Nearly a Lady (16 page)

“Here you are, my lord, miss.” The guard unlocked another door. It opened with what Gideon considered an ominous creak of the hinges. “Just give a knock when you’re ready to leave.”

Gideon stepped through into a wide hall with three sets of long cells on each side. A narrow window, midway up the wall of each cell, let in stingy slivers of light. Men lounged about on the floor and in piles of straw. Some slept; a few paced the length of the cells. Those who spoke did so in muted tones.

Winnefred stepped in behind him and the quiet of the space was immediately lost. Men on each side stepped forward to greet her with good cheer and good-natured teasing. Winnefred greeted them each in return, but her attention, Gideon noted, was on the two cells on the far right. He assessed the occupants of the first with a quick but thorough glance. An elderly man sat lounging on a pile of straw. A middle-aged man with heavy jowls and a round middle sat in the cell’s only chair, and a tall man near his own age with dark blond hair stood leaning against the wall by the window.

Gideon’s gaze jumped to the second cell where a darkhaired boy with a cherub face stood looking out from the bars. It had to be Thomas, he thought. Winnefred was right—the boy was nowhere near to fifteen. He looked to be closer to twelve, and innocent with it. His enormous brown eyes reminded Gideon of his brother’s bloodhounds. Thomas’s bravado, however, reminded him of his boys aboard the
Perseverance
.

Thomas jerked his chin in Gideon’s direction. “Who’s that, then, Freddie?”

The tall man in the next cell smirked. “What’s the matter with you, Thomas, don’t you know a lord when you see one?”

“I know a mark,” the boy answered with a grin. “He a nob like you, then?”

“No.” The man crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s not like me.”

“Aye!” someone called jovially. “He’ll no have his neck stretched for one—!”

“Shut up, MacCurry!” several people—Winnefred included—called at once and without much heat.

Winnefred turned to Gideon. “Lord Gideon Haverston, may I present Thomas Brown.” She gestured at the boy, then motioned to the tall man in the other cell. “And Connor . . . er, Connor . . .”

“Connor will do,” the man finished for her.

She gave him an annoyed look. “Fine. Connor Willdo. That’s Michael Birch in the chair, and the gentleman sitting on the pile of straw is Mr. Gregory O’Malley. Gentlemen, this is Lord Gideon Haverston.”

Gideon noticed she reserved the honorific for the elderly gentleman on the straw but refrained from commenting. He nodded his head in acknowledgment but kept his eyes on Connor. Of all the men in the hall, Connor struck him as the most dangerous. And the most out of place. Gideon had expected to find a man like all the others in that wing of the prison—poor, coarse, and rough of manner, but Connor had the speech of an educated man and the fashionable, albeit worn, clothes of a gentleman.

Gideon wondered if he was a man of good birth fallen on hard times, or if he’d stolen the clothes off someone’s back.

Michael Birch leaned back in his chair. “Lord Gideon Haverston, is it?”

“Yes,” Winnefred answered. “He is the brother of my guardian, Lord Engsly.”

“Guardian,” Conner repeated and flicked pale blue eyes at Gideon. “Bit late, aren’t you?”

“Very,” Gideon replied, uninterested in defending himself to a stranger. He gave Winnefred’s elbow a soft nudge toward the next cell. “Don’t you have a lesson?”

“Wait, lass.” Gregory held his hand up, then moved to dig through his pile of straw. “Wait. Look what I made for you.”

He stood up with a helping hand from Connor and stepped to the bars to present Winnefred with a small wooden carving of a woman with a young toddler on her hip. Gregory had captured perfectly the sleepy contentment of a well-loved child, but it was the woman who drew the eye. She held the child close, his head against her shoulder, her hand upon his hair in a gesture of love and protection. But her eyes stared at something in the distance. There was worry there, disappointment, and the very beginnings of fear.

“It’s beautiful,” Winnefred whispered. Gideon took hold of it through the bars and handed it to her. She held it carefully and turned it over in her hands. “Magnificent. You’ve outdone yourself, Gregory. Mr. McKeen would be a fool to pay you anything less than a half pound for this. Her face, her eyes . . . who is she? Is she real?”

