Chapter Fifteen #2
“It was onion.” The absurdity of the dispute, held so earnestly after such a night, drew the ghost of a smile to Archer’s mouth.
They turned into a narrower street where their steps rang against slick stone. Yet distance from the warehouse seemed to put color back into the women’s faces with every yard they gained.
“You were afraid?” Archer asked quietly.
Anne considered. “Of course we were. Only a fool would not be.”
“But we have known worse places than a river warehouse,” Lydia said.
“And we were together,” said Clara, her hand brushing Lydia’s arm. “That changes everything. It is solitude that breaks a woman.”
They went on in silence for a little while before Anne spoke again, lowering her voice.
“You did not see the clerk.”
Grantham glanced her way. “What clerk?”
“The thin one,” she said. “Ink on the cuffs. Hands that would not keep still. He tried to be kind, in the manner of weak men who wish to think themselves merciful.” Lydia’s mouth hardened. “He told us that if we gave them the names they wanted, we might return at once to our comfortable lives.”
“I asked whether betrayal was his notion of comfort,” Lydia said.
Anne gave a thin smile. “He said he had an aging mother dependent on his wages. I told him we had a Mrs. Doyle.”
At that, Grantham’s stride altered just slightly. “And what did he say?” Archer asked.
“He asked who Mrs. Doyle was.”
Anne’s eyes gleamed. “I told him she was the sort of woman one disappointed only once.” That won from Grantham the nearest thing to mirth Archer had yet seen on his face.
They came to the broader avenue leading toward Redford Street, lit by the orderly glow of gas lamps. Respectable houses stood in quiet rows. Carriage wheels clattered at a distance. The city continued in its ordinary aspect, serenely indifferent to the war lately fought in the dark by the river.
“Well,” Anne said, some mischief returning to her voice, “despite the obvious inconvenience of abduction, there is a certain romance in being rescued by two such determined gentlemen.”
“Romance,” Lydia repeated, tasting the word with skepticism, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her.
“We shall require a more handsome account by morning,” said Clara. “Add a duel or two. A dramatic conflagration.” Grantham cleared his throat and fixed his eyes more firmly on the road ahead.
“You must come to the house and let us thank you properly,” Anne said, glancing between them with open challenge as much as invitation.
They turned into Redford Street. The House stood before them, warm against the fog, its windows alight with amber. The front door remained shut, yet nothing in it felt forbidding. After the river, the spill of gold upon the damp pavement looked almost touchable.
Before Archer had set foot on the first step, the door opened.
Mrs. Doyle filled the doorway, broad-shouldered, gray streaks pinned back with her usual no-nonsense severity. For a single heartbeat she went motionless as if motion itself might break the vision before her.
Then Anne ran to her.
Mrs. Doyle caught her with both arms, holding her not delicately but with the fierce containment of relief too great to be shown prettily. One arm locked round her shoulders, the other pressed the girl’s head against her collarbone.
“Well,” Mrs. Doyle said, her voice thickened but resolute, “you have taken your time coming home.” Anne laughed into the wool of her shoulder and clung harder.
Lydia came next, and Mrs. Doyle drew her in without surrendering the first embrace. Clara pressed close, and the older woman widened her hold to gather all of them against her as if they had not been gone at all, only delayed. They folded into her like daughters returned.
Archer looked aside. The force of it struck too close. Grantham did not look away. He stood and watched with a concentration that suggested he was taking stock of something more than safety.
Mrs. Doyle drew back only enough to inspect each face in turn, her hands cupping their faces, her gaze moving with swift, unsparing thoroughness from one girl to the next as if she meant to account for every bruise, every tremor, every sign of damage the night had dared lay upon them.
“You are half frozen,” she said. “But alive.”
“We are perfectly serviceable,” Anne assured her, attempting a brightness that did not quite conceal the quiver underneath it.
Mrs. Doyle gave a disdainful sniff. “Serviceable is not the standard I raised you to.”
For one fleeting instant, the old house rhythm reasserted itself so perfectly that Anne nearly laughed. It came out a little broken at the edges, but it was laughter all the same.
Lydia’s composure gave way first. Not wholly, not in any manner that would have satisfied a spectator hungry for tears, but in the small and telling slackening of her mouth, the sudden brightness in her eyes, the visible effort it cost her to hold her shoulders square.
