“You should not have poured it all on him so thick, Sir Henry. A man can drown in that kind of responsibility.”
He eyed her shrewdly. “But you believe he is learning to tread the water.”
“I believe he might want to learn.” Victoria sat on the mattress and balanced the tray so that it would not slide off Sir Henry’s lap. “Promise me you’ll say no more on the topic.”
“Hmmpf. I will do no such thing.”
She assumed not. Once Sir Henry set his mind on a goal, he was apt to see it accomplished. If his orneriness served to keep him alive longer, then she would aid as much as possible in his purpose. She did not tell him that David had left yesterday and had yet to return from his meeting with his brother-in-law.
The last few days had given her more than the last twenty-eight years of her life. Whatever it was she suspected of keeping David away, she had found something of his strength to hold to her heart. “I would have you move to the manor house, Sir Henry.”
“Pah, I would only be underfoot.” He dawdled over a piece of bread. “Now off with ye. If you have a need to starve me, I’ll dine alone.”
Victoria gave him the spoon so he could feed himself. “Unfortunately”—she stood and fluffed her skirts—“you are not all of a piece, Sir Henry. Esma said that you ate a strawberry tart last night and suffered for it. Do you think I would have ridden through the rain if you were merely lonely for company?” Knowing that was exactly what she’d done, she turned toward the window. The curtains were closed to the light outside. She ran her hand across the moorings and opened them.
A shaggy horse pulling a heavily laden dray appeared at the top of the drive. She watched it lumber into the yard as she moored the second tier of draperies. The sun made a feisty appearance over the treetops, illuminating the driver. A floppy hat covered his head. It was market day in town. Someone was delivering a load of coal that she’d ordered last week. Nathanial appeared from the stable to help Mr. Shelby unload the dray, and she turned away.
“I will come again tomorrow,” she said, tucking the blankets over Sir Henry’s feet. “I can either feed you more broth or you can decide you are well enough and we’ll play a hand of cards. But if you wish to speak to Lord Chadwick, then you will come to the manor house and do so. I am not your bridge.”
He grumbled obstinately, and she kissed his cheek. After closing the bedroom door, Victoria walked to the kitchen. Esma stood over a washboard in the sink, her long sleeves drawn up to her elbows and a mist of perspiration on her upper lip. Victoria grabbed a pad and lifted the pot of coffee from the stove.
“I want him to move to the manor house, so I can be closer to him, Esma.” She poured the steaming brew into a cup.
“He’ll not be a burden, mum.” Esma worked one of Sir Henry’s shirts over the washboard and dunked it in a bucket of water.
Victoria set the pot back on the low fire. Laughter in the yard pulled her to the window. Leaning against the countertop, she lifted aside the curtain.
Bethany and Nathanial were talking to the dray driver. Carrying a basket of eggs, Bethany wore a cloak but no hood covering her head. Sunlight captured the gold from her hair, and her smile was bright for the older man performing some sleight-of-hand for Nathanial. Victoria shifted her scrutiny to the driver as he presented her son with a piece of candy that had magically appeared from behind Nathanial’s ear.
“Who is the dray driver?” she asked Esma.
Esma peered through the window above the sink. “He and Mr. Gibson deliver goods from town. Always brings sweets for the boy.”
That was odd for a man who didn’t look as if he had two shillings to his name. After Nathanial and Bethany returned to the stables, Victoria remembered that she was going to take him coffee. She walked to the mudroom and drew her cloak off the wall. She pulled it over her shoulders and returned to the kitchen to retrieve the coffee. Shielding the brew with the palm of her hand, she negotiated her way across the yard. Mr. Shelby and the man Mr. Rockwell had sent to watch over them were unloading buckets of coal.
The driver squatted behind the back wheel of the dray, and Victoria saw that he was scraping clumps of mud from the spokes with a large knife. She couldn’t see his face. He’d wrapped heavy wool around his palms, but his scabbed fingers were still exposed to the elements. Yet there was no hint of vulnerability to those hands.
“I thought perhaps you might want something warm in your stomach,” she said.
At first, she didn’t think he heard her. Then his head tilted and he was looking at her feet. Slowly he rose. His shoulders hunched, she saw that the knife remained in his hand. He turned his head, and she was suddenly looking into his eyes.
“Hello, daughter.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She would have dropped the cup if he had not found it in her grip and gently detached it from her palms. Her father had aged twenty years from the time she had last seen him. His once-dashing features were gaunt behind a beard now feathered with gray, though his hazel eyes remained sharp. No one questioned his presence, which meant he’d been coming and going for some time. Who knew him after all, except she and David? Yet her father was also a chameleon, and somehow she knew this version of him was another masquerade.
“Smile, Maggie.” He nosed the steam rising from the cup. “We are being observed. If you give me away, Donally’s son won’t grow up. I am not working alone.”
The words were a promise. If something happened to him, someone somewhere would carry through on the promise. Today. Tomorrow.
Her father still held the knife in his hand; though his sleeve shielded the blade, it would take little effort to strike at the flesh of a person. “If you so much as harm a hair on my son’s head, I swear I will kill you with my own hands.”
