He went outside and looked. Somehow Mary Ellison had managed to crank the car and back it out of the narrow space between houses.
“Where would she go?” he demanded, turning to Grace Letteridge.
“I don’t know.”
He remembered Mrs. Channing’s motorcar at The Oaks, and started out at a dead run.
The motorcar had been moved to the side of the inn, out of the way of custom stopping there. He cranked it, stepped inside, and gunned the engine. It roared in his ears.
Had she gone north—or south? As he sat there, looking out across the fields, he could see lanterns bobbing in a line, the search party returning empty-handed from Frith’s Wood.
She’d have avoided them, he thought, and turned south.
He followed suit, running fast, his headlamps piercing the darkness. It was some time before he caught up with his own motorcar.
He could see it in the distance, tail lamps small red dots just vanishing around a bend in the road.
If he could catch up with her here in these rolling, barren fields, it would be better than trying to stop her in a town, where she could lose him in a tangle of streets.
Where was she going? What earthly reason did she have for fleeing? She might have stayed and faced Keating down.
But then Keating had opened the cupboard in the cellar.
There would be no facing that down.
Hamish said into the wind, “She doesna’ want to die in Dudlington. Or on the hangman’s rope.”
Somewhere anonymous, where she wasn’t a Harkness, wasn’t guilty of murder. A nameless woman taken from a canal or a river, buried in a pauper’s grave. The vanished Mary Ellison would be whispered about, speculation would be rife, but after a few months her name would pass into obscurity, untarnished.
The certainty grew as he followed her. Mary Ellison was choosing her own end.
Her husband had failed her somehow; and then her daughter, running away in defiance, had failed to reach the heights of fame through her art. Instead she’d married a man who was to become a common felon. Rutledge didn’t know what Emma’s sin had been, but he thought perhaps the fact that she was so beautiful had something to do with it. Mary Ellison had watched men making fools of themselves over the girl, and in the end, she had blamed Emma. No Harkness would wish to be a public spectacle. It was somehow—unsuitable.
Then without warning, his motorcar’s headlamps swept the sky ahead of him, leaping upward and then dipping in a wild arc.
His first thought was that he hadn’t anticipated her decision to crash the motorcar. They weren’t seven miles from Dudlington, her body would still be taken back for burial—
And then the delayed echo of the shot reached him.
Rutledge pressed down on the accelerator, sending Mrs. Channing’s motorcar speeding around the bend, only his driving skill keeping the tires on the road.
It was nearly too late by the time he glimpsed the other car skewed across the roadway in front of him, directly in his path, seemingly unavoidable.
His hand went out for the brake, pulling hard on it, putting his vehicle into a gravel-spewing skid.
Hamish was shouting at him, and he was fighting the wheel, wondering if both of them were dead men.
When the motorcar rocked to a hard stop, he was no more than two feet from his own bonnet. And through the windscreen he could see the driver slumped over the wheel, her head cradled in her arms, as if she had decided to stop and rest.
He was out and running, without thinking. When he opened the driver’s door, Mary Ellison fell into his arms.
Catching her, he laid her gently on the grass at the verge, then went back to look for his rug to cover her.
In the dark there was no way of telling where she’d been hit. Blood seemed to be everywhere, and he wasn’t sure whether she had struck her head against the windscreen or if the wheel had caught her across the chest. He brushed back her hair and found the thin line of a cut there, blood welling out of it and into her face. It wasn’t deep enough, he thought, to account for a gunshot wound.
There was a long gash on her chin, half hidden by the collar of her nightdress, and it was bleeding freely as well.
Working frantically, he could see her staring at him, her eyes wide in her face. “I don’t want to lie in Dudlington.
There’s an unused grave in London,” she managed to say.
“Be still, don’t talk.”
She made an effort to bring her hand to her chest. “It hurts.”
And he realized that most of the blood came from there, not the cut on her forehead or the scrape on her chin. This time the shooter hadn’t missed. Rutledge tried to stuff his handkerchief into the wound, binding it tight with the belt from her nightdress, but he wasn’t a doctor, there was no way to save her.
“Not in Dudlington,” she repeated, trying to catch his hand and make him promise.
“What had your husband done?” he asked. “Why did you kill him?”
“He’d developed a taste for gambling. He was on the verge of losing all we had.”
“And Emma? What had she done, to deserve to die?”
“She found her mother, when she went looking for that cursed bow and quiver.” The face that had showed no emotion until now began to crumple. “I couldn’t let my granddaughter go back to London to live with a common criminal.
Even if he was her father. And after—after she’d found Beatrice, there was no turning back. It broke my heart.”
Her breathing changed, and he could feel her body struggling to draw in air, her lungs fighting the injury.
“If I tell you something, will you bury me in London?” she asked rapidly, trying to hold on to consciousness.
“I can’t promise—”
“Then I’ll take what I know with me.” Her eyelids flut-tered a little, and then, without warning, she was gone.
35
Rutledge laid her back on the grass, covering her with the rug from the car.
She had been, he thought, a woman of great pride, and with it a strong sense of what was due her name. She had been the last of the Harkness family, and she would kill rather than bring dishonor to it. A paradox...
There was no time to think about Mary Ellison. Not now.
Hamish was shouting in his ear, and Rutledge got slowly to his feet, turning to look at the hillside behind him.
He hadn’t expected to come face-to-face with this man.
Not tonight, possibly not ever, unless a shot was fired point-blank at him. And in his concern for Mary Ellison, he had left himself vulnerable.
“She took the bullet meant for you,” the man said. “I didn’t intend to kill an innocent woman.”
He looked haggard, as if he’d slept rough and only a stubborn determination had kept him going.
And the revolver was still in his hand.
Rutledge said nothing, standing there in full view, waiting. The wind whistled down the hill, blowing through his hair. He couldn’t remember what had become of his hat.
He thought it was probably still in the parlor on Hensley’s coat-tree. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t save his life. They’d learned that in the trenches, that helmets were necessary.
He wasn’t sure what had happened to his...
He fought to keep a grip on the present.
Hamish was there, in the forefront of his mind now.
“I’m no’ ready to die. And I willna’ let you die.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Rutledge said in response.
For this time had been bound to come since he’d stood on the steps outside Maryanne Browning’s house in London.
He had been lucky that it hadn’t come sooner. That he’d finished his work. He felt suddenly tired, unwilling to fight.