Miranda (10 page)

“I'm here to help you,” Lucas said. “To protect you from this scoundrel.”

“So was the constable. The warden. The doctor. And Ian MacVane.” Seared by betrayal, Miranda took a step back, wanting to be away from them all, wanting to hide in the dark like a wounded animal. “I no longer know whom to trust, so I'll trust no one. No one except myself.”

“Ah, Miranda.” Lucas's face appeared pale in the firelight. “I was hoping for a moment of privacy so I could tell you—”

“You'd do better to hope for the moon to fall out of the sky,” Ian snapped.

“Weesht!” Miranda said, borrowing Agnes's phrase. She turned back to Lucas. “Tell me what?”

“About your father. He—he's gone, Miranda. Presumed dead.”

There was a strange quality to the emptiness that yawned inside her. Since she could not picture the man who had been her father, it was like looking down into a black well. “Ian told me.”

“Did he tell you Gideon Stonecypher was murdered?” Lucas demanded.

The black well turned to blinding, raging whiteness. Her father, her own flesh and blood, was dead. Murdered. Yet she could not react properly, could not grieve properly, because her past had been stolen from her. Somehow her life had been bound up with these men, but she could not sort out the ways. “Then I must find out what happened to him,” she said.

Duffie came forward, his face lined with worry. “Lassie, please, dinna do anything rash—”

“I shan't, Mr. McDuff. I promise you that. All I ask is that I be allowed to return to London. Let me find out on my own who I am, what happened to me and to my father.” She glanced from Ian to Lucas. “Let me find out who lied, and who told the truth. It's what I should have done from the beginning.”

A sense of revulsion ran like icewater through her blood. She walked past Ian, then paused and turned back to him. “If everything has been the way you say, then I shall come back to you, if you'll have me.” She felt as if she were awakening from a golden dream to cold reality.

“You canna trust him,” Ian stated.

“I can't trust anyone but myself.”

He gripped her shoulders, bent low and whispered in her ear, “You said you love me, lass.”

Confusion spiraled through her.
Did he tell you Gideon Stonecypher was murdered?

“That is what I said,” she whispered brokenly.

“Then stay, lass. Stay, and we'll go to London together later.”

He would never know the strength it cost her to wrench herself from his grip, to step back. “I have to go now. I have to find out the truth.”

She started down the road, brushing past the astonished Englishmen.

“Goddamn it!” Ian roared. “God—”

A dull thud sounded. She whirled around in time to see him staggering back, clutching his jaw, sinking to the ground. The crowd clustered around him while Lucas Chesney flexed his hand.

Miranda felt as if a block of ice encased her. She looked neither right nor left as she walked toward the harbor. She did not want to see the disappointment in the faces of these people. She did not want to think about the sense of belonging she had felt with them. The joy she'd felt in Ian's arms. The happiness she might have found there.

* * *

“You should feel relieved,” Angus McDuff told his master the next day. “It was fate itself intervening. Keeping you from doing a grave injury to the lassie's honor.”

Ian glowered at him. His head throbbed from the ale he had consumed the previous night. Pints and pints of it. But no matter how much he drank, he could not banish Miranda Stonecypher from his mind. Miranda Stonecypher MacVane, he reminded himself.

He should rejoice at her departure. Now he could put Frances in charge of finding out what Miranda knew. He had done his best and made a disaster of it.

Ah, Frances. Did she know that Lucas Chesney, on whom her sights had been set for years, fancied himself in love with Miranda? Of course she did, Ian thought in disgust, and she probably had from the start. Fanny knew everything. No wonder she didn't care if Miranda lived or died.

“Fate itself,” Duffie repeated sagely.

“And wasn't it you, my good McDuff,” Ian asked, “who threatened to skelp me if I didn't marry her?”

“Aye.” Duffie leaned forward over the washbasin to examine his beard in the looking glass. He plucked a hair, wincing a little. “That was because you were going to bed with her to learn her secrets. Bad business, that.”

“Bedding?”

