The Heiress - Lynsay Sands [65]
Fortunately, the tailor had been quick and efficient about his work, the task ending as successfully as the trip to the bank had gone. Noting the satisfaction on Richard’s face, Daniel smiled and added an optimistic, “Perhaps we shall be lucky and arrive back at the townhouse to find that everyone has had such a successful day and the identities of the blackmailer and poisoner have been discovered so that we need only round them up.”
“We should be so lucky,” Richard said wryly.
“Was it not you who said just as we entered the tailor’s that we were both lucky men?” Daniel reminded him with amusement. They had been discussing the women at the time.
Richard glanced around at his comment and opened his mouth as if to respond, but no words came out. He just stood there frozen for a heartbeat, and then in the next second grabbed Daniel by the arm and sent them both crashing to the side. It was so unexpected, Daniel didn’t even have a chance to try to break his fall; he was just suddenly slamming into the ground amid a cacophony of screams and shouts as the people around them scrambled to get out of the way.
It was only when he heard the loud thunder of horses’ hooves and the trundle of a carriage’s wheels as they raced past that Daniel understood that Richard had been trying to get them out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. A faint breeze as the carriage passed told him how close they had come to being trampled and Daniel lay still and closed his eyes as he waited for his heart to stop racing.
“Are you all right, my lord?” someone asked the Radnor driver, Daniel thought, but didn’t move until Richard said his name with concern. Releasing his breath on a groan then, Daniel pushed himself to a sitting position, muttering, “Yes. Thanks to you.”
“It was a yellow bounder, my lord,” the Radnor driver announced grimly and glared in the direction the post chaise had gone. “Probably rented. The postillion didn’t even try to steer clear of ye. In fact, it looked almost like he was aiming for the two of ye.”
Hearing Richard grunt a response, Daniel got to his feet and quickly brushed down his clothes even as Richard rose to do the same. Daniel finished and glanced to Richard as he straightened, frowning as he noted the line of blood trailing from the other man’s forehead.
“You’re bleeding,” Daniel said with concern. “You must have knocked your head as we fell.”
Richard raised a hand to his forehead, grimaced when he felt the scrape there, and then wiped the blood away with a sigh. When he then started toward the carriage, Daniel followed.
“Father has been punishing himself for what happened and my having to marry Dicky?”
Suzette blinked at Christiana’s question, a little confused as to where it had come from. They had spent the morning having quite useless and unhelpful interviews with the staff in the hopes of learning something that might help determine who the blackmailer was and who had poisoned George. The task had been a complete waste of time so far and after the last interview with one of the upstairs maids, Suzette and Christiana had come down to the office and somehow got on the topic of the men, and then Lisa and the books she read.
Christiana had been scandalized that Suzette had read the banned book about the prostitute, Fanny, but had been positively horrified at the news that the book was actually young Lisa’s and that she had read the book as well. Exasperated, Suzette had pointed out that Lisa was nearly twenty, no longer a child and should already have been settled with a husband and having children. Suzette really had no clue how that had led to Christiana’s question about their father punishing himself.
“Yes,” she said finally, her mouth tightening with anger at just the thought of the man whose gambling had both landed Christiana in her miserable marriage with Dicky and was now forcing Suzette to marry as well. That anger showed in her voice as she snapped, “And so he should. I was