“Go and get help from the hall,” I shouted amid the chaos. I dropped to my knees beside Lady Hawse-Gorzley. “And summon a doctor.”

Darcy took off back to the hall.

Lady Hawse-Gorzley grabbed my hand. “I’m all right. Help me up.” She attempted to stand but couldn’t quite manage it. “The impudence. Thank God I’m wearing my old sheepskin coat. The hide’s thick enough to stop any bullet.”

I opened the top buttons on the coat and saw that the white fleece around the shoulder was black with blood. “You’re bleeding badly. Just lie still until help comes from the hall.”

“Funny,” she said, “I don’t feel a thing.” And then she fainted.

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

AROUND LOVEY TOR

NEW YEAR’S EVE

I looked up nervously as feet ran across the gravel toward us. But they had come to help Lady Hawse-Gorzley. Then she was being picked up and carried back up the drive. I followed behind, feeling sick and scared. In spite of everything, we hadn’t managed to protect her. Surely she wasn’t going to die, was she? I’d grown rather fond of her during these twelve days at her house. I just hoped they’d caught Robbins by now and that he would hang.

Suddenly I felt alone and exposed in the darkness and quickened my pace to catch up. I gasped and spun around as someone grabbed my arm. Wild Sal was standing beside me. “Come on, miss, quick,” she said. “That woman—the bad one. She’s getting away. She’s heading for the moor.”

She took my sleeve and started to lead me across the lawn and through the trees. I looked around for Darcy or someone else I recognized. “Tell them that the Prendergast woman is heading for the moor,” I shouted to the last stragglers who were milling around on the driveway. “Find Inspector Newcombe.”

“Come on. We’ll lose her,” Sal hissed impatiently, staring ahead as if she could see somebody I couldn’t in the darkness. She grabbed my arm. Our footsteps crunched through frosty dry bracken as we came out onto the wild upland. What a lot of noise we make, I thought and instinctively glanced down at our feet.

“You’re wearing shoes,” I said. And even as I said the words out loud I realized the truth. She wasn’t Sal at all. She was dressed in flowing robes like Sal. Her hair hung around her face and over her shoulders like Sal. But the face beneath was quite different. Before I could say anything I felt something hard shoved into my side.

“You have to stop being so trusting,” the woman said in her own voice, far coarser and more common than Wild Sal’s. “You’re all so bloody stupid around here. Now get moving.”

The thing in my side didn’t feel sharp. Not a knife, then. A gun.