Chapter Twelve
Cats.
Abigail wanted her cats.
Because of course she did.
And because he was helplessly, hopelessly, embarrassingly smitten with a wife who was already counting down the days to when she could leave him, Stephen found himself on his way to procure said cats, leaving Summerwind House before dawn so that he might return by dusk.
Three years without contact.
Three cats to procure.
Three weeks to make his own wife fall in love with him.
A fool’s errand, most likely, but what other choice did he have?
His anger toward Abigail had abandoned him the instant he kissed her in the coach.
Like sand through his fingers, the harder he’d tried to hold onto it the faster it had escaped.
And he’d known then, even though he hadn’t admitted it to himself until the next morning, that he couldn’t force her to be his wife any more than he could force the wind to change direction.
Abigail was even more beautiful and brilliant now than she had been when he’d met her, and it would be nothing short of a sin to do anything that would stifle that beautiful brilliance.
Did her inability to see things his way drive him mad?
Absolutely.
Was he tempted to lock her away at Summerwind House and keep her there forever?
Yes.
Would he do it?
No.
No, damn it all, as many times as he’d fantasized about doing precisely that over the past twelve months, he wouldn’t.
He couldn’t. Because some things . . . some people .
. . were meant to be more than the lives they’d been born into.
And Abigail was one of them. The daughter of a duke with her entire world mapped out for her before the duchess snatched her away in the dead of the night and changed not just her daughter’s path, but his as well.
There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that had Abigail been raised in England, they’d be married.
Maybe they’d even have some semblance of happiness.
But Abigail was never meant to be the Countess of Lancaster.
To live a life that most women dreamed of would mean settling for a life far below the expectations of what she could achieve on her own.
And to be married to a woman whose mind and heart were always outside the household would be a slow spiral into the exact kind of cold, isolated marriage he’d grown up loathing.
He understood that.
He knew that.
In his bones, he knew.
But a knife thrust into his belly would have been less painful than accepting that Abigail was better off without him. And even though he understood it was likely a fruitless endeavor to convince her to stay beyond the next twenty days, he had to try.
What other choice did he have?
To simply give up after a year of searching, hating, hoping?
It wasn’t in his nature.
A cold, icy wind slapped his face when he departed his coach, adding insult to injury as he walked up to Dr. Chadwick’s front door and stuck the key she’d given him into the rim lock.
She had wanted to come with him, had all but insisted, but he’d stayed firm that she remain at Summerwind House.
How hard could it be to retrieve three cats?
She’d told him where her special carriers were.
Coax a feline into each one, close the doors, and be on his merry way.
Easy enough. If it all went plan, he’d be back before dinner.
Except he couldn’t seem to unlock the front door.
“What the devil,” he cursed, rattling the key.
“Ye aren’t going to get in that way,” a young, feminine voice called out from behind him.
Turning, Stephen found that he had been snuck up on by a tall, thin girl dressed in boy’s clothing with reddish brown curls sticking out from under the floppy brim of an oversized hat and green eyes that were glaring up at him in suspicion.
“Good morning. Who are you?” he inquired politely.
“Who the ’ell are ye?” she demanded with a great deal less cordiality, and Stephen blinked when she pointed a small, but nevertheless quite sharp, blade in his direction. “Dr. Chadwick isn’t in today, but ye don’t look like a patient.”
“What does a patient ordinarily look like?”
“Coughin’ or bleedin’.” Waving the blade in the air, she advanced a step. “Keep trying to pick that lock, and I can make it so you’re bleedin’ if ye want, but there won’t be a doctor in to stitch ye up.”
“I’m not picking anything. I have a key. See?” He held up the useless brass instrument for his would-be assailant’s visual inspection. “Given to me by Dr. Chadwick, except it doesn’t appear to be working.”
“Give me that.” Snatching the key from his hand, the girl clamped her teeth around the roughly hewn wooden hilt of her weapon in order to reach into the pocket of her coat and pull out a key that, at least to Stephen’s eye, appeared identical to the one she’d just taken from him. “Hrrmpph ye giffff thisss?”
“Would you like me to hold your knife?” he asked, extending his hand. “I can’t hear you clearly.”
Her glare intensifying, she threw his key at him and spat the knife back into her palm. “I said, where did ye get that?”
