The Blood of a Baron - K.J. Jackson Page 0,13
the fates to deliver.
“Did you expect a line of servants waiting on the steps for you?” Wes asked dryly from his seat across the carriage from her. He’d ridden the last half of the day in the coach with her, foregoing a mount when they changed horses in Dunstable. All the better to glare directly at her, his form swallowing every speck of space in front of her.
She looked to him. “No, but I did expect at the very least a lit candle in a window. I did send a missive on ahead of us.”
“I imagine what little staff Morton had moved on. There was no reason to stay after he died. Who knows if they’d even been paid.”
The driver opened the door to the aging coach, its hinges squeaking and echoing along the quiet street. He pulled the steps and Wes made motion to get out.
“You don’t need to accompany me in,” Laney said.
His forehead tilted slightly down, his dark eyes cutting into her.
Without a word, telling her she was silly.
Laney sighed and motioned for him to move. He’d become quite impossible in the last seven years. There’d been a time when he would have listened to her. Or at least humored her.
He handed her down, then quickly talked to the driver before they moved into the townhouse.
Everything was off. She knew it the moment she stepped foot into the foyer and almost tripped over an umbrella stand lying on its side on the marble floor.
Wes caught her shoulder before she tumbled straight down onto her belly.
“What in blazes?” She shuffled forward in the dark, her toes low to the ground, nudging aside items strewn about as she blindly made her way into the lower drawing room.
The light of the street lamp flickering through the window of the room was enough to find the tinderbox and light a lantern that sat on the mantel.
The room was in shambles. The dim light made that painfully clear. A settee turned on its side, the fabric sliced and stuffing strewn all about the room. Side tables broken, shards of wood under her feet. Glass from broken lamps. Even her grandmother’s sewing table shredded—threads, bodkins, needles and buttons gutted from the box and strewn about the floor.
Her mouth dry, shivers ran along her spine and she looked to Wes. “What happened here?”
For how harsh his face had been every time he looked at her since delivering Morton’s body, Wes’s hard, square jawline had managed to grow even more severe. Barely bridled rage clearly pulsated with the throbbing of the vein along his temple. “I don’t know.”
She shook her head at his sudden burst of fury and moved past him, holding the lantern low in front of her so she didn’t trip over anything else.
She moved from room to room, Wes at her back. Everything in the house a reflection of the destructive mess in the drawing room. Furniture ruined beyond repair. Every book in the study torn from the shelves. The desk flipped over, half of the legs cracked off to the side.
The upper levels suffered no better. Beds torn apart, every tuft of stuffing drifting about the wooden floors. Holes in the walls, bits of plaster dust scattered about. Not a drawer still in place in the chests.
Even the servants’ quarters were not spared.
Everything destroyed.
Her stomach churning, she trudged down the stairs, stopping on the second floor just in front of the door to what had always been her chamber when she was in London.
Her right arm holding the lantern drifted downward, hanging limply by her side, her fingertips barely grasping onto the handle.
Wes had followed her every step about the house and she looked at him. “What…what…” She shook her head, unable to form words on her tongue. To form a thought as to how all of this had happened.
Her left hand moved out, shoving the door to her room open further. So much stuffing and bits of shredded dresses had gathered at the base of the door, that it fought against her pushing.
She scanned her room in the shadows—she’d looked at it quickly before, but now she truly studied the mess of it. Her bedstead had been fully ripped apart, the mattress removed and shredded, posts cracked off with only the bones of the frame still standing in place.
Maybe she could find a blanket or two and sleep on the floor. Just as long as she avoided the area with the glass from her cheval mirror that had been shattered.
She