The Lady's Deception

by Susanna Craig

  It was late—very late, she guessed—when she persuaded the girls to try to rest. Fascinated by the cavern beneath the bed, the two of them camped there with the kitten, their pelisses pressed into service as pillows, with Rosamund’s for a blanket.

  She, meanwhile, took the narrow bed. Despite the hour and the lulling motion of the ship, sleep was a long time in coming. The girls giggled over their adventure while Rosamund’s mind flitted from one dilemma to the next, incapable of landing on any solution.

  * * * *

  The Claremont, suffering from no such anxieties about its best course, landed without incident right where it ought on the following afternoon. When no other options presented themselves, Rosamund herded the girls off the ship and in the direction of a large posting inn, following the crowd of people who had made the identical voyage.

  Eileen was once more securely in her basket, but that was all the order Rosamund had managed to impose. Their rumpled and travel-stained dresses were no better for having been slept in, and they had nothing to disguise their sorry state but equally wrinkled pelisses. The girls hadn’t been wearing bonnets when they arrived, and she hadn’t even a comb to fix their hair.

  When the bedraggled little crew reached the hotel, Rosamund laid out her sixpence for a loaf of bread for the girls and paper and pen for herself. If she hurried, she could send word of the girls’ whereabouts to Molly when the Claremont set out on her return.

  Such a letter would have been challenging enough to write without the clamor of the public room, where a ruddy-cheeked serving girl had taken pity on them and given them leave to occupy a table, though they could afford to give her no custom in return. Rosamund had removed her bonnet and laid it in the center to disguise the table’s emptiness and to shield her work from the girls’ eyes.

  More challenging still was the certain knowledge that every word she wrote would also be read by Paris. She labored over each stroke of the pen, careful not to waste the paper that had been so dear.

  “Will this letter make it onto the packet yet today?” she asked the serving girl as she passed.

  “Dunno, miss.” The young woman glanced out the window with a practiced eye. “The wind does like to turn ’round about now. Why, look—the Peregrine can’t hardly make way.” Rosamund followed her gaze and was shocked to discover how abruptly the weather had changed. The sky was gray now, and in the distance, a flag whipped outward. She watched for a moment as a smaller ship, not a packet but a private vessel, fought the rising tide and the churning waves, struggling to reach the shore.

  What would she to do if her letter could not be delivered for days? No help could get to them. Nor could the girls return to Dublin. But they had nowhere to stay here. Some escape she had plotted! Her only consolation, small though it was, lay in the certainty that if they could not leave Holyhead, neither could her brother arrive.

  Pushing aside her half-written letter, she picked absently at a crust of bread the girls had left behind. She had no appetite. Carefully she wrapped the remaining mouthfuls in Paris’s dingy handkerchief to save for later. Oh, what was she going to do?

  The girls, thankfully, seemed oblivious to their plight. Daphne was busily engaged in studying the great variety of people coming and going at the bustling inn. Bell sat on the floor beneath the table with Eileen, whose mer-r-rowls were a mixture of satisfaction and ferocity as she triumphed over the head of a sturgeon almost as big as she. The serving girl had been kind enough to sneak that scrap out of the kitchen when she’d spotted the kitten poking her nose out of her basket prison.

  Rosamund forced herself once more to her task. The letter might be an exercise in futility; nevertheless, it was her last, best hope—and besides, she had to focus on something, or she would break down and weep.

  Three sentences, four. Perhaps the words would come a little more easily now. She would not think of him reading over Molly’s shoulder. She would—

  Daphne gasped. The sound, quiet but sharp, pierced Rosamund’s consciousness. Probably the outrageous purple hat worn by the lady seated on the other side of the room. Rosamund had noticed it when they disembarked from the Claremont. She would not stall her progress to indulge her curiosity. She would—

  Bell bounced up, jostling the table and sending her pen streaking across the page.

  “I declare, girls, if I can’t get this letter written, we’ll—”

  But they gave no sign of having heard her. Bell squealed and Daphne muttered, “I don’t believe it.” Finally, Rosamund could no longer resist finding out what had caused the stir.

