Davy’s fingers twisted, crushing his hat and he wobbled. “I saw it. I saw the lady’s…” he glanced at Perry and ducked his head. “Your mother’s killing.”
Perry eyed him up and down, as grave and contained as her father would ever be. “Lady Jane,” she said, with a softness that the old man would never have shown, “let us have that chair.”
Fox pulled the chair over.
Perry gave Davy a nod. “Now sit.”
“Oh, miss—”
“Before you fall. Please.”
Davy looked around and took the chair, sitting poker straight, like a man bracing for a beating.
“Go on,” Perry said.
“I saw the carriage on the road. Saw the accident.” He gulped for air.
“What happened?” Fox moved round to stand by Perry.
“I don’t know. Well, it may be the wheel slipped off. Or the driver swerved right off the edge of the cliff. I don’t know. I was below, in the cove, and couldn’t see all. I’d gone to—well, Scruggs had some barrels sunk in the water there.” He tucked his chin down and squeezed his eyes shut a moment. “Ididstart up the hillside to help. The carriage was tipping, the horses going wild, the driver trying to hold them.” He paused and gulped more air. “Then a man comes down the road from the house, all in black, he is, and I’m thinking, it’s Scruggs, and I says to myself, if he sees me tippling his tubs I’ll take a beating. I says to myself, no need to go up—he’ll help ’em.”
Davy’s face had gone ashen, the light from the lanterns and candles not finding a trace of pink in his flesh, the memory of that day draining the blood from him.
Shame did that to a man, drained the life out of him, made him walk through life like a cadaver.
“He goes behind the carriage and next thing I sees, he’s got the lady, and she was fighting him, and I’m thinking,slow down, stop hitting her, she’s panicked, is all. ’Tother lady came up, waving a pistol. Fired it, she did. Didn’t hit nothing before he slapped it away.”
The room had gone stuffy with exhaled breaths and the flames of the lights. Davy wiped a hand over his face and shuddered. “Coachman was off by then, horses going wild. Knew what was happening, they did. Gave a good fight the man did, but the big man beat him until he stopped.” His breath came, short and shallow. “Picked both ladies up and threw them over the cliff, he did. Dragged the man to the edge and rolled him.”
Davy’s eyes shone. “Looked, straight my way, he did. Scruggs’d know me, even at that distance. I pulled back, I stayed down, heard the carriage topple. Then I ran. Went around the point. Went home. Pretended I was there all day.” He gulped and shook his head. “I should’ve helped. I should’ve done something.”
Perry swallowedback tears and touched Davy’s shoulder. It was too late for her mother, too late for doubts, too late for recriminations. Davy couldn’t have been much more than a boy when her mother was killed, a slight boy against Sir Richard’s bulk. She couldn’t blame him.
And they needed him. “Help usnow, Davy. You know these parts. Where would Sir Richard take my father?”
He screwed up his face with the effort of thinking and set his gaze on Fox. “Scruggs might know. He knows more.”
Fox’s mouth firmed in that obstinate, secretive way of his.
“Scruggs?” she asked.
“We had him brought in,” Fox said.
That had been when she and Lady Jane were wrestling Kincaid into submission.
“And?” Perry asked, wanting to throttle him. It was time for these men to talk to her, and to Lady Jane.
“We didn’t get much out of him,” Fox shifted. “We left off the questioning to come up here. He’s locked in the pantry.”
“MacEwen,” Kincaid said, “you and your cousin go talk to him. Send the soldiers outside.”
They didn’t know who to trust.
“Don’t beat him,” Perry said. “Not until after I have a chance to talk to him.”
Fox sent her a cryptic look. “Davy, go and wait in the parlor with Pip. Mac, have one of the soldiers stay with him to make it look like Davy’s a prisoner too. Don’t you dare leave.”
Or I’ll kill you myself, his tone said.
