“Does he have the locket?”
“Take it, Faraday.” David’s raspy voice came from behind her. The locket landed with a metallic clink on the floor. “Go find your gold. Just leave my family alone.”
The sword lay at her knees. Victoria grabbed the locket as she stood and raised the weapon. “I won’t let you kill him, Father.”
Outside the room, she could hear shouts. People were in the house.
“Come with me, Maggie.”
“Don’t…, Meg. Don’t…bloody leave here.”
Her father took a step around her, but she moved in his path. “Can he offer you your freedom?” he said, his spectacles catching what little light was found in the room. “No one understands you better than I do. Don’t you miss the excitement? After all these years, everything we worked for is within our grasp. We’ll be free.”
But she wasn’t free.
She would never be free.
Wiping the tears from her face, she did not look from her father’s eyes as David slumped to the floor unconscious. Nor did she give him her back as she dropped to one knee and checked David’s pulse. He would never understand why she was running again.
Would he forgive her?
Perhaps it was a matter of her own honor this time. She had to see this finished.
“I won’t let you kill him.”
“Ask like you were my daughter, Maggie.”
“Please…don’t kill him, Father.”
He removed his thumb from the hammer and drew the gun back. “As you wish. Now, give me the locket, or give me your hand and we’ll be on our way.”
Chapter 24
Victoria stumbled as her father pulled her beneath a tree. Her breath came in gasps and she sucked in air when he removed the gag in her mouth. A flash of lightning revealed that the road leading into the valley lay empty before her.
“You don’t have to tie my hands, Father.”
Victoria flinched as he yanked on the piece of cloth binding her wrists. “I’m doing it for my own peace of mind, Maggie.” He adjusted her cloak and pulled the hood over her hair to protect her from the driving rain. “You have not proven that I can trust you.”
“Then why take me at all?”
She heard an uproar in the darkness behind her. Shouts grew louder. Even if it hadn’t been raining, the night was dark. She could not see anything as they moved through the yard. And then they were running, stumbling down the hill through the mud and the rain.
Pamela was waiting at the bottom of the ravine. She held two horses. Both were pulling at the reins. Victoria recognized Old Boy.
“What is she doing here?” Pamela demanded.
Colonel Faraday took Old Boy’s reins. “She’s going with us.”
“Not with me, Faraday. We only have two mounts.”
“Then she’ll ride with me.”
Pamela pulled out a revolver. Wearing a heavy oilskin slicker, she was barely visible. “She’s not coming with us!”
“Dammit, what the bloody hell are you doing, Pamela?” Rain plastered her father’s white wig to his head, and he tore it off. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Drop the gun, Pamela.” Ian stood behind her, his arm raised to fire. He shouted above the rain. “I swear I will shoot.”
Pamela didn’t move. Ian looked past her to Victoria. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
“Oh, please,” Pamela scoffed. The gun remained pointed at Victoria’s chest. “Could you be more of a bore if you tried? I’ll kill her if you don’t put down the gun.”
“My wife sold out.” Ian’s revolver wavered. She could see he wore a bandage around his head. “I found the rifle last night in the tunnel. It belonged to my father. She was the one who shot you. Did you bloody think I wouldn’t come after you, Pamela?” Ian yelled over the wind. “Where will you go?”
The dark eye of the revolver in Pamela’s hand remained steady on Victoria, but when she spoke, she spoke to her father. “I haven’t done your bidding for these years for you to double cross me now, Faraday.” Pamela cocked the hammer. “She betrayed you. She is not going anywhere with us.”
Victoria moved, her father moved faster, shoving her out of the way as the gun fired. She landed on her knees. At the same time, Old Boy reared, flailing his hooves, and she twisted away from the thrashing forefeet. Then her father loomed over her, tall and forbidding as he blocked the horse from trampling her. Somehow, even sheltering her with his body, he held to the reins. He finally mounted, missing the stirrup the first time. “Get on!” he shouted, holding out his hand to her.
Victoria shot her gaze to her father’s, seeing what the brief staccato lightning flash revealed against his chest. A dark, growing stain spread.
“Don’t go, my lady.” Ian had wrestled the gun from Pamela’s hand and sat astraddle her thrashing body. “It’s over. You don’t have to do this.”
“Maggie,” her father’s voice came to her. “You’ll never be free if you stay. I know where the treasure is.”
“Bastard!” Pamela screamed at Ian. “Kill him.”
In the distance, Victoria could see lantern light moving down the hill. She looked at Ian. His gun lay a few feet from Pamela. It was all he could do to control his wife. “When David awakens, tell him…I’m sorry.”
Pamela started laughing. “Who is the real traitor now?”
Victoria took her father’s arm and he helped her mount behind him. Her father spurred the horse forward, and she caught hold of him for dear life. His body blocked the wind and rain, and she lowered her head against his back.
Victoria came to consciousness slowly. The ground was cold beneath her back, the blankets damp. She lay beside a fire in a dilapidated barn. Nothing about her surroundings was familiar and, as her sluggish senses grappled with her memory, she struggled to sit and found her hands still bound. Every part of her body ached. Too exhausted to care about her physical state or the precarious state of her future, she turned her head and found her father sitting on a log, his elbows braced tiredly on his knees, watching her.
