Chapter 3 #2
“I sit in meetings with grumbly church wardens, my fine fellow, and I sort the fruit, barley, and eggs the good people of Sunderlin Downs pay to their Maker. I do not trifle in other affairs. Least of all those involving work or danger.” The rector limped past Tom.
“Your conundrum sounds as if it involves both.”
“I am not asking much.” Tom hustled back in front of the rector. “Perhaps an inquiry Sunday … if anyone has seen her.”
“I imagine the ones who have would not be here.”
“It is worth a chance.”
“As I said”—the rector rubbed his leg with an irritated sigh—“a matter for the constable. I am only a … eh, there you are.” He waved to a man who entered, then flicked a dismissing hand to Tom. “Excuse me, fellow. There is nothing more I can do. I am sorry I could not be of help.”
Tom bit his lip before something unholy came out.
He had respect, if not faith.
Sometimes.
“Thank ye.” For nothing. Grinding his teeth, he barreled back the way he’d come, brushing shoulders with the lean newcomer in a gray frock coat and pantaloons.
“Been troubling me all day again. Every time I put weight on it … yes, I took the tonic … gout, indeed … thank you, Dr. Bagot …”
Tom slammed his way from the church before he could hear more. Darkness crept across Sunderlin Downs like an inky infection. Like a doom.
Like a demon whisper that he would never find Meg at all.
The second her legs dangled over the window ledge, sweat dampened her grip. Do not look down. Cool, nighttime air breezed through her, rustling the white dress about her legs. She breathed in the scent of freshly trimmed grass.
I cannot. She pulled her legs back into the bedchamber, but her heart pattered in protest. She had to do this. Slipping back out, she reached for the gnarled tree branch. An oak, she was certain. How, she did not know.
Securing both hands around the branch, she breathed faster. One, two, three. On ten she would jump. Nine, ten. Perhaps twenty. Eighteen, nineteen. Before she could reason out of it, she propelled herself forward. Her body whooshed back and forth in the air.
Help.
She caught her footing in a tree crotch. Then she moved without thought—pulling herself down and over, looping through branches with movements so lithe and familiar she was certain she’d done this before. Had she climbed many trees as a child? Or did she still?
She landed on all fours in soft, damp grass.
Her head spun.
Run. Gathering the muslin dress in her fists, she slipped through what appeared to be a well-kept courtyard. Moonlight illuminated flowered bushes, tall boxwoods, and shadowed cloisters. She hurried to the only side not enclosed by the abbey.
A massive drystone wall. She sprinted the length of it, searching through vines. The door. The gate. Where was the gate?
In the distance, a bark struck the silence.
She flattened against the wall.
Her knees jellied as the sense of entrapment squelched what little courage she had left. She darted for the cloisters. The temperature chilled in the ancient covered passageway.
More howling. Lights glowed across the courtyard.
Hand covering her mouth, she hunkered against the stone plinth. The columns cast black, symmetrical shadows across the walk. She counted them. Lost count. Started again—
“Over here!”
More shouts, then a dog lunged at her from the darkness.
She screamed, covered her face.
Teeth snapped, but someone must have hauled the animal back, because they never sank into her skin. Instead, two hands peeled back her arms.
“Miss Margaret?”
“There is no gate.” Tears weakened her voice. She was ashamed of them because she had the sense she was not wont to crying. “I cannot find the gate—”
“The abbey, I fear, has no exit through its courtyard.” Lord Cunningham’s arms reached beneath her, pulling her against him. “I regret you were so frightened as to search for it at this hour.”
She buried her face into his banyan as he stood. Strange, but he still smelled of cinnamon. Stranger still, she didn’t want to smell anything else.
“Stevens, go awake Cook and have her prepare a platter of something soothing. Milk and honey and a bit of the laudanum the doctor prescribed.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And see to it that another bedchamber is prepared for Miss Margaret. One with windows to the north, so that she might feel less enclosed. This is my fault, in truth. I should have realized such a chamber would be constricting.”
Servants scurried away.
The dog yapped once or twice more before the sound of his claws faded in the cloister.
When Lord Cunningham carried her a step, she clenched the silk of his banyan with a racing chest. “My lord, I can walk.”
“I fear you are much too exerted. You overestimated your recovery, I fear, in this—”
“I do not remember anything.” She pushed at him, until he finally set her down, and backed deeper into the passageway blackness. “I do not understand. Every time I strain to remember, the pain worsens.”
“Whatever gave you the idea, my dear girl, I expected you to try at all?”
“I will not be locked away.”
“Is that what tonight is about? If so, allow me to return your mind to ease. Dr. Bagot was in error, and even if he were not, I am not in the habit of surrendering anyone to such a torturous establishment, least of all …” The sentence lingered, and she felt, rather than saw, his overwhelming conviction. “Shall we go inside now?”
“One thing more.”
“Ask me anything.”
She smeared her dripping nose with a shaking hand. “I wish to discover where I am from. I want to go back there.”
