He’d always safely entombed his guilt in the knowledge that he had engaged the best agency that money could buy, that Dodson and his lot were as relentless in this quest as he. He’d relied upon men who had made a mockery of his fidelity and a farce of his crusade.
But in the end, that highly polished veneer of diligent pursuit and familial devotion had been stripped away by a single, disposable hour in the life of Mairey Faelyn. He had hired her to find him a silver mine, not to flay open his life and turn it out to the sun so that he had no course but to stare at its ugliness. Would the very capable Miss Faelyn next find his sisters lodged in a whorehouse?
“Damn you for meddling.”
“Meddling?” She backed away, her eyes flashing silvery hot. “How can you say that, Jack?”
“I didn’t ask you to interfere.”
“But I have. And it’s done. I know it hurts, that it stings your pride and scrapes your stomach raw. But you’ve lost eighteen years, Jack; don’t lose another day. Let me help you find your sisters.”
“No! You’ve already done enough, Miss Faelyn.”
She caught up his sleeve when he turned to leave, bracing her palms against his chest in her angry defense of him. “It wasn’t your fault, Jack. Don’t you see that?”
There was the flaw in her logic. So bloody plain he wondered how she could have missed it.
“Dodson might well have been using me, Miss Faelyn, but not half as expertly as I was using him.”
He left her while he still had breath, before he made a monster of himself and an enemy of the misguided woman that he adored.
Chapter 15
Supper tasted of sawdust to Mairey. The girls were fretful, wanting to run free in the woods. Jack had been gone since yesterday, God knew where. He’d ridden out of the stable like the madman he was.
Loneliness and despair did that.
She’d never seen a man in such anguish. And she’d caused it: rammed a spear though the slit in his spiny armor, found his huge, defenseless heart, and then, because she was prying as well as pushy, she’d given that spear a good, solid twist!
He had cried out in his agony—a horrible lament that had torn open her own heart. But instead of letting her explain, instead of seeking her comfort, instead of staying to plan with her to find his sisters, the scoundrel had gone barreling off, dragging her shredded heart along after him.
“The stone-headed, ungrateful churl!”
“No word from his lordship, love?” Aunt Tattie seemed to be the only one of the family not affected by the runaway wobble of the earth; she seemed happily content with her humming as she padded through the parlor, turning down the lamps.
“I can’t very well expect to hear from him.” Mairey snuffled back another plague of tears so they wouldn’t smear any more of the notes she’d been making. “I told the lout something he didn’t want to hear.”
“Ah, men.” Tattie sat down on the settle and rubbed Mairey’s back in great soothing circles. “Was it something his lordship needed telling?”
That his mother was dead? And that he’d had a brother he would never meet? That they’d been dead for nearly eighteen years, and he could stop looking for her; stop waiting for his life to begin? “Oh, yes, he needed telling.”
“Well, then he’ll understand.”
Tears erupted from Mairey’s eyes again, dragging huge sobs from deep in her chest. “I don’t think he ever will.”
“He doesn’t blame you, whatever you’ve told him. Not really. And certainly not for long. Not the way he loves you.”
A whirlwind propelled Mairey off her aunt’s shoulder and made it almost impossible to focus.
“He what?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. I’ve never seen the like.” Tattie winked and thumbed a tear off Mairey’s lip. “Never since my own Perry.”
“Jack doesn’t love me.” He mustn’t!
“Well, he does. Which is quite the nicest of happenstances, since you love the man to distraction.”
“I—” Mairey simply nodded, resigned to the plain facts. She’d never known any man like Jack. Wise and reckless, compassionate and granite-headed.
Hopefully not angry enough to track down the Messrs. Dodson and Greel and beat the daylights out of them. Though if he had, she’d have gladly given her entire collection of elf bolts just to watch and would have sacrificed her stone axes to add a punch of her own.
She went to the window and looked out on the moon-blanketed woods, cursing this feeling of helplessness.
“Where the devil are you, Jack Rushford?”
