She stared at it as if it were someone else's hand, someone else's wound. Several moments passed before she recognized that the main focus of her feelings was pain. Her eyes turned to the tree trunk directly behind her and gazed at it. Her mind must be working very sluggishly, she suddenly thought with great lucidity. She had been staring at the bullet embedded in the trunk for several seconds before she really saw it. Now she stared for several more seconds. And then again down at her hand, from which the blood was dripping onto her skirt.

Panic took her then and she hurtled blindly downward through the mist, wailing loudly without realizing that she was doing so. The silence was a ravening terror at her back.

A footman in the hall of the house gaped at her, but he did not have to react further. Luke was on his way downstairs. He paused for a moment before hurrying toward her. She collided with his chest and clawed at him.

"Hush, hush, hush," he was saying, but she did not look at his mouth. He lifted her chin and held her head steady. "What have you done to your hand? It appears to be bleeding rather copiously. Hush now. Hush, Emily. I shall take you to your room and we will have it seen to."

But she clawed at him again without seeing his words. And then other hands gripped her shoulders tightly from behind. She did not hear herself scream.

"She has cut herself rather nastily," Luke was saying. "She is also in shock."

One of the hands on her shoulders moved down her back to behind her knees. The other circled her shoulders. Ashley lifted her into his arms.

"Try not to struggle, love," he said, "or I may drop you. Luke, will you bring Anna to her room? We will have to see if a physician is needed. Hush, love. Shh."

She was still wailing. She buried her face against Ashley's neck as the concerned face of Major Cunningham came into view.

He had been in his study, writing some letters before breakfast. His pen had made an ugly squiggle across the page and spattered it with ink blots when he had heard her. The sounds had been chillingly inhuman, more like those of an animal in pain than of a woman. Yet he had known even before flinging back the door and striding out into the hall that it was Emmy.

"Shh, love. Shh," he said to her as he carried her up the stairs, though he knew she could not hear him. The horrible wailing continued. Luke hurried ahead of them, presumably to fetch Anna.

But it was not necessary. She was running down from the floor above, her eyes wide with alarm.

"Merciful heaven!" she exclaimed. "What has happened? Emmy!

What has she done?"

"She has cut her hand," Luke said, "and is deep in shock." He hurried on ahead to open the door to Emily's room.

Ashley set her down on the bed, but she clutched at him with renewed panic. The sounds had not abated at all.

"Hush, love," he said, and heedless of his brother and sister-in-law, who were both in the room, he followed her down onto the bed and gathered her against him, rocking her, crooning to her.

"Emmy." Anna's voice was shaking. "Emmy, what happened?"

Luke was talking to a maid, for whom he must have rung or who had been sent up. He was directing her to bring warm water and cloths, soothing ointment and bandages. His voice, as one might have expected of Luke, sounded reassuringly firm and calm.

It was a raw and nasty cut, Ashley saw when he looked down at the hand that clutched his frock coat. And still bleeding. It must hurt like the devil, he thought. But she was too distraught even to feel the pain at the moment. He forced her head back from his chest and held her chin firmly.

"Emmy," he said. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut. He kissed each in turn and then her mouth. "Emmy."

Her eyes, when she opened them, were blank with terror. Oh God, and he had looked out of his window this morning, seen the weather, and assumed that she would not think of going out. He had not been there to watch over her.

"Hush, my love," he said. "I have you safe. No one is going to harm you now. You see? Anna and Luke are here too." Why was it that he could never seem to protect the women in his life?

The wailing stopped finally. She stared blankly at him and then looked over his shoulder at her sister and Luke.

"Emmy," Anna said. "Oh, Emmy, what happened?"

"Set them down beside the bed," Luke was instructing the maid.

"Then you may leave."

"I am going to let you go, love," Ashley said, "and get up so that we can attend to your hand."

Her eyes moved to it and stared blankly. He eased away from her and stood up beside the bed, but her hysteria did not return. Her face and even her lips were chalk white. She winced but did not make a sound when Anna spread a towel beside her and gently spread her hand on it.

"Oh, Emmy," she said.

'"It looks worse than it is," Luke said, setting a hand on Anna's shoulder. "When the blood is sponged away, my dear, you will see that 'tis no mortal wound."

Anna was dabbing with a damp cloth about the long gash across the back of Emily's hand.

"Emmy?" Ashley said when her eyes found him. "You fell?"

No, she had not fallen.

"You scraped it?" he asked. "Against a tree? A rock? A building?"

No. It suddenly occurred to him that a mere cut incurred in such a manner, even if rather a deep one and even given the amount of blood lost, would not have sent her into such deep shock anyway.

Not Emmy.

"What happened?" he asked. "Can you tell me?"

She stared at him for a long time. Then she lifted her free hand, seemed not to know quite how to explain, and finally formed it into the unmistakable shape of a pistol and pointed it at the window opposite.

"Zounds," Luke said.

"Someone shotat you?" Ashley felt suddenly as if all the blood had drained out of his head. "You sawhim, Emmy?''

No. She shook her head.

She would not have heard a shot. How could she know, then? Ashley wondered. But cuts like that did not simply appear from nowhere.

"How do you know?" he asked her. Anna, he could see, had looked up from her task, her face as white as her sister's.

There had been something behind her. Something big.

"A tree?" he asked.

Yes, a tree. And something small and round-she formed it with her forefinger curled into the base of her thumb-against the tree.

"A bullet," Luke said quietly. She was not looking at him.

"A bullet?" Ashley asked.

