Crystal Gardens (6 page)

This time he did not raise his talent. He did not dare. He knew what he would find, knew what it would do to his senses. He could not afford to lose his control, not now, not with Evangeline only a few steps away. He could not risk letting her see that side of him.

Besides, the bastard was dead.

Lucas stayed very still for another heartbeat or two, one fist locked around the edge of the door. When he was certain that he was in full command of himself he turned back toward the kitchen.

He did not question his reaction to the scene in the bedroom but he was more than a little surprised by the fierceness of it. He had, after all, known what to expect. After Evangeline’s description of the attack, he’d had a very good idea of what he would see at the scene. The important thing to keep in mind was that she was unhurt. She was safe, at least for the moment. That was all that mattered.

Still, the intensity of his reaction was unsettling. It was not as if he had not encountered other far more horrific crime scenes. But for some reason the graphic evidence of the attack on Evangeline had slammed through all his carefully erected psychical barriers and struck him at his core. He barely knew the woman and yet here he was reacting as if the two of them were intimately connected, as if she belonged to him.
As if it was his right to protect her
. One thing was certain: From now on he intended to do a better job of taking care of her.

He turned away from the bedroom and went back down the hall to the kitchen. Evangeline was waiting.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“All is well,” Lucas said.

“I was sure it would be,” she said. She gave him a sheepish smile. “Nevertheless it was kind of you to make certain.”

“Try to get some sleep.”

“An excellent notion. As I told you, my visitors from London arrive tomorrow. I shall be very busy entertaining them.”

“I am glad to know that you will have company for the next couple of days,” he said.

She searched his face in the glary light of the kitchen sconce. “You are concerned that whoever sent Hobson to kill me will make another attempt, aren’t you?”

“Under the circumstances, I think we must assume that will be the case. However, I think we have some time before the person who commissioned your death makes his next move.”

“Because he will not know immediately that Hobson failed?”

“Right. And even after he realizes that his hired killer is not coming back for his pay, it will take time to concoct another plan. It is not as if one can just walk down to the street and find that sort of talent loitering about on the corner.”

She looked amused. “That sort of talent?”

He grimaced. “A poor choice of words. In addition to the difficulty of hiring a professional killer who is willing to travel to the country, the fact that you escaped the first attempt will make whoever is after you more careful the next time.”

She tilted her head slightly and regarded him with acute attention. He could have sworn that her eyes heated a little, whether with interest, alarm or simple curiosity, he could not say.

“No offense, sir,” she said, “but it strikes me that you seem to know a great deal about how this sort of business is conducted.”

“One could say that the nature of my talent has compelled me to make something of a study of the criminal mind.” He stopped and then decided to tell her the rest. “Much to my family’s dismay, I occasionally consult for a detective inspector who is an old friend of mine at Scotland Yard.”

“Your family does not approve?”

He smiled. “I think the twins, my brother and sister, find it rather intriguing but their mother does not.”

“Their mother? Not yours?”

“Legally speaking, Judith is my stepmother. My mother died when I was fifteen. Judith has gone to great lengths to keep my work for the Yard a deep, dark family secret.”

“I see. I must say, I agree with your brother and sister. Your consulting work sounds fascinating.”

He thought about it. “I’m not sure ‘fascinating’ is the correct term to describe it. ‘Compelling’ comes closer.”

A knowing look came and went in her eyes. “I understand. Something to do with the nature of your talent?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

It seemed to him that the atmosphere in the room was becoming more highly charged with each passing moment. He should be on his
way, he thought. The longer he stayed here alone with her, the harder it would be to leave.

“I’ll be going now,” he said.

She slipped out of his coat and held it out to him. “Here, you mustn’t forget this.”

He took the coat from her. Unable to think of an excuse to linger, he went out onto the step. He stopped, one foot on the second step, and looked back at her.

“I suggest that you brace the door with one of the kitchen chairs for the rest of the night,” he said.

“That is a very good idea. I’ll do that.”

He waited until she closed the door. The scrape of wood chair legs on the floorboards and a soft thud told him that she had taken his advice on a makeshift lock.

Satisfied, he shrugged into his coat. The garment was still warm from her body and carried her scent, a sweet, spicy, feminine perfume that was unique to Evangeline. The fragrance carried the essence of the woman and was somehow infused with her energy. He knew that he would never forget it.

S
tone was waiting for him in the kitchen. He had made a pot of coffee.

“That smells very good,” Lucas said.

“Reckoned you wouldn’t be bothering with sleep for a while yet,” Stone said. He poured coffee into two thick mugs. “Not with that body waiting for you in the maze.”

“You’re right. I’ll have to find it before dawn if I want to examine it. Bodies don’t last long in the maze, or the Night Gardens, either, for that matter. To those plants, Sharpy Hobson is just so much fertilizer.”

He sat down at the old kitchen table. Stone sat down across from him. They drank their coffee in a comfortable silence. They were employer and employee but they were also friends who had saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion. Stone was one of the very few people in the world whom Lucas trusted. But, then, Stone was one of the very few who knew Lucas’s secrets and was not nervous around him.