“We did not yield a single name, Mrs. Doyle. Not one.”
Mrs. Doyle’s chin lifted with fierce pride. “I never thought you would.”
Clara, still pressed close enough that their sleeves touched, lowered her voice. “They struck Anne.”
Mrs. Doyle’s eyes darkened at once. The warmth that had flooded them a moment earlier did not vanish, but it hardened around the edges.
“It will fade,” Anne said quickly, with that reckless little spark she always reached for when pain came too nearby. “And I injured them badly in spirit, which is far harder to cure.”
Mrs. Doyle looked at her for a long moment, saying nothing.
Then she drew her close again and laid a hand over the back of her head with a tenderness so possessive it felt almost fierce.
“You foolish girl,” she murmured, and the rebuke came wrapped so tightly around relief that it scarcely sounded like reproach at all.
“Do you imagine I care whether it fades. It ought never to have been there.”
Anne’s face changed then. Some last thin brace of defiance slipped, and for an instant she looked heartbreakingly young. Her cheek pressed more heavily into the older woman’s shoulder. “We were careful,” she said, and for all her effort the words came small. “We remembered what we were taught.”
“I know you did.”
Mrs. Doyle’s hand moved once, slowly, over her hair.
Lydia turned her face away, as though the sight of that offered comfort had become more than she could bear with dignity intact.
Clara had gone still indeed, her mouth trembling despite her efforts.
Mrs. Doyle saw all of it. She saw too much ever to miss what mattered.
“And you,” she said, reaching out to Lydia with her free hand. “Look at me.”
Lydia obeyed. There was no resisting that tone.
“You are upright,” Mrs. Doyle said. “Your mind is your own. Your tongue is still impertinent, which is a sign of grace in this house. So, you may stop holding yourself together as if I had asked it of you for one moment longer.”
At that, Lydia gave a soft, unsteady breath that had too much in it to be called a laugh and too little control to be mistaken for one. Mrs. Doyle caught her by the wrist and drew her in as well, gathering her without ceremony into the circle of her arm.
Clara, seeing herself about to be left at the edge of the embrace by nothing more sinister than lack of space, made the smallest movement backward. Mrs. Doyle fixed her with a look that stopped her where she stood.
“And where precisely do you think you are going?”
The girl blinked. “I did not wish to crowd anyone.”
“You may crowd this threshold to splinters before I object.”
That was enough. The poor child folded in at once, and Mrs. Doyle made room for her with the instinctive certainty of a woman who had spent years enlarging small spaces until grief and hunger and fright could all be made to fit inside them.
For a moment the four of them stood locked together beneath the open door, the fog at their backs, the house’s warm light falling over bent heads and shaking shoulders.
No one in the hall spoke.
The atmosphere had altered. It was no longer the stretched, fearful hush of waiting, but the full and trembling release that comes when dread has finally spent itself and relief is almost too great to be borne with composure.
Mrs. Doyle drew back a little at last and began her inspection in earnest. She tipped Anne’s chin toward the lamplight and frowned at the bruise darkening there.
“That one will need arnica,” she said. “And a cold compress first, though not so cold as to make you shriek and disgrace us all.”
“I never shriek,” Anne said automatically.
“You do, in fact”
A weak laugh escaped Clara. Lydia pressed her lips together, but failed to suppress her own smile.
Mrs. Doyle moved on to Lydia, turning her face gently from one side to the other. “No swelling,” she murmured. “Thank heaven for small mercies. Have they touched your ribs? Your arms? Your back?”
Lydia hesitated.
Mrs. Doyle’s eyes narrowed. “That is not a question to be improved by modesty.”
“My shoulder only,” Lydia admitted. “One of them was impatient.”
Mrs. Doyle’s mouth flattened into a line that suggested a private reckoning had just been added to some inner ledger. “And you,” she said to Clara, whose courage appeared to diminish in direct proportion to the warmth around her. “Speak plainly.”
“They frightened me more than they hurt me.”
Mrs. Doyle’s expression changed then, softening in a way all the more powerful for being so rare. “There is no shame in that,” she said. “Fear is not disgraceful. It is simply tiresome, and we shall bully it out of you by degrees.”
That finally broke something open among them. Anne laughed first, Lydia after her, and Clara gave a little sound that wavered dangerously close to a sob before it, too, turned into laughter. It came in patches, frayed and uneven, but it was life returning to itself.