Lucinda wanted to cry, “Yes, of course I’ll marry you,” so he didn’t have to suffer any longer. But she didn’t want to hurt his pride; he had to get the words out himself.
“I don’t know if I can do this knowing what it means for your practice,” he said in a rush.
Lucinda brushed his hair back from his face, allowing her fingers to linger in the soft waves for just a moment longer than necessary. “I have already decided that if necessary, I’ll give up my practice rather than have my work come between us.”
“Lucie.” His face twisted. “I never thought you’d. . . I don’t expect you to. . . Then you must really love me.”
“I must.” She smiled at him.
“Then the answer is yes?” His face shone.
Lucinda laughed. “You haven’t asked the question—”
For question and answer, he drew her against him and kissed her, and she kissed him back. Below them, music rose and fell, laughter and cheers broke out like shooting stars across a night sky.
And footfalls pounded up the gallery steps.
Matt pulled away, his body tense. Lucinda turned as a footman ran up to them. “Mr. Templin. Been looking all over for you. Miss Howard said you might be here.”
“What is it?” Matt asked, an edge to his voice.
“Gertie. She needs you. There’s been an accident.”
“Has there? What sort of accident?”
Lucinda stared at him. “You don’t believe it?”
“I’m being careful about trusting him.” Matt fixed his gaze on the young man. “Well?”
“I—I don’t know, sir. John, he’s the footman at the door, he said as how a little boy came running up and asking for you.”
“Parthina Carr’s boy,” Lucinda cried. “Matt, what do you think it could be?”
“I don’t know, but I’d better go find out.” He scowled down at her. “You stay here. Go back to the ballroom and don’t leave until I get back.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, don’t.” He brushed his knuckles along her cheekbone, then turned and followed the footman to the stairwell.
Lucinda started to follow, but suddenly the door closed in her face. She gasped, reached for the knob.
And a hand closed over her mouth. An arm encircled her waist, and someone murmured in her ear, “You’re coming with us.”
seventeen
Gertie’s house was peaceful. The café lay in darkness. Parthina Carr opened the back door to his knock, and her face registered shock to see him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What’s wrong here?” Matt returned.
“Why, nothing. We’re having some hot chocolate and knitting.”
“You didn’t send your boy to the Howards’ to fetch me?”
Mrs. Carr stared at him, mouth agape. “I’d never do that at night.”
Heart in his throat, and without another word, Matt spun on his heel and sprinted back along Main Street toward the Howards’ faster than he had left. Still too long, too far. At least half an hour passed before he reached the mansion. His hair was disheveled, his bow tie askew. If they didn’t let him in—
He confronted the footman at the door. “Who told you to send me away?”
The man looked blank. “Told me what?”
“To fetch me for an emergency.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Matt looked into the man’s eyes and believed him.
“Is your name John?” he asked.
“No, sir, it’s Tim. You should know that. We went to school together.”
Matt did remember then. Tim hadn’t teased him about his lack of a father, and he’d called him sir.
Matt took a calming breath. Everything might be fine here. “I need to find my—my fiancée.” There, he’d said the word, and it tasted sweet. “I left in a hurry. Can you help me?”
“I can’t leave here, but I’ll ring for a maid.”
He rang a bell on a nearby table. Moments later, a maid appeared, and Matt made his request. “And I’ll look in the ballroom.”
She wasn’t in the ballroom. He climbed to the empty musicians’ gallery and peered through the screen. Nowhere did her crown of golden curls bob above a green velvet dress. He waited for a whole dance set to conclude, wasting precious time, and she was nowhere around.
Nor did the maid find her. She met Matt outside the ballroom. “I searched all the withdrawing rooms for ladies, sir, and no one’s seen her.”
“There must be four hundred people here. Someone has to have seen her. The servants? Did you ask them?”
“Not yet.” The girl began to twist her apron.
“I’ll ask them if you’ll show me where to find them.” She took him to the places where footmen and maids waited to see to guests’ needs. In an upstairs corridor, a tiny girl, no older than fifteen or so, squeaked out, “I seen a young lady who’d fainted. She was wearing a green dress.”
“Where did you see her, Peggy?” the other maid asked.
“Who was with her?” Matt added.
The child ducked her head. “A gentleman was carrying her. I was thinking maybe she’d drunk some spirits. People do sneak them in here, you know.”
Fainted or rendered unconscious? Likely the latter.
“Where’d they go?” Matt demanded.
“Um, out, um, out to the carriages.”
And Tim hadn’t mentioned it.
Matt pivoted toward the steps.
“They went by way of the door closest to the stable yard,” the little maid called out to him.
He paused. “Where is that?”
“I’ll show you.” The first maid, her face alight with curiosity, led the way through a maze of passages, down a back staircase, and out into the night. Too easily someone could slip Lucinda away without being noticed as anything other than a concerned gentleman helping a faint female into fresh air. Matt wouldn’t have thought anything of it himself with another woman, but with Lucinda, he doubted anything could make her faint. And someone had threatened her and him recently. The hearing for someone important was in three days. Apparently, they wanted to stop her. It had nothing to do with him or his potential claim.
