“Do I want to know what sort of business?” Morley goaded.
“You probably already do, you meddling cur.” Dorian’s eye patch hid his expression until he turned to flash a taunting smile at them both.
“He said he deserved it,” Titus told the inside of his glass, puzzling over the same conversation for two weeks now. “What did he mean?”
“Who?” Morley and Dorian asked at the same time.
“Nora’s father.” Titus wondered when he’d begun to slur. He didn’t even feel that inebriated. “What did the Baron mean when he said he deserved a punch from me? Why would he say that? Because he put me on the streets? What man wouldn’t for deflowering his daughter?”
“Enough of this.” Morley relieved him of his glass, which still had another two hefty swallows. “It’s only making you maudlin. You’ll be bound to the bottle if you keep it up.”
Reflexively, Titus plucked the glass back and downed it in one burning gulp, before slamming the glass onto the bar with a resounding noise. “One does well to treat an outside wound with alcohol,” he contended. “But it is also an effective treatment for internal injuries.”
“Sound science.” Dorian shrugged into his coat.
“Yes,” Titus heartily agreed. “The soundest of hypothessissiess. Hupothesi? Hypotenuse.”
Suddenly his stomach lurched, and he tried to remember if he’d eaten since breakfast. He’d no appetite lately. No vigor. Everything tasted flat and beige.
“Come on, man.” Dorian hauled him to his feet. “Let’s get you home to bed.”
“I don’t sleep in my bed. It smells like roses.”
He missed the glance his compatriots shared because he felt a perfectly good brood coming upon him.
“I’m—I should have stopped her.” He swayed, looking for his hat before Morley shoved the thing into his hands. “I should have just trussed her up and thrown her in my carriage and run away to Italy. But who does that kind of thing?”
“Only the best of men,” Dorian said cheekily. “So, I cannot argue the point.”
Morley reached in his pockets and left a generous several coins on the bar. “Prudence says Lady Woodhaven is as bereft as you are. She hasn’t accepted any kind of proposal. Not officially. There’s still time to fight for her, you know.”
His still, cold heart began to beat at the prospect, thrumming and stalling as if it’d forgotten how. “I’d fight the entire world for her… if she’d let me.”
A youngish man with an air of danger and an overconfident swagger came toward them. Titus braced for trouble, but the lad merely handed a folded note to Blackwell, tipped his hat at the gratuity he received, and melted back into the London night.
Dorian opened the note and read quickly, his lips compressing into a tight line.
“What is it?” Morley asked, suddenly alert.
“It would seem we’re going to Sheerness,” he said.
“But that’s…hours downriver,” Titus protested, stumbling out onto cobbles shining in the pallid gaslight from a recent rain.
“Which is fortunate for you, because you’ll need to sober up on the way.” Dorian whistled and motioned to where his carriage waited idly a block down. “It would seem your errant lady love has hired an entire handful of personal safety guards to conduct her and her two sisters there tonight rather than wait for the train. Can you imagine why?”
Titus’s heart kicked up plenty now, his hands and feet blanching cold while his ears burned, and his lungs tightened. “A town at the mouth of the Thames? I can’t begin to guess—”
He broke away, as logic threaded through his whisky-soaked thoughts. He knew her. Even though they’d spent so much of their lives apart. He still knew her. Knew what drove her decisions and desires. She wanted to make amends. To free her sisters from her tainted reputation, possibly by untainting it.
“What is in Sheerness?” he demanded.
Dorian shrugged, searching his near perfect memory. “Oh, a few hotels, an estuary, a fishing and shipping port, mostly.”
“Shipping, you say?” Morley clipped, cutting a look across to Titus as Dorian’s carriage pulled to the curb. “If they’re after what I think they are, let’s hope they took a bloody army with them, because they’re going to need it.”
“Why do you say that?” Titus asked. “I thought she was no longer being followed.”
The Chief Inspector glanced through the darkened streets as if searching for a tail. “If Blackwell knows where she’s gone, there’s a good chance Sauvageau does, as well. The messenger network in this city might be fast and reliable, but serves any master with coin. They know no such thing as loyalty.”
