He waited until the drinks were in their hands and the waiter away, and then William leaned over the table and said, “Start from the beginning. Leave nothing out.”
“I don’t know everything. I’ve been too removed from most of it, and too much an observer. I didn’t realize …” He drifted off.
“Damn it, Chris!”
Chris held his hands up against William’s shout. “It’ll not do to bring all of the train into our torment, Will.” He sighed. “I’ll start where you left us. I kept our agreement.”
“Our agreement? That’s how you think about it? As if we negotiated?”
“I’m trying to say that I didn’t tell Father about you and Nora. I told him that I’d discovered that you had intentions to manipulate us all, to ingratiate yourself and exploit us to advance your tunnel project. I told him that Nora had become infatuated with you and my trust in you had been compromised, so I forced you out before you could hurt her.”
Icy anger rose up and twisted through his white-hot worry for Nora. The man across from him was not his friend. “You’re a bastard.”
“That’s quite close to the truth as I believed it then. You were a bastard to take her before you’d made a vow to her. I don’t care what she thought she wanted—you and I both know what she needed, and you took advantage of her naïveté.”
He wasn’t going to fight that old fight, not now. There were more important things. He took a deep breath and pushed the fury from his throat. “What did you tell Nora?”
“That I didn’t know why you left. I learned months later, when she threw it in my face, that you’d managed to tell her yourself.”
The note he’d written her and pushed under her door. He’d had no hope that she’d actually found it and read it. Knowing she had opened a small space for real hope in his heart. She knew he hadn’t left her of his own accord.
“Go on. What happened after I left?”
Chris stared into his glass, swirling it in his hand. Before he spoke again, he drank its contents down. “There’s much I don’t know. She wouldn’t speak to me, and Father … hardened. I went back to London.”
“What do you mean, your father hardened? Did he hurt her?”
“At first, he only became more resolute. He was furious with me for bringing you into our home and giving you a chance to turn Nora’s head. He forbad her nearly any pursuit she enjoyed, afraid those enjoyments were the source of her wayward ideas, and he focused even more on finding her the right match. Nora made everything worse, pining after you. She rolled up, dwindled. She wouldn’t eat, and Father panicked and pushed harder. Much of what I’m saying now is conjecture. I didn’t know all this at the time. I wasn’t there. I’ve put it together since, with Aunt Martha’s help.”
He gestured for another round. William flexed his hands, which had been clenched so hard on his knees that his fingers ached, and so did his knees. He picked up his brandy for the first time and swallowed it down.
He slammed the glass down. “You left her there, alone.”
“I left her with our father. Where she belonged. I haven’t lived at Tarrindale for years.”
“What did he do to her?”
“Only what any other noble father would have done, at first. But this Season just past …”
Each time Chris faded out, the need to beat him grew. “What?”
The waiter brought their new drinks and took the empty glasses away. William breathed through his urge to throw the poor soul across the car and get him out of the way of this conversation.
Chris picked up his glass and swirled the brandy again, gazing deeply into the amber liquid as if it were a magical portal to all the answers. “It seemed to be going well enough. Nora wasn’t herself, but she was compliant, and I thought … I thought if she could just get through this part and find herself a husband, everything would get better for her. I know noblewomen, more than a few, who marry and then find their ways to enjoy their lives. It’s known, and it’s accepted. As long as it’s kept discreet, there’s no scandal. Once the marriage happens.”
Chris was talking about dalliances; he meant that he knew married women who took lovers. That was what his set accepted. It wasn’t so much different in America, though perhaps buried more deeply. But Chris had been lying to himself to think his sister would ever have found contentment in such an arrangement. William had had the pleasure of acquaintance with Nora for only a few months, and he knew that she would never have been happy sneaking beneath the surface.
“Nora would never be happy that way.”
Christopher sucked his teeth and stared into his glass.
“God damn it, Chris. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. I think she ran, but Father can’t see it. He’s chasing monsters.” He sighed. “There’s more to the story.”
“Then get to it, for the love of God.”
“During the Season … I think we’ve made her ill. We were at the dinner of some new young lady, and Nora … she went mad. Honestly mad. She said awful things and caused quite a scandal. After that … I didn’t think … I couldn’t believe Father would …”
“If you don’t finish a sentence, I am going to put my fist down your throat and drag one out of you.”
Chris’s eyes flared wide, and then he laughed bleakly. “Colorful. I’ll sum up, if I can. Father called in a doctor. She was diagnosed with hysteria. Is that something you have in America?”
It was. Adelaide gave lectures about the pernicious medical culture that diagnosed inconvenient women with mental illness. He knew the ‘treatments,’ too. “My God. What have they done to her?”
“I stopped the worst of it. The doctor here in London. He had a device … I didn’t think Father would allow such a thing, not for Nora, but he didn’t know … at any rate, I stopped it.” Chris finally looked up and faced William full on. “That doctor, in London. He examined Nora. He told Father that she’d been compromised.”
William set his head in his hands. The doctor would have discovered the same thing even if William had never touched Nora in any way but chastely, but that didn’t matter. “What did your father do?”
