Chapter 6
The corridor was too narrow. The walls were covered with paper hangings of bright green-and-red parrots and apples, and the single vase of wilted flowers put off a sweet, rotting fragrance.
Meg covered her nose. Not because the smell bothered her, so much as everything bothered her—and the last thing she wanted was to cast up her breakfast in Mr. Willmott’s corridor.
Beside her, leaning against a dusty longcase clock, Lord Cunningham dabbed his busted lip for the last time. He thrust the handkerchief into his pocket. “It should not be much longer.” But his words lacked conviction.
They had already been waiting twenty minutes.
Without chairs, or tea, or explanation.
“And I shall speak on your behalf, of course.” Lord Cunningham sent her a coddling look, as if she were some lost child who needed someone to hold her hand.
Maybe she was.
Maybe she did.
But she shook her head anyway, the slight motion bouncing pain back and forth between her temples. “No. I think it best I go in alone.”
“Do you think that wise?”
She nodded.
“I respect your determination to face the situation yourself, but I fear now more than ever you shall need support.” When she did not answer, he moved away from the clock to stand next to her, hovering close enough she smelled the sweat on his brow, the coppery scent of his blood, and the cinnamon she was becoming so used to.
More nausea churned her stomach.
She almost shrank away or covered her face again—insane impulses, because he was the only man in the world she could trust. Her one ally in a sea of strangers.
Like the stranger who had attacked her today.
Chills raced along her skin, dampening the back of her neck, as images of him flitted across her mind in numbing succession.
The loose, ivory-colored shirt rolled up to the elbows, worn under a dull brown waistcoat.
The light red beard. The freckles. He appeared rugged, strong, lithe, but there was something about his face—the fine shapes of his eyes and jaw and lips—that was almost striking.
Had she truly seen moisture in his gaze?
No.
Everything happened too fast, like a blur, and anyone who loved her enough for tears would have sparked some form of memory in her own heart. She would have known him, like the lady in the pink pinafore or the man with the tender whispers.
The stranger had stirred nothing in her.
Except panic.
At the end of the corridor, the same butler who had shown them in appeared again. He plastered on an overly bright smile. “Mr. Willmott shall see you now.”
It’s time.
Her feet wouldn’t move.
Even when Lord Cunningham took her elbow in his palm, breathing into her ear “I am right beside you,” her body would not respond.
“Ahem.” The butler cleared his throat.
Her knees wobbled.
The corridor narrowed tighter, tighter, tighter.
“Do tell Mr. Willmott there has been a change of plans. I shall write to discuss a more convenient meeting and will, of course, pay for his time.” Lord Cunningham directed her for the door. “This way, my dear.”
“My lord, I …” Explanation died in her throat. She didn’t understand it herself. Except that walking down that corridor, unlocking the key to everything, understanding the stranger with the red beard and tear-moistened eyes …
“Do not fret. Today has been most trying for you. What you need now is rest and quiet and”—he swung her back into the painted blue carriage, his touch on her waist lasting several seconds longer than needed—“and home. You need home.”
Meade would kill him, but Tom didn’t have time for that now.
Crouching back behind the row of bushes, he wiped more sweat from his forehead. Not that it was hot. He’d been positioned between the round-pruned boxwoods and the shading mulberry tree for the past three hours.
Ever since that blasted blue carriage led him through the gates.
The gentleman had grabbed Meg’s waist, pulled her down, and escorted her inside a yellow-stoned abbey. She had gone willingly. Eagerly, almost.
Tom wiped both sweaty palms against his trousers. His legs jittered. His mind kept trying to stampede—running to cliff ledges, out of control, tumbling into air with nothing to hold on to.
Except that she was alive.
Gritting his jaw, he honed in on that and nothing else. No matter that she didn’t know him. She was injured. Shocked. She would remember, just as soon as he spoke with her alone.
She had to remember.
Minutes stretched long and torturous. His stomach growled, more evidence that Mrs. Musgrave was right that he ate too little, and he snuck mulberries to alleviate the pangs.
When dusk deepened, he almost threw them up.
Heart hammering, he peered over the bushes and darted his gaze across the endless candlelit windows. All were still, save for one on the second floor.
A shadow passed back and forth, as if pacing. Then the candle blew out. The world dissolved into blackness—the one thing he awaited.
