by Merry Farmer
“I picked Eileen up at the train this morning,” Marshall said.
It was as good as if he had shouted at her. Mrs. Garforth’s mouth snapped shut and her expression pinched to deepest sympathy.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” she said in the opposite tone from what she’d used before. “Are…are the girls all right?”
“For now.” Marshall nodded and continued on.
Or tried to.
“Dr. Pycroft,” Mrs. Garforth caught up to him. Her expression was pinched and worried now.
“Yes?”
Mrs. Garforth hesitated. “Dr. Dyson is in the office, sir. She’s upset.”
Marshall’s heart slammed hard against his ribs. The way that poor, shriveled thing in his chest had been abused today was likely enough to kill it altogether. He nodded to Mrs. Garforth, then picked up speed, rushing down the hall. There could only be one explanation for Alexandra upset in the office—with the door closed, he noticed as he drew closer. George Fretwell.
He was nearly at a run by the time he reached the office and threw open the door. The motion of opening the door cut short a pitiful moan from Alexandra, who had her head down on her arms over the desk. She gasped and jerked straight when he entered the room. Sure enough, her face was red, puffy, and tear-streaked.
Eileen had put him on edge, but George Fretwell pushed him to the verge of murder.
With astounding calm, Marshall shut the door behind him.
“What happened?” he asked, walking toward the desk.
Alexandra’s startled expression melted, inch by inch, to twisting pain that pierced his own gut. “He doesn’t want me,” she said in a voice soggy with weeping.
He wanted to rush across the room, scoop her into his arms, and declare in no uncertain terms that he wanted her. He wanted to kiss away those tears and hold her to his heart until she forgot everything about the blackguard Fretwell. And yes, part of him wanted to shout at her that he had told her this would happen.
Instead, he approached her with caution, unable to keep the sympathetic pain from his own expression.
“I’m so sorry,” he muttered, feeling how useless the words were before they left his lips.
Alexandra’s face pinched to fresh tears. She broke into open weeping. “He told me I should have known it was just a lark, that he was never serious. How could he?”
Marshall opened his mouth to answer, but shut it again. Nothing he could say would make things better. Nothing would make a difference. He pulled a spare chair from the room’s small table and sat by Alexandra’s side.
“I gave him everything,” she sobbed on, twisting in her chair to face him.
She was wearing a pretty morning dress with lace accents—too fancy for the hospital. She must have dressed to please the rogue, then fled his presence before she had a chance to change.
“I took him to my bed,” she went on, voice higher, almost a squeak. “How could he think that meant nothing to me?”
Again, not a single thing Marshall could say would do any good, even if it was the truth. He’d seen what Fretwell was from the beginning.
“I was going to marry him. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a man—charming, generous, handsome.”
Everything I am not, Marshall thought.
“I experienced things with him that I had never known,” she continued, driving the knife deeper into his heart. “Passion, lust, longing.”
She stopped, choked on her grief, wracked with weeping.
Marshall was impotent to stop her misery, much though he longed to. He did the only thing he could think of—he reached out and took her tear-dampened hand in both of his.
His gesture only served to make Alexandra weep harder. She wiped her dripping face with her free hand, then clasped it over his. He shifted closer to her, adjusting his grip so that he held both of her hands. It didn’t matter that they were wet or that her nose was streaming along with her eyes now.
“You will get through this,” he told her, worlds more confident than he felt.
“No.” She shook her head. “I won’t. I can’t. My heart is broken.” Her shoulders heaved.
“You will get through this,” he repeated, stronger. “You are proud, Alexandra Dyson. You will not let one man with ill intentions pull you under.”
“But I love him,” she protested. “I love him so much.”
He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she saw sense. Love him? Men like that didn’t deserve the love of women like Alexandra.
He freed one hand and raised it to brush her tears away with his thumb, cradling her cheek when he was finished. Brow furrowed in grief, she pressed her cheek into his hand. Marshall’s heart leapt hopelessly. In that moment, she was weak. He could lean closer to her and steal the kiss he so longed to steal from her reddened lips. She would let him take it just to feel something.
