Page 87 of His Duchess' Mischief

The rain had stopped, the sun occasionally bathing the land around them as shadows scudded over the grass.

Seth closed his eyes, breathing in the smells of his estate. The gentle scent of lavender wafted toward him as Alicia came to sit beside him.

“Perhaps you are right and she is in the house,” she said, rubbing her feet from their long walk around the lake. “Or—or the buzzard has eaten her and taken her to its young.”

“We will find her. Do not fear. Rest a bit, and then we will return.”

Alicia’s spine remained just as straight as it had been earlier, but she stopped fidgeting, her hands coming to rest on her lap.

Seth looked out over the lake, the quiet and calm of the place settling over his soul.

“You have never asked me,” he said softly.

“Asked you what?”

“About my past. I know you are aware of what happened; I heard you speaking about it with your sister.”

She was quiet for a moment and then nodded. “All I know is what I have heard. I do not put much stock in idle chatter.”

“But you are aware of the trial?”

“Someone told me you had been accused ofmurder.” Her tone was tentative, nervous almost.

Seth leaned forward, watching the ripples on the surface of the water. “Not quite. Well, notonlyme. I was asked to stand as a witness at his trial.”

“Whose?”

“A man named Lord Gordon Fernside—the best man I’ve ever known.”

He could hear the catch in his voice.

Why, after all this time, does it still affect me like this?

“What happened to him?”

“Ah, well, there’s the question. He sustained a severe head injury. That is what the official report says anyway. But seeing it was something quite different.”

“Yousawhis body?”Alicia asked, her fingers clenching together in her lap.

Seth did not speak for a long time, listening to the gentle breeze in the trees and the faint call of a sparrow in the woods.

“We were breaking the rules,” he said ruefully. “Up late at night in the bowels of our house at Eton. Foolish boys, deciding that we knew better than anyone else what we should be getting up to.”

He leaned back, staring up at the clouds sailing over their heads.

“A woman arrived. I did not know her. She told me that she had been waiting for Gordon and that he had not presented himself. That was not so unusual, but it worried me. We went out to find him.”

“Who is ‘we?’”

“Me, Isaac Stone, Lucas Oakley, and Michael Grant. My closest friends. You may remember them from the wedding; they were the ones who came to fetch me when I was not doing my duty to you and our guests.”

“Ah, then I owe them a debt of thanks. But why have you not spoken of them before, if they are your closest friends?”

Why, indeed.

“I suppose I try not to think of them often,” Seth admitted.

There was something haunted in Seth’s expression, and Alicia wanted to wipe it off his face—to make him smile again.

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