by Julia Quinn
“I’m going to marry her,” he interrupted.
Frances stopped crying, her face lifting up toward his, eyes shining with hope. Even the maids, still three abreast on the bench, went silent.
“What did you say?” Sarah whispered.
“I love her,” he said, realizing the truth of it as the words left his lips. “I want to marry her.”
“Oh, Daniel,” Frances cried, leaving Sarah’s side and throwing her arms around him. “You must find her. You must!”
“What happened?” he asked Sarah, who was still staring at him slackjawed. “Tell me everything. Did she leave a note?”
She nodded. “Mother has it. It did not say much, though. Just that she was sorry but she had to leave.”
“She said she sent me a hug,” Frances said, her words muffling into his coat.
Daniel patted her on her back even as he kept his eyes firmly on Sarah. “Did she give any indication that she might not have left of her own volition?”
Sarah gaped at him. “You don’t think someone kidnapped her?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he admitted.
“Nothing was out of place in her room,” Sarah told him. “All of her belongings were gone, but nothing else was amiss. Her bed was neatly made.”
“She always makes her bed,” Frances sniffled.
“Does anyone know when she left?” Daniel asked.
Sarah shook her head. “She did not take breakfast. So it must have been before that.”
Daniel swore under his breath, then carefully disentangled himself from Frances’s grasp. He had no idea how to search for Anne; he didn’t even know where to start. She had left so few clues as to her background. It would have been laughable if he weren’t so terrified. He knew . . . what? The color of her parents’ eyes? Well, now, there was something that was going to help him find her.
He had nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“My lord?”
He looked up. It was Granby, the long-standing Pleinsworth butler, and he looked uncharacteristically distraught.
“Might I have a word with you, sir?” Granby asked.
“Of course.” Daniel stepped away from Sarah, who was watching the two men with curiosity and confusion, and motioned to Granby to follow him into the sitting room.
“I heard you speaking with Lady Sarah,” Granby said uncomfortably. “I did not intend to eavesdrop.”
“Of course,” Daniel said briskly. “Go on.”
“You . . . care for Miss Wynter?”
Daniel regarded the butler carefully, then nodded.
“A man came yesterday,” Granby said. “I should have said something to Lady Pleinsworth, but I wasn’t sure, and I did not want to tell tales about Miss Wynter if it turned out to be nothing. But now that it seems to be certain that she is gone . . .”
“What happened?” Daniel asked instantly.
The butler swallowed nervously. “A man came asking for a Miss Annelise Shawcross. I sent him away instantly; there is no one here by that name. But he was insistent, and he said Miss Shawcross might be using a different name. I did not like him, my lord, I can tell you that. He was . . .” Granby shook his head a little, almost as if trying to dislodge a bad memory. “I did not like him,” he said again.
“What did he say?”
“He described her. This Miss Shawcross. He said she had dark hair, and blue eyes, and that she was quite beautiful.”
“Miss Wynter,” Daniel said quietly. Or rather—Annelise Shawcross. Was that her real name? Why had she changed it?
Granby nodded. “It is exactly how I might have described her.”
“What did you tell him?” Daniel asked, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice. Granby was feeling guilty enough for not having come forward sooner, he could see that.
“I told him that we had no one in residence who matched that description. As I said, I did not like his aspect, and I would not jeopardize Miss Wynter’s welfare.” He paused. “I like our Miss Wynter.”
“I do, too,” Daniel said softly.
“That is why I am telling you this,” Granby said, his voice finally finding some of the vigor with which it was usually imbued. “You must find her.”
Daniel took a long, unsteady breath and looked down at his hands. They were shaking. This had happened before, several times back in Italy, when Ramsgate’s men had come particularly close. Something had rushed through his body, some kind of terror in the blood, and it had taken him hours to feel normal again. But this was worse. His stomach churned, and his lungs felt tight, and more than anything, he wanted to throw up.
