“The costume I wore last night was ruined. You’ll have to replace it,” she said briskly, counting out coins and pressing them into Mrs. Brightwell’s hand. Performers were required to supply their own costumes and Madame Zoltana was not the type to forgive the loss. “I would have you buy fabric and sew it myself, but I think it’s a good idea if I stay away until this affair has blown over.”
Mrs. Brightwell nodded, sadness in her eyes. “I’ll miss you, girl. But you must do what is best. Only, are you sure you can trust this Luke fellow?”
“I can take care of myself,” Magda said. It was too complicated to explain that she was not staying with Luke, but rather with his friend, a powerful earl who had developed an interest in her. Mrs. Brightwell would only be disappointed when she learned that Lord Kerrigan was not romantically interested in Magda. To her way of thinking, becoming a gentleman’s mistress would be a step up in the world for her young friend.
The leather pouch holding the coins still looked satisfyingly heavy. But a thought nagged at Magda. “Matt Sweeney had a wife, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes, and poor creature just had a baby. Not that he was any good to her, coming home drunk like as not, and entirely too handy with his fists. But a bad husband is better than none at all, and it will be hard for a widow with a child.”
There was really only one choice she could make. Magda reached in the purse and pulled out a coin. It was the crown that Sir Charles Applegate had tossed her after that fateful reading. It seemed an omen, but whether for good or ill she could not tell.
She tucked the fateful coin in her pocket, then tossed the purse over to Mrs. Brightwell. “Will you see that his wife gets this?” She tied up the corners of her shawl.
“Magda! You can’t do this. It’s all you have.” Mrs. Brightwell rose from the chair to confront her friend. “Matt was well paid for what he did. And he knew the risks he took. This money is yours. You earned it.”
“I didn’t pay him to die for me,” Magda said harshly. She felt guilty over his death, and guiltier still that she hadn’t really liked Matt Sweeney. Somehow that made it worse, knowing that someone she hadn’t liked or trusted had nonetheless given his life to protect her.
Mrs. Brightwell’s face crumpled and Magda swiftly apologized. “Forgive me, I spoke without thinking. I may have earned this money but it is only right that Mrs. Sweeney have it. For the baby, if nothing else.”
Mrs. Brightwell nodded. She had a soft spot for children, as Magda well remembered. “Very well. For the baby,” she agreed.
Knotting up the shawl, Magda found her worldly possessions made a pathetically small bundle. So much for her grand dreams of independence as mistress of her own shop. Now she was back where she had started from. But there was no time for self-pity. She had survived worse before. She could do so again.
She embraced Mrs. Brightwell for a final time. “Tell everyone that I’ve gone off with a fancy man and you don’t know where. They’ll have seen the carriage in the street and will believe the tale.” And with no betraying coat of arms on the doors, it would be difficult for anyone to trace the carriage back to Lord Kerrigan.
“But where can I reach you?”
“It’s best if you don’t know,” Magda said, not willing to endanger her friend. “I don’t think anyone will question you, but if you can honestly say you don’t know you should be safe enough.”
“If you say so. But don’t forget you have friends here. If you need me you have only to ask.”
Magda nodded, her throat suddenly tight with emotion. For the last decade Mrs. Brightwell had been the nearest thing she’d had to a mother. Leaving her now seemed very much like abandonment, yet what else could she do?
Magda’s eyes swept over the tiny room once more, checking to see if she had forgotten something. Opening the door, she found Luke sitting at the top of the stairs.
“Are you finished here?” he asked.
“Yes.” Whatever happened, somehow she knew she would never again return here to live.
By the next afternoon Magda was heartily bored. She hadn’t seen either Lord Kerrigan or his friend all day, and it was irksome knowing there was nothing she could do except sit and wait. But her own thoughts were poor company and she finally sought out the housemaid, Sally, the one who had obligingly loaned her the spare dress and cloak the day before. At first Sally appeared scandalized by her request but eventually agreed that Magda could make herself useful by taking on the mending.
Having explored the public rooms earlier in the day, she decided to take her sewing kit and the basket of mending to the library, where the light was better. The first garment on the pile was a shirt of fine linen. Shaking it out, she knew from the breadth of its shoulders that it belonged to Lord Kerrigan. The linen felt cool beneath her fingers, but for all the fineness of the cloth the shirt itself was not well made. The sleeves had been poorly set and it was no wonder that the earl had managed to tear one at the shoulder.
She mended the tear with stitches so fine they were almost invisible, but it gave her little satisfaction for she knew that the shirt would tear again. Without Lord Kerrigan here to act as a model there was nothing she could do about the set of the sleeves, so she reluctantly set the shirt aside and took up the next garment.
It was here that Lord Kerrigan found her when he returned that afternoon. His butler, Dugan, had taken great pains to inform him that his guest was in the library, as if her presence there was somehow exceptionable. Thinking to find her reading, he was astonished to see her sitting next to the window, bent over her sewing in rapt concentration.
