Angel In My Bed (15 page)

“I bloody
own
this house, Meg.”

Rooted to the floor, Victoria watched in shock as he turned away. “Nathanial knows Mr. Shelby,” he said over his shoulder. “I will take him with me to Salehurst. So you needn't worry that I will have to kidnap my son.”

“Then what?” she asked in a shaky voice.

He stopped on the stairway landing, his gloved hand resting on the banister, her pride and soul bared by his gaze. “I haven't decided.”

Then he was gone, and somewhere a door slammed downstairs. A deathly quiet descended over the cottage. She'd never felt more alone. Or lost. Or frightened. Her breath caught. She turned into her room and, heedless of the cold and her blood-stained clothes, dropped to her bed, anger returning to her some measure of calm. She listened to the sound of horse's hooves riding away.

“Victoria?” A slim arm came around her shoulders, and suddenly Bethany was holding her tightly. “It will be all right.”

The gentleness was too much. It was as if her lungs ceased to breathe, and when she finally gasped, she could not hold back the tide of tears. They flooded down her cheeks, then became a deluge. “I'm so sorry.”

And as Victoria turned her face into her pillow, she knew nothing would ever be all right again.

 

David raised a pitcher of water over his head and poured. The icy shock jolted his whole body, but still he poured, raising his face as he rinsed the last of the soap from his hair. He stood in a hip tub, caring little that he had not ordered the water heated before he'd bathed.

He set the pitcher on the commode and leaned his palms against the countertop. His muddy boots stood beside the tub. Buttons lay scattered over the floor where he'd torn his blood-imprinted shirt off his back and stripped away his trousers. He had not wanted to return to Rose Briar and in
stead came to the town house. Hell, he'd have ridden through the night straight to Salehurst if he'd thought he wouldn't kill his horse.

Movement in the doorway turned his head. Pamela stood next to the silk screen watching him. Her gown was a deep crimson with a full sweeping skirt and low décolletage trimmed with creamy lace. Tendrils of her blond hair curled around her shoulders.

He felt the glide of her eyes, and if his reaction was anything less than any other male's, she didn't appear shocked. “Your dressing room door was open,” she said.

David stepped out of the hip tub, sloshing water to the floor. “The door wasn't open.”

“It was unlocked.” Her gaze shot back to his as he walked toward her. “I had a key?” She dangled a metal object in her hand.

“Convenient.” David snatched the key from her hand.

“For your information I knocked,” she said, as he reached over her shoulder and yanked the robe he'd draped across the screen. “You weren't answering the door. I was worried. Especially after everything that has happened. I wasn't expecting you to be here.”

David slid on his robe. “Where have you been since yesterday?”

“Is there a rule that requires me to spend the night here?”

“Don't even ask me to begin to understand that answer. Ian was worried about you. I told him I would check in on you.”

“The local magistrate is here,” she said, folding her arms. “He's asking questions about you. I believe he is on his way to London with the intent to find evidence that will declare
you a fraud. Especially after he was refused admittance to Rose Briar an hour ago. Something about your orders?”

He belted the tie around his waist. “Is that all?”

“Do you want more?” Flashing him a smile that was part coquette and part street doxy, she nodded to the tiny bite mark on his neck. “Though I see someone has already been inside your clothes.”

His eyes hard, he trapped her gaze. Despite everything she projected, he knew some of it was an act. He just never knew for sure which part. “Do you fancy yourself the whore, Pamela? Or are you so used to the part you play that you no longer know the difference?”

David stepped past her into his room. She leaned a shoulder against the doorway as he passed. “Even after all of your reassurances to Ian and me, you're still in love with her, aren't you?”

His hand shaking slightly, he withdrew a crystal decanter of whiskey from the sideboard, as if alcohol could burn away his thoughts. “Love has nothing to do with what is between Meg and me.”

“Then you're in lust. For most men, I'd say there is no difference. But not you.” She approached in a whisper of crimson silk. “Have you considered she's not the same woman she used to be?”

“People don't change that much.”

“You did.” She flicked a long scarlet nail at his robe. “You once had no qualms about killing a man in cold blood. From what I understand, yours was the shot that took out the treacherous grandson of the Prussian archduke in Munich. How many years ago? Thirteen? Fourteen? What a scandal you caused in the international community,” she prodded
sweetly. “The identity of that assassin still remains a secret.”

David didn't question how she would know that manner of confidential information. “Obviously not.”

“If there was any job dark and dirty to be done, they called you. How old would you have been when you fired that shot?”

He'd been twenty-two when he'd pulled that trigger and ended the conspiracy to assassinate the queen. Twenty-four by the time his reputation made him one the most sought after agents in the service. Twenty-six when he met Margaret Faraday.