“He took the news quietly, and he took Nora home to rest. At the time, I was impressed by his calm, and I thought taking Nora back to Kent was for the best. She despises London, and she loves home. I stayed in London, thinking the worst was over. Then I went home for a hunt, and saw that things were all wrong. Father wouldn’t let me see her. She was being kept locked away, and her maid told me she was given laudanum around the clock. That’s when I saw how badly I’d erred, and I wrote you.”
William’s mouth went dry. He took a long swallow of his brandy. Almost two months had gone by since Chris had posted his letter. “And now she’s gone?”
“Nearly a fortnight ago. Father came home, and Nora and her maid were both gone. Father thinks they were abducted. Gaines, the butler, said that nothing was missing from the maid’s room, and nothing was missing from Nora’s, but I don’t believe it. Kate was worried for her. At the risk of her position, she came to me about the laudanum. I think she helped her run away. But we can’t find either of them. Kate’s people are from the West Country, but she doesn’t seem to have taken Nora there. If they’re in London, they might as well be on the moon.”
That was true. London was a sprawling city with a population of seven million people, millions more than New York City, the largest city in America. Few places on the planet were so easy to be lost in.
If she’d run away, that was better; it was her choice. Yet he couldn’t imagine Nora alone in London, trying to make her way. And if she’d been drugged so long, could she have been capable of making a choice? “Who do you have looking?”
“Scotland Yard is on the case. But they’re looking for men, abductors, who don’t exist. Father has convinced them that she wouldn’t have run away, and Gaines is intractable in his story. I think he’s protecting Kate. I can’t convince him that I won’t hurt him or Kate or Nora. I
’m on their side.” He leaned in. “You might convince him. They all know how Nora feels about you.”
“You want me to go back to Tarrindale?” He couldn’t imagine he’d be greeted by anything other than a row of rifles and a pack of dogs. Chris had seen to that.
“Not Tarrindale. They’re at the London house. Father wanted to be closer to the detectives.”
“Does he know you’ve sent for me?”
“No. And he’ll not be glad. But Will, I don’t care. The reason I wrote you still holds. When we find her, get her out of here. Take her away.”
If Chris had aged more than the year since William had last seen him, his father almost seemed to have died, begun to rot, and then been reanimated. He was fully grey, his skin slack and sallow. He’d developed the beginning of a hunch in his posture. William couldn’t help but be glad for his obvious pain. Whatever the man had done to Nora, at least he felt some of the consequences himself.
But the earl’s eyes blazed with lively anger to see William in his home. “You are not welcome, sir. You’ll leave at once.”
“Father, listen to me. I overstated Will’s offense. He is an honorable man, and his intentions for Nora are good.”
William stood in the library and let Chris fight this fight for him. He deserved at least that.
“They are not,” Lord Tarrin countered. “He is everything you said and more besides. This—all of this—is directly his doing, and you bring him into our home again? At this time of trouble? You confound me, son. I’ll not have it.” He turned those blazing blue eyes on William again. “Out, sir, at once. Or I shall have you removed bodily.”
This house was one of the few places in the world they knew Nora wasn’t. William didn’t need to be standing in this room to find her. In fact, this was a distraction. Before he left, however, he needed to get one or two things off his chest. “Lord Tarrin, I have no more respect for you than you for me. I blame you as much as you blame me. I love Nora, and I want her safe. That’s the only reason I’m here.”
“You ruined her. My only daughter. My beautiful little girl. You took her and defiled her and broke her spirit. And you say you blame me.”
“I do blame you. Because I love the woman she is. You let her become that wonderful spirit, and then you tried to snuff it out.”
The earl charged toward William—four steps, and then he stopped. His eyes shone with fear and worry and anger—and, William saw, with guilt. The words Nora’s father had said to him echoed in his mind, and he understood. To blame William for Nora’s disappearance made no sense if she’d been abducted.
Nora’s father didn’t think she’d been abducted. He thought Chris was right. Nora had run. Away from home, away from him. And he couldn’t face that truth.
Gaines wasn’t protecting the maid, or even Nora. Their butler was protecting his lord. Nora’s father was interfering with the case, giving the detectives false information, because he couldn’t confront his own guilt.
There truly was nothing to be gained by being in this house, or with this man. There was no point in speaking with the butler, or in expecting Scotland Yard to solve the case. William knew what he had to do.
“I’ll not darken your door again,” he said and walked past the two men who had failed Nora most.
Three men. He should include himself in that list. Nora loved three men, in three different ways, and they all had failed her utterly.
“Will, wait!” Chris called after him.
William walked on, through the foyer, out into the late autumn night in Grosvenor Square. If Chris wanted to follow, that was his prerogative, but William was through standing idly by and waiting for others to do what was right.
If he’d been in the States, William would simply have called James Cavanagh, the chief of the San Francisco office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who had done some work for Scot-Western over the years. In London, he sent a wire to Cavanagh, asking if he had contacts in England, but he was impatient with the long lag between sending his query and when he might expect a reply, so he began a search of his own for a private detective who might be of service.