Duffie laughed and turned away from the looking glass. “Nay, but doing so under false pretenses is bad business indeed. It were better that you married her first.”

“Now I've wed a woman who will not have me.”

Amusement twinkled in Duffie's eyes. “So you did, laddie.”

“I fail to see what's so funny about that.”

“You're accustomed to getting your due, Ian. You always were, ever since you ran away from Glasgow and fought your way through the ranks of the army. And you know what I find so sad? Once you survived the ordeal of your youth, all you touched, all you did, was golden, yet it's brought you no happiness.”

Ian stalked up and down the length of the room. The motion made his head hurt, his bruised jaw throb. “I have everything a man could want. Wealth. Privilege. The attention of beautiful women, the admiration of powerful men.”

“And you're miserable. Or at least, you
were
miserable. But I saw that change last night, my friend.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Miranda was going to make you happy for the first time in your life, and the very idea terrified you.”

“Blather, old fool.” Ian's ears felt hot.

“Your mother gave you her blessing, she smiled on you,” Duffie reminded him. “We all saw it. She hadn't smiled on you since you were a lad. Don't you see? The healing was about to start.”

“You're romanticizing, man.”

“You were pleased to be marrying Miranda.”

“She's got the body of a goddess, and I was about to avail myself of it when we were so rudely interrupted.”

“It's more than that. You wanted the lass, wanted her in a manner I've never seen you desire something before. Now she's gone away, and you have to get her back.”

“You're awfully cheerful about it all.”

“That's because you're going to have to struggle to win her. It's going to be the fight of a lifetime. And the rewards, if you succeed, will be so great you canna even imagine them.”

Ian washed himself in the basin, scrubbing away the vestiges of last night's escape into drunken oblivion. He looked in the mirror to see Duffie sitting on the bed, grinning like an idiot. “I worry about you, Duffie. Truly I do.”

“You'd best hurry. The ship's leaving with the tide.”

“I am aware of that.”

“I dinna think you'd just let her go!”

“I'm not letting her go. She's
mine
.” Ian surprised himself with his own vehemence. And with his speed as he readied himself, stopping only once to puke into the chamber pot, causing new howls of mirth to erupt from Duffie. Within minutes, Ian was dressed and mounted on Bruce Hume's old hunter, galloping for the coast.

Barely visible through the thick morning fog, the ship lay at anchor in the little harbor. Her sails luffed indolently in the breeze as she awaited the tide.

He had no idea what he would say to Miranda. Perhaps the square-jawed viscount had already convinced her that Ian MacVane was a liar and a cheat.

But perhaps not.

Ian knew he had not imagined Miranda's attraction to him. He had not imagined the earnestness in her voice when she had said that she loved him. He remembered the words exactly:
I love you, Ian MacVane. I'm certain I do. Surely I always have.

She loved him.

Fool woman. Didn't she know better than to love someone like Ian MacVane?

Of course she didn't. He had lied to her, had manipulated her emotions, had used his low tricks of seduction to cloud her judgment, all so that she would trust him.

He should turn his back, let Lucas Chesney teach her the truth about her past. He should, but he knew already he would not. Miranda had come to mean more to him than a puzzle to be solved.

Did Chesney understand that? Was he aware that people were after Miranda, people who would not balk at hurting her to get what they wanted?

An ugly thought stabbed at Ian. What if the yellow-haired viscount was not what he seemed?

Spitting curses between his clenched teeth, Ian launched a dory from the shore and began rowing toward the ship.

* * *

Miranda stood at the rail and stared down at the cold waters of the North Sea lapping against the hull. Deep fog hid the shoreline from view so that she felt suspended in an eerie world of ghosts.

She had spent a sleepless night in a cramped cabin, wondering how in the world to ferret out her own past. She had no idea who was lying and who was telling the truth. Her mind was filled with memories, but only recent ones.

It was as if she had been born the day Ian MacVane had walked into Bedlam and swept her into his arms, into his world. From that moment onward, her life had been bound up with his. Her hungry mind had devoured the things he had told her, even as her heart and her body had turned to him for comfort, for reassurance.