“Sure and she’s real. It was Connor who was noticing her first. Staring out the window of a Saturday, not bothering to tell the rest of us there was something worth looking at. Sweet on her, our Connor.”

Connor acknowledged the small joke with a half smile that neither admitted nor denied the truth in what Gregory had said.

Gregory snorted, then winked at Winnefred. “And that’s the most you’ll be getting out of Connor on the matter.”

“Is she the wife of one of the guards, do you think?”

“She’s not, no. She visits the debtors’ wing. Bringing the boy to see his da, I think.”

“It’s a fine piece,” Gideon commented. And it would have taken a fine knife to fashion it. He took the carving from Winnefred and put it in her empty basket. “You’ll want to begin your lesson with Thomas if you mean to be done before dark.”

When she nodded and murmured an agreement, he took one of a pair of chairs by the hall door and set it in front of Thomas’s cell for her, then he settled into the other chair to wait and watch.

Winnefred, he soon discovered, was a natural teacher—patient and encouraging. And Thomas was an exceptional student—interested, eager, and clever. Very clever, Gideon amended. For having only a handful of lessons under his belt, the boy had an impressive grasp of the written word.

He enjoyed watching the two of them, and because he did, he made no move to hurry her along as the thin beams of light from the windows stretched across the cell floors. It wasn’t until that light begin to grow orange that he reminded Winnefred of the time.

She looked up from her work with Thomas and blinked as if she’d forgotten where they were. “Oh, yes, of course. Just . . . Just one more moment.”

Winnefred handed a small stack of papers and a book back to Thomas and bent her head in the manner of someone about to begin a discussion of considerable import. Gideon listened to her explain her upcoming trip to London. “Please tell me you’ll go to Murdoch House if you’re released in my absence. I’ll make certain the staff expects you. There’s work for you there, Thomas, and a safe place to stay. I’ll be back in the summer and we can begin our lessons again.”

The boy lifted a shoulder, a perfect mimic of Connor’s casual disregard, but even in the dim light of the prison, Gideon could see the flush of pleasure on his face. Murdoch House would have another mouth to feed soon enough.

Winnefred appeared far less sure of it. After trying and failing to gain a promise from Thomas, she walked away from the cell and said her good-byes to Connor and his men with a line of worry across her brow.

Gideon knocked on the hall door and bent to speak softly in Winnefred’s ear. “You needn’t worry over Thomas. He’ll come to Murdoch House.”

She looked both hopeful and skeptical. “Do you think so?”

“Wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

The heavy door unlocked with a click and swung open. Winnefred held her peace until they were on the other side, following Mr. Holloway through the shadowy halls of the prison once again.

“But why wouldn’t Thomas say so?” she eventually whispered.

“Because he is a boy in the company of men.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” She pondered that for a while before asking, “Do you think Connor will stand in his way?”

He shook his head. “He isn’t dangerous to you, or to Thomas.”

She didn’t look surprised at his change of opinion so much as she did curious and expectant. “Oh, what changed your mind?”

“I think he took his men in out of charity.”

“Gregory and Michael are not charity.”

“They’re certainly not highwaymen,” he countered easily. “Gregory is an old man and Michael Birch looks as if he couldn’t climb atop a horse if his life depended on it.”

“I was hoping you would notice that.” She looked decidedly smug. “Told you they weren’t guilty.”

“Of that particular crime, anyway.”

 

W
innefred decided to ignore Gideon’s last comment in favor of relishing her small victories as long as possible. Thomas would come to Murdoch House, and Gideon had admitted—more or less—that she’d been right about Connor and his men.

She was smiling to herself as they stepped out of the prison into the dying light of the setting sun, and still smiling when Gideon assisted her into the carriage.

He climbed in behind her, settled himself on the seat, and quite out of the blue, asked, “Did you bring Gregory a knife?”

“What?” She put a hand out to the wall to steady herself as the carriage began to fight its way down the rutted road. “Where did that question come from?”

“Curiosity. Concern. Take your pick. Did you bring him the knife he used to carve that figurine?”

