Page 52 of An Innocent Bride for the Duke

“Shooting at this hour?” queried Damien as he followed Benedict to the gunroom. “There’s only a couple of hours until dinner.”

“Evening is the best time to get rabbits,” Benedict said calmly, loading his gun. “This is also the best time to look around the orchard. If Ashbourne was there and left any clues, they could all be trampled away by gardeners and wheelbarrows in the morning. Ezra and Fanny are also each owed an apple.”

“You’ve told the gamekeepers that we’ll have the guns out, I take it? We don’t want them to come running, thinking there’s a plague of poachers on the estate.”

“Yes, Damien, I have taken care of that already. The ladies know too and will not be alarmed by our shots.”

Calm and methodical, Benedict did not pause in his preparations as he replied. Sufficiently assured, Damien collected a weapon from one of the wall cases and went through the same motions as his friend.

“I see where you’re going with this, Benedict, but can you be entirely sure it was Ashbourne?” the Duke of Wexford asked. “I’m not saying that Louisa imagined it, for she is not the nervous type, but what if it was only some local boy scrumping for apples? He might have been as scared of her as she was of him.”

“You didn’t see quite how frightened Louisa was, Damien. Dreamer or not, she’s no fool either. If it had been a local boy playing around, Louisa would have known it at once. She knows everyone in this district and they all love her… No, I can’t be sure it was Ashbourne, but he’s the best guess I have for what happened.”

Louisa had managed to compose herself by the time they got back to the house, although she had been dismayed to find she had forgotten the children’s apples. Talking of a stranger in the orchard who had given Louisa a fright, Benedict had explained the incident in as neutral terms as possible before the children while signaling to Lady Esher and Seraphine that there was more to the matter.

As the ladies took charge of Louisa and gave her tea, he had also promised Ezra and Fanny that he would personally fetch their apples in time for supper.

“Are you going to chase the stranger away, Uncle Benedict?” Fanny had asked him.

“Yes, that too,” Benedict had assured her. “Your father and I will see to it, and there is nothing for you to worry about.”

There would be nothing for the women and children of the house to worry about because Benedict intended to make sure of it. Now, in the gunroom, both men were ready for their second bout of impromptu rabbit shooting this week.

“Well then, let’s go to it while the light is still good,” said Damien with a grin. “Got your telescope too?”

Benedict produced it from his pocket, along with a large piece of thin, folded paper.

“Lady Esher gave me a map of all the paths on the estate too,” he told his friend. “Tonight, we only investigate the orchard, shoot a few rabbits and pick some apples. If Ashbourne is coming here regularly to stalk Louisa, however, I do intend to soon discover his route and confront him.”

The two men chatted companionably about Scotland as they strolled out of the house with their guns and took the path down to the orchards. Benedict kept his eyes peeled as he walked, doubting that Ashbourne would have taken any path so easily visible from the house, but not wanting to be lulled into a state of distraction.

“Louisa must have been about here when she first realized someone else was there,” observed Benedict, stopping and looking about with narrowed eyes. “This is the largest apple tree near the statue of Hercules, I believe.”

Damien walked around the statue of the mythical hero wrestling with a lion and nodded thoughtfully.

“This is where she saw him?”

“Only a flash of coat, but yes.”

“We won’t find any footprints, you know,” Damien warned, after his inspection yielded nothing. “The weather has been too fine and the ground is dry."

“Footprints are not the only clues,” stated Benedict, who had been circling the trunk of the rather sizable old apple tree and now hunkered down to examine a small pile of something at its base that might easily have been taken for some insect casts or animal droppings at first glance. “Come and look at this.”

Damien strolled over and crouched down beside his friend.

“What am I looking at?” he asked blankly. “I have little knowledge of the natural world, Benedict.”

“But you do have good knowledge of the smoking room at Brooks’s and other clubs, even though you are not a cigar connoisseur yourself,” Benedict told him, now dipping his fingers into the crumbly substance and raising it to his nostrils.

“Cigar ash?” asked Damien and Benedict nodded, before wiping his hand on the grass and standing.

“Yes, our intruder stood here for some time, smoking a leisurely cigar before Lady Louisa happened upon him,” Benedict thought aloud. “What do you think the chances are that Lord Ashbourne is an aficionado of the tobacco leaf?”

“Fairly high, I should say,” Damien answered grimly. “But how could he know she would come out today?”

“He didn’t,” replied Benedict, a bleaker and more detailed picture of Lord Ashbourne forming in his head at every moment. “He is deliberately lurking around Rosemere for his own peculiar pleasure, at God only knows what hours of the day or night. Louisa coming along when she did was only a bonus for him. I dare say his damned telescope provides him glimpses enough of her otherwise.”

As Benedict talked, he took the map that Lady Esher had provided from his pocket and found the spot where they were standing, before looking up again to take his bearings.