Must Have Been The Moonlight (26 page)

Brianna purchased a silver watch with diamond inlaid numerals, and also a beautiful amethyst swan clasp, perhaps as a gift to his mother.

“My nephew designed these.” Mr. Smith held the swan to the lamp.

Brianna studied the piece. “You must give him my compliments.”

“Perhaps when you see your brother again, you can give him my greetings…. Sir Christopher,” he clarified. “We had cause to work together four years ago. He needed my expertise on a piece of stolen jewelry. A piece similar to the one in your hand.”

“Truly?” She couldn’t hide her thrill of surprise.

“How are your brother and his wife, mum?”

Brianna informed him that Lady Alexandra was back in England. After a few minutes of idle talk, she tucked her cache in her reticule, pleased with her find and that she’d met someone who knew Christopher.

Once across the busy street, she put her attention to setting the watch. Grabbing the ends of her leather-encased fingers with her teeth, she pulled off one glove, then glanced down the street for one of the fancy lamppost clocks that stood at each end of the street.

She’d scarcely taken a dozen steps when she saw that something hung from the door latch of her carriage.

Brianna stepped closer. An icy chill raced down her spine.

She lifted the amulet.

Set in a golden scarab, a jewel, with the brilliance of the sky, glittered against her palm.

Her fingers closed over the golden scarab and yanked. The chain snapped.

“Your Grace!” The driver and footman hurried out the door of the building adjacent to the carriage. “Let me get the step.”

Ale tainted his breath. “Who has been watching this carriage?” she asked.

“No one is going to steal from the Ravenspur carriage, your Grace.”

“Of course someone would steal from this carriage.” The man was senile to think otherwise. “Take me to Westminster now.”

“Yes, your Grace.”

Brianna had never spoken so rudely to any servant. But he worked for the Aldbury family. He had no right to leave his post. No right at all!

The carriage jerked forward. Brianna opened her palm and held the amulet to the light. She’d seen nearly this same amulet in the
suks
of Cairo.

Cheap trinkets, love charms meant to symbolize an eternal bond into the afterlife; but here in London she felt only a sense of depravity as she realized someone was trying to play a cruel prank on Michael. Someone had obviously been reading the papers and knew who Michael was.

But why leave a trinket? Something about the stone bothered her.

Her hands trembling, Brianna held the amulet to the light.

She had seen this stone once before, or one exactly like it in shape and size. In Cairo. On a ring that Omar once wore. She wrapped the scarab in the black cloth that had held the watch, and shoved it beneath the warming blocks under her seat, as if the act would rid her of its presence.

Omar was dead. But she was suddenly afraid for her husband.

He was waiting for her in the marble plaza outside the ministry office. The wind battered her cloak as she stepped out of the coach. Tenting a hand over her eyes, she fought to affect some semblance of ease in her expression as he saw her and dropped a cigarette to the ground beneath his boot. She hadn’t seen him smoke in over a month.

She hurried up the stairs. “I’m late. Have you been waiting long?”

“No you’re not.” Michael passed her, then waited as she joined him at the bottom of the steps. “I’m early.”

The mall where they stood was crowded.

“Are you officially a civilian?” she quietly asked.

He saw that her hand trembled, and took her palm into his, turning it toward him. “What’s wrong?” he asked, tipping her face.

Smiling up at him, she brought his hand to her lips. “I
maintain my original stance about your name. You don’t look like a James.”

He tucked her hand against him. “My name evolves from the Latin name ‘Iacobus,’ or Jacob,” he said. “Did you know I actually had an Uncle Iacobus? Everyone called him Ick.”

“Uncle Ick?” Laughing, she reached the carriage.

“He was given that name for a reason, I assure you.”

Listening to Brianna talk, watching her smile, Michael removed his pith helmet, standing aside as the driver set out the step. She held his hand to her cheek, the hood of her cloak framing her face. Her touch soothed him to the very core of his being. She had come to be with him, and all the anger that had filled him this day vanished in her eyes.

