desperate groping of his thigh by cupping my face in his hands. “Truly, Lora. It’s fine. My fault. I should have spoken to him through the door before opening it.”
“I don’t understand.” I clutched his shirt to my chest, dazed. “What happened to him? Why was he shooting at us at all?” I noticed then that many of the crates were opened, shredded paper frothing over the edges of the wood, tumbling about. “What is all this?”
“The Vickers,” said Armand. He lifted his hand and pointed at a pair of large, evil-looking guns set out past the crates. They’d been attached to legs of some sort, narrow muzzles, round drums, lots and lots of bullets. Just like he’d described before. “If he’d aimed those at us, we wouldn’t be around to chat about it now.”
“But why?”
His voice began to climb. “Oh, well, it turns out he’s to blame for Aubrey’s death. He wasn’t able to leave well enough alone, to leave Aubrey to his goddamned glory in the goddamned war. He had gotten him reassigned back to England, even though Aubrey’d never have wanted that. Never would have agreed to that, so they must have forced him. But he was coming home. When his plane was shot down in that dogfight, he was on his way home. Because of Reginald.”
He threaded both hands through his hair, staring at his father; I could see the fury draining away. When he spoke again, he sounded just … confounded. Disbelieving.
“So he’s lured them here. The Germans. He managed—oh, God, he managed to somehow start a rumor that Iverson’s been turned into a secret munitions factory. That we’re building explosives or something out here. I found cables and cables about it, and everyone knows how—how easy they are to intercept. He wanted the Germans to come to blow it up, don’t you see? And he meant … I think he meant to shoot them first. With the Vickers.”
“I thought that ground fire couldn’t reach the zeppelins,” I said. “I thought that guns on the ground didn’t have the range.”
“Eleanore. Do you imagine for one particle of one second that he was thinking clearly enough to fathom that?”
“He was thinking clearly enough to fathom all of this,” I retorted, my hand flung out to encompass the roof. Blood stained my palm. “Clearly enough to have men haul all these crates into the castle in broad daylight all week long, so that everyone could see them and wonder what was actually inside!”
“I know!” Armand’s voice broke. He walked back to his father, going to his knees beside him. He placed his hands upon the unconscious man’s chest. “I know,” he repeated, beneath the screech of the wind.
Jesse left me to limp to them. The backs of his fingers grazed the top of Armand’s head, not quite a caress. “Grief can break a mind. He loved and loved, your father, because that’s his way. He couldn’t turn it off.”
“He shot at Armand,” I felt compelled to point out. I wasn’t in a forgiving mood; the duke certainly hadn’t minded risking me and everyone inside the castle getting blasted into oblivion to gain his revenge. And the smell of Jesse’s blood was becoming overwhelming. “He might have killed you.”
“Yet he didn’t. He had the opportunity to kill both of us when we first made it up the stairs, but once he saw he’d wounded me, he simply shot around us. I suspect the bullet that got you, Lora, was more of an accident than not. All he wanted was for us to go, so that he could finish his plan. Burn away his grief.”
Armand was shaking his head. “I don’t know what to do now. He’s the duke of all this. The duke of everything. If people find out … I don’t know what to do.” He rubbed at his eyes. “God, Dad.”
I had managed to get myself into the shirt, even past the throbbing ache of my arm.
“Right,” I said once more, because it sounded firm, and because Armand’s brittle desolation was beginning to eat at me. None of this, after all, was his fault. “We get him downstairs. We sneak him out of the castle, back to your motorcar. You take Jesse to a doctor and take your father home. Lock him in a room, pour some wine down his throat. Laudanum. Whatever you have to do to keep him out while I get rid of the guns. None of this ever happened.” I looked at