Scandalous Ever After

by Theresa Romain

  But what if he could hear her in some way? What if some part of his spirit might respond to her words? She would bother him into staying. She would persuade him to wake, just by wanting it so damned much. Her heart beat for two.

  “I’ve hurt you. I said I didn’t want anything to change between us, but I took every intimacy you would give. I was so selfish. I hope—that is not the way I always was. I hope that in itself was a change. And if I would change for the worse, why should I not change for the better? I don’t want to be fearful, Evan. I fear losing you, so much right now. I feared losing you the first time I saw you again in Cambridge. That fear is from love—but I’ll act on the love now, not the fear. I would lose you by risking nothing, so instead I will risk everything. Only wake, and I will show you.”

  These words were not persuasive enough to initiate a medical miracle.

  “Let’s try water again. The doctor thought it would help.” She rose on legs made unsteady by fatigue, fumbling for the glass. The flicker of the lamp, or her own bleary eyes, caused her to misjudge the distance, and instead of gripping it, she tipped it. Cool water hit Evan in the face before Kate’s wet fingers righted the dripping glass.

  “Sorry about that.” She felt for a cloth then wiped his face with the edge of the sheet. “We seem to be short on handkerchiefs. Again.”

  His lids moved. She was not imagining it this time, was she? No, it was not the flickering light. Dark lashes rose, fell again. The shallow breath became deeper, like the catching of breath after a long sleep.

  “Kate,” he mumbled. “Water.”

  She all but collapsed into her chair, then drew it closer to the bedside. “Yes. I’m here. Kate. Water. I threw it on you, but—maybe that was good, because you’re awake. Are you awake? Do you want water?” She took up the glass again, carefully, and cradled his head so he could take a sip.

  “Why…?” His voice was thready and faint, his body still. She set aside the water and leaned close to his lips, listening. “Why do I smell like a butcher shop?”

  She snorted. “That, of all questions, is your first? There was an incident with beef broth.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nora and I spilled it when we were trying to get you to take some. I took off your cravat and collar, but you ought to have a bath.”

  His expression altered—a flicker of oh, please, you know that’s not what I mean. His hand moved, fingers flexing toward his head.

  “You were hit on the head.”

  A tiny nod. “A stone. Grazed me.”

  Kate sat up straight. “A footpad threw a stone at you?”

  “No, it fell. In the castle.”

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were delirious. But I do know what you mean. You went looking for evidence of those statues.” Kate cursed. “Was there a footpad at all? Were you by the Suir?”

  “At Loughmoe.”

  Kate cursed again. “Driscoll fed me a pack of lies. Or the men who took you to Driscoll fed them to him.” Far less palatable than potatoes, these were.

  “My coat…the cinch…” His hand made a wave, a grasp.

  “Your coat’s here. You had the cinch with you? There is nothing in the pockets now. Those footpads have unusual preferences.”

  “No footpads. Old stone,” Evan mumbled. “Good way to be injured. Noble.”

  The crook of his mouth, more than his fragmented words, told Kate he was making a joke. Relief was like a wave. “Yes, Evan. If one must be hit on the head, it should be by an old stone from a castle.” She smoothed back his hair, for a reason to touch him. “Now I know you will recover. And wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be hit on the head by a stone? You’d come up with all these ways for me to meet my end.”

  “Had to test it for you. Seems it wasn’t a good idea after all.”

  “I believe that. It won’t kill you, but it’ll make you powerfully determined.”

  He moved a hand, brushing hers, and she caught it. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” he mumbled. “But Con was contrary.”

  A random observation, but she took it in stride. “He certainly was. That was part of his charm, wasn’t it?”

  “Too much.” His eyes were closing again, his voice growing fainter. “He said he’d care for her and the boy. He should have cared for all of you.”

  “What?”she whispered, doubting her own ears. “Cared for whom?”

  “Mary, Mary,” Evan said again. His eyes closed, his breathing slowing in the fall of sleep.