He knew fear. This went beyond fear.
He looked at Granby. “Do you think this man has taken her?”
“I do not know. But after he left, I saw her.” Granby turned and looked off to the right, and Daniel wondered if he was re-creating the scene in his mind. “She had been in the sitting room,” he said, “right over there by the door. She heard everything.”
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked.
“It was right there in her eyes,” Granby said quietly. “She is the woman he seeks. And she knew I knew.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I believe I remarked upon the weather. Or something of equal unimportance. And then I told her to carry on.” Granby cleared his throat. “I believe she understood that I did not intend to turn her in.”
“I’m sure she did,” Daniel said grimly. “But she may have felt that she must leave, nonetheless.” He didn’t know how much Granby knew about the curricle accident at Whipple Hill. Like everyone else, he probably thought that it had been Ramsgate’s work. But Anne obviously suspected otherwise, and it was clear that whoever had tried to hurt her did not care if anyone else was injured, too. Anne would never allow herself to put one of the Pleinsworth girls at risk. Or . . .
Or him. He closed his eyes for a moment. She probably thought she was protecting him. But if anything happened to her . . .
Nothing would destroy him more completely.
“I will find her,” he told Granby. “You can be sure of it.”
Anne had been lonely before. In fact, she’d spent most of the past eight years feeling lonely. But as she sat huddled on her hard boardinghouse bed, wearing her coat over her nightgown to keep out the chill, she realized that she had never known misery.
Not like this.
Maybe she should have gone to the country. It was cleaner. Probably less dangerous. But London was anonymous. The crowded streets could swallow her up, make her invisible.
But the streets could also chew her to bits.
There was no work for a woman like her. Ladies with her accent did not work as seamstresses or shopgirls. She’d walked up and down the streets of her new neighborhood, a marginally respectable place that squeezed itself in between middle-class shopping areas and desperate slums. She’d entered every establishment with a Help Wanted sign, and quite a few more without. She’d been told she wouldn’t last long, that her hands were too soft, and her teeth too clean. More than one man had leered and laughed, then offered a different type of employment altogether.
She could not obtain a gentlewoman’s position as a governess or companion without a letter of reference, but the two precious recommendations she had in her possession were for Anne Wynter. And she could not be Anne Wynter any longer.
She pulled her bent legs even tighter against her and let her face rest against her knees, closing her eyes tight. She didn’t want to see this room, didn’t want to see how meager her belongings looked even in such a tiny chamber. She didn’t want to see the dank night through the window, and most of all, she didn’t want to see herself.
She had no name again. And it hurt. It hurt like a sharp, jagged slice in her heart. It was an awful thing, a heavy dread that sat upon her each morning, and it was all she could do to swing her legs over the side of the bed and place her feet on the floor.
This wasn’t like before, when her family had thrown her from her home.
At least then she’d had somewhere to go. She’d had a plan. Not one of her choosing, but she’d known what she was supposed to do and when she was supposed to do it. Now she had two dresses, one coat, eleven pounds, and no prospects save prostitution.
And she could not do that. Dear God, she couldn’t. She’d given herself too freely once before, and she would not make the same mistake twice. And it would be far, far too cruel to have to submit to a stranger when she’d stopped Daniel before they had completed their union.
She’d said no because . . . She wasn’t even sure. Habit, possibly. Fear. She did not want to bear an illegitimate child, and she did not want to force a man into marriage who would not otherwise choose a woman like her.
But most of all, she’d needed to hold onto herself. Not her pride, exactly; it was something else, something deeper.
Her heart.
It was the one thing she still had that was pure and utterly hers. She had given her body to George, but despite what she had thought at the time, he had never had her heart. And as Daniel’s hand had gone to the fastening of his breeches, preparing to make love to her, she had known that if she let him, if she let herself, he would have her heart forever.
But the joke was on her. He already had it. She’d gone and done the most foolish thing imaginable. She had fallen in love with a man she could never have.
