Page 72 of The Case of the Curate

“Trying to work out exactly where you were standing when the lantern shattered. I found some tiny pieces of glass around this part of the path, but they could have shifted a few feet in the clearing-up process. Can you remember precisely?”

“Yes. Nearer the door.” She walked back the way she had come. “I tried to go in and found it locked, so I took a couple of steps back onto the gravel, here, still facing the house, and bent down like this.” Holding up the imaginary lantern in her left hand, she bent and swiped up a handful of small stones and crushed shells with her right. Hearing the crunch of Rupert’s feet approaching, she let the gravel trickle through her fingers. “It was dark and I wasn’t paying attention,” she added in a smaller voice.

“You probably noticed more than you think.”

His voice startled her by its nearness right behind her, where he had clearly crouched down again to take in, as nearly as possible, the same view. She felt his breath on her hair, the warm brush of his knee against her leg, his arm touching hers as he raised it to the same position.

For an instant, she couldn’t breathe, cast back to another time when she was fourteen years old, and he had just returned from his first term at Oxford.

She had run to find him as usual and discovered him perched on the rocks on the bank of the river, fishing. Supremely casual in his shirt sleeves, one knee under his chin, his untidy black hair fallen across his cheek, he had seemed to shine in a beam of sunlight. His once-boyish shoulders had filled out, as though the rest of his body had finally caught up with the length of his legs. The sight had winded her, tied her tongue so that she couldn’t even call out to him as she had intended.

In that moment, something had changed in her easy friendship with him. Some wonderful, terrible awareness. Not that he had treated her any differently, and so she’d got gradually used to him again, though that awareness had never truly gone away. She’d never been sure whether she was glad that he’d come home less after that, for she hadn’t trusted those feelings.

She still didn’t.

She jumped up, out of his way. Not that he was paying any attention to her. He was scratching around in the gravel again.

“Ah,” he said at last, and lifted his hand to show a small, round lead ball held between his finger and thumb. “From a pistol, I’d say, although a fowling piece is possible too, if it had just one ball loaded into it. Someone sure of their marksmanship.”

Kate shivered. Distractedly, Rupert pocketed the ball, gazing up at the windows again.

“Did you smell the powder?” he asked. “Ater the shot was fired?”

Surprised, she thought back to the terrifying moments between the shot and her bolting back into the house. “Actually, no. Does that mean it was fired outside, from some distance away?”

“Perhaps. Or you just weren’t in the right place to smell it inside the house. We’re not getting very far, are we? Were there lights in any of the windows?”

“Not on the ground floor, though I thought I saw something move at the next window to the left there.” She frowned. “I didn’t look up. Why didn’t I look up?”

“Because you forgot to be careful.” He pointed up to the first floor with his raised hand. “Is that the library window?”

She nodded. “All these long windows are the library… Actually, there might have been a faint light from there. A few of the guests were working late in there. Lord Chadbon was in his study, at least by the time I got to him.”

“And how long did that take you from the moment of the shot?”

“I don’t know. Three or four minutes, maybe. Long enough for him to have sped there from somewhere else close by. That window, at the right-hand side of the library, belongs to the morning room, and it’s right next to his study.”

“Did you hear windows opening or closing?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything. Even after the shot.”

“Are the bedchambers on the second floor?”

“I’ve already asked Mrs. Thornfield, who has rooms looking out on this part of the garden.”

“And?”

She pointed to the windows from left to right. “Mr. and Mrs. Newman, Mr. and Mrs. Otteridge, and Sir Colin Nye has that single window on the corner. He has windows to the front as well.”

“A decent shot could have hit you from any of those, even using a pistol. Though I imagine the noise of it would have disturbed everyone.”

“People could have heard the shot in the library, but like Chadbon, they probably assumed someone had dropped a box of glass with a clatter.”

“Which implies the shooter was more distant,” Rupert murmured, straightening to stare to the left and right. He turned to face behind. “There is cover in all directions. You wouldn’t necessarily have seen anyone in the dark. But they could see you clearly by your lantern.”

She shivered, the stark knowledge of her exposure, her near death, resurging. Just as last night, she felt very alone. Rupert threw an arm around her shoulders in a brief, brotherly hug. Stupidly, it made her feel better.

“We’ll find this villain, Kate,” he said, releasing her. “And quickly. But you have to be careful. No more wandering about in the dark.”