Blackwell nodded grimly as he called the footman down from his carriage. “Tell Farah I’ll be home in the morning… we have wild beasts to hunt tonight.”
That Afternoon of
Though her shoulder was healing nicely, the rest of Nora remained one jagged, bleeding wound. And only one doctor in the world could hope to stitch her back together.
She’d eaten more crow in the past couple of weeks than she’d prepared to, and suffered a multitude of indignities. The worst of which was clearing what was left of her things from the home that would be occupied by Adrian McKendrick, the new Viscount Woodhaven.
It wasn’t that she was at all attached to the home she’d shared with William. Merely that she was convinced that by the time she married the son of a duke, she’d not have a shred of dignity to offer anyone.
It was worth it, she kept reminding herself. To once again secure Titus’s future, along with—
A loud crash from below broke her reverie, and she called down the stairs to where Mercy and Felicity argued in the parlor. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s splendid!” Mercy sang back. “Nothing amiss down here!”
“A vase tipped.” Felicity emerged from the parlor to the hall where Nora could see her from the second floor. She was holding two larger shards of pottery and wearing a chagrined expression. “We were packing the library when a spirited debate over the superiority of romances or mysteries turned into a fencing match with the fireplace implements. Mercy cut her hand.”
“Don’t be cross!” Mercy’s plea sounded more like a command, though she still hid out of view.
“I’ll be right down.” Nora checked out the window for the guards her father had hired to stand sentinel against either gangsters or reporters. She wondered if any of them knew a wit about doctoring wounds.
They stood on the walk, looking much too brutish and conspicuous for such a quiet square.
She hurried to fetch a kit of bandages and iodine from the washroom and flew downstairs to the parlor.
Felicity swept up the vase and Mercy was sitting like a child about to be scolded, her fist curled around a handkerchief.
“I’m not cross, it’s only a vase,” Nora said with a fond smile, holding her hand out. “Where are you hurt?”
“It’s a trifle.” Mercy unclenched her hand and pulled back a handkerchief, revealing a cut on her palm that still welled with blood. “When the vase fell, I lunged for it and, clumsy dolt that I am, I fell right on top of it.”
“It’s bleeding so much,” Felicity said with a delicate, dyspeptic burp. “I can’t look, or I’ll be sick. Or faint.”
“It appears worse than it is.” Mercy inspected it. “So superficial, I can’t imagine it’ll even need stitches.”
“A small mercy that,” Nora murmured, dabbing a ball of cotton with the iodine and pressing it gently to the cut.
“Why?” Mercy queried. “Because the closest clinic happens to be Dr. Conleith’s surgery?” She waggled expressive brows, her wide, mischievous mouth twisting in a suggestive grin. “I still can’t believe he broke father’s nose.”
“I’d have given anything to have seen it,” Felicity sighed.
At that, Nora shoved a bandage into Mercy’s wounded hand, and promptly burst into tears.
Her sisters instantly bracketed
her like two clucking bookends, their hands fluttering on her back and her arm like anxious butterflies unsure of where to land.
Nora wrestled with her runaway emotion, doing her best to rein it back in, but each bawl seemed more gasping than the last, until every breath dragged through hiccupping sobs.
Felicity crooned to her, rubbing little comforting circles against her spine as Mercy affixed a one-handed makeshift bandage on her own palm.
“You love Titus, don’t you?” Felicity sighed, resting her chin on Nora’s uninjured shoulder.
Nora shook her head, accepting the handkerchief Felicity handed her, and dabbing at her eyes and nose. “Don’t mark this, either of you. It’s been a trying time and I’m…it doesn’t matter.”
She took in a deep, painful breath and swallowed the ocean of tears threatening to sweep her into the tide. “What matters is that next year I’ll be married to a Duke’s son, Titus will be the toast of the elite scientific and surgical community, and you… you’ll be the belles of the season with dowries the size of which London has not yet seen, if Father is to be believed.” She smoothed the skirt of her black gown and took in several calming breaths. “There’s still hope,” she reminded herself.
