“We’ve done our best,” the innkeeper said, sensing criticism. “Isolated them just as soon—”
“Did a young lady arrive here in a carriage bearing the crest of the Duke of Windebank?”
Piers saw it in Sordido’s eyes before he spoke, the way they avoided his own, the way his weight shifted from foot to foot. In an instant Piers had him by the grimy neck cloth. “Where is she? Is she dead?”
“We done nothing!” the innkeeper squealed, his face turning persimmon red. “We’re taking care of her, good care. And we done so for the coachman too, afore he died.”
She was still alive. Piers let go of the red cloth, stepped back. “Where is she?”
Sordido’s eyes shifted again. “We isolated her, same as the minister said we should. If you’ll just step into the common room, me lord, I’ll get my wife to check on the young woman and make sure that she’s able to take visitors.”
“Young woman?”
The innkeeper actually fell back a step. “We thought—the doctor said—we thought she must be a maid in service to his dukeship.”
“A maid? You thought a future countess was a maid?”
Where there had been persimmon red, now there was just sallow yellow. “We had no call to think she was a lady, me lord. No maid, and no trunks.”
“The coachman would have told you, before he died.” Piers took one precise step forward.
Sordido’s eyes flickered to Piers’s cane and back to his face. “He didn’t say nothing. The man was sick, mortal sick. He raved some, but none of it made sense that we heard. Then he died quick.”
Piers closed his eyes for a second. What was he doing, bickering with the innkeeper when Linnet . . . “Take me to her.” It was not a request; it was a demand.
The man looked behind him desperately. Then he bawled, “Moll!”
His wife was a trifle cleaner than her husband, but her eyes were small and close-set, like a ferret’s. There was a rising panic in Piers’s throat. His coachman had been attending silently from his seat; now he stepped down, tossed the horses’ lead rein over a hitching post, and moved to Piers’s shoulder.
“His lordship has come here a-looking for that woman”—the innkeeper corrected himself—“the lady who’s been lying sick. At our own expense, we’ve been caring for her,” he said, jutting his chin. “On account of how she had no money with her.”
Piers frowned. It was entirely possible that Linnet had not carried a reticule with her, or had left it in the drawing room when she escaped through the window. The duke’s coachman would have been equipped by his master for ready expenses, but if, when they’d arrived, he succumbed immediately as the innkeeper claimed . . .
The innkeeper’s wife dropped a curtsy. “She’s been terrible sick, I’m sorry to say. I had the doctor to her just yesterday, and he said that we’d done all a mortal body could do.”
Piers jaw was clenched so hard that he could barely say the words. “Take me to her.”
“Like I said, if you just wait in my common room for a moment, the wife here, Mrs. Sordido, she’ll make sure the young lady is acceptable for visitors.”
“Take me to her.”
Mrs. Sordido dropped another curtsy. “Begging your pardon, me lord, but I couldn’t do that of a right conscience. The young lady is of a tender age, and not married. I’ll just go and make sure that she’s—”
Piers’s voice cracked like a whip in the quiet innyard. “Take me to her now.” He was walking toward the door, his cane thwacking the rough cobble stones, when his coachman said, “My lord.”
The innkeeper’s wife was trotting around the corner of the inn, her husband standing rather helplessly where he was.
Piers altered his path. Of course they hadn’t put her in the inn. He had ensured that himself, when he sent out the orders for quarantine. They rounded the corner, Mrs. Sordido hastening ahead. Piers looked over his shoulder.
His coachman, Buller, had her elbow in a moment. “We’ll all walk together, shall we?” he said. Buller was a large man, and his voice, though soft, seemed to frighten her.
“It isn’t proper!” she squeaked. “She’s not properly attired.”
Piers just concentrated on picking his way across the stones in the falling dark. He was aware of the innkeeper trailing behind, of the gathering shadows fingering out from the woods surrounding them. But fear filled his mind. Fear pounded in his head and his heart.
It took two or three minutes to walk there; it felt like an hour. Mrs. Sordido protested the whole way, but Buller kept a firm grip on her elbow. “There,” she said finally, spitting it out defiantly.
Piers looked, but Buller spoke first. “That’s for chickens. That’s a chicken coop.”
“It’s a good coop,” she said. “Tall enough to walk in. And there haven’t been any chickens in there for months, six months probably. We put her in there, and I had my girl visiting her morning and night of my own good Christian will, let me tell you. And I had the doctor to her two times, and had him try everything in his power, the leeches and all, though there was no one to pay him.”
Piers was frozen to the spot. The chicken coop had no windows, and the door was hanging from one leather hinge. It was made of rough boards that had apparently started falling apart at some point, as random pieces of wood had been nailed this way and that.
“What is that smell?” Buller said, his voice dropping an octave. His hand on Mrs. Sordido’s arm must have tightened, because she squeaked in protest.
“It’s the chickens,” she said. “That is, chickens do smell, and we didn’t have time to clean it.”
Piers had shaken free of his paralysis and was going as fast as he could through the little clearing before the coop. One part of his mind was screaming silently in panic, the other was grimly aware that he was reliving his nightmare, trying to reach Linnet . . . too late.
Behind him he could hear Mrs. Sordido’s protests and Buller growling back at her. He reached the door, flung it open. The hinge snapped, and the door fell with a crash onto the ground.
Once inside, Piers couldn’t see anything in the gloom, and his eyes immediately started watering from the foul air. Carefully he inched his cane forward, pulling himself a step, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
“Linnet,” he said, quietly. Quietly, because in his heart he knew the truth. She was dead, and it was his fault.
No answer. He walked forward another step and finally his eyes began to adjust. There was no bed. He looked down to find he was about to step on her.
The woman at his feet had no resemblance to his laughing, beautiful Linnet. But the doctor in him came to the fore, pushing aside his grief, dropping his cane so he could kneel beside her and take up her wrist.
For a moment he despaired of finding a pulse, and then he felt it: thready and weak, but there. “Linnet,” he said, hand on her cheek, seeing not her ravaged skin or tangled hair, but the shape of her dear face, the way she curled slightly to the side as she always did in sleep. He loved her; he loved her so much that his heart was breaking.
There was no answer. A cloud of chicken effluvia rose around his knees as he shifted. She was burning up, of course. Numbly he catalogued such symptoms as he could see in the half-light—and couldn’t bring himself to add them up to the obvious conclusion.