  Kate stretched out beside him on the bed, boneless. Puzzled. And yet…not, exactly. Evan’s words had the ring of familiarity, something she’d learned but never allowed herself to know.

  His longtime mistress had had his baby, and that mistress’s name was Mary. This much Kate had long known. Everyone in Ireland, it seemed, knew. Con had built two families for himself, and he had provided for neither.

  What could have created a permanent breach between Con and Evan but a matter of honor? Con could not be brought to care for the welfare of others, but he could not bear to be criticized for it. The appearance of honor was the only thing Con held fast to. Everything else was a possession to be admired, then forgotten.

  Queasiness seized her, and she rolled from the bed and scrabbled for the chamber pot. She was sick into it, again and again, until she was heaving nothing but sour air.

  This was what she had feared: not change she chose, but change in spite of herself. Change that rocked her world and made it unfamiliar. The two men she loved both hid secrets from her: Con to protect himself, Evan to protect his friend.

  Oh, God—and they thought they were protecting her too, didn’t they? Keep this from Kate. She’s better off not knowing the truth. They could apply this to debt, to smuggling, to anything they wished not to bring into the light.

  As if it could ever be better to live a lie that might crumble. Who was helped by hiding the truth? By pretending everything was fine, and they were all content? As long as they pretended, such contentment could never become real.

  You are not perfect, but you are just right. If this were true, why hadn’t she been enough for Con? If she were just right as a wife, why had her husband strayed? Why hadn’t he cared about anyone’s well-being but his own?

  Or maybe that was what one did, if one were an earl and one’s wife was just right. She hadn’t divided herself into pieces alone. The more she tried to be for Con, the more diminished she became. Yes, he was the one who had strayed, but they had first become unhappy together.

  With watering eyes, Kate covered the mess in the chamber pot with a cloth. Her hands were steady now, steady as Evan’s breathing. He slept, and he would wake when he was ready. Already the night promised to end, the black outside the windows turning to gray.

  “Some grays are good.” She watched him sleep, innocent of what he’d shaken within her.

  It was for the best: that she knew. Right now, he slept on. His task was to heal. Hers? To stop being such a damned fool and to learn all she could. Con had left more affairs unsettled than even Kate realized. She would put them right—not for his sake, but for everyone else’s.

  Easing open the door, she looked for a servant who might spell her at Evan’s bedside. Instead, she spotted two huddled figures in nightshirts, sitting in the corridor outside the bedchamber.

  “Declan. Nora.” You know you have a half-sibling, right? And as much as I worry about money, the baby’s mother must. More so.

  She was so surprised to see them that she almost spoke the words uppermost in her mind. They deserved to know, but there was much more she needed to learn first.

  She crouched beside them, the lamplight from the room filtering over their pale, tired faces. “You must be worrying over Evan. He’s sleeping now, but it’s the good sort of sleep.”

  Nora sagged against Kate. “Will he be all r
ight?”

  “He made a joke about being happy to be hit on the head by an ancient stone, so I think he will be absolutely fine.”

  “We want to see Uncle Evan,” Declan said.

  She hesitated. “He’s not your uncle, you know. And the room smells of sickness and old beef broth.”

  Nora peered at the doorway, wrinkling her nose. “We can see him after the room is cleaned. And he’s better than our uncle, because we don’t have to call him uncle, but we want to. You and Da picked him as our godfather.”

  “And he picked us to spend time with,” added Declan. “So he wants to be in our family.”

  Did he?

  They were so beautiful, these young people. She’d had a part in creating them, but they were not of her. They were themselves, better than she could ever have imagined.

  She smiled, wanting to ruffle their hair, but restraining herself. “How did you two get to be so certain of everything?”

  They looked at her blankly. “What is there to be unsure of?” asked Nora.

  “A fine question,” Kate said. “Right now, it is the one uppermost on my mind—above all the other things.”

  “It must be horrid being a countess,” said Declan.