Felicity pulled her hands back as if she were made of burning rubbish. “Hope for what?”
“For you both. For good marriages.”
The twins looked quizzically at her, and then each other, before they astonished her by bursting into peals of unladylike guffaws.
“What on earth makes you think we want to be married?” Mercy ended a chortle with an accidental snort, which sent them both into another tumult of amusement.
Felicity wiped tears from the corner of her eyes. “I believe the idioms, not if the entire world depended on it, and never in a million years have been batted around.”
Nora stared at them as if they were each two heads of a hydra. “But…you’re being bullied terribly. Shunned from society. Not invited to participate in the season.”
“And?” Mercy shrugged. “That leaves us time to attend lectures and meetings, and it’s ever so much easier on Felicity that she doesn’t have to talk to men. Or look at them. Let alone marry one, can you imagine?”
Felicity sobered at this a little, but seemed sincere when she said, “We’ve decided all we need is each other’s company. No husbands. Ever.”
Nora shook her head, unable to comprehend. “But… without husbands how will you afford to live?”
Mercy shrugged. “Well, Father’s on the hook for our upkeep indefinitely.”
Alarmed, Nora grasped her uninjured hand and forced Mercy to meet her gaze. “Father is unforgiving if you defy him like this. He’ll throw you to the wolves if you’re of no use to him; believe me when I tell you that.”
Mercy stood, pulling her hand from Nora’s frantic grasp, her eyes blazing with a sapphire zeal. “We’ll become governesses then, or seamstresses. Companions or stuffy old librarians. But I’ll see a cold day in hell before I see myself in a church as a bride.”
Felicity put her hand on Nora’s knee. “Is that why you came back, Nora? To fix our reputations?”
Choking on another sob, Nora clapped a hand over her mouth.
Mercy sighed and regained her seat at Nora’s side, her curls spilling over her riotous magenta bodice. This time, she seized Nora’s hand, and then thought better of it, gripping her beneath the chin like a recalcitrant child. “Stop it,” she ordered with much more confidence and command than her tender years should have afforded her. “You stop martyring yourself for us or for anyone else. I’ll not have it. Neither of us gives a fig if the house of Goode is sullied, and—regardless of what Father says—it’s certainly no fault of yours.”
“Go be happy, Nora. Please,” Felicity admonished. “We’ll be all right. We’ll be better than that. The worst has already happened, the damage has been done. Not by you but your terrible husband.”
Mercy released her so she could look over to Felicity, an identical face, if softer and more earnest. “You needn’t endure any longer. You never should have done. Father is dreaming if he thinks this marriage will save everything. But one thing isn’t a dream… Titus Conleith loves you. He has always loved you. And you love him, I think.”
Nora shook her head, her heart bursting with love for her sisters and pain for her loss.
Of course she loved Titus. All she’d ever done was because she’d loved him.
“He hates me now, I’m certain of it,” she sniffled, wiping away tears that refused to stop falling. “I left with Father when he all but begged me not to. I betrayed him again.”
Felicity took off her spectacles and rubbed some fog away on her sleeve before replacing them. “According to the novels I read, if his feelings for you are powerful in either direction… that means there’s hope for a happy ending yet.”
“I don’t know if he’ll ever trust me,” she lamented. “I’ve been so unspeakably cruel.”
Mercy perked up. “What do they do in your novels, Felicity, when it seems all hope is lost?”
Nora plucked at a stray thread in the handkerchief. “It doesn’t matter, it never ends well for the villain.”
Felicity shook her head forcefully. “No, you’re not the villain. You’re the hero, and Titus—regardless of his apparent virility and… impressive musculature—is the heroine.”
Nora looked at her askance. “How do you figure?”
“Well, you’ve the reputation of a rake, I gather.” Felicity blushed as she said this, pressing a hand to her cheek. “And have wounds from a dark and painful past.”
