Heart in Hiding (The Six Pearls of Baron Ridlington Book 6)

by Sahara Kelly

  Winnie hurried in with a tea tray and Hecate poured, her hands shaking and making the pot clink against the cup. Even Beelzebub appeared out of nowhere, and jumped up onto the mantelpiece, his eyes wide and roaming the room, black tail twitching in nervous curiosity.

  Augusta grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around his legs, and Dal surreptitiously added a good dollop of brandy to the tea.

  It was the last that helped Finn regain his countenance. Hecate held the tea beneath his nose urging him to drink, and the scent of the liquor percolated through his nostrils. He reached for the cup, happy that his hands were working and not shaking too much.

  Seeing that face had been the shock that brought everything rushing back into his head.

  Everything.

  All his memories, all the details of those long months he’d lost—a tidal wave swamped him, washing away all the dams that had blocked his memories.

  He took another gulp of the tea, letting the brandy warm him from the inside and the cup itself warm his cold hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, shaking his head a little as if trying to clear away the cobwebs.

  “Don’t be silly,” scolded Hecate who sat at his feet on the floor. “Drink up. When you’re ready, we must know what you saw. And what you remember.” She touched his knee. “But only when you’re ready.”

  Nodding, he tried to breathe more slowly, and finished the tea. “Thanks,” he glanced up at Dal. “That helped.”

  Dal merely nodded, his eyes on Finn’s face.

  “I do apologise for frightening everyone,” Finn began, reaching for Hecate’s hand and drawing comfort from the feel of her fingers intertwining with his. “As you all know by now, I have been missing a part of my life…the part from the end of Waterloo to the moment Hecate found me in the forest.” He glanced down at her and managed a smile. “The moment she saved my life.”

  “And now?” she encouraged him with a smile of her own and a little squeeze of her fingers.

  He took a breath. “Now I remember. I remember all of it.”

  Lady Augusta gasped. “Your memories have returned?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I saw a picture on the front of a newspaper…” he turned to Hecate. “Do you have it?”

  “I do, Mr. Finn.” Dal brought the sheets over to Finn and opened them on the side table.

  “There,” said Finn, pointing to a small rendering of a rotund and stately man. “That’s him. He was on the field at Waterloo.”

  “He’s the one you told me about?” Hecate leaned over.

  “Yes. When I knew him, he was Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey DeWitt. One of the officers on the field of Waterloo. He had a solid reputation, was good to his men and most of us considered him a strong soldier and leader.”

  “You fought alongside him?” asked Dal.

  “For a small part of the day, yes. He was there when the horrid mix-up took place.” He paused and took another breath. “In case you didn’t know, a battlefield isn’t tidy or organized. It’s messy, chaotic, loud and in our case filled with people who spoke different languages. A dangerous situation at best, a disaster in the making at worst. On this day there was a failure in communications. With the end result—the Prussian guns were aimed in the wrong direction. At us.”

  “Oh my God,” whispered Lady Augusta.

  “Exactly. For a couple of hours we were exchanging fire with our allies. Finally, someone with a lick of sense sorted it out and orders came through correcting the error. But by then, we’d lost more than a few of our lads to Prussian shells.” He paused, swallowed, and continued. “One of the dead was my friend, Johnny Marchville. But the shot in the back that killed him didn’t come from the Prussians or any of their shells.” He reached out his hand and tapped the picture with his finger. “It came from him.”

  Silence fell as everyone digested this news. Hecate rested more fully against his knee, bringing warmth up and down his leg. It was a delightful sensation and helped him through this difficult moment.

  “Aubrey DeWitt shot Johnny Marchville in the back and killed him. This I know because I was there and I saw the foul act play out not fifteen yards from where I stood.” He closed his eyes briefly. “I can still hear the shot and the noise of the colours flapping in the wind as Johnny fell.”

  “Finn,” murmured Hecate. “Oh Finn.”