“You’ve been asleep for hours.” He poured coffee into a battered tin cup. “Are you hungry?”
Squatting in front of her, he set down the coffee tin with hands that contained a curious suggestion of unsteadiness. With the makeup scrubbed off his face, her father looked younger than his forty-nine years. His hair was the same color as hers, a dark brown with a feathering of gray at the temples and tied back in a queue. The spectacles were real, and he wore them now. The flames from the cooking fire reflected from the lenses. “It isn’t my wish to hurt you,” he said, pressing a red-stained kerchief to his mouth. “I’ve missed you and would prefer your conversation to my own, which on a good day is not so pleasant to my ears. If I untie your hands, do you give me your parole that you won’t escape?”
Her fingers rethreaded themselves and she looked out into the darkness beyond the barn. Thick groves of naked-limbed trees cloistered close to the abandoned farm they had found for the night. They’d played this game for two days, traveling the cold, wet country roads. She had no plan to escape him, but neither would she surrender an ounce of cooperation. He seemed to recognize this and accepted the gauntlet thrown as the price for her company. For she would allow him nothing more.
“Where do you go when you are with me, Maggie?” Her father held her chin and forced her to look at him. “You used to talk to me. I remember how much you loved talking. I remember the little girl you were.”
Noting his ashen pallor, she knew he was dying.
“Why did you take that bullet for me?”
“What makes you think I did anything for you? You had the locket.”
She didn’t have the locket now, and he still had not hurt her. “You are a liar, Father.”
His eyes narrowed and she saw something dangerous glint in them, before his expression vanished as quickly as it came. “Maybe I should reconsider gagging you, after all.” He struggled to his feet, and she saw tha
t he wore another change of clothes from the ones he’d worn yesterday. Obviously, he had prepared well his escape across country. He just hadn’t prepared for the bullet Pamela put somewhere in his chest.
“I have no change of clothes for you.” He slapped food onto a tin plate. “I was expecting Pamela. Not you. I do not believe her dress will fit.”
“You sound sorry that she didn’t make it. Doesn’t that leave more treasure for you?”
“Pamela was Kinley’s close protégée these last few months. I will miss her company.”
The thought revolted her.
“Why did you kill Nellis?” she whispered.
“He figured out who you were and was planning to blackmail Donally for his silence, without understanding who I really was. Donally was already piecing together everything too fast. Alas, Nellis ended the game sooner than I wanted.” Her father set a tin pan smelling of burned beans beside her. “Donally was the only one who ever understood me completely, always my most worthy adversary. I thank you for single-handedly defeating him for me, both times.”
Dropping her gaze, she looked at the fire and watched the flames blur behind tears. She had given him a huge amount of morphine. She did not dare entertain the horrible thought she might have killed him.
“Hold out your hands, Maggie.” Shaking her head past the tears, she did as her father asked, and he cut her bonds. “Would you believe I never wanted to see you hurt?”
“No.”
He laughed shortly, but his laughter spasmed into a cough. She saw pink-tinged spittle on his lip. The infamous, larger than life Colonel Geoffrey Faraday was not immortal after all, yet all she could feel was a strange loss she could not explain. “Perhaps you should consider making your peace with God, Father.”
His mouth crooked in a parody of a smile. “God and I never cared to know one another. He was your mother’s hypocrisy. Not mine,” he said, struggling to sit upright.
“Will you let me look at the wound?” she asked quietly.
“When we get to Brighton, I have a cottage waiting. Not far from where your mother is buried. The chapel is a beautiful place by the sea. She loved the sea,” he said, studying the place on his finger his gold band had once been. “Even you would approve.”
After so many years of wondering and waiting, she would finally know where her mother rested. Something she never thought possible.
“You want to see her, don’t you?” he asked.
She nodded, for more than anything, she wanted closure to her past. She desperately needed closure with her mother. Knowing where she had been buried all these years would give her that.
“Why would you do that, Father? Bury her someplace she would have loved?”
He never answered, and she knew as she followed him to Brighton over the next few days that she would never learn the reasons.
Maybe he had enshrined her mother’s memory in death because he could not hold on to her in life, anymore than he could hold on to her. But from the moment her father had stepped in front of Pamela’s gun, that one unselfish act had forever imprinted itself on her.
It was the reason she stayed with her father in the following days, feeding him and taking care of Old Boy.
He brought her to a cottage as he’d promised, the only promise he’d ever kept, and, too weak to stand, he had needed her help to walk inside. The cottage was set back in a forest of trees, something out of Grimm’s fairy tales, covered in a century of thorny vines.
David did not appear in the days that followed her arrival in Brighton. At night as she’d slept on the settee beneath the window, she would sometimes hear a distant foghorn. Here where there were only her private thoughts and a sky filled with stars until she’d begun to believe that David was not looking for her because he believed that was what she wanted, until she almost believed it herself.
By the end of the second week, her father had become so ill, Victoria knew he would not survive another night, but he continued to do so. She fed him his meals, bathed his face, and kept him alive longer than he deserved.
