The Miss Mirren Mission

by Jenny Holiday

  Spending all day having her bones jostled in the coach, followed by a late dinner with the gentlemen, had inspired Emily to set off in search of solitude. Welcoming the opportunity to stretch her legs a bit, she’d followed the earl’s direction that they should make themselves at home and climbed to the top floor.

  So much had happened in the last few days that her nerves were humming: the heartbreak of the forsaken speech, the shock of Lord Blackstone’s revelation—and all that happened afterward. She was glad to be here with everyone, and it was wonderful to feel that she was part of something, but after a long day she wanted to be alone, away even from Angela, who lurked in Emily’s bedchamber, unpacking.

  And, if she were being honest, she had to admit that she was avoiding Lord Blackstone. Despite their encounter in her bedchamber last night, he had been nothing but the perfect gentleman today. There was no sign from him that anything was amiss. He was obviously not affected by their intimacies. So neither would she be. She’d wanted some experience, and she’d gotten it. Experiment over, end of story.

  Taking a deep breath of the musty air, she returned her attention to the gallery. If she were a peeress, she would display pictures of her ancestors prominently rather than let them molder away in a distant corner of her house. She simply could not imagine having access to likenesses of one’s ancestors and not wanting to look at them all the time.

  She eyed a dour-looking woman in a gable headdress with a loose veil down the back. The Blackstone title must be very old, judging from this and some of the other ancient styles displayed at this end. Rows and rows of ancestors stared down at her as she walked the long, narrow room. She began to revise her opinion. Perhaps secluded galleries were the best place to keep one’s family history after all. When there was so much of it, she could see how it might become overwhelming.

  When she reached the far end, she stopped in front of an image of a woman who looked very like Lord Blackstone. Well, she resembled him superficially in that they shared the same dark hair and eyes. Beyond that, the woman seemed…empty. It was difficult to put a finger on, but there was a kind of remoteness in her gaze that made her seem not quite of this world. Yet Emily could not tear her eyes away.

  “Miss Mirren. I hoped I’d find you.”

  She jumped. Emily didn’t like to think of herself as a jittery sort. But where he was concerned, she was always gasping, startling. It was exceedingly irritating. Recovering herself, she turned and said, “Apparently you are a good spy.”

  Footsteps echoing, he strode toward her from the far end of the room, gaze darting to the painting she’d been looking at and then back to her. “I wanted to discuss the matter of Manning’s arrival. I think it best if he doesn’t know you’re here.”

  She nodded. “I agree.”

  “You agree?”

  “Did you come braced for battle, Lord Blackstone?” She couldn’t help teasing, though she’d just vowed to hold herself aloof from him.

  “I confess I did.”

  “I am here with a chaperone, of course, so he can’t argue that, but I think it’s better if he doesn’t know I’m here at all. And so we are in perfect agreement. How unusual.” She let a genuine smile blossom, and the grin he summoned in return calmed her jittery insides.

  “He sent a letter saying that the boat will arrive Thursday, and he is due Wednesday. He won’t stay here, but he’s likely to call. I think it’s best if you spend Wednesday and Thursday in the house’s private quarters. There are several nice morning rooms. We’ll all do our best to keep you entertained.”

  “Your house is endlessly fascinating,” she said, gesturing around the room.

  “This is not my favorite part of it, I must admit.”

  Emily felt oddly guilty, like she’d been caught doing something forbidden. “She looks like you,” she said, feeling the need to explain why she’d been so intensely scrutinizing the image before them. “Or you look like her, I suppose I should say. The likeness is striking, particularly around the mouth. She must be your mother?”

  “Yes.” The affirmation came out short, clipped.

  “You don’t like to think there is a resemblance?”

  “I shouldn’t like to think I take after her, no.”

  “But looks are very superficial, are they not? A man cannot control his looks, but he can create his own character.” Feeling bold, she gestured to the next painting, which was of the same woman, with a boy who looked to be about ten. “Is this your brother?”

