The lost Heiress

The Road to Bath

They took the estate's fastest carriage before dawn, while the house still slept, Mr. Marsh clutching his satchel of documents and Wren wrapped in a borrowed cloak against the autumn chill. Thomas Whitfield insisted on driving them himself, refusing Mr. Marsh's protests with the quiet stubbornness of a man who had already decided the matter.

"You'll want someone who knows every turning of this road in the dark," Whitfield said, climbing up onto the driver's seat before either of them could argue further, "and someone who can swing a fist if it comes to that, which I rather suspect it might, given the company you're hoping to outrun."

The road to Bath ran along the river, mist rising off the water in the gray predawn light, and Wren sat pressed against the carriage window, watching the honey-colored stone of Ashcombe Hall recede behind them, and found herself thinking not of Julian's threat but of how strange it was to be fleeing toward safety rather than away from it — to have spent her whole life running from nothing in particular, and to find herself, at last, running toward something as plain and solid as a magistrate's signature on a warrant.

"You're quiet," Mr. Marsh observed, some miles on.

"I'm frightened," Wren admitted. "Not of Julian, particularly. Of how easily this might all have gone the other way. If Nell hadn't found the locket. If I'd drunk the wine. If Ruth Pryor had been a lesser woman than she was, seventeen years ago, and had simply looked away." She shook her head. "It seems a very great deal to owe to chance."

"Not chance," Mr. Marsh said. "Courage, Miss Calloway — yours, and Nell's, and a dead woman's whose name you now carry pressed against your skin. I have practiced law thirty years, and I have learned that the difference between the survivors and the lost is rarely luck. It is simply who was brave enough, at the deciding moment, to act."

Wren fell quiet again, watching the fields blur past in the strengthening light, and found her thoughts drifting, unbidden, to Thomas's steady hands on the reins above her, to the plain unhurried certainty with which he'd insisted on driving them himself when he might easily have sent a groom in his place. She had known him scarcely a fortnight, and yet she trusted him more readily than she trusted anyone in that great honey-colored house she was meant, by blood, to call her own — trusted him, she realized with something like surprise, in the same simple, uncomplicated way she had once trusted her own needle not to slip.

"He didn't have to come," she said aloud, before she'd quite decided to say it.

"No," Mr. Marsh agreed, following her gaze toward the driver's seat with the faint, knowing look of a man three times her age who had seen a great many things begin exactly this way. "He did not."

The carriage rattled on through villages just beginning to stir — a baker unshuttering his window, a boy driving geese across the road, an old woman sweeping her step with the unhurried rhythm of a life untouched by poison or inheritance or any of the dark business unfolding around her — and Wren found the ordinariness of it almost unbearably sweet, a reminder of exactly what she was fighting to protect: not a title, not a fortune, but simply the chance to go on living an ordinary life inside an extraordinary one.

They reached the magistrate's chambers by midmorning, and Mr. Marsh laid out the chemist's letter, Ruth Pryor's confession, and the household accounts documenting Julian's recent purchase from the Milsom Street apothecary with the same careful precision he brought to everything, while the magistrate — a heavyset, unhurried man named Coxwell who had known Lord Ashcombe thirty years — listened in grim silence and sent, before the hour was out, for the constables.

"We'll want to move quickly," Coxwell said, rising from his desk with a heaviness that suggested he had hoped, all these years, never to have cause to act on his old suspicions about Edmund Ashcombe's convenient death. "A man who has already killed once to secure an inheritance is not a man who waits patiently to be arrested. I'd suggest, Mr. Marsh, that we ride for Ashcombe Hall directly, before word of this morning's business finds its way home ahead of us."

Outside, Thomas was already turning the horses, as though he had known, without being told, exactly what the magistrate's answer would be, and exactly how little time remained before the quiet ordinary morning gave way to whatever waited for them back at Ashcombe Hall.