And, of course, Peony was right in declaring that she could look after herself. She’d been doing that for a long time, both as a wife and as a widow. The thriving shipping concern Ben had left her was proof of her competence, for it had not diminished, but grown.
“This girl you married,” she mused when Jamie made no verbal response to her earlier questions. “What was her name again?”
The enormous irony of it made Jamie grin again, albeit wearily. “Bliss,” he answered, and before the sound of his voice faded away, he knew he’d die if he didn’t find her.
Miss Pennyhope—if indeed it was the mistress of the house answering the door—was short and plump, with iron-gray hair and spectacles that perched on the end of her nose. “Yes?” she asked, and while there was no note of suspicion in her voice, there was no encouragement either.
Bliss battled an urge to bend one knee just slightly, in the bobbing curtsy she’d learned as a child. “I’m here to see Miss Calandra Pennyhope, please,” she said, painfully aware of her tattered coat.
“I am Miss Pennyhope,” came the cautious reply.
Bliss introduced herself, leaving out the surname she’d recently acquired, and then Miss Pennyhope was all smiles.
“Heaven have mercy, you’re Lilian’s child!” she cried, stepping back and all but dragging Bliss after her, into a small, tidy entry hall that smelled pleasantly of beeswax and strong soap. “Come in, come in!”
Bliss tried not to look about her as she set her satchel out of the way near a brass umbrella stand etched with tiny rickshaws and Chinamen and pagodas, but her curiosity made it a hard bargain. “I know I should have written before I came—” she started to apologize.
“Nonsense,” Calandra Pennyhope interrupted, in her chirping voice. “I was just having tea beside the fire. Of course you’ll join me.”
“Of course,” Bliss echoed without certainty, unfastening the buttons of her coat as she followed her aunt into a tiny parlor so filled with furniture that it would be impossible to make a sudden move without overturning something.
“Do sit down,” Miss Pennyhope said. She indicated a chair near the hearth and waited patiently while Bliss wended her way through settees and hassocks and plant tables to take her seat. On the mantelpiece, a little brass clock with roses painted upon its ivory face chimed nine times.
Bliss blushed at this reminder of how early it was to go calling and draped her shabby coat carefully across her lap.
“You so resemble dear Lilian,” commented Miss Pennyhope when she’d settled herself in her rocking chair and poured tea for her guest. “I knew you instantly.”
“Thank you,” Bliss said moderately.
“You will address me as Aunt Calandra, I hope?” From her tone of voice, it sounded as though the woman did indeed hope to be spoken to in just that familiar fashion.
“Yes, certainly,” Bliss agreed. She took a sip of her tea, wanting to add lemon and sugar but suddenly too shy to so presume.
“I was, of course, devastated by what Lilian did,” Calandra confessed when the silence stretched. “I was some time recovering from the shock, I don’t mind telling you.”
She paused and sighed sadly. “Mama and Papa, God rest their souls, never wanted her to marry your father, you know. They said he had a contentious disposition.”
That was an understatement to Bliss’s way of thinking, but she saw no point in bringing up abuses she’d suffered at Nils Stafford’s hands at this juncture. She had bigger and more serious concerns.
“If her letters are any indication, Lilian is still very stubborn and high-spirited,” Calandra went on, her teacup poised near her mouth. “It only goes to prove that you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him wear his shoes.”
Bliss blinked, certain that her aunt would correct herself, but the older woman only flushed with conviction and nodded her head.
“Yes, indeed,” she added at length. “My sister is most stubborn.”
Unsure of how to broach the subject of Jamie, Bliss sipped her tea in a mannerly fashion and kept her quandary to herself.
“What brings you to Auckland?” Calandra finally asked, a note of cheerful interest in her voice. “Have you come to seek a post of some sort?”
Bliss nodded. “Yes, Aunt Calandra.” She took a deep breath and then blurted out, “I want to join Mama in America, earning my passage by teaching children or keeping an elderly woman company, but there is a problem.”
Calandra looked positively stunned. Clearly, she numbered among those who saw no reason to leave a fine country like New Zealand. “Problem?” she echoed, and her voice came out as a little squeak.
