Chapter 22 #2
The lie fell away with a surprising ease. She had spent a month guarding it with her life, terrified of discovery, and now, shedding it felt like dropping a heavy, suffocating coat.
Silas tilted his head, his gaze sweeping over her stained gray dress and her tangled hair. "Could have fooled me. You look like the help; you talk like the help. And the lady said you were just a stray cat trying to climb into a warm bed."
"The lady lied to you about everything else," Thelma said, keeping her tone perfectly level. "Why would you believe her about me?"
Silas pushed off the doorframe, taking two slow steps into the room. The sheer physical bulk of him was intimidating, blocking out the light from the corridor, but Thelma forced herself not to shrink back against the wall.
"Alright," Silas said softly. "I'll play your game. If you aren't a nurse, who are you?"
"My name is Thelma Preston," she said.
If I give them his name, I pull him into this. I make him a target. The thought clawed at her conscience, a desperate, warning voice.
Her father had taken Liliana from her. He had sent the baby away into the cold, convinced he was saving Thelma’s future by destroying her present. But he was still her father. He was an old man sitting in a quiet house in Somerset, unaware of the violence he had set in motion.
But if I don't give them a name, they have no reason to keep us alive.
"Preston," Silas repeated, testing the weight of the syllables on his tongue. "Doesn't mean anything to me."
"It means something in Somerset," Thelma lied, injecting a cold, aristocratic arrogance into her voice that she had spent weeks observing in the dowager duchess.
"My father is Albert Preston. He is a gentleman, a landowner, and a magistrate.
We reside near Shepton Mallet. If you want a return on your labor, he is the man who can pay you. "
Silas stared at her, his jaw working as he calculated the risk. "A magistrate. You expect me to send a ransom demand to a magistrate?"
"I expect you to do what you must to get paid," Thelma said, lifting her chin.
"My father cares very much for his reputation.
He will not want it known that his daughter was dragged across the country by hired thugs.
He will pay you to return us quietly, and he will not involve the constabulary if you make that a condition of the exchange. "
"And if he decides he'd rather see us hang?"
"Then you are no worse off than you are right now," Thelma countered, her voice hardening. "Because Daphne Vane is going to see you hang anyway. You know too much about what she did to the Duke of Langley's household."
The mention of the duke’s name caused a visible shift in Silas’s posture. His eyes darted toward the window, then back to her face. He didn't say anything else. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Thelma let out a long, trembling breath, her shoulders collapsing inward as the adrenaline bled out of her system. She reached out and pulled Liliana into her lap, burying her face in the child’s neck.
I am sorry, Father. I am so sorry.
But the dice were thrown.
The afternoon stretched on in a tense, terrible silence.
Thelma fed Liliana the rest of the cheese and drank the water, her mind racing through the variables of her own gamble.
Somerset was days away by fast rider. Even if they sent a letter today, it would be a week before her father received it, and another week before he could arrange payment and travel north.
Fourteen days in this freezing cell. Could Liliana survive it?
Late in the afternoon, the voices drifted up through the chimney breast again.
Thelma was immediately on her hands and knees, pressing her ear to the cold stone.
"I wrote down what she said," Cobb was saying, his wheeze loud in the flue. "Albert Preston. Shepton Mallet. It's a risk, Silas. If the man has the law in his pocket, he might just send the dragoons instead of the coin."
"We tell him to send the money to the drop at the old tollhouse," Silas replied. "We don't show our faces. If he brings the law, we walk away, and the girl stays in the room until they rot. He'll pay. Gentry folk always pay to keep their dirty laundry out of the papers."
There was the sound of paper crinkling, the scratch of a heavy nib against parchment.
"What about the other one?" Cobb asked.
Thelma frowned, pressing harder against the stone. The other one?
"I'm writing it now," Silas said, his voice carrying a grim, satisfied weight. "The magistrate might pay for his daughter, but the Duke of Langley has vaults full of gold. And from what I saw when we took her, the duke is going to be very interested to know what the lady did to his household."
Thelma’s breath hitched in her throat.
"You're going to ransom them back to the duke?" Cobb asked, sounding nervous. "You want to demand money from a man who owns half of Yorkshire?"
