rain-chilled fingers.
“Help me,” he mumbled brokenly. “Please—you have to help me.”
“Of course I’ll help,” Adam assured him. “But let’s get you in out of the weather first.”
Humphrey had left the driver’s seat of the Bentley, and was coming around the front of the bonnet to join them. Janet’s face was a pale blur in the opening of the left rear door. With sudden decision, Adam headed Peregrine toward the Morris Minor, putting his own coat around the younger man’s shoulders before bundling him into the passenger seat with Humphrey’s help.
“I’ll deal with this,” he told the butler, as he closed the door on Peregrine and headed around to the driver’s door. “You drive Lady Fraser home. Tell her I’ll ring her tomorrow and explain,”
As Humphrey retreated to the Bentley, bending to speak to Janet as he closed the door, Adam glanced at Peregrine. Huddled deep in Adam’s coat, the artist was shakily pulling his spectacles from an inner pocket, sliding them onto his face with trembling hands. Adam reached for the ignition, for he wanted to get Peregrine back to the house, but the keys were not there.
“I’ll need the car keys, Peregrine,” he said quietly, holding out his hand.
Peregrine dragged them clumsily from his coat pocket. When he unclenched his fingers to drop the keys into Adam’s waiting hand, Adam caught sight of a row of raw, half-moon gouges across his palm where he evidently had driven his own fingernails deep into the skin, Adam said nothing for a moment, merely locating the correct key by the light of the Bentley’s headlamps and then starting the car.
Humphrey activated the gate from inside the Bentley, and Adam put the Morris into gear and eased it through, glancing sidelong at his silent passenger as he negotiated the few dozen yards to the garage. Floodlights came on as he pulled into the stableyard, triggered by an electric eye, and Adam parked the Morris under one of them.
“I’m—sorry to be such a bother,” Peregrine murmured huskily, when Adam had pulled on the hand brake and switched off the ignition. “I wouldn’t have come here, but I had nowhere else to turn. I—think I must be going mad.” Adam’s dark gaze was steady. “Why do you say that?” Peregrine made a small gesture of miserable helplessness, not daring to meet Adam’s eyes.
“I wanted to kill myself earlier,” he muttered. “If I’d had a gun in the studio, I probably would have done it. Then I thought of gouging out my eyes with a palette knife. I only just managed to stop myself, by clenching my fists as hard as I could and slamming my head against a wall.” He gave a bitter, half-hysterical laugh. “If that’s not mad, I don’t know what is.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Adam said quietly. “Can you tell me what made you suddenly decide on this course of self-destruction?”
A long shudder wracked the younger man from head to foot. “Lady Laura,” he said hoarsely. “She’s dead. She died this afternoon.”
This bald announcement kindled a gleam of enlightenment as well as grief in Adam’s steady gaze.
“You were right to come to me tonight,” he said, after a heartbeat’s silence. “I’m only sorry, for your sake, that you didn’t come sooner.”
“Then you think you can help me?” Peregrine asked disbelievingly.
“I think you can be helped,” Adam corrected carefully, still taking it all in. “For my part, I shall do whatever lies within my power. Meanwhile, we should get you out of those wet things.”
With Humphrey otherwise engaged, it fell to Adam to manage the domestic details. After showing Peregrine the location of the library, he shepherded the younger man upstairs to one of the auxiliary bedrooms and laid out dry clothing from his own wardrobe, returning downstairs then to make a phone call. The tear-choked voice that answered at Kintoul House belonged to Anna, Lady Laura’s maid, and confirmed, without
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