The tenseness in his voice surprised her. But he must have suspected danger, or he would not be abroad in the light.
“Not yet.” She waited for Penny to come to a perspiring halt. The state his horse was in told her that they had ridden fast, and she wondered what had brought them.
She continued breathlessly, “I was going into the village to send you a note. It was Mr. Letchworth, my lord. He has the King’s Evil.”
As St. Mars dismounted, she tried to make out his face, but in the failing light, his mask and hat hid his reaction. “Mr. Letchworth is your murderer, my lord.”
He clasped both of her hands in his. Even now, his face was in shadow. “I know. Bournemouth supplied me with his name, but I did not know why he had considered risking so much.
“We must hurry,” he said, leading her back to his horse. “We believe that Letchworth is on his way to the Abbey. Tom was told by an ostler on the road from London that he was headed this way. He must mean harm.”
Hester froze. “Harrowby. He means to kill your cousin, my lord. Mr. Letchworth is in love with Isabella. He wrote her a letter, vowing to kill anyone who tries to take her from him. And the announcement of their wedding appeared in the newspaper a few days ago.”
She felt an increased pressure from his hand. “I know where he’ll be then. Come on.”
Faster than she would have believed possible, he picked her up and tossed her in front of his saddle. Not waiting for Tom’s help, he mounted swiftly behind her and spurred Penny back in the direction she had come.
They burst out of the trees, but the light Hester had expected in the open was not there. A dreadful stillness seemed to have fallen upon the world.
No birds were singing. Aside from the sounds their horses made, there were not even any rustles in the trees or the grass. They passed a lone oak tree, and Hester looked down at the strange shadow it made. Unbelievably, every single one of its leaves had cast a separate shadow of its own.
Some primitive instinct made her feel as if the world was sliding towards its end. No wind was in the trees. Nature had abandoned itself. And the earth seemed poised for a giant calamity.
Then the light grew dimmer, the shadows all merged into one, and they were plunged into a terrible darkness.
Behind her, she could hear Tom’s dreadful curse. St. Mars tightened his arm around her, and then she remembered.
She covered his hand, turning her face up to his. “It is the eclipse,” she said, hoping he heard her.
Gideon did hear. And the comfort of her touch made him relax his unconscious grip. He moved his fingers beneath hers until they clung.
The darkness was eerie. It was neither the absolute blackness of night nor the uneven light of a storm, but the tenebrosity of an Italian masterpiece. If God had appeared in the sky, Gideon would not have been amazed.
Holding on to Hester with a sense of impending fate, he reined Penny towards a corner of the house. The thick brick wall loomed above them. The stillness of the eclipse seemed to have frightened the inhabitants of the Abbey. No one was in sight as they rounded it from the east.
As they did, he saw a man approaching the house on foot, no more than twenty yards away. It was Letchworth, and he was aiming for the small door tucked between two wings under an eave, the door that the murderer had entered to kill his father.
A white haze covered Gideon’s vision. He forgot the eclipse and the stillness. All he saw was the coward who had stabbed his father in the back.
Letchworth saw them coming and halted.
“There he is, my lord!” Hester’s cry reminded him of the need for her safety. He pulled Penny up, and with a squeeze of Hester’s waist, he said, “Stay here,” and slid her to the ground alongside a hedge leading into the formal gardens. She moved behind it, out of his way, and he and Tom pushed their horses to surround their man.
Letchworth had frozen. Transfixed by the darkness or by the sight of a masked man riding out of it towards him, he stared at Gideon like one who beheld the gates of Hell. He had no weapon, just his cane, which he thrust up over his head to ward off the attack. Gideon urged Penny closer to him. The swing of Letchworth’s stick made her shy and step sideways, but she was too weary to flee.
When no blows rained down on his head, Letchworth lowered his cane. Hastily putting a hand inside his pocket, he shouted, “All the money I have is in this purse. Here, take it—” he reached up with it— “leave me to my task. If you ride quickly, no one else will see you.”
Gideon’s mind filled with loathing. Letchworth was so intent upon Harrowby’s murder that he would make his robber an accomplice.
“I do not want your money,” he said, remembering all too well how he had helped this man frame him for his father’s death. A chill of hatred welled up from deep inside.