“Good afternoon, Magda,” he said.
“Good afternoon, my lord,” she replied. She paused to set her needle in the item she was sewing, then looked over at him. “Do you have any news?”
“Nothing yet,” he said. If she was disappointed she gave no sign. His investigators had refocused their efforts back to finding the man who paid the stableboy to interfere with Foolish Pride. Bob Parker was following some leads but nothing of any value had turned up yet.
Crossing over to the window where she was seated, he saw that she was engaged in mending, not in embroidery as he had first thought. There was a basket of clothes at her feet, and on close inspection it appeared the garment in her lap was a set of drawers.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sewing. You could hardly expect me to sit in my room all day, could you? And I hate being idle. I asked the housemaid for something to do and she suggested I take on the mending.”
He recognized the garment in her lap as a set of his own drawers. He felt mortified, as if she had somehow caught him in an intimate act. It wasn’t decent that she should be handling his things.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, resisting the urge to snatch the offending garment out of her hands.
Magda looked up at him with a trace of a smile. “But what else should I do? I could hardly ask one of your servants to play chess,” she added, gesturing with her free hand to the ivory chessboard that stood nearby.
“Do you play?”
“Not for years,” she said.
“Well then, it’s time you started again.” He would have suggested anything just to get her to put down her sewing.
“I really should finish this,” she said. “I don’t like leaving work undone.”
“Someone tried to kill you yesterday,” he pointed out drily. “Surely you are entitled to a little rest.”
“We don’t know they were trying to kill me,” she countered. “And I am sure that if you were in my place you would find it impossible to take your ease.”
“One game won’t hurt,” he said, pulling back a chair for her.
Laying the offending garment on top of the basket, she rose from her seat and took the chair he offered her. “One game,” she agreed. “My skills are so rusty I am sure you will finish me off in no time.”
She chose white and made the first move. The opening moves
went quickly enough but as the game went on she proved herself a thoughtful player, considering each move carefully. When she captured his bishop she crowed in triumph, then covered her mouth to dampen the sound. “We don’t want your servants to think we are enjoying ourselves,” she explained.
“Why not?” The loss of his bishop did not concern him, for by moving her queen out of position Magda had laid herself open to a trap.
“They don’t know what to make of me as it is,” she explained. “I am clearly not a lady, nor am I beautiful enough to be your mistress. Yet why else would you bring me here?”
She did herself an injustice. True, she was not pretty in the conventional sense, but there was much to be said for her slim elegance and fine-boned features. Her hair was like burnished mahogany; while shorter than the current fashion, it framed her face beautifully, calling attention to her hazel eyes that sparkled with an unexpected twinkle.
“Does it matter to you what they think?” he finally asked.
“Not really. But aren’t you worried about the possibility of scandal?”
It was her move. She could have blocked him with a knight, but clearly she did not see the trap closing in on her. Instead she advanced her rook toward his king. “Check,” she said.
“There will be no scandal. My servants are well paid, and know they will lose their positions if they gossip. You need have no fear for your reputation.”
“My reputation?” Magda chuckled, honest amusement lighting up her face. “I have no reputation. I am either an insignificant shopgirl or a would-be actress posing as a Gypsy. Either way I have no reputation to lose. It was you I was thinking about.”
She was worried about his reputation, he mused. It was ridiculous but in a way it was almost touching. There were few people he knew that cared enough to worry over him.
It was almost a shame that he had to make the next move. “Checkmate,” he announced, sliding his bishop diagonally across the board.
Magda looked down at the board in chagrin. “Drat! I never saw that coming,” she said.
“It was a good game,” he hastened to assure her. Indeed, her instincts had been sound, even if her skills had been a little rusty. With practice she might present a challenge. “Another game?” he offered.
“You must have better things to do with your time,” she said.
“Nothing pressing. I’ll ring for tea and we can play until then,” he said.
The second game progressed more slowly than the first, as she studied the board carefully before each move, wary of making another mistake.
“Who taught you to play chess?” he asked. He was still trying to puzzle her out. Everything about her was a contradiction, her elegant manners and refined speech contrasting so clearly with the life of service she had led.
“My mother,” Magda replied. “I haven’t played with anyone since…”
“Since her death?”
She pushed back her chair, clearly uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. He reached over and captured her right hand, unwilling to let her leave.
“Your mother must have been an unusual woman,” he said.
“I am sure that Bob Parker told you all about her,” Magda said angrily.
“Why don’t you tell me instead?” he asked, genuinely curious to hear what she had to say.
She gently disengaged her hand from his, but she did not leave the table. “Which do you want to hear? The version she told her clients or the truth?”
“I leave it up to you.”
Magda sat back in her chair, one hand nervously rubbing the skirt of her gown. “Maman told me I was born in France, at the time of the revolution. My father was a physician, but he came from a noble family. He was arrested and executed, but my mother was able to flee with me to the countryside where we stayed in hiding. Later, when I was about five, she was able to arrange passage to England.”