  “But the battle was fully underway and that day, that terrible day, dragged on. At last it was over and I left the field. I never found Johnny’s body, but I did look for it. I saw things…” He passed a shaking hand across his face.

  “Don’t, Finn,” urged Hecate. “Let that be for now. Such memories will always be there, but their pain will lessen with time. Tell us now what happened when you came back to England.”

  He nodded. “I remember coming back to chaos in London. Many of the lads were being discharged but the paperwork was muddled and there were weeks when none of us knew if we should be in barracks or not. It turned out that I was not to be discharged; in fact, they sent me back across the Channel. The Treaty of Paris allowed for various areas of France to be occupied by troops from several countries, as you may have read. I found myself in command of a garrison in Calais.”

  “You were promoted then, Mr. Finn,” observed Dal.

  “I was lucky, Dal,” shrugged Finn. “Lucky to survive Waterloo and then to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “So where does he come into it?” Hecate stared at the image.

  “Not too long ago,” answered Finn. “When my assignment finished in Calais, I returned to London and was discharged. This must have been…oh…just about the end of the summer? I was never one to keep close track of dates and times, unless it was in battle. Off duty, I was a bit careless about such things.”

  “It’s the Irish in him,” said Augusta wryly. “Great lovers but always late.”

  That surprised a crack of laughter from Finn, and eased his state of mind considerably. “Be that as it may, Lady Augusta, and I’ll have to take your word for it, once I got back to London, I did what any ex-soldier does. I ordered new clothes, made the rounds of a few of the parties, and since I had some well-heeled friends, it was a delightful and fun few weeks. Until…”

  He paused, not for dramatic effect, but to clear his mind and focus on the memory.

  “Until I was accosted, knocked unconscious and woke up in the bowels of a prison ship bound for Australia. The memory of one face stuck in my head. One man looking straight at me right before I was knocked out. And that man…” he looked once more at the paper, “that man is the one you see there. Lord Aubrey Faversill now, but back then? Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey DeWitt.”

  Dal put words to the question he knew they were all ready to ask.

  “Why, Mr. Finn? Why?”

  *~~*~~*

  Hecate’s insides were shivering at Finn’s story. His recollections of Waterloo alone were enough to chill one’s soul, but then to have been attacked like that, with no warning? It was heinous.

  Bub yowled softly from the mantel, adding his outrage. Then he jumped down and strode to Finn, sitting down next to his foot, a shiny black guardian with bright eyes staring at Finn’s face.

  That made everyone smile and Finn took a breath. “Thank you, Bub.”

  “I have to assume all this has something to do with the Johnny Marchville incident,” observed Lady Augusta. “I didn’t know them—they were in a different social circle. But I did know the previous Lord Faversill. And he looked nothing at all like this man.” She tapped on the newspaper in her turn. “As a matter of fact, we’ve never looked to find out why he’s in the paper, have we?”

  “Good point,” agreed Hecate. “Finn, what does it say about him?”

  Finn picked up the sheet and frowned at it. “Well, it says here that Lord Faversill’s horse is the favourite to win the Triple Rose at Newmarket on Saturday.” He replaced the paper on the table. “It mentions the horse’s lineage but not Faversill’s.”

  “That�
�s all?”

  “That’s all.” Finn sighed.

  “Of little or no use,” commented Dal. “One wonders why a newspaper bothers.”

  “Finn,” said Hecate, “Your friend Johnny. Do you have any idea why Faversill, or DeWitt as he was then, would kill him?”

  Finn shook his head. “No, and I have thought about it many times since.” He turned to her. “I was so close to finding someone to tell in Whitehall, Hecate. Several times I was in the right place to see the right person, but something held me back. What if I was proved wrong? What if I’d made a terrible mistake? Suppose the bullet I thought came from DeWitt was actually fired from a Prussian rifle? And how could I prove that anything I said was true? There was no body and no motive as far as I could tell. What was there for me to say? It would have been my word against his. A simple Irish Casey against an established DeWitt with influence.”