Daniel Smythe-Smith, Earl of Winstead, Viscount Streathermore, Baron Touchton of Stoke. She didn’t want to think about him, but she did, every time she closed her eyes. His smile, his laugh, the fire in his eyes when he looked at her.
She did not think he loved her, but what he felt must have come close. He had cared, at least. And maybe if she’d been someone else, someone with a name and position, someone who didn’t have a madman trying to kill her . . . Maybe then when he had so foolishly said, “What if I married you?” she would have thrown her arms around him and yelled, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
But she didn’t have a Yes sort of life. Hers was a series of Noes. And it had finally landed her here, where she was finally as alone in body as she had been for so many years in spirit.
Her stomach let out a loud groan, and Anne sighed. She’d forgotten to buy supper before coming back to her boardinghouse, and now she was starving. It was probably for the best; she was going to have to make her pennies last as long as she could.
Her stomach rumbled again, this time with anger, and Anne abruptly swung her legs over the side of the bed. “No,” she said aloud. Although what she really meant was yes. She was hungry, damn it, and she was going to get something to eat. For once in her life she was going to say yes, even if it was only to a meat pasty and a half pint of cider.
She looked over at her dress, laid neatly over her chair. She really didn’t feel like changing back into it. Her coat covered her from head to hem. If she put on some shoes and stockings and pinned up her hair, no one would ever know she was out in her nightgown.
She laughed, the first time she’d made such a sound in days. What a strange way to be wicked.
A few minutes later she was out on the street, making her way to a small food shop she passed every day. She’d never gone inside, but the smells that poured forth every time the door opened . . . oh, they were heavenly. Cornish pasties and meat pies, hot rolls, and heaven knew what else.
She felt almost happy, she realized, once she had her hands around her toasty meal. The shopkeeper had wrapped her pasty in paper, and Anne was taking it back to her room. Some habits died hard; she was still too much of a proper lady to ever eat on the street, despite what the rest of humanity seemed to be doing around her. She could stop and get cider across the street from her boardinghouse, and when she got back to her room—
“You!”
Anne kept walking. The streets in this neighborhood were so loud, filled with so many voices, that it never occurred to her that a stray “You!” might actually be directed at her. But then she heard it again, closer.
“Annelise Shawcross.”
She didn’t even turn around to look. She knew that voice, and more to the point, that voice knew her real name. She ran.
Her precious supper slipped from her fingers and she ran faster than she would have ever thought herself capable. She darted around corners, shoved her way through crowds without so much as a begging of pardon. She ran until her lungs burned and her nightgown stuck to her skin, but in the end, she was no match for George’s simple yell of—
“Catch her! Please! My wife!”
Someone did, probably because he sounded like he’d be ever so grateful, and then, when he arrived at her side, he said to the man whose burly arms were holding her like a vise, “She’s not well.”
“I’m not your wife!” Anne yelled, struggling against her captor’s grasp. She twisted and turned, smacking his leg with her hip, but he would not be swayed. “I’m not his wife,” she said to him, trying to sound reasonable and sane. “He’s mad. He’s been chasing after me for years. I’m not his wife, I swear.”
“Come now, Annelise,” George said in a soothing voice. “You know that’s not true.”
“No!” she howled, bucking against both of the men now. “I am not his wife!” she yelled again. “He’s going to kill me!”
Finally, the man who had caught her for George began to look unsure. “She says she’s not yer wife,” he said with a frown.
“I know,” George said with a sigh. “She has been this way for several years. We had a baby—”
“What?” Anne howled.
“Stillborn,” George said to the other man. “She never got over it.”
“He lies!” Anne yelled.
But George just sighed, and his duplicitous eyes brimmed with tears. “I have had to accept that she will never again be the woman I married.”
The man looked from George’s sad noble face to Anne’s, which was contorted with rage, and he must have decided that of the two, George was more likely to be sane, so he handed her over. “Godspeed,” he said.
