A duke found his bride-to-be’s servant bound to a chair in a cottage with a theft charge. But the girl slipped a folded note into his pocket — and it named the poison meant to be poured into his wedding goblet, purchased through the very household he was about to marry into.

 PART 8

They rode back to the estate before first light, the carriage wheel bound with rope and green branches — enough to limp the final miles at a careful pace, the driver guiding the horses along quieter lanes that skirted the main road entirely.

By the time the estate’s chimneys came into view against the gray morning sky, the household had only just begun to stir, kitchen fires being lit, none of them sparing more than a passing glance for a battered carriage returning from an errand no one had thought to question in the first place.

Norah slipped away before the carriage reached the main courtyard, disappearing toward the servants’ entrance, where the hidden passage behind the tapestry waited to carry her back up to the tower unseen. Ambrose was already waiting at the base of the stairs, and said nothing beyond a short nod as she passed, resetting the ankle chain loosely around her own leg before he withdrew.

She had barely settled onto the cot when footsteps sounded on the stairs below. A young maid entered carrying a tray of bread and weak tea.

“Her ladyship says you’re to eat,” the maid said quietly, setting the tray down. “Wedding rehearsals this afternoon. Whole house is in an uproar over it.”

Norah thanked her softly, and the maid left as quickly as she had come.

Below in the estate’s grand hall, Sebastian had already changed into attire suited to a duke overseeing the final preparations for his own wedding, and found Vivien waiting near the long dining table, directing servants in the placement of silver and linen with the brisk efficiency of a woman who left nothing to chance.

“You look tired,” Vivien observed as he approached, studying his face with an attentiveness that felt, to Sebastian’s newly wary eyes, less like affection and more like assessment. “Did your business on the coast prove troublesome?”

“Only the usual complaints from tenant farmers about drainage and boundary fences,” Sebastian said smoothly, the lie coming easier than he expected. Something in his chest tightened at how naturally it left him now, after so many years of honest dealing with the people around him. “Nothing worth troubling you with — especially not today.”

Vivien smiled, apparently satisfied, and returned her attention to the table settings. Though Sebastian noticed her steward — a thin, sharp-featured man named Halloway, who had served her family for years — watching him a moment longer than courtesy required before turning back to his own tasks.

It was Halloway, Sebastian suspected, who had likely arranged the ambush on the coastal road, or at least carried word of their journey to whoever had sent the riders.

The opportunity came during a lull in the rehearsal, when Vivien stepped aside to consult with the cook over the wedding breakfast’s final menu, leaving Sebastian a rare moment unobserved.

He found Halloway near the wine cellar, overseeing the delivery of several casks meant for the celebration.

“Halloway. I trust everything proceeds smoothly for tomorrow.”

“As smoothly as such occasions ever do, my lord,” Halloway replied, his tone carefully neutral — though Sebastian caught the faint tightening around his eyes.

“I confess I grow anxious,” Sebastian said, allowing a note of genuine-sounding worry into his voice. “There is a matter I wished settled before the ceremony, concerning arrangements her ladyship’s father requested. I would send word myself — but I understand you have better means of reaching him quickly than the household’s usual courier.”

It was a calculated risk, a suggestion vague enough to seem innocent, yet pointed enough, Sebastian hoped, to press on whatever urgency already sat beneath Halloway’s careful composure.

The steward’s expression flickered — something close to alarm passing quickly behind his eyes before he mastered it.

“I had, in fact, already planned a visit to the courier post this evening, my lord, on a separate matter entirely. I can certainly carry any message you wish added.”

“No need to trouble yourself with mine,” Sebastian said, waving a hand as though the matter had already lost its urgency. “I only wish to know the post remained reliable. Attend to your own business first.”

Halloway inclined his head and returned to overseeing the wine delivery. But Sebastian noted, with a satisfaction he kept carefully hidden, how the man excused himself from the rehearsal not twenty minutes later, slipping away toward the stables with the particular haste of someone whose careful plans had just been disturbed by an offhand remark he could not quite dismiss as harmless.

Whatever Sebastian’s coastal errand had stirred in Vivien’s father’s household, it had not changed the plan — only frightened them into finally naming, in writing, the one detail they had left unspoken until now.

That evening, just after the supper bell, Norah sat listening to the muffled sounds below, waiting for the signal she had arranged with Sebastian before their return that morning — three soft taps against the tower’s outer wall, a code borrowed from the household’s old cipher games.

The taps came, and Norah crossed to the window to find not Sebastian, as she expected, but Ambrose standing below in the fading light, a coil of rope looped over one shoulder.

“His lordship sent me,” Ambrose said quietly. “Halloway rides for the courier post within the hour. His lordship believes the letter he carries finally names the hand meant to carry out tomorrow’s plan, and asks that you intercept it, if you’re able, before it reaches wherever it’s bound.”

The chain and the door, Norah realized, would need her own hand this time — Ambrose could not linger without drawing notice twice in one day. It took only minutes to work the chain free with her hairpin. Norah secured the rope Ambrose had left beneath the window to the old iron bracket, testing its hold twice before trusting her weight to it.

The climb down proved harder than the passage through the servants’ corridor had been — but no alarm was raised, and she reached the boundary road near the estate’s eastern edge, where a narrow iron gate marked the division between Sebastian’s land and the public lane beyond.

She did not wait long. Dusk had nearly given way to full dark when the sound of hooves reached her — a single rider moving at a determined, anxious pace. Halloway’s thin, upright posture was unmistakable even in the failing light, a leather satchel slung across his shoulder in a manner that suggested he guarded its contents carefully.

Norah stepped out just enough to fling a length of loose rope across the gate’s lower bars, catching the horse’s foreleg at precisely the moment it attempted to pass through. The animal reared hard, nearly throwing Halloway from the saddle, and for a long, panicked moment he was entirely occupied with hauling the frightened horse back under control — too busy fighting the reins in the near-dark to notice the satchel slip from his shoulder and land in the long grass at the gate’s edge.

Norah snatched it and slipped back into the shadow of the hawthorn bush before he had the animal settled. Halloway searched the ground near the gate for a moment in growing alarm — before apparently deciding, in the poor light, that the bag had simply worked loose somewhere further back along the lane, and rode on at a slower, wearier pace, casting anxious glances behind him.

Inside the satchel, beneath a few unremarkable household receipts meant to disguise its true purpose, she found a single sealed letter, the wax pressed with a signet she felt certain belonged to Vivien’s own hand.

The instruction was plain, precise, stripped of any softening language. Naming the wedding toast goblet directly. The exact moment the sacramental wine would be prepared for the morning’s blessing, when the household’s own cellar-servant — bribed weeks before, and named plainly in the letter — would measure the drops in. And a final line, added almost as an afterthought, instructing that the girl in the tower be dealt with quietly before the week’s end, whatever the outcome of the wedding.

Norah refolded the letter with hands that had gone suddenly cold despite the mild evening air, understanding now, with a clarity that settled deep and heavy in her chest, precisely how little time remained — and precisely how much depended on reaching Sebastian with this final proof before the sun rose again over the estate.