“No, of course not. I did see him with it once, though, and agreed to not say anything if he promised to keep it on his person at all times and only use it for his carvings.” She shrugged. “I bring him the wood, and Lilly and I sell the pieces to Mr. McKeen in Enscrum. He has a small shop on the square.”

“And what does Gregory pay you for your trouble?”

“It isn’t any trouble.”

“I thought so,” he murmured. He studied her, his dark eyes unreadable, until she fairly squirmed in her seat.

“What?” She gave a small, uneasy laugh. “What is it?”

“How is it you came by Claire?”

She couldn’t begin to imagine what Claire had to do with anything. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“You have a goat you neither milk, breed, nor show any intention of eating. In essence, a completely useless animal. Why?”

“Claire is not useless,” she retorted. “She . . . grazes on the lawn. Keeps it quite tidy.”

He didn’t bother responding to that bit of nonsense. He just looked at her in silence until she caved.

“Oh, very well. We found her on the road to Enscrum. I imagine she belonged to a farmer passing through on the way to market, but no one returned to claim her so . . .”

“She’s old, isn’t she, no longer capable of breeding?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you keep her.”

“She has value to me.”

She was a little afraid he would poke fun at her for the sentiment, but he merely nodded and said, “You’ve an extraordinary capacity for sympathy.”

It was dizzying the way his mind jumped from topic to topic. “No different than any other’s.”

He tapped a finger against his leg, thinking. “You’re right.”

“I am?” She frowned at him, uncertain if she was pleased or disappointed to have won the argument so easily.

“It isn’t your sympathy that’s unusual,” he explained. “It’s your empathy.”

Suddenly, she regretted having argued against his sympathy theory. “I did not empathize with a goat.”

“The fact she was a goat had nothing to do with it. It was the fact she was lost.”

“I’ve never been lost,” she replied, deliberately misunderstanding his meaning. “I have a superb sense of direction.”

“There are different kinds of lost,” he said gently. “Even a superb sense of direction will get you nowhere if you have nowhere to go.”

She knew he was speaking of her life immediately after her father’s death. She wished he wouldn’t. She was no more comfortable receiving sympathy from him than she was speaking of her own. “I had Murdoch House.”

“Only after my father refused to take you in.” He surprised her by chuckling softly and turning his eyes to the window. “I wonder what it would have been like, had my father kept his promise and cared for you himself.”

“I’m sure the results would not have been the least amusing.”

“A young girl with a penchant for bringing home every stray, wounded, and lost human and beast to cross her path? It would have had its moments.”

“I don’t bring home every stray I come across,” she argued, mostly because she wanted to be done with the subject of being lost.

“Not for lack of wanting.”

She smiled sweetly. “I wanted to drop you in the loch.”

His gaze snapped away from the window. “Beg your pardon?”

“The night we dragged you out of the stable, I suggested to Lilly we drop you into the loch.” Strictly speaking, she’d said it was a pity they’d missed the opportunity to send Lord Gideon Haverston to the bottom of the loch, but that was close enough.

He ran his tongue slowly across his teeth. “I stand corrected.”

“To give your argument due, you weren’t lost, exactly, and you weren’t livestock.”

If he had a comment for that, she would never hear it.

The carriage suddenly jolted violently, knocking her to the floor, and for a split second, it felt as if the whole of it would tip on its side. But after a few terrifying heartbeats, it slammed back down to the road and came to an abrupt stop.

Gideon’s strong hands wrapped around her arms and pulled her up. “Winnefred. Winnefred, are you hurt?”

“I’m all right.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. Yes.” Her knees stung a little from hitting the floor, but other than that she felt fine and oddly calm. “You?”

The moment he nodded, she reached for the carriage door and threw it open. “Bess! Peter!”

“Here, miss!”

Bess’s voice came from the other side of the carriage, and Winnefred’s calm disappeared in an instant. Bloody hell, the girl had been thrown from the top of the carriage.

“Oh, no.” She scrambled for the door, but Gideon was the first to reach it and Bess.

She was sitting up, which was a relief, but her face was pinched with pain, and her hands gripped her leg above the ankle.