The Physicians Gave Up on the Duke’s Only Son – The Herbwoman They Scorned Stayed the Whole Night…
Chapter 9
The trail led next, as trails so often do, to the man who had bought the venom rather than the man who had ordered it. And it was Pemberton, making discreet inquiries through the network of stewards and innkeepers he had cultivated across three counties in twenty years of service, who found where Dr. Mercer had gone to ground.
The physician had fled not far — only to a modest lodging house in a market town two days’ ride from Blackwood, living under his own name still, as though he had convinced himself the distance alone would be protection enough. He was a thin, anxious man, and when Alexander arrived at his door, accompanied by Pemberton and two of the estate’s steadier grooms — with Elara kept deliberately at a distance this time, for her own safety — Mercer’s nerve broke almost before a single accusation had been spoken.
“I never meant him to die of it,” he said, backed against the wall of his own small parlor, his hands shaking visibly. “I want that understood, your grace, before anything else is said. I was told only that the wound should heal slowly and badly, and that no physician who followed me would find cause to suspect the stitching itself. I was never told — ”
He stopped himself. Too late.
“Told by whom?” Alexander’s voice carried none of the fever roughness Mercer might have remembered from the night of the ambush. It was worse than that — quiet and utterly certain. “I will ask you once more, and I would advise you to answer carefully.”
“Mr. Croft,” Mercer whispered. “Your cousin. He came to me three days before the ambush. Said there would be an attack on your carriage, and that you would be wounded. He said it was necessary. That you were planning to cut him out of the family inheritance. That he only needed you weak for a few months — long enough to secure his position. He swore it would not kill you.”
“And you believed him.”
“I believed what I was paid to believe. He gave me a purse of gold and a length of thread that had been treated with something I did not ask about. He told me to stitch your wound with it, and to leave the estate before dawn. He said if anyone questioned me, I was to say I was called away to another patient.”
Alexander stood very still for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “You will give evidence of this before a magistrate.”
“If I do, he will kill me.”
“Then you will have to decide which of us you fear more.”
It was enough. The confession, written and signed, with Pemberton and the grooms as witnesses. Alexander carried it back to Blackwood in his own hands, and did not let it out of his sight for the entire journey.