The Beguilement of Lady Eustacia Cavanagh (The Cavanaughs 3)

Frederick didn’t waste breath swearing. He shoved Stacie under the piano. “Stay there!” He scrambled up, raced across the room, hauled open the French door, and charged after the man racing up the side lawn, making for the stone wall fronting the street.

The man flung himself at the wall. He reached the top and dropped to the street as Frederick laid hands on the thick ivy.

He hadn’t forgotten how to climb. He scaled the wall, swung over the top, and dropped to the pavement.

Just in time to see an older carriage careening up the street, one door still hanging open. The carriage slowed for the turn into Park Lane, and a hand reached out, caught the door, and slammed it shut.

Then the carriage turned the corner and was gone.

He glanced up and down the street, but there were no lurking hackneys to commandeer.

Stacie rushed out of the house and down the steps. She fetched up beside him, one hand gripping his arm as she scanned the street. “Are you all right?”

The breathlessness in the question had him jettisoning any inclination to upbraid her for not staying safely in the house. If he wanted her love—and he did—he had to put up with the consequences. “Yes.” He focused on her. “What about you? Did the fall jar your wound?”

She shook her head. “Kitty bound it up tight this morning. The bandage didn’t shift at all.” She looked toward Park Lane. “Did you see anything useful?”

“Enough to be sure of the sort of man our villain is sending against us.”

When she looked at him questioningly, he took her hand and turned back to the house. “The man was a rough sort—the type of man one hires from the taverns down by the docks.” That whoever was behind the attacks refused to face him openly—to do the deed himself—only fed Frederick’s fury.

Also his frustration. “Using such men leaves us little chance of identifying who our true villain is. That said”—he felt his jaw clench—“I’ve had enough.”

Hand in hand, side by side, they climbed the steps to where Fortingale stood by the door, alert and watchful.

As they reached the porch, Frederick vowed, “One way or another, we’re going to get to the bottom of this—whatever it is that’s going on.”

After calming the staff and Ernestine—thankfully, his mother and Emily had yet to come downstairs—Frederick and Stacie repaired to the study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ernestine refused to let them out of her sight; while Frederick sat mired in thought behind the desk and Stacie fell to pacing—also deep in thought—across the windows of the alcove, Ernestine sat poker-straight on one of the chairs before the desk and watched them both.

Frowning, Frederick picked up a pencil and let it slide through his fingers, twirled it, and let it slide down to tap his blotter—a habit from his schooldays that helped him think. Eventually, he said, “It occurs to me that, while hiring a thug from some dockside tavern makes it more difficult to trace the man and so learn who hired him, it still tells us something about our villain—namely that he knows dockside taverns well enough to find the right man to hire to kill someone.”

Stacie paused in her pacing, then drifted closer and perched on a corner of the desk. “So our villain is someone who knows dockside taverns well.”

Frederick nodded. “That seems a reasonable bet. And given how many unsuccessful attempts have thus far been made, I think we can also conclude that our villain, whoever he is, isn’t able to pay for a quality assassin—someone who actually knows what he’s doing.”

He glanced at Stacie and, when she frowned at him in puzzlement, explained, “If he came to Brampton Hall to kill either you or me, then he made a poor fist of it. Breaking into the house in the dead of night—if you hadn’t walked in on him in the kitchen, how would he have proceeded? Even if he knew which room we were in, it’s a huge house to go tramping around in.”

She nodded. “Especially in the dark, walking through areas with which he would have been totally unfamiliar.”

“And if he had found his way to the room we were sharing, what then?” Frederick shook his head. “I suppose he might have had a pistol on him, but even so, attacking both of us at once in a large house full of servants would have been a huge risk.” He paused, then went on, “Next, he tried the rocks on the track—that had to have been the same man.”

Stacie nodded. “Or men.”

Frederick narrowed his eyes. “I think just one—if there had been two, there would have been two in the kitchen, and more and more, I’m inclined to think our villain is cash-strapped—that he walked into a dockside tavern and found a thug willing to do the deed for what our villain was able to pay.”

“Hmm.” Stacie folded her arms and frowned. “The rocks on the track—overturning a gig is hardly a certain way of killing someone.”

“True. But if he’d been hiding in the woods, waiting to finish us off… He would likely have assumed only one of us would drive out in the gig.” Frederick tipped his head. “That might have worked.”

“Except it didn’t, and we came back to town,” Stacie said, “and he shot at us in the park.”

“What?”

With Stacie, Frederick glanced at Ernestine, who he realized had been hearing of the earlier attempts for the first time.

Looking shocked and pale, she stared at them. “Some blackguard has been trying to kill you both all this time—ever since you married?”

Frederick, hearing what might be the critical point clearly stated, nodded. “Indeed.”