Simon stopped the fall with his own boot, then kicked the varmint onto his back. “Move and I’ll kill you.”
“It was not me. I did not soil her.” With brown, greasy hair strung into the damp leaves, the man blinked up at Simon, a cough rattling through him. His cheeks were thin, forehead veiny. Dark stubble shaded his jaw, but despite the hungry—perhaps sickly—complexion, his voice gave him away.
He was from England. Berkshire, if Simon rightly detected the accent.
And educated.
Well.
Trembling fury coursed through Simon, as he snagged the man’s filthy cravat in his fist. He jerked him to his feet, knife pressed to his throat. “Who are you?”
“Neale.” He coughed. “Friedrich Neale…please, I beg of you, please do not—”
“Where are the children?”
“What children—”
Simon bashed him into a tree. “Where?”
“Do not know.” Half sob, half cough, the words sputtered. The man sagged in Simon’s grasp, eyes shut, face draining as white as a moon in the dead of night.
Simon shoved the knife back into his boot. He threw the man over his shoulder, skidded back down the hill, and hurried his load for the stone root cellar. He threw the man inside and fumbled with the lock.
“John!” The slashing rain muffled his bellow. He darted for the barn. The doors moaned when he flung them open, and his panic ascended as he surveyed the stalls, the empty straw piles, the quiet ox and mule. “Mercy!”
Above him, something creaked. Then an ashen face peered down at Simon from the hay loft. “Sir?”
“John.” Simon scaled the ladder, relief coaxing back a wave of sickness, as he scrambled through the straw and grasped the shoulders of his seven-year-old son. “Your sister.”
“Asleep.” John nodded to where four-year-old Mercy curled in the hay. His brown eyes were round and stricken. As if he’d seen too much. As if all the innocence, all the tranquility of fishing in mountain streams and shucking corn and chasing chickens in the yard had all been stripped away in one horrifying nightmare.
A nightmare Simon should have stopped. He should have been here. He should have foreseen that something—
“Stay with your sister. Do not come down until I come for you.”
“But Mama.” John latched on to his sleeve. Something he had not done in years. Just as he had ceased to call Simon Papa, or sit on his lap, in the decision he was more man than boy.
The terror in his grasp now cut Simon to the heart. He murmured, “Stay here,” before he bounded back down the ladder, shut his children inside the barn, and sloshed his way to the cabin.
Before he even stepped onto the porch, his gut clenched with white-hot agony.
God, spare my wife.
Hollyvale Estate
West London, England
This was far too much to bear.
Georgina Whitmore slipped behind a Greek-style pillar, willing the heat to cease throbbing at her face. If someone did not stop Mamma—and quickly—there would be no telling the scandal and ruination that would occur.
Other guests strolled by, their shoes squeaking on the chalky ballroom floors, soft chatters a hum in her ear. Were they already whispering?
Oh, what was she saying?
They had been whispering for years. This evening would make little difference, even if shedidstop Mamma from falling into Colonel Middleton’s arms.
Drawing in a breath of composure, Georgina plastered on a smile and emerged from her hiding place. She drifted back through the crowded ballroom, squeezed past gentlemen who attempted to gain her eye, and sidled next to Mamma on the west wall.