"I'm not demanding anything from him," Silas said.
"I'm offering him information. I'm going to tell His Grace exactly who hired us to empty out his nursery, and exactly where the merchandise is currently sitting.
I'm going to tell him that if he wants the lady's mess cleaned up, and if he wants the girl and the baby back breathing, he can send five hundred pounds to the York coaching inn under a blind name. "
"And if he doesn't care?"
"A duke doesn't let someone steal from his own house without doing something about it," Silas scoffed. "Even if he hates the girl, his pride won't let another family make a fool out of him. He'll pay."
Thelma slowly pulled away from the hearth, her back sliding down the rough granite wall until she hit the floorboards.
Roman.
They were writing to Roman.
The realization washed over her in a violent, crashing wave of emotion. He was going to know. The letter would arrive at Langley Hall, and he would read it. He would know that she hadn't just taken the money and run. He would know that she hadn't abandoned the estate willingly.
He will know Lady Daphne lied.
She brought her hands up to cover her mouth, a harsh, ragged sob tearing its way out of her throat.
For twenty-four hours, the only thing she had been able to see was the look of absolute, glacial disgust on his face when he stood in the nursery door and told her to leave.
She had believed she would die in this stone house, and that Roman Berengar would spend the rest of his life thinking she was a monster who used her own child for coin.
But Silas was writing a letter. Silas, in his brutal, calculating greed, was about to tear Lady Daphne Vane’s perfect, sterile narrative entirely to shreds.
Thelma looked across the dim room at Liliana. The baby had fallen asleep on the cot, her small hands curled into fists near her face, the yellow wool blanket rising and falling with her steady breaths.
She crawled over to the cot and sat on the floor beside it, resting her head against the wooden frame.
Lady Daphne had planned everything with flawless, aristocratic precision.
She had uncovered Thelma’s secret, she had manipulated Roman’s pride, and she had arranged for the inconvenience to vanish into the mist of the high moors.
It was the kind of plan that worked perfectly in the drawing rooms of London, where people obeyed the rules of their station, and honor dictated silence.
But Lady Daphne had forgotten one crucial detail.
She had outsourced her cruelty to men who did not care about the rules of the drawing room. She had relied on the loyalty of criminals, and she had refused to pay them.
Thelma reached out, her fingers gently stroking the soft, dark hair back from Liliana’s forehead. The stone room was freezing, the shadows lengthening into pitch-black as the evening closed in, but for the first time in two days, the suffocating terror in her chest began to recede.
Money leaves a trail, Thelma thought, staring at the heavy iron door.
Lady Daphne wanted them to disappear into nothing. But Silas wanted five hundred pounds. And to get it, Silas had to reach into the light.
He will come, the thought whispered through her mind, reckless and fierce and completely unearned. When he reads that letter, he will come.
She pulled her knees to her chest, leaning her head back against the cold stone wall, and prepared to wait.Chapter 23
Roman braced both hands against the edge of the leather blotter, staring down at the topography of the eastern counties until the black ink lines of the roads blurred into meaningless gray smudges.
Three days.
It had been seventy-two hours since the heavy oak doors of Langley Hall had closed behind Thelma Preston. Seventy-two hours of a silence so absolute, so suffocating, that Roman felt as though he were breathing underwater.
He had stripped the illusion away. He had learned the truth of her name, the truth of her sister’s death, the truth of the frantic, desperate love that had driven her to infiltrate his house.
He had realized his mistake exactly one hour after he had watched the brougham roll away into the morning mist. He had realized it the moment Orson had forced him to look at the parish records, the moment the cold, hard logic of Daphne Vane’s lies had fractured under the weight of reality.
And for three days, they had found absolutely nothing.
"The Harworth properties extend past the third turnpike," Orson said. He was standing by the tall windows, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his cravat loosened and his waistcoat unbuttoned.
He looked as haggard as Roman felt, the usual effortless charm completely stripped from his features. "I sent riders to every tollhouse between here and the eastern border. Two keepers remember a plain green brougham passing through on the first morning. But it never reached the Harworth estate."
Roman closed his eyes, his fingers curling into the edges of a parchment map until the thick paper crumpled.
Where are you?