To Tempt a Saint (26 page)
Authors: Kate Moore
But it had happened.
X
ANDER Jones’s silent servants sat hunched with Charlie around the kitchen table. They looked up at Cleo’s entrance. Isaiah cast a quick, anguished glance at the others.
ANDER Jones’s silent servants sat hunched with Charlie around the kitchen table. They looked up at Cleo’s entrance. Isaiah cast a quick, anguished glance at the others.
“You told them?”
He nodded.
Cleo squared her shoulders. She held the framed verse from Charlie’s room against her chest. “You may blame me if you like, but we’re going to have to act together to help him.”
The fire cracked and popped.
Charlie looked from Isaiah to Cleo. “Why was Xander arrested?”
“Uncle March is trying to prove that we did not truly marry, but rather, pretended, to get the money out of my trust. That’s fraud.”
“But you were married in a church. It was real. I was there. They could ask me.”
“You are a minor.”
“Will was there. He’s an officer of the law. Oh, but he is Will Jones, isn’t he?” Charlie looked at Cleo’s face. “Are you going to be arrested, too, Cleo?”
“Xander thinks not,” she said.
And I didn’t believe him.
And I didn’t believe him.
Five anxious faces looked at Cleo.
“So what do we do now, my lady?” Amos asked.
Cleo took a deep breath. “We look for a lost boy. What’s his name?”
For a long moment no one answered. Alice choked back a sob, and Mrs. Wardlow put a comforting arm around the girl. “Kit. The boy is Kit.”
Cleo took a steadying breath. “I’ve seen a boy in the garden at dusk.”
“Teeth, the chestnut seller?” Charlie asked.
“No, not our spy, another boy altogether, fair and sweet-faced.”
She felt all those eyes on her, not daring to hope. She had no proof. Three years of searching. To raise false hope would be cruel. She saw clearly now why her husband never opened or answered his mother’s heartbroken letters. The only answer to that drawer full of letters was a living boy, not a name in the Bills of Mortality.
“This ghost boy comes to the garden after dark. I’ve been leaving him food and quilts. Tonight I want to leave him something . . . Kit . . . would know. This.” She turned the framed saying to them for all to see. “I don’t want to frighten him. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Cleo directed Isaiah to take Alice and Charlie to Hodge’s lodging for safety. Her uncle would not find Charlie there, and she would get a message to Norwood to protect him. She sent Charlie off without the hug she longed to give him and told him that he and Alice were to stay with Hodge until Xander himself came for them. Then she sent Isaiah to the court to see whether Xander had been arraigned.
She ordered Cook to prepare another food bundle and wrapped the little verse in a sturdy oilcloth wrapping with a note in her own hand.
It’s safe to come home. We all want you back.
It’s safe to come home. We all want you back.
The night sky was thick with clouds and the air arctic when she returned to the house. Snow was coming. It was not even Guy Fawkes Night. She and Amos went from room to room lighting the lamps. Alone, she climbed up through the empty brightness to Xander Jones’s bedroom. Only there she could not light a lamp. In the dark she removed her clothes. Naked and shivering, she buried herself in his bed. And lay still and let what they had done come back to her. It could not be erased after all.
Chapter Nineteen
I
N the morning Cleo’s bundle in the tree notch wore a white snow hat six inches tall. Snow was falling still. She refused to think what that meant for the boy; just another cold night where he had sought shelter somewhere.
N the morning Cleo’s bundle in the tree notch wore a white snow hat six inches tall. Snow was falling still. She refused to think what that meant for the boy; just another cold night where he had sought shelter somewhere.
She had trusted in his return. Her plan was to follow him when he took the bundle. She did not know how else to search for him. But she understood him better this morning. She, too, had hovered outside London’s bright windows after three years away, conscious of herself as someone different, someone who would not be welcomed back into her old life.
She paced the great room, and the emptiness of the house wore on her. Amos brought her coffee while they waited for Isaiah to return from his vigil at the court. He was to leave a message with Norwood whatever happened to Xander.
The street was a stark landscape of brick and snow, the usual traffic reduced to an occasional sled. A group of ragged children chucked snowballs at each other. Cleo studied them closely. Apparently her uncle used such children as spies, but she did not see Teeth among them.
By nine there was still no word from Isaiah, and the snow in the garden was nearly a foot deep. A lumbering hack wallowing through the drifts was the first sign of danger. The vehicle slowed and two large men emerged. Cleo shouted for Amos. She heard the front door bang open, heard the scrape of heavy feet against the marble and the crash of furniture and porcelain. As she came flying down the stairs, two rough men barreled up them.
Amos lay insensible on the floor, around him the wreckage of a demilune table and a vase. A broad-backed man rummaged noisily through the open closet. A second man with the broken table leg in his huge hand spotted her.
“Ma’am, officers of the law.”
Cleo recognized the lie with sinking certainty.
“Do you have a writ?” she asked, kneeling to tend to Amos, hoping to buy some time. A deep gash over his temple bled freely. She heard the tramp of feet above her.
The man rummaging in the closet emerged with her cloak. “Here’s yer writ, miss, yer comin’ with us.” He hauled Cleo up and dragged her stumbling and resisting to the door. The other man dropped the table leg and grabbed her free arm, lifting her off her feet. They swept her down the stairs and tossed her into the old coach. Only the ragged children saw her taken.
Her knees hit the floor of the coach, and she braced herself against the bench. She staggered up, caught in her skirts, and came face-to-face with her uncle as the coach lurched into motion. Cleo lunged for the door handle when his fist swung out to meet her.
