Frederick ducked his head and, with a bucket held in his arms, loped off toward the river. Graham waited until the child had gone, and when he and Martha were alone once more, he continued speaking. “Frederick takes his understanding of how he should live his life and that which is right or wrong from you. And in your unwillingness to exist for anything other than your work, he believes that is all that matters. And it’s not.”
She hugged herself in a lonely embrace that belied the fire in her gaze. “You don’t—”
“Know anything about it?” he gently interrupted. “No. I don’t know about whatever secrets you carry.” Only the ones that the Home Office had provided him. “I do not know what has made you so sullen and somber, but Frederick deserves more.”
Whatever Martha was about to say was lost as a short cry echoed in the distance before cutting out altogether.
As one, Graham’s and Martha’s gazes went in the direction of that shout, and they sprang into action.
“Frederick,” she rasped, and collecting her skirts, Martha took off flying.
Graham was already racing ahead, his longer strides surpassing her smaller ones. His chest pounded with panic. It pulsed in his ears, the frenetic rhythm of his heartbeat deafening as he tunneled all his energies, all his focus ahead.
Cool logic. Do not go rushing headlong into any battle unprepared.
That lesson doled out by his mentor reverberated in his memory, but Graham let it go ignored.
Frederick.
He tore through the copse and then skidded to a stop at the sight that met him.
Two children—nay, the boys were too old to be children, mayhap near sixteen or seventeen years—had Frederick between them. Both went white-faced at Graham’s appearance.
The taller, bulkier of the pair had an arm about the child’s waist and a hand over his mouth. The other, a gangly, thin lad with oily skin and pimpled cheeks, held a boot in his hand, the tip of a knife damningly pressed against the sole.
Graham narrowed his eyes, taking in Frederick’s one bare foot.
Around his assailant’s palm, horror, fear, and embarrassment all seeped from Frederick’s eyes. And then, he dipped his gaze to the ground.
My God, the boy is… ashamed.
As one who’d felt the keen burn of that sentiment, he recognized it in another.
It sent a new wave of rage and fury burning through his veins. “Release him,” he seethed, and when the bullies didn’t immediately act, Graham, in one fluid motion, removed the pistol tucked in his boot and aimed it at the pair. “Now.” He wrapped that whispered word with an edge of steel, leveling it as the threat it was.
The bastard holding Martha’s son immediately dropped the boy.
Frederick crumpled to the ground, landing at the feet of the oily skinned, thinner boy. “Who are you?” Graham asked evenly, and when neither boy answered, he brought the hammer of his pistol back.
In their rush to speak, the two bullies’ words spilled over each other’s.
“Phinneas Tanner.”
“Dudley Holbrooke. We weren’t doing any—”
Graham leveled his gun at Dudley Holbrooke, and the dark-haired, gangly young man with pimpled cheeks promptly wet himself. A dark stain spread on the placard of his breeches, even as his cheeks splotched with color.
The painfully thin bully dropped Frederick’s tattered boot, and it fell with a thump beside Martha’s son.
Just then, Martha came charging through the brush and jolted to a stop.
From the corner of his eye, Graham caught her wide-eyed stare taking stock of the scene around her. Her gaze lingered for a moment on Graham’s pistol. “What is going on here?” she demanded of the two bullies.
“I’m fine,” Frederick mumbled, his cheeks red. “I fell,” he said unconvincingly.
She ignored his empty assurances, continuing forward until she earned such a dark glare from her son that she staggered to a stop beside him and hovered, uncertain.
“I said I’m fine,” her son repeated more insistently, peeking up at the boys behind him.
Graham waved his weapon at the pair of bullies. “Get out.” The command hadn’t even fully left his lips before the young men went scrambling off.
As soon as they’d gone, Martha dropped to a knee beside Frederick. “Are-are you all right?” she asked, running her hands frantically over his little frame. “D-did they hurt you?” Her voice was breathless, her chest heaving from her exertions.
Frederick gave her hands a hard shove. “I told you I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me, Frederick,” she pleaded. “Surely you don’t truly expect me to believe Dudley and Phinneas, who haven’t helped a villager in all of High Town, were good enough to help you.” She grabbed his shoe and held it aloft. “My God, they removed and cut up your boot.”
Frederick lashed out once more, smacking the ripped shoe from her fingers, and a gasp tore from her as the boot landed with a thump. “I don’t care what you believe,” he shouted, and several birds took flight overhead, rattling the crisp, errant leaves that had clung to the barren branches. He stood over her and shouted at the top of her head. “All of this is because of you. All of it.” Frederick balled his hands into little fists at his sides. “You’re the reason people hate us. You’re the reason why it’s so miserable here. You’re the reason our family has been cut in half.”
Martha simply took each one of the hateful charges as if they were her due. Kneeling on the snow-covered ground, she gathered up the boot and clutched it to her chest, maintaining a deathlike grip.
Through the volatile exchange, Graham hovered, an interloper at a fight that moved far beyond a boy’s hurt pride at being caught and then challenged by his mother.
Martha glanced to Graham, her usually direct eyes now refusing to meet his own. “This is neither the time nor the place for this discussion.”