He'd seen her the first time on a polo field at the British consulate in Calcutta. The beginning of the end to his way of life.

His sin and his salvation.

His curse.

“I'll be away for a week or so.” He sloshed whiskey into a glass. “Maybe longer.”

“Now? You're leaving now?”

“I have personal business to attend.” Without offering her a glass, David peered at her over the rim as he drank. “You're our liaison with Kinley. While I'm gone, I want you to find out where Faraday has been living for the past nine years, who was paying the cost and how many of his former cronies are still alive.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don't know, Pamela,” he said facetiously, aware of his sarcasm and the mood driving at him. He was impatient to be on the road. “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that someone may have tried to kill me and shot Faraday's daughter instead.”

“What makes you think you might have been the target?”

“She was wearing my cloak.” David studied the bottom of
the glass. “Why would someone shoot the one person suspected of knowing where a fortune in jewels and gold is hidden?” He set down the glass. “Even if shooting someone at six hundred yards was Faraday's modus operandi, after nine years in prison he would be fortunate if he could hit the broadside of a barn at twenty feet.”

“There are only a handful of men in England who could make that shot.” She smiled temperately. “Since your whereabouts could be accounted for, maybe less than a handful.”

David shut the cabinet door none too gently. It was never easy to keep his patience with Pamela, and he sometimes wondered why she provoked him so, as if she always had something to prove, especially when he was sharing the same assignment with her husband. He walked to the bedroom door and swung it wide. “I don't intend to be gone long,” he drawled.

She stopped in the doorway. “You still haven't explained why you are you leaving.”

“I have a son, Pamela. Now”—ignoring the knot in his stomach, he offered her an indulgent smile, inviting her to leave—“for my safety, go.”

“A son? I see,” she said after a moment. “I'm sorry, David.”

“For what? It isn't your fault that no one knew.”

“What shall I tell Mr. Munro about you? He isn't happy that you have seen fit to steal Rose Briar out from beneath him, and now you have barred him from seeing Lady Munro. I warned you when you came here that you needed to be careful of him.”

“Usher Nellis out the door.” He started to turn then hesitated. “Then after you have finished contacting Kinley, do a little background investigation on the magistrate while he is in London. I want the history on Rose Briar and why he wants that property so badly.”

“G
ood gracious, child.” Esma met Victoria as she entered the kitchen and put a hand to her cheek. “You're still feverish. It's only been a week. What are you doing out of bed?”

“Determined to remain on my feet.” Victoria set Zeus on a chair and watched the cat dart straight for the bowl of cream on the floor. “Sir Henry isn't in his room.”

“He is in the herbal, mum.”

Victoria accepted a cup of hot tea. She disposed herself as comfortably as possible on a stool and watched Esma begin cutting carrots for supper. “Has Sir Henry spoken to you since last night?”

Esma shook her head. “He has kept to himself since Lord Chadwick left to fetch Nathanial.”

Victoria hurt, and the ache had nothing to do with her injury. David had sent no messages. Despite her want to push him out of her head, his absence as much as her concern for
her son's welfare kept her awake when she'd needed to rest.

Sir Henry had continued to care for her wound, though he had shut himself away from the deeper one in her heart.

She loved Sir Henry like the father she'd never had. He was the only grandfather Nathanial would ever know. She had no right to ask for his forgiveness, but he'd had a right to know the truth no matter the cost to herself.

When he had come to change her dressing yesterday, she could no longer bear the lie. She told him about her marriage to David in Calcutta ten years ago, from whom she had been running when she'd left India and met Scott Munro's widow.

She could find no words to express her sorrow for the hurt she had caused.

Yesterday had been the first time since her mother had left her that she opened herself so completely to another human being. How much of that honesty Sir Henry would choose to share with the world was up to him. It was enough that people would learn that Nathanial was David's son.

This morning she had risen to change her own bandages.

Laughter outside diverted Victoria's attention to the window. Mr. Rockwell and Bethany were in the yard with the mare Bethany had been nursing back to health, just as she had been caring for Victoria.

Frowning, she set her teacup onto the saucer. Other than a dimple on his cheek, Ian Rockwell, Foreign Service agent, had nothing to recommend to a sunny seventeen-year-old.

“He has done nothing untoward, mum,” Esma said, reading her mind as if she had spoken her doubts aloud. “My William told me Mr. Rockwell knows about horses, and that girl loves that horse.”

“Bethany should be with other young people her age.”

She should have a new dress every once in a while and at
tend teas and other social functions that allowed her to meet nice boys.

