Chapter 12 #2
For the hundredth time, he touched a light finger to the bandage on his head. No blood dotted the linen, but he winced just the same. “I can see I have bored you with my lessons, however, so you must allow me to finish when we are both in better health and spirit.”
“You have not bored me, my lord.” She stared at the doorknob. “I am only uncertain—”
“Do not say anything yet. We have both endured much, and to make any decision on so irrational a mind would be criminal.”
“I fear I have encouraged you when I—”
“Indeed. You have.” He slipped a finger under her chin, lifted her face to him. “But only because, whether you wish to admit it or not, you have thought of this too.”
Was he right?
Days flashed across her memory. Sitting next to Lord Cunningham, smelling cinnamon, lulled by the rhythm of his deep-voiced poetry readings. The picnic. Dancing with him. Laughing with him—her one friend in a world of strangers.
Yes, she had thought of it too.
The realization soured through her like curdling milk.
“A maid is already on her way. You must promise to do nothing but sleep.”
The one thing she felt certain she could not do. Not now. She nodded anyway. “As must you.”
“We shall speak again after breakfast.”
“Very well.”
“All shall be resolved.”
“Yes.”
“Good evening, my dear.” With a firm kiss to her forehead, he departed down the corridor, his footsteps echoing in a discordant beat.
Meg shut herself inside. When the maid knocked several minutes later, she did not answer. Instead, she dropped to her hands and knees, coaxing out the white-and-orange kitten hidden beneath the bed skirt. What had Tom called the thing?
Pippins.
Ridiculous name. She’d taken to calling it Marigold instead, something sensible and pretty—but now, she found herself murmuring, “Come here, Pippins. I shan’t hurt you.”
The kitty poked out its head, eyes wide, ears flat. With a meow, it darted out from the bed and zoomed across the room. Then under the escritoire. Then slowly, toward Meg’s outstretched hand.
After several sniffs, the furry creature allowed Meg to hold it against her body. She had touched the thing so little. She had even been so negligent as to allow her maid the duty of feeding and watering—because accepting the creature had seemed somehow like accepting Tom.
More guilt swamped her. She stroked the kitten harder, until the bedchamber window turned dark and the kitten purred in sleepy contentment.
Breakfast. Tomorrow. Her mind hurt. Her body hurt. Marriage. She tried to imagine what she would say to him—what dress she would wear downstairs, if her fork would tremble, or if she would drink of her morning cocoa without the faintest flinch. “You have thought of this too …”
A noise in the distance. A faraway rider.
Dr. Bagot?
No. He had never arrived in anything but a carriage.
Taking Pippins with her, Meg rushed out into the corridor and found a window not colored with the isolating stained-glass pattern. She brushed back the curtains, but had no view of the entrance drive.
Tom. The thought drove her to the stairs. She padded down them without a light, nearly stumbled, and winced when the kitten’s claws pricked her chest in fear.
In the anteroom, the shadow of the butler was just pulling shut the door, his light flickering from the gust of night air. “Miss Foxcroft.”
“Who arrived?”
“Why, no one, miss.” He smiled, candlelight glimmering off his walrus-ivory dentures. He swept something behind his back. “In truth, I was just ready to depart for bed. May I assist you back to your chamber?”
“Tom McGwen was here.” She stepped closer. “Wasn’t he?”
“Miss Foxcroft—”
“He brought my shoes. Give them here.”
He hesitated, then sighed. “Very well. Anything you wish, of course, Miss Foxcroft.” He surrendered a pair of muddy half boots. “But I have been instructed not to allow—”
Meg brushed past him and out the door, ready to shout the name of Tom McGwen.
But the steps were empty, there was no movement on the pea-gravel drive, and the distant thud of pounding horse hooves faded into silence.
Meg clutched Pippins with a ragged breath. She should not have wished to see him. Not tonight, of all nights.
But he had answers she needed. If she was to make any decision regarding her future, she must first understand her past.
“Are ye ready then?” Tom glanced down the black chimney hole, a foot on each slope of the thatched cottage roof. He hoped the groaning and creaking was no omen the boards were about to cave.
When Joanie’s answer rose up the chimney, Tom dropped the rope with a furze bush tied in the middle. Seconds later, she tugged the bush down.
Scratch.
Scrape.
Thunk.
“A bird nest!” Joanie laughed below, coughed, then shouted, “Up again!”
