Mary froze. Her breath was coming in rapid bursts, while she tried to calm her pounding heart.
“That is better,” her captor said. “Now, if you please, hand me that pistol before you cause an accident with it.” He pried the gun out of her hand and tossed it aside. “Good; now, if I might make a suggestion, run back inside the house and do your best to pretend that this never happened.” Her assailant came around to face her. He was dressed entirely in black, with a scarf covering his mouth and nose. A pair of dark eyes glistened with contemptuous delight as they swept over her. “Remember, we know who you are and all that you have done. We will ruin you without a moment’s pause, my lady. So if I were you, I would forget that these journals ever existed. Go on with your life, or I promise you that you will live to regret it.”
“Who. . .who are you?” Mary stammered “Who sent you, and what do they want with my father’s journals?”
“You certainly have a lot of questions, don’t you?” he sneered. “In answer to your first question, however, I am the Messenger. Be thankful that I will not answer the rest, for the answers would cost you your life.”
With an overstated salute, the Messenger swung himself up onto his horse. The agitated creature snorted, sending clouds of hot breath out into the chilly air. He struggled a moment against the command of his master but finally surrendered to the pull of the reins, turning about and breaking into a fast gallop.
Hands hanging limply at her sides, Mary watched as the darkness closed behind them, impervious to the cold that clawed at her flesh. After several minutes, she brushed her hair away from her face, then stooped down to pick up her discarded pistol as she wiped the onset of tears from her eyes with a shaky hand. She’d lost the only worldly possession that mattered: a lifetime’s worth of medical research that had been entrusted into her care. Choking back a cry of anguish, she crept slowly back inside Whickham Hall on trembling legs.
“Mary?” Ryan implored, his voice a ghostly echo in the dimly lit corridor. The candle he’d brought along with him sent flickering shadows along the walls that stretched themselves until they reached across the ceiling. Occasionally, a few scattered puffs of smoke would rise from the melting wax, obscuring his vision for the briefest of moments. He paused at the top of the stairs, sweeping the candle in a wide arc, but he could see nothing but depths of infinite blackness below. With slow, deliberate steps, he made his descent toward the front hall. Filled with an ever increasing sense of concern, he called out her name once more, his voice resonating against the stone walls of the grand entrance.
A soft whimper caught his attention. “Mary?” he asked again, this time in a softer tone.
He held his candle out at arm’s length and circled the room, the soft glow spreading outward from the center of the twitching flame before blending with the shadowy darkness. He turned back and suddenly paused. There, huddled against one corner, was a small hunched figure. “Mary,” Ryan murmured with a mixture of relief and despair. Never in a million years would he have imagined that she could look like this, so fragile and utterly defeated.
He hurried over to her, kneeling at her side as he placed the candle on the floor beside them. Reaching out, he set his hands upon her shoulders and started to pull her toward him, but she flinched at his touch and instantly pushed him away, arms flailing to ward off the attacker that she thought him to be.
“Mary,” he whispered. “It is only me, Ryan. It is all right; you are safe now.” He reached for her again, and though her body remained tense, she allowed him to wrap his arms around her in a tight embrace. A moment later, he felt her shoulders tremble, and she began to sob, burying her face against his chest and dampening his shirt in the process.
He let her cry until her breathing had steadied, running his fingers through her hair and over her head in long, soothing strokes. “Come,” he told her at last, as he took her hand in his and helped her to her feet. “We cannot remain here on these cold stone slabs, or we’ll catch a chill. Let us go upstairs instead, and you can tell me what happened.”
Mary wiped away her tears with the handkerchief he offered her and nodded so slightly that he barely noticed her response. Then, taking her by the arm, he guided her back up the winding stairs and down the hallway toward her room, all the while alarmingly aware of how cold she felt beneath his touch.
“Is everything all right?” a voice asked from behind them just as they reached Mary’s door. They both turned to find Michael standing in the doorway of his bedroom.
“There has been an incident,” Ryan told him gravely as he met Mary’s red-rimmed eyes. “Give me a few minutes to get Mary settled back into bed, and I will meet you in the library to tell you what happened.”
Michael nodded, ignoring the impropriety of a genteel young lady being escorted unchaperoned to her bedchamber by a man whose eyes had held a roguish gleam for the past few days. Instead, he merely closed his bedroom door behind him and started off in the direction of the stairs. “I will get the claret ready,” he muttered, disappearing into the darkness and thus out of sight.
“Now then,” Ryan said as he eased Mary’s robe off her shoulders and lifted her onto her bed, tucking the blankets around her. He brushed a few strands of stray hair from her face and gently lifted her chin so he could meet her gaze. “What exactly happened? I heard a horse ride off. Who was it? Who frightened you like this?”