A burden he didn’t know he was carrying slipped away. He wasn’t responsible for her abduction. No matter how things worked out for him, he hadn’t placed her in danger.
But he would get her out of it.
He charged into the stable. “Who’s left here in the past half an hour?”
A crowd of grooms and coachmen turned toward him, their faces blank.
“No one, sir,” a groom said.
“No one?” Matt glanced back at the line of carriages, the paddock of horses beyond. “You’re sure?”
“Do you think we wouldn’t notice someone taking a horse and carriage?” an old coachman demanded.
“No, it’s just that. . . I’m looking for someone.”
“Sweetheart leave you?” one man jeered. “Find out—”
Matt didn’t wait for the taunting remark. He knew it all too well, and it didn’t hurt him. Finding Lucie was so much more important than word battles with the ignorant. His heavenly Father loved him. As much as he would have liked to have known something about his earthly sire, he wasn’t less of a person because he didn’t.
He felt like less of a person without Lucie. She was part of him. He felt her absence from his present. He had to find her, but she had disappeared once her kidnappers had taken her from the house.
If they didn’t take a horse or carriage, then they had to have carried her to somewhere nearby.
After leaving the stable, Matt began to walk around the house, seeking clues, searching for ideas. The snow wasn’t fresh. Many feet had trampled it during the week until, beneath the glow of the lanterns, it resembled nothing more than wave-pounded sand.
Close to the house anyway. As he moved farther afield, taking one of the lanterns with him, he saw that fewer and fewe
r human feet marred the whiteness. At last, when he paused to empty snow from his shoes, he saw them—two sets of footprints leading into the trees on one side of the Howards’ land. He pushed his sodden shoe back onto his foot and headed into the trees.
❧
They threatened to hurt Matt if she wasn’t quiet. Considering one man had broken into his house and used his gun, Lucinda believed them and kept her mouth shut all the way down the back stairs and through the freezing night. She also wanted to remain conscious, so she didn’t want to risk one of the men knocking her out before she learned where she was going.
She didn’t need to ask why, not with the hearing in three days. That led her to the who—Mayor Woodcocks and possibly his wife. They had ordered her abducted from the ball in order to keep her from the hearing.
“You won’t win,” she said through chattering teeth.
They had dumped her in an outbuilding only a short walk through the woods from the Howards’ house. Possibly the Woodcockses’ land. There, with only a thin blanket to stave off the cold, she huddled on a rock floor certain they didn’t have to kill her. She would die from freezing long before morning.
If she didn’t get herself out.
She would get herself out. Hearing nothing of her abductors nearby, she began to crawl around the room on her knees, one hand straight out in front of her to feel obstacles and another hand in front of her face to protect her from colliding with anything in the dark.
She encountered nothing except a shelf of clay pots, some still filled with earth. If any gardening tools had been there, they had been removed so as not to provide her with a weapon. At least not a good weapon. But a thrown pot, or one brought right down on someone’s head, would work well if one didn’t get grabbed while trying to apply the blow.
The lock on the door was stout. The panels didn’t even tremble when she kicked them as hard as she could. If she had a small, sharp object, she could perhaps unscrew the hinges. But she didn’t have anything so accommodating on her person. One generally didn’t need a small sharp object at a ball except for hair pins, which weren’t as useful for picking locks as heroines in books seemed to manage. Lucinda discovered that after ruining three pins poking and prodding at the tumblers inside the door lock to no avail. All she accomplished was to send her hair tumbling over her shoulders. The cloak of it was welcome. She could barely feel her fingers and toes.
If she didn’t get out of there, she would die.
Her kidnappers might come back. Matt might find her. She could huddle in her thin blanket and ball gown and pray for that kind of assistance. Or she could pray to save herself, immediate help.
She chose the latter, then began to circuit the shed again. Again, all she found was the shelf. A nail? She groped to the back of the shelf to find what held it in place. Yes, some kind of nail, something too big for her purposes. Shaking from the cold, she slumped against the shelf—
And it crashed to the floor. Clumps of dirt, splinters of wood, and shards of broken pottery scattered before her, over her, around her.
Broken shards of pottery.
Hope rising, she fumbled on the floor for the right size of broken clay vessel. Several large chunks sliced through her silk gloves and into fingers so numb from cold she didn’t feel the pain. Unable to find anything small enough, she wrapped a larger piece in one of her gloves and smashed it against the stone floor until it cracked and fragmented into smaller bits.
Shaking so hard she could hardly hold her makeshift tool, she groped her way back to the door and began to work on the hinges. If they were rusted shut, she would never get anywhere.
If she didn’t stop trembling, she would never get anywhere. She dropped her tool twice before she got one screw out. Her shard broke on the second screw, and she had to make another piece. Again and again she lost or broke her fragile instrument. But finally, the door groaned, sagged, and gaped with only its lock holding it in the frame.
A cold, damp wind rushed in upon her. It felt as sweet as the purest summer day. It was freedom.
She stumbled into the snow on feet she couldn’t feel. She must get away, find her way back to the Howards’. If she could find her way, remember the path through the trees, not encounter anyone. Ahead of her, she saw lights. The house of whoever owned the shed. She went in the opposite direction.