“Now, that’s the spirit.” Her father drank from the cup, eyeing her over the rim. His knuckles bore evidence of a recent fight. “Nice boy, my grandson, despite his bastard of a father. You know why I am here, Maggie.”
At once, her son emerged from the stable where he had gone to find eggs with Bethany. “Mother?” He ran toward her.
Her breath caught, and she felt an overwhelming sensation of drowning. She could have screamed, but it had not occurred to her to do so. Anymore than it had occurred to her father that she would do just that and risk the lives of her family.
“Please…don’t hurt him.”
“Mother.” Breathless from his obvious foraging in the stables, he stopped in front of her. Straw stuck out of his hair. His eyes sparkled as he held two eggs out to her. “Bethany said if I wrap these in blankets, they’ll hatch chicks.”
Victoria stepped between her father and her son. “I think Bethany was just teasing.”
“She said she’s done it a hundred times and that I should keep the eggs in my room near the stove.”
“She’s jesting, Nathan.” She set her palms on his arms and gave him a little push. “Now, go inside and have Esma make you lunch with those eggs.”
His expression growing mutinous, he looked past her to her father. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him as he crooked an elbow against the wagon.
“But why?” he asked. “I don’t want to eat—”
“Just do as I say, Nathanial!” Her son was too young to hide his hurt, and she wanted to touch his cheek. “Now!”
He took his precious eggs and walked toward the cottage. When she finally faced her father, she knew a ferocity born of her past, the need to protect her family and the knowledge that she would fight.
“He’s just a little boy, Father.”
“How very quaint.” Handing her the cup, he smiled. His teeth were still nearly perfect. “If I wanted to harm Nathanial, I could have long ago.”
Hearing her son’s name spoken with such familiarity accomplished what nothing else had. A strange sort of calm settled over her. It kept her chin high. She watched as he hitched the gate on the dray and turned. She should have been afraid, as they faced each other. Father and daughte
r. He had molded her so perfectly into his shadow.
Perhaps he did not realize just how perfectly.
He blew into his hands to ward off the chill, his gaze catching hers and perhaps the thoughts behind her eyes, as even the silence framed her memories of him. A visceral mixture of love and hate that had forever defined her image of herself.
His slow smile told her that he recognized her weakness. “Watching you these last months, I have decided you can have your little family, Maggie, unhindered by the burden you’ve carried for me all these years. No one need ever know the machinations of your devious little heart. I will forgive you your betrayal of me. I’ll leave the country, and you’ll never see me again.” He walked to the front of the dray, and climbed onto the bench. He retrieved the reins. “I want the locket, Maggie. My time is up here and now I must go.”
“It was you that night in the church after the storm.”
He did not deny it.
The dray lumbered in a turn as her father brought the horses around. She could do nothing to stop him from leaving, for catching him did not erase the danger to her son, or his purpose for finding her. She walked beside the slow-moving wagon.
“Did you shoot me?”
“Assuredly I did not,” he said as casually as if they were discussing the weather.
Then there was someone else.
David’s man walked outside the stable and, thumbing his hat back on his head watched them. She lowered her voice. “Is Nellis working with you?”
“Nellis is a preening maggot who overplayed my patience and put his nose where it does not belong.” Pulling the floppy hat over his forehead, he smiled down at her. “Donally has settled that particular problem for me.”
Her hand went to her chest. “What do you mean?”
His eyes were laughing as if he were privy to some great joke, as if the last laugh belonged solely to him. “He has great affection for you, daughter. He always has. Alas, he is walking the line of treason to save you.”
She came to a stop. Dizzy and disoriented. She stood on the drive, her mind a total blank as she struggled to think. Pressing her hand against her waist, she only knew if she took a single step from where she stood, her knees would fold.
She waited until the dray disappeared before turning to look at the trees and surrounding rooftops. Nothing moved. There was no flash of field glasses staring down at her. No hint of any sharpshooter ready to drill her through the heart.
She called to the man standing outside the stable. “Where is Mr. Rockwell?”
“I don’t know, mum,” he replied as she approached.
“Take Bethany and go inside the cottage. If you leave my son alone, so help me, you will regret my wrath to your dying day. Do you understand?”
She darted past him into the stable. She didn’t want her father to get too far a start, but it took precious minutes arguing with Mr. Shelby the entire time he saddled the horse.
The mud from the recent rain made following the heavy wagon tracks simple. Fifteen minutes later, she rode into the busy churchyard. With no thought as to what she should do, she searched for the dray and saw the man at the reins set the brake.
Victoria stared in disbelief as Mr. Gibson climbed out of the seat. She nudged the horse forward. “My lady.” His expression showed surprise as she rode up beside him.
“What happened to the man driving this wagon?”
“I met him a ways back. He said that you asked him to return to town for more supplies. He took my horse and went the way of the old drover’s trail.”
Victoria twisted in the saddle and glared at the woods. The neglected trail went down the bluff to the river bridge. She had taken the same path when David found her in the cemetery. Her burst of vim died inside her almost at once. She would not find her father unless he wanted her to find him.