He wanted to use his sword. He wanted to run Letchworth through and make him suffer the way his father had. But the only thing that could restore him to his life was this man’s confession.
“I am taking you to a magistrate, so you can confess to the murder of my father.”
Letchworth staggered back. Even in the dark, Gideon could see the horror on his face—a fear of the vengeance that had ridden out of the night to take him to the gallows—a figure, cloaked and covered as he had been the night he had attacked St. Mars.
“St. Mars?” His voice trembled. His legs seemed no longer to work as he stumbled backwards, finally falling to the ground. He clutched his worthless cane to his chest.
Had his illness become so severe that he could no longer resist it? A hard ride on horseback would have weakened him. Letchworth had made that same trip and back a bare six weeks ago, yet how much more ill those weeks would have made him, as his disease rotted him from inside, stiffening his joints and mangling his bones.
Gideon dismounted and went to help him up. Tom took his reins.
Letchworth cringed, and still he made no move to pull a weapon. No sword hung at his side. Gideon wondered what injury he had planned for Harrowby. Did he carry a pistol or a dagger? Carefully, he bent over to take the man by the arm.
A sudden lightening of the sky as the moon moved away from the sun illuminated the look on Letchworth’s face. It bore a look of cunning, not defeat.
How had this creature outwitted his father?
Things unseen do not deceive us
. The motto flashed into his mind, and with it, a revelation.
Jerking away, and reaching for his sword, he just missed Letchworth’s lunge as he pulled a sword from his cane. Surging to his feet just a moment too late, he missed his mark, hitting Gideon with his shoulder instead of the point of his blade. Gideon was knocked sideways, but he recovered, leaping backwards to put more space between them.
“Careful, my lord!” Tom cried. He had not seen the attack coming, and remorse was in his voice.
“Put the sword down,” Gideon said, struggling with his breath. The attack had caught him by surprise, disrupting his intake of air. So this was how the coward killed. “You cannot win. If I fail to stop you, my servant won’t.”
He saw Tom out of the corner of his eye. Tom had pulled a pistol from his saddle and was pointing it straight at Letchworth’s chest.
“Don’t shoot him! I need his testimony.”
Letchworth laughed as he circled widely, the swordstick raised in his hand. He seemed unconcerned about Tom. “You will never kill me. I am the only one who can exonerate you, St. Mars—not that I will. I was too cunning for your father—and I’m too cunning for you. I’ll still outsmart you and get what I want.”
“You weren’t that smart. You were nothing but a coward. The only way you managed to kill my father was by stabbing him in the back.” Gideon tried to move closer, keeping a sharp eye on his quarry’s blade.
“He thought he could buy me with a medal from the Pretender, but I don’t need the Stuart touch. Vickers will cure me, and even if he doesn’t, I have another King now. And his Majesty laid his hands on me when he made me a knight.”
Hester had followed upon the horses’ heels and had come within hearing distance. As long as the moon had blocked the sun, she had struggled to see the men’s expressions, but ever since Mr. Letchworth had pulled his sword, the sky had been brightening. The flat, odd light had returned. St. Mars and Letchworth circled each other, casting unnatural shadows on the ground.
She couldn’t understand why the murderer wouldn’t yield. Two armed men could surely stop his flight. St. Mars would not kill him, which would be for the best. She had the letter with Mr. Letchworth’s threats. But better no blood should be on St. Mars’s hands.
Still with his weapon
en garde
, Mr. Letchworth pulled back near the horses, which stood where Tom had left them. Just as he reached for Penny’s reins, St. Mars lunged to stop him.
Their swords clashed in a cross in front of their chests. St. Mars pushed Mr. Letchworth back with the strength of an angry man, but surprisingly his opponent countered with almost equal strength. Its source was madness. It could not be anything else, for he responded with a terrifying frenzy.
Hester had never seen a sword fight. It was nothing like the brawls one saw in the streets of London or in the Yorkshire village where her father had been a clergyman. Those had been mere tussles. She had not liked them. They had caused bruises and cuts, which had seemed like enough misery to satisfy the men who had earned them. But this—this duel, in which St. Mars’s life depended both on defeating his opponent and keeping him alive, frightened her more than anything she had ever seen.
