by Baird Wells
“Brilliant scheme. The windows were a smart idea.”
“Simon was sure to touch me when he came in. Not a chance he was accepting it all strictly on face value. I wasn’t convinced I’d be cold enough, even with them broken out.” She sat up and took handfuls of his sleeves. “He’d nailed the windows shut; we couldn’t really be discreet about opening them. Margaret wrapped a chemise around her hand, but it slipped off in her haste.”
“And one of you thought to fudge the candlestick, and your head, with her blood.”
“That was Margaret’s idea.”
“Blood always adds an element of believability.” He exhaled, sat back, and slumped in his chair. “I’ve never had a moment like it, my hands on you while Margaret assured me that you were dead, when I knew it couldn’t be true. I called her a liar, and I pressed the matter.” His smile was wan. “Think if I’d kept at it, given Simon more cause to doubt.”
“I’d had too much laudanum and brandy to know the difference. Not a thing affected me until I woke in the carriage.” It had been a risk, being incapacitated and vulnerable. She had come to, cold, stiff, and tangled in a bedspread, and it had been perfect because she’d heard the horses’ hooves and known they were free.
“All this time,” mused James, shaking his head, “Margaret was never exactly as she seemed.”
“Margaret was no heroine, either,” she bit back, and then calmed. “She was my husband’s mistress; I’ve hated her and thanked her for that, by turns. But while I thought of her as my warden, she was a prisoner in the same cell.” She massaged confusion and old hurt from her forehead. “We’re not friends, but I bear her no ill will, not now. I think she’s been suffering my loss all this time, too. She can’t give back what she took, didn’t realize she was taking, but she can regret it. The epitome of Simon’s evil.”
“What was Tad saying about Mister Hilton?” She noticed that he had kept silent where Margaret’s culpability was concerned, maybe a little less forgiving because he hadn’t heard it from her own lips, hadn’t witnessed the crumbling breakdown of her confession.
“Oh! That’s the last hateful chapter. Well, it could have been. Simon sent the most awful letter to Mister Hilton, and then, thinking Margaret had obeyed his threats and run off, sent his men to tell Mister Hilton he shouldn’t expect to see her again. I asked Tad to do what he could, before he left for the ship. So, while Mister Hilton knows a good measure of Margaret’s past, he loves her too much to be scared off. He’s coming for her in the morning.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
James was right to be skeptical; she’d had her doubts, too. “His cable to Tad said he would. Mister Hilton wrote twice, en route, to make certain she would be here. He’ll come.” She stood up, ready to be off to the first activity of the rest of their lives together. “He asked about you, too.”
“Oh?”
“That new wing at the hospital has been long completed, and they’re still looking for good doctors and competent teachers.”
James snorted and took her arm. “Should be the other way around.”
“Hush and give it some consideration. You know he’ll want an answer at the first moment.”
James dragged her to him and smothered her in the sweet, vanilla, pipe-smoke odor of his coat. “I’m frightened,” he whispered.
She wrapped her arms around him, holding the small of his back. “Whatever for?”
“In your room, in that moment when I saw you on the floor and Margaret said you were gone…It was Emily all over again. I want to be with you till I die, and I’m terrified of being without you. As bad as it was when you found me at Meadowcroft, I could never carry on if I lost you.”
“Oh, Jamie.” She rose and kissed him. “I would never leave you by my own will, and I’m too stubborn to die. You’re stuck with me now, for decades and decades.”
“I’ve been stuck with you,” he said, taking her arm again. “But now I can make it official.”
“You can,” she agreed, snuggling up to him while they strolled through the lobby. “And I will say yes because you’re rich now.”
“Hannah!” he chided, using her name alone as a rebuke. “You’re not marrying me for my money?”
She dared a peck to his cheek under the wide eyes of three fruit-and-flower bonneted matrons taking tea in the restaurant. “No, you’re right; I’m not.”
“You’re marrying me for my astounding good looks.”
“Oh, no.” She managed three fingers up inside his sleeve in a wicked caress. “I’m just exploiting you for those.”
“Oh, God,” he whispered, dragging her out onto the street and waving at no one passing vehicle. “Why is our hotel so far away? I’m dying to be exploited.”
And she was dying to grant his wish. She grabbed his arm and twisted it with her, back toward doors just shutting in their wake. “Come along, Doctor Grimshaw.”
