A Tip of the Cap (London League, Book 3)

by Rebecca Connolly

  Still, Lily was wise and capable, and in her elegant lavender ensemble this morning, she looked far better than Beth did. She’d come to Knightsgate today with color in her cheeks and a warmer smile than Beth had seen her wear in months, and there was undoubtedly a story there.

  Unfortunately, Malcolm and Beth were the chief topics of conversation, and it was no more pleasant to tell than it had been to endure.

  “Not because I can see,” Beth said, at last, bringing herself back to the conversation and out of her miserable reminiscence. “Because I did not tell him I could see.”

  Lily frowned slightly, her delicate brow furrowing. “Surely, he ought to have been only surprised, and afterwards he should have exuded joy at the recovery.”

  Beth shook her head, and her forced smile faded completely. “There was no joy, despite his evident surprise. None at all. I betrayed him, Lily! I’ve never seen him look the way he did then, and the manner in which he spoke… It was as if someone had stolen my husband completely and only a stranger remained.”

  Lily sat back in her chair, her tea untouched on the table, her gaze suddenly far away. “I know that feeling all too well,” she murmured in a hollow tone. “It is painful and unsettling, to say the least. I would not wish it on anyone.” She exhaled slowly, shook herself, and then turned back to Beth with a smile that almost reached her dark eyes. “I would say that he behaved badly, to be sure, though I think that you would disagree with me in this instance.”

  There was no simple way to answer her, particularly when she was absolutely correct. Oh, there had surely been a better way for Malcolm to have responded, but she knew full well that she had been the guiltier of the two parties. She had hidden the truth from him, knowing he would not like it. She knew him well, and his reaction had been only slightly worse than what she had anticipated.

  And while it had hurt her exceptionally, she also felt that it was well deserved.

  “You are correct,” she murmured now, looking down at her fingers as they plucked at her skirts. “I would disagree. I should have told him the moment I knew I was improving instead of waiting until it was too late. I knew that he was burdened with matters, and suspected that he had a need to be in London, and I was afraid of being alone again, with or without sight.”

  “Understandably so,” Lily soothed, reaching for her hand. “Monty is a complicated man, and exceptionally dedicated to whatever he sets his mind upon. He will never forget you, nor the children, but on occasion, he becomes so focused that he forgets himself.”

  “I know.” Beth nodded slowly and sipped her cold and tasteless tea again. “I know. We had just gained so much with the loss of my sight, and having it return seemed almost a bad omen.”

  Lily tsked sharply. “Ridiculous,” she snapped with a tight squeeze to her fingers. “I refuse to let you wallow in self-pity and blame when we ought to be celebrating your miraculous recovery! Monty might have been cross, but I doubt it had anything to do with you. If there was anything on his mind that made the revelation ill-timed, that is his own fault and nothing to do with you.”

  Beth looked at her friend in disbelief, and then, impossibly, felt a smile form, grow, and spread until her eyes crinkled. “You are an impossibly good friend, are you aware of that?”

  “I have it on good authority that I am only impossible,” Lily replied with a laugh, releasing her hand and taking up her tea. “But you are kind for saying so.” She sipped her tea, and then made a wry face and set it down. “Good heavens, Beth, what in the world have you done to this tea?”

  The unexpected outburst made Beth laugh, and she took another sip of hers, but without any sort of disgusted facial expression. “I apologize. I’ve had to temper my tea of late. If it is too strong, I become very ill, and I already wake up ill as it is.”

  There was absolute silence in the room for the space of three heartbeats. Beth counted each one. Then the teacup clattered against the saucer as it was set against the table and her hands were seized.

  “Elizabeth Colerain, are you saying what I think you are saying?” Lily demanded without shame.

  Beth closed her eyes on sudden tears and dipped her chin in a nod.

  “A child?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, pained by the admission.

  “That’s wonderful!” Lily cried, obviously delighted by the news.

  When Beth hesitated to reply, and the only sound in the room was the clock ticking on the mantel, Lily let her hands fall away.