At first, St. Mars did nothing but parry Mr. Letchworth’s thrusts. Though wild, they still bore the mark of schooling. He was clearly no novice to the skill of fencing. He must have trained with a master. A lack of ethics had led him to cowardice, not a lack of skill.
Skill that Hester was afraid St. Mars might lack, as she watched him evade lunge after lunge. He parried neatly, but Mr. Letchworth appeared to have the strength of seven men. How long St. Mars could continue to hold out under the force of the other man’s attacks, she did not know, but she worried that his recent injury had robbed him of his strength.
A grim look settled beneath his mask. He stared into his adversary’s eyes with the piercing gaze of a hawk, determined on a kill. His breaths came evenly, though beads of sweat had collected on his brow.
Slowly Hester became aware of the enormous skill he had held in check. His defensive posture had been intended merely to tire his opponent. Now she saw that his every movement was working towards Letchworth’s disarmament, not injury. His smooth, rapid footwork, and well-timed thrusts began to drive Letchworth backwards towards the Abbey wall, where he would be helpless to retreat.
Letchworth kept backing, unaware of the wall behind him and the small door just off to his left. His skin turned a sickly grey as he sweated off his thick layer of paint. Beneath it, they could see the ravages of the King’s Evil, the crusty eating-away of his flesh, then the knobby growths on his bones that he had striven so hard to hide. Hester would have shrunk from the pitiable sight if her fears for St. Mars had not kept her eyes glued on the movements of the two men engaged in mortal battle.
A piece of cracking paint slid into Mr. Letchworth’s eyes. He gave it a swipe with his sleeve, leaving a streak of white and rouge from his forehead across his cheek. St. Mars hesitated. A look half of disgust, half of something like pity crossed his face. In that moment it seemed as if he would have pled again with this murderer to surrender to him. But Mr. Letchworth saw his pity, and he roared.
He rushed at St. Mars, just as he poised his weapon to parry a thrust. But Mr. Letchworth had not raised his sword. With the fury of a mad dog, lunging to bite, he threw himself bodily at its source.
St. Mars’s sword caught him just beneath his heart. The weight of his body drove it home. Even with the pain of the strike, he could not recoil, but plummeted forward into St. Mars’s arms, the blade burying itself to the hilt.
St. Mars caught him, and all the colour drained out of his face. “No!”
Hester heard the desperate syllable even where she stood. Tom rushed to help, and she ran, coming to a halt at St. Mars’s side.
Mr. Letchworth’s eyes were still open. They had fixed in an expression of surprise, as if he had never believed in his own mortality.
With an anxious face, Tom pulled the body out of his master’s arms and lowered it to the ground. They heard a gurgling sound deep in Mr. Letchworth’s throat. Hester watched St. Mars’s expression change from anxiety to despair, as Tom loosened the man’s neckcloth, and felt for a pulse. Then Tom put his ear to Mr. Letchworth’s chest.
“Is he dead?” St. Mars’s asked, in a curt tone, even though Hester could see the anguish in his eyes.
“Aye, my lord, I’m afraid he is—not that the cur didn’t deserve it.”
“Yes, he did. But I have truly fixed things now. Sir Joshua will never believe the evidence of a corpse.” He turned away from them both to run a hand over his face.
Hester stood helplessly by. She wanted to tell him about Mr. Letchworth’s letter, but she was afraid to raise his hopes. It would take a great deal of convincing to persuade Sir Joshua or another magistrate that Mr. Letchworth had been responsible for Lord Hawkhurst’s killing.
“But I was here, my lord,” she started to say. “I can be a witness to what transpired here. I can tell Sir Joshua that you tried to deliver Mr. Letchworth to him.”
St. Mars shook his head as he turned towards her, his hat shading his mask. “No, you must not say anything. How can you explain what he was doing at Rotherham Abbey when he heard my quarrel with my father? You cannot—not without exposing my father as a traitor and a Jacobite. I could not live with that, not when I am so much to blame.”
“But, my lord—”
They heard a shout. St. Mars shoved her behind him as he whirled to meet it. Someone from the far end of the garden had seen them, but whoever it was, was too far away to be recognized.
He turned back to face Hester. Gripping her by the arm, he quickly walked her to the small door in the Abbey wall, shielding her with the spread of his cloak.