The Wedding of Molly O'Flaherty (5 page)

“It’s about Birgit,” she interrupted, politely but firmly. “It’s about your daughter.”

This was enough to halt whatever he’d been prepared to say next. Concern flashed in his eyes. “Please explain.”

Only I saw the way Molly’s chest rose, as if she was taking in a breath for courage but also trying to hide it. I thought of her earlier today, her hand trembling in mine, her eyes glittering with unshed tears.
It’s too late for me.

I’d tried to prove to her that it wasn’t; that nothing changed the way I felt about her. If anything, I loved her even more, not because her story inspired me to protect her and heal her, but because it had allowed me a glimpse of the incalculable strength of her mind, the diamond-hard quintessence of her soul. It allowed me to see a Molly that I saw rarely—a woman both fragile and fierce, brilliant and yet so impossibly ignorant about herself.

I love you
, I thought fervently, trying to send that thought to her, to strengthen her.

And maybe it worked. She let go of the breath she’d held and answered in that same calm but firm voice. “When I first met Birgit, I asked her to consider me a friend. After all, we are both very similar—we were both raised by fathers after our mothers had died. Our fathers were both prosperous businessman. And both of us were deeply loved by these fathers.”

Molly had said the right thing. Van der Sant’s irritation melted somewhat, and he nodded.

She went on. “In addition, I wanted to extend my protection to her. Birgit is very beautiful and very young and very…untouched. I’m sad to say that I know from personal experience that a man within my own company is drawn to such girls. I worried that Birgit would capture his eye, and I wanted to make sure that he couldn’t bring any harm to her, as he has to me and others. Unfortunately, she came to me this morning to tell me that he has threatened her with the most appalling of arrangements. That she must surrender herself to him or he will publicly slander her reputation. He has told her that if she doesn’t comply with his wishes then he’ll convince you that she’s been dishonest and unchaste.”

“That’s a very concerning allegation,” van der Sant said after a pause.

“I know it is,” she agreed. “And it probably seems unlikely. Outlandish even. Which is why I am not asking you to believe me without proof.” She indicated the corner of the room, where a narrow door was set into the wall, a remnant from a century ago, when this building had been a family house. There was a heavy table placed against it to discourage use, and indeed, it looked like no one had touched it in decades, but a door it remained, and it allowed eavesdropping, provided you pressed your ear to the seam and listened closely.

Van der Sant seemed to grasp Molly’s meaning right away. Color rose up his neck, anger and horror and disbelief. “Are you—is my daughter behind that door?”

His anger didn’t faze Molly. “She will be shortly. The room adjoining us belongs to Frederick Cunningham.”

“Mr. Cunningham,” he said. “He’s the man you were referring to?”

“Yes.”

Van der Sant’s mouth opened and closed at this new piece of information. Molly forged on. “I can understand why you are angry. Why this situation infuriates you. But before you vent your rage on me and before you storm into the next room, I want you to know that Birgit sincerely believes that you would not put faith in her if she came to you. Your own daughter, who adores you and has never given you any reason to doubt her, still thinks that you do not love and trust her enough to believe her story.”

Van der Sant’s neck grew redder, as did his cheeks and ears. “That’s preposterous,” he said, his voice growing louder. “My daughter knows she has my full trust. She should have come to me and not a…strange woman!”

“Think,” Molly ordered. “Would you really? If your daughter came to you and claimed something so heinous about a man you had chosen to do business with? What would you really think?”

Van der Sant seemed ready to yell again, but he didn’t. He met Molly’s eyes instead, his gaze blazing full of indignation, his jaw working as if he were picking precisely the right words to say. But Molly didn’t blink or look away.

“There’s nothing to be gained from lying to yourself,” she said, a bit sternly. “You’re a hard man, Mr. van der Sant. A good man, maybe, but a hard one. Even to your daughter.”

He stared at Molly for another minute, the red slowly receding from his cheeks. He finally dropped his eyes to the floor. “That’s possibly not untrue.” The concession cost him visible effort.

Encouraged, Molly stepped even closer. “Will you please allow us to prove Birgit’s innocence? So we can extract her from this terrible situation?”

Van der Sant was clearly torn. The plan seemed so reckless and terrible at first—even I had felt that way—but under the surface, Castor and Molly had planned for every eventuality. I listened as she explained to him that Castor’s men were shadowing Cunningham until he came to his room, that Castor’s most trusted servant was escorting Birgit here to ensure that she remained safe until she reached her destination. And once both Cunningham and Birgit entered, we would be able to hear through the door if Birgit cried for help, in which circumstance, Castor’s men would break into the room and rescue her.