Jack leaned up against an elm at the edge of the dark woods. Mairey’s woods. Cricket songs and rilling water, that sweet smell of green. The lights of the lodge winking at him.
He’d let her family swarm over Drakestone willy-nilly, even encouraged the intrusion; let the household routine become disrupted; and like a fool, let them all into his heart—that great big murky chasm.
Shored up with stout timbers, crossbeams and struts. Indeed, heartwood. Sturdy stuff, impregnable, unbreakable. Best when hollow and echoing and insulated from unthinkable truths by ghosts and shadows.
Dodson, Dodson Greel and Rushford. There was a partnership. Conceived long ago in the conscientious pursuit of Jack’s lost integrity, dedicated throughout its term to the cherished memory of a valorous father, and, in the end, executed by all parties with contempt for both truth and honor.
The truth was that Jackson Rushford was a coward. Afraid that if he allowed anyone, himself included, to search too efficiently for his family, he would discover that he had done too little and was years too late. All of them slipping away from him, falling, drowning, just beyond the reach of his fingertips.
He’d ridden hell-bent to the rail station and, still denying the truth, had gotten halfway to Manchester before he had realized where he was going. He had to see for himself this eighteen-year-old grave. His mother’s name. And this other child—his brother…Patrick.
But as he had stepped down from the darkened platform, he realized that he still didn’t know where she was buried; he’d been too clumsy in his thinking to ask Mairey in which churchyard he’d find his mother’s grave.
He hadn’t learned a thing, though Mairey had tried to teach him.
He’d been a damn fool. Blaming her for holding up a mirror to his deficiencies, for loving him; and then tearing away from her like a maniac. His pride tasted like metal, chewed like a handful of nails. But he had swallowed it all, though it took him a full day to do it.
He wanted her to know that he wasn’t a lunatic or a brute, that she had courage where he had none at all. He wanted her wisdom, her help to find his way back. He wanted her to know his heart, all of it. That crowded, madly thumping vessel in the center of his chest, the one that had always seemed so empty but now was full to bursting.
So here he was, lurking outside her house like a lovelorn dolt, holding fast to the monumental decision he’d made this evening.
The lodge was dark save for a single light high in the gallery window. Nine o’clock. The girls would be gone to bed by now, Mairey’s bedtime tales tucked under their pillows to sweeten their dreaming. Tonight’s tale and last night’s would surely have been of fire-breathing dragons and purloined princesses.
And that dragon’s name would rightly be Jackson Rushford.
He wondered if the trellis beneath Mairey’s window would hold him.
“It’s Lord Jack! Look, Poppy! I found him!”
They leaped at him out of the understory, flying toward him in streaks of white gossamer and clouds of giggles and streaming hair.
“Anna Faelyn, what are you doing outside in the middle of the night?” He knelt on one knee to corral them, and they fell on him in a clump of arms and legs, landing fairy kisses that would probably leave purple bruises. “Ouch! Caro, does Mairey know you’re all out here?”
“No, she’d skin us!”
“Where have you been, you mean old Jack
?” Poppy found his neck and clung there, a bare heel in his crotch until he shifted her to his hip.
“We were looking for you.”
“Here, in the woods, in the dark?”
“You made Mairey sad when you left.” A belly-blow from Anna that had nothing to do with her sharp little elbows.
“I didn’t mean to. I made myself sad, too.”
“Do you promise never to run away again?” Anna had her sister’s persistence and sense of order, and was far too perceptive for her years.
“I promise to do everything I can to make her the happiest woman on earth.”
“She’ll like that.”
“I certainly hope so.” This was no place and no time for a conference. “And I don’t need to be looked for any longer. You found me; I’m home.” At least near it. “Which is where you should all be. Now, be off before Mairey finds you gone.”
But even as he gave the warning, the door to the lodge clicked open and Mairey stepped out onto the wooden porch in her nightgown, a candle held high, searching for something beyond the glow.
