The Wedding Night

by Linda Needham

  Dearest Aunt Tattie,

  I have found lodgings near my work and wish you to join me here at Drakestone House, as soon as you can pack the girls and all their things.

  And may the dragon beware.

  Chapter 5

  Dodson. Christ, he’d forgotten. Had another June come already? This one had crept up on him, forgotten in his quest to find Miss Faelyn and her silver mine.

  No, not altogether forgotten. Never that. It was an everlasting echo in a heart gone hollow.

  Jack made a detour into his private office, not yet ready to face Dodson and his partners. This meeting took more and more out of him every year, sapped his strength for days afterward.

  It had become a dreaded reckoning, an acrid accounting of his failure. He had a file drawer packed with reports and assessments. Eighteen years of searching for the family his father had left to him.

  Protect them, Jack. The girls, your mother. They’ll need you, son.

  But he hadn’t protected them: he’d never seen them again. Not after the savage violence of a miner’s strike gone horribly wrong. He had lost track of his family even as his father lay dying in his arms.

  He’d been sent away that night, exiled to Canada, with the law on his heels and a price on his head. He’d spent his first shilling searching for his family; he would gladly spend his last if he had to.

  Dodson and his lot had found little trace of them—only rumors and unverified sightings. Eighteen years was a lifetime of waiting, of stark loneliness and phantoms.

  And hope was a heavy burden.

  Jack emptied his chest of the pain, of his fury, and dimmed his memories so that they wouldn’t flare up and overcome him in the midst of his meeting. He took a steadying breath and then shoved through the adjoining door into his office.

  “Your report, gentlemen,” Jack said sharply and without preamble, because he’d never found any other way to begin this annual farce. Every year it grew more difficult to talk through a tightening throat. “I haven’t time to waste.”

  The firm of Dodson, Dodson and Greel, attorneys at law, had been sitting like undertakers around the conference table, and now they scrambled to their feet, all chattering at the same time.

  “Well…sir…my lord Rushford—” The youngest of the men struggled to right his chair, his fingers creasing an already folded sheaf of stiff documents.

  “Speak up, boy!” Jack stood fast at the end of the table, looking down its cold expanse of mirror-glossed mahogany. “You’ve had another year, Dodson. Have you added anything at all to my very thick but very empty file?”

  “No!” the young man said, casting a pleading glance at the elder Dodson. “I mean…”

  “What my son means is nothing explicit.” Dodson punctuated his findings with a bow. “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry. That answer still slashed as deeply through Jack’s defenses as ever, made his throat close over and disabled his fury. He turned away to the windows and the green woods beyond the garden, where Mairey Faelyn was settling her brightness into the lodge.

  “Detail your report, if you please,” Jack said, hearing the shuffle of papers and the whispering as though they were close-kept secrets. A scheme to keep him from his family, to expose his shame.

  “Um, sir. We…our operative, that is, he…” It was Dodson’s son again, and more whispering.

  “Your operative did what?” Jack turned, his anger patched over thickly enough to shield his heart from the blows that would come.

  “Our operative searched the usual sources, sir, focusing this time on the parish records in Cornwall and Devonshire.”

  “You’ve searched both counties three times before.”

  Greel wagged a patronizing finger. “But not for years—”

  “Seven years ago, Greel. I have the report in my own file, compiled by a Mr. Wilfred Rainey.” He’d memorized every item, sorted and analyzed, hoping Dodson had overlooked some fact or an idiosyncrasy that only Jack himself would notice. Nothing. “Why do you waste my time looking in places you’ve already examined?”

  Greel lowered his finger. “Mr. Rainey no longer works for Dodson, Dodson, and Greel. We thought that our new operative—”

  “Tell me, Dodson, why I shouldn’t fire your firm and find another.”

  Dodson bristled and blinked. “We are the very best at these issues, sir. We’ve found many a lost relative, united heirs with fortunes—”

  “But what have you done for me?” Jack’s righteous anger made him feel whole and in control, made him feel as though his mother and sisters were waiting for him at Southampton or at the shore in Brighton, eating frosted cakes, their hands and faces scrubbed clean of coal dust. He need only take the right train.