Mercy held her finger up to mark an idea. “You were shot at least once and stalked by diabolical fiends of the underworld.”
“That’s right!” agreed Felicity. “That makes you the dashing—if somewhat imperfect—hero.”
Even Nora couldn’t fight the tug of a smile at their antics. Bless the souls of bookworms everywhere. “So, what does the hero do to win back his heroine?”
Felicity tapped her chin. “Usually a grand gesture of some kind. The hero realizes he was utterly wrong and dreadful—sorry Nora—and he does something to make himself ridiculous for his heroine. Or he fixes all her problems and restores her honor and good name. He saves her from the villain—”
“Titus doesn’t need saving from anyone except for me… that hasn’t changed.”
“Tosh,” Mercy shoved that idea aside with a wave of her glove. “I’m sure he needs something; we only have to figure out what that is. What is the conflict? What would keep you two apart?”
Nora cast about for ideas, feeling too cynical to be this idealistic. And yet…
“I suppose Titus needs funding to expand his new clinics, and for that he needs financiers, investors, and wealthy patrons to his surgery. He wants to open one in every borough, so even the poor can be treated in time without having to solely rely on the underfunded and overwhelmed city hospitals.”
“So, it’s just a question of money.” Mercy shrugged as if that were no insuperable impediment. “If you can figure out how to replace what he might lose through… well through scandalous association with a benighted—if beautiful—widow, then what’s to keep you from being together?”
Nora stood, suddenly agitated by a relentless pinprick of hope in a dark abysmal sky. “It’s not merely money, it’s everything. I’m still possibly a mark for this Sauvageau person because William is haunting me with misfortune from beyond the grave.”
“If only we could find that gold William took,” Felicity mused. “Surely that would be enough to finance any manner of medical marvels.”
Nora put a hand to her forehead and squeezed, hoping to bring forward any idea, any helpful memory. “Before he died, William was looking in shipping containers at the Southwark warehouse because it is largely unused in Father’s business. The rest of the London warehouses were subsequently searched by Morley.”
“What about the one in Sheerness?”
Nora turned to
Mercy very slowly, her blood suddenly pulsing through her. “Say that again.”
Mercy’s eyes shifted restlessly or—one could say—guiltily. “Well one time, when Prudence and I were snooping through Papa’s papers, I thought… I would like to figure out just how rich Father is.”
“And?” Nora breathed.
“He’s obscenely affluent. Perhaps wealthier than the Queen.”
Felicity frowned. “I knew we were rich, but to listen to Father go on, it’s as if we’re on the verge of ruin at all times.”
“The warehouse, Mercy,” Nora redirected the conversation back to the salient topic, doing her level best not to snipe at her sisters.
“Oh, well, Father has a few warehouses closer to the mouth of the Thames. According to the papers I found, they’ve been for sale for months, but the rafters are rotting, so no one’s been interested. He’s planning on razing and liquidating the property.” She put her fists on her hips. “Did you know, he has estate holdings all over, in the strangest of places. Houses we never knew existed?”
This seemed to increase Felicity’s distress. “What does he do with them?”
“Who is to say?”
Nora put a hand to her heart, just below the still-healing wound that now ached when she became so tense. “It could be there,” she whispered. “Morley has no jurisdiction in Sheerness.”
“Should we send for him?” Felicity suggested. “For safety’s sake, if nothing else.”
“No, you ninny,” Mercy stood as well and began to pace as she considered. “If we invite the police, they’ll confiscate the gold.”
“The gold has been stolen from someone…” Nora reasoned. “Even if we find it, it’s not ours.”
“We’d be taking from smugglers to finance medical care for the poor,” Mercy remonstrated. “We’re essentially Robin Hood.”
Nora couldn’t believe she was about to do this. “I’m not getting you two involved. You need to return home at once.”
“Oh, no you don’t!” Mercy wagged her finger, then winced as she jostled her wounded hand. “You’re not leaving us out of this adventure. I’ve been reading about quests for illicit treasure my entire life and I’m finally able to go on one!”
Courting Trouble Page 15