After three introductory meetings, William’s rage was nearly more than his flesh could contain. All three had been coldly unreceptive to his case, despite his ability to pay considerably for their assistance. As an unmarried noblewoman, Nora was her father’s responsibility and no one else’s. Despite the fact that she was nearly twenty years old now, they wouldn’t consider working with an unrelated American who had no claim on her. He’d crossed some kind of societal line even to ask.
William was stunned. In the States, a private detective worked for whomever paid him.
Finally, he got word from Cavanagh, and a name: Eliot Hardy. He called Hardy’s office at once and made an appointment to meet first thing the next morning.
On his way through the lobby to his appointment with Hardy, he found Chris slumped in a chair, dozing. Had he slept there through the night?
He hadn’t seen Chris since the confrontation with his father, a day and a half earlier, and he wasn’t feeling friendly at all to either Tate man. He’d had notices of three calls, but had been too angry yet to answer. Detouring in his progress to the front door, he stopped and kicked the chair Chris slept in.
When Chris started awake, William asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you. You haven’t returned my calls.”
“Because I didn’t want to talk to you.”
Chris wiped his hands over his face. “I deserve that.”
“And more. What do you want?”
“I want to find Nora. It’s dawned on me that Father isn’t looking for her. Not the way he should. He knows she ran away—or he suspects it, at least, as I do. I think it’s up to us, Will.”
William considered him. He was angry, and bitter, nearly violently so. Chris had done real damage to Nora. If not for him, maybe they’d be married and building a life together by now. Maybe his mother would be knitting for the grandchild she so badly wanted. Instead, Nora had been tormented and mistreated by the very person who should have loved her most unconditionally, and now she was missing.
“Will,” Chris said into the lingering silence. “I’m sorry.”
At a minimum, Chris might be a help to Will in surmounting the arcane social strictures of the noble class. “Get up, then. I’ve got a meeting with a private detective in fifteen minutes. You can drive.”
NINETEEN
By the time her will was shaken, by the time she might have broken and offered what they wanted in exchange for her freedom, she’d forgot who she’d been. She remembered that she had been someone else, but here, in this place, this dark, terrifying place, she was only Eve.
She was no one else, and there was nowhere else. So she shored up her will, she held fast to what she knew, and she fought to keep hold.
At first, she remembered, there had been other women. She’d been allowed sometimes from this small, shadowy cell, led by stern-looking women in severe grey dresses into a large room where other women like her gathered. She remembered being allowed out into the daylight sometimes, too. No longer. How long had it been since she’d seen more walls than these, or no walls at all? A lifetime, perhaps.
There’d been a fight, she remembered that. In the large room where the women were given bowls of stew and cups of water. Some women had pushed their bowls and cups away at once, and others had followed. Eve had followed, she remembered that. They’d sat with their hands in their laps, quietly, and refused to eat.
They’d sat quietly and refused before that, too. The hunger had been howling in Eve’s belly already. A hunger strike, it was. Because they were unjustly imprisoned.
She remembered that—what she was, why she was in this place. She fought for justice.
Had she? Why couldn’t she remember the fight? Had she fought only here?
She must have fought before. Why else would she be in this place?
On the last day she
remembered being with other women, women like her, she’d fought. It was a vivid image in a mind filled with shadows and ghosts. One of the stern women had picked up the bowl of soup before her, grabbed her by the hair, and tried to force the bowl’s contents into her mouth. She’d remembered being forced to swallow what she didn’t want, and she’d fought back.
Fighting with her hands wasn’t a skill she had, but she’d acted from some kind of bestial instinct that lurked deep in her chest. She’d knocked the bowl away, splattering its watery contents across the splintery table, and spun from her chair. Hanks of her hair had pulled from her head, but she hadn’t cared. The bright sparks of superficial pain had cleared her mind and galvanised her. She’d clenched her fist and thrown it straight into the matron’s face.
She hadn’t expected the punch to hurt her hand so much, and in the moment of that shock, she’d been hit by a stick-wielding guard and knocked to the floor.
Others who’d been forced had fought as well. All around her, women fought, and the terrifying men in uniforms beat them with clubs and fists.
Two guards dragged her back to this bleak cell, and she hadn’t left it since.
She hadn’t eaten since, either. She remembered she shouldn’t eat, that keeping her mouth closed was the only fight left to her. It was important not to eat. How many days? Had it been weeks? Sometimes, the door opened, and two terrifying men came in, followed by a severe woman. A tray was left and her pot was emptied. She took the water and ignored the food, though for a while it had called to her, drawn her, tempted her. But then the smell began to turn her shriveled stomach, and the temptation waned.
A small man came in once or twice, a doctor, to listen to her heart and poke at her body. “You must eat, dear,” he always said, but she said nothing.
They’d punished her for not eating. They’d beaten her, they’d taken away her shapeless dress and her flimsy shoes. And her pillow, her blanket, her sheet, leaving her to shiver in a thin shift on a soiled mattress. But she remembered that to refuse food was to resist, and she carried on.
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