  When she looked up, Paris was standing just a few yards away.

  The girls rushed forward and wrapped their arms around their brother, nearly knocking him off balance. They were no doubt peppering him with questions. But ordinary sounds seemed to have been sucked from the room, leaving behind a dull, disorienting roar. How had he managed to find them so quickly? And was he alone?

  As he came closer, his gaze never left hers. Dark eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue. Dark beard—two days’ growth, at least. While she watched, a welter of emotions sketched across his face. Anger, fear, relief. And—oh, yes. Guilt.

  Well, why not? By coming here, he had ensured Charles would be able to track her down. And when her brother found her, he would make her feel the full force of his wrath. Afterward, she would find herself trapped in a miserable marriage with a wretched man who had one wife already in the grave.

  With a shaking hand, she reached up and slapped his handsome face.

  She knew she had been right about the guilt because he made not even the feeblest attempt to stop her from striking him. As if he knew he deserved whatever punishment she could mete out.

  Afterward, she expected to feel satisfaction. Instead, a wave of regret washed over her. Her trembling fingers crept to her lips, holding back a sob. For just a moment, his sardonic mask had been lifted entirely. Now it was firmly back in place.

  He wrapped one arm around Daphne’s shoulders, laid his other hand on Bell’s head. They were ogling him, waiting to see his reaction to their governess’s shocking act. But he did not look at them. His eyes still had not left Rosamund’s face. “Why, Miss Gorse,” he said, with that familiar wry twist to his lips. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Don’t be angry, Paris,” begged Bell. Daphne made a frantic gesture to silence her, apparently more interested to see how the drama played out without interference.

  “I might say the same, Mr. Burke,” Rosamund replied. Oh, how she despised the way her voice shook. With relief. With…something that wasn’t relief at all. “Molly told me you’d rather drown than cross the Irish Sea.”

  “Did she now?” Surprise flickered into his eyes, and he gave a weary laugh. “Well, I very nearly managed to do just that.”

  Bell sobbed and clutched him harder. “He just means the sea was a bit rough,” Daphne both chided and reassured her. And then she glanced upward again, seeking confirmation. “Right?”

  He looked at his sisters at last, shifting his grip to clutch Bell by the shoulders and reaching up to muss Daphne’s hair. “Let’s sit down, shall we?” he said, moving them toward the table. Rosamund noted that he hadn’t answered Daphne’s question.

  The three Burkes settled themselves around one half of the table, the girls clinging to their brother. On the other side, Rosamund stood, uncertain. She ran one fingertip along the table’s scarred edge. “You must have crossed on the Peregrine, Mr. Burke. Were you alone?”

  He lifted his head. She could still see the red mark her palm had left. “Alone, Miss Gorse? Your confidence in my sailing abilities is quite extraordinary. I assure you, the ship was fully crewed, and the passengers—” She parted her lips to interrupt the flow of his raillery, but something about the look in his eye gave her pause. “I’m quite aware of your meaning, ma’am.” He eased back in his chair and crossed one booted leg ov
er the other. “Rest assured, there was no one of your acquaintance on board.”

  Rosamund released a shaking breath and let herself sink into a chair. A reprieve. Of one sort, anyway. Charles might be half a day’s sail away from her, but she was once more just as desperate as she had been on the night she’d met Paris on the quay. The single shilling now hidden in her shoe made no difference at all.

  Daphne, however, had been reminded of her annoyance with her brother. She had released her hold on him and was once more regarding him skeptically. “No one of her acquaintance? Why, there must’ve been dozens of people on that ship. How could you possibly know whether Miss Gorse was familiar with any of them? And anyway, I still want to know why she—”

  “What’s this?” With his free arm, Paris reached across to snatch up the half-finished letter. “Ah, I might’ve known you wouldn’t disappear entirely without a note to—why—” A laugh burst from him. Humorless. Hurt. “To Molly. Of course.”

