My Enemy, My Heart (The Ashford Chronicles)

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “And you know Deirdre can barely walk,” Mama said, “let alone get up to mischief.”

  “Deirdre,” Kieran said through his teeth, “can always get up to mischief.”

  And he did not want her to change that indomitable spirit.

  “They did not while we were in Hampshire,” Tyne said.

  “Did they not?” Kieran ground his teeth. “Do we know that? Did we ask if Chloe took out the pony cart?”

  “She did not,” Tyne said. “I did ask.”

  “And neither of them has enough money to be bribing the servants,” Mama said.

  “No?” Kieran raised his hand toward the check string and have the carriage turn around. “I never found all that much gold out of the strongbox. If Deirdre retrieved those bank certificates from their hiding place, why could she not have hidden the gold somewhere more secure?”

  “You are not going to make us go back,” Juliet wailed. “We will miss the party.”

  Kieran stayed his hand, not wanting to hurt his younger sister. Still . . .

  “Sir?” He addressed his father, “Why did someone decide to steal our lambs in Hampshire?”

  Tyne knit his brows. “I presumed it was Rutledge up to more of his tricks.”

  Kieran lowered his hand, nearly convinced.

  “Kieran,” Mama said, “Deirdre could not have arranged for someone to steal lambs in Hampshire. She knows too few people.”

  “And Chloe?” Kieran asked. “She knows more people than I.”

  “She would still need to know someone who could travel that far,” Tyne pointed out, “and none of our people were gone long enough.”

  “Please stop this,” Juliet begged. “It will be my first real party not at our house, and now that you are no longer considered to be bad ton, I can start seeking a truly eligible husband.”

  “Not quite yet,” Mama said on a sigh. “I still need to marry off Chloe.”

  Talk turned to possibly taking the girls to London in the autumn for the Little Season. Kieran sat staring out the window, not caring about where Chloe would spend October. He wondered where he would spend it. Hampshire with his wife and baby? His baby? Of course it was. His family doubting him made him doubt himself, doubt how a lady as wonderful as Deirdre could want him because she cared about him. Yet his family was attempting to make up for their doubts. He raised his hand to the check string again. They were close enough to Plymouth he could hire a horse and return home.

  The coach stopped before he touched the signal to the driver. The hatch opened and the coachman’s wind-reddened face peered down. “There be a vehicle comin’ up fast, m’lord. I thought to let ’em pass afore—” His head disappeared.

  Kieran let down the window, letting in a blast of cool, sea-scented air, and poked his head out to see what had drawn the coachman’s attention. “What the—” He stared. “It’s a mule-drawn cart.”

  The lighter vehicle swept around them as though it were a phaeton and rocked to a halt.

  “He’s blocked the road.” Kieran reached for the door latch.

  “My party,” Juliet moaned.

  Kieran shoved open the door and leaped out without letting down the steps—and came face to face with Chloe in breeches running from the other vehicle.

  She grabbed his hands. “It is Deirdre. Her confinement.”

  “Then why did you leave her?” Kieran all but shouted at her. “You left her alone with servants? What if—”

  “Calm, my dear.” Phoebe rested her hand on his shoulder, then leaped to the ground with the grace of a young girl. “How long, Chloe?”

  “I do not know.” Chloe’s eyes were wild. “Two hours?”

  “Two hours?” This time, Kieran did shout. “It took you two hours to come?” He wanted to shake her.

  He was shaking, shattering inside. He was about to believe in Deirdre, but now nature had proven her a liar. Weeks early.

  “We’d best be on our way.” Mama was still calm. She turned back to the coach. “Garrett, my dear, will you continue on to Plymouth with Juliet? I think she is best off out of this.”

  Kieran glanced at his father. When Tyne leaned from the carriage to squeeze his shoulder, he thought perhaps his face gave away some of his agony.

  “Learn a lesson from us, my son,” Father said in a low voice. “Do not leap to conclusions without all of the information.”

  Kieran simply nodded. His throat felt too constricted for words.

  “Why are you in this cart?” Mama asked.