“Wait,” he pleaded. “What the devil are you doing?”
“We’re rich now,” she tossed over her shoulder, still hauling and heaving him back into the lobby. “Damn the other hotel. We’ll make our reservation here.”
.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Manhattan, New York – October 4th, 1883
Hannah sat on a lacy iron bench along First Avenue, outside the towering black gates of Bellevue Hospital’s wide drive. She had waited here, under the brick institution’s shadow, against mild spring showers and shaded from a summer sun, every day that she could since James had accepted Mister Hilton senior’s offer to teach and practice.
Most times she had barely touched her seat when he appeared whistling and smiling, but days like today, when patients or students kept him, she waited on the bench and admired New York’s hazy rush, so different from London and yet so much the same.
October flattered the city with warm light, rust crimson and gold leaves accenting rows of brownstones or gray mansions, little Vanderbilt castles that seemed to guard each exclusive corner along Fifth Avenue. Theirs was a cottage by comparison, the cast-off from one of the city’s oil or railroad or shipping dynasties when they’d moved north toward the park, now that it was no longer social suicide to live above Fiftieth Street. Twenty-five rooms were fifteen rooms too many, in her estimation, and she had told James as much in April, the day he’d signed the lease papers. But he had reminded her that, here, they were new money and an old title, and that came with expectations. They would have to spend and reside like new money in order to be at home and settle comfortably into New York’s new-world machinery.
She had teased that they would simply have to fill up the house with children, and he’d laughed. Then she had pressed his hand to her belly and shared her secret, and he’d refused to let her walk back to the house they’d let on Forty-Seventh. He only allowed her efforts now because the new house was so much closer, and the air made her feel refreshed and settled her stomach. She had reasoned with him in his own words about exercise and pregnancy, and the benefits of the outdoors, but he had pleaded with her time and again not to reason with him where she was concerned. She was fortunate that he indulged days like today because, when he looked at her belly and she caught a shadow of his old fear in his eyes, she could never deny him.
“Mrs. Grimshaw.” He stopped at the end of her bench, grinned, and held out a hand. He looked so smart in his long lines, top hat, knee-length coat, and charcoal gray scarf that she’d jubilantly finished for him after a frustrating first and second attempt. Her heart skipped when he took her glove in his, until he groaned with a lot of drama while he pulled her up like an anchor.
“Hush.” She elbowed him and then took his arm.
“My rote humor falls flat today?” He hmm’d. “We’re married now; I suppose you no longer have to laugh at my jokes.”
“Laugh at jokes you make at my expense!” She did her best to hold in her laughter. “How cruel. And just like a husband. Millicent will hear of this.”
“Save space in your letter
for Ms. Anthony’s visit next week. Millicent will be green right through.”
“I can’t wait to tell her she was right. There’s plenty to be done here, too, and I can hardly wait to begin. Rallies are out of the question for now, but teas are very popular, and salons. Think of the pleasure of gathering so many minds together, of the progress we can make!”
James chuckled, a sound that delighted her because it meant he’d been caught by her enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re here,” he offered gently, when they had crossed over to the west side of First Avenue, changing their tone entirely.
She nodded. “I’m always glad to be here. It doesn’t change the number of hours we’re apart, but they go by more quickly when I have the trip to look forward to and we have the walk home together.”
“Then you’ll be disappointed at what I have to say next.”
“Oh?” she braced; he was going to ask her not to walk anymore.
“I’ve taken a leave of absence from the hospital. It’s just until the spring, for now.”
“That’s…” She stopped them in the middle of the walk, forcing pedestrians behind them to dart in front of the oncoming foot traffic. “It’s the best news!” She threw her arms around his neck, as far as her belly would allow, and pecked both of his cheeks. “I am not disappointed in the least.”
“I want to be with you when the baby comes and for a while after. Maybe indefinitely; I don’t know. I’m thinking of private practice.”
“We don’t have to figure that out now,” she said, catching the struggle in his words. “We have enough to worry about.”
She felt his eyes on her and chewed her lip. “I’ve had a letter from Avaline; she’d like to come for a visit.”