  Too late to stop him, Rosamund was forced to sit with her hands folded in her lap, watching as his eyes scanned the page, taking in her feeble attempt to explain why she had left, the predicament in which she had found herself when Daphne and Bell had followed her on board the Claremont.

  He read it through twice, at least. Perhaps three times. The handful of words on the paper were otherwise insufficient to require such lengthy attention. At last he raised his gaze to hers. “I confess I have spent the better part of the last day puzzling over why you had chosen to involve my sisters in your flight.” With a flick of his wrist he tossed the half-finished letter onto the table. “Knowing them as I do, the truth ought to have occurred to me sooner. Why, it could just as easily have been the case that they had absconded with you.”

  “Par-is,” came the expected chorus of protest, followed by an almost unintelligible attempt to explain simultaneously their decision to try to find their governess.

  He held up his hand. “Enough. Answer me these questions, one at a time, if you please,” he said, looking between them. “Whose idea was it to follow Miss Gorse?”

  “Daphne’s,” said Bell, and to Rosamund’s surprise, the elder girl did not try to deny it. “But my idea to bring Eileen along,” she added.

  At that, he drew up his lips as if trying to contain a laugh. “And how did you determine where to look?”

  “Lady Sydney was just setting out on her afternoon constitutional,” explained Daphne, “and she said she thought she’d seen Miss Gorse walking south. So we went that way.”

  He looked both of them over carefully, taking note, Rosamund felt sure, of the dirt and the state of their clothes. “You came to no real harm on this adventure?”

  “No, Paris,” Daphne promised solemnly. “We were careful.”

  “No harm,” echoed Bell. “Although…well, my legs and feet are tired.”

  “I should think so. Why, it must be nearly four miles from Merrion Square to Dunleary.” His eyes darted toward Rosamund but did not rise to her face, as if he did not quite trust himself with what he might see there. “Such journeys are very hard on the shoes.”

  She feared for a moment that she might be the next subject of his interrogation. Instead, he freed his other hand from the circle of Bell’s arms, retrieved the discarded sheet of foolscap, and took up the pen. With none of her own uncertainty or hesitation, he added several lines to the bottom of Rosamund’s letter and swiftly signed his own name to the missive. She made no effort to read what he had written.

  “You’ll excuse me for just a moment,” he said, moving as if to rise and dropping a kiss onto the top of Bell’s head. She might still have resisted, but the kitten chose that moment to emerge from beneath the table and distracted her. Eileen licked her whiskers and staggered rather drunkenly toward Bell, thrown off balance by the sudden roundness of her belly.

  Letter in hand, Paris strode from the table, pausing first to speak to the serving girl for a moment, then disappearing through the door that led into the inn. Before he had returned, a tray of food arrived: a steaming tureen of stew, more bread, even a pot of tea. The serving girl set it before them with a wink, and the two Burke sisters needed no other encouragement.

  Rosamund held back for a moment. She oughtn’t to take any more from him than she already had. Though she really couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. And as the delicious aromas rose from the table and wrapped themselves around her, she discovered she was quite hungry. Starving, in fact.

  No sooner had she fallen on the food than Paris returned, just in time to see her shoveling stew into her mouth in the most unladylike fashion. Eileen had behaved with more decorum as she attacked the fish head on the dirty floor. She tried to restrain herself long enough to thank him, to invite him to join the repast. But the offer died as she licked a drop of stew from her lip and glanced around the table. The tureen had already been scraped bare, she realized, and the loaf of bread was now little more than scattered crumbs.

  “Quite all right,” he said, seating himself once more between his sisters. The corners of his mouth curved with that smile that wasn’t quite a smile; this one, in fact, looked somehow sorrowful. “I will be perfectly satisfied with a cup of tea.”

  While they finished eating, he offered to regale them with his adventure. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask about Kilready. But he of course began at a later chapter of his story: his return to Dublin and Molly’s shocking revelation. Then he told how he’d set out again immediately, uncertain where to look, and how he’d wasted time seeking here and there. “I did not have the good fortune to enquire first of Lady Sydney, you see,” he added with a wink for Bell. “But I did have one advantage over you. I was on horseback. My feet aren’t tired at all.” Eventually, his enquiries had led him to the harbor—the two girls had caught the notice of several people—but he had arrived too late to board the Claremont. “Fortunately, the Peregrine was still at anchor and I was able to secure a place just as she was ready to sail. Though we very nearly had to turn back to Dublin when the wind shifted and the sea grew rough.”