“You are stronger than this set-back,” he told her, shaking with the effort not to tug her into his embrace. “You are a fine, worthy doctor.”
“But that’s the point,” she wailed, startling him almost to the point of letting go of her. “He said I’m unfeminine, that he would never marry a woman doctor.”
“Then he’s a coward and a fool!” At last, the full force of Marshall’s fury—and his hurt—burst forth. Alexandra gasped and met his eyes. He dropped his hand to cover hers again. “Any man that would toss a woman aside because of the very thing that makes her extraordinary doesn’t deserve that woman.”
She blinked at him, lashes clumped and damp, eyes shining. If only she knew how beautiful she was in her vulnerability.
A moment later, she shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not extraordinary. I’m an aberration, a freak of nature.”
“Hush, don’t say that.” He scooted closer still, tightening his hold on her hands. “In this moment, you are upset. That’s to be expected. There’s nothing abnormal about that.”
“But, Marshall—”
He silenced her with a long, “Shh,” wanting to lay his fingers on her lips. “Hush now. The pain is too great for you to see the truth as it is right now. Give it some time.”
“There is no time,” she fretted. “The house party is over before the end of the week. I’ll lose him for good if I don’t do something.”
Lose him for good? Did the woman actually want the bastard back?
He scrambled for something to say, searched for words that might fit. Everything that came to mind began with “Are you mad?” or ended with “Bollocks to him.” Nothing was going to make her see sense.
So he waited. He waited until she cried her eyes dry. Waited until the intensity of the pain in her face flattened to dull acceptance. He waited, but she didn’t pull her hands away from his.
Finally, he said, “We have young Jimmy Hale’s bowel obstruction to remove.”
They were the furthest thing from romantic or soothing words that could possibly be spoken, and yet somehow, they worked. Alexandra drew in a breath and nodded. She hummed and rolled her eyes as she realized what she must look like, and at last, pulled her hands away from Marshall’s. Marshall pushed back and scanned the room for some kind of handkerchief. He’d left a slightly used one on the corner of his desk. He reached for it now, handing it to her. She took it and dried her eyes, blew her nose.
“Thank you,” she said in the smallest of voices. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me, to have you as a friend.”
Friend. In that moment, with all he’d been through since daybreak, it was a consolation. He smiled and stood, helping her to her feet.
“Do you need a few more minutes to compose yourself?” he asked, standing closer to her than he should.
For the love of all that was good and holy, why couldn’t she just love him?
She nodded, sending him a weak smile.
“Then I’ll make the rounds and see to the patients in the waiting room that the nurses haven’t already treated. After that, we can prep Jimmy for
his surgery.”
He left before he could say more. He hadn’t mentioned a thing to her about his own troubles—about the girls and Eileen, about Lawrence’s odd behavior or the trouble Matty might be in. One might argue that he had every right to complain, that the depth of his trials superseded the frivolity of her own, but a woman’s heart trumped all other evils.
No, Alexandra’s heart trumped everything.
He completed his rounds, holding his emotions inside. Alexandra emerged from his office a half hour later, looking exhausted and worn, but not so obviously bereft. They said nothing as they scrubbed and dressed for surgery, as Simon brought young Jimmy into the room and helped him to lay on the table. They set to work, putting Jimmy under with ether and making the first incisions. All of it felt almost normal, as if life went on, no matter what trials people faced.
It wasn’t until they were closing Jimmy up that shouts were heard down the hall.
“You will not hold me back,” Eileen’s voice boomed from the hall. “I must speak to him.”
Marshall glanced up from his work and frowned.
“What is it?” Alexandra asked.
“Eileen,” he answered.
“She’s here?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Marshall didn’t answer. She could figure that out on her own.
“Get away from me,” Eileen shouted, far closer than she had been moments before.
