Free The Devious Duchess by Joan Smith Page B

miss. He had an easy passing. Had a grand last supper and all, though he didn’t eat much of it. I gave him a proper burial, miss,” Evans told her in a kindly way.
    “Where? I’d like to see the grave.”
    "Come out in the morning and I’ll show you. You wouldn’t see a thing in the dark. It’s behind the barn.”
    "I'd like to see it now,” she said, and went out by herself. Evans was mending a harness, and she didn’t ask him to accompany her. She wanted to be alone with her unhappy, uneasy thoughts.
    The grave was easily found. It formed a black hump in the earth. Sad to think of poor Shep, buried in that frozen ground. The soil was so hard it sat in sharp-edged lumps. Evans must have had to use an axe to start the hole, to get below the frost line. They probably wouldn’t bury Dudley till spring. There was an old mausoleum in the graveyard where winter corpses were stored. But Shep would remain here, where he had been placed, and she’d erect some small sort of memorial stone—just a simple slab laid flat on the earth.
    Her step was slow as she walked back to the house. As dismal as her visit had been, she wasn’t at all eager to be home. There was nowhere she wanted to be. She hardly wanted to exist at all, unless she could turn the clock back and live in the past. The future held nothing but fear and sorrow. She could almost envy Polly Shard. Her greatest fear was of a ghost.
    It was after six, and her aunt was resting. The cook offered Deirdre some soup or a sandwich, but she didn’t feel that she could swallow anything, for the lump in her throat. She went up to the saloon and sat all alone, with only one lamp burning. No tears sprang to her eyes. She was gone far beyond tears. Uncle Dudley was dead. Her aunt’s very life was in danger, and she had turned Dick off. There would be no wonderful wedding, no honeymoon in Italy. The exciting life she had anticipated as Lady Belami was only an illusion. She had half known it would never really come to pass.
    She hardened her heart against all these miseries and told herself that she wouldn’t marry Dick if he came begging. He had been insufferably rude to Auntie, and poor Auntie needed her now. All her life, she had been taking things from the duchess, and now it was her moment to repay. It would be unforgivably selfish to turn away. But why had Dick sent that sample off to be analyzed? What demon possessed him to go making new trouble when there was already such a surfeit of it?
    She poured a glass of sherry and continued her thinking. It was impossible to avoid the most overwhelming question of all. Had the duchess poisoned Dudley? She denied it, and Deirdre tried to maintain her conviction that she was telling the truth, but it was difficult with so many contradictions staring her in the face. Especially the fear that gleamed in her aunt’s tired, old eyes and that had turned her, in the space of an afternoon, from an autocrat into a human being. And it was money at the root of it all. If Dudley had meant to change his will in Nevil’s favor, would Auntie . . . No, she wouldn’t let herself even think such a thought.
    Whatever had happened, she would do everything in her power to protect her aunt. Deirdre had become the stronger force now at Fernvale. It was for her to make decisions, to do what had to be done to save the situation. She would discover from Nevil and Straus and the servants what Belami was up to, what tack the investigation was taking, and she would do everything in her power to protect her aunt. Because even if some wretched mishap had occurred, she knew in her heart that the duchess hadn’t willfully stirred arsenic into the stew and handed it over to kill Dudley. She wasn’t that black-hearted, no matter what they all thought.
    That was one concrete thing she could do! She could ask the servants about the envelope of arsenic. She set down her glass and fled to the kitchen, where the girls were washing their own dinner dishes and