  “Were you worried, Paris?”

  He took a sip of his tea, then looked down at Daphne with his laughing expression. “And what, may I ask, would have been the use of worry?”

  Rosamund, however, was not fooled. She had glimpsed the slightest tremor in his hand as he returned his cup to its saucer. And she could not help but wonder, oddly, whether her own brother had ever worried for her.

  After they ate, the girls were quiet. Drowsy. Someone had pushed Rosamund’s bonnet aside to make room for the food and even Eileen could do no more than bat half-heartedly at its strings, though they dangled invitingly over the edge of the table.

  Absently, Paris pulled the ribbon away from the kitten and rubbed its frayed end between his thumb and forefinger, his gaze at first unseeing. Then, as the pale blue silk came into focus, the motion of his fingers stopped, and she watched his eyes travel over the bonnet to which the ribbon was attached. Another strange expression quirked across his features and was gone. The ribbon slithered from his grasp as he rose.

  “Come.”

  At the sound of his voice, his sisters started as if from slumber. “Are we going h-h-home now?” asked Bell around an enormous yawn.

  “Not tonight. We’re staying here at the inn.”

  Daphne nodded drowsily and staggered to her feet, while Bell gathered Eileen in one hand and reached for Paris with the other. Only Rosamund did not move.

  “Aren’t you coming, Miss Gorse?” Daphne asked, impatient for bed.

  Rosamund fixed her gaze on the table and the sad remnants of their feast. “I—”

  “Yes, Miss Gorse. Mustn’t dawdle.”

  Paris’s voice. Despite its mocking tone, her pulse quickened. But no. She mustn’t accept the offer. For a dozen reasons. A hundred.

  She looked up and met his gaze.

  She
rose.

  She grabbed her bonnet and followed.

  Chapter 16

  The room to which the chambermaid showed them was neat and pleasant, but small. A folding screen had been set up to partition the space further, into a sitting room that contained just one seat—an overstuffed chair with comfortably worn upholstery, placed beside the crackling hearth—and a bedroom that contained just one bed.

  A hip bath and cans of steaming water stood on the bedroom side of the screen, and a pile of fresh linen lay on the bed itself.

  “Your man told me your trunks got left behind when you sailed,” the chambermaid said. “Pity those porters can’t do a better job o’ managin’. I scrounged a few night things for you, an’ I’ll take your dresses to sponge and press, if you’d like, ma’am.”

  Rosamund was still doing mental calculations. One room in which to undress and bathe and sleep. One room…for the four of them? She tried her best to hide her unease at this state of affairs. “I—er. Thank you,” she said, though she’d hardly heard the girl. She gave another nervous glance around the room.

  And discovered Paris was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

  “’e went back down to the pub, ma’am,” the chambermaid explained.

  Of course. “All right, girls,” Rosamund said, emboldened by his absence. She ushered the sleepyheads behind the screen and assisted them in undressing. After giving all three of their dresses to the waiting chambermaid who carried them away, she helped Daphne and Bell to quick baths and tucked them into bed. At last she stepped into the tub herself. The girls were sprawled on the bed and sound asleep before she had finished bathing. Eileen, curled beside Bell’s head on the pillow, gave one flick of her ears, a sort of wave of dismissal, as if to dissuade Rosamund from disturbing them further.

  After donning an old-fashioned nightgown—borrowed, ill-fitting clothes were nothing new to her now—she wrapped herself in an extra blanket, stepped around the screen, and went to sit before the fire to dry her damp hair. Her gratitude at having food and a place to sleep tonight could not erase her anxiety over the morrow, and despite her fatigue, sleep seemed unlikely to come soon. The Burkes would of course return to Dublin on the first available ship. But where would she go? What would she—?