  “Why,” Kieran asked Chloe in a voice tight with control, “did you take two hours to reach us?”

  “Because—” Chloe covered her face with her hands. She was shaking and gasping as though she had run to fetch them. “Because we were nearly to Dartmoor when she told me.”

  Chapter 24

  You were nearly at Dartmoor.” Kieran stalked to the cart and gathered the reins so he did not strangle his sister. “Get in wherever you can fit.”

  Mama settled onto the seat beside him and bowed her head as though she were praying. If she were, he hoped that the Lord had mercy on Chloe and his wife; he could not. She had betrayed his country, his family, and him. She had lied to him.

  He shoved his fingers into his hair and gripped the sides of his head as though that could push the thoughts away—or hold his heart together.

  “Tell me,” he managed to get out without bellowing. “Everything. No, wait until we’re moving again.” With Chloe perched in the narrow bed of the cart, he started to turn the vehicle toward Bishops Cove.

  “We need to head up the road to the prison.” Chloe sounded like she was being choked.

  “Indeed.” Kieran lifted the whip from the box and cracked it over the mule’s back.

  The beast shot forward, and Chloe began to talk. She spilled everything as the cart began its climb away from the sea—the visit in April, the plans, the manipulating of circumstances that day.

  “She planned to pretend to be going into her confinement to create a distraction,” Chloe concluded. “With the new clothes the men have been able to purchase and hide with the gold we have smuggled in to them, they could pass as persons with wares to sell and leave while the guards were distracted with Deirdre and walk out. There is a boulder halfway down the gorge. Deirdre marked it in April, and I have gone back in the night to work around it with a spade. It is loose enough that a push will bring it coming crashing down and block the track from pursuit long enough for me to get the men away to hide in the caves until boats can get them away.”

  Kieran barely heard this explanation through the rush of blood in his ears. At that moment, he thought he could have outrun the mule. He hoped Chloe could outrun him. At the least, he would lock her in her bedchamber. She deserved to be in Newgate or transported to New South Wales.

  “And were you going to leave Deirdre there to suffer the consequences of your treason?” Mama asked.

  “You left my wife in a prison.” Kieran thought he would strangle from the effort not to shout at his sister. “That baby is going to be born in a prison?”

  “As though she were not already in a prison as your wife,” Chloe shot back. “I did what I thought best.”

  “Best would have been to stay—”

  “Children.” Phoebe flung up her hands, palms forward. “Chloe did the right thing. First babies rarely come quickly, but bumping about in a cart could hasten delivery, and Chloe is ill-equipped to manage such a thing.” She turned to Chloe with a smile. “Continue telling us about your plans. You were not going to leave Deidre in the prison after her men escaped?”

  “No, Mama.” Chloe’s hands opened and closed on her nankeen-clad knees. “She would ask to be taken to the inn at Princetown, and of course the guards would comply for a lady in that condition. And she could escape from there.”

  “Is that what you did?” Kieran asked. “Did the guards take her to the inn?”

  “I have no idea,” Chloe wailed. “I had to leave her. She was not supposed
to go into her confinement.”

  “Then you should not have waited so late in the season,” Kieran bit out. “We have been expecting it any day now.”

  Chloe thrust her face between Kieran and Mama and glared at him. “How dare you make accusations against her?”

  “How dare she betray me in favor of those men.”

  “Because she knows her crew loves her. They have been more of a family to her than we have and longer. They know this is all your fault.”

  “My fault—”

  “Children.” Though soft, Phoebe’s single word shut Kieran and Chloe up in an instant from a lifetime of experience. “This isn’t helping Deirdre any.”

  Chloe’s face twisted up, and tears ran down her face. “I tried to stop her once I knew. I could not stop her.”

  “And why was my sister there, too?” Kieran demanded. “Aiding and abetting—”

  “Kieran,” Phoebe interjected.

  Chloe wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Ross . . . Trenerry.”

  “For the love of—”

  For the first time in his life, Kieran wished he were a female so he could dissolve into tears. They had to feel better than the churning agony tearing his insides to shreds.