“Major Fallon?” a perfectly cultured male voice queried.

With Brianna in his arms Michael turned.

He registered the derringer pointed at his head. Even as he heard Brianna scream, a part of his mind had already seen, too late, the flash of gunpowder. He felt his head explode.

Then he felt nothing at all.

“I
’ll cut his fucking heart out!” Michael’s arm shot out and caught the doctor by the throat. “Where is she?” “Keep him still, damn you!” The physician fought to fill a syringe. A bowl crashed to the floor, spilling bloody water. Michael fought the two footmen who struggled to pry his fingers from the physician’s throat. “I said hold him, God blast you!”

Shoved aside in the wild rush of panic, Brianna slammed against a chair as two footmen pushed past her to hold Michael down on the bed. Her knuckles pressed against her mouth, she trembled at the virulent force in him, watching helplessly as the tableau unfolded. Someone screamed.

“Hold him, for Christ’s sake!”

“Stop it!” Brianna pushed to reach the bed. “You’re killing him!”

But someone grabbed her by the waist and dragged her away, fighting.

“We’ve got to finish stitching his head before he bloody bleeds to death!” The physician jammed the syringe in Michael’s hip. “Get her out of here.” The physician fell away from Michael’s grip.

Brianna found herself in the corridor, the door shut in her face, her breath coming in gasps. The locked door was an immovable object against her shoulder. She pounded furiously.

Outside Michael’s room, servants had gathered in the hall. Someone in the corridor was shouting. They’d brought Michael to his residence in Kensington. It had taken three men to carry him upstairs. He’d been fighting since he regained consciousness. He wasn’t in his right mind.

He hadn’t known her. He hadn’t known anyone.

Someone wrapped a blanket around her, but Brianna wasn’t aware of it. Footsteps sounded up and down the corridor. Michael’s arrival had ruthlessly thrown the household into chaos. Her numb gaze fell to the carpet at her feet. She had not noticed the blood on her skirts. And on her hands. She had not noticed anything.

“You mustn’t worry, mum,” a kindly voice said. “He is in the best of hands. It will be all right.”

But it wouldn’t be all right. Didn’t anyone understand that?

Nothing would ever be right again.

The salon where the kind woman took Brianna was paneled in cherry wood. Lemon oil scented the air. A parlor maid worked on lighting a fire. Brianna saw all of this as if she were detached. She stood unmoving.

“Head injuries are unpredictable, your Grace,” someone in the room was saying. The man wore the uniform of a constable. “We won’t know the extent of damage. It could be possible he’ll have no memory of any of this. Or himself,” he said to the elderly woman on the settee.

The woman’s hands gripped the sterling head of a cane. “How could this have happened to my grandson in broad daylight? In public?”

“We believe it was a robbery attempt, your Grace. The lady’s reticule was stolen.”

“It was not a robbery,” Brianna said in a parched whisper.

Could he be any denser? Were they all idiots?

The room had grown silent as all eyes turned to her.

“Your Grace,” the constable bowed his head in her direction. “You said the assailant had a tattoo on his wrist. Do you remember anything more?”

Scraping the dark hair from her face, Brianna found her gaze impaled on a pair of sharp gray eyes. “No,” she whispered.

“Leave us. All of you.” With an impatient wave of her gloved hand, the woman dismissed the people standing in attendance. “Except you, Chamberlain,” she snapped. “I want you to shut the door. And be quick about it.”

Brianna could see the resemblance Michael bore to this woman. It was there in her silver-blue eyes and in her bearing. She had caught glimpses of this side of her husband, and hadn’t liked it.

“Come forward, child. There is nothing more you can do at the moment in that sickroom for my grandson.” The dowager wore a heavy black crepe de chine gown gathered sternly at her wrists, and it rasped with the movement. “Come. Let me see you.”

Her gown stained with Michael’s blood, Brianna made no effort to move. The woman’s gaze made another assessing pass. “Who is your father? You are not familiar to me, child.”