“Because of Mr. Malin?” the boy charged, unrelenting in his fury. “What? Are you worried because he doesn’t know? Or because of what happens when he finally knows the whole bloody truth?”
She jerked and then righted herself with the aplomb only a mother could manage. “Watch your language.”
“My language?” Frederick laughed, a jaded, ugly sound empty of mirth. “Do you really think whatever bloody words I use matter?”
“Frederick,” Graham said quietly. “That’s not the way a gentleman speaks to a lady.”
The boy showed more courage than the pair two times his age. He lifted his chin mutinously. “But I’m not a gentleman, and she isn’t a lady. And when you know the truth about her, you’re going to feel the same way as all the others.” Ripping the boot from her hand, Frederick went running, crashing through the brush. Dried out twigs and branches cracked, signaling the path he’d gone, until silence stretched around the copse.
Martha sank back on the ground, sitting there as casually as if it were a summer day and she’d stolen herself several deserved lazy moments.
Still hovering, Graham returned his pistol to his boot, and then to give his fingers something to do, he doffed his hat and beat the article against his thigh.
For the first time in the whole of his roguish life, he found himself without a single damned word for a young woman.
“I suspected for some time, you know,” she murmured softly, directing the admission to the imprint Frederick’s boot had left on the ground. Martha trailed a fingertip along the outline. “It was easier to pretend that he was simply being clumsy than admit that he was being bullied for sins that didn’t belong to him…” Her words trailed off.
Those sins that her son had alluded to had likely been the reason she’d earned the concern of some member of the Brethren.
Do not let a person’s pain matter… Do not let a person’s pain matter…
It should not. Not personally. She was an assignment, and a previously unwanted one at that.
As such, Graham should make as hasty a retreat as Frederick had.
Instead, he found his legs carrying him over to her side. Graham sank down to his haunches.
She looked up with surprise lighting her pretty green-blue eyes. “They’ve been bullying him.” She voiced the truth aloud, and then her eyes slid shut. “And I knew. Deep down, and not even that deep. I knew because…” Martha shook her head.
Graham rested a hand on hers, stilling the distracted trail her fingers made. “Because…” he murmured, urging her to have it said, because he knew she needed to say aloud whatever misery consumed her and the angry boy who’d dashed off.
Martha finally lifted her gaze to his. “I knew because I’d found myself bullied enough times to recognize that it was happening to my own son.”
A pressure weighted in his chest. He’d come upon her on the Birch Path, facedown in the mud. How many other times had she and Frederick found themselves so, with no one about to protect them? To defend them? And what would happen when he was gone? Would she be once more forgotten by the Home Office? “The people of this small village combined cannot add up to your and Frederick’s worth,” he said quietly. A woman who worked as she did without complaint and the son who toiled alongside her.
A small, sad laugh spilled from her. “You say that, but you don’t know me. Not really.”
“I know enough to know I’m right.” And all of that understanding had come not from her file, but from their every exchange.
Martha fiddled with her skirts. “I married a man I had no place marrying. He was… a viscount.”
Graham rocked back on his heels. “A nobleman?” he repeated dumbly. Of anything she might have said about her past or her marriage or secrets, that had been the least expected.
She nodded once. “A viscount.”
His mind raced. Martha Donaldson was… a viscountess, the wife of a nobleman. And likely that nobleman was a man Graham knew or had passed in some ballroom or club. This was her connection to the Brethren, then. And coward that he was, Graham didn’t want to know the bastard’s name. He didn’t want to know the name of the one who’d given her children and known her laugh and who’d failed her in every way…
A restless energy thrummed to life, and Martha stood and wandered off to the shore of the slightly frozen river.
He’d been strictly advised to allow Martha Donaldson her secrets. His superiors did not want him prying into her past. Graham, however, had never done what was expected of him… by anyone. He started over to where she remained motionless next to an ancient, gnarled oak tree. The hem of her skirts kissed the edge of the ice.
At his approach, the long, graceful column of Martha’s neck angled ever so slightly.
Graham stopped beside her, standing shoulder to shoulder with her, staring out.
And once more… he waited, allowing Martha her time and more, allowing her the choice to share what she would with him.
Wind gusted along the shore, tugging at her cloak, and some of the errant brown leaves that had fought the winter’s pull at last ripped from the branches overhead and fluttered forlornly onto the ice.
“He was a stranger to High Town,” she said softly, at last breaking the quiet around them. Her voice carried on another gust of wind. “No one had ever seen him before.”
While she spoke of that nameless, faceless him, Graham tried to imagine a younger, more innocent Martha, untouched by life’s ugliness. Who would she have been in those days? Bright-eyed, no doubt. Brimming with the same husky, unrestrained laughter that had left her lips as she’d chased him around the gardens. “Was it… love at first sight?” Some foreign sentiment, something green and insidious that felt very much like jealousy, ran through him. Which was preposterous. Him… jealous about this woman he’d known little more than a week, or any woman for that matter.
The irrational sentiments were shattered. “With him?” Martha snorted. “Hardly. I was just sixteen.” She’d been all but a child. Nay, she had been a child. “He was more than thirty years older, without a sliver of charm in his rotund frame.”
