They sat back and enjoyed their cool drinks, condensation running down the glasses, content in one another’s company. To Matilda, it had always been one of the most fascinating discoveries of a close friendship that friends could spend hours in each other’s company and not feel compelled to fill every second with chatter. Easy silence could be just as wonderful.
Now, if Matilda could just get her mind to cooperate with the silence, the balmy late afternoon would have been perfect, but her mind wandered as it pleased, taking her back to the cove, the sea, the summer house, and the window of Albion’s study. Her thoughts tormented her with longing kisses, sweet embraces, and dancing in the moonlight and plagued her more cruelly with an empty vision of the future where they were gray and old and had nothing to say to one another.
“Your Grace!” a cry went up, startling Matilda out of her reverie. “Your Grace, where are you?”
Matilda frowned. It sounded like Jenna, but that was impossible; the maid was miles and miles away at Whitecliff Manor.
“Your Grace!” A red-cheeked figure burst through the garden gate, skidding to a halt on the white gravel. “Thank goodness!”
Matilda slowly rose to her feet. “Jenna? What are you doing here?”
“The housekeeper… told me where… I could find you,” Jenna wheezed, bracing her hands against her ribs as she bent to catch her breath.
“Nothere. Here.” Matilda wafted a hand around. “What are you doing here?”
Had Albion sent the maid to drag her home—and so soon? Indeed, Jenna must have departed just half a day or so after Matilda and Anna. Maybe, he thought she might be persuaded more easily if he sent a friendly face instead of going himself. Maybe, he was too busy to go himself, deciding that chasing after a wayward wife was not worth the effort. Although, that did not sound like the Albion she knew at all.
“It is… His Grace,” Jenna choked out. “I came as… quickly as I could. In a carriage, too!”
Matilda’s eyes narrowed. “He sent you to bring me home?”
“The housekeeper did,” Jenna replied, edging forward. “He is… not well, Your Grace.”
Matilda held her nerve. “He is angry with me? Has he flown into a temper?”
The maid seemed confused. “I… doubt it, Your Grace. He is unconscious.”
“What?” The word squeezed out of Matilda’s throat, little more than a gasp.
“The physician… or maybe it was the gardener—I can’t remember, but someone said… he’d been poisoned, Your Grace,” the maid replied, still breathless. “The Duke has been poisoned.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
Horror rippled through Matilda. “How? What? This does not make any sense.” She paused, her horror doubling. “Do they thinkIdid it?”
“Heavens no, Your Grace!” Jenna yelped. “Everyone is beside themselves. The physician doesn’t know if His Grace is going to wake up, but the… gardener thinks you can wake him. He didn’t say how, but… maybe he means you being there with His Grace might give him reason to wake up?”
Matilda gripped the balustrade of the quaint bridge, scrunching her eyes shut.Think… You must think!she urged, forcing her tired brain to cooperate. It had been permitted to daydream and wander at its leisure, but now, she needed it to stay on the right path, sifting through the evidence before her, finding a solution.
“Do you know what he was poisoned with?” she asked, her eyes snapping open.
Jenna hesitated. “The gardener mentioned… um… it had a bird’s name in it. Oh, what was it?” She lightly smacked the side of her head as if to knock the name out. “Laurel? No, that’s not it.”
“Larkspur?” Matilda asked, the name a razor on her tongue.
Jenna’s eyes widened. “Yes, larkspur!”
“How did the gardener know?” Matilda’s suspicions darted this way and that, distracting her from the crushing terror that would otherwise overwhelm her. If itwaslarkspur, Albion’s fate was practically sealed.
Jenna paused. “He said… something about disturbed plants. He’d gone into the greenhouses, and there was a plant missing. Or some of a plant. I can’t remember properly. It was that plant you just said. Oh, forgive me.” Her voice was getting higher and higher, tears glistening in her eyes. “I was told it all when I left, but I was so panicked that I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”
“No, no, that is ample,” Matilda said, unnervingly calm. “I suspect the gardener thinks I can… fix it. An antidote.”
She had spoken to the gardener at great length about her plans for her corner of the garden: what she wanted and why, and the properties of each plant if he was not already aware, the good and the bad, the medicinal and the dangerous. She had alluded several times to her hopes of writing a book about poisons and medicines one day. It stood to reason that he thought she knew enough to be able to undo what had been done.
Despite the hot sunlight bathing her in golden light, she felt icy cold, her limbs numb, her chest clenching as if a vise were twisting tighter and tighter, while blood rushed in her ears. It was becoming impossible to breathe, her lungs forgetting what to do as her mind raced and swirled.
He is going to die… My beloved is going to die…A voice that was her own but not chanted in her head, a cold sweat prickling up the back of her neck.