They repeated the process, pulling the bush up and down, until his hands were covered with soot—and the chimney, hopefully, was not. He pulled the bush out for the last time, the branches and crushed yellow flowers stained black and gray. A flurry of ashes swirled around him as he turned—
“Mr. McGwen.”
He straightened, stilled, heartbeat grinding into his chest with a burst of speed.
Below, hand shading her eyes, Meg stared up at him.
She wore something elaborate—a sort of green-velvet riding habit, with yellow gloves and the same boots he had rescued the night before.
Her expression was hard. Her shoulders tight.
As if she wished him to think her calloused, unaffected, and determined.
Which he might have believed if not for her eyes.
“Yer lord allows ye to go roaming by yerself, does he?” Frustration nipped him. He slung the bush off the roof. “Ye should know better.”
“He does not allow nor disallow me to do anything. I am not imprisoned, sir.”
“No.” He tied the rope about his waist, secured it around the brick chimney, and lowered himself back to the ladder. “Just stupid.”
“I did not come here to be insulted.”
“Then ye shouldnae have come.” Rung by rickety rung, he climbed down. When he reached the ground, he turned on her. “Someone wants to do ye harm, and until that man is found, ye’ll be staying out of the open and going nowhere alone. Ye understand?”
“You are not my husband nor my guardian.”
“Meg.”
“Miss Foxcroft to you.”
“Fine. Miss Foxcroft.” He brushed at his shirt sleeves. Hard. “Since it’s apparent ye need no one to tell ye anything, I suggest ye start looking to yerself and using yer own wits.”
“I fully intend to.”
“Good.”
“Which is why, in fact, I am here.” Her chin raised a notch. She wore no bonnet, and the loose wisps of her brown-red hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. Pink stole across her cheeks. “I wish to finish our discussion.”
“It is finished.”
“You have no right.” She stepped toward him, arms tight at her sides—and he had a faint memory of a younger Meg with wild hair and patched trousers, raising a kitchen ladle over her head.
She had swatted at him twice and missed.
He couldn’t remember why, unless it was the time he scooted the candle too close by accident and she lost part of her braid in flames. Or the day Maryanna Hopkins landed a surprise kiss on his cheek on the church steps after Sunday service.
“If you were any measure of a man at all, you would tell me.”
“So ye think ye can persecute me into it, do ye, Meg Foxcroft?” He’d been grieved so long, missed her so, that he’d forgotten how blasted infuriating she could be. How impossible. How quickly she could get his blood heated. “Fine.” He motioned to the cottage door.
As she nodded and marched inside, he tried not to think.
Everything would have been so different.
She would have begged him to paint the walls red before he ever cleaned the chimney.
She would have flounced about the yard. Pointing at things.
Gathering stones to frame her garden. Peeking in the windows and squealing.
And running up to him, every few minutes, to throw her arms about his neck and tell him it was wonderful.
The ashes burned his throat as he followed her inside.
His steps were heavy.
If God was of the mind to take memories, He should have taken them from them both.
Lord Cunningham had likely arrived to the empty breakfast table. The realization should trouble her. She was wicked to forsake him and disappear when, at this very moment, she was supposed to accept the offer of becoming his wife.
His wife. For him to touch, possess, keep forever. Her skin crawled. Our Penrose Abbey. Ours.
“Joanie.” Tom must have motioned the girl outside, for she gave a shy smile to Meg, curtsied, then slipped from the cottage. The door groaned shut.
All of Meg’s nerves sharpened. She had a sense of being trapped—like she’d been with Lord Cunningham after the accident when he’d kissed her.
But Tom did not so much as look Meg’s way. He grabbed Joanie’s broom and went to work, sweeping hard at an old bird’s nest, dirt, and flurrying ashes on the floor.
Meg took a step back, covering her nose and mouth with a handkerchief. She waited.
He swept.
Silence.
“Are you so contrary as to make me ask again?”
He gave her a quick side glance. He wore a soot-stained white shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, the sweaty cotton sticking to his back. The outline of his muscles, the strength and veins of his neck, gave her heart a tiny plunge.
She stared out the window—to the sloping green hills, the crab apple tree—anywhere but at Tom McGwen. “Well?”
“It happened to ye the spring before I came.” Swish. “Ye were twelve.” Swish. “Sent on an errand to deliver valerian to Mrs. Whalley, who was suffering another of her headaches.”