  “My wife led my sister into treason and introduced her to the man who . . . who is—” He could not say it, could not voice his fears.

  “Oh, Kieran.” Chloe wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “Do not be such a widgeon. Ross Trenerry is not that baby’s father nor is anyone else in that crew. He was devastated when he realized her condition. I saw his face, and he knew it meant she would not go with them. Would he assume that if he had a prior claim to the child?”

  “It would have a better life with us.”

  “He would not think that, not the way he hates us English.” Chloe was sobbing now, and Kieran took the reins on one hand so he could press her head against his shoulder. “It is not Deirdre’s fault that I . . . care for him. And I asked her if I could help. The conditions there . . . And it is an Ashford’s fault that her men are there. I had to help even after learning Mama’s story.”

  “But Deirdre is betraying me.” Kieran spoke the words, then realized that that mattered more to him than her treachery to England.

  “Loyalty to those we have loved the longest is a powerful lure,” Mama said. “I knew what I did was wrong, but I’d known Charlie, my fiancé, all my life in Savannah. I couldn’t dismiss him simply because I knew he wasn’t the loving man I’d always thought him.”

  “And Deirdre’s crew does still love her,” Chloe said. “Ross is angry, but that is because he is hurt that she loves someone else and an Englishman at that.” She poked Kieran in the chest. “You.”

  “I wish—” He heaved a sigh in an attempt to relieve the restriction across his chest. “Her baby . . . Risking you all for her crew . . . I mean nothing to her.”

  Beyond the rumble of the wheels and clatter of the mule’s hooves on the hard-packed track, the world seemed unnaturally still. Mama and Chloe said nothing. Kieran could think of nothing to say. Then the wall of the prison hove into view.

  “What do you intend to do?” Mama asked.

  He wanted to cry out, “She can deliver in a gutter like a Covent Garden whore for all I care about what happens to her or her brat.”

  But he did care about what happened to her. He loved her even now that he knew of more lies from her, more acts of treason and deceit. He loved her enough that he did not care who had fathered her child. Since it came from her womb, and if it grew to inherit only half of her spirit, he would be unable to do anything else but love it.

  “We have to fetch her home before she delivers our baby,” he said. “If there is time.”

  “Will you go get her?” Mama asked.

  “What about her crew?” Chloe asked. “Do we leave them to languish even longer in that hellhole?”

  “Chloe, your language,” Mama murmured.

  “We have everything arranged.” Chloe continued, her words tumbling over one another in her haste. “We have everything planned. A trap. Ponies on the moor. Provisions in one of the caves.”

  Kieran stopped the cart. He held up a hand to stop Chloe, then pulled out his penknife. “Her crew will not escape if I can help it.”

  As far as he was concerned, they could rot in prison for letting Deirdre risk her life and his family’s to get them out. As soon as she could travel, he would take Deirdre to Hampshire and too far from Dartmoor to do anything for them.

  But he had put them there.

  And had nearly lost his family’s regard for doing so. Now that he had rebuilt their respect and begun to realize that his father did love him, he could not risk it all for strangers.

  He began to saw at his hair with the knife. “We need disguises, Mama.”

  With his hair rough-cut like a laborer’s, divested of his fine coat and with his shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, he had done the best he could to mask his true identity. All Mama could do was tilt her hat brim to obscure her face and remove her gloves. But she could stay with the cart out of sight of the guards.

  Kieran and Chloe approached the prison. Austere gray walls and the smell of corruption made him ill. Human beings lived inside there. Died inside there. The guards looked stolid and bored where they stood near the gate.

  One barred their passage through the gate with an upraised musket, bayonet affixed. “You ain’t got naught to sell. You can’t go in.”

  “I think my widowed sister is here,” Kieran said in the broadest Devonshire accent he could produce. “I told her not to come, as she’s near her time, but she never listens. My brother-in-law is lucky he died and don’t have to live with her.” Kieran felt in his pocket and found half a crown. “Just let me in to fetch her, will you?”

  The guard glared at him. “Do you be tryin’ to bribe the king’s soldier?”

