Chapter 5
Sitka; One Day Later
She was a fool for coming.
Rosalind stared at the sound, the waves wild and gray, frothed with tips of white from the raging ocean.
She couldn’t see the ocean from where she sat on the log just inside the edge of the trees where she usually met Yuri.
The mountains shielded the small cove in this part of the sound from any views of the open water, but the ocean would have to be roaring and angry to push such large waves into the sound.
In the summer, seals would often gather here, and she sometimes came early to watch them play.
But there had been fewer and fewer seals of late.
Her family’s company, the Alaska Commercial Company, hunted them on islands far to the north of Sitka, and the number of seals they were allowed to legally harvest each summer was rather controversial.
Many sailors felt as though too many seals were being hunted and were lobbying Washington, DC, to have the quotas reduced.
A gust of wind whipped down the mountain to her west, driving rain into her face and causing her to shiver, even beneath her fur coat.
The mountains surrounding her were covered with snow that started about a third of the way up, but other than the week of Christmas, when it had snowed three times, most of the winter had brought icy rain to the valleys and waterfront that quickly turned to snow at higher elevations.
She probably shouldn’t have come. Not given the rain and wind. Not given the fact that there was no way for her to be remotely comfortable as she sat atop the damp wood.
Not given the fact that Yuri would not be coming to meet her, seeing how he was over a thousand miles away.
Fifteen hundred, to be exact.
Though she wasn’t going to admit to looking it up.
And that just made her an even bigger fool for coming to a meeting place where she had nothing to think about other than the fact she was sitting in the rain missing someone she wasn’t supposed to be missing.
She’d taken the sling off yesterday, a full week earlier than the doctor had instructed, and she wasn’t going to think about how badly her wrist ached, nor was she going to put that dratted sling back on. She wanted to move about freely.
When she looked at how Millicent and Jane and Freya moved about town, the liberties her father allowed her seemed ridiculously small.
But if she wanted even that much freedom, she couldn’t bear any proof of his outbursts. She’d learned that after her mother died, when her father had suffered his first fit of violence toward her.
A bruised cheek, a sprained wrist, a turned ankle, or anything else another person might notice would confine her to the house for weeks at a time, and sometimes even to her room, if her father thought the servants might gossip.
So yesterday she’d taken off her sling, simply to prove to her father that she could visit Millicent today.
And she had. It had been a pleasant visit, filled with the goings-on about town.
People were still talking about the Amos-Wetherby wedding, and apparently Mikhail Amos had been seen traipsing up Castle Hill holding his new wife’s hand.
Not allowing his wife to grip his forearm as he escorted her up the hill like a gentleman, mind you.
And not even with one palm clasped firmly in the other.
No, their fingers had been laced together in public, no less.
Mrs. Traverton had seen it herself and was scandalized.
Millie had claimed Mikhail Amos’s actions were improper, but something about the way he’d held Bryony’s hand in public made Rosalind’s heart hurt.
She wanted to marry a man who would lace his fingers with hers and not care who saw it or what they said.
Someone who would lean down and swipe a strand of hair away from her eyes when the wind was blowing.
Someone who would look at her with tenderness and not mind waiting if it took her longer than expected to ready herself for church.
Something told her that the man her father would eventually marry her off to would do none of those things.
He probably wouldn’t even notice if she were alive.
He’d have multiple houses, and he’d stuff her in one of them and then go about his business as usual—which would probably include visiting his mistress on a regular basis.
Or maybe he’d have more than one mistress.
Her father had never been like that, not while her mother was alive, but after she died . . .
Rosalind shifted on the wet log. She wasn’t sure how to describe what had changed in her father after her mother’s death. She only knew that he was no longer the man she’d grown up with as a girl.
Another gust of wind tore over the water, rattling the tree branches above her and sending a fresh spray of rain across her face.
She should leave. This was foolish. The damp was seeping into her bones, and she didn’t want to spend another week confined to the house if she came home with a cough.
She wasn’t even sure why she’d come in the first place.
