Chapter 9
Everyone stared at her. She bumped shoulders with too many people.
The white-haired woman—Mrs. Whalley, she said—with loud exclamations of sympathy on her negus-scented breath.
“Heaven be merciful, but with all the dilemmas you are always getting yourself into, I thought certain you had finally met your demise.”
Another woman, thinner, quieter, with spectacles. “I am Alice Grier. From the bookstore—”
“Miss Foxcroft.” This time a gentleman. Large, wearing a ridiculous periwig, with wafer crumbs spilled on his tailcoat. “As justice of the peace here in Juleshead, I wish to offer you my sincere condolences. Mr. Foxcroft was a good man, and his benevolence to this parish will not be forgotten …”
Then him, standing in her line of vision.
Tom McGwen.
A surge of too many emotions welled insider her. Anger that he had come. Relief, almost, that he had. Absurdity. She clawed the thought away and resisted the pull to chance another glance at him.
He had trimmed his beard shorter to his face, and the hair, usually a little wind tousled, was combed carefully in place.
His cheeks were gleaming and clean, if not a little sun kissed.
He wore finer clothes than she’d seen hitherto—black breeches and a simple brown frock coat—and she scolded herself for noticing the strength tightening his sleeves.
Blood hastened to her face as she tightened her grip on Lord Cunningham’s arm. “I—I know none of these people.”
“You are doing tremendous.” His encouragement was cut off by another gentleman and his wife, who pressed close to Meg and asked her too many questions about fire and injury and a night she had no memory of.
“I fear Miss Foxcroft prefers not to speak of anything so somber.” Lord Cunningham guided the conversation to safer topics—the weather of late and how in need of repair the roads were after so much spring rain.
The conversation droned in her ear.
She squirmed.
For the second time, now farther way, Tom McGwen’s gaze collided with hers. He stood on the other side of the ballroom, leaning against the timber-beamed wall with a young girl clinging to his hand.
Couples passed between them.
A few grating fiddle notes struck the air.
The haze in the room thickened, as if more than one gentleman were puffing on his pipe—but every time the space between her and Tom McGwen was clear, his eyes remained on hers.
She excepted him to come barreling toward her, but he didn’t.
Why?
“Remind me to cease being so sentimental.” Lord Cunningham dropped the words in her ear as the couple finally sashayed away to join the set. “These assembly balls are far more rustic and unbearable than my childhood memory recounts. Are you well?”
She nodded, but she wasn’t.
“Are you hungry? I have been once already to the supper room, and I fear there is not much to entice save a few wafers, pistachio prawlongs, and as many bruised fruits as you can imagine.” His lips grazed her ear. “But perhaps orgeat lemonade?”
“Yes.” Her throat was tight. Her slippers tight. The skin on her face tight. “Lemonade, please.”
“I shall be but a moment.”
In his absence, more strangers were already closing in on her. She murmured excuses. With her forehead thundering, she squeezed past shoulders and bumped her way toward a green-curtained window.
She turned her back to the room, to the music, to everyone.
Then he was there.
Close enough that his stance, as she turned, blocked out the turmoil of the ballroom.
“How dare you come here and follow me.”
“Ye ought to dance, Meg.”
“What?”
“I said ye ought to dance.” His jaw tightened as he looked away, then back to her face. Candlelight danced on his features. He was a stranger, yes—but here, amidst all these faces she’d never seen—he was a faint anchor to familiarity. “Ye said ye always wanted to, so ye ought to do it.”
“I would no sooner dance with you than I would—”
“I didnae ask ye to dance with me.”
“Margaret.” Behind Tom, Lord Cunningham strode forward with a sloshing goblet of lemonade. He pressed it into her hand with narrow eyes. “Everything is well, I presume?”
She hesitated.
Tom answered instead, “Everything is well.” Then he was gone, weaving back through the crowd, disappearing into the muted colors of age-faded dresses and drooping feathers.
“It escaped my notice he was in attendance, else I would not have abandoned you.”
She took a shaky sip of the lemonade. The sour, tangy liquid nearly choked her. “I wish to go home.”
“Then he has distressed you.”
“No.”
“This must cease.” Lord Cunningham started forward, but she grasped the sleeve of his tailcoat and skirted in front of him. Lemonade spilled.
“No. It is not him. It is … everything.”
“I shall not allow him to torment you with each new encounter.”
“He did nothing unkind to me.”
“He is dangerous.”
“You do not know that.”
“Yes, Margaret. I know more of the man than you think.” Lord Cunningham breathed a resigned sigh, his shoulders deflating.
