Angel In My Bed (32 page)

V
ictoria came awake with a gasp to uncertain darkness. Cocooned in the down mattress of tester bed, she tried to remember where she was, breathing again when she saw David asleep in a chair near the hearth. She had not seen him at first in the darkness. His arm in a sling, he no longer looked disheveled and exhausted, far less vulnerable than he had earlier that day.

A voice startled a gasp out of her. “I don't think he's slept in two weeks.”

“Sir Henry?” She twisted against the pillows. He sat next to the bed gnawing on a corncob pipe. His features were pale, his eyes infinitely weary, but she felt only gentleness in their touch. “He hasn't left that chair since he returned to find you asleep.”

She sat up. Her hair still damp from her bath fell over her shoulders. “I had no idea you were—”

He waved her words away. “What am I going to do all by
myself at Rose Briar? Play tiddlywinks with Stillings? I came down with Chadwick on the train. Esma and William are also here. She'll be in the kitchen downstairs overseeing the preparation of your meal. She's been as firm with Chadwick's health, making sure he was eating properly. Surprised the young man hasn't had her bound and gagged and put on the first train out of here.”

Emotions shimmered in her eyes. “You've all been taking care of him.”

“Or him of us,” Sir Henry said. “I see he got you something proper to wear.”

Glancing down at her lavender and lace wrapper, she knew that Sir Henry must have been the one to see her things packed. “Do I have you to thank for my clothes?”

“Esma packed a valise. We had to move quickly or that young whippersnapper would have left us. I only hope the cottage is still standing when we get back.”

“Is Sheriff Stillings causing trouble again?”

“Worse,” Sir Henry snorted. “He and Chadwick's man Blakely have become friends. He practically lives at Rose Briar now. Though he did spend two days looking for your trail. Got to respect a man for that, even if there's nothing else about him to like,” he said, wiping a red kerchief across his nose.

He talked on and on about the train ride, the miserable late December weather, and what the cold and rain did to his joints. His head bowed over his folded hands, he leaned forward against his knees and talked about missing Nathanial and Bethany, and how nothing was the same without them. Startled by the sudden wetness in her eyes, she slid off the bed, dropped to her knees on the floor beside Sir Henry's chair, and took his aged hands between hers.

“I love you, Sir Henry.” She cradled his palm against her cheek. “If I've not ever said that before, I'm saying it now. Thank you for everything you have given me and for taking nothing less than my very best. Nathanial and Bethany are fortunate to have you for their grandfather.”

He let her hold his hand a moment longer, then cleared his throat. “He is a fine boy. A fine boy, indeed. He already plays a respectable hand of gin. Knows his way around an ear tube and can take a pulse. Bethany could show him a thing or two about the herbal though.”

“I believe if you ask her, she will.”

“Now, up with you.” He patted her shoulder. “Do you want to wake Chadwick with all this nonsense?” Sir Henry nodded to the other side of the bed where David slept. Only he was no longer asleep but was watching them.

The light of the fire behind him cast his face in the shadows, but as he leaned forward, she could see one corner of his mouth tilt. “Too late,” David said, looking between Sir Henry and Victoria.

He'd shaved and changed his clothes, but for all his respectability, the look in his eyes sent her heart racing, and she found it nearly impossible to answer. Impossible when hot shivers raced up her spine, when she was still afraid that she might be dreaming.

Sir Henry took his cane and stood. “I'll leave the two of you alone.”

But at the door, he turned and surveyed them both. “You
are
married? Correct?”

“Our state of affairs is somewhat ambiguous at the moment.” David looked across the bed at Victoria. “But in a few days Victoria will no longer be a Munro.”

“I was not for certain that you would choose to keep the name, Victoria.” His sudden pause sounded loud, but his proud face had filled with emotion as he shifted his attention to David. “If I have not thanked you yet—”

“You have, Sir Henry.” David nodded in deference. “More than you know.”

“I've yet to misjudge a person's character. It is nice to know my family is in capable hands, Chadwick.”

Sir Henry left the room, the sound of his cane thumping across the sitting room as he limped toward the door. David moved into the bedroom doorway and, leaning a hand against the doorjamb, watched the outer door shut. Victoria joined him. After a moment, she regarded David's profile, and he felt an enormous surge of love.

“Have you decided to formally accept the terms of the will then?”

He turned into the room, leaning his back against the door as it clicked shut, and suddenly he wanted to laugh with the relief of a hard-fought day, as if he had just come from battle unscathed and very much alive. His wife was free, and he'd never felt more confident of his future. “I think you know I have.”

“Where did you go today while I was in my bath?”