Brianna closed her hands in her skirt. Her throat ached, and for all of her effort to remain brave, it took standing in this room to achieve that task. “You wouldn’t know him. His name was Brian Donally. He was an alchemist and inventor.” She didn’t add that the international corporation her Irish father had founded probably employed twenty thousand people in a good year, because she knew it wouldn’t matter.

“There is a Sir Christopher Donally who is the Public Works minister in Egypt.” Chamberlain cleared his throat. “It’s very possible that your grandson did wed her,” he allowed. “She is one of the two women he brought out of the desert after the caravan they were riding in was attacked and everyone lost. Sir Christopher’s wife was the second—”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” A hand waved him to silence. “I
read the broadsheets, too. Was the account true?” the dowager inquired.

“Yes, your Grace,” Brianna said. “Now, may I beg your leave?”

“And are you always this fresh with your elders?” Her eyebrows curved into a perfect arc of displeasure.

“No, your Grace.” Brianna pressed her fingernails into her palms. “Only to those who treat me with the disrespect that you have shown me. My husband is lying in another room, while his grandmother is interrogating me as if I were a criminal. It is out of respect for him that I have not yet dumped the contents of that teapot on your head and left your presence.”

“Dear heavens!” The lorgnette hanging around the dowager’s neck went to her eye. “I should have known.” The monocle performed one more reprimanding pass, but her eyes had gentled. “James always did attract the wild ones. That’s why he was forever in trouble.” The dowager’s gaze moved away before returning to Brianna. For a long time it seemed as if she couldn’t speak. “He won’t die, Brianna.”

The words, so unexpected in the stilted formality that surrounded her, tore a sob out of Brianna. Her hand went to her mouth as if that act alone could hold everything inside.

“I came here when I received word from Aldbury Park that my grandson had arrived in London,” the dowager said, her chin lifting. “He is my grandson, you see. And he has not come all this way to perish by some thug’s deed.” She held out her hand, and for the first time Brianna saw that it trembled. “Now, come here and sit beside me for a moment.”

Brianna swallowed the aching lump in her throat. Horrified by the damning break, she took a step backward. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” If she cried now, she would never stop.

She would die.

Turning to run from the room, she was brought up short as a footman stepped in front of the door.

“Your maid has been instructed to take you to your room,
Brianna,” the dowager said. “You need to bathe and eat. It will do my grandson no good to find that I have allowed you to neglect yourself. We must carry on as an example to everyone else. Do you understand that?”

No, she didn’t understand.

She understood nothing!

“Come, mum,” Gracie said from beside her. Hands went to her shoulders to stop her from running. “I’ve a bath drawn and waiting. We need to clean you up.”

Brianna stood staring at the dressing room walls as Gracie unlaced her soiled gown, then helped her into the tub. She sat unmoving in the bath as Gracie washed her hands and her face, until the bath turned cold and Gracie returned to wrap her in a warm robe. A tray of food waited for her. “You must eat something, mum,” Gracie said, carefully drying Brianna’s hands. Her knuckles were raw as if she’d scraped them on gravel. “You need to keep up your strength.”

Brianna walked to the window seat and sat. “I will, Gracie.”

“You must trust that the physician can do his job, mum.”

But Brianna trusted in no one and nothing.

Leaning her cheek against the frosty glass, she stared out at a dead brown world, finally bringing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly about her legs. The tears started to fall.

She couldn’t stop them.

And it seemed with every breath, the tears grew heavier and heavier, until the pain had pulled her under and exploded. Until she’d begun to cry with huge sobbing gulps.

Brianna wept because she was terrible and selfish, because she was alive when so many other people had died, because she was afraid that she’d failed Michael and he would die because of her.

If she had not distracted him, if she had paid more attention, cared more, loved more. If she had done anything but what she had done.

Dimly, she was aware of the door shutting behind her, of the descending darkness. The world of nightmares where there was no escape.