Marshall barely had Jimmy’s abdomen sewed up before his wife’s sister burst through the surgery door. Her ire flashed to shock at the sight of the boy on the operating table, Marshall and Alexandra swathed in white surgical outfit, standing over him. She pressed a hand to her chest, but her stunned silence only lasted for a moment.
“Where are they?” she demanded.
“Eileen, this is a surgery,” Marshall told her, shaking with anger. Without words, he handed the needle to Alexandra to finish the final stitches.
“Where are the girls?” Eileen continued to demand.
Marshall was halfway around the table before he froze. “What do you mean, where are the girls?”
“They’re gone,” Eileen announced. “Disappeared.”
Lawrence
The Fox and The Lion was all but deserted so early in the morning. A few regulars—men who were out of work or worked the night shift at the factory near Ambleside—were tucked up in corners, discussing yesterday’s news with no mind for the regular flow of the outside world. Lawrence had chosen this time, this place on purpose. There were enough witnesses who knew him to keep an eye out, but not so many as to make a stranger nervous. It was the perfect set-up for a trap.
“Lawrence,” Ted Folley nodded to him from behind the bar as he washed out glasses with a clean rag. “Business slow?”
“Not particularly,” Lawrence answered, sliding up to the bar.
Ted eyed him askance. “Word on the street is that the forge has been closed as often as not lately.”
Lawrence shrugged. “I’ve had other business.”
“That so?”
All Ted got in response was a knowing grin from Lawrence.
Ted nodded, getting the message. “What’ll it be?”
“A pint.”
Ted turned to pull the pint, and Lawrence surveyed the room. There were plenty of dark corners in the old pub where he could have the conversation he needed to. The darker the corner, the more likely Bobbo was to confess.
From the moment Matty had spilled her entire story, Lawrence couldn’t rest. All this time, they’d been waiting for her memory to come back, waiting for the time that the truth would be known so that they could deal with it. But the truth was far more difficult than anyone had expected. Matty hadn’t killed her mother, but she’d played a part in that horrific night. The pieces of a much bigger puzzle had come together in Lawrence’s mind as she had finally revealed the whole story to him, with Mother Grace’s help and guidance. Hoag was as black-hearted a murderer as they came, but with only his word against Matty’s, with the injuries Hoag had sustained, obvious for any judge to see, any attempt to bring the case out into the open would be as dangerous for Matty as for Hoag. More dangerous.
“Here you go.” Ted brought a frothing glass of beer to Lawrence, sliding it across the counter. “Mind you don’t get into the habit of early-morning drinking. I’d hate to see a good man go the way of that lot.” He nodded to one of the groups of drunks just as they burst into snorting laughter.
“Cheers.” Lawrence picked up the pint and headed to the dark corner without further comment.
Cool and crisp as the beer was, it didn’t make a dent in the sense of menace pressing down on him. His mind kept looping back to the law. The law should work in Matty’s favor, should protect the innocent. It wouldn’t. Not without evidence. Not without a push. It had taken the better part of a week—not to mention consultation with Mother Grace and Jason—to come up with so much as a flicker of a plan. The truth was not enough. What they needed was a witness.
Lawrence sank to sit with his back against the wall, waiting. Robert Carlson. Hoag’s best friend. Matty had recognized him on the street and confessed as much to Mother Grace. Good old Bobbo sounded exactly like the kind of toady who would crawl through muck and love it in order to earn the favor of a more powerful man like Hoag. If Matty’s suspicions were right, Bobbo would know the truth, may even have played a part in the events of that night. And if he was as much of a worm as Matty made him out to be, there was a possibility he could be turned. Or at least that he might squeal to save his own hide.
It was all they had to go on.
The thought rolled over and over Lawrence’s mind, causing him to bob his leg up and down with impatience for the worm himself to show up. He’d sent the invitation the only way he knew how—by giving his description to some of the town’s most clever urchins and waiting until one of them found Bobbo and delivered it. The Fox and The Lion. Thursday. Ten-thirty. All he had to do was wait.