  “Is it?” Beth finally asked, raising her eyes just enough.

  A frown graced Lily’s fair face. “Why would you ask that? What did Malcolm say about it?”

  Beth rose from her seat and went to the window, the panicked feeling this news always brought her rising yet again. “I never told him.”

  “Why not?” Lily remained in her seat, thankfully, but her tone indicated she would much rather fly at her. “Surely that is something he deserves to know!”

  “Of course, it is.” Beth sighed and stared out at the drive in front of the house, wishing for the thousandth time that a certain someone would appear on it. “And I had intended to tell him. But then he discovered my other secret, and it seemed ill-timed to announce such news in an attempt to keep him from leaving.”

  Lily made a soft noise that Beth could not interpret. “I suppose. How long have you known of it?”

  “I suspected around the same time my sight started to return, but I was not sure until Dr. Durham came around last week.” She swallowed with difficulty, the rise of tears impossible to stem. “He confirmed both that my sight was indeed returned, likely for good, and that I was with child, destined to make its appearance in the winter. And I have no husband to tell.”

  She hadn’t said those words aloud before, but they had been haunting her thoughts since Dr. Durham had visited. Four times, she had sat down at her writing desk and begun a letter to Malcolm, expressing her apologies on her betrayal of his confidence, but she couldn’t bring herself to call it such. It had been her sight that had vanished, and her sight that had returned.

  He hadn’t been involved at all. Which, naturally, caused her to regret the letter at all, and she either tore it to bits or crumpled it up.

  She’d tried to write a letter as if she’d had nothing to apologize for, if only to tell him of her news, but she couldn’t bear to do so. She had tried a cold, emotionless note of the bare facts, but that was not her nature, and she could not be less than herself. Not now, not ever.

  She missed him fiercely, longed for his touch, for his words, even his presence in absolute silence. She would take the almost-distant man she’d married in a heartbeat, so long as he was here. She would go back to the comfortable arrangement of those days without a backwards glance.

  But she couldn’t say that in a letter either. She could not say anything she needed to in a letter. No husband about her and many things to say if only he were.

  “Oh, Beth…” Lily said from somewhere behind her.

  “I want to take joy in this, Lily,” Beth confessed in hushed tones. “I want to be delighted that I can see once more and that I am no longer an invalid in any way. I want to be excited and relieved that I will bear his child. That I carry his child at this moment.” Her voice broke, and her hand drifted to her midriff absently, as it tended to these days. “Part of me is delighted and exhilarated, humbled and touched, and utterly terrified.” She managed a weak smile and cast a look back at Lily, who had risen. “But when I consider this child, Lily, all I can think about is Malcolm. He doesn’t know, and I don’t know how to tell him when we are at odds. How can we have this child like this?”

  Beth bit her lip as the tears returned and turned back to the window.

  Lily was quick to come to her, turning her from the window and taking her hands. “Beth, you cannot dwell on such things.” She brushed away the tears on her cheeks and met her eyes steadily. “We have to focus on the good in any way. In every way. Monty will not stay angry foreve
r, nor will he stay away forever.”

  Beth sniffled and gave her friend a despairing look. “How can I? My husband does not love me and will not love me now.”

  The look she received was severe and significant. “You think I don’t understand the sentiment?”

  That took Beth by surprise, and she reared back a little. “You love your husband?”

  Lily smiled the saddest, faintest smile Beth had ever seen. “I have loved my husband since I was seventeen. Up until the day of our engagement, I had hope in it. But the day I married him was the day that hope ended, for the arrangement was one of business and not affection. I have a comfortable marriage, Beth. It is staid and proper and cordial, but very much separate and distant. I do not know, and cannot know, how my husband feels, but I know that the man I married was not the one I fell in love with. Yet somewhere inside him, that man still exists, and I hope one day to see him again.”

