf would be galloping at. At last, though, she was staring out of mud-spattered carriage windows at the busy streets and closely packed houses and sighing with relief that they were back in London when she had been so pleased to quit it less than a week ago.
Magnus would have to stay at Cravenhill until he was well enough for the long journey home, so it should be obvious why she left her brother-in-law’s house for the time being. Louise and Kate would have sent out the right letters to the right people by now, explaining how poor Mr Haile was laid up at Cravenhill after foolishly riding all the way there at breakneck speed to beg for Sir Hugh’s help in his family’s hour of need. The poor man had some sort of brain fever earlier this year so how could they turn him away at the risk of his health being permanently broken? Although his timing was unfortunate to say the least and poor Isabella had been forced to leave Cravenhill for London in order to stay with dear Charlotte Shaw, her former governess, until Mr Haile was well enough to leave. Nobody could blame the Countess of Carrowe for being too bowed down with her own troubles and sorrows to drive all the way to Herefordshire to attend to Mr Haile herself, but really it was most inconvenient.
There would still be murmurs about why Magnus Haile was in Herefordshire when he should have been at Carrowe House. He would probably be portrayed as the devoted, broken-hearted suitor seeking comfort at the darkest time in his life; she would be the hard-hearted female who hotfooted it to London rather than give in and marry him after all. Enduring a few whispers and the odd sneer was nothing next to the horrors haunting Magnus’s mother and sisters at this very moment, though. They had to live with the sort of wild speculation and storytelling that could cost an innocent life if the wrong person was found guilty of the Earl’s murder. Her own lot in life suddenly seemed very easy in comparison.
‘Drive straight round to Hanover Square, Samson,’ Isabella ordered briskly. ‘Carnwood House will be closed up, so there’s no point in stopping there.’
‘Very well, Miss Alstone,’ Kate’s well-trained coachman replied impassively.
Glad her personal maid, Heloise, was new and not given to arguing about anything that didn’t concern fashion or her mistress being perfectly turned out whenever she left her bedchamber, Isabella sat back on the comfortable cushions and hoped Charlotte was home.
‘Izzie, what on earth…?’ Charlotte shifted the baby in her arms to kiss her former pupil, then raised her eyebrows at the small mountain of luggage piling up in her spacious hallway under Heloise’s stern supervision. ‘You’d best come into my sitting room and tell me all about it,’ she said softly. ‘Have everything conveyed to the Blue Bedchamber if you please, Harris,’ she said to the butler before leading Isabella into the cosy parlour she favoured, because it was next to her husband’s office and he frequently dashed in to join her for half an hour or so.
‘What are you doing back in London less than a week after you left?’
‘Magnus came to Cravenhill in great haste, then had to stay to be nursed through a recurrence of that illness he had earlier in the year.’
‘Is it catching?’
‘No, not after all these weeks. Edmund is a kind Christian gentleman, but he would have sent Magnus somewhere else to be cared for if there was the slightest risk of infection for Kate and the children. Oh, don’t look at me like that; the babe hasn’t been born yet. Or at least it hadn’t been when I left. By now it may have come into the world, since Kate was the size of a small cottage.’
Charlotte raised her eyebrows again and looked unconvinced by Isabella’s misplaced humour, as well as her telling of half the story. The horrid tale of the Earl of Carrowe’s murder must be flying about London faster than a family of hungry kites by now, so it was little wonder Charlotte refused to be diverted.
‘Oh, very well, Magnus suffered what the doctor called a “nervous collapse”. It’s not my fault he’s been under so much strain of late, so don’t you start blaming me as well. And don’t expect me to tell you what did cause it either.’
‘As well as whom?’ Charlotte demanded. Trust her to latch on to the one part of her sentence Isabella wished she hadn’t let slip.
‘The rest of the world,’ she explained so airily it ought to divert attention from her flushed cheeks. ‘Who should mind their own business for once.’
‘I doubt even the gossips care about your part in the Haile family’s woes now.’
‘They would have done if I hadn’t left Cravenhill the day Magnus arrived unfit to ride another yard, let alone go a mile to the village inn. I didn’t dare wait for Kate’s baby to be born before I left, but why must the gossips tattle and fabricate stories and put me and the Haile family to so much trouble, Charlotte?’