At quarter to eleven, the pub’s door inched open, and Bobbo scraggly, grimy head poked around, checking the place out. Lawrence waited, expressionless, until Bobbo saw him, then flinched. Lawrence caught his eye and held it, unmoving. His heart thumped in his chest and his fingers itched to form into fists, to pummel the man to within an inch of his life for the harm he’d caused Matty, directly or indirectly.
Bobbo straightened, came fully into the pub, and let the door shut behind him. He tugged at his vest as if wearing the king’s clothes, then strolled over to meet Lawrence in the dark corner. The regulars kept right on laughing over whatever ribald discussion they were having, but their eyes followed Bobbo’s path.
“What do you want,” Bobbo growled, plopping into the chair across the table from Lawrence.
“I want you to tell me the truth,” Lawrence said. Might as well come right out with it, though there was no chance Bobbo would play along.
Sure enough, Bobbo laughed. It was a horrible, wheezing sound that raised the hair on the back of Lawrence’s neck. “I got plenty of truth for you, if you want it,” he said.
Lawrence wouldn’t play along. “Trevor Hoag killed his wife.”
Bobbo undulated into a long shrug, his face suggesting he would have fun playing with Lawrence, but telling him nothing. “Don’t seem too likely when the coppers are already looking for that girl of yours to nab her for it.”
“Matty is innocent,” Lawrence said.
“Not what I hear,” Bobbo guffawed.
“She is, and you know it.”
Bobbo sniffed and leaned back against the wall. “Way I hear it, she’s guilty as sin, blood on her hands.”
“But you know that isn’t true.” Lawrence leaned across the table, staring hard at Bobbo. He would break. He had to. It was all about finding his weak spot.
“How would I know anything?” Bobbo went on. “I weren’t there when it happened.”
“Maybe not,” Lawrence conceded, “but you’r
e Hoag’s friend.”
“Right you are.” Bobbo grinned. “And I intend to stay that way.”
“By lying for him?” Lawrence pressed.
Bobbo shrugged again. The gesture irritated Lawrence to no end, set his teeth on edge. He would not be made a fool of, not by this turd of humanity.
“You’ll go to prison, you know,” he tossed at Bobbo, hoping the threat would have an effect.
“For what? I ain’t done nothing.”
“For being an accomplice to murder,” Lawrence said. He had no idea if that could happen, but he had to press on with conviction. “For knowing who the guilty party was but doing nothing about it.”
Bobbo arched an eyebrow. “The girl’s the one that did it. Seems to me as you’re the bloke who should be worried about going to prison as a ’compliss.”
Lawrence shook his head. “Matty is innocent. She doesn’t have the strength to strangle and stab a woman. No court of judge that took one look at her would convict her. Any judge that looked at Hoag, however….”
He let his statement hover in the air between them. At last, Bobbo’s calm faltered. He cleared his throat and sat up straighter.
“The law thinks the girl did it,” he said.
“The law hasn’t seen Matty. They’re going on Hoag’s word alone. Hoag doesn’t have a spotless reputation, does he?”
It was all a guess, but the sudden shifty look that came to Bobbo’s eyes told Lawrence he was on the right track.
“He’s been before the judge before,” Lawrence pressed on, guessing as he went. “So have you.”
“It were for nothing,” Bobbo blurted. “They couldn’t prove a thing.”
“But the suspicion is there,” Lawrence tightened the screws. “One more whiff of crime around you and it’ll all be over.”
Now Bobbo was sweating. “I had nothing to do with it,” he said, thumping his fist on the table.
“But Hoag did,” Lawrence went on.
“It wasn’t me,” Bobbo insisted. “They can’t send me up just because someone told me a story.”
“About what really happened that night.” Lawrence was so close he could taste it. “Hoag killed his wife. Matty is innocent.”
