A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (23 page)

“What did I tell ye, Mary, about accepting charity? This—”He plucked a hunk of bread and flung it down on the table, where it bounced onto the floor. Molly the dog eyed it wistfully. “Charity bread! And you and everyone in town saying I canna provide for ye! Is that what you tell them? Ye like makin’ a mockery of me, now, don’t ye? Don’t ye?”

“No, John,” Mary said dully, soothingly. “Not at all. I promise you. It’s just that with the new baby—”

And time slowed then, as John O’Flaherty stepped back raised a hand good and high.

The better to swing it across his wife’s face.

And Eve shrieked like a banshee and flew through the door at him.

And Adam, just a few feet behind her, saw her do it. In two long strides, he was inside. He lunged for her and seized her about the waist. She thrashed and kicked to be free, so he tucked her under her arm and hurled her toward the door.

And it was he who stepped between John O’Flaherty and his wife, and took the fist to the jaw.

Evie gasped when his head snapped back, and he went down on one knee.

But when O’Flaherty reflexively tried again—like a windmill that had no choice but to keep going around—Adam’s hand shot up and seized his wrist in midair. For a moment, their two arms locked, straining against each other. And then in one swift deft motion Adam twisted O’Flaherty’s arm around his back and yanked it up good and high.

O’Flaherty yelped; his face bunched in pain and darkened to the color of brick.

The roar of breathing, his and Adam’s, was all anyone heard in the room. Not one sound came from the children huddling in the corner.

“Now, John.” Adam’s voice was calm. Conversational. “You and I both know if you move at all, this will hurt worse for you. And like as no you’ve gauged my size and yours and, well, let’s be reasonable, I’m sober and you’re not and the odds are against you. Very against you.”

John O’Flaherty seemed to take this in. He nodded, almost reasonably, though the cords of his neck were still taut with fury. He gave a token struggle. Apparently confirming precisely what Adam had just said, because he gasped.

“I’m not going to let you hit your wife. And I’m not going to let go of you until you’re out of this house. We’re going to walk like this to the door, then I’m going to walk you through the door, then you’re going to keep walking down the hill, through the town, past the pub, out of the town, and you won’t turn around, and you won’t come back. If you turn around,” he said almost apologetically, “I’ll flatten you. I will take you down very quickly. What I do to you, in fact, will hurt considerably worse than a hangover, and last considerably longer. I invite you to test me.”

Again, very reasonably.

John O’Flaherty mulled this. “Sounds fair,” he conceded. Wisely.

“Shall we now?”

In a peculiarly mutated form of waltz, they shuffled, Adam maintaining his hold so tightly his knuckles were white, the muscles of his forearms bulging. John O’Flaherty cooperating, as though he knew he’d done something wrong.

A few feet outside the door, Adam released him abruptly. John staggered, then righted himself. He gave his head a shake and looked back at the house.

“Keep walking , John.”

Adam watched as John O’Flaherty trudged up the road.

And then he touched his face. It had been a glancing blow only, just enough to knock him off balance. He’d likely have a bruise. But, then, he’d had bruises before. He could accommodate them better than Mrs. O’Flaherty could.

Mary O’Flaherty was scarlet with shame. “I’m so sorry, Reverend Sylvaine. He seldom … that is … only with the drink. Almost never … almost never in front of the children. I …”

She turned and hurried to her children. And they were so accustomed to it that not even the little one cried.

Captain Katharine was in the corner, one protective arm looped about her huddled brothers and her sister. Molly the dog, nearly as tall as the youngest girl, sat among them. The baby was waking, fussing softly in her crib. With her other hand, Katharine held on for dear life to her St. Christopher’s medal.

“It worked, Mama,” she said. “Lady Wareham’s captain’s medal worked. Da is gone!”

Eve made a small sound of pain. As though something had snapped inside her.

She turned on her heel and walked out of the house.

Mary O’Flaherty had ceased noticing him, busy with the children, and she was safe for now. So he followed Eve.

She’d walked as far as the big oak tree and stopped. She flung her body back against it and stared up through the stripped branches.