‘Mainly because you were born with such spectacularly good looks it’s impossible to avoid it, but that’s the burden you bear, poor love.’
‘Don’t mock me, Charlotte. It feels heavier than usual right now.’
‘Because gentlemen can’t see the real Isabella for your looks and fortune?’
‘Maybe,’ Isabella said cautiously.
If Charlotte ever guessed there was one man in particular who thought the social gulf between them so wide it was unbridgeable, she’d dig until she found out who he was. Charlotte was the only grandchild of a duke and she had wed a nobleman’s by-blow. No argument about Wulf’s unsuitability or the scandal he was born into would cut ice with Mrs Ben Shaw.
‘Love can creep into even the most carefully guarded heart when you least expect it,’ Charlotte warned with all that personal experience waiting to back her argument up.
‘Not into mine it won’t and Miss Margaret seems to have exhausted herself with her protests about her teeth coming through,’ she said as the baby in Charlotte’s arms let out a wail.
‘I’ll try putting her in her cradle so we can have a cup of tea and eat one of Cook’s best sugar buns in peace.’
Charlotte rose very carefully and eased the child gently into her cradle. A little stir of protest and she sang softly until the little girl settled back to sleep with an angelic sigh of content.
‘At last,’ Charlotte breathed as she lowered herself to a chair. She looked so weary Isabella murmured she was going to order that tea herself instead of ringing for it and left them to sleep off their disturbed night side by side.
* * *
Isabella sat in her own private sitting room attached to the large guest bedchamber in the corner of the Shaws’ house that was furthest away from the nursery wing and wondered how Wulf FitzDevelin was faring under very different circumstances. The murder of a peer of the realm couldn’t quietly fade from public memory after a day or two of shocked gossip and a few soothing murmurs from the authorities. She hoped Hugh had managed to set the right hounds on the right trails to find the killer, because until he was tracked down and punished, the Hailes would be eyed with suspicion wherever they went. Isabella puzzled over the challenge of visiting the ladies of the family. It would have to be done in secret, however much she wanted to march in through the front door and make it clear she didn’t care about the newssheets or the gossips. If she was an independent lady without close family and many friends and well-wishers, she could do just that, but given that she had two sisters and a clutch of very good friends whose reputations and wellbeing were bound up with her own she had to be discreet and careful about her own reputation.
If Magnus’s supposed love, the woman who was too timid to admit to him even when his father hadn’t been murdered, really loved him, she would come to town and stay at his mother and sisters’ side even if she couldn’t bring herself to support him as openly as Isabella thought she should. Lady Delphine’s family estate marched with that of Haile Carr and the lady knew the family very well. Isabella frowned and couldn’t recall much about her own past meetings with Lady Delphine Drace. She knew Lady Drace was widowed last year and her pompous husband had been the sort of political baronet she always avoided as carefully as she could herself. The man would prose on for ever about his own views and beliefs, then condescend to all women as if they were incapable of rational thought and put on this earth to listen to the wisdom of pompous idiots like him. The Lady Delphine she remembered had anxious blue eyes set in a thin face and hands that seemed restless and almost outside of the lady’s control. Who would think a woman like that could inspire such passion in Magnus he hadn’t cared very much if he lived or died once she’d turned her back on him after he’d fathered her supposedly posthumous child?
Isabella was tempted to write and order the woman to live up to her obligations for once in her life. The Hailes needed a friend and Lady Drace was the logical person to be there for them, but she clearly wasn’t coming. News of the murder must have reached Norfolk and the Drace Dower House by now and she hadn’t driven up to town to show her support or even written a sturdy message of support for her old friends. Lady Delphine was clearly a broken reed, so Miss Alstone would step into the shoes of supporter and friend. Yes, now she was here and it wasn’t quite time for the Season yet, she would be able to find lots of good excuses to slip away on errands for her sisters or fittings for a new gown or an endless search for exactly the right bonnet to match her new pelisse. If she also happened to visit the creaking old Carrowe mansion while she was out, that would be by the by, as long as she didn’t allow herself to be seen by the hordes of spectators still haunting the scene of the crime like expectant carrion crows.