Axel (7 page)

Instead he offered a slight bow. “Until next we meet.”

Mrs. Stoneleigh disappeared in a swish of black skirts, leaving Axel to absorb himself for the next two hours in the artifacts of another man’s life. Gregory had kept up a rambling and occasionally illegible correspondence with several old friends—late-night applications of brandy seldom improved penmanship—and he heard occasionally from his children. Nothing stood out as evidence connected to murder.

Shreve appeared, wheeling a tea cart before him. “Beg pardon, sir. Madam thought you might be getting peckish, and suggested luncheon would be in order.”

Sandwiches had been stacked in a tower beside a dish of sliced pears. A vented tureen savored of hot barley soup. Chocolate tea cakes graced a candy dish.“Madam is thoughtful,” Axel said. Surprisingly thoughtful, for a woman whose husband had accused her of requiring constant cosseting.

“She is that.” Shreve fussed with trays and rearranged linen. “But, Mr. Belmont?”

“Shreve?” Stoneleigh’s own wife may not have known if he’d had a mistress—what wife wanted to confront such a fact?—though Stoneleigh’s butler likely would.

“About Mrs. Stoneleigh.” Shreve’s gaze remained on sliced pears arranged in a pink bowl.

Axel kept his tone level when he wanted to shake the old fellow until his jowls flapped.

“I can keep a confidence, unless it points to somebody’s guilt in Mr. Stoneleigh’s death.”

“Well, as you are the only neighbor coming and going from the estate,” Shreve began, a blush creeping up his neck, “and as duty alone prompts me to speak, I am breaching all protocol to mention this to you.”

“I am listening.” Axel had also prepared lists of further questions, for both Shreve and Ambers, though at Mrs. Stoneleigh’s request, Ambers had taken several horses to Melton for sale.

“Madam isn’t doing well, sir. She barely eats, and I know she’s suffered a grievous shock, but one must eat.”

“One must, though these things take time.” The words were ashes rather than a source of warmth to a grieving heart, and yet, they were true.

Shreve lifted the lid over the soup tureen for the third time. “If it were only that, Mr. Belmont.”

“Out with it, Shreve.”

“She doesn’t sleep, and she’s taking laudanum, which madam has never done before with any frequency.”

“Many people medicate their grief.” The mention of laudanum sparked alarm and anger. Why wasn’t the woman’s physician calling on her, or had that fool prescribed the poppy to a widow when she was enduring the most vulnerable and isolated weeks of grief?

Shreve drew himself up. “Madam leaves the candles burning at night on every floor, walks the house for hours, then collapses in her bed near dawn, only to rise shortly thereafter. Her digestion is most delicate, her strength ebbing. She is not coping well.”

Axel considered the woman who’d spoken with him at such length earlier in the day: polite, gracious, cooperative, and capable of humor and humanity if not exactly warmth.

Not that
he
had acquired the knack of warmth on social situations.

He compared that woman with the widow who’d greeted him at the crime scene: composed, calm, physically cold, and something else plucked at his awareness, like brambles snagging at his sleeve…

Afraid.

“I’ll deal with it, Shreve. For now, I suggest you run out of laudanum, or at least make sure the supply is limited, and do likewise with the decanters.”

“But sir, I wouldn’t want…”

“Shreve,” Axel said gently, “Madam knows you are grieving too, and she will not hold it against you if the decanters aren’t immediately refilled, or the medicinals run low. Falling asleep with the candles lit is dangerous, and she doesn’t need for this place to burn to the ground.”

Shreve’s sigh should have fluttered the curtains. “I will see to it.”

Axel ate in silence, considering his options and his duties, which had lately multiplied, much to the detriment of his progress with the herbal.

Mrs. Stoneleigh was without family, and she needed to be taken in hand. She was grieving, frightened, and living in the same house where her husband had been murdered, while the murderer was still at large.

Axel had heeded the neighborly summons, he was investigating the murder as best he could, but was he being a
gentleman
when the damsel was clearly in distress?

And of those three duties—neighbor, investigator, and gentleman—which mattered the most, and where did that leave the other two?

“D
id you find anything in the letters?” Abby asked as her mare plodded along beside Mr. Belmont’s gelding.