A
RCHIBALD’S blow quelled his niece’s furious resistance. She sat opposite him in her wretched old cloak, stunned, and silent for once.
RCHIBALD’S blow quelled his niece’s furious resistance. She sat opposite him in her wretched old cloak, stunned, and silent for once.
“Without a poker it is more difficult to overcome a man,” he told her.
She pressed her hand to her jaw. He did not think he had broken it, but he had made her look at him with quite a new appreciation, those intelligent eyes of hers wide and wary. He could almost see the rapid rush of thoughts. Why did people so underestimate him? He offered her his handkerchief.
She reached for it and let it drop to the muddied floor of the cab.
He shook his head. “Don’t be tiresome, niece. You have an opportunity here. And it’s the last one I’m offering, so you’d best make yourself agreeable.”
In his own words he heard an unfortunate echo of that chill, polite voice speaking from behind and above his favorite chair at the club. Three years earlier, the voice had thrilled him when he first heard it speaking intimately to him; now it chafed him.
It was the voice that had prompted this next step in dealing with his wayward niece. Before his visitor had dropped by Archibald’s club, things had been well in hand. Her foolish marriage to Jones, while initially inconvenient in its impact upon her trust, had proved an opportunity. Archibald’s legal tactics were sufficient to discredit them both, but the voice wanted more.
After their appearance at the theater, the print shops had portrayed them as the “madly mated” pair with Jones running about lighting lamps as bank notes fell from his stuffed pockets and his wife chased him with a poker.
Archibald had found he could not share the joke with his visitor. The pale, long-fingered hand with the heavy signet ring, resting lightly on the wing of his chair, discouraged familiarities. The voice simply made it plain that Archibald must stop Jones’s ridiculous search for the boy.
At the end of Hill Street the rear of the hack dipped and hung for a moment on the lip of some rut in the road before it lumbered onward through the snow. They would have slow going, but he could afford to be patient now that he had everything in motion. Archibald stared at his niece. Her scrutiny never wavered. How had the chit managed to make so much trouble?
“You’re not taking me home, are you?”
“Too late for that. You had a chance to come to your senses, return to my protection, and end this charade of a marriage a fortnight ago.”
“Abducting me is hardly an act in keeping with your role as benefactor to the downtrodden of London.”
He didn’t answer. It really didn’t matter that she underestimated him again. “Where is your would-be husband, niece? You can’t hide him, you know.”
“You had him arrested, Uncle; you must know where he’s been taken.”
“I confess I did want an opportunity to speak to you without his influence. It’s not too late to repudiate your most unwise marriage and take a more suitable husband.”
“No, thank you, Uncle.” She still held her jaw, but he thought she sat straighter on the bench.
“Like him between the sheets, do you, girl?”
“As a matter of fact I do. Very wifely of me, don’t you think?”
Damn her for refusing to blush
. “Do you know what his lovers say about him?”
. “Do you know what his lovers say about him?”
He caught her off guard but watched her quick recovery.
“He cut quite a path through Mayfair when Prinny gave him that knighthood, you know. But he’ll be tossing up a different class of skirt inside of a month if you insist on remaining married.”
“We are married, Uncle, no matter what you did to poor Mr. Tucker to get him to lie for you.”
“Don’t be absurd, girl. You’ve been practiced on by a presumptuous nobody with a paper knighthood, who went after your money for an unprofitable scheme of lighting London’s reeking lanes.”
“All London, I think. He’s more democratic in his notions than you, Uncle. The hearing will determine the validity of our marriage.”
“You think Norwood can convince the investigators that you meant no fraud? Let me tell you, the law does very little for bastards, and nothing at all for those who offend the rich and powerful with their searches for dead boys.”
He saw something shift in her expression. “How do you know the boy is dead, Uncle?”
“He must be. Three years.” That of course was the rub. The polite voice hinted that it would be a most inconvenient and entirely unsatisfactory outcome if Xander Jones were to find his brother alive. The voice implied that Archibald would be held accountable for such an unfortunate result, for promises left unfulfilled, though how the boy could have survived, Archibald did not know.
But Archibald had found a way to stop Xander Jones’s search cold. Sniveling Dick Cullen with his demand for free beer had suggested the idea, and Archibald had instantly seen a chance to purge Bread Street of the likes of Cullen and Mother Greenslade and anyone else who talked too freely about lost boys for the price of a pint. He would simply wash them away on a tide of their favorite drink. And Archibald had decided to dispense with his inconvenient niece in the same flood.
“Really, Niece, the best thing you can do for your husband is to cast him off.” Archibald opened his traveling case of writing materials. “I am willing to drop prosecution of your lover, if you sign an affidavit that no marriage took place.”
She gave him an untrusting look, so unlike those first days after Edward’s death when she had been willing to lean against him for comfort. At one time he had thought to have her for himself, but not as another man’s soiled goods.
“My signature on that paper won’t change the facts of our marriage.”
Damn the girl for being a stubborn fool
. Archibald signaled the hack to stop. They had reached a conveniently empty stretch of road. Across the way, he could see the donkey cart driver waiting in the appointed place.
. Archibald signaled the hack to stop. They had reached a conveniently empty stretch of road. Across the way, he could see the donkey cart driver waiting in the appointed place.
A group of ragged street urchins descended from the back of the carriage. Apparently, they had stolen a ride. Momentarily they swarmed the coach with cries for alms. The driver shouted and plied his whip, driving them off down a dark lane. Archibald put the writing case in his niece’s lap.
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