  He followed her gaze. Another “Yes,” this one less terse than the previous, and followed with the hint of a smile. “I remember when they sat for that. Alec had to be bribed with sweets.”

  “And where are you?” she asked, turning around in place, looking for another family image, or perhaps one of the modern-day earl, painted since he’d ascended the title. It took only a moment to realize her error. There were no images of Lord Blackstone. None at all. She turned back to his mother. Perhaps her eyes weren’t empty so much as cruel.

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard her. Maybe he truly hadn’t, because he stared at the portrait of his mother and brother with a focused intensity. When he finally spoke, he didn’t take his eyes off the picture. “My mother suffered the same affliction as my brother.”

  Emily nodded, though he still wasn’t looking at her.

  “Except,” Lord Blackstone continued, “she was more violent than Alec, angrier.” Pulling his eyes from the image, he settled his gaze on her without modulating its ferocity. “She killed herself, too.” He paused. “Does that shock you?”

  It did, but she shook her head.

  “Does anything shock you, Miss Mirren?”

  “Perhaps only that you have survived your childhood so well,” she whispered.

  That earned her a bitter laugh. “My mother wanted her second child to be a girl. That’s why I’m not in any of the pictures. ‘I delivered the heir, no need for a spare,’ she said. Repeatedly.” He grimaced. “I think you would be shocked if I told you about some of her more violent and irrational behavior. Anyone would be.”

  Emily’s heart wrenched to think of young Lord Blackstone, excluded from the family portrait—and from his mother’s affections. “And your father?”

  “Because my mother was difficult to live with, he chose to absent himself as much as possible. He was rarely home. And home was generally London. We only came here when my mother was having a period of improvement.” He closed his eyes again and let a long silence unspool before continuing. “I knew she killed herself, though it was never discussed. At least not openly. I was nine and Alec thirteen. My father tried to cover it up, but we knew. She was found in a stream here on the estate. Drowning was the official explanation. But she was a country girl. She knew how to swim. She’s the one who taught me.” His eyes found hers, and she almost gasped at the pain she saw in them, visible for just an instant before he transformed himself back into the inscrutable aristocrat.

  …

  Swimming with his mother. Blackstone hadn’t thought of that day for twenty years. He’d been young, and hadn’t yet learned not to trust his mother’s sudden bursts of kindness.

  Emily’s eyes sparkled like dark sapphires. Amazingly, he saw no pity in them. It’s the only thing that allowed him to keep speaking. “My father blamed me.” He braced himself to deflect expressions of disbelief, for her to offer hollow words of comfort. To his relief, none were forthcoming.

  “He blamed you because you were supposed to be the daughter that could make your mother happy?”

  “Something like that.” In truth, she’d read the situation perfectly. “I tried to be quiet, and God knows I spent enough summer days inside the library—either here or in the London house—so as not to be underfoot. But eventually I realized that I would never feel at home with my family. More, that we’d never really been a family.”

  “So you bought a pair of colors.”

  “My father did, but yes. I asked him, and I think he was glad
to be rid of me.” He remembered the conversation as the longest one he had ever had with the old earl. “It was the last time I ever saw him. He died shortly after I sailed.” Blackstone paused and looked at his injured arm. “You know, I think I was less upset over the loss of my hand than that the injury signified the end of my military career. The last thing I wanted to do was come back here.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I imagine you thought you’d escaped.”

  Blackstone had withstood several interrogations in his life, and he hadn’t yet spilled any Crown secrets. Somehow, though, all Miss Mirren had to do was look at him with those vibrant, kind eyes so like her father’s, and he was prepared to allow all the family skeletons to tumble out of the closet at once. He was getting sloppy. “I am not the only man who’s ever fallen victim to unasked-for responsibility, Miss Mirren.”

  “Of course.” She smiled a little too brightly. She’d accepted his dismissive nonanswer and wasn’t going to hold him to account for the truth.

