He stepped so close that his feet touched my feet, and my instinct was to hiss at him, like a cat, but I resisted. Instead I looked up at him. “This isn’t necessary, Gareth,” I said. “Please. I’m sure if you just explain it to Mr. Markham—”
“Explain what? That he deserves to suffer for what he’s done to me? And what do you think he’ll say in response? ‘Yes, you’re right, please take my fiancée?’”
That had not been what I had meant, but I didn’t know exactly what I had meant, only that I was trying to appeal to whatever sense of sanity still lived in this man. This man who had seemed so steady, so damn sunny and friendly before. “There’s got to be a way around this,” I said. “What will killing me solve?”
Gareth shook his head. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He went over to the fireplace and started building a fire. “There’s nothing that can fix what’s happened to me. It’s too late for that. But I can make sure that Julian Markham suffers like I suffered. And that will be a small comfort in itself, I think. All I really want is one glimpse of his face when he learns the truth. When he knows that you’re dead.”
“He’ll kill you.”
Gareth shrugged, still attending to his work. “He can try. I’m very good at hiding, Miss Leavold. I hid in plain sight for three years.”
Whatever he was planning with this fire, I didn’t like it. I tried to move the chair, gratified when I found I could force it across the low carpet with a minimum of noise. If I could make it to the door…
What then I didn’t know. But damned if I’d sit here waiting to find out what happened if I didn’t.
“I tried to save you, remember, the night he took you for his own? I tried to save you from being loved by him. I didn’t want to hurt you. I like you. But I have no choice. You are the sacrifice with the most value. I delayed as long as I could, but then I realized that someone else in the house knew. I didn’t have long before Julian learned who and what I was…”
The fire was catching now, licking at the sticks and logs in the fireplace, dangerously close to the pile of wood halfway in the fireplace and halfway on the hearth. I kept trying to move the chair as quietly as I could, having made it almost three feet since he’d turned away.
Three things happened at once then. The first was that Gareth stood up and turned around. The second was that I decided to run for it, no matter how hopeless it was. I stood in the chair and tried to run for the door as he chased me.
The third thing was that Mrs. Brightmore appeared in the doorway.
I blinked at her a minute, as I’m sure Gareth did too, her presence so incredibly incongruous with the setting and the circumstances that it was almost impossible to reconcile the two.
Oh, and she was holding a gun. A shot cracked through the air and plaster rained down, showering the room in granules of white dust.
Gareth froze behind me.
“Brightmore,” he said, his breathing labored from his sprint across the room.
She walked farther into the room. “Sit down,” she told me. I reluctantly obeyed. I wanted to keep running, I wanted to beg for help. I wanted to take her gun and shoot Gareth, but I sensed the wisest course was to make myself as quiet and as easy to forget as possible, so I sat, keeping my feet firmly on the floor as I did in case I got a chance to run again.
“Don’t you want to know how I found out?” she asked Gareth. “That it was you?”
“I don’t care,” he said honestly. “It makes no difference now.”
“I always recognized you,” she said, continuing on anyway. “I knew you the moment you came to work at Markham Hall. But I didn’t say anything. If you didn’t want the master to know that you were Josiah Whitefield’s bastard, that was nothing to do with me. But still—I watched you. You were a sneaky thing as a child, all dimples and bows for the lords and ladies, but devilish and cruel when they were out of sight. I knew what happened to those cats that ended up drowned. To those outbuildings that mysteriously caught fire.”
Gareth sounded impatient again. “I. Don’t. Care. What. You. Know.”
Brightmore didn’t stop. “See, I thought the mistress was unhappy simply because of her marriage to Mr. Markham. But then I realized it was you. You were the one who made her unhappy. Who made her desperate for help.”
Gareth shook his head. “She didn’t give me a choice, Brightmore.”
“She wanted to stop interacting with you. Wisely. But of course, you wouldn’t let her stop, would you?”
“What did you do?” I asked, unable to help myself.
He looked down at me. “I did what I had to.”
“He threatened to kill her. And the rest of her family—which is you,” she pointed out looking at me, “and she cared enough about you, for whatever reason, to comply.”
Gareth took a step toward her. “How did you know that?”
“The same way I finally figured out that it was you who tampered with the saddle. Who’s always awake in the middle of the night? Who is running inside and outside, up and down stairs, from three in the morning until nine at night?”
And then Gareth visibly paled.