“And when might that be, mum?” Esma scraped the carrots into a pan of water. “She hasn't said another word about the Yule soirée this year. She knows we cannot afford fabric for a new gown. But it's a shame you'd not ask Lord Chadwick to sponsor her.”

“I can't do that, Esma.”

“It's not my place to ask what has happened between you and Sir Henry and His Lordship. Maybe Lord Chadwick's coming here has not been such a good thing. It is a shame to be sure. I like that young man.” Her housekeeper changed the topic. “But since he did open up the manor house, you should speak to Lydia Gibson about returning to Rose Briar. The household doesn't have anyone cooking for them.”

“They did, until you insulted the cook yesterday.”

Esma waggled the knife in her hands. “If you count boiled chicken a meal. Those men up there need nourishment and I can't be leaving here to feed them.”

“Mrs. Gibson is caring for Mr. Doyle—”

“Mr. Doyle will be over the moon if you asked him to ready the bulbs in the orangery for spring planting. There's many of us what would be mighty beholdin' to His Lordship to see Rose Briar come alive again like it used to be around here in spring. It would do all of us good, including you, mum.”

Except David's purchase of Rose Briar meant nothing to him. Looking down at the cup in her hand, she absently touched a chip on the once-flawless ivory porcelain. How could she explain to Esma who David really was and his purpose here? She could not even tell Esma if David planned to return Nathanial or that she would not even be here come spring. People should not ask impossible things of her.

Esma quit chopping and set both hands on the wooden block. “None of us ever asked what ye were runnin' from all those years ago, because some things don't need to be talked about. But you've been here a long time, and we are family now. If ye wish to talk, not a word of it will ever leave my lips.”

“You and William have always been so good to me, Esma. But I fear this is something I must figure out how to fix myself. I should go see Sir Henry,” she murmured.

Victoria pulled her cloak from its place on the wall and slipped it around her shoulders. David had taken his warmer one away.

Once outside, sunlight hit her face. Snow was still on the ground where it had drifted against the cottage. Avoiding the wet spots on the drive, she made her way across the yard to the herbal and let herself into the cellar. The single sound of a spade cutting into the dirt broke the silence.

Chop. Scrape. Chop. Scrape.
The cinder walls amplified the noise from the back of the cellar. She compressed her lips. A cold, tight feeling formed in her stomach as she approached the noise. If there were worse things than being a pariah to one's own family, then it was having no family at all.

“What are you doing out of bed, Victoria.” Sir Henry's voice carried to her from the dank shadows.

Aware that he continued to use the name by which he knew her, she remained next to a lamp on the workbench, unsure whether to go forward or retreat. “I want to talk to you, Sir Henry.”

“If you're well enough to walk and talk, then hand me a jar.”

Victoria pulled a jar from the shelf. She turned up the lamp on the workbench. Sir Henry had dug holes everywhere in her garden. She dropped to her knees beside him in the loam
and helped place the delicate tuber in the jar. Later, she would lay it out to dry. It couldn't remain in a jar like this—surely he knew that.

Watching his hands work over the soil, she realized he was doing the same task repeatedly with no real purpose. She looked at his profile and felt a rush of tears before turning her attention to the jar. “I've put much of last month's herbs in jars. The others—”

“Will he bring my grandson back?” Sir Henry continued to chop at the mound of dirt.

Victoria's hands paused on the lid, but she nodded, even if it might be a lie. “David holds no ill will toward you, Sir Henry.”

“I want you out of the cottage, Victoria. You can take what you want to Rose Briar. There is nothing here to which I'm attached, except for my books. When I am dead, you may have my books. If you decide that you will carry on here.”

She blinked at his profile in confusion. “I don't want your things, Sir Henry.”

“Your place is with your husband.” He sat back on his heels. “You belong to Chadwick whether you recognize that fact or not.”

“I do not recognize that fact.”

“How much do you love your son?”

“How can you ask me that?”

“Will Nathanial be safe with his father?”

Wiping the back of her hand across her cheek, she nodded. “David will never allow anything to happen to him.”

“Then so will you be safe in his keeping as well.”

“You are mistaken,” she said, looking at Sir Henry as if he had lost his mind. “He despises me.”

“Pish posh, Victoria.” Using his favorite phrase, Sir Henry wiped his hands on his trousers. “That man is in love with you.”

A shocked denial formed, yet she could not voice the thought to Sir Henry, who already knew her to the core of her soul. But loving someone was not the same as trusting that person with your life. On as many levels, David was as big a fraud as she was.

A pale shaft of light from the cellar window behind her speared the garden. “There are few gifts in this life.” Sir Henry returned to the spade. “Family is one. Love is another. I had both with Scott's mother, only to learn that life is too short. I don't care who you both were ten years ago. You will take responsibility for who you are now.”