Of terror that came suddenly and completely.

The way the ground seemed to shudder and build beneath her feet. Of memories she’d buried. Of gunshots and screams. Darkly clad riders swarming over the sand, an image that had burned into her head, her memories, and her life.

Omar’s clawed hand reached out of the darkness to touch her.

The stone is the color of your eyes. I will have it made into a necklace for you
.

Brianna came awake with a start. Had she screamed?

Heart pounding, she looked around her.

She was sitting up in bed. Someone had moved her and covered her with a feather comforter. Outside, the sun had dipped below the horizon, leaving a blazing sky to consume the clouds. She’d been asleep for hours.

She donned a simple gown of lavender muslin and plaited her hair. Kneeling in front of one of her trunks, she opened the lid. Her fingers wrapped around the revolver Michael had once given her at the oasis. She checked the load and shoved the gun in her pocket. While Michael yet breathed, she would never go anywhere without it again. Dragging her cloak off the bed, she left her room.

The corridors were empty. The house silent.

She walked down the stairs and out of the house. Her flat-heeled slippers left tracks in the snow outside. She entered the carriage house, her breath hanging suspended in the air. In the half darkness, Brianna made her way to the carriage she’d been riding in that morning. Something skittered in the shadows. A rodent perhaps. Her hand hesitated before she opened the door. Dark stains covered the seats and floor.

Crawling inside, her hands trembling, she withdrew the amulet that she’d shoved beneath the seat. Carefully, fear
fully, she unwrapped the black velvet, its presence burning into her thoughts.

Ice-blue facets glittered in the cooler shades of light that sifted through the eaves and laid a crisscross pattern on the floor.

Brianna had not seen the face of the shooter. He had worn a hood. Even the tattoo was not distinguishable. But she had this. She had to find out what it meant. For deep inside, she recognized that the amulet had somehow been meant for her.

Someone had used her to lead the assassin directly from the jewelers to Michael.

The amulet had been meant for her.

“Your Grace?” Light spilled through the carriage house entryway. “Are you in here?”

Brianna tucked the amulet beneath her cloak. Wiping the tears from her face with the heel of her gloved hand, she stepped away from the carriage. One of the coachmen stood at the doorway carrying a lantern.

“Are you all right, mum?” he asked.

They were all worried about her state of mind.

Brianna could see it in the glances the servants exchanged as she entered the house. Skirts clutched in her hands, she ran up the stairs past them all. Michael’s door was open when she reached his room.

Hesitating on the threshold, she neither moved nor breathed. A fire burned in the stone hearth, the smell of peat mixing with the scent of carbolic acid. The draperies had been drawn over the frost-laden glass. Shadows danced on the floors and walls.

Brianna walked to the bed, afraid of what she would see. Tears welled in her eyes. Michael lay unmoving beneath the huge canopy. A bandage, lighter gray in the darkness, marred his dark profile. His face was turned away from her, his features thrown into sharp relief by the rusty glow of the fire, and she stood watching him with an aching, possessive need that seemed to crush her chest.

Someone had undressed him, the white sheet against his body, a pale contrast to the man he was that morning. There were dark circles under his closed eyes. She stretched a palm over his chest and felt the slow beat of his heart.

“I’m sorry, Michael,” she whispered.

“He should remain asleep until tomorrow,” someone said from the shadows behind her. The physician sat in a chair near the hearth. A book in his hands, he regarded her over his spectacles. “He has a possible fracture in his right clavicle from where he hit the pavement. Certainly shoulder damage. We won’t know much more until he awakens.” He’d closed the book. “I’m sorry that we had to remove you earlier, your Grace.”

Brianna turned back to her husband. “Will he…live?”

She didn’t ask if he would regain consciousness or if it were possible that he could wake up and have no memory of his life. Those were issues too terrible to consider. She only want to know that he would live.

“He must be kept immobile, your Grace. But he’s strong.”