“And then?”
“We lived just outside London in a small cottage. Maman had always had visions, but now people came to call on her and ask her advice. She told them she was born a countess, the daughter of a Russian count and a Gypsy princess. She said she’d inherited the gift of sight from her mother.”
The footman arrived with the tea tray, and Magda jumped up to serve them both, clearly welcoming the distraction. But Alexander was not to be put off, and when she finally sat back down he resumed his questioning. “Did she really have visions?”
“Yes, and it was a terrible burden,” Magda said. “What she saw never seemed to bring her happiness, only pain.”
“Did you inherit her gifts?” He was certain she had not, having seen that her predictions were based on fakery, but he was curious as to what she would say.
“No, and I am glad I did not,” Magda said fervently. “For it was not a gift but a curse.”
She paused to take a sip of tea. “But the rest of it, the Russian count and the Gypsy princess, that was the story she told her patrons. Some of it may have been true. She was well educated and even as a child I could see that her manners were more refined than those of many a noble lady who came to call. But if a Russian count was her father, she was almost certainly born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
“What did she tell you?”
Magda sighed, and there was bitterness in her eyes. “She told me the same story she told her clients. She told me she had met my father when he was studying medicine in St. Petersburg. They’d fallen in love and eloped, much against the wishes of her family. She used to tell me that she’d written to her father, the count, and that someday he would appear to rescue us from our exile. At the end she’d told the story so often I think she actually believed it.”
“And then she left you,” Alexander said. He could see this conversation was distressing her. A kinder man would have stopped questioning her, but he kept on, driven by an inexplicable need to understand his mysterious guest.
“And then she was killed,” Magda corrected him. “Friends of hers took me in and planned to take me with them when they emigrated to Canada. But the night before we sailed I became dreadfully sick, so much so that the Captain refused to have me on board. So the Dubrays left me at the lodging house and promised to send money for my passage once they reached their family in Canada. But I never heard from them. I would have been lost if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Brightwell.”
Alexander couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be that child, left all alone not once but twice. No wonder Magda clung so fiercely to her independence. Even with the dangers to her so obvious, she had almost refused his offer of refuge. It had taken all his powers of persuasion to get her to agree to stay with him.
Magda essayed a tight smile. “Mrs. Brightwell was with a traveling theater company. She took me in out of pity and the members of the troupe adopted me. By the time I was ten she’d left the stage to become a dresser, and she found me an apprenticeship with a dressmaker. The rest you know.”
She related the story simply, as if it had happened long ago to someone else. But though she tried to hide the pain, he knew that the scars from her abandonment ran deep. He felt she had told him the truth, yet Alexander also felt that there was more to the story. Something she wasn’t telling him or perhaps something that she herself did not know. It was an intriguing possibility.
“What will you do once we have found your attackers? Will you go back to sewing, or will you try your hand again at the fortune-telling game?”
“I don’t think that is any concern of yours,” Magda said, putting him firmly in his place. Laying down her cup and saucer, she rose from her chair, then gathered up the mending basket with the blasted drawers on top. “Just find your criminal and then everything will be as it was before.”
With that pronouncement she left the room. But Alexander knew she was wrong. He would find the criminal. There was no question of that. But he doubted that everything would ever be the same as it had been before.
Chapter 7
After much pon
dering, Alexander finally concluded that the man they were after was either the greatest criminal mastermind in all of England or else a complete fool. It was the only possible explanation for why his earnest efforts, along with those of Luke, Bob Parker, and a host of investigators and informants, had not yielded the slightest clue to his identity. Only a genius could have covered his tracks so thoroughly.
Or perhaps they were overcomplicating matters. What if the man who had fixed the race was a novice? Someone who had no great scheme, someone who had simply fixed this one race and then disappeared back into civilized society? And the bungled attack on Magda—surely that spoke more of amateurish panic than calculated professionalism.
Had the last week been wasted? What if the clues had been there all along but he had overlooked them, blinded by his need to find devious schemes where there were none? Suddenly re-energized, he leaped out of his chair.
“Luke!” he called. “Damn it, where are you?”
Striding into the hallway, he began issuing orders. “Dugan, see that my horse is saddled and brought around at once. And a horse for Master Luke as well, assuming we can find him.”
The butler coughed politely and Alexander turned to find that Luke had crept up and was now standing at his elbow.
“The most excellent sahib has called and his faithful servant has answered,” Luke said, salaaming in the manner of a Hindu servant.
“Bother that,” Alexander replied. “It just occurred to me that we may too clever for our own good. What if this wasn’t part of some great scheme or criminal enterprise?”
Luke was quick to grasp the concept. “You think our man’s an amateur?” His playful manner slid away like water as he considered the idea. “Yes, yes, that’s possible. We could have overlooked someone like that.”
An Unlikely Alliance Page 8