I love you, Ian MacVane. I'm certain I do.
The words she had spoken only the night before came back to humiliate and haunt her. Had she made the declaration based on lies he'd woven?

She clung to the things she knew were real—the joy she felt in his embrace. The tears on his face when his mother had forgiven him. The pride in his voice when he had taken her to the crest of Crough na Muir and shown her his homeland. The open acceptance of the townspeople, who had embraced her without question.

And she was leaving all that behind. For what?

Because a handsome stranger had filled her with the need to find out what had happened to her father. She ached with uncertainty. Regardless of what lay hidden in the past, she had wanted Ian with a fierce, driven passion that was as real as the wooden planks beneath her feet.

“We'll weigh anchor within the hour,” Lucas's cultured tenor voice called through the fog.

Miranda turned, pressing her back against the rail. She knew nothing about this man, yet she was certain he was not the sort who would waltz with her on the deck of a ship. “Good morning, my lord,” she said.

Lucas Chesney sent her a brilliant smile. “Ah, Miranda. You mustn't be so formal with me. I swear I am who I claim to be. The man you had promised to marry.”

She shivered. He did not frighten her; what frightened her was the sense of not knowing. “That is what Ian MacVane said.”

His mouth hardened. “I know. The lying dog.”

“How do I know that you're not the liar, my lord?” she demanded. “What I don't understand is why either of you would lie in order to have me for a wife.”

He reached out and gently grazed her chin with his knuckles. “You're a beautiful woman, Miranda. You're clever and sweet-natured.”

She drew back from his touch. Caresses and love words only confused her. “Perhaps I have a hidden fortune neither of you has bothered to tell me about.”

“That,” Lucas said, a hooded darkness coming over his sun-bronzed features, “is definitely not the case.”

She tilted back her head and let the breeze lift the hair at the nape of her neck. “Tell me your version of the truth. Tell me what my past was like. Tell me why I have no memory of you or anyone else in my life. Tell me why I nearly died in a warehouse explosion. And tell me why Ian, and not you, was there to save me.”

“I knew nothing of the accident until your friend at Bedlam explained it to me.” He took both her hands in his. “Come. Sit here, and I'll try to explain.”

She went with him stiffly and seated herself on a banquette formed by a plank set across two upended buckets. She braced herself. Perhaps Lucas would tell her what she feared to remember—that she was an evil person, bent on mischief or murder in the warehouse.

“We met,” Lucas began, seating himself beside her, “at a scientific exhibit at the London Institution. You were assisting your father with a demonstration of aeronautics. He had designed a balloon.”

She closed her eyes. She knew a great deal about ballooning, but that was no revelation. She knew at least three languages, and how to play the pianoforte, and she could recite Homer and Virgil from memory. She had no idea how she had come by any of her skills. “My father,” she said quietly. “Tell me about him.”

“Gideon Stonecypher was a gifted man, gifted at dreaming and talking. I never approved of the way he raised you, dragging you from salon to salon, barely able to keep you in frocks.”

Miranda forced herself to ask, “Why do you say he was murdered?”

“Your lodgings had been ransacked. I found Midge there—”

“Midge?”

“A servant. You don't remember her, either?”

She shuddered. “No.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, and she thought she recognized true horror in his face, in the white lines about his mouth. “Are you certain you want to hear this?”

“I must.”

“Midge had been injured and was dying by the time I found her. She was able to speak, but barely. She said you and your father had been taken, perhaps killed.” Miranda watched him grow pale. Lucas Chesney was either a very gifted actor or he was telling the truth.

“But you didn't find...his body,” she said faintly. “So that could mean he is alive.” A sense of urgency built inside her. “Perhaps he's in trouble.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “Oh, why, why can't I remember him?”

He took her hands away from her face and rubbed the insides of her wrists. The touch was meant to be soothing, but instead his caress only agitated her. “Go on with what you were telling me,” she said.