Thief of Hearts (49 page)

"Oh," she breathed, holding him, vowing that somehow she would get through this without crying.

He caressed her hair as he gazed out at the soft rain falling in the garden. "Are you disappointed in me because I'm running away?" She looked up blankly. "I gave them my word. I said I'd go back to Bristol when this was over. Now…"

"No, no, I couldn't bear to think of you being locked up!"

"But I made a promise."

"But you're
innocent
. Where is the justice? Your promise can't bind you to an unfair bargain. You have to take responsibility for their mistake."

He smiled with relief and hugged her; he'd worried that she would think him dishonest. But he couldn't have allowed himself to be locked up for the rest of his life for something he hadn't done, in a place less than two hundred miles from Annie, no matter what principle was at stake. It was too much to ask.

He took hold of her cold hands. "Listen to me, now. As soon as I go, you must send a message to Dietz, telling him. Immediately. Do you understand?"

"No, John, you'll need time. I should wait at least a day."

"No, I
won't
need time. Tell him right away so he'll think you knew nothing about it. Yes!" he insisted, squeezing her hands. "Besides, he'll have to think of a way to explain my death, Nick's death, and he'll probably want to say it happened away from the house, without witnesses. Not even you. So…"

"Where will you go?"

He reached up and touched her cheek. "It's better if I don't tell you."

She closed her eyes. "Oh, my God."

"Dietz will ask you a hundred questions, you'll have to convince him you don't know anything. It's better—"

"You won't tell me?" Helpless tears streaked down her face; she lacked the will to wipe them away. "Will you write to me?" He shook his head, and her heart broke.

"I can't," he murmured. "Too dangerous for you."

Their clasped hands grew slippery from the tears splashing down from her wet cheeks. She imagined the tie that bound them stretching, stretching until it snapped, leaving them alone and separate for the rest of their lives. It would be as if he had died. Or she had.

"Don't cry," he begged her. Unfairly his tears were on the inside, and easier to hide.

"Take me with you."

He shook his head.

"Please!"

"No." She whirled around, angry, but he pulled her back. "This is where you belong. It's not as hard for me. I never had a home for long. But you have your family here, your work, all your friends."

"I don't ca—"

"If you came with me you'd hate the way you had to live—"

"I wouldn't!"

"—and before long you'd learn to hate me."

"Never!"

"Listen to me. We'd be poor, we wouldn't be respectable—"

"Respectable!" She spat it out like a curse. "I don't care anything about respectability." His expression of sad amusement galled her. "I don't! Society's rules, all the conventions, they're more of a prison for me now than the one you're escaping. Please, John, please" She hated the pleading in her voice, but she couldn't help it.

"No," he repeated, firmly.

She shoved at his chest with her bunched fists, furious. She walked in a frustrated circle back to him and threw her arms around him.

Now Brodie's tears were on the outside, too. He held her tightly, feeling her heat, the beat of her heart against him. "It doesn't matter where I go because I'll always be with you, you'll always be in my heart. Be happy, Annie, live a good life. Be careful, too; don't let anyone hurt you."

She drew a choking breath. "I will always, always love you."

"You taught me everything."

"You taught
me
."

This was too hard. They drew apart at the same moment, and turned together at a noise in the doorway. It was the maid. Anna looked away; Brodie swiped at his face with his sleeve.

"You have a visitor, sir."

He swore incoherently. "It's probably Nell. I said I'd lend him some money. I've put him off twice already. I'll get rid of him."

But the maid handed him the engraved visitor's card, and instead of brushing past her he halted in his tracks and went dead white.

"Who is it?" asked Anna, clenching her hands, fearing the worst. Dietz.

"It's my father."

They heard it at the same moment, the slow, labored thumping of a cane on the wood floor. It dulled on the carpet, rang out again on the parquet as it drew nearer. Anna went to Brodie and took his hand. His face frightened her. "Are you all right?"

He didn't hear. His senses were concentrated on that deliberate and sinister thunk, thunk, thunk, and the sibilant shuffle that accompanied it. A lifetime of bitterness rose in his chest, but something even stronger pulled on a private, unused place inside.

The drawing room draperies were closed, the room was dim; they saw the shape coming toward them only as an indistinct, hunched form until it crossed the threshold and stood still in a splash of afternoon sunshine on the library floor. Even then, slowly swirling motes of dust in the brightness softened the outline and obscured the features.

Anna glanced at Brodie anxiously before leaving his side and moving toward the visitor, an uncertain smile faltering on her lips. "My lord," she said softly.

Regis Gunne, the Earl of Battiscombe, was an old, old man, white-haired and brittle-boned, thin as a rake, humped and bent and curved with arthritis. His skin stretched tight over the fragile, almost visible bones of his face, then sagged in countless folds and wrinkles around his birdlike neck. Gnarled, misshapen fingers of both hands held onto a black walking stick; stick and bowed legs made such a shaky tripod, Anna was afraid to offer her hand. She curtsied instead, and realized the gesture felt entirely natural.

"How do you do?" said the earl. His voice was gravelly but refined. "Please do pardon me for coming here without any warning, it was unforgivably rude, but I… " His words trailed off as he seemed to give up trying to pay polite attention to Anna and fixed his fierce old eyes on Brodie. His thin, nearly invisible lips opened and closed two times before he could get his next words out. "Nicholas? Is it you?"