Again, Bliss nodded. Then, after drawing a deep breath, she rushed into her story, explaining as best she could why she’d left home in the first place and how she’d met Jamie. She hadn’t even gotten to the shotgun wedding when tears sprang unexpectedly to her eyes and she couldn’t go on for the lump in her throat.
Jamie. She would never, ever see Jamie again, and the knowledge was too much to bear.
“Oh, my goodness, what is it?” Calandra fussed, reaching out awkwardly with one plump hand to pat Bliss’s slender, freckled one. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m married!” Bliss wailed. “And I’ve run away from my husband!”
Calandra withdrew her hand to fan herself with it. She truly did look as though she might suffer an attack of the vapors, and little sputters came from her lips.
Bliss forced herself to finish the shameful tale. “He didn’t want to marry me, but Papa forced him.”
Calandra had found her voice, and it showed remarkable control, given her near hysterics of moments before. “Do you love this man, Bliss?”
Wretchedly, Bliss nodded, using an embroidered tea napkin to dry her eyes. Hellfire and spit, she’d cried more tears since meeting Jamie McKenna than in all the rest of her life put together. “Yes, God help me!”
A stunned “My, my,” was the response to that.
“He meant to get rid of me,” Bliss said. At the look of alarm on her aunt’s face, she hastened to clarify the statement. “Oh, I mean by an annulment. Jamie wanted to wash his hands of me, but—”
“But,” prompted Calandra.
Bliss could feel the color of shame pounding in her cheeks. She might have lied, and saved herself a great deal of grief, but something inside her prevented that. “We were—intimate.”
Calandra gave a little cry and fanned herself again, this time with an air of desperation, and then she reached out for a small silver hand bell and began to ring it frantically.
Bliss was certain that she would be sent packing, satchel, sad story, and all, and she prepared to leave on her own with dignity. Her pride demanded that much of her.
An elderly maid wearing a threadbare uniform and a mobcap appeared, looking put out. “Yes, ma’am?” she demanded of Miss Pennyhope. “What is it now?”
“I want a boy sent round for my solicitor, Mr. Wilson. He is to come here immediately.”
The maid gave Bliss a skeptical assessment, at the same time addressing her employer. “He’ll be thrilled to hear it, mistress. And what, pray tell, has this little redheaded urchin to do with the matter?”
Calandra gave a long-suffering sigh. “Really, Bertha, I do grow weary of explaining my every decision to you. Just send the boy round and go on about your business, please!”
Bertha’s button-bright black eyes moved over Bliss once more, and then she said practically, “I’ll just go over across the way and ring him up on the telephone.” She shook one skinny finger at Calandra. “That’s not to say he’ll be pleased, mind you. Mr. Wilson is a busy man.”
Bliss stared openmouthed as the intrepid Bertha ended her discourse and marched toward the front entrance.
“Mr. Wilson will see to everything, dear,” Calandra assured her niece blithely, now engaged in the process of pouring herself another cup of tea. “Don’t you fret one little bit.”
“What—what
will he do?” Bliss dared to ask. “Mr. Wilson, I mean?”
“Why, I would imagine he’ll see that scalawag you married arrested,” came the cheerful response. “More tea, dear? Your precious mother always liked lemon and sugar in hers, you know. It does seem that you share some of Lilian’s—inclinations.”
Bliss sank back into her chair. Her coat had long since fallen to the floor, but she made no effort to pick it up. Getting Jamie arrested was not at all the kind of solution she’d had in mind, but she hesitated to say so now, in the face of Calandra’s enthusiasm.
“Can they do that? A-arrest a man for—for consummating his own marriage?”
Calandra smiled broadly. “I have no idea, dear,” she replied.
Jamie hated the harbor, with its unremitting stench, its fishmongers and whores. It reminded him too well of Dublin and the privations he’d suffered there. . . .
“Lookin’ for somebody, lad?” a male voice asked.
