How to Woo a Reluctant Lady (37 page)

“More’s the pity,” Giles bit out.

“Now hold still and let me bind it before you lose any more blood, will you?” Minerva said.

“You can let him bleed to death for all I care,” Giles growled.

“He’s still my cousin,” she said. “And you don’t need a death on your hands. Especially when you’re about to become a K.C.”

“She’s right, Masters,” Desmond said, backing away from him. “There’s no reason to let any of this become public. You keep quiet about Ned’s bumbling, and I’ll keep quiet about your shooting him. We’ll even give you some of the treasure. How’s fifty percent, no, sixty percent of whatever gold we find?”

Now was his chance to figure out how this treasure hunt connected to the murders. Pretending to consider Desmond’s offer, Giles said, “How can you even be sure there’s any gold out here? Considering that you’ve been looking for it nearly twenty years—”

“No, I just started looking a few months ago. I mean, when Ned was seven and told me about finding some in the dirt, I did bring him out here to show me where, but he couldn’t remember where it was, save that it was by the pond.”

Giles’s eyes narrowed. “Ned actually found gold out here?” Since Ned was Gabe’s age, that would have been around the time of the murders.

“Yes!” Desmond cried. “It’s here, I tell you. I looked for it a bit myself back then, but I never found any more so I gave it up as pointless. Then after I saw that map in the museum a few months ago, I knew Ned must have stumbled across Mainwaring’s treasure.”

“That’s absurd,” Giles said. “For one thing, Mainwaring’s treasure was supposedly in jewels.”

“They’re wrong about that,” Desmond said. “Mainwaring was a buccaneer—they all took Spanish gold. And you must admit that the map looks like this estate.”

“It looks like a lot of estates.”

“It’s this one, damn it. I know it is!”

Suddenly they heard sounds of thrashing through the woods behind them. “What’s going on here?” Stoneville cried as he burst into the clearing.

“Damn it all to hell,” Desmond muttered, obviously realizing that his chance to keep the matter from being “public” had just gone up in smoke.

“Oliver!” Minerva cried. “I thought you were in town!”

Jarret rushed into the clearing, followed swiftly by Gabe. “The wives were tired, so we decided to come home. We were just heading up the drive when we heard a gunshot, and a few moments later two horses came bolting from this direction.” Jarret glanced around. “Who the devil shot Ned?”

“I did,” Giles answered. “He had a knife to Minerva’s throat.”

Stoneville lunged for the man, but Minerva held him off. “Leave him be. He’s wounded.”

“He’ll be dead by the time we get through with him,” Gabe put in.

“I wholeheartedly agree with
that
plan,” Giles snapped.

“None of you are going to kill him,” Minerva said. “He’s simply laboring under a gross misunderstanding.”

“What sort of misunderstanding?” Stoneville demanded.

Giles nodded at Desmond. “He and his father have some notion that there’s a fortune in Spanish gold buried hereabouts.”

As Stoneville groaned, Jarret said, “Oh, God, Ned. Tell me you’re not that stupid.”

“I saw the gold! Don’t lie and say I didn’t!” Ned cried as he struggled to a stand.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, you’re making it bleed more!” Minerva stood and leveled a hard glance on her brothers. “Could we continue this conversation elsewhere? Ned needs a doctor.”

“He needs more than that if he thinks there’s gold out here,” Jarret said.

Annoyed that his wife was looking after Ned as if he were some wounded puppy, Giles gestured to Desmond to follow them.

“What does he mean about your being stupid, Ned?” Desmond asked as they trooped back through the woods. “You said there was gold here. You gave me several pieces of it.”

“Then he
stole
pieces of it to give you,” Gabe snapped.

“You mean from the treasure buried here—”

“There’s no treasure buried here, Desmond,” Stoneville said with a sigh. “There never was. The Christmas before our parents died, Father gave each of us pieces of eight from some old Spanish gold he’d won in a card game.”

“I remember that!” Minerva said. “We all got ten pieces.”

“Then the Plumtrees came to visit,” Jarret said, taking up the tale, “and Ned was being such a brat to Celia that we . . . er . . . played a trick on him.”

“Good Lord,” Minerva said. “What did you three do?”

Giles had already begun figuring out what they’d done. He’d been part of too many such “tricks” that the Sharpe brothers played on their friends.

