Is your heart truly that hard, Lady?
He wanted to scream at her. But doing such would only cause more harm and widen the already huge breach between them. Instead, he looked back at Wilmot’s sleeping form.
“Where did it happen?” he asked, squashing his fury.
When Augusta refused to answer him, the physician did. “He was on the battlements, Your Grace.”
“The battlements?Why on earth would he go way up there to sharpen his knife?”
“Before he slept,” Augusta replied in that same annoyingly calm tone, “he told me he just wanted to sit up there and look out over the moors. He always used to when he was a small boy.”
Maximilian glanced at Mr. Leary. “I want to be notified the moment he wakes up.”
The physician bowed. “I will inform you myself.”
Maximilian wanted to smash something. He strode quickly from Wilmot’s apartments with Nigel still at his shoulder. Taking the stairs two at a time, he climbed to the uppermost battlements of the castle and found servants cleaning blood from the stonework. They rose to bow, then stood to one side as he and Nigel gazed at the huge stain.
“I find this incredibly odd,” Maximilian murmured to Nigel.
He paced from the stain to the stone wall where the knife and the whetstone had been placed after Wilmot had been taken to his chambers. He picked up the blade, examined it, then met Nigel’s steady gaze over it. “This is a hunting knife,” he said, his voice low. “Wilmot never hunts, he hates it. It’s not even his knife. It is mine.”
“What does this mean then, Your Grace?” Nigel asked. “Could it be he thought he might perform a kindness for you?”
Maximilian shook his head, but in confusion, not negation. “I do not know, but it is baffling.”
He gazed down at the drops of blood atop the battlement wall, holding the knife and whetstone in his hands. Drawing the knife slowly over the stone, he spoke. “So, he stands here to look out over the moors. He slides the blade across the whetstone like this.”
Pulling the blade toward him, Maximilian demonstrated what he thought might have happened to Wilmot. Yet, he frowned. “Look here, Nigel.”
As his steward stepped up beside him, Maximilian slid the blade across the stone again. “The knife does not come anywhere close to my arm, even if I whet it quickly.”
“But your brother has little experience with knives,” Nigel said. “Maybe it did slip.”
“Watch when I make it slip.”
Maximilian forced the blade closer to his arm while sharpening it, yet the angle was not quite right and merely brushed his wrist. “See?”
Nigel frowned. “I was told the wound was deep, almost to the bone, and from wrist to elbow. Unless he was so totally inept with the knife, how could he have hurt himself so badly?”
Maximilian set the knife and stone back on the wall, placed his palms beside them. He leaned forward and gazed at the moors. “Augusta said he always liked coming here as a boy,” he murmured. “I seem to remember this was one of his favorite places.”
“I remember that as well.”
“If you could choose your own death,” Maximilian went on, still gazing out at the rolling hills. “Would you not wish to be in your favorite place when you died?”
“Your Grace!” Nigel gasped.
He lowered his voice as Maximilian turned to him, glancing at the servants standing well out of earshot. “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he muttered. “Surely you are wrong about your brother.”
“I do hope I am,” Maximilian replied. “But my brother is very unhappy, and we both know it. Constantly belittled by his mother, never truly given the chance to be himself, seeing no escape, no recourse. Perhaps this is the method in which he could escape her.”
“Could Lord Wilmot be truly that unhappy? I mean, I know he seldom speaks and shows little interest in anything other than cards. But unhappy enough to take his own life?”
“I think so, Nigel,” Maximilian picked up both knife and whetstone from the wall and signaled the servants to continue their work. “Perhaps there is something I can do to help him.”
* * *
After supper, the atmosphere in the room seemed chillier than the brisk wind outside the castle. Maximilian wandered the almost silent castle, deep in thought. He knew Augusta had retired to her chambers for the night, and most of the servants performed their chores behind closed doors and traveled around the castle via the tunnels built within the stone walls.
