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“Is that what you wish?” he murmured. “For me to be angry?”
“Not at all,” she sighed. “It’s only that I don’t understand. You had to have thought that I tried to kill you. Which of course,” she corrected in a rush, “I didn’t but you could not have known.”
Here he laughed outright. “I won’t deny I thought as much at first,” he admitted. “It certainly felt that way when my insides attempted to become my outsides. Plus, I knew you were angry about my lies.”
“No!” Marilee groaned and clenched her eyes shut against the thought. How he must have suffered at her hands. She felt his fingers brush her cheek, and she found herself pressing her face to his touch.
“Let us talk,” he coaxed her from her dismay with the softness of his tone. “We have both lied, and kept secrets, but I believe that between the two of us we can piece together the whole truth, and go forward into the future from there.”
“Is there a future? For us?”
“I dearly hope so,” he said leading her to the settee, where she could sit in comfort. Her version of Lady Lydia’s demands came rushing out like a stream that had overflown its banks. She told him of the poison and how she had switched it with the emetic so that they might believe him ill in the moment. She revealed how she had meant to drive him from Blackwell house with such force that he would never return. How she had only meant to ensure his safety and that by such dramatic means she hoped he would understand the danger that would befall him if he ever set foot in the house again.
“It was effective to be sure,” he nodded, “but why did not you just tell me? I could have played along.”
“Mrs. Cavendish was listening at the door to be sure that I did not fail in my task,” Marilee explained. “If I did, they would send a man to accost you and finish the deed. I could not risk it. I am only glad that you knew well enough to disappear. They were so cross when you could not be found nor your death confirmed.”
“When one has an attempt made on their life it does seem the best plan of action to go to ground,” he chuffed.
“Where did you get off to?” she asked.
“The only place I could think outside of London where I might be hidden…” he replied. “Northwick.”
“To your brother?” she mused. No wonder he had not been able to be found. The last place any of the crooks would wish to be caught poking around would be the very place from which the late duke had departed with the females who had been declared missing.
Nikolas nodded. “Daniel and Martha took me in and kept my visit secret. However, angry as I was, I could not help but pester him about your acquaintance. I did not at first tell him of your situation, only that you expressed having known him. Had I been more forthcoming we might have solved the riddle earlier.” He explained that at first the doctor had been sure that he knew of no such corkscrew-haired maid named Kate. Nikolas had grown so used to using the name that he had quite forgotten that he had once suspected that it may have been falsified. So it was that Dr. Harding could not recall any maid at all by that name having lived in Northwick for at least ten years. “The entire town was preoccupied with the disappearance of their lady, a situation that I did not think the events were connected for surely criminals would know better than to take one of nobility. Let alone to force them into servitude. It would be idiocy. Besides, you told me that you were looking for your cousin.”
“That might have been a bit of an untruth…” Marilee admitted.
“Yes, well…So it was that the odds of such matters being linked seemed so improbable that I did not even consider it at first. It was not until my brother started questioning me about what manner of poison, I had ingested that we began to put two and two together.”
“The tartar emetic,” Marilee nodded. “It came from…” she halted. Perhaps admitting that the doctor had given her the vial was not something that he wished known.
“From my brother,” he finished. “He told me that he had just recently given his last bottle to the maid who had been traveling with the missing Miss Caroline, a Miss Pelletier. Then, he stopped short.” Nikolas pantomimed Dr. Harding’s shock when he made the connection that Marilee was quite possibly the only maid who matched the description of the acquaintance his brother had described. “But he explained that your name was not Kate at all, and that if you had been found then certainly Miss Caroline must too have survived.
“I swore him to secrecy and rushed back to London posthaste. Now, having heard you and Miss Caroline retell the story of the duke’s murder and how Lady Lydia and Lord Edward had plotted all this time to usurp the title for themselves, it all makes sense. To think, I had thought her merely questionable in terms of finance and employment. A murder! When it had all seemed so accidental in the reports.”
“It all seemed accidental in the moment as well,” Marilee admitted. “I too had thought it merely happenstance that the carriage was diverted. For a long while, I thought it merely highwaymen who perpetrated the act. I thought Lady Lydia was flighty and quite possibly mad, but I did not think her a villain.”
“Thank heavens you did not confide in her,” Nikolas added. “Anyway,” Nikolas continued. “At the point that I knew you had slipped me the tonic that my brother had instructed you as to how to use for effect and not harm, I was sure that it must all have been an act. Otherwise, you would have dosed me the entire bottle, and I would have been sick for a much longer time. I felt certain that my instinct about you had been right and you would never have aligned yourself with those fiends, for any offer. I could not fathom your reasoning but I began to hope that you must have one. Soon enough my anger faded to fear for your fate. Still, I could not return to Blackwell house until I had more than suppositions.”
“What did you do then?” she wondered.
“I went to the Baron Wickham, who had already gone to the young duke,” he explained. “I told them the truth, and perhaps my part in the scheme made me sound less like an accusatory madman.”
“But they believed you?”
“Not only did he believe me but the duke had only just recovered from an attempted poisoning of his own,” he revealed.
“I was mortified to think that it was a concoction of my making, but when the duke explained his symptoms, it was clear to me that it was nothing I had done, which meant they had another supplier.”
“They were planning to replace you,” Marilee said.
“Yes. Then I explained Lady Lydia’s concerning financial habits to the duke. He had been away at sea for several years, you see, and so he had limited knowledge of the nefarious dealings.”
Marilee nodded. “It may have all gone to plan if Lord Robert really had met his end in the war.”
Nikolas gave an audible shiver. “It is all horrendous to even consider.”