  “The 1842 Devonshire assize, my lord,” Greel said quickly, sliding another page out of the report and across the table toward Jack. “As you can see there, a woman named Claire Radforth was fined three shillings for stealing eggs from her employer.”

  Jack picked up the paper, tasting venom on his tongue. “And I see that the same woman served three months in the Female Penitentiary in Exeter. What has this creature to do with my mother?”

  Greel’s face paled to match his ginger frizzled hair. “Well—we just thought—”

  “My mother’s name is Claire Rushford, not Radforth.”

  “Yes, of course, sir. But mistakes are often made when the illiterate speak their names to a court official. Rushford quite easily becomes Radforth if one—”

  “Claire Rushford, Mr. Greel.” Jack came slowly around the table, grateful that the man was backing well out of his reach, else he might take him by the throat and squeeze too hard. “My mother was a collier’s wife, not a street-corner slattern. She taught me and all my sisters to read and to write. She damn well knew how to spell her own name.”

  “Yes, yes, of course she did, my lord. However—” Greel sat down hard, and Jack followed after him.

  “Nor was my mother a thief. You are looking once again in the wrong place.”

  “There is the graveyard accounting, my lord,” Greel said, shuffling wildly through his papers, thrusting one between Jack and himself. “Here.”

  The graveyard accounting. The page crumpled against Jack’s chest.

  The writing was a blur, as it always was at first. That startling fear of finding a name that was too dear, and with it a spiraling pool of emptiness. His hand shook as he went to the window with the report, where the light was better and the air was sweetened by the wisteria.

  “You’ll see, sir, that our operative has singled out a number of possibilities.” Jack could hear the fear and hesitance in Greel’s voice; relished it because it matched his own. “Odd spellings and such, as I said. Collected in potters’ graveyards only because they were connected with the appropriate dates and locations. The unclaimed body of a woman your mother’s age.”

  A body. Jack grasped again for his anger and found plenty of the sort bound up in helplessness. It would do; it was heavy enough to weight him to the spot.

  “What else have you got to show me, Dodson? I have three sisters: Emma, Clady, and Banon.”

  “We know their names, sir.”

  “They would be twenty-eight, twenty-six, and twenty-one, respectively.”

  “We know their ages.”

  “Then why haven’t you found them? I pay your firm thousands of pounds annually, have done so for nearly two decades—long enough for your father to die, Dodson, and your own son here to have grown out of knee breeches and take his bloody place as a partner—and in all that time you have yet to turn up anything of consequence. Not a single word. My family did not vanish from the earth!”

  “It isn’t easy, my lord,” young Dodson said from behind his chair. “Perhaps if you could give us a bit more information.”

  “There must be a very hot place in hell for lawyers, Dodson. I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “Yes, yes. Without a doubt, sir,” the younger man stammered, though Jack had spoke
n his curse to the senior partner. “Perhaps if you’d repeat it again. I’ll check our notes.”

  “Do that. Check your damn notes. I last saw my mother the night my father died. I was on the deck of a smuggling ship that was sailing out of a dark cove off the coast of Furness.” Sightless darkness, the sting of salt in his nostrils. A fatherless son. The sea had smelled of desolation and betrayal and untimely farewell ever since. “It was the twentieth day of June, 1840.”

  Young Dodson’s nose was buried in the file. “Yes, my lord, as it says here. When again did you last see your sisters?”

  Jack swallowed the clod in his throat, tossed the report onto the table, and looked to the enormous map on his wall, the breadth of his domain. Lead, tin, copper. And for what purpose?

  “I saw them that morning at breakfast, before they crawled back into the mines for another twelve-hour day of dragging coal sledges to the surface. That was the last I saw of them.” But their faces still gleamed each night in his dreams, haloed in golden curls.