“A trick?” Ned said hoarsely. “No, I saw you get it from the ground. You said a pirate had buried the gold. I dug through
the dirt with you myself!”

“We put it there, you fool!” Gabe said. “When some of it went missing afterward, Oliver was furious. He thought Jarret and I had lost it in the dirt. But you took it, didn’t you?”

“It can’t be,” Desmond said, his face deathly pale. “It was old gold, centuries old.”

“Yes,” Stoneville said. “That’s what Father won. He was in one of his extravagant moods and gave some of it to us. We can show you ours, if you want.”

“I can’t believe it,” Desmond said. “All those hours digging . . . coming out here and looking and—”

“That’s what you were doing the day Minerva’s parents died, wasn’t it?” Giles prodded. “Digging for gold.”

Everyone fell quiet as the four men surrounded Desmond.

“What happened, Desmond?” Stoneville demanded. “Did they catch you digging for it? Were you afraid they’d take the gold from you, so you shot them?”

“No!” Desmond said, true shock spreading over his face. “I had nothing to do with killing them, for God’s sake! How can you even think it?”

“It’s a stone’s throw away,” Jarret pointed out, “and we both know you were here that day. I saw you in the woods.”

“And a groom at the Black Bull swore that he cleaned blood off your stirrup that very night,” Giles added.

Desmond paled. “Oh God oh God oh God . . .”

“What happened, Desmond?” Stoneville growled. “If we prosecute Ned, he’ll hang for stealing that much gold. Not to mention his attempt on Minerva’s life. So Ned is going to the gallows if you don’t tell us the truth now. How did the blood get on your stirrup?”

“I found them dead, all right?” Desmond cried. “I found Pru and Lewis after they were shot.”

“You found them,” Jarret repeated skeptically.

“I was out here looking for the gold when I heard the shots,” Desmond babbled. “I went running to see what had happened, and I noticed that the door to the hunting lodge was ajar. So I . . . went in and saw the blood and fled.”

“A likely tale,” Gabe snapped.

“If I’d shot them for catching me digging, don’t you think I would have shot them in the woods?” Desmond cried. “Why would I have done it over there in the hunting lodge?”

He had a point. And Giles had always thought it rather far-fetched that a milksop like Desmond would have committed cold-blooded murder.

“Besides,” Desmond went on, “at that point I wasn’t even sure there
was
any gold. All I had was my seven-year-old son’s tales of it, and no evidence beyond what he’d claimed to have found. I certainly wouldn’t have been mad enough to shoot someone over
that
.” He glanced around at his cousins’ murderous expressions, and cried, “I swear it! I had nothing to do with it!”

“Did you see who
did
shoot them?” Stoneville asked.

Desmond shook his head.

Giles brandished the gun at him. “You’re lying.” He’d spent too many years sifting lies from truth in people’s tales not to recognize a lie when he heard one. “Who did you see?”

Desmond’s gaze dropped to the pistol. “I swear, all I saw was someone on a horse.”

“Describe who you saw,” Giles prodded.

“I . . . I . . . can’t be sure . . . it was dusk . . .”

“If you want me to keep your son from hanging, Desmond . . .” Giles began.

“Whoever it was wore a cloak!” he said, his voice desperate. “I-I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.”

“Describe the cloak then,” Giles demanded.

“I-it was black and had a hood. Or perhaps dark blue. I’m not sure. It was getting too dark to see by that time.”

“And the horse?” Giles asked.

Desmond glanced around at the four men. “A black Arabian with a blaze face. And one white stocking on the left hind leg.”

Stoneville glared at him. “All these years, and you never told anyone about this. We could have been looking for their murderer, for God’s sake!”

“No!” Desmond protested. “You don’t understand. The one I saw on the horse was riding
toward
the lodge.”

That stymied them all. “Toward?” Giles asked.

“Yes. I was in the drawing room when I heard a horse approaching. I looked out the window and saw the rider heading toward the lodge. So I went out the back and got right out of there. Didn’t want whoever was coming to think I’d killed them, you see.”

“Could it have been you, Oliver?” Jarret asked. “You were the one to find them.”

“No, I was with Gran,” Oliver reminded him. “And we came at night. Desmond just said he heard the shots right before dusk.”