Mary shrank back against her pillows and clutched his hand in hers. She closed her eyes briefly, only to find her mind flooded by visions of a dark figure mocking her with his venomous glare. “The Messenger,” she whispered, meeting Ryan’s eyes with a dead stare. She saw the flicker of overwhelming anger in them and caught her breath, quite unwillingly.
Swallowing hard, she forced herself to go on while Ryan listened quietly to her every word. “He took the journals,” she told him in a small voice at the end. “Every last one of them. Those books meant the world to me, Ryan.”
“I know,” he said as he wiped a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. His eyes filled with regret. “But he did not take them all, Mary; we still have one left.”
Mary stared at Ryan in puzzlement while she waited for him to explain. The box was gone; the journals had all been in there.
“Earlier today, while you were speaking with your uncle in the library, I took the liberty of borrowing the last volume of your father’s journals, hoping to perhaps discover something more in it. It is still on my bedside table.”
Mary closed her eyes against the fresh onset of tears and breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said, gently squeezing his hand.
“In a way, it is the most important one,” he added. “It is the one that lists the hospital where one of the many fatal surgeries took place. It is also the one that lists all of the initials. If we can work out what they stand for, we might be able to find the people who took the journals.”
“You don’t think that this is the doing of just one man?”
“I don’t know, but I do think that the Messenger is just that: a messenger.” Not to mention a cold-blooded killer. “I believe there is someone else behind him pulling the strings and telling him when to jump. I intend to find out who that somebody might be.”
Mary nodded thoughtfully. “And I thought my uncle might have had a part in this,” she said. “I treated him quite badly, I’m afraid, but the man I saw this evening—I couldn’t see much of him—I could tell that he was no more than thirty years of age.”
“I had the same impression when I met him in London,” Ryan told her. “But you still ought to tread lightly. There is no harm in being cautious.” He ran his hand carefully along her cheek. He couldn’t read her expression in the dim light, but he knew that she’d had a terrible fright, and he was prepared to do bloody murder because of it. If something had happened to her. . .His jaw tightened at the very thought of it.
“You are right,” Mary agreed as he lowered his head, kissing her briefly on the forehead. “Please be sure you put the journal somewhere safe before going downstairs to meet Trenton. I would hate for something to happen to it.”
“You have my word,” he told her softly as he tucked the blankets around her once more and headed toward the door. He turned for a moment to look at her, his hand resting on the handle. “I will be back to check on you before I go to bed.” But Mary didn’t offer a reply; she was already fast asleep.
“You say that somebody came into Lady Steepleton’s room while she was sleeping and stole her father’s medical journals?” Michael asked in shock. His forehead was creased in an angry frown as he paced about the library, the brandy in his glass sloshing from side to side.
Ryan sipped his claret. “That is correct.”
“And she confronted this man alone?” Michael asked in even greater disbelief.
“She had a pistol,” Ryan explained. He would have laughed at the absurdity of it all if it weren’t so damn serious. “Your wife gave it to her, I believe.”
“Of course she did,” Michael muttered as he took a large gulp of his drink. “That woman has probably handed out weapons to half the women in England. A pity that Lady Steepleton did not have the opportunity to use it, or the man would be hanging from the stable rafters by now and receiving a good whipping.”
“I agree,” Ryan told him. “But I intend to find the instigator behind all of this and put an end to it once and for all.”
“If you need help, Ryan, I hope you know that you can count on me.” There was fire in Michael’s eyes. A young lady had been accosted in his home: Ryan knew that it was enough to make him lust for revenge.
“Yes, of course. Thank you,” Ryan told him sincerely before emptying his glass.
“You know,” Michael said after a moment’s silence, “you might do well not to trust anybody. I checked the doors myself before going to bed; they were all firmly locked. And our intruder did not make use of a window.”
“Are you suggesting that—”
“I am merely stating the facts,” Michael told him, placing his empty glass on the sideboard. “For whatever reason, the front door was opened after we had all retired. If anything, it certainly makes you wonder.”
“I hear that there was quite a stir last night,” Mr. Croyden remarked as he sat down to breakfast the following morning and proceeded to fork a large slice of ham onto his plate.
“Yes!” Cassandra exclaimed. “It is all very exciting.”
“That will do, Cassie,” Isabella chided her daughter. “Mary could have been seriously injured.”
“But she was not, Mama,” Cassandra countered. “She is perfectly fine, a bit pale perhaps but. . .oh, I wish something like that would happen to me. My life is perfectly dull, you know.”
Isabella gave her daughter an admonishing look. “I think perhaps you ought to worry more about your shawl, my dear; the tip of it is trailing in your coffee.”