“It shall be done. I shall send servants out in the morning.”
“And if my whereabouts … my identity cannot be discovered … I wish you to know I shall not go on troubling you. The moment you wish it of me, I shall leave.”
“You speak absurdity, dear girl.” He stepped closer. His fingers reached for hers—soft, without callouses. Why was that so strange to her? “Penrose Abbey is your home for as long as you have need of it. Whether you remember or not, whether you desire a harbor or merely a comrade, it is yours.”
She wanted to ask why he would be so benevolent to her. Why he would grace her with such kindly trust—a stranger—when she didn’t even know if she could trust herself.
But she was too frightened that if she did question him, her one foothold in a rocking world would shatter. She allowed him to guide her back inside Penrose Abbey, hand in his.
She was penniless.
Homeless.
Nameless.
But he seemed determined to convey, with every new squeeze of her hand, that she was not as friendless as she felt.
He was fevered, but he wasn’t sick.
Just like before.
That night seven years ago, when the brick cottage of nine children became soundless.
When they all crowded around the bed, looking at each other, not saying anything.
Mamm had dried her eyes with a raspberry-stained apron.
Papa was stone. He was always stone—but as he leaned against the wall with a baby in one arm and little Joanie in the other, some of his steadiness seemed to crack.
Tom slipped off the chestnut mare, the lights from the whitewashed livery stable aching his eyes. Twilight had already settled over Juleshead. Crickets sang in the distance, that same chorus that had always lured him and Meg into their nighttime mischief.
His stomach protested the memory. He had forgotten what this felt like.
Losing everything all in a moment.
“Day late, yaw are.” Young Brownie, the six-foot stable hand, crossed his arms with amusement. “Yaw paid for four but was gone five.”
“I need another five.”
“When?”
“Morning. First thing.” Tom handed over the reins. “Give him plenty of oats. Brush him down good too. He rode hard.”
“I don’t think yaw have enough.”
“I’ll pay.”
“With what? Hankies and shoe buckles?” Nonetheless, Brownie led the mare back into the stables, asked no more questions, and said that the mare would be saddled and waiting come sunrise.
Tom nodded and crossed the street toward the blacksmith shop. Wind cut through him, smelling of salt and horse sweat.
His mind combatted too many thoughts at once.
Meg hurting. Meg frightened. Meg alone. Meg waiting for him, but he wasn’t coming. And then just the sound of her—her laugh washing over him with its breathy sweetness. That had been his salvation the past seven years. The only thing that kept him smiling.
He needed Meg Foxcroft.
She needed him.
Reaching the blacksmith shop, he tried both doors. Locked? Why? Meade should be inside, dousing the fire in the forge and nursing his tankard of gin for the night.
Unless something was wrong.
Unease spiked through Tom’s exhaustion as he resisted the urge to climb the side of the shop, pry open the window, and collapse onto his own pallet.
He rounded the street instead. As blackness dimmed and quieted the village, the Kingfisher’s Tavern was the only establishment not blowing out their candles and closing their shutters for the night.
Don’t.
He tried to pull himself back. He was too afraid now, of all times, he would be tempted to gulp down any poison that would numb his pain. He entered anyway, breathing in smoke, and scanned the wood-framed taproom.
A hulking figure, toward the end of the bar, ended Tom’s search.
He elbowed and pushed his way through unwashed fishermen and light-skirts. Someone in the room strummed a hurdy-gurdy. Another belted a song in Cornish.
“There be the ’ero.” A hand snatched Tom and slung him against the wooden bar. More clapped his back. “I say’ee ought to toast to the man wot runs into a burnin’ buildin’ to save our own. What do’ee say, gents?”
A clamor of cheers blasted Tom’s ears. Fire singed his nerves. “Get off me—”
“Here. Drink this.”
Ale sloshed onto Tom’s shirt, then a woman’s clammy arms slinked around his neck—
“Back to your drinks, fools.” Meade. Grunting, shoving, the bar clearing. Then, quieter, “Take to the ale or give it here.”
Tom slid over the dull tankard that had been thrust into his hands. He wiped at his shirt. “The shop was locked.”
“I locked it.”
Tom glanced at the blacksmith’s face. His cheeks were too red, eyes too squinted and bloodshot. Something was wrong. “The ratcatcher—”
“That all you care about?” Meade downed the ale. “Gone five days. No word. Nothin’. All you want to jabber ’bout is the ratcatcher when I been—”
“Ye knew I was looking for Meg.”
“I be many things, but no nursey. You were different. Older. A man almost, but she—”
“What’re ye talking about?”
“Blast you, boy, there be a pint of a girl sleepin’ in my bed this very minute. I don’t be knowin’ who she is or what the devil I’m supposed to do with her while you’re gallivantin’ about, but she—she …”
Tom gripped the edge of the bar in gut-sinking confusion. “She what?”
“Had this sewn into her coat.” Meade smacked a letter against Tom’s chest. “And says she belongs to you.”