“From Dr. Chadwick, as I stated. May I ask where you procured your key? I would presume there are finer establishments to rob than a doctor’s office.”
She stomped her foot. “I’m not here to steal nothin’!”
“Just general threats and idle stabbings, then.”
“You’re him, aren’t ye?”
“Him who?”
“The fancy fellow that’s married to Dr. Chadwick.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “While I’ll admit I’ve never heard myself described as fancy before, I am, indeed, Dr. Chadwick’s husband. Which is why I am here, at my wife’s office, with my wife’s key.”
The girl crossed her arms. “Where is she?”
“I am not answering any more questions until you tell me who you are and what you are doing here. You may try to stab me if you’d like,” he said mildly. “But I’d advise against it.”
“Oh yeah? Why is that?” she challenged with a jerk of her pointy chin.
“Do you see that large carriage in the street behind you?”
“What of it?”
“That happens to be my carriage, and sitting right there is my driver. In another life, he was a boxer. Quick on his feet. Fast with his fists. I don’t think he’d take kindly to the man who pays his salary being gutted on the pavement like a fish.”
The knife dropped a few inches. “My name’s Jack.”
“Jack,” he said dubiously.
“That’s right. Ye got a problem with it?”
“Not at all. Matter of fact, it suits you. All right, Jack. Dr. Chadwick sent me here to retrieve her cats. Now it’s your turn.”
“I’m here to feed the cats. Supposed to get a whole crown for it, too.”
Stephen scratched the nape of his neck. When Abigail had asked him to fetch her feline friends, he did not recall her saying anything about them being fed by someone else.
Surely he would have remembered mention of a murderous girl dressed as a boy with a chip on her shoulder the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“Who’s paying you?” he asked.
“None of yer bloody business. Now git out of my way so I can do my work and collect my blunt.”
He stepped aside when Jack shoved past him, and watched with some interest as she stuck her key in the lock and twisted it hard to the left while giving the bottom of a door a kick with her right foot.
“So that’s how you do it,” he said when the door sprang open and he followed her inside before she could slam the door in his face.
Unwinding his scarf from his neck, he absently draped it on the back of a chair as out of the corner of his gaze he caught a glimpse of a sleek gray tail and a flash of gold eyes when a cat darted up the stairs.
The other two were nowhere to be seen, nor did they make an appearance when Jack opened a glass jar and dumped a foul-looking mixture of chopped up fish into three small bowls.
“Lock up behind ye.” Jack shrugged, then headed for the door.
“Wait.” Ducking down, he looked under Abigail’s desk. No cats. He went to the bottom of the steps and made a clucking sound. No cats. He scanned the bookshelves. No cats. “How do I call them?”
“Call them? Ye don’t call them. They’re cats.” She rolled her eyes at him over her shoulder. “They’ll come out when they get hungry.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know. They’re cats.”
Unfortunately, repeating the obvious did not solve his problem.
With the clock ticking, he did not want to waste an entire day—or even an hour—chasing after three recalcitrant pets.
He already knew that Susan hated him. What if her spite had rubbed off on the others and they were all wedged in a hidden cabinet somewhere, intent on spoiling the time he did have left with their mistress?
“Two crowns,” he called out, and Jack paused with her hand on the doorknob.
“Eight,” Jack replied airily.
“Eight? That’s two pounds!”
She gave him a puckish smirk. “Do you want the cats or not?”
He did, dammit. And she knew it. Money-grabbing little murderess that she was.
“How do you know Dr. Chadwick?” He followed Jack up the stairs, making sure to step around any random pile of books that appeared in neat stacks.
The entire house was filled with them, as well as an assortment of medical equipment.
There were various sized beakers, bandages, and glass jars filled with metal instruments stuffed in every corner and stacked on every shelf.
While there was a chaotic order to everything, it was spilling out in every direction with hardly any room for personal belongings.
A single glance in any room and it was evident that being a doctor wasn’t what Abigail did, it was who she was.
And there was valor in that. Goodness in that.
Determination in that. She’d chosen a life devoted to helping others.
But sweet, he thought as he picked up an abandoned cup still filled halfway with cold tea, who is helping you?
“The doctor is a friend of a friend.” Jack opened the door to a tiny linen closet, sniffed, then closed it again. “They’re probably in ’er bedroom. Come on.”