Do You Want to Start a Scandal

He moved to the desk.

Thud.

The noise gave him pause.

Probably nothing. Definitely nothing. A servant dropped something upstairs, that was all.

And yet even as he closed one drawer and noiselessly rifled through the second, his mind couldn’t let it rest.

He didn’t like the silence that followed that thud.

If an object was dropped, it ought to be picked up. Unless Charlotte was the one who’d dropped the object, in which case said object might remain on the floor for a year or more.

And with that, his mind was with Charlotte again.

He smiled a bit to himself, and before he even knew what he was doing, his eye had wandered to the window seat.

This was useless. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. He couldn’t be easy about that silence. And if he wasn’t concentrating on the task at hand, he should wait for another opportunity. In his distraction, he would make a mistake.

He closed the drawer and left the library, turning to climb the stairs.

What he found in the corridor scared him bloodless. Here was the source of the thud.

Charlotte.

He dashed to her side.

“Charlotte.” He gave her arm a gentle shake. “Charlotte. Are you well?”

No reply.

No response whatsoever. She was motionless.

As he turned and lifted her, her head lolled backward. Her lips had a bluish tinge.

A sick feeling rose in his gut.

“No.” He shook her roughly, to no avail. “No, no, no.”

This couldn’t happen. Not this time. She would not be taken from him.

He pried open her eyelid to check her gaze, then turned his cheek to her pale lips.

She was breathing, at least. And when he pressed a hand to her throat, he found her heart to be beating—rapidly.

Maybe it wasn’t too late.

Charlotte, Charlotte. Who did this to you?

“Ridley!” he called, suddenly hoarse. “Miss Highwood is ill.”

Ridley joined him on the floor. “Shall I help you move her to the bed?”

“Don’t touch her. No one else touches her.”

He would be the only one to move her, to hold her. To gather her in his arms and carry her back to her bed. To smooth the hair from her mottled, feverish cheek.

“Find Sir Vernon,” Piers said, barely restraining the edge in his voice. “Tell him to send for a doctor.”

Ridley nodded. “At once, my lord.”

Piers whipped the cravat from his neck and doused it with water from the washstand. Then he returned to her bedside and swabbed the cool cloth over her head and neck.

She stirred, and his heart leapt with hope.

“Stay with me, Charlotte.”

He could almost hear her teasing him in return. I don’t like being told what to do.

Wake, then. Wake up and tell me so.

If he needed to irritate her back to life, he would do it.

“Charlotte, stay with me. Do you hear? You can’t leave me. I forbid it.”

He held her, counting each of her shallow, precious breaths. When he dared glance away, he took a look about the room. Her breakfast tray sat on the table. It looked untouched, with the chocolate pot still steaming and the plate decorated with . . .

With a sprig of sinister greenery.

He knew it at once. Monkshood. One of the deadliest of nightshades. It didn’t even need to be ingested. Mere contact on skin could prove fatal.

Charlotte hadn’t merely fallen ill.

She’d been poisoned.

“Which hand?” he demanded. “Charlotte, you must wake. Tell me which hand you touched it with.”

Her lashes fluttered, and she looked toward her right arm.

Piers turned her hand palm-side up. Christ. Her flesh still bore faint scrapes from where she’d clutched the reins on her wild ride the other day. An open door, and the poison had entered through it.

He reached for the ewer on her washstand and slowly poured the remaining contents over her right forearm, letting the water run down her palm, all the way to her fingertips before spilling onto the floor.

“Ridley!” he shouted.

Ridley appeared in the doorway, out of breath from his jog down and up the stairs. “The physician’s been sent for.”

“We can’t wait that long. It’s monkshood. Fetch the razor and basin from my washstand. I must bleed her to draw out the poison.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Piers tied his cravat about her upper right arm, cinching it firmly to serve as a tourniquet. She gave a faint moan of pain as he drew the knot tight. He ignored it. From this point forward, there was no time for emotion, no room for doubt.

His first objective was ensuring that Charlotte would live.

His second was learning who’d done this, and making him pay.

Chapter Nineteen

She drifted in and out of consciousness for days, it seemed.

No matter when she woke, full daylight or dark of night, Mama was beside her, without fail. Pressing damp cloths to her brow or spooning her sips of beef tea.

When she felt well enough to sit up, her mother helped her wash and change into a fresh chemise. Mama sat behind her on the bed to brush and plait her hair.

“Thank you, Mama. You really needn’t do all these things for me. I could call in a maid.”

“Pish,” she said. “I’m still your mother, even though you’re grown. And mothers never fall out of practice.”

“I have the vaguest memory of being ill as a child. I must have been two. Or even three . . . ?”

“Three. You had scarlet fever. Minerva, as well.”

“Really? I don’t recall being feverish. All I remember is that I was irritated at being kept indoors for so long afterward, and that you let me sip lemon and honey from a twisted handkerchief. Though I suppose you must have been worried.”

She harrumphed. “My nerves have never been the same. Imagine it. I was recently widowed. We’d been cast out of our home when your father’s cousin inherited, allotted only a paltry income. I was alone for the first time in my life, with three young daughters to raise, and two of you burning up with fever.”

“What about Diana?”

“I had to send her away to the curate’s wife. We didn’t see her for a month.” She paused. “Or was it two months? I remember she was still away on my twenty-fifth birthday.”

“Lord.” Charlotte knew Mama had been widowed young, but she’d never stopped to think about what that meant in such practical terms.