And ran into the man striding around the corner of the outbuilding.
He grabbed her arms. “How’d you get out? Never mind that. Those fools never should have put you in the gardening shed.”
Mayor Woodcocks. Lucinda went limp. She couldn’t even speak through stiff lips and chattering teeth.
“I wanted you held, not dead,” he growled. “You’ll have to come inside now, but if you scream, I’ll tie you up in the shed and let you turn into a block of ice.”
At that moment, Lucinda only cared about the notion of inside, a fire, a radiator, warmth. Like a docile lamb, she allowed Woodcocks to drag her to a french door off of a terrace and shove her over the threshold and onto a thick wool rug. A fire blazed on the hearth beyond two wing-backed chairs, and she half walked, half crawled toward the heat, thanking the Lord. She might be a captive still, but she would thaw out.
“The men are holding your gentleman friend,” Woodcocks said as he locked the door behind him and drew the curtains. “If you misbehave, he’s dead.”
“Not quite yet,” Matt said, rising from the depths of one of the wing-backed chairs.
eighteen
Matt drew Lucinda to his side with his left arm. In his right hand, he held the poker. “Good evening, Mayor. Thank you for bringing my lady in from the cold, though perhaps you should tell us why you’ve taken us away from the ball.”
“I think you know.” Woodcocks slipped behind his desk and reached for a drawer handle.
“Down.” Matt spun Lucinda toward one of the chairs and lunged across the room.
The poker struck Woodcocks’s arm as he brought a pistol from the drawer and fired. The bullet whined past Matt’s ear and thudded into the paneling. Matt grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted it behind him. He yelled and kicked, but the gun flew out of reach. Matt hooked his foot around the mayor’s ankle and they crashed to the floor.
Bigger, younger, stronger, Matt held the man down. “You—will—not—hurt—my—lady.”
Woodcocks heaved and coughed. “Can’t breathe.”
“She will go to that hearing and win,” Matt continued.
“Your stepson deserves his freedom,” added Lucinda.
“Can’t. . . let. . .him,” Woodcocks wheezed. “Not. . .his. . .money either.”
Matt started. The momentary distraction was all Woodcocks needed. He heaved up, knocking Matt off of him enough to twist and reach the gun. He aimed it over his shoulder. Even at that awkward angle, the range was close enough he would kill if he pulled the trigger.
“No,” Lucinda cried from above them. “Mayor, please. I–I’ll delay the hearing if you drop the gun.”
“Get out of the line of fire,” Matt commanded.
“Not good enough,” Woodcocks said. “Drop John Paul’s case.”
“I can’t. It’ll discredit me as an attorney. I’ll never be able to prac—” She broke off, and her hand rested on Matt’s shoulder. “All right. All right. I won’t go to the hearing.” She was sobbing.
“I’ll write a letter right now,” Lucinda continued.
“Get away,” Matt said. “This won’t stop Woodcocks. John Paul will just get another lawyer.”
“I can stop him from getting another lawyer.” Woodcocks cocked the gun.
“Lucie, move.” Matt hurled them both backward.
The gun blasted. Searing pain scored across Matt’s upper arm.
Woodcocks rolled to his feet and stood over them, the muzzle of the pistol shifting from one to the other. “You two are going to disappear tonight. Lost in the snow and frozen to death, I think, while out on a tryst.” He drew back the hammer. “Which first?”
“You shot her,” Lucinda cried.
With a roar like a wounded bull, the mayor ran for the french doors and into the night.
“Matt, she’s wounded,” Lucinda said.
She quite possibly was dead. Blood running down his arm, Matt pushed himself up and reached for Mrs. Woodcocks. “Ma’am, how badly are you hurt?”
“All right.” She opened her eyes. “Just a scratch.” She gave him a half smile. “He never could hit a target.”
“Why did you do such a thing?” Lucinda kneeled beside the older woman and pressed her hand, then a fold of her skirt on the wound across her shoulder. “He could have killed you.”
“He was going to kill you.” She didn’t speak to Lucinda; she spoke to Matt. Her gaze held his. “You know why.”
“I do.” Matt pressed his handkerchief to his own wound. “I found the papers.”
“I put them there for you to find. I was tired of the lies. Tired of the way Harold was wasting money meant for my sons, making me hide the truth about you.”
“I want to know why, ma’am, but we both need help now. It can wait.”
“Both? Matt?” Lucinda glanced at him, followed his hand to his bleeding arm. Her face paled.
“If you faint on me,” he said, “I won’t marry you.”
She smiled. “Then I’d better not faint.”
❧
Lucinda filed the paperwork to postpone the hearing for John Paul’s emancipation as a minor wishing to be independent. With his stepfather captured and in jail awaiting trial for kidnapping and attempted murder, his claim wasn’t quite so urgent. It could wait until his mother recovered from a wound that proved more serious than a scratch.
Matt, too, was put to bed in one of the Woodcockses’ rooms, and Lucinda stayed with the Howards so she could be close at hand. Three days after the Christmas ball, they all gathered in the parlor with coffee and cakes, no one touching the latter, and Mrs. Woodcocks told her story.
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