Chapter 23
“What is it?” The attic bedchamber was small, windowless, and warm.
Too warm.
Sweat beads already formed along Uncle’s hairline as he drew the patchwork coverlet up to Tillie’s neck. “Water,” he barked.
Meg swept to the stoneware pitcher and bowl along the wall. She poured a glass and handed it to him. “Lord Cunningham is waiting outside. Two more have fallen ill.”
“Fevers?”
“No.”
“Hmph.” He pulled two corked vials from his bag, dumped powder into the glass of water, and stirred with a long brass spoon. Clink, clink, clink. “Drink this.”
Tillie paled. “I can’t.”
“You must.” Meg slipped her hand behind the girl’s neck. The skin burned her fingers, charging Meg with increased disquiet. “It is only ginger and cinnamon. You are fond of both, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“Then drink and rest. You shall feel better come morning.” She hoped. “Uncle, may I speak with you?” She followed him from the room and into the narrow attic hallway, where dust flecks glided across sunrays from the tiny window.
Lord Cunningham pushed off the wall. “The entire grounds are polluted. Aside from two scullery maids and the stable boy, they are all bedridden.”
Meg fisted her dress. “It cannot be serious.”
Several heartbeats.
No one answered.
“Can it?”
Uncle fidgeted with his medical bag. Snapped the latch with too much care. Looked everywhere—down the hall, at their shoes, the various servant doors—before finally turning to her face. “Phosphorus.”
Lord Cunningham swore.
Meg’s chest hollowed.
“Poison.”
Mr. Willmott’s eyes traveled long and slow between Tom and the half-hidden papers. His face slackened. “Mrs. Willmott has long called sentimentality my undoing. It seems she was right.”
“Ye lied.”
“We all lie, McGwen, when its effect works to our advantage.” His eyes dulled. “Even you.”
Rage boiled through Tom, aggressive in its ascent as the room sweltered in heat. “She believed ye.”
“Elisabeth?”
“Ye said ye would marry her.”
“An unfortunate conclusion she reached, I fear, without any encouragement from me.” Mr. Willmott rounded his desk.
None of his composure slipped, save for a little shakiness of his hands as he crinkled the paper cutouts and stuffed them into his pockets.
“She was unaware that circumstances made such an aspiration impossible. I was not.”
“And her death?”
“Unnatural.”
“So ye knew.”
“Yes.” He growled. “I am many things, McGwen, but I am no imbecile. I am as aware of her demise as I am the man who caused it.”
A wall clock chimed in the corner.
One of the twins must have resumed playing, because harsh piano notes hammered into the silence, striking pain along Tom’s temples.
The breath lodged in his throat when Mr. Willmott stepped closer.
“That man will be punished. That man will suffer.” The faintest glisten of moisture formed in the corner of his eyes. “That man is me.”
“Dr. Bagot shall arrive soon.” Lord Cunningham paced back and forth before the drawing room window. He’d sent the stable lad for the doctor over two hours ago.
Still, the boy had yet to return.
Meg wiped a new sheen of sweat from her forehead. “You should sit.”
“If Violet falls ill, it will kill her.”
“She won’t.” So far, the poison had only affected the servants. Whoever orchestrated this plan had slipped into the abbey unseen, worked with deliberation, and injured Meg where it hurt the most.
These people, all of them, had taken her in.
They’d loved her.
How unfair, how terrible, that they should suffer now on her account. And it was on her account. She didn’t know how. She didn’t know why.
But this was nothing more than another letter.
Another message to her.
Written in agony instead of words.
Lord Cunningham smacked both hands into the sash window, and the panes rattled. His breath fogged the glass. “He should have returned by now. I should have gone myself.”
“Uncle says the poison is unlikely to render fatality.”
“A fact he offered in the spirit of comfort not truth.”
“You misjudge my uncle. He is not so apt to conceal distresses.”
“I see.” Lord Cunningham turned and glanced to where she sat perched on the sofa.
If he disapproved of her unkempt hair and rumpled clothes—evidence of hours assisting Uncle—it only made him sigh.
“You must rest, Margaret. Neither of us knows what this assault means, but I fear we both know it warrants more trepidation for you than me.”
“I am sorry”—the words fell flat, inadequate—“that I ever appeared under your elm tree. That I ever made you love me … and brought this suffering into your sanctuary.”
“Penrose Abbey is not my sanctuary.” He shook his head. “It has not been, ever since my father died.”
