Meggy grabbed the edges of the duke’s coat and pulled them to her chest. Her sobs turned to gulps as if she tried to catch her breath, but her weeping continued, and she did not rise.
When Charles knelt next to him, Rand could see that the shallow knife wound inches away from the artery pounding in his cousin’s neck still oozed blood. He needed to get them both out of the hellhole they were in. His cousin raised his brows in question, and Rand nodded. Perhaps she would listen to the duke.
“We need to move you, Mrs. Blair,” Charles repeated. “I fear I’m too weak to carry you. If you are unable to stand, will you let Rand carry you?”
She didn’t answer. She lay shivering under the coat. Charles moved back, and Rand put one hand tentatively under her middle. She started, but didn’t protest. He slipped the other under her knees and rose, cradling her as gently as he could. She made no objection; neither did she speak. She gripped the coat as if her life depended on it.
They strode toward The Swan, their pace slowed by Charles, who swayed on his feet, and by Meggy, who continued to cry quietly. Rand prayed he could get them to the hotel before Charles fainted in the street and he had to manage them both.
When they arrived, the duke sank into a chair just inside the door. “Get her upstairs quickly,” he said. Rand didn’t need to be told. Behind him, he heard Charles giving orders in a wavering voice, asking someone to run for a surgeon and someone to fetch two hot baths for their quarters.
Rand fumbled for the key, turned the lock, and opened the door to their rooms with his shoulder. He went quickly through to the bedroom he shared with Charles and laid her on the rumpled sheets of his cousin’s bed. The servants had obviously obeyed the dictate and avoided the room.
Meggy rolled to her side and continued to shake violently, still wrapped in Charles’s coat. Not knowing what else to do, Rand pulled the blanket and coverlet over her and then grabbed up the blankets from his truckle bed and added those. He put a tentative hand on her back, barely touching it through the blankets. When she didn’t react, he began to rub her back gently at first and then more vigorously, desperate to get some warmth into her.
“She’s in shock.” Charles leaned on the doorframe.
“Did you order tea?” Rand asked, standing up.
“No. I didn’t think of that. I ordered a hot bath, though. I’m told a physician has premises nearby, and he should be here soon.”
“Unless he’s down at the wharf,” Rand said, biting his lower lip.
“Doubt it. Ships’ surgeons haunt the waterfront taverns. Stewart will manage the thing. I sent him word where we are. He’ll see to the—to Blair and his minion.”
“Beg pardon, Your Grace.” Charles turned back toward the sitting room. Rand heard a woman’s hesitant voice say, “They be heating water now, but Mrs. Wilbur—she be the cook—sent tea. Thought you—or the lady—might like it. Great believer in tea is Mrs. Wilbur.”
Rand brushed Charles aside and stalked into the sitting room to see the maid lay her tray on the table and bow to Charles, a ridiculous, low, teetering bow that managed to be touching in its way, before she left. He poured steaming tea into a porcelain cup and took it to Meggy.
“Try a sip,” he urged. “It may help.” She blinked back at him. For a moment, he thought she would refuse, but she pushed herself up on one elbow and sipped from the cup he held before sinking back to the bed to stare at the ceiling with bleak eyes. She never looked at Rand’s face.
He hovered over her, afraid to come too near, afraid to leave her alone.
“Is he dead?” Her voice sounded harsh as if she forced it from deep within.
“Martin? Yes.”
“And Fergus?” she asked, the sound vibrating with strain.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she whispered.
She rolled over and stared at the wall.
The sound of water moving behind the closed door almost soothed Rand’s raw nerves. The scent of lavender wafting up from under it drove him crazy. They had sent maids for more hot water nearly an hour before. It must be getting cold again. Meggy still hadn’t called for help. Only the sound of her movement in the water calmed his fears. She had been bathing for almost two hours.
He sat in his dirt with his back to the door, knees drawn up and elbows leaning on them, and gazed at his cousin. Charles, who had bathed long since, smiled at a maid standing just inside the door. She held a bundle of clean clothing the duke had requested from a nearby shop. After it arrived, they ordered what she had been wearing to be burned.
The woman bobbed a curtsey and approached the bedroom door. Rand rose to his feet in one smooth movement, eying the woman closely. The expression of compassion he saw on her face calmed him, and he moved away to allow her to approach the door.
Meggy didn’t answer the woman’s knock, so the maid knocked a bit louder and opened the door a crack.
“Madam? Are you finished? I have clean linen,” the maid said in a firm voice. She nodded as if in response to something Rand couldn’t hear and then disappeared into the inner room.
“Shall I order hot water for you now?” Charles asked. A pristine bandage peeked out from the neck of his fine linen shirt. His pallor had improved with a good meal and beef tea. He seemed fit enough.
Rand vaguely recalled refusing his bath earlier and stared down at himself. He had forgotten he wore black to raid the counterfeiters. He had forgotten the dirt. He had forgotten the blood. He couldn’t think what to say.
“She may not be ready to talk for a while. When she is, it might help if you don’t look quite so much like a brigand.”