  “Urgh.” She groaned with frustration. “I see your point.”

  “Money.” Lady Augusta steepled her fingers together and touched the point to her lips. “In my experience, money is at the bottom of cases like this. And others too, come to think of it.”

  “Was your friend wealthy, Mr. Finn?” Dal tilted his head to one side, the gem in his turban glittering in the firelight.

  “Not to my knowledge, Dal. But we were just that. Friends. Neither of us spent much time on our backgrounds or our pasts. We were too busy kicking up larks in the present.” Finn sighed. “But I see where your train of thought is going. Yes, there most likely has to be something to do with money involved in this business.”

  “Finn, a question if I may.” Augusta looked at him, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “Of course.”

  “How did you escape the prison ship?”

  Hecate blinked. She’d taken that for granted, but Augusta hadn’t. An excellent point.

  Finn shook his head. “I didn’t. The damn thing foundered.”

  “Oh good Lord,” gasped Hecate. “Where? When?” She reached for his hand without even thinking about it, needing to touch him, to know he really was safe there with her in the parlour, telling of his dreadful experiences.

  “We had been on board a few days…perhaps a week after the ship put to sea. I don’t need to tell you how bad conditions were. But it was soon apparent that the vessel was not well maintained. There were leaks, obvious problems in the hull. We spent a goodly amount of time up to our knees in water.” He shivered as he recalled those days. “I’d been taken aboard in my uniform, because my civilian clothing had yet to be completed. And it was probably a good thing, since I got slightly better treatment because of it and the other prisoners mostly left me alone.

  “How terrible,” said Dal. “It is unbelievable what one human can do to another.”

  “Callous in the extreme,” agreed Augusta.

  “I cannot argue that,” said Finn. “But once convicted and sentenced to transportation, prisoners assume some sort of less-than-human identity. They become things. The conditions they are forced to endure do not matter. But…in my case…” he pulled himself together and continued, “a storm blew up. We could hear the rigging screaming in the wind and the waves must have been massive. They threw the ship around as if it was a cork in a bathtub.”

  Silence fell as he paused, everyone holding their breaths for the final part of Finn’s story.

  “We must have been driven too close to shore, because the weak timbers were no match for the first couple of rocks we hit. Everything sort of shattered, including the system that chained us prisoners. In the chaos, I found that my shackles were loose and I managed to free myself before the hull filled completely. It only took a few minutes for the ship to break apart, and I clung to a large piece of wood. It rode the waves to the shore. Now I realise it must have been near here, and we were either heading to or from Ireland down the Bristol channel.”

  “And the other men?” Augusta breathed the question.

  Finn shook his head. “I do not know, Lady Augusta, and I’m not proud of that fact. But many were weak, some I believe were ill right from the start of the voyage…I have no idea who survived and who didn’t. I managed to get myself to shore, but collapsed there on the sand, clutching my bag, which for some reason I’d managed to seize before the ship sank, and weak as a kitten. And from then on, it’s rather blurry. I believe I was ill myself by that point.”

  “The typhus. Of course,” said Hecate. “A prison ship would be the place for such diseases to run rampant.”

  He nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I was lucky that whoever put me in there left me with my clothes and bag, such as it was. They’d cleaned out everything worth anything, of course. Now, in hindsight, I suppose they couldn’t afford to leave even a hint of my presence in London. I was supposed to vanish. And the fact I had nothing of value annoyed two ruffians who accosted me on the beach, if you can imagine that. Now, looking back on it all, I would guess they were scavenging the wreck.” He lifted a hand to the back of his head. “A handy piece of driftwood, and they probably thought I’d joined the rest of the dead and would be no threat to them. But Fate intervened.”

  “Thank Heaven for that,” said Hecate with relief.

  He smiled down at her. “Yes, indeed, but I think it’s more thank Hecate than thank Heaven.”