  “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it has its benefits. But being a mother is even better.” She dropped kisses on their heads, then stood. “Keep watch on the lamp for a moment, will you? I need to find someone to take my place in there.”

  And then? She’d find the answers to her questions. Likely she could find out most of them without even leaving her household, for servants knew everything that was going on upstairs and down. A servant raised in Thurles, native to the land and raised among the longtime families, would know even more. Would know where to look for answers that she didn’t possess herself.

  With quick steps, Kate followed the corridor from Evan’s bedchamber to her own suite of rooms. She opened the door and crossed to the nook belonging to her lady’s maid, Susan.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, shaking the shoulder of the sleeping maid until she turned over, startled awake. “It’s so early, I know. But Susan, you must tell me whatever you can.”

  Twenty-five

  At an hour of the morning respectable for being received as a caller, Kate left Whelan House. She was armored as well as a countess could be: bathed and fed, dressed in a riding habit, her head topped with a hat studded with silk flowers that had once seemed so smart.

  She also carried a pistol, because even countesses needed the assistance of a shot sometimes. She would not use it to kill, but to put fear into someone? Yes, indeed. And maybe to maim—if necessary.

  Awakened early and peppered with questions, Susan had been abashed and fearful until Kate reassured her and fetched tea from the kitchen. “With your own hands!” Susan accepted the cup from Kate, still huddled in her bedclothes, but was so distressed at being served by the countess that Kate again offered to take every helpful act from Susan’s wages.

  This unlocked both a laugh and the maid’s tongue. She knew Con’s mistress well, having been a servant at Whelan House for some of the time Mary O’Dowd had.

  “Mary, Mary,” Kate murmured.

  “You’d know her by sight if you saw her about the village,” Susan said, evidently taking Kate’s low reply as confusion. “She has hair red as a fox pelt, and she’s as pocked as the moon since a few years ago when she took ill with smallpox.”

  Kate raised her brows. “She’s prettier than she sounds,” Susan said.

  Kate raised her brows still further.

  “Not that it matters,” Susan hurried to add.

  So it all spilled forth, with a smoothness that cemented together the broken pieces Kate had collected over the years. Con had split from Mary at the time he wed Kate. But he went back to the mistress, time and again, even as he slaked his casual lusts with other women too.

  It was an odd sort of fidelity. Maybe it was the only sort of which he was capable.

  “And how does she live now?” Kate asked. “The late earl cannot have left her well off.”

  “I don’t know about that. I know she gets money and doesn’t ask questions. It’s always better not to ask questions.” Susan clutched at her sheet. “Isn’t it?”

  “Was that a question?” Kate arched a brow.

  “Are you angry with me?” Susan whispered.

  “With you? Heavens, no. You were reluctant to tell tales that were none of your affair, and such discretion is admirable. No, I’m not angry at all.” Kate answered with perfect honesty, almost surprised to realize it. “I’m not angry at all. Just weary, Susan. Weary and ready for answers.”

  The first seeds of this bramble knot had been sown before Kate met Con. More had been added when they married, still more when Con overspent their income year after year. When Mary O’Dowd grew ill, drawing Con back to her side; when the winter grew harsh and crops failed. All this, over years, had ended in a slashed saddle cinch and a dead earl.

  All this, over years, had continued even since Con’s death. But it would stop now. It would be sorted out. And everyone would get what he or she needed.

  Starting with Driscoll. Driscoll, who didn’t know who had come upon the injured Evan, but seemed otherwise certain of the circumstances. Driscoll, who—as Susan said—kept Mary O’Dowd supplied with coin, but was not her protector. Driscoll, the first to blunder into a link between Con and a set of odd little statues with pull-apart forms. Driscoll, who had bought up Con’s debts after his death. Debts he would never have been able to secure were the earl, charismatic and full of promises, still alive.

