A Stranger's Secret by Laurie Alice Eakes

Author:Laurie Alice Eakes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2015-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

“No need.” Morwenna took the tray from the cook and rushed back to the drawing room. Grandmother was opening the doors to allow the chilly March wind into the room. “Cold air does wake a body.” Her smile was forced.

Grandfather stood before the dying fire, his arms folded across his chest. “How did this happen?”

“I don’t know.” Morwenna looked him in the eye. “We all drank the same tea and are all right.”

“Could he have put it in himself? Some men are addicted and take too much.”

“And where would he have gotten it? I keep asking myself that. He hasn’t been near any and didn’t have it with him.” Morwenna flicked a glance to David, where the footmen had set him in a chair and were trying to get coffee down his throat. They were surprisingly successful. “One of the servants or Jago or Tristan. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I just know—”

She broke off, her heart squeezing with fear of being blamed and something worse—the depth of her panic that he might not be all right.

“Perhaps we should take him outside.” Grandmother frowned at a trickle of coffee dribbling onto David’s chest. “He could be ill . . .”

“It’s too cold—” Morwenna’s protest died on her lips as the footmen lifted David once more and half carried, half dragged him onto the terrace.

The footmen would listen to Grandmother. It was her house. They had taken over David’s care. She stood helpless, useless in the middle of the parlor.

The doorbell rang. She spun, stopped herself in time from answering it. Servants did that here at Bastion Point. She was there to greet the apothecary and direct him out to the terrace. She followed in the event she could be useful. Unable to do anything, she leaned against the balustrade while medicines were poured down David’s throat, encouraging his body to reject the drug, the poison. He had been so healthy earlier, looking stronger when he came to the cliff path to see her.

He wanted to tell her something. Then the gentlemen arrived and David and she had no opportunity to talk.

The gentlemen. Talk. Drugs . . . It all whirled through Morwenna’s mind. Investors. Mines. Attack on riding officers.

Life at Bastion Point had never been smooth. Drake was forever getting into scrapes of one sort or another. Morwenna’s parents breezed in and out as though the house were an inn for overnight stays on their way to somewhere else. They brought her useless trinkets from around the world—a chunk of rock with leaf impressions, a hunk of quartz the size of her head, a nasty little doll she had tossed off the cliff at high tide. Then they vanished again and she sought for assurance elsewhere—a Carn, a Carter, a Polhenny. Because she was a Trelawny, people called her fast. The words would have been far less complimentary if she had been a village girl. She had done many things she regretted, but not once had she broken the law.

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