  She looked up at him. The warmth in his eyes spread through her body and she continued to cling to his hand. This man, this moment…all the pieces of the puzzle that was Finn Casey started to come together. And the picture they made—well, she finally acknowledged beyond any doubt that he was her destiny.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Oh Bub. What now?”

  Hecate slipped from her bed and walked to the door, where the cat was sitting and staring at her after meowing imperiously. “You just came in. And now you want to go out?”

  He gave her his best of course. I’m a cat look.

  She sighed, opened the door and then closed it again as he slipped through, a sleek black shadow vanishing in the darkness of the hall outside. She liked the comfort of his weight around her feet, but if he decided he wanted more, it got a bit uncomfortable, especially if he lay across her legs, pinning her to the mattress.

  Restless, she walked across her room to the window, grabbing a shawl from the chair and wrapping it around her shoulders. Pulling the curtains aside, she stared out across the fields, realising that it must have started to snow sometime before. Everything was white, with the exception of some of the lower shrubs and under-branches of the fir trees.

  It was magical, of course. There was nothing like snow to change one’s outlook on the world, since the pristine layer turned lanes into ribbons, fields into white blankets, and forests into strange and wonderful shapes.

  She loved snow, but on this night her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Hard questions thumped her brain endlessly. Questions about Finn, her emotions, his feelings…where was it all going?

  Although Lady Augusta had become a friend, Hecate was hesitant to use her as a sounding board when it came to this particular matter. Always private, Hecate knew she could not discuss her dilemma openly with her, and thought it likely she’d be given advice based on her—Augusta’s—experience.

  Given the lady’s previous notoriety in the Ton, it would not be a good match for the naive and cautious Hecate.

  But the problem of Finn remained.

  He filled her thoughts too often, brought light into her presence when he walked to her side, and when they touched? It was a sizzle unlike anything she’d experienced.

  Her meditations, her talents, all the things that made her Hecate…seemed to have diminished in importance next to seeing Finn’s smile and hearing his voice. Even Bub was less of a companion and more of a casual visitor these days.

  Her breath made little foggy circles on the cold glass as she stood at the window, and finally she shivered, drawing the curtains closed again, turning away and reaching for another log to bank up her fire for the ni
ght.

  A knock on the door made her jump, and the log fell from her hands with a thud.

  The door swung open and Finn’s head appeared around the edge. “Are you all right?” He saw her struggling with the log and came into the room, closing the door and walking to her side. “Let me.”

  “Thank you,” she said, rubbing her hip and watching him efficiently stoke up a small blaze. “Dratted thing dropped and I bent at the wrong angle.”

  He stood and looked at her. “Are you sure you’re all right? Bub was crying outside my door, and the first thing I thought of was that you were in trouble.”

  He wore an old dressing gown that he’d procured from somewhere and a night shirt that was too short. It revealed firm legs and bare toes. His hair was mussed, and if Hecate had had a spoon nearby, she would have devoured him from spiky curls to naked feet.

  “I’m fine, really.” The warmth from the fire took away her earlier chill. “I apologise for Bub. I just let him out of here a few minutes ago. He has no business rousing you from your sleep. I shall have a strong word with him.”

  Finn shook his head. “I didn’t mind. I couldn’t sleep, anyway.” He gazed out of the window. “My family. Everyone gone, Hecate. It was…a horrid memory, but I know now I couldn’t have done anything to stop it.”

  “You couldn’t,” she agreed. “Like so many, you lost what was most precious to you.” Her voice was gentle and soothing. “But you can honour their memory by living the best life you can. And keep in mind, you have a new family, now, here at Doireann Vale.

  Unshed tears glittered in his eyes as he nodded. “In that, I’m blessed indeed.” He noticed her still moving her hand over her hip. “But you’re in pain. And don’t argue, I can see it.” He frowned. “Here. Get into bed and give me that shawl.”

  She blinked.

  “Go on. Do as your told.”

  She huffed. “Well, yes sir. Whatever you say, sir.” Obediently she moved to the bed, admitting she was glad to get off her feet and ease the twinges.