Page 50 of The Secret of the Three Fates
We entered the brightest room I’d ever seen. Flooded with light and clean air. Linens hung from the rafters above, blowing in the breeze like storybook ghosts. Shelving sat along one wall loaded up with stacks of bedding and clean textiles to stock the entire manor house.
Ruan lay by an open window in a makeshift hospital bed clad in a pair of gray pajamas. Ruan Kivell was maddening and frustrating and incredibly obstinate but he was the only trulygoodperson I’d known in my life. And here he was, a breath away from death, looking small and fragile.
I sank down on the mattress beside him. His skin was hot beneath my touch, warmer than my own. A hint of a bandage peeked out from the collar of his shirt.
“There’s nothing more I can do for him. He has to fight this last battle himself,” Andrew said softly. “You did everything you could. Ruby, by all rights, neither of you should be alive right now. You, least of all.”
My eyes widened as I turned to look at Andrew in the light of day. The exhaustion was all over his face, but there was another expression there. Andrew Lennox was perplexed. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“It took me half the night to get the bullet from the bone. It went straight through you, burying itself into his scapula, fracturing it.”
“Throughme? That’s preposterous…” I’d assumed when the maid said I’d been shot that I’d been grazed, but a rifle round through that part of my chest ought to have killed me.
“Itispreposterous. I would have thought it an old wound from the war, had I not seen you after you came out of the lake with Lucy’s body. You hadno scar. It is as if the wound cauterizeditself inside and out, but I do not understand how it could have happened.”
My eyes stung as I looked down at Ruan’s still form. My rusty heart seized up at the thought. He’d saved me—whether he knew it or not. I wanted to scream. Drag my nails down the walls until they wept from the fury that flooded my veins.
Ruan was dying.
Mr. Owen was going to prison.
And I could hardly walk down a damned hallway without collapsing.
Andrew didn’t notice my distress, or was polite enough to ignore it. He fiddled with the horn handle of his crook, running his graceful fingers over its smooth head, drawing my attention there. “You were in the war, Ruby. Uncle Owen told me as much… In truth, he’s told me a great deal about you. You are quite the remarkable woman.”
His words scarcely registered as I remained mesmerized by the slow rise and fall of Ruan’s chest beneath the nightshirt.
“You saw what rifles do to human flesh, there is no way that you could have carried him to the surface after being pierced by a round. Ruby… this is beyond all science.”
“Why isn’t he waking up?” I asked numbly, though the wounded beast within my mind knew the answer.
Andrew wet his lips, removing his spectacles. “The real question is why he isn’tdeadalready. I am not going to mince words with you, you deserve far more than that. We will be lucky if the infection doesn’t take him before the week is out. It’s only the fact that your wound somehow sealed itself that you aren’t in the same sorry state.”
Andrew had done everything science would allow to save him and had given the rest up to… to fate. All that was left to do now was wait.
“You’re a clever lass, you know what filthy wounds do to even the strongest of men.” He reached into his pocket, withdrawing a damaged copper-jacketed bullet, the object resting heavily in his palm. “Strange how such a small object can cause such devastation.”
I reached out, wrapping my fingers around the horrid chunk of metal. “Do they know who shot us? Mr. Owen was far from Manhurst by then, shouldn’t that tell the inspector that he had arrested the wrong man?”
Andrew inhaled sharply and shook his head. “Inspector Burnett assures us that it was a stray bullet. A hunter…”
I eyed the metal skeptically. “With one dead woman already, another missing, and the inspector believes that while standing on a bridge in the middle of Manhurst grounds, we were caught by ahunter’sround.”
Andrew raised his brows in surprise. “What other woman do you mean?”
I shifted my weight on the mattress, the heat of Ruan’s fevered, damp body soaking through my nightgown. “I spoke with the youngest medium. Genevieve,” I began cautiously, watching for any sign of emotion to give away why he’d been following her around Manhurst. “She said there was another woman who was working with her and Lucy. That this third medium disappeared without a trace. Supposedly Lucy went all the way to Edinburgh trying to get help finding her and the authorities brushed her off…”
Deep ridges formed at the edges of his mouth. “Do you think that whatever happened to this missing medium has to do with Lucy’s death as well?”
I gave Andrew a curt nod, gnawing on the inside of my cheek. “But what I cannot fathom is why. People do not run about murdering mediums and shooting booksellers without a reason.”
“I agree, it does seem too much of a coincidence. I shall speakto the inspector about it this afternoon, but—Ruby—I don’t think he cares who shot you. I’ve met him several times and I don’t believe him a truly bad sort, but instead the lazy kind. One who wants the easiest and simplest explanation to speed him home in time for tea. The whole mysterious death of Lucy has him angry. Agitated in a way I’ve never seen.”
I trailed a finger over the back of Ruan’s hand. “He doesn’t like you, you know.”
“I don’t blame him for it. I don’t like myself very much either most of the time.” Andrew sighed, watching Ruan’s still form with a peculiar expression. “I was a foolish boy back then. At Oxford, I saw Kivell as a rival for my uncle’s affection. This darling boy he dragged up from the mines and elevated to polite society. I’d tried so bloody hard to be the perfect son, the perfect nephew. The perfecteverything. Always doing what I ought, never daring to place a single toe out of line and then Uncle appears one day and tells me I must look after this boy with his rough manners and his sullen disposition. I was to ease his way…” Andrew sighed, watching Ruan. “The man now regrets the boy then.”
My fingers curled into Ruan’s hair. “Do you know why Mr. Owen took such an interest in him?”