“Trouble,” Jack whispered, wondering how the hell he had become a confederate to three changelings. He was smiling grandly, finding it difficult to hold in the belly laugh that was brewing in his chest.
The four of them became part of the shadowed brambles and the ferns, huddled in a conspiracy of silence as they protected their collective hides and rode out the danger of discovery.
“You should marry her, Lord Jack.”
“Sh!” He clamped his hand over Caro’s mouth, felt her silly grin in the middle of his palm.
Marry Mairey? Oh, God, yes! Tomorrow if she’d let him. His heart filled up so fast the tide of it jostled him off balance, and a twig snapped under his knee.
Mairey turned sharply and took a step toward them, held her candle higher, and leaned forward in her glowing gown and spun-glass hair. She stood for a long time, peering directly at their fear-frozen tableau, before she pinched out the flame and gazed up at the bright moon.
“Come home, Jack.” Her whisper or his wish, or a soughing breeze. She was there, and then she was gone. The door closed, and everyone collapsed but Jack.
“Off you go, young ladies! Now! And I mean go straight into the house or I’ll see that Mairey knows you were out here.”
“Yes, sir, Lord Jack.” Anna was giggling.
“Don’t say a word about me, or we’ll all be in trouble.”
“Cris and cross our hearts!”
Then they were gone, bare feet shushing across the small yard and through the side door of the kitchen.
Not a minute later, their small, smiling faces and waving hands appeared at the garret window.
Ghosts. No, not ghosts—hoarded remembrances, cherished and enduring. Maybe that’s all he would ever find of what-might-have-been. And maybe that would have to be enough.
He let the gouging grief hurt this time, and the lost years; let them sting the back of his throat and fill his eyes to overflowing.
He waved Godspeed to his phantoms and hello to the three little girls who had won over his heart the moment Anna’s well-aimed apple had hit him in the shoulder.
He left the woods for his cavernous house, a man with marriage on his mind and Mairey in his heart.
Unsure what whimsy had drawn her outside earlier, but suspecting the foolish moon and Jack Rushford, Mairey went back to her restless idling. She dusted the curios on the mantel, read for a time in the parlor, then soaked for an hour in the tub until she was prunish and pink. She made the rounds to the girl’s rooms and left kisses on their foreheads, wondering how each of them had gotten bits of mulberry leaves in their hair. Her three dancing princesses.
She tried her best to sleep, but the crickets were in full voice tonight and the breeze that caught at her curtains was too sweet, and soon she was pacing down the stairs in her night rail.
The Willowmoon and its knot-work were on her mind, a maze inside a maze; Jack’s life and hers woven together intricately, recklessly. She couldn’t leave Drakestone until she’d found the Willowmoon Knot. She couldn’t stay for the ache in her heart.
Finding the Knot quickly was the logical solution. The sooner she did, the sooner she could extricate herself and her family.
Which would cause great tides of grief that would drown her every day for the rest of her life. But it couldn’t be helped; she had promises to keep. She would start bringing her work home to the lodge, and separate herself from Jack a little at a time until she could manage perfectly—perfectly wretchedly—without him. No time like the present, she thought, trying to convince herself of the urgency.
The twenty-volume Gazetteer of Ecclesiastical Antiquities had been delivered to Drakestone’s library earlier today among the properties that the Royal Family were to give to the new museum at South Kensington, and she hadn’t found a single moment to study them. She would do so now.
After donning a long walking-coat over her nightgown and slipping into a pair of garden boots, Mairey left the lodge and made her way toward the main house.
A rustle of guilt stirred the air in her lungs and tainted the sweetness of the night. Not because she had stepped out of the bounds of their relationship and proved Jack’s lawyers as devoid of honor as they were of resources. He needed that jolt of truth, whatever it had cost him in agony.