Jamie’s revulsion deepened as he looked upon the twisted little man who’d spoken. It wasn’t the blighter’s disability that turned his stomach, but the yellow film that covered his half-rotted teeth and the filth that encrusted his skin. The smell fair made a man’s eyes water.
“Maybe I am,” Jamie answered after unbuttoning his coat, taking a cheroot and a match from the inside pocket, and lighting up. His blade, sheathed in its supple scabbard on his hip, was within easy reach again. He’d gotten careless of late; time was, he’d never have made a stupid mistake like that.
“Might be I could help.” The sailor was sizing Jamie up, no doubt trying to decide if a warm coat and a few coins of the realm would be worth the scuffle.
Something in Jamie’s bearing must have made him think twice. He smiled in an ingratiating way and said, “You be lookin’ for a woman, mate?”
Jamie felt a shiver move up and down his spine at the thought of Bliss having to deal with this stinking bastard or one of the many like him. He made himself smile. “Not in the way you think,” he said. “It’s my wife I’m looking for. We had a little—run-in, you might say, and she’s got it in her head to go running off to America.”
The scrounger tried to look properly disapproving. “A bad business, mate. What’s she look like?”
Jamie was reluctant to describe Bliss, but he didn’t see where he really had a choice. If he wanted to find her, he was going to need help; driven as he was, he wouldn’t be able to keep on searching day and night forever.
Once he’d given a brief verbal sketch of the woman he sought, Jamie offered a high price for news of her whereabouts. After taking his blade out to clean the fingernails of his left hand, he gave a casual warning: the man who touched Bliss Stafford McKenna would henceforth be able to relieve himself sitting down.
The cripple paled under the grime on his face, then backed away. “Yes, sir, Mr. McKenna,” he said. “You can count on me. You can depend on old Wally Row, yes, indeed.”
Jamie’s knife flew end over end through the air, lodging itself with a whistling thump between two of Row’s fingers in the wood of the piling he’d been grasping. “Remember what I told you,” he said cordially.
Row’s hand was trembling as he drew it close to his body. “I’ll remember. I’d never lie to you, mate.”
Jamie smiled. “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” he said. By the time he’d pulled the blade from the piling and slipped it back into its scabbard, Row had vanished.
To Bertha’s obvious surprise, Mr. Wilson did indeed condescend to answer Miss Pennyhope’s summons. He appeared in time for dinner, as it happened, and didn’t even pretend to polite reluctance when he was invited to stay.
Calandra apparently saw no reason to beat about the bush. Once they’d all settled down to juicy slabs of some roasted meat, potatoes, and creamed peas, she plunged right into the subject at hand. “This is my niece, Bliss Stafford—er—what was that other name again, precious?”
“McKenna,” Bliss supplied, almost in a whisper. If she hadn’t been so hungry, she’d have gone back to the tiny room beneath the stairs, which had been allotted to her as her very own, and hidden.
Mr. Wilson, who had been attacking his food with relish, laid down his fork. His brown muttonchop whiskers, tinged with gray, bobbed up and down as he chewed. “McKenna,” he repeated thoughtfully after some considerable time had passed.
The name reminded Calandra of the situation, which had apparently escaped her for a few minutes. “My niece married this fellow and came to rue the deed,” she said, conveniently leaving out the part about Nils and his pistol. “Now she wants an annulment, but there is one rather serious—and quite embarrassing—tangle.” Bliss should have known what was coming by her aunt’s dramatic pause. “That beast forced himself upon her.”
The piece of meat Bliss had been chewing caught in her throat, and she began to choke ingloriously. Calandra fanned herself and Mr. Wilson sputtered helplessly. It was Bertha who struck her a hard blow to the space between her shoulder blades.
The morsel was dislodged and Bliss was able to breathe again. After casting one grateful glance at the maid, she reached out for her water glass and took a steadying sip.
“Are you quite all right now, dear?” Calandra wanted to know.
“Fat lot of help it is to ask that,” Bertha muttered, watching Bliss intently in case she should need another smack.
Red in the face, Bliss nodded and croaked, “Yes, Aunt Calandra, I’m just fine. But—”
Everyone was staring at her.