Yes, a bullet. Lodged in the trunk of the tree behind her. It had cut a swath across the back of her hand. No more than a few inches from her body. From her heart-it was her left hand that had been hurt.

Someone had shot at Emmy and had missed killing her by only a few inches.

"But you saw no one?" he asked her. "Either before or after it happened?"

No, no one. She winced again. Anna was crying and dabbing at the cut. Luke squeezed her shoulder and reached for the jar of ointment.

"Move aside, my dear," he said. "I will finish this and bind up her hand. Some laudanum would not be amiss, I believe."

"Emmy," Ashley said, "we are going to need to know what happened to frighten you two mornings ago. We need to know who wishes you harm."

Who could want to harm Emmy? Ashley asked himself. Verney? But why? Had Verney shot Gregory Kersey after all? In the same hills?

With the same gun? But why Emmy?

Her eyes closed and her teeth bit into her lower lip as Luke applied a liberal dose of ointment to her hand and began to bandage it.

"I believe a physician's services will be unnecessary," he said, "unless the shock has still not worn off after she has slept. But the questions will have to wait, Ash."

"I need to know," Ashley said. "I am going to kill him, whoever he is."

"I shall help you," Anna said fiercely.

"You will stay close to your sister while she has need of you, madam," Luke said quietly and gently, "and to our children, who have a right to your attentions."

"And leave the serious business of guarding our safety to the men in the family,'' she said sharply, her eyes flashing. ""Tis always the way of the world. And what if the men fail?"

Ashley watched in some astonishment as his brother and his brother's wife, the models of marital love and affection, proceeded to quarrel. Luke, his task completed, looked coolly at Anna.

"To my knowledge I have not failed you yet. madam,'' he said.

"But once you needed my help," she said. "Once I helped you kill a man who needed to be killed."

Luke raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. "And so you did, madam," he said.

"Then do not tell me that I have no further use in life than to comfort my sister and play with my children." she said.

Luke had killed Anna's kidnapper years ago, after Ashley went to India. He had not heard before now of Anna's having had any part in that killing.

"I ask your pardon," Luke said, "if you wish to continue this difference of opinion, Anna, I shall be at your service later in the privacy of our own rooms."

She flushed, opened her mouth, and closed it again.

Ashley sat on the side of the bed and took Emily's good hand in his own. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

"You are in pain?" he asked. "I shall have some laudanum brought up."

She shook her head.

"But you will stay here and sleep?" he asked her.

She nodded, but her hand tightened about his.

"You must not fear," he said. "I shall see that someone is always with you, night and day. I shall have a maid sent to sit with you." He would have stayed himself, but there were proprieties to be observed.

He wondered what Anna and Luke had made of his lying on the bed with her when he had carried her in. And had he not been calling her his love? For Emmy's sake, he did not wish to arouse their suspicions.

Perhaps she would still refuse to marry him when he next offered.

"I shall stay with her, of course," Anna said. "I intended to do so even before I was informed that 'tis my function in life." There was a definite edge to her voice. "Harry will not need me for a few hours."

"I have a strong premonition," Luke said, sounding both bored and haughty, "that I have just fashioned a scourge with which I am to be whipped mercilessly for the next eternity or two."

"Anna will stay with you," Ashley told Emily. "Both Luke and I will be in the house-and Roderick too, I daresay. He will be waiting to hear what happened. He is a military officer, well experienced at defending people in danger. And there are many servants here. You are quite safe. Do you believe that?" If she did not, then he would stay himself and to hell with propriety.

She nodded.

He raised her hand to his lips. "Try to sleep," he said. "Later we will talk and get to the bottom of what has been happening here. I will put everything right for you so that you will never have to fear again."

It was perhaps a rash promise, he mused. "I swear it, little fawn. On my honor."

She smiled-a mere ghost of a smile-for the first time since he had picked her up downstairs in the hall and carried her up here to her room. And she closed her eyes.

Luke, looking somewhat grim about the mouth and eyes, was holding the door open for him. He closed it behind them after they had left the room.

Roderick Cunningham was pacing back and forth in the corridor outside, a look of deep concern on his face.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Anna was suckling Harry, who had been crying lustily when she arrived in the main room of the nursery. He had been playing happily with his sister until his stomach suddenly told him that his mama was late and he was hungry. He was now contentedly sucking. The housekeeper was sitting with a sleeping Emily, who had been persuaded after all to take a small dose of laudanum to ease the pain in her hand.

Anna did not look up when the door opened and closed or when her husband seated himself in a chair close to hers. She was quite out of charity with him-especially over the fact that he had had to point out to her in his usual oblique way the distasteful nature of quarreling in public.

"Your only function in life is not to care for my children, Anna," he said after several minutes had passed in silence. "Or even to bear them. Nor is it to give pleasure to my bed. Though you perform all of those functions superlatively. You are the joy of my heart and half of my soul. Yet your function is not even to be those things. 'Tis merely to be, as a person worthy of my respect, regardless of your gender or your relationship to me."

"Oh." She still refused to look up. She watched Harry pull on one of his ears as he sucked. "You were always magnificently clever with words. And you have rehearsedthis speech. Tis not fair."

"Rehearsals take time and effort," he said. "And commitment and conviction. I belittled you and I hurt you and I beg your pardon."

She looked at him and her lips quirked. "I wish your Paris acquaintances could hear you apologize to a woman," she said. "To your own wife."

"They would assume that I had been corrupted by English beef and English ale," he said. "They would be immensely saddened. Forgive me?"