The air hissed between his teeth. “Thirty years?” My God, the man could have been her father. “And yet, you married him,” he said, a statement that she answered like it was a question.
“And yet, I married him.” Her voice was distant. “My father thought it would be best.”
Graham’s jaw tightened. “Best for whom?” he asked rhetorically, unable to keep the distaste from creeping into his voice. Ultimately, what fathers of all stations sought—rank, privilege, or pride—outweighed all.
“Ah, but he represented an escape from”—she gestured to the tree-covered landscape—“all of this.”
But for the handful of pieces she’d shared, he knew nothing about the man, but that was enough for him to despise the man with a loathing that burned. “Your father was the reason you married that viscount.” Who was this letch who’d marry a child? Had it been a member of the Home Office? Is that why they were so determined to see her looked after?
Frowning, Martha skimmed her fingers along a nook in one of the branches. “I wanted…” She fiddled with a crisp brown leaf that dangled forlornly from the tree.
When it became apparent she didn’t intend to add anything more to that, he drifted closer. “What did you want?” he quietly urged, wanting to know about her past and who she was. And this time, he didn’t attempt to force the lie upon himself that the need came only from his assignment.
Martha looped her arms around the branch and reclined a bit, her gaze fixed on the cheerful blue sky exposed by the leafless trees. “I wanted to see London. I wanted to attend lectures and visit museums. The theater.” Her eyes lit for a world he’d largely despised.
“Have you ever been?” she asked abruptly, knocking him off-kilter.
Or mayhap he’d already been dangerously upended when she’d tossed her first snowball.
“To London,” she clarified. “Have you ever been to London?”
He’d lived there more than he had at any of his family’s country properties, and never once had he appreciated the metropolis for anything other than the den of sin he’d taken it as. He cleared his throat. “I… have,” he said lamely, wanting to add nothing more, because anything he added at this point would be a lie. All the while, he knew Martha Donaldson would never be content with simply that.
“You have?” She exhaled those two syllables. “What is it like?” she asked, taking a step closer to him.
“What is it like?” he echoed, glancing distractedly about. A small, odd pile of stones snagged his notice. To give his hands something to do, he retrieved the flat rocks. “The air is thick with fog and dirt.” Graham tossed one of the rocks across the ice, and it skidded across the surface before eventually falling into the part of the river that was not yet frozen.
“That is it?” she asked, incredulity and disappointment rolled together. Martha placed herself in front of Graham just as he made to launch another stone.
Let lying come as easy to you as responding to your name, Whitworth.
“It is crowded. The streets are brimming with people and conveyances. And noisy,” he added. “It is that, too. Nor have I visited any museums.” But he had the theater. Never, however, for reasons he could or would admit to this woman—that he’d been watching a mistress or lover perform. Those reasons now left him with an unexpected niggling of shame.
Martha sighed and stepped aside so he might complete his throw. “Yes, well, that is how those of our station live,” she said after his rock had landed with a plunk in the river. “We see the dirt and the noise and the crowds, while the places of beauty that exist within those worlds belong to others.”
Guilt. It had a taste and a feel and the power to consume.
Of all the damned times to develop a conscience, it would be when you’re conducting official work for the Crown.
Martha held her hand out, and he stared at her callused palm a moment before turning over several stones. She tossed one at a distant hole in the ice, and the rock disappeared below th
e surface. “All those places and experiences I’d only read of in books but dreamed of seeing for myself at last seemed… real. A place I could go and see for myself and be part of. I wanted to sketch in Hyde Park.” She peeked around, as if she feared some interloper might overhear her and judge that a silly longing. “I’ve read of the Serpentine and the queen’s gardens and imagined what it would be to paint those visions.” With that, she’d opened yet another window, offering him another glimpse into who she’d been… mayhap who she still was—a woman who sought a life away from this place. And it was an escape he understood. Because it was one he had craved since he’d been a boy faced with a disappointed father and unable to be more or do better—at anything.
The bright glimmer in her eyes died. “I sold my soul for the promise of all that.” Martha let the rocks in her hand fall, and they rained down around her feet with a staccato clunking. “My father believed the viscount represented my path to that dream. But ultimately, it was my decision, and I live with that.” Her gaze moved beyond his shoulder. “No one forced me.”
“You were a child, Martha,” he said gently, willing her to see that. “You were a child.” He fought to keep the hatred stinging his veins from spilling out into his words. “Your father should have taken you to London.” Except, that was a slip on his part. It was an admission that he was aware of the funds the missing Mr. Donaldson had been in possession of at some point. Martha, however, gave no indication that she’d heard or recognized that tell. He took her by the arm and gave a light squeeze. “And then your husband should have, too. He should have provided you the world you dreamed of.”
An image flickered forward of a moment that didn’t exist, nor would ever: Martha sitting alongside Hyde Park and sketching the grounds, Graham at her side, observing her while she worked and tossing stones, Frederick at his other side.
“He wasn’t,” she whispered, slashing through the jarring tableau in his mind.
He wasn’t?
Martha wet her lips. “My husband.”
Graham shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
The Rogue Who Rescued Her Page 14
