Read Chapter 17: The Jockey's Confession

The rain had stopped by the time Helena reached the stables, but the air still held the promise of more. She had dismissed her maid at the door, claiming a headache, and now she moved through the damp straw with the ease of a woman who had spent more hours in a stable than in a ballroom.

The stall at the far end was occupied. She had been told Ned Stokes was there, hiding, half-starved, and terrified for his life. What she had not been told was that he would look like a ghost of the boy she remembered.

He sat on an overturned bucket, his hands wrapped around a tin cup of something steaming. His face was bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut, and his shirt was torn at the shoulder, revealing a vicious purple mark that spoke of rope and struggle. When he saw her, he scrambled to his feet, swaying.

“My lady.” His voice cracked. “I did not think you would come.”

Helena stopped three paces from him. The stall smelled of horse and hay and fear. She had known Ned Stokes since he was twelve years old, a scrawny lad with a talent for calming fractious fillies. Her father had called him a natural. She had called him a friend.

“You escaped,” she said. “From Lord Eastman.”

Ned’s throat worked. “He kept me in a cellar. Three days. Maybe four. I lost count.” He touched the bruise at his eye and winced. “I got out when the guard fell asleep. Walked six miles in the dark. I did not know where else to go.”

“Why would Eastman take you?”

The question hung between them like a blade. Ned’s gaze dropped to the straw. His hands tightened around the cup until the knuckles went white.

“Because I was working for him.”

Helena felt the words land like a blow to the stomach. She had suspected—God help her, she had suspected something of the kind. The sabotage at the stables, the poisoned feed, the timing of the accidents—all of it had required someone on the inside. But she had hoped, foolishly, that it was not Ned.

“You were paid,” she said. It was not a question.

“I was desperate.” He looked up, and she saw the tears standing in his eyes. “My mother fell ill last autumn. The apothecary would not see her without coin. I had saved what I could, but it weren’t enough. And then Lord Eastman’s man found me in the village, said there was work to be had, good money, if I would do a few small favours.”

“Small favours,” Helena repeated, her voice flat. “Like cutting a girth strap so my brother could break his neck?”

“No!” Ned’s face went pale. “God, no, my lady. I never—I would never—It was smaller things at first. Moving a feed bucket. Leaving a door unlatched. I did not know what he meant to do with it. Not until the bay mare came up lame, and I heard him laughing about it with his man, and I understood what I had helped him do.”

Helena remembered the bay mare. A yearling with a temperament like quicksilver and a racing future as bright as any in the yard. She had spent three months in a sling after a fall that had nearly broken her fetlock. The veterinarian had called it an accident, a bad step in a poorly maintained stall.

“You told no one.”

“I was ashamed.” The words came out in a rush. “And I was afraid. He said he would see my mother turned out of her cottage if I spoke. He said he would ruin me, ruin any chance I had of working for any stable in England. And I believed him, because he had the money and the men and I had nothing but a sick mother and a job I loved more than I had ever loved anything.”

Helena’s hands had curled into fists at her sides. She forced them open, one finger at a time.

“And then?”

“And then the season began. And he asked me for something worse.” Ned’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He asked me to watch you. To follow you. To tell him where you went and who you saw. He said he needed to know about the London man. The one who came to the house.”

Julian. Of course.

“What did you tell him?”

“Everything.” Ned’s shoulders slumped. “Every meeting. Every letter I could see delivered. I told him about the note you sent, the one to his lodgings. I told him about the wager, about the deed.” He swallowed. “I told him you were going to Newmarket. That is how he knew to be there, to make his accusation.”

Helena closed her eyes. For a long moment, there was only the sound of the horses shifting in their stalls, the creak of leather, the distant rumble of thunder.

When she opened her eyes, Ned was on his knees.

“I am sorry,” he said, and the words were ragged, raw, stripped of all pride. “I know sorry is not enough. I know I have betrayed your family and your father’s memory and everything you have worked to keep. But I am sorry, my lady. And I will do whatever you ask to make it right.”

Helena looked down at him. The boy she had grown up with, the man who had helped her train her first colt, the friend who had sat with her through the long night after her father died. And the traitor who had fed information to the man who wanted to destroy her.

She had every right to send him away. To have him thrown off the estate. To have him arrested and brought before a magistrate. It would be just. It would be proper.

But it would not be useful.

“Eastman believes you are still in his cellar?”

Ned blinked. “I—yes. I suppose. He does not know I escaped, or he would have come after me by now.”

“Then you are my advantage.” Helena crouched down, bringing herself to his level. “You will give me a statement. Everything you did, everything he asked you to do, in writing, signed and witnessed. You will testify before a magistrate if I ask it of you.”

Ned’s mouth fell open. “You would keep me on? After what I have done?”

“I would keep you on a very short leash.” Helena’s voice was steel. “You will sleep in the gatehouse. You will not leave the estate without my permission. And if you breathe one word of this to anyone—anyone—I will see you transported. Do you understand?”

He nodded, his eyes wide. “Yes, my lady. I understand.”

“And you will do something else.” She straightened, brushing the straw from her skirt. “You will tell me everything Eastman knows about Julian Graham.”

Ned frowned. “The London man?”

“He seems to know a great deal about my estate,” Helena said carefully. “More than he should. And I want to know whether your employer taught him or learned from him.”

“I do not think they are friends.” Ned shook his head slowly. “Lord Eastman spoke of him with contempt. Said he was an upstart, a man with too much money and no breeding. But he was watching him, too. He had me watch them both.” He hesitated. “There was something else. The last time I saw Lord Eastman, before he locked me in the cellar, he was angry. Very angry. I heard him shouting at his man about a letter. About a signature that was not his.”

Helena’s heart quickened. “A signature?”

“I do not know more than that, my lady. But it seemed important. He burned the letter after. I saw the smoke.”

Helena filed the information away. A signature that was not Eastman’s. A letter important enough to burn.

She looked down at Ned Stokes, still kneeling in the straw, his face a map of bruises and shame. He had betrayed her. He had helped the man who wanted to destroy her family. And yet, standing here in the half-dark of the stable, she could not help but remember the boy who had taught her to whistle through her teeth, who had laughed when she had fallen in the mud and then helped her clean the muck from her habit.

“I am not forgiving you,” she said. “Do not mistake this for mercy. But I will give you a chance to earn back a fraction of what you have cost me.” She turned toward the door, pausing with her hand on the latch. “Do not make me regret it, Ned.”

“I will not, my lady.” His voice was fierce now, desperate in a different way. “I will not. I swear it.”

Helena stepped out into the cooling air. The clouds were gathering again, dark and heavy on the horizon. She should return to the house, change for dinner, pretend that her world had not shifted again on its axis.

But she could not shake the thought of that letter. That signature. A hand other than Eastman’s on a document he had found threatening enough to burn.

Julian had known about the sabotage before it happened. He had warned her of the danger at Newmarket without revealing how he knew. He had access to legal documents she had never shown him.

And now she wondered, with a chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm, whether the enemy she had been fighting was not one man, but two.