Who Wants to Marry a Duke - Sabrina Jeffries Page 0,79
waited until you left.”
A chill swept through her. “You mean, all the while I was working, you were watching me? How dare you?” It was enough to make her want to lock herself in her home and never leave. She marched up to poke him in the chest. “You had no right, curse you!”
Frowning at her, he rubbed his chest where she’d poked him. “P’raps not, but that’s how I know you weren’t in no danger of being blowed up.”
With fire in his eyes, Thorn stalked over to put himself between Olivia and Elias. “You got lucky, that’s all,” he growled at the young man. “If that laboratory had been closer to other structures, we could still be pulling bodies from buildings.”
The words made Olivia shiver. Because if Elias had been heedless enough to try and destroy the laboratory here, too, he very well could have set the entirety of Rosethorn on fire.
“I could’ve put the lady in danger if I’d wanted,” Elias protested. “I was told to destroy the place whether or no she was there, but I’m no murderer, and I waited till she were gone.”
Her heart missed a beat. Whoever was behind Elias’s machinations hadn’t even cared if she were killed in the destruction? Dear Lord.
Thorn loomed over Elias, his face filling with the fury of an avenging angel. “So who hired you to destroy the place? Who is this mysterious devil?”
Elias visibly flinched. “Can’t say, mister.”
“It’s duke. I’m the Duke of Thornstock, and the lady chemist is my fiancée. So if you don’t tell me who paid you, I’ll become your worst nightmare up until the time you hang from the gallows!”
Major Wolfe looked momentarily startled by the news that Olivia was now Thorn’s fiancée. Olivia was merely surprised to hear Thorn use rank to intimidate someone, but if ever there was a situation that required it, it was now.
With an unrepentant expression, Elias stared up at Thorn. “What I did ain’t a hanging offense. It’s damage to property, it is, and the most they’ll give is transportation. More likely they’ll give me a few years in Newgate. I can serve that in my sleep, and that’d be better any day than me endin’ up with a slit throat. Or worse.”
“What’s worse than having your throat slit?” Major Wolfe asked.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Elias got a stubborn look on his face. “A long, slow death by poison, that’s what. And that’ll be what I’m gettin’ if I talk.”
“Poison?” Thorn murmured to Major Wolfe. “At least now we know we’re on the right track.”
At that moment, Gwyn entered the room. “I heard that Joshua—You!” When everyone turned to eye her in confusion, she said to her husband, “He’s the fellow who tried to cause Thorn’s carriage to have an accident in Cambridge a few months ago, when you and Thorn and Mama and I went to London for my debut.”
The alarm on Elias’s face instantly implied guilt.
“Are you sure?” her husband asked.
“Absolutely. How could you not remember him?”
“I didn’t get as good a look as you did.”
“Well, I never forget a face.” Gwyn glared at Elias. “And I certainly have never forgotten his. We could have been killed!”
“Weren’t trying to kill nobody,” Elias muttered. “I keep sayin’ that.”
Major Wolfe shook the young man until his teeth rattled. “Then what were you trying to do, you little bastard?”
“Stop you from goin’ to London is all. That’s what I was told—make it so the carriage ain’t able to run. Didn’t know why and didn’t care.”
“There had to be more to it than that,” Major Wolfe said. “If you were just supposed to disable the carriage, what was to stop us from hiring another? Or waiting an extra day at the inn so Thornstock could send for another of his own? It makes no sense.”
“Only know what I was told,” Elias said.
Major Wolfe shoved the lad into a chair, then motioned to the others to join him in the corner. “What are we to do with him? He has confessed to the destruction of the laboratory, but that carries a minor sentence at best.”
“Couldn’t they charge him with attempted murder?” Olivia asked.
“They could,” Major Wolfe said, “if they could prove he knew that the destruction of the laboratory might kill someone. But he didn’t know it could even blow up.”
“Yes,” Olivia said, “but since I’ve proved definitively that Grey’s father was poisoned—”