“I must have fainted. What happened next?”
“He threw the knife at me”—Charles glanced severely at Penny—“at us, instead of plunging it into your heart. Then he fled.”
“He got away?”
“The shrubbery is too damned close to the house—it’s the perfect escape route.” Charles studied Nicholas’s face. “I need you to tell me all you can remember about your attacker.”
Nicholas nodded; gingerly, he eased up in the bed.
Charles rose and went to help him, stacking the pillows behind his back. “You’ve lost a fair amount of blood—you’ll be weak for a day or so, and those wounds will pull like the devil as they heal, but you were lucky—he didn’t have time to be as professionally vicious as he’d have liked.”
Penny rose and poured the tisane; when Nicholas was settled again, she handed him the cup. “It’s Em’s special recipe. It’ll help.”
Nicholas accepted the cup, sipped gratefully. Slipped back into his thoughts.
“So?” Charles prompted, returning to sit on the arm of Penny’s chair.
Nicholas grimaced. “I couldn’t see anything of his face—he had a scarf tied over his nose and mouth. In the dark, I couldn’t get any idea of his eyes, and he wore a hat jammed low—it didn’t come off.”
“Don’t think of features—you wrestled with him. How did he feel to you—old, young, supple, strong?”
Nicholas blinked; his expression grew distant. “Youngish, but not that much younger than I. Quite strong—leanish.”
“How tall?”
Nicholas looked at Charles. “Not as tall as you. More my height, maybe an inch or so taller.” He paused, then asked, “Did you see anything—anything to identify him?”
“Not specifically, but I believe we can cross Yarrow and Swaley off our lists. From what we both observed, Swaley’s too short, and there’s no way a man of Yarrow’s weight could have moved as your attacker did. I agree with your youngish—younger than you or me—and leanish, too, although on that I’m less clear.” Charles leveled his gaze on Nicholas’s face. “Now think back—you said he swore when you entered the library. What did he sound like?”
“He was swearing even before he saw me—he seemed enraged about the pillboxes.”
“Well, then?”
Nicholas’s grimace was self-deprecatory. “It was all in French—fluent, and…well, if you work with people who speak multiple languages, you realize they sound different in one tongue versus another.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to how he would sound in English.”
Charles humphed, but nodded. “Carmichael, Fothergill, or Gerond, then.”
“But from what you said before, Fothergill and Carmichael are unlikely.” Nicholas handed his empty cup back to Penny. “And it was very fluent French.”
Charles shook his head. “Don’t build too much on that. I swear in very fluent French, too. As for the rest, ‘unlikely’ isn’t definite. Those three are all still suspects.”
Nicholas fell silent.
Penny studied him, then looked at Charles. He was thinking, furiously, not about what they’d learned, but about how to learn more. He was weighing his options; she knew the look.
After a long moment, he refocused on Nicholas, who met his gaze.
“When are you going to tell me—us—what’s going on?”
When Nicholas’s lips merely tightened, Charles went on, “If I hadn’t decided to come down and check the doors and windows, I would never have been in time to stop his next blow, one that would very likely have ended your life. And no, I’m not telling you that so you’ll feel grateful. I want you to understand how serious this is. This man has killed, not once but twice that we know of, and he will kill again. He has no compunction whatever. Who knows who it might be next time? Figgs, perhaps—she tended your wounds. Or Em, who made the tisane. Or Norris. Or Penny.”
His voice had grown progessively colder. When he said her name, even though she’d guessed it was coming, Penny had to fight to quell a shiver.
When Nicholas glanced down at his hands, lying atop the covers, and said nothing, Charles continued in the same, coldly judgmental tone, “You said you’d reasoned he’d make for the library, and that he was swearing over the pillboxes. Am I right in guessing that you believed the pillboxes would be part of his target?” He stopped, waited.
“Yes,” Nicholas eventually said. Closing his eyes, he rested his head back on the piled pillows.
“I assume you thought that because he’d gone after Mary—she was the downstairs tweeny, so she was responsible for dusting in the library.”