“When you finish your coffee I want you to go down to the cottage and keep an eye on it until morning,” Lucas said after a while. “I’m sure there is nothing to be concerned about tonight but I want Miss Ames to have some peace of mind. She has been through an ordeal.”

“I’ll watch her for you.” Stone put down his mug and got to his feet. “Are you sure you won’t be needing any help with the body?”

“No. I’ll examine it but I don’t have much expectation of learning anything useful. Still, you never know.”

“I’ll be off then.”

Stone walked out of the kitchen and went down the hall. Lucas waited until he heard the side door open and close. Then he put down the mug, got to his feet and went outside.

He walked across the terrace, went down the steps and started along the narrow path framed by two towering, faintly luminous hedges. Bizarre flowers, unnatural in size and color, glowed in the night. Chester Sebastian had transformed Crystal Gardens into a living botanical laboratory. The results of the paranormal experiments he had performed over the decades had taken on a life of their own. In recent years, they had run dangerously out of control.

It was no accident that the curious hybrids that Chester had developed flourished on the grounds. He had chosen the old abbey for his laboratory because of the paranormal aspects of the waters from the hot spring.

Unlike the waters that had made the town of Bath a popular destination for both the Romans and modern-day visitors, the spring that fed Crystal Gardens had acquired a far more sinister reputation.

The local townsfolk were not the only ones who were convinced that Chester had been killed by one of his own unnatural specimens. Most of the members of the Sebastian family believed that as well.

It did not take long to find the body in the maze. Hobson had collapsed face up, his expression frozen in a mask of horror. A few
creepers and vines were already starting to twine around the dead man’s legs and arms.

Lucas pulled on a pair of leather gardening gloves and wrenched the body free from the tenacious grip of the creepers. It was not easy.

He went quickly through Hobson’s clothing. There wasn’t much to find, a rather impressive amount of money, a couple of ticket stubs and two concealed knives. One of the tickets was for a cheap seat in a London theater where a melodrama titled
Lady Easton’s Secret
was playing. The train ticket indicated that Hobson had arrived in Little Dixby on the afternoon train that day. The timing fit with Evangeline’s estimate of when she started to feel that she was being watched.

Lucas tucked the knives and the ticket stubs into the pocket of his coat, kicked the body back to the hungry plants and walked out of the maze.

B
eatrice Lockwood angled her fashionable frilled parasol against the warm afternoon sunlight.

“Who could have guessed that the countryside would be so dangerous?” she asked. “It is quite pretty here in Little Dixby but it does appear rather dull. Not exactly a hotbed of criminal activity.”

“And to think that Mrs. Flint and Mrs. Marsh banished you here so that you could recover from your case of shattered nerves,” Clarissa Slate added. “Wait until we tell them of how you were attacked in your own bed by a man armed with a knife.”

“Make certain they realize that I was not actually in the bed when the villain got to the bedroom,” Evangeline said. “No need to alarm them any more than necessary. By the time Hobson arrived I was halfway out the window.”

“As if that will reassure them,” Clarissa said. “You know that they have both been very concerned about your nerves since the events of
the Rutherford affair. They packed you off to the country to recover and just see what happens.”

“I did try to tell Mrs. Flint and Mrs. Marsh that I was not suffering from shock as a result of the incidents that followed the Rutherford case,” Evangeline said.

It was mid-afternoon and they were walking along the lane that would take them into Little Dixby, where they planned to have tea and tour the ruins. Earlier, Evangeline had met her two friends at the station with a hired carriage. Mayhew, the owner of the town’s only cab, had driven the women and their luggage to Fern Gate Cottage. After unpacking, Clarissa and Beatrice had declared themselves eager to see some of the antiquities.

Evangeline was feeling a great sense of relief now that her friends had arrived. Although she was certain that her nerves had not been shattered by the events of the night, the truth was that this morning she had discovered that she was far more shaken than she cared to admit. The assault had revived all of the fearsome emotions she had experienced two weeks ago when Douglas Mason had lunged out of the bedroom doorway and held a knife to her throat. Really, she thought, how many such violent attacks should a lady have to endure in a month?

She was very glad that Clarissa and Beatrice were planning to stay for the next two nights. With luck she would get some sleep. If she had been obliged to spend the next two evenings alone in the unnervingly quiet countryside, she was certain she would have spent the long hours of darkness lying awake, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall and watching for shadows at the bedroom window.

She had met Beatrice and Clarissa shortly after joining the firm of Flint & Marsh. The bonds of friendship had sprung up very quickly among the three of them, in part because each of them was alone in the world and each was facing a lonely future.

There were few options for women when it came to obtaining respectable employment. With marriage out of the question due to their poor finances and lack of social connections, they had each faced the gloomy prospect of making their livings as governesses or paid companions. Both professions were notoriously ill paid. After twenty or thirty years in either career, a woman was likely to find herself as impoverished as she had been when she started out. The only hope was that somewhere along the way a generous employer would remember to provide a tiny bequest in the will. It was a hope that was often cruelly crushed.