  But, suddenly, he wanted her to. He owed her what truth he could, anyway. Sighing a not unwelcome surrender, he said, “You’re right. I wanted to disappear. To cut ties to this place. Other than Alec, I didn’t care if I ever saw them again.” He barked a bitter laugh and made a vague gesture around the room. “And now I can’t escape them.”

  She was looking again at the painting of his mother. “She must have loved you, in her way.”

  “I don’t think so.” When she began to protest, he held up a hand. “I say that not to inspire pity. It’s just a statement of fact. My mother and father were more like adults I saw every now and again than parents. I don’t think I encountered a true parental figure until…” He trailed off. Of course he couldn’t finish that thought.

  But she did, unflinchingly. “Until you met my father.”

  There she was, so small in this cavernous room with its vaulted ceilings. A slip of a woman, yet she took up so much space, commanded his attention utterly.

  Before he could think better of it, he extended an arm. “Come with me.”

  They walked in silence until they reached the door of his apartments. He paused. “There were a hundred men in your father’s company, but he made time for us all. Of course, I was one of his lieutenants, so I saw more of him than the average soldier.” Pushing open the door, he gestured for her to precede him inside. “I can’t say we were close. But he helped me see that I needn’t let my parents define me. That I could make my own life. It sounds obvious now, but it was a revelation at the time.”

  “I suppose,” she ventured, “that men grow close in times of war.” She looked around the room. He could see by the slight lift of her eyebrows the moment she realized they were in his private quarters.

  “I loved your father,” he said quietly.

  What a relief, to tell her something true.

  …

  What was a person supposed to say to that? She could only hope that her father had loved Lord Blackstone back—and that he’d shown that love in a way he hadn’t been able to with his child. She looked around, taking in her surroundings while searching for words. A traveling trunk stood open on the far end of the sitting room, a white shirt draped haphazardly over the lid. The room was imbued with his citrus scent. It felt very intimate, being here with him.

  “He saved my life on more than one occasion.” He walked to the trunk and began rifling through it.

  “As I’m sure you did his.” The words came out rather—embarrassingly—squeaky.

  “No.” He froze in place. “I can’t say that I did.” He began searching through the trunk’s contents again. Finding whatever it was he’d been looking for, he turned.

  “My father and I weren’t close,” she said, noting the slight furrowing of his brow that followed the statement. “How could we have been? He traveled with the army. I loved him, of course.” Or I tried to. “But if I knew him, it was as a child knows her father. I never knew the man he was. When he died, and I learned that he’d made arrangements in his will for Mr. Manning to be my guardian, I wondered if I had ever known him at all.” Pausing, she considered whether to go further, to voice the angry thoughts that made her feel guilty just thinking them. Lord Blackstone made her feel brave, somehow, so she pressed onward. “He knew I didn’t want to stay with the Mannings. He knew.” She wanted to imbue those last words with meaning she could not speak aloud, but instead they came out choked. She tried again. “My own wishes never made a whit of difference to him. I just kept thinking if I explained it all to him, he would change his mind. But he never listened.”

  A shadow of something—disappointment? perhaps even anger?—washed over his face. The last thing she wanted to do was tear down his hero.

  His hand clasped hers and its warmth buoyed her. “It’s curious, isn’t it,” he said gently, “how we show different faces to different people? To truly know someone is rare.”

  That was exactly it. She’d spent years trying to know her father, and from her perspective, it seemed as if her father had spent years trying to shut her out.

  “I’m sorry he was taken from you, that you didn’t have more time together to try to see eye to eye.” He gave her hand a final squeeze before dropping it, and she felt a twinge at the loss. “You must have been lonely at Manning Abbey.”

  Emily shrugged. To admit to it felt weak.

  “I know all too well the feeling of being alone in a house full of people, Miss Mirren,” he whispered.