He leaned against the tree alongside her; there was room enough for the two of them, even a third person, to lean. The tree had been there for centuries and had likely seen worse than the O’Flahertys. And better.

“ ‘Almost never,’ ” she quoted bitterly.

He had nothing to say to that. They leaned in silence for a time.

“Why are they like that?” she asked finally. Listlessly.

“They?”

“Men. Some men,” she corrected.

He moved just an inch or so, until his shoulder just barely brushed hers, and he could feel her ease just slightly into the comfort. He remained as still as if a butterfly had lighted on his hand.

“Sometimes it’s poverty,” he began softly. “A man gets to feeling helpless, so tortured by the fact that he can’t support his family. There’s nothing most men like less than to feel helpless.”

“You’re not rich.”

“Oh, how I love to be reminded of it.”

She half smiled. She reached up to touch her throat, but dropped her hand again. Remembering again that her St. Christopher’s medal was now hanging around the neck of Captain Katharine.

“I wish I had a cheroot,” she admitted. “I smoked now and again, when I was in London. Very calming, cheroots.”

“And here I was thinking there was a vice you’d somehow missed.”

Another small smile. “You arrived just in time. My cousin Ian warned me John O’Flaherty had been seen. Instinct made me come ahead of the volunteers.” He gestured to where his horse was tethered.

She was lost in thought. In memories, no doubt.

“Do you ever feel helpless, Reverend Sylvaine? Utterly at the mercy of circumstances?”

He wasn’t about to admit to that particular word: “helpless.” Neither that, or to being at the mercy of circumstances, because his current circumstances involved the complicated, glorious ways he felt about Evie Duggan.

“I meant it when I said my work involved a lot of guessing.”

“Well, then. I’d say you’ve a knack,” she said dryly.

He blew out a breath. “Your father drank?” He asked this question as if they were continuing a conversation.

She turned her face slowly up to him. At first incredulous, then indignant, then pinched with pain.

“Evidence of your knack.” She said it ironically, almost bitterly amused. “There was naught I could do to stop it, you know, when I was young. Da drank, and he hit Mum when he did. I did try to stop it.”

He could feel every muscle in his body tightening, bracing himself for the next question.

“Did he hit you?”

But he was certain he already knew the answer. He imagined a man raining blows on a little girl, and fury was acrid in the back of his throat. His head went light from it. And he thought: I will turn back time. In that moment, he felt he really could do it, such was the force of his fury. I will undo whatever harm came to her.

She must have felt his tension in the arm that just barely brushed hers. She stirred a little.

“Only a few times,” she said distantly. “It was Mum who stepped in, like you stepped in today. She wouldn’t let him get near us. It was always Mum who bore the brunt. And then he left and never came back; and then she died.”

Such a succinct, brutal way to summarize a childhood, he thought.

“And do you know … I swore then that I would never be at the mercy of any man. Ever. I would always choose when to begin and when to end with a man.”

He heard this as a confession and a warning.

And thus more and more of the mosaic of her life shifted into place. Being born into chaos was why she’d planned her life so carefully. And why she remained so desperate to protect her family—because she’d never been able to protect her mother as a child.

And her family was all she had. But some of her puzzle was still missing.

“How did you come to be in London?’

“A tinker passing through our village told me I was so pretty I could make my living on the stage.” She slid him an ironically flirtatious look. “I managed to persuade him to take all of us there in his wagon. All the little Duggans.”

“Ah, the advantages of being pretty. And persuasive.”

She gave a short laugh. “Mind you, all he got was a kiss for his trouble. My brothers and sisters were small, but we would have torn him to pieces if he’d tried anything else, but the tinker was decent, for all of that. He gave me my St. Christopher’s medal. Bit of tin, but he said it was for luck. And I might have been pretty, but I was a peasant, and there are only a few choices for a girl like me who needed to make a good deal of money in order to keep her family from the workhouse or the hulks. Fortunately, I was directed to the Green Apple Theater. You see, I’ve a bit of a knack, too,” she added with a quirk of her mouth. “Or so I discovered. I could entertain. Or entertain sufficiently.”

“And so you were able to take care of your family.”