  It was worse than Beth had feared and far more than she had ever suspected. She had been aware of Lily’s attachment to Thomas Granger in the early days, but she’d never heard of any arrangement between them until she’d heard of the wedding itself. She’d known that it wasn’t under the usual circumstances, and that Lily had been monstrously wounded by the affair, but not why. To marry a man one loves only for the emotion to be lacking?

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said, hugging her friend for her situation, and for her attempt at comfort.

  “I do not divulge this to earn your pity,” Lily replied with surprising fierceness, pulling back. “I tell you this because I understand the loneliness that comes from this sort of thing, and I am telling you there is a way to cope without being utterly miserable.”

  What a startling thought.

  Beth tilted her head curiously. “Is there? I’ve yet to discover anything but utter misery.”

  “Well, there will still be some misery,” Lily admitted with a shrug. “We cannot avoid it altogether, especially being the idiotic women who’ve fallen in love with their husbands.”

  Beth laughed at that and found her tears completely gone, much to her surprise. She’d been on the edge of crying almost constantly since Malcolm had gone, and not even the brilliant lights of the children could put them off, though she had attempted to hide it. Laughter had certainly not been a part of her life of late.

  “What fools we are,” Beth said on a sigh.

  “I have come to the conclusion,” Lily announced, taking Beth’s arm and walking her away from the window, “that it is the men who are the fools, and our souls are simply too good.”

  “There’s a thought.”

  “A rather good one, I’m coming to find.”

  “Of your own discovery?”

  Lily shook her elegantly curled hair. “No, I have several supporters of the idea.”

  Beth shook her head again, smiling at the inanity of the conversation. None of this would take away from her pain, but it would provide a distraction, if nothing else.

  Lily rubbed her hand gently. “You’ll find your way through. Just don’t live in the darkness.” She smiled at Beth in a sort of amusement. “I once described you as a woman that nothing dark could touch.”

  “Did you really?” Beth snorted a little at that and adjusted the shawl around her. “Why would you say something so plainly false as that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  Beth nearly stumbled and turned to face her friend with a frown. “How can you say that? I am struggling to keep my wits about me, let alone put on a false smile for my stepchildren, so they will not think there is a true rift between their father and me. I quite literally lived in darkness for over a month, and there was nothing light about me in all of that. You know perfectly well that I am not immune to darkness.”

  Her friend did not look any less amused for her protests. “I never said you were immune to it. You are, after all, human.”

  “There’s a fair point for you,” Beth muttered, folding her arms about her.

  “I said the darkness does not touch you. It does not linger.” Lily shook her head, smiling further. “Your situation before your marriage was utterly dismal. You were planning to be a governess, though you are ill-suited for it, because there was no fortune for you, minimal support from your family, and no one to really care what you did with your life.”

  Beth frowned further still. She hadn’t thought her life had been so very dismal, but when it was put that way…

  “That does sound rather dreary,” she allowed with a small smile.

  “And you didn’t even know it until I pointed it out,” Lily said, taking her arms and shaking her a little. “A poor family with ten children and you the youngest? But you didn’t care, and never paid much attention to the fact that you ought to have been panicked or distressed about your prospects.”

  Beth shrugged, slightly embarrassed. “I was concerned, but it hardly seemed like something to spread about.”

  “And you married Monty with all the optimism in the world,” Lily went on, still smiling, “though that could hardly have been a fair prospect, aside from his looks.”

  There was a faint blush of embarrassment at that, considering the measure of truth there.

  If Lily noticed, she said nothing about it. “You took on four children in need of a mother, with a distant father, and they have fallen completely in love with you. You lost your sight and learned how to make do without. You made an aloof, broken, emotionally crippled man come to life and fall in love with you…”

  “Why would you say that?” Beth broke in suddenly, eyes wide. “He’s never said anything of the sort.”

  A look rife with derision was flung at her. “If you couldn’t see that, no matter what came out of his mouth, then you were blinder than I thought.”

  Beth swallowed hard and found no good response to that. Had she seen anything resembling love in him?

