Bracing, she counted to three, then hauled. The heavy head of the halberd rose. She staggered, boots shuffling as she fought to swing the unwieldy weapon aside.

She hadn't meant it to fall.

Having only just walked in and discovered Horatio's body, she hadn't been thinking at all clearly when the stranger's footsteps had sounded on the gravel outside. She'd panicked, thinking him the murderer returning to remove the body. With all the village in church, she couldn't imagine who else it could have been.

He'd called a "Hello," but so might a murderer checking to see if anyone else had come upon the scene. She'd frantically searched for a hiding place, but the long drawing room was lined with bookcases-the only gap that would have hidden her from the door had been too far away for her to reach in time. Desperate, she'd secreted herself in the only available spot-in the shadows behind the open door, between the frame and the last bookshelf, squeezing in alongside the halberd.

The hiding place had served, but once she'd realized from his actions and his muttered expletives that this man was no murderer, and after she'd debated the wisdom of showing herself-the daughter of the local magistrate and quite old enough to know better than to slip into other peoples' houses dressed in breeches to search for still other peoples' misplaced personal belongings-once she'd got past all that and realized that this was murder and she'd gone to step forward to make herself known, her shoulder had nudged the halberd.

Its descent had been inexorable.

She'd grabbed it and fought vainly to halt it or deflect it; in the end, all she'd been able to do was twist it enough so that the heavy blade had not struck the man's head. If it had, he'd have died. As it was, the hemisphere at the side of the iron axe-head had connected with a sickening thud.