The simple explanation was that she came on this little excursion every month when she visited Millicent.
Millicent didn’t know where she went or why, only that she left.
It took a good thirty-five minutes to walk to this abandoned little cove, and another thirty-five minutes to walk back, and that gave her about fifteen minutes each month to exchange letters with Yuri.
If she suddenly stopped visiting Millicent while Yuri was out of town, someone might be able to piece together whom she was meeting, and she couldn’t afford to have rumors about her and Yuri floating around.
She tried to tell herself that was the reason she was sitting there, getting wetter and wetter while the letters she typically exchanged with Yuri every month weighed heavily in her pocket.
That everything about their monthly meetings was practical and transactional.
That Yuri Amos was nothing more than a means to an end.
Come to San Francisco. She could still recall the sound of his voice, still feel the snowflakes landing on her cheeks and see the way the warm light from the warehouse window had almost illuminated Yuri’s face, but not quite.
She’d wanted to say yes. For a fraction of a second, that had been all she could think about.
But then she remembered the letters and the money and how she couldn’t possibly leave Sitka without also leaving the money her mother had left her. Leaving meant the charities that she donated to every month would suddenly stop receiving her donations, and some of them were quite generous.
Her mother’s solicitor had left her a small inheritance in a separate investment trust until Rosalind turned eighteen.
Her father had always dismissed it as trivial—a small lady’s fund earning interest—so he’d never bothered to put his name on it.
But unfortunately the account was at the same bank in Washington, DC, where her father, her uncle, and the Alaska Commercial Company held all their other accounts.
They moved large amounts of money through the bank every year, and she had no doubt that if her father really wanted to get access to her money, he could.
The key was allowing him to believe the money in her trust was too trivial to matter.
Her solicitor reported to her directly, meaning that as long as she limited her correspondence with him so it wasn’t frequent enough to be alarming, her father would leave her and her money alone.
She’d thought of trying to change banks and solicitors several times, but that would be hard to do without traveling back to Washington, DC, and she hadn’t had an occasion to go—at least not one that wouldn’t alarm her father.
Even if she did change banks, her father might still find a way to get his hands on her money.
Her current solicitor, Mr. Holloway, had served her mother faithfully.
He probably feared her father, but he didn’t go out of his way to curry her father’s favor.
That made him more reliable than most men in Washington, DC—solicitors, bankers, and politicians alike.
But if she up and disappeared from Sitka?
The first way her father would try to track her would be through her money.
The bank Mr. Holloway worked for would likely force him to turn over all of her Finnancial information within hours.
Even if her father couldn’t put his name on her account—and she wouldn’t put it past him to bribe the bank to do exactly that—he’d still be able to see what city and bank Mr. Holloway sent her money to, and she’d have little choice other than to ask her solicitor to send money.
What else would she use to pay for an apartment and food?
Having her father track her down would be so much worse than staying in Sitka, doing what she was already doing and dreaming that one day a man with kind brown eyes, a constant smile on his lips, and a thatch of hair that was always falling over his brow might—
A rustling sounded in the woods behind her.
Every muscle in her body went stiff.
It was a ridiculous reaction. An animal was probably making noise and—
“Rosalind?”
She turned to find Bryony moving through the woods, then stood.
What was her friend doing here? Her heart thudded against her ribs.
“Are you all right?” Bryony rushed forward, then clasped her in a hug, holding her tight against her chest, wayward strands of her red hair tangling in the fur of Rosalind’s coat. “Yuri was so worried.”
“Yuri?” Rosalind swallowed, trying to understand just what Bryony’s presence here meant. “Did he tell you about our meeting? I told him not to say anything.”
Bryony gripped her shoulders and pushed her back just far enough to look into her eyes. “I think he’d have been quite content to keep everything a secret if you had met him last week as planned. He was quite worried when you didn’t come.”
She pressed her eyes shut. Of course, he’d have been worried. He was too kind to shrug off a missed meeting. That was why she’d chosen him to send and receive letters for her in the first place.
That, and he was her father’s enemy, meaning there would never be any occasion for Yuri to divulge to her father what she was doing with her inheritance.