  She must have done. Or had she only wished it there?

  “Nothing dark can touch you, Elizabeth Colerain,” Lily told her firmly. “And nothing dark will.”

  There was nothing she could say to that, so she cleared her throat and moved to the pianoforte, though she would be an absolute fool to attempt to play in Lily’s presence. Lily was a gifted musician, and Beth was most certainly not.

  “And to whom precisely did you give this false impression? I shall have to write them to let them know of their delusions.” She ran her fingers over the keys soundlessly, smiling to herself.

  “Your husband.”

  Beth pressed down two keys in her surprise, the dissonance in sound echoing that of her mind. “What?”

  Lily clasped her hands before her, looking a perfect picture of an English lady, complete with the classic smirk that hid everything. “The first day he saw you, I told him that. And I stand by it.”

  An odd sort of calm settled over Beth’s aching heart, and she exhaled slowly. It didn’t solve anything, and it certainly didn’t remove the wounds she felt, but she felt the burden lift ever so slightly.

  And for now, that was enough.

  She smiled a little at her sweet friend, who endured so much herself. “I can see, Lily.”

  Lily returned her smile. “Yes, you can.”

  Now Beth laughed. “And I’m with child.”

  Lily grinned outright. “Yes, you are!” She laughed merrily and came over to the pianoforte. “Slide over, I’m going to teach you a duet, and we are going to play and celebrate both!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  "Two weeks and no progress?” Malcolm grumbled, running his hand through his hair.

  “Now you understand our frustrations,” Fritz nodded.

  “Technically, it’s been four weeks and no progress. Only two since you arrived.”

  Malcolm glared at Rook, feeling the lack of sleep and increased stress eating away at him. “Was that input entirely necessary?”

  Rook held up his hands in surrender, smirking a little. “Apologies, sir.”

  Fritz snorted softly
from the desk they’d dragged into Malcolm’s office, laying aside the papers he’d been examining. “Don’t apologize to Cap, Rook, you were only stating the obvious.”

  Malcolm dropped his hand to his desk with an angry thump and shifted the glare to his friend. “I am no longer surprised that you sent Rook to be our replacement, Weaver. He is exactly your type, and I am tempted to ask if he is your offspring.”

  Rook looked at Fritz with new interest. “Lord, tell me there’s a chance, Weaver. I’d be ever so grateful.”

  Fritz barked a laugh and waved a dismissive hand. “Back to work, Rook. You know exactly where you came from, and I am not old enough to have spawned you.”

  “You’re old enough,” Malcolm muttered, returning to the letters.

  He’d been over each a dozen times at least, and he’d found exactly the same thing that Rogue had, and none of them had led to anything. There were other bits and pieces of the letters that did not make sense, such as stray grammatical errors and unusual punctuation. There was just an odd, disjointed feeling surrounding them, but he could not find any pattern. He was not accustomed to failure, and it was maddening.

  “Hardly,” Fritz replied. He rubbed at his eyes and sat back. “Rook, why aren’t you more upset, like Cap?”

  “I’m used to feeling lost,” Rook said carelessly, propping his feet up on the edge on Malcolm’s desk. “It’s usually when my best ideas come.”

  Malcolm looked up at his newest associate, though it had been over a full year since he’d been brought in. “Then let’s hear one, shall we?”

  Rook gave him an appraising look. “I would, but you just said you were surprised that I was put in here, and I’m feeling disinclined to share.”

  Malcolm was beginning to understand why the others frequently asked to kill Rook, and he was giving the idea some serious consideration at this moment. “Your pride will survive the shock, I have no doubt.”

  Rook shrugged easily. “Most likely.” His smirk faded, and his look became serious. “I’m not indifferent to this, Cap. Far from it. I simply don’t have the attachments that the rest of you do, so at present, I do not feel the same sense of panic. I await further orders, and until then can only attempt to aid the rest of you in the tasks you have set for yourselves. Tell me what to do, Cap, and you’ll find that I’ll do it.”