“Ravenspur asked to see me.” David slipped the locket out of his pocket. “He said that you wanted Nathanial to have this.”

She almost didn't take the locket. Neither of them spoke a word about the treasure, but the topic was there between them. He knew only time could truly eradicate the past. But nine years had been a good start.

“Then everything is finally over?” she asked.

“Or it is just beginning.” David reached behind him and
carefully eased the sling from his arm. Ignoring the pain, he tossed the fabric to the floor.

Her eyes widened in alarm. “Should you be doing that?”

He slipped his arm around her waist and, with only the slightest encouragement on his part, she moved into his arms. “Probably not.” She had used his soap. His lips brushed her forehead and the fine hairs at her temple, then his hand tilted her chin and he pressed the advantage. “Have I ever told you that I like the way you smell?”

“David?” She pulled back. “We really
were
legally married in Calcutta, correct?”

“You are questioning the legitimacy of our civil ceremony?”

“If you were supposed to be working on a covert job, why did you use your real name?”

“As luck would have it, my brother served in India before I got there,” he said in the manner of someone confessing for the first time. “The governor general recognized the family resemblance my first hour at the consulate. Denying it would only have raised questions. None of that mattered anyway.”

“Why didn't you leave and let someone else take the job?”

“Because I saw you.” And smiling that familiar smile she loved so much, he framed her face with his hands. “I only know that I love you, Victoria or Meg, I will love and honor both of you through sickness and in health until death. You are the mother of my son. The mistress of my new home, and everything that I hold dear. I don't ever want to wake up and find you gone from my life again.”

Clutching his lapels, she regarded him with shining eyes and laughed. “We will love and honor you back. In fact, we are all going to grow very old together.”

With a reverent touch, he slid his fingers into the warm
sable of her hair and tilted her face. They'd been lovers for weeks, but this was different. He was about to be exactly where he wanted to be. Where he thought he would never be again when he'd awakened that stormy morning at Rose Briar to find her gone from his life—in her arms.

Yet, in a way, Meg had vanished, for he no longer saw the woman he'd married in Calcutta all those years ago. The girl he'd fallen in love with and lost had matured into a woman he would love forever. When he'd seen her in the church that morning, he'd seen only Victoria.

A devilish twinkle appearing in his eyes, he backed her to the bed. “Where do you want to honeymoon?”

He smiled like a saint but promised sin, leaving her breathlessly aware that she was ready for her honeymoon now. And closing the distance, his mouth sinking onto hers, David sealed the private vows they had just spoken, melding her past to his future, and knew he had found his piece of heaven in his arms.

 

They were married just after the New Year at St. Mary's in London. With her hands clasped to his, his body warmed by her gentle strength, they faced each other and spoke the promise in their eyes. Sir Henry, Nathanial, and Bethany stood around them. His family was also there. His brothers and sisters and their children were present to share this moment in his life. He felt blessed and, as he met the conviction in Victoria's gaze, he felt alive.

More than alive. He felt peace as he spoke his wedding vows for a second time in his life. For he had found purpose. Or it had found him. He was not sure of anything except its steadfastness in his life and his promise that he would never forsake his family.

Eight months after they were married, he and Victoria
christened their second child in the church at Rose Briar, a little girl who looked the image of her mother, more fragile than a sunbeam, and David had held her in his palms, caught by the tiny miracle of life that never ceased to amaze him. Sir Henry passed away shortly after that day, but not before he held his newest granddaughter in his arms.

The funeral took place in September, a year after David's arrival, where long rows of meadow hay lay drying in the fields, ready for gathering. The weather had grown cooler and autumn set in on the banks of the Cuckmere River where the measure of a man's dreams could be found in the fruits of his labor, a child's sparkling laughter, and a wife who loved him.

“There you are,” Victoria said, finding David in the cemetery one day after she was leaving the cottage to return to Rose Briar. She saw patients there these days, and most days the tenants kept her busy. She carried their baby. Nathanial and Bethany were with her.

David was looking down at the tilled earth beneath his feet. Someone had set flowers on Sir Henry's grave. “Don't you think it strange that you and I came here and both found the same thing?” he asked as she held out her hand to him.

Victoria glanced up at the church and the beautiful stained-glass windows and smiled. David pulled her against him, then told her that he loved her, outdoors beneath a bright bold sky amid the modest zephyr and surrounded by angels.

It only seemed fitting, he thought as he took his tiny daughter from her arms, for fate had returned to him a second chance and the promise of a shiny gold future he never thought possible. The treasure he'd been searching for his entire life. David laid his arm across Victoria's shoulder, and together with Bethany and Nathanial flanking them, they walked home.