George thanked him profusely, then accepted his aid and his handkerchief to combine with his own to form bindings for Anne’s hands. When that was done, he gave her a vicious yank, and she stumbled up against him, shuddering with revulsion as her body pressed up against the length of his.
“Oh, Annie,” he said, “it is so nice to see you again.”
“You cut the harness,” she said in a low voice.
“I did,” he said with a proud smile. Then he frowned. “I thought you’d be more seriously injured.”
“You could have killed Lord Winstead!”
George just shrugged, and in that moment he confirmed all of Anne’s darkest suspicions. He was mad. He was utterly, completely, loonlike mad. There could be no other explanation. No sane individual would risk killing a peer of the realm in order to get to her.
“What about the attack?” she demanded. “When we thought it was just petty thieves?”
George looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. “What are you talking about?”
“When Lord Winstead was attacked!” she practically yelled. “Why would you do such a thing?”
George drew back, his upper lip curling with condescension and contempt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he sneered, “but your precious Lord Winstead has enemies of his own. Or don’t you know that sordid story?”
“You’re not fit to speak his name,” she hissed.
But he only laughed, then crowed, “Do you have any idea how long I have been waiting for this moment?”
About as long as she’d been living as a castoff from society.
“Do you?” he growled, grabbing the knotted handkerchiefs and twisting them viciously.
She spat in his face.
George’s face mottled with rage, his skin turning so red that his blond eyebrows nearly glowed in relief. “That was a mistake,” he hissed, and he pulled her furiously toward a darkened alley. “Convenient of you to choose such a disreputable neighborhood,” he cack
led. “No one will even look twice when I—”
Anne started to scream.
But no one paid her notice, and anyway, she only made noise for a moment. George slugged her in the stomach, and she stumbled against a wall, gasping for breath.
“I’ve had eight years to imagine this moment,” he said in a terrifying murmur. “Eight years to remember you every time I look in the mirror.” He pressed his face close to hers, his eyes wild with rage. “Take a good look at my face, Annelise. I’ve had eight years to heal, but look! Look!”
Anne tried to escape, but her back was jammed up against a brick wall, and George had grabbed her chin and was forcing her to face his ruined cheek. The scar had healed better than she would have thought, white now instead of red, but it still puckered and pulled, distorting his cheek into a strange bisection of skin.
“I’d thought I’d have some fun with you first,” he said, “since I never got to that day, but I didn’t envision myself in a filthy alleyway.” His lips twisted into a monstrous leer. “Even I didn’t think you’d be brought so low.”
“What do you mean, first?” Anne whispered.
But she didn’t know why she asked. She knew. She’d known all along, and when he pulled out a knife, they both knew exactly what he planned to do with it.
Anne didn’t scream. She didn’t even think. She couldn’t have said what she did, except that ten seconds later, George was lying on the cobbles, curled up like a fetus, unable to make a sound. Anne stood over him for one final moment, gasping for breath, and then she kicked him, hard, right where she’d kneed him before, and then, her hands still bound, she ran.
This time, however, she knew exactly where she was going.
Chapter Eighteen
At ten that evening, after another fruitless day of searching, Daniel headed home. He watched the pavement as he walked, counting his steps as he somehow pulled each foot in front of the other.
He’d hired private investigators. He’d combed the streets himself, stopping at every receiving house with Anne’s description and both of her names. He’d found two men who said they remembered someone of that description dropping off letters, but they didn’t recall where she sent them to. And then finally there was one who said that she matched a description of someone else altogether, someone named Mary Philpott. Lovely lady, the proprietor of the receiving house said. She never posted letters, but she came by once per week like clockwork to see if she’d received any, except for that one time . . . was it two weeks ago? He’d been surprised not to see her, especially since she hadn’t received a letter the week before, and she almost never went more than two weeks without one.