“Mind you, it wasn’t glamorous at first—I wouldn’t recommend a room over a Seven Dials whorehouse as your next residence, for instance, Reverend Sylvaine.”

“And here I was sorely tempted.”

“It’s just … seeing the O’Flahertys … Adam, I’m worried sick about Cora,” she confided. Her voice nearly a whisper. She half laughed, half moaned and swiped her hands down her face. “For history repeats, doesn’t it? And in the last letter I had, her husband had gone missing. Will you pray for her?”

She turned hunted eyes up to him.

“I’ll pray.” It was a vow. Anything he could make right for her, anything he could do, he would.

A rogue breeze sent a few dead leaves tumbling and scraping after each other over the ground. It looked like pursuit.

“Such a kind thing to do, Eve,” he said, his voice soft, fierce. “To give your medal to little Katharine. Such a good thing.”

She shrugged with one shoulder. “I used to think it helped when I held on to it. It was so much better than nothing. It’s a horrible feeling, helplessness. God, how I hate to be at the mercy of anything.”

For a moment they watched the road together, as if it were the source of all surprises, for good or ill.

“How do you do it? How could you talk to him as though he was … human?”

It wasn’t an accusation. It sounded as though she truly wanted to know.

He drew in a breath. “Well, my father was … is … a bit of a tyrant. Unpredictable. Subject to rages, free with his fists. I learned to read him the way you can read the weather, in order to stay clear of him, and I think it’s how I became observant. And … I had to try to understand him in order to outthink him. And when I understood him … it wasn’t a far leap from there to compassion. I didn’t like him, mind you.” He said distantly. “And I don’t like John O’Flaherty, either. I think he’s despicable. But I pity him.”

He’d never said these things aloud to another soul. He wasn’t certain he’d drawn these conclusions quite this clearly before this moment.

But he wanted to give something of himself to her. Even as he knew these exchanges of confidence bound them ever closer together, like a cat’s cradle, even as he knew they simultaneously unraveled each other.

“And there are days … nearly every day … when I hope O’Flaherty never returns to his family, like your da. And when the O’Flaherty boys are old enough to work their scrap of land and raise stock, I think somehow, with luck, with my help and the worthy Mrs. Sneath’s battalion, they’ll all survive the better for it with their father gone. But sometimes a man’s family is all he has, the only thing that keeps him going from day to day. He may not deserve them, but it’s not an easy thing to deny him whatever comfort that might bring. And everyone, like you say, deserves a chance.”

When he turned, he found her eyes on him with an expression he couldn’t decipher. Something open and aching, something like pain that could just as easily have been joy.

It smoothed into inscrutability so swiftly it might have been a trick of the light.

“I would have liked to rip his throat out,” she said almost absently. “O’Flaherty.”

“I know.”

She half smiled. “Such calm in the face of my violent confession.”

The decision made itself. It was a pure extension of the moment. He slipped his hands in the pockets of his coat and closed it around the box Lady Fennimore had given him, nudged it open with his thumb, felt the fine chain beneath his fingers.

He closed the little gold cross in his hands and lifted it out.

He hesitated only a moment before he spoke. “I’d like you to have this. Lady Fennimore gave it to me. Said it brought her luck and protection. She said I’d know to whom I should give it.”

He opened his hand and showed her what it was.

She peered down at the tiny cross. Her breath went out of her, softly, in surprise.

A faint flush washed over her cheeks. For a good long while she didn’t look up at him. Perhaps she didn’t want him to see her expression. Perhaps she was considering what it meant to him, and what he wanted from her, and the consequences of accepting a thing.

“Oh, but I’m grown now.” She strove for lightness. “I shouldn’t have need of protection. I couldn’t possibly acc—”

“Eve.”

She stopped abruptly. Her face lifted, her eyes widened at the quiet vehemence he’d given her name.

“It’s all right to need help on occasion. It’s all right to let someone else look after you for a change. And, sometimes, accepting a gift is a gift you give to someone else. And that’s all it is.”

She hesitated. Her lips pressed together in indecision. And then she blew out another breath.

“Will you … will you put it on for me?”

And slowly, slowly, she turned around and cupped a hand to the knot in her hair and lifted it.