“All I know is that the horse was from
your
stables,” Desmond said. “That much I remember.”

“He’s right,” Gabe said grimly. “We had a horse just like that.”

“If someone came upon them right after they died, why didn’t the person say anything?” Stoneville said.

“For the same reason as Desmond, probably,” Minerva said. She stood outside the circle, still supporting Ned, who was looking decidedly peaked. “For fear they might be accused of their deaths.”

“Whoever it was must have been going there for a reason, though,” Jarret pointed out. “He might have known why Mother and Father were there—might even have been going to join them. We should find out who it was.”

“That won’t be easy,” Giles said. “Any of the guests at the house party could have taken that horse out of the stables.”

“Not just guests,” Minerva pointed out. “With so many people on the estate, a complete stranger could probably have taken a horse, and the grooms might not have realized he wasn’t with the guests.”

“Or she,” Jarret said. “Let’s not rule out a woman. So now we’re back to needing to question the grooms. Assuming Pinter can track them all down.”

Ned moaned, and Minerva said, “We can talk about this more later. We’ve got to get Ned back to the house and fetch a doctor. I don’t want my husband having to endure a trial for murder, even if he
was
defending me.”

That galvanized her brothers into action. They hoisted Ned onto Desmond’s horse, and Stoneville led it toward the mansion. Giles kept his pistol trained on Desmond as the brothers continued to pepper him with questions about what he’d seen in the hunting lodge.

Regrettably, he hadn’t seen enough to be useful. So Minerva mentioned Giles’s visit there, and despite the grumbling from Stoneville about her meddling, Giles laid out everything he’d noticed. That sparked more discussion about their parents’ deaths.

Stoneville promised to have Pinter out to Halstead Hall first thing the next morning so they could give the runner the new information and see what more he could learn.

They’d finally reached the house, where two very anxious wives and Minerva’s grandmother came running out to learn
what had happened.

While Minerva sent a servant off to fetch a doctor for Ned, Hetty Plumtree demanded to hear the whole story. Once they were done telling her everything, she rounded on Desmond with the fury of a lioness protecting her cubs. “How dare you come onto my grandson’s property and try to steal what wasn’t yours!”

“There wasn’t anything to steal!” Desmond cried. “They told you—it was a misunderstanding.”

“The only misunderstanding was in their not coming to me first, to let me know what they suspected of you. If I’d heard any of this, I would have demanded answers of you. Hell, I would have had your head!”

“You were ill, Mrs. Plumtree,” Giles put in. “Your grandsons didn’t want to worry you.”

She shot him a dark glance. “And
you
, young man, helping them keep all this from me! I thought you were on my side!”

“I am,” Giles said. When Minerva raised an eyebrow at him, he added, “Sort of.”

“Then call me Gran like the rest of them,” she said with a sniff. “You’re part of the family now.” Then she marched over to where Ned had been laid on a settee to await the doctor. “But
you
, my own great-nephew. How dare you pull a knife on your own cousin!”

“I had to!” he protested. “She was going to ruin everything, she and that damned husband of hers.”

“Stop cursing! And stop your whining, too. I have done everything I could to help your father, and he repays me by filling your ears with poison and teaching you to hate your cousins. He started out in this world with plenty of advantages: my brother left him a perfectly good cotton mill. It is not anyone else’s fault that Desmond has frittered it all away with
bad management. For God’s sake, he even hires children to run his mills!”

“It’s the only way I can make it pay,” Desmond complained.

“Nonsense. I make the brewery pay, and there are no children working there,” she snapped. She leveled a hard glance at both of the Plumtrees. “So what am I to do with you two? I cannot have you continuing this sort of nonsense simply because you resent your cousins.”

“You could hand them over to the authorities,” Oliver drawled. “I’d be all for that.”

“So would I,” Giles added.

She shot them a quelling glance. “And have everyone talking about us in the papers again? Not on your life. I am finally getting your names out of the gossip rags, and I mean to keep them out.”

“Besides, prosecuting them would make Cousin Bertha and the other children suffer, too,” Minerva pointed out, “which hardly seems fair, since they didn’t do anything. If you ask me, you should let Ned and Desmond both go home.”

At the storm of protest that rose around her, she cried, “Let me finish! What if we agree not to prosecute them in exchange for Desmond agreeing to stop using children to run his mill?”