Mistress of Sins (Dredthorne Hall #3) - Hazel Hunter Page 0,49

distress her mother by spending the night away from Reed Park seemed completely out of character.

She is here, and in some trouble. I know it. I can feel it.

The sound of horse hooves drew Jeffrey’s gaze to the side of the house, where three men leading horses appeared. The trio came to tether their mounts near the front entry, which made no sense to him. No gentleman rode at night, even with a full moon overhead. One of the men stepped back and staggered as if he had tripped over a stone, and the other two snickered at him.

“Br?le en l’enfer, salauds,” the one who had tripped shouted at them.

As a student at theological college Jeffrey had been required to study French. While he had never learned to speak the language with anything more than mediocre fluency, he understood enough to translate the curse.

Burn in hell, you bastards.

Being the vicar of Renwick for nearly twenty years gave him an intimate knowledge of his parish as well. None of the families or their servants spoke French as this man had. The few travelers who came through the area did speak to each other in their own language mixed with some Welsh, but it bore no resemblance to French.

These men did not belong here, not while England engaged in a war with France.

Climbing down from the driver’s perch, Jeffrey released the skidpan to keep the horses from wandering off with the carriage. He then watched from the gate as the three men entered the house. They swaggered, as if confident, and servants never came into a great house through the front entry.

Something was indeed very wrong here, and Jennet must have gotten caught up in it.

Jeffrey would never admit it to his wife, but he secretly disliked Dredthorne Hall as much as she did. A madman had shot his sister and her future husband in the front hall, leaving them to bleed to death. Some days later Jeffrey had been obliged to leave Lucetta in Deidre’s care to hold the funeral services for the assailant and his accomplices. The house had killed them, his wife had once claimed, because it could not have his sister and her beloved. Although as a vicar he could not hold with such superstition, a part of him knew Deidre was right.

Now the French had invaded Dredthorne, it seemed. But what would they want with Arthur Pickering and Jennet Reed?

Jeffrey began walking up the drive, and his dread seemed to swell with every step he took. He was a man of God, not the law. Dealing with the enemy would be better managed by soldiers. Renwick had a magistrate, but his estate bordered the river, and he would likely have retired by this hour. The nearest regiment had been recently moved to Brighton to prepare for their voyage to Spain, to relieve the exhausted English troops there fighting in the Peninsular War.

A passage from Joshua came to him, one he had often paraphrased for his parishioners during their worst moments: Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for He is with you wherever you go.

Jeffrey stopped short of the steps at the front of the house and regarded the horses the men had left there. None of them had come from the livery stable in the village; he had often visited the stable master and knew every horse available for hire there. These animals looked as if they hadn’t been groomed or properly looked after for some time.

The brightness of the moonlight allowed him to follow their tracks from the house to the staircase tower. There, where he expected to see them disappear into the stables, they instead led into the trees, as if the men had kept them in the woods behind the hall. If the three men were agents who had come to England for nefarious purposes, the forest would have provided them with concealment for as long as they needed it.

Arthur Pickering did not come to Renwick to hold a masquerade.

Jeffrey took a step toward the staircase tower, and then nearly slipped and fell. He righted himself, and saw something wet on the ground. It had run from the woodpile bin to collect in a small puddle. Too dark and thick to be water, he bent down and smelled a coppery odor coming from it.

Blood.

“Sovereign God, abide with me now.” Murmuring that entreaty gave Jeffrey renewed strength, and he approached the bin. Blood stained the ground before disappearing under it, and when