“I wanted to meet him, but I hurt my wrist, and the doctor came to call when our meeting was set. I had no way to let him know.”
Bryony stepped back. “You hurt your wrist? How?”
“Oh, it’s nothing to fret over. It’s almost better, see?” She pulled off her mitten and extended her left arm, twisting her wrist to show her friend. The trouble was, twisting it sent a fresh stab of pain through her arm, and she sucked in a breath.
Bryony’s brows pinched as she looked at the wrist that was still a bit bruised and discolored. “It doesn’t seem all that healed.”
“It’s healed enough to be out of a sling.”
More questions filled Bryony’s eyes, but she didn’t voice them.
Bryony had stayed with her for a few days after returning from the expedition where she’d met Mikhail last November.
Her friend had pieced together just how quick her father was to use his fists when he was angry, but Rosalind wasn’t going to admit anything, not aloud, at least.
Another gust of wind tore across the water, whipping a strand of Bryony’s coppery-red hair across her face. She shoved it away, then met Rosalind’s eyes. “Come back to the Amoses’ with me.”
“What?” Rosalind blinked. Where had that question come from? “I can’t. Father will be furious.”
“You can,” Bryony insisted. “We’ll have you on a ship away from here in a day or two, and you’ll never have to face your father again. You can go somewhere and disappear and—”
“Did Yuri put you up to this? It will never work.” She was already shaking her head. “He’ll be able to track me.”
“Not if we’re careful.”
Again, she shook her head. She wanted to leave, yes, but she couldn’t abandon her inheritance and leave the charities she supported with nothing. If she was going to leave, she needed to find a way to do so while still protecting her money, and at the moment, that seemed utterly impossible.
“Did Yuri explain what usually happens?” Rosalind pulled the letters from her pocket. “I need you to mail these for me. Hopefully it won’t look suspicious when you go to the post office, since the return address shows Yuri’s name.”
“I doubt it.” Bryony took the letters and fanned them out, briefly studying the addresses before stacking them up and sliding them into her satchel.
“Yuri says you give him letters that get mailed to the same places every month. Whoever sees them probably assumes he left them to be mailed in his absence, and that I’m doing it as his sister-in-law. ”
“Yes, you’re right, of course.” She blew out a breath, trying to calm the racing in her heart. “That doesn’t seem very suspicious now that I think about it.”
Bryony pulled another stack of letters out of her satchel and extended them. “Yuri said these are for you.”
“Thank you.” She took them, then stilled. One of them was open.
In the three years they’d been doing this, Yuri had never once opened one of her letters. That had been part of the original agreement when she’d first gone to him for help. What had caused him to—
“It was me,” Bryony blurted.
“What?” Rosalind jerked her gaze back up.
“I opened it on accident. It was in a big stack of letters that I was going through, and I’m afraid I opened it and started reading before I realized it was addressed to Yuri.
But even though the envelope was addressed to Yuri, the letter itself was addressed to you. You can see why I had questions.”
Coldness swept through her. “Does anyone other than you and Yuri know about the letters?”
Bryony nodded. “The whole family knows.”
“The whole family?” She could hear the panic creeping into her voice, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
“Please don’t be upset.” Bryony reached out and settled a hand on her arm. “They’re just donation letters. Sending money to these charities is nothing to be ashamed of.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she shoved the letters into her pocket and backed away. “No one except for Yuri is supposed to know.”
But if the rest of the Amoses had been told about the letters, how many people now knew? Twelve? Thirteen? Maybe even fourteen?
“Rosalind? It’s all right.” Bryony took another step forward. “None of us are going to tell your father.”
“No, it’s not all right.” Nothing about the situation was even close to right.
“Rosalind, please. Let’s sit back down on the log. We need to figure out how to get you away from your father. I know he was the one who hurt your wrist. You won’t be able to convince me otherwise.”
She just shook her head again, then took another step back. “No. No, I don’t want to sit and talk to you. I don’t want to do any of this.”
Then she turned and ran.