Chapter 9 #2
“Ye were …” Poisoned? Almost killed again? His blood boiled. “Ye fell ill at the ball. Lord Cunningham and I brought ye here.”
“Where is …” As if sensing the answer, her sentence trailed off. She jerked from the pillow too quickly. Ripped from the blanket. Yanked from his hand. “Get me out.”
“Meg, ye’re in no danger.”
“Lord Cunningham!” A scream. Veins protruded in her neck as she strained against his arms easing her down. “My lord! Help!”
“Meg—”
Her hand slapped across his face.
The sting zipped through him, like a lightning bolt, and he relinquished any hold on her. He backed away. The other side of the chamber. The farthest corner, but it wasn’t far enough. Can’t. He could not look at her. Instead, he stared at her sock hanging limply on his peg. I cannae do this.
She stumbled for the door, but doubled over and retched before she could grab the knob.
Vomit splattered the floorboards.
Stained her dress.
Her hair.
She sobbed, and for the first time in his life, he could not make her stop.
“Miss Foxcroft.” The child was a blur of long brown hair and checkered green cotton.
The stairwell narrowed.
Splinters in the banister prickled her flesh.
“Let me help you.” Hurrying up the steps, the child weaved a gentle arm around Meg’s waist. She smelled warm, like oatmeal scones. “His lordship just departed for the stables. That way he can see the doctor coming.”
“I—I need to sit.”
“This way.” The girl led Meg into a small kitchen, where she scooted a chair with peeling paint out from the table. The hearth fire crackled. “You can rest here. Move, Gyb.” She shooed a kitten from the seat, then hurried to dunk a rag into a bucket of water. She hesitated. “May I?”
Meg nodded.
The cool cloth swished at her chin, her neck, then the splotches on her silver-netted dress. The acrid taste of bile soured her mouth. “You were with … him.” Her stomach quivered. “At the ball.”
“Tom is my brother.”
“Oh.” Another person Meg should know. But didn’t. “Forgive me. I—I do not remember your name.”
“He probably didn’t speak of me.” With a careful stroke, Joanie leaned closer. “I don’t think he talked of home. Meade said he didn’t.”
“Meade?”
“The blacksmith. He’s outside with the constable. In case they come back.”
“They?”
“Whoever put camphor in your lemon—” She bit her tongue as her eyes lifted to someone behind Meg. Her cheeks pinkened. “My name is Joanie, Miss Foxcroft. You can call me Joan if you like. My sisters did.”
The hair on the back of Meg’s neck lifted. She sensed him behind her. Tom McGwen. In the doorway. Watching her, no doubt, with his troubling blue eyes.
“I hope you liked Pippins.”
God, help me.
“Gyb is his brother.”
Please.
“They’re very troublesome, Meade says, but I think they’re sweet.”
She should not have run. Nor struck him. Nor looked at him as if he were the one who had slaughtered her uncle and poisoned her drink and stripped her memory.
But the chamber had been too small.
The sickness had disoriented her.
She was weary—and frightened—of being in places she did not recognize with people she did not know. “Excuse me.” She stood faster than she meant to, bumping into Joanie and sending the kitten scampering. “I must f–find Lord Cunningham.”
“I will walk beside you, miss.”
Meg braced herself to face him, but when she turned to the kitchen doorway—Joanie on her arm—he was already gone.
Her heart faltered with a strange measure of regret.
Whether Tom McGwen was untoward or not, whether he was capable of the sins Lord Cunningham accused or innocent, one thing was certain.
He had loved her.
He must have.
Because as she clawed at him upstairs, in frightened delirium, she saw it on his face—in the stricken and shattering gape of his lips.
He was as lost as she was.
Or worse.
They were gone. The doctor had arrived, ministered to Meg, and given solemn instructions that she “rest in a more suitable setting.” With Meg still wrapped in Tom’s blanket, Lord Cunningham had gathered her into his arms and carried her to the waiting landau.
“You hid from her.” Meade tied on his leather cowhide apron as Tom leaned against the workroom window.
Where he had, in truth, been hiding the past hour.
“She does not want to see me.” The landau disappeared around a street corner. The insane urge to run after her choked him like an iron fist. “She … fears me.”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“She should!” He pummeled the wall with his hand. The window rattled. His chest rattled. “I have to get out of here—”
Meade grabbed his arm. “She needs time.”
“She needs protection.” Tom willed the fire to douse in his blood. “Something I cannae give her when she looks at me like I’m the blackguard who …” The sentence hung. He wasn’t certain Meade knew about the night in the alley anyway.
He nodded as if he did. “But you’re not. Prove it to her.”
