“That’s everyone, then. Isn’t it?” I knocked on the door one more time and raised my voice for good measure. “Cecily? Are you in there?”
“Other than Aunt Effie and Uncle Maury,” Constance agreed and reached for the doorknob. “The older generation relatives won’t be arriving until this afternoon.”
She twisted the knob and pushed the door in.
The first thing I saw was that the drapes were still drawn. That became obvious as soon as the door swung open. The room was dusky. Not as dark as it had been last night—sunshine crept in around the edges of the curtains—but dark enough that it was difficult to see.
“Cecily?” I took a step across the threshold, with Constance right behind me. “Are you awake?”
There was a lump under the covers, but it didn’t move at the sound of my voice or my approach. She must still be exhausted from last night, I supposed.
We stopped at the edge of the bed and looked down at the part of Cecily we could see above the blankets. Her face was exposed, and twisted in a grimace of pain.
“Cecily?” I put my hand out and, after a moment of hesitation, rested it on her forehead. Her skin was cool under my palm, and a bit clammy.
“She’s breathing,” Constance said. It ought to have been a confident statement, although it sounded more like a question than anything else.
I nodded. “Yes.” Cecily was indeed breathing. Shallowly and with some difficulty, but she was taking in air.
“Open the curtains,” I said, and Constance scurried to obey. The curtain rings rattled along the drapery rod, and a flood of sunlight illuminated Cecily’s pale face. “Thank you.”
Constance came back to my side, wringing her hands. Her face was worried as she peered down. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. Something clearly was. No matter how tired—or how pregnant—she might be, our voices and my touch and the flood of light ought to have done something to wake her. “Cecily?”
I reached under the blankets and found her shoulder, and shook it. “Wake up.”
Cecily’s body moved with my action, but her eyes didn’t open.
“This isn’t good,” Constance said.
I shook my head. “One of us should fetch Francis. He might know what to do.”
He had had quite a lot of experience with dope of various sorts, after all. Overdoses and otherwise. And that was what this looked like. An overdose of something.
“I should try to find Dom Rivers, too,” I added. “If he gave her something, it would be helpful to know what it was.”
Constance nodded. “I’ll stay with her. You go, and hurry.”
I hurried, out into the hallway, down the back stairs to the first floor, down the hallway to the main staircase, and then down that and across the foyer to the hallway and the back door.
There were two of them, one beside the storerooms just outside the servants’ wing on the west side of the house, and the other between the boot room and game room on the east side. This latter was the one I aimed for, and I saw no one until the moment I burst through the door onto the lawn and spotted Christopher and Francis in the distance, setting up the wickets for a friendly game of croquet.
“Francis!” I let the door slam behind me and started across the grass at a run. Francis straightened from driving wickets into the lawn to peer at me. “I need you!”
Christopher straightened too, and started moving towards Francis, if at a more decorous pace than the one I was employing. In the distance, I could hear the sound of shots, and the beating of wings and of hooves.
“Francis,” I panted as I skidded to a stop a few feet away, and then stumbled forward when my momentum carried on. “Oof! Francis, we need help.”
Francis stiffened. “Constance?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Constance. I left her in the room?—”
And that was when another shot rang out from within the trees, close enough to us that I could hear the whistling sound the bullet made as it moved past me with but a few inches to spare and embedded itself in the gray stone wall of the manor with athwack.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Down!”Francis barked. He put a hand on the back of my neck and shoved me onto the grass, and followed me down, half on top of me. Christopher, meanwhile, had the sense to drop on his own.