After the explanations were complete, van der Sant found a chair and sat down, rubbing at his forehead. It was the only fissure in his perfect self-control that I could see, but I suspected that with a man like him, the smallest ripple in his disciplined mien signaled tremendous turbulence underneath.

“I am still troubled that my daughter did not come to me first,” he said, but there was less recrimination in his voice now, less superiority. “But I suppose I understand why she felt she could not.”

Three light knocks on the door. The signal that Cunningham was inside his room. By some unspoken cue, we all quieted, even van der Sant, who seemed as if he still had more he wanted to say.

Not five minutes later, there were four knocks at the door. Birgit was now in the lion’s den.

It made me sick.

Even though Castor and I had been so careful, even though every angle had been thought through to achieve both our goals—keeping Birgit safe
and
extricating her from Cunningham’s trap without endangering her relationship with her father—it still felt wrong. Wrong and despicable, to let her alone in a room with a man like him.

Van der Sant was standing with his ear pressed against the seam, as was Castor and Julian, but Silas had found his way to me in the middle of the room, where I stood wondering if I should go over there. Silas’s hand slipped in mine, something van der Sant would probably find deeply inappropriate if he were watching, which he wasn’t.

Silas squeezed my fingers. “Do you want to go over there?”

I nodded, but I still couldn’t move. It was only when I heard a low growl of anger from Castor that I knew I needed to hear what he was hearing. I was, for all intents and purposes, the author of this situation and I needed to see it through to the end. No matter how many painful and shameful memories were dredged up in the process.

The men rearranged themselves slightly, and I found a place to listen. There was silence at first, and for a moment, I panicked that perhaps he was forcing her right this minute and she hadn’t managed to give any sort of signal, but then there was the clinking of glass against glass and deliberate footsteps.

“I don’t drink,” came Birgit’s muffled voice.

“It will help you relax,” Cunningham urged. I hated that voice, that voice that pretended he was being kind and attentive even as he forced you against your will. Like everything he did—even the defilement—was for your best interest and any protest on your part came from ignorance or petulance. Like you were just a selfish child and he was the patient adult trying to coax you into doing what you were supposed to do.

“I’d really rather not,” she insisted. “My father doesn’t approve of women drinking.”

“Your father isn’t here, is he?”

Van der Sant didn’t react, at least on the surface. There was a slight twitch to one eye, a careful rhythm to his breathing that told me he was trying to maintain complete control and that it was costing him significant effort.

“No,” Birgit said, and even through the door, I could hear the trembling in her voice. The fear. I swallowed, trying to stop the ball tightening in my throat as I felt my own fear again, my own remembered panic on the day Cunningham took my virginity and a piece of my soul.

You are not that girl anymore.

It was true. I’d worked so hard to make sure that my body was my own, that my sex was my own. That Molly only belonged to herself and not to the ghosts of the past. But that girl would also be there, somewhere, hiding inside of me. Waiting for the right events to bring her shivering and crying to the fore.

Cunningham murmured something, and Birgit cleared her throat loudly, launching into the script we’d rehearsed.

“Please, Mr. Cunningham, I don’t want to do this.”

“What you want doesn’t matter, Miss van der Sant. I think you know that already.”

“I don’t want to—” her voice broke off, thick with tears, and my own tears were coming now, welling up and clinging to my eyelashes.

“If you don’t give me what I want, I will ruin you. You understand that, right? I can ruin you. And now that you’re here—well, I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice. You
will
do what I want, and no one will believe you if you try to tell them.”

No one will believe you.
Wasn’t that what I had told myself all these years? Why I’d kept his crimes a secret? Because who would believe the word of a woman over the word of a gentleman like him?

Except I could see how imprisoning that belief had been; maybe not everybody would have believed me, maybe not the public at large, but here were my three closest friends and all of them had plunged themselves into this situation to help as soon as they learned about it. They’d all believed me about Birgit. And they would have believed me about my own story. Warmth seeped in through the shame, not erasing it necessarily, but making it lighter, smaller. As if knowing what I felt, Silas wrapped an arm around my waist, and both Julian and Castor looked up at me with such expressions of friendship and trust that my tears did truly spill over. Julian frowned—he still didn’t know about Cunningham—only Silas knew how personally this affected me, how difficult it was for me to stand here and not relive every awful moment of my own torture. But I knew that if I told him, he would be exactly what I needed. Kind but not overbearing. Concerned but not pitying.

While I pondered this, the conversation had continued on the other side of the door. More of Cunningham’s evil words and more of Birgit’s tears, until finally van der Sant straightened abruptly. “I’ve heard enough,” he said tightly, and Castor was at the door in an instant to summon his men.