Victoria eyed Sir Henry through the gloom. “It isn't that simple.”

“I'm an old soldier and a doctor, Victoria,” he said, forcing her to meet his ardent gaze. “My son and I were estranged long before he joined the ranks of the East India Company and went to find his fortune. He left me with Bethany and the responsibility to see her properly raised. My son didn't have the courage or steadfastness to manage his life or that of his daughter's.”

Victoria had once heard rumors that Scott Munro and Sir Henry had quarreled and were estranged up until his son's death. But she'd never felt it her place to know more than what Sir Henry told her. “What happened between you and your son?”

“After Bethany was born, I wanted him to take his place at the head of the family. Rose Briar needed him. His daughter needed him. This town needed him. But he forever rebelled against the constraints of his station.” Sir Henry dug the
spade beneath the root. “We argued one night, and he left angry. I found him the next morning on my way to see a patient. He'd had a carriage accident. One should never allow a loved one to go away angry. I should have fought harder for both of us. Six months later, Scott had regained most of his health. But he and I remained estranged until his death.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He shook his grizzled head regretfully. “After the accident, Scott was physically incapable of fathering any more children.”

Victoria startled. “Then you've always known…”

“For whatever reason, I thought Scott loved you enough to marry you and give your babe a name. That was sufficient for me.” He sat back on his heels, looking older than he had yesterday. “I will never come to terms that it was all a lie no matter my deep affection for you. But I could not let you leave here angry.”

Wearily Victoria nodded, wondering vaguely why no tears came.

“A person only has two roads to follow in life, Victoria. You can do what's right, or you can do wrong. Everything else forks from those two arteries.”

He pulled a fat tuber from the loam and set it in another jar, closing the lid. “When next I see you, we will speak of this conversation no more. Do you understand?”

Without looking at her, he struggled to climb to his feet. Victoria's hands curled into fists and she resisted reaching out to steady him as she followed him to his feet. He would not appreciate her help. “That young whippersnapper…Ian Rockwell”—he pointed the spade at the narrow window—“take him with you to Rose Briar. I don't want you at the house alone.”

 

Victoria tossed and turned in bed, her hand finally going to the small clock on her dressing table to check the time. Having administered to herself a dose of hartshorn last night, she had fallen asleep before eating dinner. She set the clock down and let her eyes go over the bedroom. The house was utterly silent in the hours before dawn.

It had taken her only one day to move into Rose Briar. She had nothing that belonged solely to her. What she did have, Ian moved from the cottage for her.

“Mum?” a girl said from the doorway. Victoria recognized Moira, one of the girls who had come with Blakely from Ireland. “I heard ye cry out.”

Victoria turned her head. “I did not mean to awaken anyone.”

Certainly, it was not her intent to cause worry among the sparse household staff.

“Shall I add more coals on the hearth, mum?”

“No, I am fine. You may go back to sleep.”

After the girl left, Victoria dragged herself out of bed and washed with the pitcher of water Moira left out last night. Looking into the mirror, she examined the discoloration at her waist. The silvered glass was not kind. The skin surrounding the wound was a mottled red and still proved tender to the touch. The wound was healing, but not quickly enough for her satisfaction.

She dressed, took the lamp, and left her bedroom. The two chambermaids and the butler David had hired slept somewhere on the other side of the house. Moira did not.

Victoria quietly walked the corridor and up the back staircase that led to the attic. Her shadow wobbled eerily over the walls as she stood in the center of the room and raised the lamp. Her surroundings were cold and layered with dust and
spiderwebs. Trunks, crates, and old furniture, looming like ghostly shapes, were piled against walls in no particular order of age. Beyond the dormer windows, the morning sky remained dark.

Kneeling next to the second dormer window, she dug through a pile of needlepoint tapestries, and sundry other relics stacked against the wall over the years. At last, she reached the bottom and dislodged a piece of pine floorboard. The box remained where she'd hidden it years ago. A monument to all that she would forget, but could not.

She withdrew the satin box and lifted the lid. A golden locket lay on a puff of aged velvet. She released the latch, and inside was a daguerreotype of her mother. She could have been looking at an image of herself. There were no dates engraved, only a Latin inscription and a scarred emptiness that revealed so much more of her heart than the terrible secret it hid.

Her father had given her the locket for her seventeenth birthday. A gift that shocked her for all that he loathed her mother, but one that she had treasured nonetheless, for it was a link to her mother. It had been a private gift given to her away from the small gathering of her father's cronies—the Circle of Nine. It would not be until much later that she began to believe the locket meant something insidious, and that it had been given to her not out of affection, but out of an obsession to tie her to him. She had not lied when she'd told David that she didn't know where the treasure was buried.