Bliss drew a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and blurted, “But Jamie didn’t f-force himself on me. I was quite willing.”
At this, Calandra swooned but did not faint dead away. Bertha stood ready to slap her mistress awake should the need arise.
Mr. Wilson tossed down his dinner napkin. “There you have it,” he said abruptly. “Nothing can be done.”
Bliss felt a crazy kind of relief, even though this could herald the end of all her wonderful plans. She wondered what Jamie would do if she went to him now and threw herself on his mercy.
Jamie lay stretched out on the bed in the room he always used when he visited Peony in Auckland, staring up at the ceiling. He was too exhausted to sleep, and too worried about Bliss.
Despite the fear he felt for her, he smiled in the darkness. God, what he wouldn’t give to strip her naked and kiss every freckle on that delicious little body of hers.
The prospect made him harden uncomfortably. With a sigh, Jamie sat up and reached for the cheroots on the bedside stand. Peony didn’t allow smoking in her house, but she probably wouldn’t find out until after he was gone, anyway. He struck a match and held it to the tip of the small brown cigar.
As he smoked, he deliberately shifted his thoughts from Bliss and the thousand and one different predicaments she might have gotten herself into, to the skirmish on the road a few days before.
Dunnigan had worked for Increase in Queensland, when Jamie first knew him, and later he’d turned up in New Zealand. He’d wanted Eleanor, Dunnigan had, tried to force his attentions on her, in fact. Jamie had heard her screaming and permanently changed the shape of Dunnigan’s nose.
He sighed, remembering. That had been before he’d learned, the hard way, how Eleanor liked to lead a man on and then watch Jamie take his vengeance on the poor bastard. He waited for the old pain to come over him, but when it did, it was little more than a twinge.
There was a rap at his door and then Peony let herself in, flipping on the electric light switch. The glare made Jamie flinch and close his eyes for a moment.
“Just as I thought,” his friend complained good-naturedly. “You’ve been smoking in here.”
Jamie smiled and shrugged. “Sorry.”
Peony crossed the room and wrestled open a window. When she turned around, there was an expression of concern in her eyes. “No luck today?”
Jamie knew she was referring to the search for Bliss, and he shook his head. For some reason, he wasn’t comf
ortable talking about the Duchess with Peony, and that was something new, for there had never been anything he couldn’t talk to her about before. “I’ve been thinkin’ about that tiff she and I ’ad with Dunnigan and ’is men—”
“Some tiff, that,” Peony fussed. “You would have been killed if it hadn’t been for Cutter—that old miscreant. I never thought I’d be grateful to him for anything.”
“Will you let me finish, woman?” Jamie demanded, folding his arms across his chest.
Peony nodded grudging assent and sat down in a chair near the empty fireplace. “Go ahead, then,” she grumbled, “and damn you for smoking.”
He grinned. “Sorry. Anyway, as I was sayin’, I’ve been givin’ some thought to those blokes on the road.” Jamie’s expression turned sober. “Could be they were workin’ for Increase.”
Peony’s beautiful complexion paled slightly. “Off with you,” she protested after a moment with a weak wave of one hand. “After all these years, that old devil’s probably dead and gone—and good riddance to him, too.”
“He hated me, Peony.”
“He hated everybody.”
Jamie sighed impatiently. “Maybe, but I’ve got a nasty feelin’ that ’e’s decided to call in ’is markers, love. And if that’s the case, you’re in a lot of trouble and so am I.”
Peony gnawed at her lower lip, obviously remembering that vicious old man and the days when she’d been at his mercy, after her first husband, Will, had been killed in a fight. “It would be like him not to forget,” she admitted in a very small voice. She turned frightened eyes to her friend. “What are we going to do?”
By then, Jamie wished that he hadn’t mentioned Increase’s name—at least, not that night. “We’re goin’ to be a little more careful than usual and go on about our business,” he answered softly.
The lonely sound of a dog’s howling floated in through the open window. Peony shivered, stormed across the room again, and slammed the window closed.
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