  “No, sir.” Kieran thought fast. “I thought you could pay a body to fetch her out for me, if she’s here.”

  “Aye, she’s here, caterwauling about going to the inn, but ain’t nobody gonna carry a female that big all that way.” The guard took the silver coin. “Go on with you.” He lowered his bayonet.

  Imagining that length of steel entering his back, Kieran shook his head at Chloe and went in alone. He spotted two of the Maid’s crew at once—Old Wat and a man whose name he did not know. Both looked ill. They stared at him, their eyes alight with recognition. He turned away, seeking Deirdre, seeing other men he knew—including Ross Trenerry.

  Trenerry stooped beside Deirdre, who sat on the ground, her arms wrapped around herself. A veil hid her face, but the bow of her body spoke of wracking pain.

  Kieran stalked over to them. “Get away from my wife.”

  Ross rose and stepped back. “Get her to safety. She needs to go where she can have help and forget about us.”

  “Can’t.” Deirdre was panting. “I’ll give birth here before I’ll let you all down. You know the plan. I’ll start screaming again—”

  “You are going—now.” Kieran knew he could not carry her. She was a big girl even without her burden. “If you help me carry her, Trenerry, you can go free.”

  With one crewman released, Deirdre might find some tenderness toward him eventually.

  Yet was some enough?

  “I’ll help you carry her out of here,” Ross said, “but I won’t run without the others.”

  “I’m not leaving. Can’t—” A moan replaced Deirdre’s protest.

  Together, Kieran and Ross lifted her and headed for the gates. She began to sob. The guard paid little attention to them as they were leaving. Ross could escape now with or without Kieran’s assistance.

  Ross helped Kieran settle Deirdre onto the seat of the cart, then turned and walked back through the prison gates.

  Deirdre cried out in protest.

  Mama scrambled into the back of the cart behind Deirdre. “We better be going.”

  She was right, but Kieran kept starin
g at those gates where Ross had returned to being a prisoner.

  Loyalty and love.

  Ross had just given up his hope of freedom for the sake of his crewmates. Deirdre was willing to have her baby in a prison yard to give those she loved a chance at freedom. Kieran knew he condemned all of them to more imprisonment because he was afraid that he might lose love. Yet he had done nothing for anyone he claimed to love. He had caused his family years of embarrassment and even shame for his rakehell ways because they did not treat him with the respect he thought they should, yet he said he loved them. He had humiliated Joanna before the ton because she had let herself get seduced by some man who abandoned her yet claimed he cared enough to spend his life with her. Now he intended to keep Deirdre and eleven men prisoners because his family might stop loving him, not because he believed they faced much danger unless outright caught. Yet he expected Deirdre to believe she should ally herself to him and his family. For what? A marriage that mostly benefited him, passion that would produce more children and curtail her freedom? A husband who distrusted her as much as he lusted after her, but did not claim to love her? He should expect nothing less from her than disloyalty when he had given her so little of himself to love.

  Chloe grasped his arm. “What are we going to do? The cart will never carry all of us.”

  “I see that.” Kieran took the reins from her and handed them to Mama. “You will need to drive home. You will get there faster without all our extra weight.”

  “How will you get home?” Mama looked around at the trickle of people leaving the prison yard.

  “Chloe and I will manage something. We can likely hire horses in Princetown.”

  “All right.” Mama compressed her lips, then lifted her head as though about to say something more, but Deirdre groaned, and Mama merely nodded before setting the cart into motion.

  Chloe turned toward the track into the town. “I hope you are right about hiring horses.”

  “We have no need of them from town.” Kieran took a deep breath. “Did you not say you and Deirdre arranged for ponies to await you all on the moor?”

  Deirdre couldn’t stop crying. She had failed her crew—again. After this escapade, Kieran would have every right to lock her in a room and throw away the key, maybe even take away her baby. Her crew would die. She had seen Wat in the prison yard. He was gray and gaunt, consumptive. Dying, while she now lay in a feather bed with a fire burning despite the warmth of the June evening.