And then there were shouts, tables and chairs knocking over in a scuffle; and then Birgit was in her father’s arms, and the stoic Martjin van der Sant finally succumbed to the anger and pain he’d repressed all evening, sobbing into his daughter’s neck and apologizing profusely for whatever he’d done to make her doubt his love under any circumstance; and then the constables were called, and then there was Castor giving testimony along with van der Sant and Birgit herself, and Cunningham was brought away and I stood in the hallway as he passed.

“
You
,” he hissed as they dragged him away.

“Me,” I said. And the look he shot me was venomous enough to kill, but he couldn’t kill me in any sense any longer. He was finally exposed. He would be punished. And the part of me that was still fourteen, still a terrified virgin pretending to be brave, breathed a sigh of relief and closed her eyes at last.

“You’re shivering,” Silas said.

I was. In fact, I wasn’t even sure how we’d ended up in this carriage that was currently rattling me back to my house. Silas must have called for it…what had happened to the others? I vaguely remembered van der Sant wanting a physician to tend to Birgit’s nerves, Castor thundering words to the constables, who scrambled to obey the aristocrat, Julian clutching one of my arms while Silas clutched the other, and him murmuring to Silas, and Silas murmuring back over my head.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said, my teeth chattering. My hands shook so hard that I couldn’t even try to untie the bonnet I’d put on at some point.

“Catharsis,” Silas said in a gentle voice. “You’re purging something you’ve carried for a long time. You had to feel it all again, confront it all again, and now you’re able to let go of it.”

My shivering was so violent that I couldn’t even respond, and the tears came again. Silas moved over to my seat and crushed me against his chest.

And then we were home, and then he was carrying me, and then we were in my bed, fully clothed, his body curled protectively around mine, and I felt only a weary sort of peace as I slipped into a dreamless sleep.

When I woke, I woke up alone. I knew why Silas had felt so betrayed when I’d left him the other day; falling asleep in his arms had felt so deeply right that waking up and finding nothing next to me felt deeply wrong.

I sat up, aching and stiff from having slept in my clothes, and found a note on the side table.

I’ve stepped out to check on a few business matters. I’ll call on you later today.

I set the note aside, feeling a grim sort of reality settle in. Would it really be wise to have Silas call on me? We’d spent so much of the last day together, it was impossible that Hugh wouldn’t hear about it. And while Cunningham was now out of the picture, I had no guarantee that the rest of the board wouldn’t still insist upon my marriage to Hugh. And I was certain that my successful rescue of Birgit had also cost my company the partnership with van der Sant’s. There was no way he would want to continue working with us. So I’d done nothing to help myself and possibly even hurt my company with my actions yesterday.

But I couldn’t regret them. In fact, despite my pragmatic view of the current situation, I still felt a sense of victory. A sense of completion. I’d done the right thing. I’d protected Birgit and I’d seen justice done to Cunningham. And maybe that was worth my bleak future.

Treasures in heaven…
That’s what the priest in Ennis used to preach about when I was a girl. So I wouldn’t have treasures on earth. At least I’d done moral good in the world…maybe God would look at that and not at my hedonistic past when I died.

A knock sounded at the door. My lady’s maid came in, carrying a freshly pressed dress. “It’s time to dress, miss. And don’t forget that the dressmaker will be calling later today for your final fitting.”

The dressmaker. For the engagement ball. Which was—
fuck
—tomorrow night.

“Of course,” I said calmly, although inside I was twisting with unhappiness. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Molly was out when I came to her house. She’d gone to visit Birgit van der Sant, her butler intoned sternly, and he didn’t know when she’d be back. He also made a point to tell me that Hugh was expected for dinner.

I sometimes got the feeling her butler didn’t like me very much.

I went back to my townhouse and paced my parlor floor for several long hours, until I finally gave up and went to Castor’s, where I held Julian’s baby until I felt better, missing my nieces and nephews. Missing my family. Missing Molly.

Only I could manage to feel lonely in the busiest, most important city in the world.

The next day dawned foggy and gray, mist clinging to trees just this side of turning colors, and the first thing I did after waking was seek out my solicitor. I knew it was early to expect confirmation for our shares, but I also wanted to know what was going on with Molly’s board. Were they still determined to see her married? Were they shaken up by Cunningham’s arrest? Had everything changed for the better?

Or the worse?

The Cecil-Coke solicitor was named Kestwick, an imposing man of equally imposing age, white hair and wrinkles upon wrinkles, with a posture and strength that belied his years. He rose to shake my hand when I entered his office, and then we both sat.