  To Driscoll she would go—after she retrieved a constable. Even countesses in possession of fashionable hats and pistols needed additional protection sometimes. Dressed in her riding habit, she entered the stables and greeted surprised grooms. “I should like Lucy to be saddled, please.”

  And for the first time in two years, Kate took to the back of a horse.

  When they set out into the morning air, fresh and cool as only autumn can be, Kate felt solid in a way she had not for quite some time. Riding Lucy, rocking with the flowing cadence of the horse’s strides, was like being part of a team she had abandoned. It was like rediscovering part of herself. One that looked higher and moved faster.

  One that would have a dreadfully sore backside the following day. But that didn’t matter now. Kate nudged Lucy into a trot, and together they covered the distance between the Whelan lands and the town of Thurles.

  Almost as soon as they fell into a walk on the high street, they encountered a commotion. The landlady who kept the lodging house beside Bridge Castle was out in the street, wailing to an interested crowd. “Gone this morning, and without a word!”

  Lucy pricked up her ears.

  “I agree,” said Kate. “Let’s find out what’s happened.”

  A quick word at the edge of the crowd told her what had passed: Mrs. McIlhenny had awoken at her usual hour, gone to collect the weekly rent, and found Miss Ahearn’s room vacated. Ever since, there had been much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  “Did Miss Ahearn steal from her landlady when she left?”

  The ear Kate had caught belonged to a housemaid of Mrs. McIlhenny, who answered in the negative. “Only her own things, plus a funny little stone sculpture the missus used to keep on the mantel in the parlor. But that were a gift from Miss Ahearn, so I don’t think it’s stealing, like.”

  “Right.” This was getting more and more curious. “Miss Ahearn paid her rent? Or was she behind on it?”

  “She wasn’t, at that. Always beforehand, she was, and she left enough to cover the next month.”

  “Then what is your mistress wailing about?” As if seconding Kate’s question, Lucy shook her head and snorted.

  “The missus, she likes to wail. And who am I to stop her?” The housemaid winked. “It�
�s as good as a holiday, hearing her go on like this. Think I’ll get a currant bun and enjoy the show.”

  Kate nudged Lucy onward, letting the bay pick her own footing through the crowd on the high street. “What does it mean, Luce? She had family in Dublin whom she visited often. They must have had some emergency, and she had to go to them at once.”

  Lucy’s ears flicked as Kate spoke. With a little shake of her head, one warm brown eye regarded Kate. You know better than that.

  “The sculpture, hmm? I agree. That’s damning evidence. But of what, I don’t know.”

  It was time to find Driscoll. At Bridge Castle, Kate found a constable on duty. She persuaded him to come with her after swearing on a Bible, on the soul of her dead husband, and on her dear late mother, that Mr. Driscoll had been involved in injuring Evan Rhys, and she needed an officer of the law to confront…well, an officer of the law.

  The constable, a ruddy-faced young man with a shock of hair the same shade as his chestnut horse’s coat, mounted up and followed Kate and Lucy to the Prancing Pony. “Will he be in there?”

  “He’s always in there,” Kate replied grimly.

  But she was wrong, or was after a few seconds. When the constable swung down from his horse and entered the public house, a great crashing of furniture ensued. Then shouts, then another crash—and then the constable jetted forth, shouting, “He’s gone out the back!”

  Before the young man could remount, Kate wheeled Lucy. Tightening her leg around the pommel of the sidesaddle, Kate bent forward, looking through the churn of the crowd still blocking the high street.

  There! Driscoll’s rotund figure was unmistakable. He had mounted a white horse and tried to set off at a good clip, but the crowd prevented him from getting away quickly.

  “After him, Luce.” Kate spurred the mare along, giving her a quick pat on the neck. “The constable will have to catch up when he can.”

  Progress back up the street was frustratingly slow, as Kate reined Lucy in every other step to avoid treading on someone. She kept the white horse in sight, and even caught up a little when a familiar housemaid, currant bun in hand, dodged back and forth before the white horse and the magistrate.