  Young Dodson was still searching his notes. “That was a full two years before Parliament enacted the law prohibiting girls and women from entering the mines. Perhaps your sisters met their ends in an accident. If that were so…I mean…”

  The young man inhaled sharply and raised his eyes, wary, obviously waiting for Jack to strike out. But Jack had never allowed himself to think of a cave-in or a fall, or the skull-cracking swing of an iron donkey.

  Was it time to begin thinking that way?

  Had his family’s silence been so immutably real all along? Had he been alone from the beginning? He cleared his throat and steadied his hands on the back of his chair, wondering if he would ever be ready to hear that kind of truth:

  “I suggest, Mr. Dodson, that if your operative hasn’t thought to research mining accidents in northern Lancashire between twenty June, 1840 and the autumn of ’42, perhaps he should.”

  A spark lit the young man’s eyes. “Yes, my lord, immediately. I shall oversee the project myself.”

  Jack should have been grateful for young Dodson’s enthusiasm, and for this new direction, but there would be harrowing pain in such success. A molten hotness pricked the backs of his eyes.

  “That will do, gentlemen.” Jack walked away from the stinging heat and found his anger again. “Leave your report on the table, Dodson.”

  “My lord, we’ve not finished explaining—”

  “One more season, Dodson,” Jack said, holding open the door to the breezy foyer. “That’s all I’m giving you. Then I shall terminate our association.”

  “But, sir, we—”

  “Good evening.” Jack waited while the men clucked and eyed each other gravely as they gathered their ruffled dignities and left.

  Jack listened to Sumner’s balmy tones as the man let the Messrs. Dodson and Greel out into the twilight, and he wondered if he could ever act upon such a threat. Terminating his relationship with Dodson’s firm would be admitting that hope was lost, that he had abandoned his pledge to his father. A trust betrayed. He wasn’t ready for the shame of it; would never be.

  More than that, he wasn’t ready to be alone in the world with no other blood of his heart but his. He battled every night to keep the memories from fading to fog, turning them into dreams where his parent’s small cottage was larger and brighter and warmer than it had ever been. Where his father told stories of his soldiering, and his mother combed the tangle of twig and bramble out of Banon’s hair. Where Emma read the month-old Times aloud and Clady wrapped Jack around her finger, and his heart around hers.

  Jack bit the inside of his cheek and tucked away his grief. He couldn’t risk losing them. Not yet. He would give Dodson a year, perhaps longer. After all, the man’s son seemed to have taken a real interest in the case. New blood. Yes, that’s what was needed.

  Just as he needed to give Mairey Faelyn free rein to find the Willowmoon Knot. If its design truly was a cryptic map to a vein of silver hidden in some forgotten part of Britain, he would find it as surely as he had found the glitter of silver in her eyes.

  Granted, the woman was ill prepared to conduct a prudent investigation. Her library had resembled a squirrel’s nest and had had just as much security.

  She would need a key to the Drakestone library.

  Jack unlocked his desk drawer and fished out the extra key. He kept his own deep in his pocket, but for some reason he would never understand, women rarely had such conveniences stitched into their garments.

  A piece of twine would do nicely.

  Jack left the house through the rear door, relieved at the head-clearing mission, and traversed the graveled garden walk to the toolshed. He found only bailing wire there—strong, but hardly suited to hanging about a woman’s neck. He tried the stable and the laundry and finally located a thin length of hempen cord in the cook’s pantry.

  Jack let himself into the library, lit the lamp at his desk, and noticed the broken pot, sitting like an indictment. Beside it was a brush-stoppered bottle of cement.

  “Thank you, Sumner,” Jack said to the bottle, “you’ve just saved my hide.” He would glue the bowl back together in no time, and Miss Faelyn would be none the wiser.

  He sat down at the desk and found a shard that looked as though it would fit perfectly—well, almost perfectly—in the space near the lip of the bowl. He unstoppered the cement and was about to dab the sharp-smelling goo against the first piece when the library door opened.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing, Rushford!” Miss Faelyn was on him in the next blink, a cloud of peach-scented fury as she grabbed the bowl out of his hand and cradled it as though it were a baby chick and he were a slavering wolf.