Discomfort zipped up Meg’s spine. Her mouth dried. “And?”
“It was dark on yer way home. Ye cut through the alley between the cobbler and the wine merchant.” The swishing halted. His lips pressed, his face angled farther away from her, as if he were as afraid to look at her as she was him.
No. Do not tell me. She took a step back—
“A lad named Tobias Graham followed ye.”
No.
“He hurt ye. Someone heard ye screaming, and he ran before …” Tom cleared his throat. “He ran before he took all of yer innocence.”
“Does everyone …” A knot wedged in her throat. “Do they all know this of me? In the village?”
“Nay. The man who found ye was a sexton at the church. He carried ye to yer uncle, swore himself to secrecy, and even helped yer uncle in paying Graham to board the next ship out of Juleshead. He never came back.”
She nodded. “I see.”
Silence again.
She faced the window, holding her arms as a cold sensation of filthiness slinked through her. She was damaged. Irrevocably damaged. The incontrollable need to bury the truth, hide this secret, brought a blur of moisture to her eyes.
Then her heart pumped faster.
If she and her uncle had guarded this secret so well, kept it for so many years, why had she ever told Tom McGwen? She turned back around, looked at him.
He stood straight and rigid, eyes trained on hers, with an expression she could not decipher.
Something about his face pulled at her, softened her.
The pleasing shape of his eyes, with their dark red lashes and gleaming assuredness.
The lines in his forehead. The sun-blush of his cheeks.
The full, easy smoothness of his unmoving lips.
The lips she had given herself to in a different life.
Despite her fears.
Despite the alley.
The words rushed out of her before she could stop them, “I must have trusted you very much.” To tell him such things about herself. To believe he would not alter the way he looked at her. Or leak the truth. Or find another village lass—one who had not been soiled and robbed of her precious purity.
Tom’s nod was slow, a little sad, when he whispered back, “Ye did.”
She did not return to Penrose Abbey. The reins were loose in her hands. She was aimless, listless, as her distance from both the cottage and abbey stretched wider.
She was not certain she would ever go back.
To either.
Sunlight—and shame—warmed her face as the horse discovered a small cart path in the field.
She followed the trail. When it met with a grassy arched bridge, she dismounted and wandered to the middle.
I cannot do it. She sat, legs dangling over the stone edge as the brown creek water rushed and splashed beneath her. I cannot.
She was not strong enough to marry Lord Cunningham.
And she was not strong enough to tell him she couldn’t. Was she?
Tom’s story colored again in her mind. She imagined it so well. As if she’d opened a book, read over the pages, and watched through words as someone else endured agony. Lord Cunningham had a right to know. If she were to be his bride, he must be privy to her secrets as surely as Tom was.
That bothered her.
That she had told Tom so much.
That whoever she was before had …
She tried to slam shut the imaginary book, but scenes rushed through her with flashing vividness.
Her kissing him and laughing at the same time.
Her holding his face. Feeling his jaw, his soft beard, while her nose brushed his.
Then her doing the one thing she wanted to do now—crying, but not alone.
Pressed close to him, swallowed in the arms that looked so strong, certain that nothing in the world could penetrate his strength and hurt her.
Had it really been such a way? Had he truly made her safe? And happy?
In anger, she grabbed a fistful of grass. She slung it into the creek. Kerplunk.
The memories weren’t real.
Mere fragments of her imagination.
In many ways, she was grateful she was no longer the girl who remembered the alley. The one who had nightmares haunting her soul. But another part—the smallest part of her—envied the Meg Foxcroft who had Tom McGwen to love.
Brushing at her clothes, Meg stood and remounted her horse. She turned back to Penrose Abbey, her heart alternating between each mile, not certain if she would reject Lord Cunningham when she returned or accept him.
By the time she made it through the gates, she was determined.
This had nothing to do with Tom.
The decision was for herself, because she could not entrap herself in marriage when so many questions still prowled through her. She would tell him tonight. At the dinner table. After his third glass of wine and only when he prodded—
“Miss Foxcroft.” One of the maids, Tillie, met Meg as she entered the anteroom. Sweat lined her forehead. Her clothes were rumpled, damp, and her eyes had a stricken panic.
Meg dropped the riding crop, lungs squeezing. “What is it?”
“Miss Violet. She …” Tillie hiccupped on a sob. “She be dying and Lord Cunningham be gone.”