Rand nodded then, and the duke stepped into the hall. A short while later, a parade of servants began to carry buckets of steaming water to the far bedroom, the one Stewart used.
“Stewart will want a fresh tub set up there when he returns from the magistrate. I’m off to join him actually,” Charles said. “There will be hurdles to clear. But Rand”—he waited for Rand’s attention—“be patient.” The duke shrugged on his coat, gathered a valise, and gave his cousin a swift one-armed hug around the shoulders. “Patience,” he repeated as he went out the door.
Rand busied himself about his bath as soon as the tub filled and wondered if there would be enough patience in the world for what lay in front of him.
Charles’s fine sandalwood soap, different as it was from the lavender that fueled his imagination, served him well, removing layers of sweat and ash, mounding suds in his hair, and taking his mind from the bath in the other room for brief moments. He ducked under to rinse his hair and then soaped it twice more, eager to remove any trace of his disguise.
A suit of clothes, fetched from his room by the maid, lay on Stewart’s bed, and he made short work of dressing. He crossed into the sitting room to see the maid leaving Meggy’s room with a mountain of damp towels.
“Is she well?” he asked hoarsely.
“As well as may be, sir but . . .” she replied, glanced toward the door behind which Meggy bathed, bobbed a curtsey, and backed toward the hallway door.
“Miss, please,” Rand called, “I think you wanted to say more.”
The woman, young but well past the first blush of youth, colored slightly and put her head down.
“Don’t be afraid to speak your mind, miss. What is your name?”
“I’m Hester, sir.”
He glanced over at the door. “Is she well, Hester?”
“She be well enough, sir. No harm done, least nothing permanent,” the woman said hesitantly. She spoke to him directly but shied away, turning her eyes toward the wall behind him, anywhere but at his face. “She’ll just need a bit of time. She’ll need gentling, if I kin be so bold.”
Rand wanted to ask more, but the maid scurried off, afraid she’d gone too far. Gentling. The
image of Meggy shaking in that alley and his reaction shamed him. I failed her miserably, he thought. I won’t make that mistake again.
It took two maids to remove the copper tub from Meggy’s room, the male servants being forbidden to enter. They closed the door behind them, leaving Meggy inside and Rand standing in the middle of the sitting room staring at it.
Patience.
He paced to the window; he let the men in to empty his bath and ordered them to dispose of his bloodied clothing. When they left him, he sat at the table with his head in hands. No sound came from the other room, and his imagination went wild. Is she lost in her grief? Weeping? He doubted she would harm herself since she had two children to care for. A mother wouldn’t—would she?
The need for reassurance drove him from the chair. He hesitated in front of the door.
Don’t be a damned fool, Rand. You just want to inquire about her well-being. What are you afraid of? he chided himself.
He knocked anyway.
Chapter 38
Meggy heard knocking, a distant sound muted by the door. It meant nothing to her, no more than the shouts of men in the inn yard or the clouds skittering across the sky. She sat by the window, her face turned toward the sun, and wondered how to put the broken pieces of her soul back together.
It could have been worse. Corporal Martin hadn’t actually breached her, not quite. The memory of his flesh on hers, his penis against her belly, made her skin crawl. The tea and sandwiches Hester had pressed on her threatened to revolt. Visions of Fergus, blank eyes to the heavens, with Martin’s massive knife in his throat haunted her. He was my husband. Shouldn’t I feel grief? Regret? Relief? None of them came to her, only a creeping numbness.
“Meggy?” Rand’s voice. It sounded far away, but she knew he must be in the doorway. She didn’t turn from the window. “I need to know if you are well.”
Of course I’m not. Can’t he see? She stared out the window, seeing little.
“Talk to me, Megs,” he begged.
Rage exploded at the sound of that word. “Don’t call me that. Don’t ever call me that!” she shouted. She knocked over the chair when she surged to her feet and stood panting, hands fisted at her side. Fergus called her Megs. She never wanted to hear it again.
Rand stretched his hands out in front of him, palms out in a gesture of conciliation, his face a picture of fear and concern. Her rage began to subside, and she tried to pull it back. Anger felt better than the deadening numbness.
“He called me that,” she told him.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ll call you Meggy. I’ll call you Marguerite if you like.” Is the fear in his face for my sake? She thought it might be. She picked up the little wooden chair, sank back onto it, and examined her hands. They rested in her lap but were still fisted. She wondered absently if she should open them.
She heard him come a bit closer. “She changed the bed up, I see.”
The maid had removed anything that touched Meggy’s body, while Meggy herself scrubbed and scrubbed her skin. She wished she could wash away memory with the filth. Does Rand understand that? What does he want from me?
The scent of sandalwood alerted her just before he fell to his knees. He dipped his head to one side to peer up into her bowed face. “Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head. When he put out a hand as if to touch her, she stiffened. He pulled it back. She surveyed him carefully then. He wore a clean shirt, a comfortable short coat, and a cravat that had been pulled a bit loose. His hair looked darker than she remembered. His disguise, she thought. His skin had a fresh scrubbed look, as if he too had tried to wash away the violence, and the lines around his eyes looked deeper than she had ever seen them. He looked weary. She understood that; she felt weighed down with an exhaustion that might never lift.