Brodie was clenching his hands together behind his back. Hard-faced, unmoving, he answered. "No, I'm John. Nick's dead."

The earl seemed to stumble. Anna reached for his arm and steadied him. With gentle hands and slow steps she steered him to the leather sofa and helped him to sit. He clutched at his cane between his knees and closed his eyes, and his face paled to the color of beeswax. The paper-thin nostrils flared in and out with his quick breathing.

Anna flashed Brodie a look of alarm. His granite-hard pose was crumbling; he moved toward his father slowly, drawn there by emotions more powerful than resentment or twenty-year-old anger, and lowered himself to the seat beside him. Anna stared at them, twisting her fingers, searching for a resemblance. She found it in the eyes, although the earl's were clouded with age, and in the high, proud forehead.

There was silence for a long moment. Regis lifted one hand and laid it with palsied lightness on the sleeve of Brodie's coat. "John?" he quavered. If he had a sparrow's body, at that moment his eyes were ferocious as a hawk's. "John," he repeated, staring down at Brodie's motionless hand. "My son."

The angry child in Brodie wanted to recoil, to shout out loud, to force this decrepit old man to cringe from the power of his rancor. Instead his hand surrounded his father's in the gentlest of clasps and then he carried the aged claw to his lips and kissed it. "Father," he whispered. Regis's arm stole around his son's neck. They embraced.

Anna stared at the floor and watched teardrops slap at the carpet and the toes of her shoes.

The earl pulled away to peer at his son; he couldn't take his eyes from him. "I've been trying to find you for so long. More than a year, John, you and Nicholas. The gentleman I hired told me you were in prison for... for killing someone. But when I went to the gaol, they wouldn't let me in. They said I couldn't see you."

"I never killed anyone."

Regis flicked a bony wrist in the air. "Of course you didn't," he said feelingly. And with that he dismissed the subject.

Brodie looked down, embarrassed by the unmanly tears that had filled his eyes so suddenly. But his father's lack of hesitation, his blind, instantaneous faith in his innocence moved him powerfully. He felt a feather-light pressure on his shoulder and looked up again.

"So. Nicholas is dead?"

"Yes, sir. Four months ago."

"He was ill?"

"No, he… " Brodie broke off, at a loss. "It was sudden. He… didn't suffer." He glanced at Anna, who had quietly taken a seat a little distance from them. Her face was full of sympathy. He wanted to ask her what in the world he ought to tell his father about Nick, and how best to explain his own presence in the Jourdaine home. The old man's mind seemed perfectly clear, but to tell him the whole complicated truth about everything would cause him too much pain.

"Thank God for that," his father was saying. "I have another son." Brodie nodded. "My late wife's boy, your half-brother." He shook his head grimly. "He's a grave disappointment to me, John. I couldn't leave everything to him; he'd only drink it away, or worse. Much worse. That's why I've been trying to find you. I've had people looking, for you and Nicholas for so long, I had almost given up. This... this is like a miracle to me."

They were holding hands. Summoning all his courage, Brodie made himself ask the question that had tormented him most of his life. He kept his voice gentle, non-accusatory. "Father, why… " he stopped, started again. "Why did you send us away?"

The Earl of Battiscombe raised his chin and looked off into the distance. His throat convulsed on a nervous swallow; restless fingers pressed a crease in his trousers above one pointed knee. "Because" he had to clear his throat, "because I was proud and stupid." After that he couldn't speak, and Brodie had a glimmer of an understanding that he was hearing words his father had never spoken to anyone before, and perhaps had never admitted even to himself.

A movement in the doorway caught his eye. The maid again. He started to shake his head. "Mr. Vaughn is here to see you, sir."

Anna stood up. "I'll speak to him, John," she said quietly. It was time to leave them alone together, and she was glad of the opportunity to steal away. "I'll have some tea sent in. Please make yourself comfortable," she told the earl, smiling; "this is your home now. Excuse me."

Brodie watched her go, and felt an ache inside that was almost intolerable. Leaving her had become obscene to him, a perversion of his best instincts. His father's words reclaimed his attention, but the lead weight on his spirit would not lift.

"I loved Elizabeth dearly, John, but I couldn't marry her. Or I thought I couldn't, today, heaven knows, I would do everything differently." He smiled his sad, thin-lipped smile. "But she was so low-born, and in my mind that made it impossible. And you boys were illegitimate. I was afraid of the scandal." He looked down, ashamed. "But I never thought she would leave me. I thought she would let me keep her, support her, that things could go on as they always had. I was… " he swallowed again and took a deep breath, "a little arrogant." He looked Brodie in the eye. "I was an ignorant son of a bitch." He saw his son's lips twitch, and it gave him the heart to go on. "But she was stubborn too, and that's the truth. She wouldn't take a penny from me, sent all my letters back unopened. When I finally found out where she'd taken you, I went there and tried to talk sense into her. Hah! Might as well have saved myself the trip. We said some ugly things to each other that day, John, words I'll regret till the day I die. After that, I never saw her again." His hand tightened on Brodie's; bitter sorrow bleared his old eyes, and in that moment Brodie forgave him everything.