“I pulled out a half dozen or so, but no. They’re exactly what you’d expect from an older gentleman’s family and cronies. I’ve written to a few of his regular army correspondents and commanding officers, making general inquires, but I don’t expect much in reply. Sir Dewey has an exquisite hand, while the colonel’s penmanship declined with the lateness of the hour, apparently.”

“Sir Dewey is a gentleman in every particular.” A handsome gentleman too, about the same age as Mr. Belmont. “One wonders how a fellow so given to aesthetics coped in the military. Every room of his home is lovely and filled with exotica.”

“Lives alone, does he?” Mr. Belmont glanced back at the two mares, who were behaving themselves on their lead lines. They’d probably eat buttered scones at his command and not even dare to colic thereafter.

“Sir Dewey dwells alone,” Abby said, “though with a regiment of servants from his days in India. He and Gregory always enjoyed one another’s company. They could tell stories on each other for hours.”

The same stories, though. Over and over, which must have been tedious for Sir Dewey.

This outing was not tedious. The sun shone blindingly bright on the snow, and Mr. Belmont sat with the ease of a cavalryman upon his horse, a great, black beast given to admonitory snorts at nothing.

“Do you ever wished you’d served?” Abby asked, as one of the mares took exception to a dark patch of ground.

“My brother and I were both left with children to raise while the Corsican was wreaking his mischief. I could not see taking up arms to save the world while depriving my offspring of the company of their only surviving parent.
Settle now, you two
.”

The mares settled while Abby’s mount tripped on a frozen rut. “Easy, Pumpkin.”

“Pumpkin?”

“Why not Pumpkin? She’s chestnut, Gregory named her, and she knows that’s her name. Upon whose back do you sit?”

“Ivan the Terrible.” Mr. Belmont looked a bit sheepish at this disclosure. “He’s not terrible, but as a lad, he was a handful. I must confess that today’s excursion serves an ulterior motive, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”

“Confession is said to be good for the soul.” Though Abby did not want to hear
his
confession, nor did she want to return to Stoneleigh Manor, particularly.

“I’m kidnapping you,” Mr. Belmont said, in the same tone he might have predicted more snow, or an early lambing season. “You will be my guest for the nonce, until I can make progress determining who killed your husband.”

Abby hadn’t seen this coming, but then, in her present state, she could hardly see the coming of the next dawn.

“I am in your custody?” The notion should have been foul rather than reassuring. The sight of Candlewick, a quarter mile ahead at the end of the drive, was very reassuring indeed.

“You are certainly not in
my
custody. You’re enjoying a repairing lease at the home of a concerned neighbor.”

The horses clopped along, while Abby tried to locate anger, indignation, or even some mild dismay.

“I would rather you had consulted me.” Not that Abby would have had anything sensible to say. Now that she was on Belmont land, this kidnapping all but a fait accompli, she was… more relieved than anything else.

How telling—and pathetic—was that?

Mr. Belmont wanted for tact and charm, he had no finesse with social niceties, and his neighboring over the years had been casual at best, and yet, Abby would feel safer under his roof than her own.

She would
be
safer under his roof. “If you think I am in danger, Mr. Belmont, then I suppose a short visit might be for the best. I trust you have a housekeeper in residence to put a patina of propriety on this repairing lease?”

Their horses came to a halt in the stable yard, and along the eaves of the coach house, icicles hung like so many glistening sabers.

“Mrs. Turnbull quotes her Scripture better than Mr. Weekes cites his, she’s been known to emasculate presuming footmen at a glance, and my boys fear her setdowns worse than they fear my own. She’d chide me sorely for using the word emasculate in a lady’s hearing too.”

Abby liked unusual words, a relic of her days growing up in a bookshop. She hadn’t heard
that
one spoken aloud before though.

Mr. Belmont remained in the saddle as the eaves dripped and Abby’s chin grew numb.

“No ‘To blazes with you, Mr. Belmont’?” he said. “Or ‘This is an outrage,’ and ‘How dare you? Of all the nerve.’” A list—Mr. Belmont apparently favored lists and organization.

“You aren’t doing this to upset me,” Abby replied, “and I’ve already told you I wish you had consulted me. Regarding future decisions that affect my welfare, please see that you do. As magistrate, you are probably within your authority to do this, and nobody will gainsay you, save perhaps Gervaise.”

