The Wedding Night (21 page)

"We're taking on water, Rushford."

"Get rid of the rocks, Sumner!"

Unfortunately, they simultaneously chose to toss out one of the stone cannonballs from the same side.

The boat rocked, listed fatally, and then took on water like a burst dam.

"Lord Jack! You're sinking!" A trio of screams came from the bank.

"Hell," Sumner said.

"Damnation."

The sorry vessel dropped out from under them in a single sucking slurp, and then sank to the bottom fully loaded with rocks, leaving Jack and Sumner treading water and the girls in a shrieking panic.

"Welcome to
Duck
Island
, sir."

"You too, Sumner." Jack laughed and swam the twenty feet to the
bankside
, to the little hands that were eager to help but nearly lethal.

"A towel!" Anna was already racing back from the laundry, her arms loaded down with linens. She dumped a load of them into Sumner's lap and gave the rest to Jack along with a kiss on his eye. The other two fell all over him, wanting to help, buffing his hair into a nest.

They discussed what to do next, and the merits of erecting an island on the foundations of a boat.

"Let's ask Mairey," Caro offered.

"An excellent idea. As soon as she comes back," Jack promised, harrowing the last of the tangles from his hair.

"I'm back now. Is that too soon?"

"Never." Jack's heart gave a thump, and he dropped the towel on the grassy slope. He would have embraced her and set her mouth on tire, but he was soaking with pond water and surrounded by too many people, and she was laughing.

"Oh, Jack! Sumner! You're all wet!" Mairey swiped tears out of her eyes. The others were roiling on the ground, equally demented, echoing their grown-up sister's laughter.

Until they all noticed Aunt
Tattie
standing at the end of the stone walk, her hands fisted against her hips.

"Uh-oh. She's tapping her foot," Sumner whispered loudly, rising up on his haunches. "I think I hear cook calling me."

"You sit there, Mr. Sumner."
Tattie
loomed large in the midst of their huddle and took three muddy little hands in one of hers. "Girls, you're coming with me." She kissed Mairey,
then
raised her spectacles to Jack as he stood there in his dribbling sleeves. "And you, your lordship, ought to know better."

"Yes, ma'am." Jack and Mairey stood silently, hiding from Aunt
Tattie
in broad daylight, while the others scurried away to their separate corners of the estate.

"It's plain the woman likes you best, Mairey." Jack took her hand and started toward the laundry for a dry shirt, a momentous discussion on his mind.

"The secret is chocolate." She ran her fingers through his hair. He had emptied his boots and taken off his socks, but he still squished water out of the soles when he walked.

Mairey watched from the door of the laundry as he exchanged a wet shirt for a dry one, a cat smile on her lips. It was too inviting not to kiss, so he did.

"
Ooo
, your lips are cool, Jack." Hers were warm and her fingers searing as she buttoned his shirt. He would have to live with wet trousers while he strolled back to the house with Mairey on his arm and her scent in his nostrils, while he formed the perfect proposal of marriage.

"You seemed to be enjoying yourself out there, Jack, even when the boat sank. I saw it all."

He was dizzy with happiness, crazy for her smile, and bursting to be alone with her. "You won't tell them, will you? That I'm a sucker for their silly projects?"

"They love you, Jack."

"Ha! They know I'm good for a hobbyhorse ride, or a duck house builder."

"Because you love them."

Yes—that was that whirling sensation in his chest. Being needed for himself. Succeeding where it counted.
Ah, Mairey, what you've given to me!

"You had a lot of practice, living with three sisters of your own."

"They were a handful. I confess that I see them stair-stepped in Anna and Caro and Poppy."

She seemed distracted from everything but his fingers, opening his hand inside hers and caressing the lines and the hollows. "Time stopped that day, didn't it, Jack?"

And started again with you, Mairey.

"Hell, I'm probably an uncle many times over, yet in all my memories, I'm still fifteen and my sisters are still young. They still have the bony little fingers that knew which of my ribs to tickle until I surrendered the sweets I brought them every Saturday."

"The consummate brother."

He snorted. "One who took every opportunity to escape his annoying little
siblings.
I had discovered women just about then."

"Ah." She raised a brow that he decided, with great jubilation, was the tiniest arc of jealousy.

"The mating instinct, Miss Faelyn. It's very strong in the young human male."

"Yes, I know."

Jack felt the chaotic flush like a fever, borne of this woman and her patience, of the uncommon memories he was making with her.

"And were you successful?"

"At what?" He hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about, only that she seemed pensive, and intent upon everything he said.

"You and
your
mating instincts."

"Ah, that." He caught her around the waist and stopped beneath the wisteria arbor.

"I was bumbling," he said, remembering too vividly, too quickly, to fend off the image of his first time with a woman—
which
had taken all of fifteen seconds, and hadn't been accomplished until he was eighteen and the first brothel was built in
Chantilly
. He never went back to the place; he'd purchased his fleeting pleasure with precious gold that should have gone to finding his family. And in the deepest part of him, he had known that the desperate young woman was someone's sister.

"You've grown out of that."

"I'm glad you think so." Her face was turned up to him, her mouth the color of Sumner's prized damask rose, now and forever Jack's undisputed favorite.

He cupped her chin, and tasted her lips with his tongue. Very sweet, soft, scented with honey.

"Jack…" She slipped her fingers into his hair and seemed to be choosing her words with unusual care. "Jack, I found something today—"

"Tell me you've found the
Willowmoon
Knot and we can get down to the real business between us." Marriage.
That
would have been a cloddish opening.