“Would you like tea?” he asked.
Are they trying to drown me in the stuff? If tea truly cures ills, why do I feel dead inside? “No,” she whispered.
“Brandy?” he suggested.
She blinked. Brandy?
He left her briefly and returned with a tumbler with two fingers of an amber liquid in it. She took it when he handed it to her, careful not to touch him when she did. A tentative sip burned her mouth and throat. It reminded her she was alive. She took another.
“It isn’t quite the earl’s finest,” she said.
His smile lit the room. “Your humor is intact!” he said.
Is it? She drank the brandy and felt it settle in her belly, a reassuring warmth. I’m still alive! She closed her eyes and savored the realization, until Lena and Drew’s precious faces surfaced in her mind. What on earth will I say to them? How can I tell them how their father died?
“He wasn’t much, but he was their father.” She realized then that she had spoken out loud and felt her face warm.
“They’ll be relieved,” Rand replied. He had pulled up a chair in front of hers, keeping a comfortable distance.
“Yes, but confused. It isn’t that simple. He may have been a monster, but he was still their father. Should they be glad he died?”
“No, but perhaps relieved to be safe. They knew, Meggy. He threatened Drew with terrible things. He terrified the boy.”
She drew breath. “Yes. What is he to feel, though? Joy? Relief?” She thought for a moment. “Shame? They have to live with knowledge of what he was. Their father!” she wailed.
When he had no response, she went on. “How can I tell them how he died? It will confuse them even more.”
“Perhaps. I won’t make light of this, Meggy, but remember they have you. Your strength will see them through.”
Tears pooled in her eyes, and thick moisture threatened to close her throat. She swallowed convulsively.
“Strength? I have none. I can’t be strong. Not now, Rand. Not for a while. I can’t face them with this. Please don’t make me!”
“I’ll take her to Songbird by post chaise.”
Charles paused in his packing, startled at the suggestion. “The two of you alone? She isn’t ready for that.”
“No, I—perhaps. But I can keep my distance. I’ll stay at Eversham,” Rand replied, studying his shoes.
An awkward moment passed, and his head bobbed up. “Sorry, Charles. I forgot. Julia is there. I can stay in the village.”
“You could have Eversham Hall to yourself, actually. I had notice from my solicitor that Julia requested funds. She’s in London for the season, but she wants to visit Italy for an extended period. I believe an Italian count is involved. She asked to have her quarterly allowance transferred—and increased, of course.” The duke shoved the last of his papers with more force than necessary.
“Will you give it to her?” Rand asked, diverted.
“I would give her half my fortune if I thought she’d stay away. She won’t. She’ll always want more.”
Compassion for his cousin distracted Rand from his own problems. The arrival of servants to carry the rest of their luggage down saved him from needing to voice his thoughts. Charles wouldn’t welcome his pity.
“That’s it then,” Charles said. “Stewart will mop up the operation here.” Both men focused their attention on the bedroom door, still firmly shut. The two of them had slept on pallets in the sitting room to allow Meggy privacy. She’d been warned they would depart for London in the morning, but the door had remained firmly shut.
“If she won’t go back to London, I’ll have to take her somewhere. It may as well be Songbird,” Rand told him.
“I still don’t think Meggy will agree to your suggestion,” the duke said.
“She needs time to heal. You said it yourself. The farm is the perfect place for that now that spring has come. The orchard will be in full bloom and the meadow in flower.”
“
Perhaps you need to go there. It’s your land—and your home. Meggy won’t go with you.”
“She told me herself, she isn’t ready to face the children. You can tell Drew and Lena. Catherine will help and—”
“I will care for my own children!” Meggy stood at the door fully dressed with a cloak over her shoulders, a traveling case in her hand, and a towering anger on her face. He gaped, unable to reply.
“They need me, not some countess, however well-meaning. I’ll go to London with you and collect my children.”
It was on the tip of Rand’s tongue to ask, “What then?” but he feared the answer.
The duke held out his arm to her. “The carriage is waiting. Shall we go? There will be plenty of time to talk about it once we reach London.” He escorted her from the room.
Rand followed them, his heart hanging heavy in his chest. Talk about it. The future. Does she plan to collect the children and leave? Where will she go? His sense told him to simply give her time to think; the rest of him wanted to forbid her to move anywhere he couldn’t be with her.
Chapter 39
“I thought you two were supposed to protect her. What happened?” Catherine demanded.
Meggy didn’t hear their answer because Catherine closed the door and led Rand and Charles away, scolding them as if they were schoolboys. She felt the walls of the tiny sitting room at the end of the guest corridor close in on her while she waited for her children. Guilt lay like a weight on her chest.
The countess shouldn’t chastise Rand and Charles, she thought. I chose to put myself there, chose to lead the authorities to my husband, chose the path that led to his death. If anyone deserves blame, it’s me.
They had reached Chadbourn House mere minutes before, and the stress of the long ride, most of it spent in utter silence, lay heavy on her. She still wore her traveling clothes and the dust of the road. The countess had suggested she change first, but she couldn’t wait.
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