Then too, the ride over had exhausted Abby. She was simply too tired and cold to muster a show of resistance. Cold in her bones, in a way that had little to do with the weather.

A groom trotted out to take the mares, and Mr. Belmont swung down. He came around to Abby’s mare and glowered up at her.

“Mr. Belmont?”

“I cannot believe the colonel was so lacking in gallantry he neglected to offer assistance when you mounted and dismounted.”

The colonel had been utterly lacking in gallantry, once he’d become Abby’s husband. She put a hand on each of Mr. Belmont’s shoulders and eased off the horse.

Pumpkin took one step to the side, pitching Abby into her kidnapper.

“Steady on.” Mr. Belmont had Abby by the waist, but as she stepped back, she bumped into the mare, who sidled over again, knocking Abby chest-to-chest into Mr. Belmont.

“We’ll change her name to Bumpkin.” He stepped away from the horse, guiding Abby to follow him as if he were her waltzing partner. “You truly won’t rail at me, will you?”

His scent—fresh flowers, scythed grass, and wool today—wrapped about her, as did the sure knowledge that Axel Belmont dreaded feminine hysterics and had done his gentlemanly duty nonetheless, such as he conceived that duty.

“I’m to dissolve into histrionics because you kept me from falling on my… derriere?”

“For absconding with you.” He tucked Abby’s hand over his arm and steered her toward the snowy garden. “For being high-handed, thoughtless, inconsiderate, you know the list. My late wife kept it close at hand lest I forget my transgressions.”

“The list.” What did a woman long dead have to do with a murder investigation? “I suppose you had some of my things sent over?”

“I gave Shreve no choice.”

“He doesn’t do well with a great deal of choice.” Not many men did, in Abby’s experience. “Do you really think someone might try to hurt me?”

Please scoff, which you do well. Please inform me I’m being dramatic for no reason, and grief makes women hysterical.

“I think, on your present course, you are well on the way to neglecting yourself, madam. My housekeeper will cosset you within an inch of your life, and you will bear up as best you can lest she redouble her efforts.”

Abby stopped walking and dropped his arm. “Explain yourself, Mr. Belmont.”

“You have more or less stopped eating,” he began, even as he held the door to a back entrance for her. “You do not sleep, you pace at all hours, then take enough laudanum to fall asleep, leaving candles burning on every floor of the house. If you burn the house down, or waste away to a shadow, you could well accomplish whatever the murderer’s initial goal was, all the while making it harder for
me
to do
my
job.”

Clearly the difficulty of Mr. Belmont’s task as the king’s man trumped any petty consideration such as Abby’s continued existence.

She had the lowering suspicion he was sparing her pride. “Shreve peached on me.”

“Probably put up to it by your cook and Mrs. Jensen,” Mr. Belmont temporized.

“Once it becomes known I reside with you,” Abby said, as she was led into a large, cozy kitchen, “how will you keep me safe, how will you force me to sleep, how will you ensure I eat every bite on my plate?”

Mr. Belmont started undoing the frogs of her cloak. “I can at least encourage you to look after yourself properly and make it harder for you to get to the laudanum. My staff will abet me, or they’ll be sacked.”

“You forgot to mention the brandy,” Abby said, lifting her chin rather than smack his hands away—competent hands they were too. “And the opium, the rum, and the gin. Godfrey’s Cordial will do in a pinch. What do you take me for, Mr. Belmont?”

“I take you for a newly widowed neighbor,” he said, slipping off her cloak and hanging it on a peg near the hearth, then seeing to his own greatcoat.

“You are too tall.”

“My apologies.” He bowed slightly, as if he heard this complaint frequently. “My oldest nephew will soon be as tall as I am, and you will likely be making his acquaintance. I will inform him in advance of his transgression.”

Abby passed Mr. Belmont her gloves and bonnet. “I met him at services this autumn. He’s the son of your brother, Michael?”

“Matthew,” Mr. Belmont replied. “Christopher and Remington, Matthew’s two oldest, are at university. They are frequently here on weekends, cleaning out my larder, putting the laundresses to work, and sleeping round the clock. The youngest nephew, Richard, has remained with his father, Dayton, and Phillip in Sussex.”

What must it be like, to have nephews and sons to share back and forth, a sibling to visit? Surely such family came in handy when a woman could no longer feel safe under her own roof?