Chapter Thirteen
Collins entered The Black Horse, looking every bit a gentleman and very little like a butcher. He wore a pair of beige trousers with a white shirt and cravat, a navy-blue waistcoat and matching tailcoat. He removed his top hat when he greeted Nate and sat beside him.
“I took the liberty of ordering you an ale,” Nate said.
Collins glanced down at the glass of ale and thanked Nate before taking a thirsty sip.
“Long day?” Nate asked.
“Butchering is hard work,” Collins said. “It requires a lot of physical strength. And a strong stomach as well.”
“More difficult than teaching, I imagine.” Nate picked up his ale and eyed Collins as he sipped it.
Collins kept a straight face, revealing nothing.
“I just returned from a trip to Harrogate,” Nate said casually.
Collins’s cheeks paled. He picked up his ale, took another sip, and said, “What is it you wanted to see me about, Mr. Squires?”
“About a school called St. Joseph’s, where you were once a teacher.”
“So you’ve been investigating me, have you?” He lowered his mug. “On what grounds, may I ask?”
“Because you and Mrs. Groby have a history together—a long history.”
Collins shifted in his seat. “You have no proof of that.”
“The young woman involved in the scandal that got you dismissed from your position at St. Joseph’s was Mrs. Groby, wasn’t it?
” Nate saw Collins’s jaw tighten, and he knew he’d stumbled upon the truth.
“You met her in town where her father would come to sell his meat and buy cattle on market days, and the two of you fell in love. But her father disapproved of you. Although I can’t think why.
You are a gentleman and well-educated. Why would a butcher not think you good enough for his daughter? ”
Collins made a face and when he answered, his voice was bitter. “For those exact reasons, you stated. I was educated, and he was not. He didn’t want anyone better than himself for his daughter. He treated her like she was one of his cows. I wanted to take her away from all that.”
“But then one of your students caught you together in a compromising situation and reported you to the headmaster. You lost your job.” Nate paused. “So how is it that both of you ended up in Westmorland with her married to Groby?”
Collins ruffled his blond hair and sighed.
“I didn’t abandon her if that’s what you think.
We were going to run away together, but her father discovered our secret and kept her under lock and key.
He watched her every move. I had the idea of paying him off.
But of course, there was the problem of money.
I didn’t have enough, so I was forced to return home to Kent to borrow some from my father. ”
“Kent? You said you were from York.”
Collins shrugged. “As you can see, I had things in my past that I wished to stay hidden.”
“Fair enough. And did your father give you the money?”
He chuckled sadly. “Of course not. I don’t know why I thought he would. He’s always been a bastard. But I was desperate.”
Nate nodded. He could relate. He knew what it was like to have a father who was constantly disappointed and refused to trust you. It was hurtful, and he’d made the same mistake Collins had made countless times—thinking things would change. They never did.
“He’d received a letter from the headmaster, detailing my dismissal—as though I was a rusticated schoolboy and not a grown adult and schoolmaster.
It was humiliating. He was furious to learn that I had been dismissed, especially under the circumstances.
As far as my father was concerned, I’d disgraced the family name and dragged everyone down into the lowest gutter, and he wanted nothing more to do with me.
He threw me out and cut me off without a penny. ”
Nate could not help but feel some sympathy for the man. He knew all too well his pain. But he reminded himself, Collins could be a killer, and if so, he was likely a liar as well.
“Did the headmaster tell your father about the child?” Nate asked.
Collins paled.
“Mrs. Groby’s boy is your son, isn’t he?”
“How did you find out?” Collins said in a whisper.
“I guessed. It wasn’t difficult. I saw the way you looked at him.”
Collins ran a hand over his face. “None of this means that I killed Groby.”
“Agreed, but you have to admit it doesn’t look good. So why don’t you tell me how she ended up married to Groby instead of you?”
“Her father found out that she was with child, and near beat the babe out of her.” He swallowed as if the thought choked him. “Then he forced her to marry Groby. Sold her to him like one of his cattle.”
“All of this happened while you were in Kent, I presume,” Nate said, and Collins nodded.