"Not that. But I have found something." As a man who had forged a career looking for treasures, Jack knew the stomach-churning thrill of discovery. Yet these were grieving eyes that were watching his face.

"Something that makes you frown?"

"I just don't know how to tell you this, Jack." She looked away from him with her bleakness, and the distance left him starved for air.

"Just tell it straight, Mairey."

She swung her gaze back to him, watery and rimmed in red. "When I first took on the task, it seemed quite the most natural thing for me to do. It comes so easily to me."

"So does
your
riddling, Mairey. What is it?" A premonition rode him. Was she leaving him? Had
Walsham
or one of the other men whom she charmed so regularly stolen her fancy?

"I've spent my life looking for lost things, Jack. Digging up burial burrows, capturing folk tales so they won't vanish when all the storytellers are gone."

"Yes, I know. You're very good at spinning a tale." He didn't think he was going to like this one.

"I can't tell you how dearly your search for your family has affected me. I think about it all the time. My parents have passed away, but I was with them both when they died. And I have my sisters, and can love them, hold and kiss them, every day of my life." Tears were rolling down her cheeks, mystifying him completely. "I couldn't imagine never seeing them again. But if something horrible did happen to them, it would be better to know they were at peace in a churchyard, Jack, than simply lost to me."

That hit him like a slap, an insult to the memories he held so dear. "Not better at all, Mairey. I appreciate your empathy, but I would rather let the subject rest."

"It can't."

"It can if I say so."

"Listen to me, Jack. After you told me about your search, I was incensed!" She threw her outrage at him, the reflection of his own, though better focused and glaring in its brilliance. "Eighteen years, Jack, and Dodson turned up nothing! That's appalling."

"But it's my business."

"Maybe so. But I couldn't just stand back and not do anything. And so I—"

He took her arm, sat her down on the stone bench, and knelt in front of her. "You what?"

She caught her lip with her teeth, lowered her eyes to her fidgeting fingers. "I went to see them. Dodson and his son."

Stunned and wanting to see the truth in her teary eyes, he held her chin. "Why?"

She shook off his touch. "I pretended that I had lost my family—"

"Why, damn it?"

"Oh, Jack." She grabbed his hands, forced her fingers between his, and held fast to them. "I had this appalling feeling that they were… That for all these years they had been—"

"Playing me the fool?"

Her face paled. "Worse than that, Jack. I was sure they had no idea what they were doing. So I asked how they would approach a search for my mother and three brothers. A family much like yours, lost twenty years ago. Oh, Jack, they didn't even know where to begin. They rattled on about their operative who looks through registries
when he has time!
You were the man's
hobby
, Jack!"

Well, then—his suspicions were confirmed. Nothing more than he had already concluded. He stood, avoiding
Mairey's
eyes, emptier than he'd been before but still whole. He swallowed his outrage so that it wouldn't blaze across the sky.

"Thank you, Mairey." He'd hired Dodson from across the world and trusted him with his business. He'd been foolish not to look for a new firm once he'd returned to
England
. "I shall take great pleasure in sacking them tomorrow morning. They aren't my regular staff of legal advisors; I only used Dodson for this single issue."

His anger was burning brightly, but he didn't want to focus too clearly on its meaning. Treacherous bastards. He needed to walk for a while, needed air.

"There's more, Jack." She slipped her hand into his.

"More? Did you find them embezzling from me, too? Impossible—I have a whole staff of lawyers and accountants who protect me from incompetence."

She held his face between her soft hands and made him look into her eyes, though they were still streaming with tears.

"Jack … I found your mother."

His heart went wild and leaping. Heat seared the back of his eyes before
Mairey's
words settled into the air between them.

"What did you say?" He held fast to her arms, wanted to see and hear her words because she couldn't possibly have said what was ringing inside his head. Sunbursts of hope, star-pinned wonder filled his chest. "My mother? You found her, Mairey? My God, where is she?"

He wondered if he would recognize her after all these years, and why she hadn't come with Mairey.

"Oh, God, Jack, how do I tell you this?" She kissed his palm and held it to her lips, to her damp cheek. "Your mother died, my love, a very long time ago."

"You're mistaken, Mairey." He pulled his hand out of hers, standing stiff and disconnected. That wasn't possible. He'd promised his father he would take care of her; he only needed to find her and his sisters and then he could start. He'd bought this house for them—

"I found the registry of her death, in the parish church just outside
Manchester
." Her fingers quaked as she handed him a folded sheaf of paper. "I made a copy of it, and a carbon rubbing of her gravestone. Jack, I'm so sorry."

His limbs were numb as he took the bundle, tucked it under his arm, and looked out across his estate, counting all the freshly painted corner posts in the fence that bordered the herb garden. He was waiting for his throat to clear of the volcanic sob seething there, waiting to breathe again without aching.

"When did it happen?" He swallowed back the molten heat, and let it burn its way down his gullet.

"She died in
Manchester
on
December fifteenth, 1842
."

Eight months after he left Glad Heath. All those years of imagining that his mother was waiting on the porch for him to come home, bread-scented and smiling, holding back the wriggling tide of his sisters. Lost to him completely.

"Jack, you have to know this, too." Mairey reached for his hand and took just his fingertips, as though she thought he would lash out at her. "Your mother died in childbirth. And the baby with her."