I gestured to Julia to accompany me to the window. She followed with alacrity and we both looked out at the square. In a clatter of quick hooves, Duffy’s coach pulled up at our doorstep, his footman springing down from his rear seat to open the door. Our brother stalked down our front steps and into his equipage. Behind him, another man exited our door and descended our steps: tall, dark-haired, smartly dressed, leaning slightly more than usual upon a silver-tipped cane. He glanced up at our window as he crossed to our next-door neighbor’s house—a quick roguish smile directed at my sister—then quickly ascended the steps to their doorway, behind the cover of the coach.

“You persuaded him to do this for Lord Evan?” Julia asked.

“He did not do it for Lord Evan, my dear.”

As our brother’s carriage set off in a clatter of hooves, Mr. Kent descended our neighbors’ steps as if newly emerged from their front door. He turned in the opposite direction of the slouching, uninterested Pritchard and strolled across the square, a brief, jaunty lift of his cane bringing a radiant smile to Julia’s face.

For better or worse, my sister had found her heart too.

We watched Mr. Kent disappear around the corner to safety. When Mulholland worked out what had happened, he would take such a humiliating defeat personally. Evan was in more danger than ever, as was Mr Kent, and we could not hide Hester forever.

Mr. Kent had demanded evidence that proved Evan had not murdered Sanderson, and so would the courts. We had one possible pathway to that evidence—Dr. Lawrence—and Evan was now set upon finding him. I hoped the search took my love far from London, for it was not safe for him, or indeed Hester, to stay in the city.

As the Bible says, there is no rest for the wicked. I opened the dining room door and found my butler and footman in the hallway watching the escape unfold through the sliver of window at the side of the closed front door.

“Weatherly,” I called.

He turned, ready as ever. “Yes, my lady.”

“Prepare the household. We are traveling tomorrow.”

Bad Medicine

23

About ten miles from the Davenport estate, our carriage slowed and Miss Grant turned in her seat beside me to peer out the rain-spattered window.

“Soldiers,” she said.

Her surprised voice seemed unnaturally loud in the cabin. Lady Hester and Julia had fallen asleep somewhere outside Manchester, and Miss Grant and I had not spoken since then in case we woke our exhausted companions.

We both looked across at them, propped in their respective corners among cushions and rugs, but they still slumbered.

I leaned over to look out of Miss Grant’s window. No wonder she had felt the need to comment. At least forty red-coated soldiers carrying bayonets had moved to the side of the road to make way for our carriage.