Seconds ticked away. Tom shrugged out of Meade’s hold, grabbed his coat, and headed for the door. “I have to go.”
“You’re getting good at that.”
“What?”
“Running. Hiding.” Meade turned to his forge and lifted a half-filled bottle from the floor. He tossed it to Tom. “Might as well try this sometime too. For all the good it’ll do.”
Tom wedged the bottle between his vest and shirt. Then buttoned his coat. Then ran. He rented another horse from Brownie and galloped his way from Juleshead like the angels of death were nipping at his heels.
He went to the cottage.
The one he should curse and forget.
Spiderwebs stuck to his face as he entered the damp, mold-scented room and almost tripped over the wooden cask of paint articles. He opened the bag of red pigment. Rubbed the soft powder staining his fingers. Two days ago, he’d brought Joanie here.
They’d roamed the property together. She’d called it lovely.
Meg would have said that too.
Then, with the banknote in his pocket, Tom had located the owner, a local tea dealer on the main street in Juleshead. The man had ushered Tom into a shop that fumed of minty sweetness and, with a toothy smile and too-eager handshake, had agreed to the purchase.
Tom had less than half of his inheritance left.
But he had this.
Tossing off his coat, he kicked the wooden cask into a corner of the room and started with a broom. He swept bat droppings and old nests and leaves across the threshold. Then ripped moth-eaten curtains from the windows. Then stomped a wayward floorboard back into place.
All with the bottle stuck between his shirt and his vest. Sloshing against him. The glass cold and luring through the linen of his shirt. He itched to bite off the cork and guzzle away the sickness in his throat. Anything to get it out of his mind.
Her crying in his bedchamber.
He’d known her—och, loved her—two years before he’d witnessed her first tears. They’d been crushing rhubarb roots at the rear counter late in the evening, with only a flickering candle to light the apothecary shop.
She’d used the mortar and pestle with deftness.
But he saw her tremble.
“It wasnae yer fault, Meg.” He dumped the powder into a tiny blue-glassed vial. “Ye did all ye could.”
“He should have lived.” She crushed with aggression. “He was seven and twenty years old. Strong.” Grind. Bash. “He fell six feet from a ladder.” Grind. Bash. “He should be lying in there with a crippled leg, not dead.” The last word faltered.
Helplessness had pulled at Tom. He hadn’t known what to say when she threw her face into her hands, bent over the counter, and stifled a terrible sound.
“I did everything Uncle ever taught me.”
“Ye did right, lass.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesnae have to.” He stepped closer. Touched her braid, then stroked her arm with the back of his fingers. All hesitant. Uncertain. As if he were doing the wrong thing.
But she flung against him anyway. Her arms circled his waist, her face burrowed into his shirt, and she clung so hard he felt every choppy breath as if it were his own. “Squeeze me, Tom.”
His arms tightened.
His senses hummed alive—with grief because she grieved, with fervor because she needed him, with rapture … for no other reason than that he could smell her hair.
“I wanted to speak with Uncle.” She smeared her tears. “We told so many people of his death. The wife. The children. The vicar. And I wanted to tell all of them how sorry I was, how frustrated and confused.” Her voice dropped. “I couldn’t tell anyone but you.”
“Ye’ve nothing to be sorry for, lass.”
“I can always tell you.” Pulling back, she took a deep breath. “Make me laugh.” She scampered to the other side of the counter. With flustered embarrassment, she wiped her nose and cheeks with her apron. “Please. Do something ridiculous before I become a weeping child.”
Now, clenching his broom, Tom bristled at the memory. He could not recall what measure of nonsense he had displayed for her. Something absurd, like setting half her uncle’s bottles upside down.
With glassy red eyes, she had laughed at him. Her attention was so eager and glowing that he might as well have been the king of the world.
Tom glanced about the dirty, empty cottage with an even bigger hollowness inside himself. His heart shriveled.
He missed that.
He missed her.
Something about the smell bothered her. Even tucked beneath the downy coverlets provided by the inn, she tugged the warm blue blanket tighter against her neck.
She closed her eyes.
Wool.
Earth.
Another faint scent, one she could not identify but had only noticed in the presence of Tom McGwen. ’Twas a nice smell. Whether she wished to admit it or not.
The chamber door opened and closed, and a lanky young woman swept into the room. “My name is Betsey, Miss Foxcroft.” She settled a tray next to Meg’s bed. “I thought I ought to tell you, on account of you forgettin’ things.”
“Thank you.”
“Here.” Betsey lifted a pottery plate to Meg’s lap. “Oat cakes, fish, and peas. His lordship downstairs was right ready to pay an extra shilling for more proper courses, but Mamma didn’t have nothin’ else to fix.”