Until her father’s voice drew her from her sleep near dawn ten days after their arrival at the cottage. He was muttering incoherently. His fever was high. She gave him water. Wet his lips with cool water.
And quietly, she watched him die.
Victoria wrapped him in blankets. Forcing herself to stand, she washed her teeth, face, and hands, scrubbing beneath her chipped nails until her flesh was raw. She removed her gown and washed her arms and neck. She washed everything before sinking to the floor. For a long time afterward, holding the locket in her hand, she sat with her back against the tub, the single lamp beside her throwing shadows on the water-stained walls, then, drawing her knees to her chest, she buried her face against her skirt and wept.
She didn’t know why she wept. But she was no longer that frightened, angry nineteen-year-old fleeing from her life. All that was strong in Meg had now become Victoria. Sir Henry and David had given her back the very things she’d once allowed her father to take from her. Her honor, her dignity, and her heart. The revelation did not take away her fear, but it did give her courage.
When she again lifted her head, the sun was coming up and the room filled with light. She walked to the window.
She had been at the cottage almost two weeks and never once stood at this window as the sun topped the trees. Now, as she breathlessly watched, the morning light caught the golden spires of a distant church tower.
The trek to the church took her across an open field visible to an entire town. Moisture in the grass soaked her shoes, but she didn’t care about the dampness against her feet or the icy December cold beneath her rag of a dress as she clasped her cloak to her. She flung open the huge wooden doors and stepped inside the quiet sanctuary.
Morning sunlight captured the stained-glass windows, spilling color over the pews. Walking forward into the gauzy light, she looked upward at the painted wooden and elaborately carved ceiling, a giant eight-sided lantern tower. Victoria had never dreamed that heaven truly existed. But in here, as she stared in awe, she could believe it surrounded her. The Italianate Roman church was heavily decorated with marble and statuary. Only the stone was cold beneath her slippers, and she looked down at her feet. The stained glass cast colored images over the floor, and when the sun was just right in the sky, the images became floral pictures. Like those on her locket.
Victoria held out the locket, realizing that the image engraved on the front was a special flower. A white lily.
She took a step backward and examined the colored definitions marking the stone floor and walls. She walked back and forth across the length of the church, looking at the stained glass and all the names on every stone, looking for her mother.
A laugh finally escaped her. One filled with irony. She was at the wrong church. After all she had been through, she was at the wrong church.
Victoria didn’t know how long she sat with her hands folded in her lap. A shadow fell over her, and a young vicar spoke. “You look a little lost, miss.”
She was a little lost and wanted to go home. “Is there a Margaret Victoria Faraday buried here?”
“No, miss,” he said and handed her a slim wedge of paper. “But there is a Lady Margaret Victoria Sullivan buried in the chapel by the sea,” he told her. “If you go outside, you will see the dome on the next rise.”
Victoria stared at the paper in her hands, giving no hint that she wavered between feverish exhaustion and disbelief. But her hands trembled as she opened the folded paper and read her mother’s name. “I don’t understand. Who gave this to you?”
“That young man sitting behind you. He told me to give you that slip.”
Victoria came to her feet and turned.
David was sitting in the last row of pews. His arm in a white sling, he came to his feet, and her heart leaped with an aching love. His dark hair fell over his brow and white collar. He did not walk toward her, but in standing surrendered that choice to her.
She stopped in front of him. She did not touch him for fear she would crumble if she did.
“Is Nathanial safe?”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
They had both spoken at the same time.
And a sob formed in her throat. “I think so. Yes,” she whispered, perhaps not so well physically, but her strength and purpose had never been clearer. “I am very all right.”
He held out his hand as if she had not gone missing for three weeks, as if it was the most natural thing in the world that he should do. She looked at that hand, aware of the constancy of its strength, and let him take her fingers, his height bringing her chin higher.
Then he pulled her to him within the protective circle of his arm, and pressed his mouth against her temple. He’d not shaved. His shirt was unbuttoned at the collar. He was not so well put together as she’d originally thought.
She set her fingers against the loose wave of his hair that touched his collar, and, closing her eyes, she felt everything dark inside her simply disappear in the peace that filled her. She was crying but they were not tears of sadness. “How did you know where to find me?” she rasped against the dark stubble of his chin.
“I’ve been staying at the inn that overlooks this cathedral. I saw you walking from the direction of the field.”
“My father is dead.”
“You cannot know how I wish I had been there for you.” He turned his face against her cheek, then he cupped the back of her head and kissed her, finally searing her with his need and hers. Their lips met again and again, openmouthed and hungry. “I missed you.” He turned his face against her cheek and she choked on the intensity of his emotion as he moved his lips back to her mouth. “I couldn’t get to you sooner. I thought I had lost you.”
And like the whisper of her name, the words echoed with tenderness of her own feelings. She had lost weight and her clothes were in disrepair, but she was better than all right, and she held him to her, her heart brimming. But before she could speak, movement drew her attention to the back of the cathedral where she saw the young vicar leave, his echoing footsteps fading in the empty silence surrounding her. A glance around David’s injured shoulder told her that they were alone. The morning was too beautiful to be so void of life.
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