“Nevertheless, I am not so unwise, nor so unkind, as to burden you with that now. If you wish to go home, we shall depart immediately. Now finish your drink, and I shall send the servant to prepare the carriage.”
Lost. The word cut through her as she backed against the wall, drained her goblet, and waited for Lord Cunningham to return. She should not have come. Lord Cunningham had encouraged that the event might cheer her. That greeting those she once knew might pour light into the darkness of her mind.
He was wrong.
She was wrong—for coming, for imagining she could step back into her old world and somehow still belong. What was the matter with her? How could this happen?
She curled her fist and resisted the urge to scream, hunt down Tom McGwen again, and demand he tell her who she was. Who she really was. Why she felt so lost. Terribly, unbearably lost.
“The carriage awaits.” Lord Cunningham returned and took her hand in his gloved one. “This way.”
This way. Why did his words bounce back off her? This way.
Her legs moved, but the floor shifted. The glass slipped between her fingers. Shattered. No. She must have kept moving, led by his hand, dragged through endless waves of people, because the old arch-framed door blurred before her …
Her body careened.
She plummeted forward, knees whacking floorboards. No, no. Her muscles spasmed. Colors dotted across her vision. Lost, lost, lost.
A scream floated somewhere above her, but it was distant and unreal.
Her body melted into the floor.
The wood smelled like mildew and cobwebs and soil and death. God, help me. She was not ready to die. She had too much to remember. Please.
Arms gathered her up. Her face squashed into a solid, earth-smelling chest—but when she squinted up, there was no perfect black kerseymere tailcoat or white neckcloth or shiny pale skin.
“Out of the way!”
“What are you doing—”
A mild oath. Then fresh, cool air. Then grass beneath her back, hands in her hair, with shouts of wine and laudanum. The sky was too big, too black. The darkness reached down and stole her away.
But not before she felt her face itch with the softest lips and beard.
For the faintest second, she was not lost.
She had never been here before.
Not in his chamber, with its cracked plaster walls and messy makeshift bed. His patched clothes—and one of her socks—hung from pegs beside the door. The window bore no curtains. The air smelled of salt and soot and whatever Meade had baked downstairs a few hours before.
Tom tucked his woolen blanket under her chin.
Strange, that she should be here now.
In his bed.
When she didn’t even know him.
He had the faint urge to grab her stolen sock from the peg, place it next to her, to return the moment she awoke. She probably had dozens of socks now. Ones that weren’t threadbare at the heels and discolored from age.
For the first time in three hours, her head curled sideways on his pillow. The ringlets had long since lost their hold. He’d taken the pins out himself.
Her hair was everything it had always been—messy and smooth and wavy across his pillow, like honey he was starved for but forbidden to touch.
Behind, the door squeaked open again and Lord Cunningham’s voice whispered into the chamber, “How does she fair?”
“Still asleep.”
“My own esteemed physician should be arriving any moment. As soon as she awakens, I wish to transport her to the nearest inn and secure her a proper bed.”
As if the pallet on the floor were not good enough. Maybe it wasn’t.
But Tom had carried her here anyway.
With Meg collapsed on the assembly room floor, Lord Cunningham had seemed too unraveled to make any decision. As villagers crowded in, trying to assist, clamoring remedies, Tom had done the only thing he could think to do.
Get wine down her throat, ten drops of laudanum, and bring her home.
Where he could sit as close to her as he could.
Watch the door.
The windows.
Everywhere.
“For all my proficiencies in medicine, I fear in a moment of crisis it all abandoned me.” Lord Cunningham’s words rang with a true note of care. A realization that both comforted Tom.
And bothered him.
“Shout for me the moment she stirs. I shall go await Dr. Bagot.” The door squeaked shut just as the first sunbeams of morning slanted through the window. They brightened a million dust motes.
Tom leaned against the wall, counted them, massaged her hand beneath the blanket.
Until her fingers twitched.
“Meg.” He slid to his knees, blood pumping, as her sweaty face thrashed back and forth.
Her lashes fluttered.
“Shhh. Ye’re not hurt.” That wasn’t true, but he’d heard both her and Mr. Foxcroft murmur it to frightened patients, and the lie always seemed to do more good than harm. “Ye’re doing a wee bit of resting. That’s all.”
“My lord.” Breathy. She squinted up at him, confused, as if neither his words nor his face held the power to sooth her. “Where is … Lord Cunningham?”
“Downstairs.”
Her eyes fell shut again. “I feel very … sick.”
“Dinnae speak.”
“What happened?”