Turning her attention back to the churchyard, she sought out Mr. Rockwell. More than that, she wanted David—if only to know that he was safe. The sight that met her eyes stopped her. “Mr. Rockwell found the tunnel, mum,” Mr. Gibson said.
Men filled the churchyard, thirty or forty strong, standing in a line passing down buckets filled with dirt. “They have come to help, my lady.”
They were the same men and their sons who had walked away from their farms afraid of reprisal, now back with more numbers than before.
“But how did David get them here?” She said the words without realizing that she had spoken them aloud.
“I don’t know. But they came, mum. They came for Lord Chadwick.”
Chapter 21
Victoria arrived upstairs from the servants’ entrance. Gripping the edge of her skirt, she hurried down the corridor to her chambers and slammed the door behind her. With a flick of her wrist, she snicked the key in the lock, spun on her heel, and walked through her private sitting room to her bedroom.
With little regard for her cloak, she threw it on the bed. It wasn’t until she’d dropped on her knees in front of the night table that she felt her muscles drain of strength. She wanted to close her eyes and disappear. Tears grabbed at her throat. But she would not allow herself to cry.
After a moment, she rallied herself and pulled open the drawers in her night table. When she could not find the locket, she dumped the contents on her bed.
The locket wasn’t there.
Victoria returned to her sitting room and emptied the contents of another drawer. In desperation, she made her way through cabinets and articles of clothing. When she could find nothing else to tear apart, Victoria stepped back, saw the destruction, and gasped at what she had done. Her hair had loosened from its pins. Long dark strands fell over her shoulders. She shoved it off her face with hands that trembled, prepared to move the furniture and carpets. She stopped in her tracks.
David was standing in the doorway between her sitting room and bedroom. There was something restrained in his eyes as he met her horrified look, as if he had been watching her for some time. She did not know how he had gotten into her chambers.
Yet she felt relief. He was here and he was whole, and he filled her vision. She ran to him. He wrapped his arms around her and held her.
“You’re shaking, Meg.”
It didn’t matter that his clothes were damp or that his face scratched the tender under-curve of her cheek. She held him to her with all her strength. “He’s here, David. He has been living beneath our very noses. He left by way of the old drover’s trail.”
His head angled back. “Who, Meg? Your father?”
“He’s been making deliveries to the cottage for Mr. Gibson. He stood close enough to Nathanial to touch him. He knows that he is our son. He knows everything. He knows—”
“Shh.” He brought her against him. “Where is Nathanial now?”
“He’s at the cottage. I sent Blakely to be with him,” she said, trying to regain her equilibrium. She felt as she had when she was a little girl, before her mother had gone away. When a scrape or a bump was perfectly tolerable until her mother had appeared and the tears she’d been able to hold back rushed to the surface.
“He wants the locket, David.” She pushed herself to arm’s length, aware that his hands held her shoulders. “I must have dropped it behind the furniture, though I don’t know where. I have to give him the locket. He said he would go away forever.”
“Why does he want the locket?” He looked at her hard. “How does he even know you still have it?”
Shaking her head, she heard herself falter. “I tried to take her image out of the locket. I should have thrown it away years ago, but I couldn’t. I hid it away. When I made up my mind to fight him, I thought if I didn’t have the locket…he would never have the treasure. But you brought it back to me.”
“He gave you something that he knew you would never throw away. Something so important that he would want it back after a decade. Why? What is the locket to him?”
“A long time ago, he told me it was the key to my mother’s heart. That if I wore it long e
nough, it would lead me to her.”
“He is a bastard, Meg. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded slowly. “He is the only one who ever knew where the treasure was. I told you the truth when I said I didn’t know.” Was David ashamed of her? she wondered.
She had no more secrets. David knew them all as intimately as he knew her body and her heart. If he turned her over to the authorities this time, there would be nothing left of her to salvage.
“After the treasury theft in India, the Circle began crumbling,” she explained. “Father seemed bent on doing things that drew attention to us. Everything was a game for him. He allowed you into the Circle. He must have known what would happen. And I did exactly what he wanted me to do. He always knew I would be the one to betray him to the authorities all those years ago.”
He framed her face within his palms and forced her to look at him. “But you didn’t know that, Meg.”
“Don’t you see? He could not have planned the last ten years better. For who in the Circle of Nine remains to claim the treasure, but the one who created the scheme?”
He started to say something else, but she forestalled him. “There is someone else working with him, David. Someone other than Nellis is involved.”
“I know.”
She pushed away from him. “He promised Nathanial would not be hurt. He’ll go away forever—”
“Meg…”
“We can finally be free. Do you understand?” She walked to the window and flung open the curtains. The glass framed a dome of sky. “I want to wake up and feel the sunlight on my soul and know that I am free of him. I have lived in fear for nine years that my father would find my son, but now if I give him the locket, our son can be free. My father will go away.” She dropped to her knees and began rifling through the drawer contents she’d dumped on the floor. “This can be over.”
David stood at the edge of the carpet, his heart torn in half, unable to move farther into the room, yet helpless not to go to her. He stepped over the scattered papers, buttons, pens, and knelt beside her. “You’re not alone anymore, Meg.”
Angel In My Bed Page 28
