PART 5 — The Doctor Who Lied
Arthur reached the nursery before anyone else.
The room was empty.
Theo’s wooden soldiers lay scattered across the carpet. His small chair was overturned. The window stood open, rain blowing against the curtains.
For one sickening second, Arthur saw not the room before him, but every mistake of the last three years. Every closed door. Every ignored cry. Every time he had mistaken silence for safety.
Then Katherine moved past him.
She did not scream. She did not freeze. She went straight to the window, touched the sill, and looked down.
“No mud,” she said.
Arthur turned. “What?”
“If someone took him through the window, there would be mud on the sill. There isn’t.” She scanned the room. “He wasn’t taken out. He was frightened out.”
Arthur forced himself to breathe.
Katherine knelt and picked up a wooden horse from the floor. Its head was turned toward the corridor.
“Theo runs when he’s afraid,” she said. “But he hides where he feels close to his mother.”
Arthur’s face went white.
“The green room.”
They ran.
The green room had been locked for three years.
It had once been Duchess Katherine’s private sitting room. After her death, Arthur ordered it sealed. He could not bear the sight of her embroidery frame, her books, her blue china cup left beside the window as if she might return and finish her tea.
Now the door stood slightly open.
Arthur pushed inside.
Theo was curled beneath a writing desk, both hands over his ears.
Katherine dropped to her knees.
“Theo,” she whispered. “It’s me.”
The boy looked up. His face was streaked with tears.
“I remembered,” he whispered.
Arthur slowly knelt beside Katherine.
“What did you remember, son?”
Theo’s eyes fixed on the fireplace.
“Mama was in that chair. She was coughing. Lady Evelyn came in. The doctor too. Mama told me to hide because she heard them in the hall.”
Arthur stopped breathing.
Theo continued, voice shaking.
“Doctor Wexley put drops in her cup. Mama told him no. Lady Evelyn said, ‘If she lives, everything ends.’”
Katherine covered her mouth.
Arthur closed his eyes.
The words did not arrive like a revelation.
They arrived like a sentence.
For three years, he had mourned a death.
Now he understood he had been living beside a murder.
By evening, Dr. Samuel Wexley was brought to Wardington Manor under the pretense of examining Theo after his fright. Arthur received him in the library. Katherine remained behind the screen with Mr. Havers and a constable from Bow Street.
Wexley entered with the calm arrogance of a man who had spent decades being welcomed into powerful homes.
“Your Grace,” he said, removing his gloves. “I came immediately. I understand the child had another nervous spell.”
Arthur stood near the fire. “My son remembered the night my wife died.”
The doctor’s face did not change.
But his fingers tightened around his gloves.
“Children imagine things.”
Arthur lifted a small blue bottle from the desk.
Dr. Wexley’s eyes flicked to it.
Only once.
But once was enough.
Katherine stepped out from behind the screen.
“We found it in the green room cabinet,” she said.
The doctor’s face sharpened. “You have no authority to search this house.”
Arthur’s voice was ice. “She has mine.”
Wexley tried to laugh. “This is absurd.”
Arthur leaned forward. “Was it Evelyn Ashbourne who paid you, or her father?”
Silence.
The constable moved closer.
Wexley’s composure cracked.
“You don’t understand what they are,” he whispered. “The Ashbournes do not threaten. They erase. They would have ruined my sons. My practice. My name.”
“So you took my wife instead?”
“She was dying already.”
Arthur struck the desk with such force the lamp jumped.
“She was alive.”
Wexley flinched.
For the first time, he looked old.
“It was only meant to weaken her. She was writing letters. She had evidence. Lord Ashbourne said if she became too ill to speak, the matter would pass.”
“And when it did not?” Katherine asked.
Wexley looked at her with something close to pity.
“Then he decided others would have to vanish too.”
Katherine’s blood chilled.
“My father.”
Wexley did not answer.
He did not need to.
Arthur stepped toward him. “Who else was involved?”
The doctor swallowed.
“There is another ledger. The true one. Your wife hid it before she died. Lord Ashbourne never found it. Neither did I.”
“The key,” Katherine whispered.
The silver key from Duchess Katherine’s packet.
Wexley looked at her.
And fear returned to his eyes.
“If you have the key, then you are already marked.”
Before Arthur could respond, a deafening crash exploded from the corridor.
Glass shattered.
A footman shouted.
The library windows burst inward.
A flaming bottle rolled across the carpet, spilling fire.
Katherine seized the Duchess’s letter from the desk just before the flames swallowed the papers beside it.
Arthur grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
Through the broken window, in the rain beyond the terrace, a dark figure turned and ran.
The constable raced after him.
But the damage was already done.
The blue bottle was gone.
The doctor was on the floor, unconscious from the blast.
And when Katherine looked down, she saw something pinned to the burning carpet with a black-handled knife.
A note.
May you like
One sentence.
Stop digging, or the boy dies first.