  Smiling as a tear escaped, she said, “I did have Mrs. Talbot to talk to.”

  He smiled back and led her to a sofa tucked into a corner of the room. “I think you mean you had Mrs. Talbot to talk to you.”

  “I know she can be tedious, but her affection is genuine. And I had Billy and Sally. They became my family. And I have had my cause all these years. I still have my cause.” She was a little uncomfortable talking about her abolitionist work like this, making it sound like a hobby, like embroidery or playing the pianoforte. There was no way to explain how throwing herself into a wider cause was not only the right thing to do, but a remarkably effective balm for unhappiness.

  “Since we were on the topic of family portraits, I wanted to show you this.” He held out his palm to reveal a miniature.

  “Who is she?”

  He grinned. “You.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Emily plucked the small painting off his palm and examined it. The figure did have blond curls, but the face was nondescript and the eyes too close together. “That doesn’t look like me at all!”

  “I know!” Lord Blackstone laughed. “Your father had a miniature of you—a proper one. One day, after he’d returned from a visit home, he decided to have it copied. You were his only family, he said, and he couldn’t bear it if anything happened to his original, which, I can tell you, he kept on his person at all times.”

  Emily’s heart wrenched. Those seemed like the actions of a man who loved his daughter. “I know the miniature you speak of.”

  “One of the soldiers fancied himself an artist. He offered to paint a copy. And there”—he gestured to the miniature—“you have it.”

  Emily didn’t know what to say. Her heart was flooded with something that felt very much like relief. Her father had loved her, it seemed. “Thank you for showing me this.” She tried to return the image to Lord Blackstone.

  He waved away the offering. “It’s properly yours. I’m sorry I’ve kept it all these years.”

  “Why did you?” She had to know, suddenly.

  “I would never have kept it if it was the only one, but I…” He broke off as his voice thickened. “I wanted something to remember him by.” He met her eyes. “And apparently, that something was you.”

  “I want you to keep it,” Emily said, dismayed that another tear had started to fall. And another.

  Lord Blackstone reached out and swiped at her tears with his long, warm fingers. They were rough against her face, yet they imbued a profound comfort.

&nbs
p; Emily pulled his hand from her face, pressed the miniature into it, and closed his fingers over it.

  …

  Blackstone didn’t know if he’d made things better or worse for himself. He snuffed out the candle, put his feet up on an ottoman, and stared at the fire.

  It was clearer than ever that Miss Mirren needed him. He recognized what she was doing because she’d made him see he was doing it too. They were both filling the emptiness in their lives with work. Their causes were different, though both worthy and genuinely felt. But the fervor that motivated them was the same. And he knew she would not stop, because he knew he would not stop. The difference between them was that he was a powerful peer with an intelligence network at his fingertips, and she was a young, unmarried woman with a big heart, a dotty grandmother, an elderly ex-slave, and a housemaid who was good with curls. But elementally, they were the same.

  Indeed, “Marry Miss Mirren,” had moved to the top of his list. It was just that he rather thought it would break his heart to be the second man to override her wishes and shape her fate according to his will.

  He closed his eyes and let his mind drift.

  “They don’t even look like the same girl,” Bailey said as he studied the miniatures side by side.

  “That’s what you get when you retain a thirteen-year-old chimney sweep turned soldier as an artist.” Blackstone closed the flap of leather satchel he had packed with the Captain’s things. It took him longer than he would have liked—he wasn’t yet acclimated to the missing hand. “I think that’s everything.”

  “Are you sure you won’t consider delivering this yourself? I’m sure she’d want to hear from you.”

  “Not won’t—can’t,” Blackstone said, busying himself adjusting the bag’s straps. “Too much to do here.” He assumed Bailey knew that was a lie, but the younger man wouldn’t press the matter. Even though they’d sold out in order to begin working for the Duke of Denning, Bailey still treated him like a superior officer. “Jasper will be here soon, and he’s resolved to come spy with us.”