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He sat there, calm and controlled, dispassionately laying out the facts. Facts that made her and Augustus look like alarmed peahens, with about as much intelligence.
‘No, that is not what I mean. You could have been hurt in any of those attacks and you are certainly suffering anxiety and stress with good reason, but you would have been very unlucky indeed to have been killed by any of them.’
‘Why did Bow Street not point this out to me?’ Augustus demanded. He looked as though he was not certain whether to be relieved or outraged. Neither did she, come to that. Both, she decided.
‘You are a member of the aristocracy, my lord, a man of status and influence. They are not going to argue with you when you come to them and announce that your wife is in danger of her life. They may not even have thought it through, simply reacted.’
‘And you are not intimidated by my title and influence, Mr Hunt?’
‘No, my lord.’ He smiled fleetingly and for some reason Guin’s pulse kicked up. ‘My last employer was a duke, if you recall.’
‘You are very sure of yourself for a man with no background, no history from before your seventeenth year.’
‘Yes, I am. You are very close to this, Lord Northam. I can look at it as an outsider, unemotionally. You called me in, you have paid me well for my skills – I am unlikely to be of much use to you if I am lacking in confidence or afraid to put matters to you straight.’
It was time to intervene before her husband in his bafflement and frustration alienated this man to the point of him turning on his heel and leaving them. They needed him. Yesterday she had been afraid of him, a little. Had resented his hard-edged competence. Now… ‘Augustus, my dear. Mr Hunt is on our side,’ Guin said mildly. ‘He is trying to help us see the whole picture and he has made a valuable point.’ She found herself smiling at the swordmaster who looked back, serious, his eyes shadowed. Did she imagine it, or had the severe line of his lips relaxed, just a trifle? She made herself stop looking at his mouth.
‘What? Oh. Yes, apologies, Hunt. Shouldn’t have said that about your history. Bad form.’
So what was that about? She watched Jared Hunt as he made vague, soothing noises. He was really very good with Augustus, almost as good as she was. ‘But if whoever this is does not intend to kill me, what can they be intending?’
‘I believe you need to reassess who might wish you ill, my lady. You have been trying to find a motive for murder. Now you must think again about who might want to make your life miserable, put you in fear, torment you. This is at a very different level of motivation from killing, although such harassment is deeply harmful.’
‘You said yourself that the motive may be irrational,’ her husband objected.
‘True, but the absence of deadly intent must mean the obsession, if that is what it is, is less extreme, although the level of spiteful intent may actually be higher. Of course, if we are dealing with a lunatic, someone utterly irrational, then arguments about motive are no help at all. Now I must probe each incident in more detail. The time, place, who was there, exactly what happened.’
‘I am due at my dressmaker in an hour,’ Guin said with a glance at the clock. ‘Will you accompany me, Mr Hunt? You can begin to ask me what you need to know as we travel.’
‘I am at your disposal, Lady Northam.’ He said it with so little nuance that, somehow, the words seemed to carry a double entendre that he was anxious not to stress and in suppressing only emphasised.
Guin closed her eyes for a moment while she composed herself. She was a married woman and while hers was not a marriage such as girlish dreams were made of, it was a marriage. A good, honest, companionable marriage. And, more importantly for her, she owed Augustus a great debt, one she could never repay. She would certainly never dishonour him by a dalliance with another man and even finding herself affected by one, as she realised she was by Jared Hunt, felt perilously like betrayal.
‘My maid is fully in my confidence,’ she added. ‘She will come with us.’
‘Of course, Lady Northam.’ The slight lift of one eyebrow hinted at his surprise that she even thought such a detail worth mentioning. Of course he would expect her to be accompanied. She must have imagined the momentary warmth in his gaze, a secondary meaning in what he had said a moment ago. How very embarrassing if he had suspected what she was thinking.
The mysterious little notebook reappeared when they took their places in the carriage. Today, April the first, the weather was fine enough for the open coach, but Augustus would not hear of it so early in the year, so they were in the closed carriage, the panel of slightly brighter maroon leather in the middle of the forward-facing seats a reminder of that bullet in the park. The upholsterer had repaired it speedily, urged on by Augustus’s desire that she should not be reminded by the bullet hole. Instinctively Guin sat to one side of it while Faith her maid sat opposite, her back to the horses.
‘In the middle, if you would, my lady.’ Jared Hunt settled next to her, his broad shoulders taking up enough room that she had no choice but to sit against that patch, the colour of dried blood. ‘If I say down, I want both of you on the floor, at once. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly,’ she said tartly, the memory of that long, hard body pinning her to the carpet in her sitting room all too vivid.
‘Good. Let us discuss the adder in the sewing basket. Where was it?’
‘On the terrace at Allerton Grange in Yorkshire.’ He looked at her sharply, so she explained. ‘In the first eighteen months of our marriage we went to Northam Hall, in Dorset, my husband
’s principal country property, when we wanted to be away from London. But Augustus had only acquired Allerton quite recently and there were matters requiring his attention, so we had moved there for a few weeks in the middle of March.’
She explained carefully, wanting to give him every detail. ‘I had taken my embroidery outside because the Spring sunshine was so lovely, even though it was a trifle chilly. I wanted to add small details to the design and that needed good light, but I was interrupted by unexpected visitors. I left the basket with my work where it was, on a table on the terrace. When I returned and lifted the embroidery frame from the top the adder was coiled inside.’
‘And it was not there before?’
‘Absolutely not. Earlier I had rummaged right to the bottom in search of my thimble, I could not have missed it.’ She paused, thinking back to the shock of seeing the snake curled there like a jewelled rope on top of the silks. ‘It was quite a large one.’
‘Could it have crawled in when you were away? Although in March it would only just have emerged from hibernation and would be sluggish, I believe,’ he added. ‘I have more experience recently with cobras in India than the snakes of the English countryside.’
‘The basket was on top of a pedestal table, sir,’ Faith interjected while Guin was digesting the fact that Mr Hunt had been in India. ‘My lady had laid her embroidery frame over the top, and that is quite large. I cannot see how the snake could have crawled in by itself.’