  “It’s…broken,” he said, feeling foolish as hell for stating the obvious.

  “It isn’t broken, sir. It’s Pictish!” She held the thing up to the lamp, inspecting the finish as though suspecting he had bruised it.

  “Pictish?”

  “And irreplaceable. What were you going to do?”

  Jack felt like a child confessing to roughhousing in the parlor. “I was trying to repair the bloody thing.”

  “Repair it? Sweet blazes!”

  She clutched it tighter, abject horror on her face. This wasn’t going well. He’d best confess all.

  “The breakage must have happened in the course of shipment from Oxford. Look for yourself, in here.” Jack pointed to the shards still tangled in the shavings, prepared to ride out her displeasure and then buy her another pot or two. “Shattered in two dozen pieces.”

  She obliged him by peering into the box of rubble, then stared up at him as though he’d grown a second nose. An airy, indulgent smile bloomed in her eyes and made them twinkle like the evening star.

  “Which is exactly the state in which my father found it thirty years ago.”

  Inscrutable woman. She was testing him. There would be a lot of that between them; she hadn’t come to him gently.

  “Your father found the pot shattered?” he asked, willingly walking into her trap to best learn how she set them, how they could be sprung.

  “Yes, shattered. Imbedded in clay, in a burial mound near Dundurn in Scotland.”

  A plausible trap, and utterly absorbing, this antiquarian of his. “Your father kept all these pieces of a broken bowl? Why?”

  “Not a bowl, actually. A bevel-rimmed cook pot. Papa kept and cataloged the pieces because he was a scholar of antiquities, just as I am.” As thorough and forbearing as a mother lion, Miss Faelyn gathered up all the pieces that Jack had spread out on his desk and replaced them one by one in their nest inside the crate.

  “How, madam, do you know this cook pot was Pictish and not Wedgwood?” She smelled too much of the woods and his own roses, too fine to keep him from peering over her shoulder into all her nesting.

  “The pot is red slipware, imported by the Romans from the Mediterranean. But the painting is”—she held up the rounded end and drew her finger along a series of black slashe
s as though she were lecturing to a room full of twelve-year-old boys—“here, Rushford, this raven design is Pictish. Third century, A.D.”

  Yes, a fine trap. An even finer fragrance. He sighted down her arm, up the curve of her wrist to her hand. “Ravens are Pictish then?”

  “One of their most common designs. The raven was thought by the Picts to give power through omens and sneezing.”

  “Sneezing?” There were limits to his gullibility. He’d been willing to believe the Picts, the broken pot, the burial mound, and the omens. But sneezing ravens? “Not bloody likely, Miss Faelyn.”

  “Think what you will, Rushford. But considering your inexperience in the preservation of antiquities, you’d best leave the unpacking to me.”

  Mairey heard Rushford blow a curse from under his breath and fancied that she could feel it on her neck as she dug in the nearest crate and retrieved a bundle of eighteenth-century guides to county antiquities—one of the first purchases she’d ever made with her own money. She’d been twelve at the time, and proud as cinnamon pie.

  “I’m more concerned over the matter of security, Miss Faelyn.” He reached into his coat pocket and dragged out a double length of bristly twine. A key dangled from its center.

  “Security for what? Hey!” He abruptly turned her away from him, then stepped in so close behind that his chest and all that heat met her back like a caress. Before she could protest he surrounded her completely with his arms, his broad hands holding the loop of twine out in front of her.

  “You’ll wear this always, madam.” The weight of the key and the twine fell into place over one of her breasts, a buoyant pressure that could have been his caress. But his hands were busy behind her, wrestling with her hair and the knot he was tying.

  “So you’re trusting me with a key?” She centered the loop, trying to sound unperturbed, but the key matched the thrumming of her heart and echoed it in a pulsating swing.

  He took her by the shoulders and turned her, frowning down into her eyes.

  “This is not a game. Nor is it a scholarly grant where you can wile away the hours with your nose so deeply buried in a book that you can’t tell midday from midnight. I’ve made an investment in you—”