“Incredible!” It was James's turn to be astounded, and rightly so. Avaline Guilford, who never saw cause for leaving her little street, nor the good in going into the smoggy, gnashing maw of a city, had made a priority of lumbering her sixty-two-year-old frame across an entire ocean. It was a leap that Hannah imagined no one saw coming. Avaline’s collection of literary types in the blue and yellow houses had rubbed off, and she confessed in her letter that she was eager to see and enjoy more of such people and their environs. Old money might not enjoy new money but, in Avaline’s case, it sometimes delighted in new ideas. She also was anxious to give her blessing to ‘…two people who had been her especial favorites, unlike these snobs in town’. Hannah had read it three times and chuckled equally with each pass.
But James had caught a tremor in her voice. By her face, he perceived that something in Avaline’s letter had given Hannah sad pause, and he was watching her now, waiting for it.
Hannah worked up her courage for the balance of her news about Avaline. “Irena has abandoned Elizabeth at Avaline’s. Gone back to Russia with some Polish colonel and whatever money Simon willed her. She might resurface when her new lover abandons her, but Avaline doesn’t mean for her to get Elizabeth back this time.”
“And neither do you.”
“Absolutely not.” The idea heated her with an angry flush. “Elizabeth is nearly fourteen; she needs a mother and an example. She’s not my niece by blood, though I love her regardless. But we have a baby of our own coming and a life here.” She rested her head on his arm while they waited at Fifth Avenue to cross over Forty-third street’s busy ribbon. “I’m asking what you would like to do.”
“She had a hard life, even before all of this,” said James. They both understood the meaning of ‘all of this’ as it translated in their married short-hand. Irena’s most recent affair, carried out nearly in the open while her husband had obsessively dogged his sister-in-law, had slapped him in the face without warning. He noticed it when his other efforts had been thwarted by Hannah and Margaret’s flight, and when Tad was no longer around to be a sort of paid companion.
It had been in all the London papers, according to Avaline, and Hannah had seen a brief mention of it deep in the first section of the New York printing as well; how Sir Simon Webster had come to be on the railroad tracks, and whether it was a suicide. Everyone had an opinion, a red thread of conspiracy to lace their version into one shape or another, but in Hannah’s mind there was no question. Everything Simon had ever loved, or subjugated, or manipulated, had left him. And Elizabeth, the one person who feared him but also loved him unconditionally, was beneath his notice. Losing her father to the train and her mother to the officers’ mess in the span of a few months must have done her profound injury.
“She was so tiny,” James muttered over the crowd’s din, “when I pulled her from that street. It feels like ages ago.”
“It probably does for her, too, with all that’s happened.”
“Avaline should bring her,” he said, leading them through their low front gate.
Hannah squeezed his arm, hugged herself to him and thrilled at his decision.
“She should stay with us, where she’ll be wanted, and without a lot of upheaval from here on.” He opened the door for her, and they exchanged another quick kiss. “Write Avaline tonight or tomorrow. You can see to Elizabeth’s wardrobe a little, before the baby comes. Oh, and now that I’ve taken leave, I can go downtown and see about furnishings! Two rooms to arrange. Which room do you think she–”
Hannah pressed a hand to his coat and doubled over in the hall, winded and laughing, and touched almost to tears. “After dinner. We have time. I need food if I’m to keep up with you.”
“I’m excited,” he said, grinning ear to ear and taking her coat. “Thrilled beyond words. We’ve gone from one child to two, and with half the effort. And besides, I get my son and my daughter all at once.”
“What makes you think our baby is not a girl?” she demanded, handing off her bonnet to Bethany’s waiting hands.
“Because I’ve named him Emmit.”
Hannah pressed a hand to her heart and her belly. “After Emily.”
“Yes,” he said, sweeping a hand toward the stairs and easing her up, “But Emmit, because it’s a boy.”
And they named him Emmit, because he was.
.
-About the Author-
Baird Wells enjoys writing romance, historical, and speculative fiction. History is her passion, with two decades of study finding its way into each of her tales.
Her debut novel, Vermillion, was a 2015 second-round finalist for a Writer’s Digest award; Argent received a 2016 honorable mention.
Baird grew up in Langley, Virginia and makes her home in the Wild West.
Look for her novel, The Last Woman in Weary Creek, in December of 2016.
-Other Books By Baird Wells-
Vermillion
Viridian
Argent
The Glass Apple