Rather because he was the most honest and trusting man she had ever met—which left Mairey feeling caddish and hollow. She was in the business of deception, and Jack was her helpless mark. Even if he read his way through all twenty volumes of the Gazetteer of Ecclesiastical Antiquities, even if he memorized every word of it, he would still be confounded. He needed Mairey to make sense of the passages and to lead him to the Willowmoon Knot.
And that made her great, bellowing dragon vulnerable to her slightest falsehood, the ones she created every day to keep him off track. Big, sloppy red herrings, drawn so easily across his path.
With the weight of the ages pressing on her shoulders, Mairey let herself into the dark library, feeling her way along the familiar textures to her workbench, surprised that Jack’s eloquent scent of leather and soap was so strong and so evocative though he’d been gone for more than a day.
She lit the lamp on her worktable, then lugged volume one of the thick gazetteer to her desk and flipped open the cover.
This Volume, intended as a Gazetteer of Minor Collections of Antiquities, is Respectfully Dedicated to the Most Honorable, the Viscount Norbury, Lord President of the Council of Antiquaries, 1778.
The Willowmoon Knot hadn’t been in York; she and Jack had returned to the storage rooms in the minster and had found nothing of Runville’s pagan collection, no mention of its ever having been cataloged. It might have been stored there unremarked for decades and then been traded to another parish, or sold to a museum or even to a private collector by one of the minster’s deans.
1778. Nearly modern. It was the most tantalizing resource yet. Inefficiently indexed, and compiled from many sources, it would be a long, hard read. She should have been thrilled at finding the Gazetteer, but success had tasted bitter recently.
“If you were to search for my sisters, Mairey, where would you begin?”
“Jack!” Her heart wild with relief, Mairey searched him out in the shadows that stuffed the corners of the library. She had sensed him in the darkness after all, she’d heard his breathing, felt his heat and his scent. She wanted to run to him and hold him through the night—an accidental friend, an inconvenient colleague…and oh, yes, a lover.
“Your sisters, Jack?” she asked instead, trying to assess his mood across the distance between them. “That would depend on what more you could tell me about them.”
“Everything, Mairey.” His desk chair creaked, and she heard him rise. “I would tell you everything. You can have Dodson’s file full of lies and distortions, for all the good it will do you.” He teetered in place, caught his hand fast around the back of his chair.
&n
bsp; The lout had injured himself, or he’d been drinking. Which didn’t seem at all like the Jackson Rushford who planned and controlled the workings of his rigid life to the nearest inch.
“Jack, where have you been?” Concern for his recklessness made her voice far more chafing than she meant.
“Out.”
“More than out, Jack. You were gone a night and a whole day.” His delicate mood be damned. Mairey grabbed up her lamp and set it on the table beside him, then stood back to examine him as he flinched from the light, squinting down at her. He looked tumbled.
“Were you worried about me, Mairey?”
“Worried? How about terrified, good sir?”
He smiled sideways, too charmingly bashful for this hour of the night. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
His hair was standing every which way, finger-combed and drooping damply into his eyes. She reached up and ran her fingers through its silky blackness.
“Your hair is wet.”
He was jacketless, collarless, with his sleeves rolled to his elbow. “I took a bath, Mairey. I think I fell asleep again.”
“You think?” He looked half-asleep still.
He leaned down lazily and pulled her close to whisper in her ear, “I didn’t have you there to rescue me.”
A very good thing, because she wouldn’t have had rescue on her mind.
“Sit here, Jack, before you fall.” Mairey wrestled him into the high-back chair. He landed with a grunt and a grimace. “Have you been fighting? Did you kill Dodson?”
“Christ, Mairey, I wanted to take on every Dodson and Greel I could get my hands on.”
“And did you, Jack? Did you find Dodson and beat him to a pulp?” Hoping he had, Mairey knelt between his spread thighs and took pleasure in the intimate smoothness of his beard against her palms while she turned his jaw to examine him for injuries.
He hadn’t even a scratch on him, save for the cut he must have just gotten from his razor.
“I would have, Mairey. But I didn’t want you to hate me any more than you do.”
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