Black Knight by Elizabeth Johns

Author:Elizabeth Johns
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2020-06-10T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

HEATH HAD FINALLY gone back to the fields and worked himself into exhaustion. It was the only way to curb his growing frustration with his situation. Having sensed the impending storm, he and the men had all stayed out late to finish the oat fields before it hit. It was now dark, his clothes were clinging like a second skin, and he needed a meal and his bed.

“My lord?” Dougherty asked as Heath walked in through the front door, dripping wet. He handed the butler his hat and began to pull off his ruined boots.

“Is her ladyship not with you?”

“What do you mean? I have not seen her ladyship since this afternoon,” Heath answered in mild confusion.

“Expecting to be called for, her maid went to discover if anything were amiss and Lady Heath was not there. She is not in the house.” Dougherty sounded concerned.

Heath cursed. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“She sat at the dinner table until almost ten, my lord. She asked Thomas to save you some food and that was the last any of us saw of her.” Dinner was normally on the table at seven. She had waited for three hours?

“So no one has any idea where she went?”

“No, my lord. We were hoping she had gone to find you.”

Heath cursed again. “She is out in the storm. We must hope she has found some shelter in which to wait it out. I am not sufficiently familiar with the land to know where she might have gone.”

“Squire Jeffries has a small pack of hounds. Perhaps he would be willing to help?” Dougherty suggested.

“Yes, please send a note to him. I shall start looking now. Perhaps she has gone into the woods and become lost.”

“That is not somewhere I would want to be after dark,” the butler said unhelpfully.

Heath bit back a caustic reply. He was exhausted beyond reason, and now his wife was missing in a dark, unknown forest. Placing his sodden, muddy boots back on, putting his soaking hat on his head and accepting his greatcoat from the butler and a cape for his wife, he went out to the stables to find a lantern. Then he set off towards the woods, lifting the light all around him as he went. He went in the opposite direction from the house and the Romani camp, feeling that she would have found her way if she was close to them.

As a child, he and his brothers had played in these woods, which had been overgrown and vast even then. Passing through the hop fields, where he had walked with her earlier, he continued on into the forest. Unless the hounds could catch her scent, he knew it would be nigh on impossible to find her that night without a great deal of luck.

It was tedious looking through every copse and around every large tree trunk. There was little place for adequate shelter. It was an hour before he heard the hounds, but it was a very welcome noise.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.