“By the time I returned to Yorkshire, she was gone. He refused to tell me where she was. I inquired—begged—the surrounding farmers to tell me what they knew, but they all refused. I was an outsider—an interloper—and moreover, they were afraid of Lockwood.”
“So what did you do?” Nate asked. “How did you find her?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
Nate remained silent, watching the man. Whatever had happened had obviously taken an enormous toll on him.
He’d paid a heavy price to find the woman he loved and his child, and it had been humiliating.
That much, Nate could tell from the pained look on the man’s face.
Nate felt a lump in his stomach. He, too, was having to pay a price and act the fool to stay in his son’s life.
And that would continue for as long as Helen desired. He was at her mercy.
“Lockwood said if I worked on his farm for a year, he’d tell me where she’d gone.
He said he’d turn me from ‘a posh know-it-all’ into a real man—a farmer who worked the land and a butcher who brought home his own supper.
So that’s what I did.” He hung his head.
“But one year turned into two and then three. He kept saying I wasn’t ready. ”
“Good God!” Nate said.
“Then one day, his heart gave out, and he keeled right over in the field. I thought I would never find Alice, then, but a few days later, she arrived at the farm with Groby and my son, and another babe in her arms. I could hardly believe it when I saw her. All that time, Lockwood had been lying to me. Alice was already married.”
“But you weren’t prepared to lose her again, were you?”
He shook his head. “I’d follow her to the ends of the earth if I had to. Even if she didn’t love me anymore. I wanted to be close to her and to my son. But as it turns out, she did still care for me. Groby was good to her, but she didn’t love him.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Not in so many words, but I knew. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me.”
“Still, she was married to him, so that should have been the end of it.”
“It should have, but it wasn’t. I let about a week go by after she departed the farm before I followed her to Westmorland.
Once I got there, we started meeting in secret.
She was already taking reading lessons with Otis, so we’d meet briefly after her lessons.
She was earnest about her reading. She said she didn’t want to be like her father.
She wanted to learn how to read so she could teach our son.
I think she wanted to be on more of an equal footing with me.
I told her I’d teach her, but she refused.
She said it would make people even more suspicious if she suddenly came to me for reading lessons.
Otis was a poet. People respected that, so it made sense for him to teach her.
No one knew I was a former schoolmaster. To them, I was just a farmer.”
“And you never became jealous of Otis? He was a charming young man, and he was spending far more time with her than you were.”
“I had no reason to be jealous of Otis. Alice and I had a strong bond. We shared a child. And Otis was doing me a favor. If not for him, we would not have had the opportunity to see each other at all. His lessons gave us a chance to meet thrice weekly.”
Nate got the distinct feeling that Collins wasn’t being entirely truthful. “I can’t understand why Groby would let his wife go off with a handsome young Don Juan like Otis. Surely, people talked,” he baited Collins.
Collins shrugged. “They did. But Alice is a strong woman. She was raised by a tyrant and survived. Town gossips weren’t going to bother her.
But the gossip did bother Groby. He ordered her to end her reading lessons, but she refused.
The gossip grew worse. And then came the night at The Black Horse when Rupert taunted Groby about being a cuckold.
His patience must have reached its limit, and so he killed Otis. ”
“You really believe that?”
“I do,” Collins said.
Nate recalled his conversation with Groby when he’d visited him in jail.
The man had told him that he’d been suspicious of Collins, not Otis.
He’d had his wife followed and discovered she’d been meeting Collins in secret, which Collins had just confirmed.
Why, then, would Groby kill Otis? It made no sense at all.
It was far more likely that Collins had grown jealous of Otis and killed him.
A man who spent three years laboring—for a butcher!—so he could find out where the love of his life had disappeared to would not take kindly to losing her heart a second time. And if anyone could steal a woman’s heart, it was that charming charlatan, George Otis.
*
Bridget attempted to read while she waited impatiently for Nate to return.
She sat with Bijou by the drawing-room fire, foregoing the library where Rupert and Charlie worked late into the night.
Most of the other guests had retired to bed, but Bridget suspected that Lady Luxton was waiting for Rupert to make a late-night visit to her room.
She was doing everything in her power to make Nate jealous, but the only real power she had over him now was her son.