Tom emerged from behind the bushes, energy shredding his nerves.
Time to get her.
Time to bring her home.
Lord Cunningham was too good to her.
Meg burrowed deeper beneath the downy coverlet, her clean hair dampening the pillow with scents of rosewater. She curled her legs to her chest in the fresh nightgown. Upon their return from Juleshead, she’d scampered to her chamber with dust on her clothes and webs of terror in her mind.
She had expected Lord Cunningham to leave her alone.
By all accounts, he should have. Did he not have other matters to occupy his mind? Why must he always devote himself to her—as if she were something to him? Something more than a lost creature he had discovered beyond his gates?
After two minutes alone in her chamber, he had knocked on the door. “I am sending in a maid, Miss Margaret,” he had said. “Do take your time. Rest as much as you please. And if you should grow weary of solitude, know I shall be awaiting you downstairs with something I think you might enjoy.”
The maid had bustled in, cooing and fussing over Meg, with her copper tub of warm water and vials of rosewater. Her easy fingers kneaded gently across Meg’s scalp. Lathering soap. Dispelling the tension. Washing more than the dust away.
Then, clean and dry and wrapped in a soft blue gown, Meg did what she’d already told herself she would not do.
Found Lord Cunningham.
He awaited her in the library by a glowing silver candlestick, where he patted her next to him on the pillowed, scroll sofa. “I do not know about you, but a dosage of Lord Byron always sets the world to right.” He’d spent the long, quiet evening murmuring poetry into her ear.
Soft words like, “Peace to thy spirit” and “The dew I gather from thy lip” and “ ’Tis your friendship alone I request.”
Now, alone in her bed, the comfort of those words—of this house, this chamber, the man himself—caused her eyes to flutter shut in peace. She could almost blot out today. She could almost forget the shrieking woman in spectacles and the man with the blazing red beard.
Footsteps.
A creak outside her door. Had Lord Cunningham sent yet another maid? Or had he come himself—
Her door whined open and shut so fast she jerked upright.
A shadow whooshed next to her.
Fingers pressed against her mouth, stilling her scream, as a thousand horrors prickled her skin. She bit into flesh—
“Shhh.” He was closer to her, one hand in the back of her hair, his nose against hers. “I’m going to let go of ye, Meg, but ye must be quiet. Hear me?”
She bit again, harder, kicking back her head in protest.
“I willnae hurt ye, lass.” Something in his stance—the way he did not panic or move too quickly or alter his voice—dampened some of her panic. “I’m going to step back. It’s me.”
Me. As if that were supposed to mean something to her. It didn’t.
Easing backward, still facing her, he found his way to the window and fumbled to light the candle. A frail light glowed a circle around him, illuminating his face, the freckles across his sun-blushed cheeks, the open neck of his shirt, the bleeding palm he wiped across his trouser pants.
She had injured him?
“I want ye to tell me what happened.” He set the candle on the mahogany stand beside her bed.
She glanced from it to him to the door. She should scream. Lord Cunningham would have wanted her to scream. But some strange nudge told her the old Meg would not have cowered.
She stood instead, facing him. “Who are you?”
“Tom.” When she only blinked, he said again, “Tom McGwen. Ye were hurt. Something happened to ye. Something to make ye forget.”
“How?”
“Someone set upon ye and yer uncle. There was a fire.”
“How did I get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there anyone else?” She hated that her voice quivered. She raised her chin to make up for it. “In the house, when the fire started. My mother and father or a—”
“They died when ye were four.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
He shook his head.
“My … uncle?”
His face tightened. His eyes slanted downward, and when they edged back up, they brimmed in the candlelight. He shook his head again, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t.
Bile crawled through her.
Threads unraveled, all the pink and green and white of the dream she’d fabricated. There was no sweet mother in a pinafore, sending flowers to the wind. No loving father waiting at some cottage window, hoping for her to come home.
No one had loved her, save an uncle? He was dead? She was alone?
“And you?” Her legs threatened to give, so she backed into the edge of the bed without looking at him. “Who are you … to me?”
Too many things reared inside him. The dimly lit kitchen back of the apothecary shop, where she’d sewn the rip in his coat while he twisted her hair into outrageous braids.
The knitted stockings she always left out to dry on the sill of her bedchamber window.
Her indignation when he snatched them. Her burning face when she found them in unlikely places.