“I increased your pain.”
“Yes.” He swallowed. “But you were a balm to it as well—”
The drawing room door banged open with such force Meg’s heart pitched. She stood from the sofa, hand at her chest.
A boy stumbled inside. He fell to his knees on the rug, a trickle of blood at his hairline, a wooden cudgel pinning the back of his neck. “My lord, I be sorry. I—”
The cudgel whacked his head. The boy slumped into the rug. Motionless.
No. Meg scurried backward, closer to Lord Cunningham, as two ragged figures stormed the room. Recognition ignited. The same assailants who’d set off an explosion in the forest.
The young one pressed a foot onto the stable boy’s back. He grinned as he swept off his turkey-feathered hat. “And sorry I be, m’lady, but nobody’s going no place at all.”
Nighttime possessed a strange coldness. The streets were empty, eerily still, and every scrape of his boots on the cobblestones was loud and haunting.
Tom wandered the streets he knew by heart.
He strayed to the alley, the one where young Meg had met with tragedy, and dragged his fingers along the brick. He used to curse this place. Him and Mr. Foxcroft both.
Somehow, the pains of what had happened to her were less sharp tonight.
Like the Meg of then and the Tom of then were different people.
Flipping up his coat collar, he roamed back to the streets and lingered for a while before the blacksmith shop. He didn’t go in. Meade wouldn’t know what to say, even if he did.
I need help.
Fog formed like storm clouds, haloing street lamps, weaving in and out of his legs as he cut toward the wharves.
Heaven knew, of all places, he shouldn’t come here.
Ripping off his shoes, he splashed his way to the little fishing boat. Black water rocked the vessel. Moonlight rippled on the waves in ethereal light as he dragged both hands down his face.
I dinnae know what to do.
Mr. Willmott had positioned his back toward Tom as if unable to look him in the face. He’d bothered the tassel on his curtain with quivering fingers. “I knew it was wrong. At first she was nothing to me.” His shoulders wilted. “And then she was everything.”
“You wrote the letters,” Tom had accused.
“If Elisabeth received letters, they were not from me.” Was the man truly so clueless? “For which I am grateful now, lest another sin be added to my charge.”
“What?”
“If you spoke with anyone at all, McGwen, you would know why she’s dead.” His words had caught. “She killed herself … because of me.”
Tom had stood for longer than he should have. He thought of everything from slamming the blackguard into the study wall, choking the truth out of him, and dragging him to the constable without his wig or his dignity.
In the end, he left the study without imparting a word to anyone.
His throat was closed.
His mind wrecked.
God.
The word clung to his consciousness as he wiped more tears on the wool of his coat sleeve. The heaviness smothered him. Not just from tonight—the terror of not knowing who to believe, the devastation of still grappling with darkness.
But the heaviness of seven years ago.
Caleb.
Papa.
God, I dinnae think I can do this. Rage seethed through him and he pummeled the air with his fist. I cannae help Meg. I cannae stop the letters. His weakness slipped out in a sob. More shame. I cannae pray.
He missed that.
He missed God.
“Take a look at this.” The rawboned boy stabbed his antler-handled knife into an orange. The fruit bowl tipped over. Apples, pears, and grapes scattered across the drawing room tea table, then kerthumped to the rug one at a time. “Reckon this is how the other side lives, eh wot?”
“W–w–we was told not to touch nothing, Orkey.” The other man cast a wary glance to the door. “Don’t go m–messing everything up.”
“I’m not messin’ nothing.” The boy ripped into the orange, tearing through the peeling with stained, chipped teeth. Juice trickled down his chin. “You locked up the servants?”
“Door to the servant entry be locked. Tuckwell’s guarding it.”
“All of them up there?”
“Aye.”
“Any dead?”
The man scratched his stubbled face, lips flattening, eyes sinking.
“Vern! I said any dead?”
“N–no.”
“Fine.” Orkey walked to the settee and hoisted a muddy boot onto the cushion. He smirked at Meg and Lord Cunningham, where they sat in the center of the rug. “Right unfair it’d be for folk like them to die for folk like these.”
Meg bristled against the rope binding her wrists. Hours ago, the two men had kicked back the furniture, shattered a porcelain vase, and slung Meg to the floor among the broken glass. Lord Cunningham had joined her before they could do the same to him.
His breath wheezed.
Every time his shoulder pressed into hers, the tremble surged through him, like a hare twitching and thumping in panic. “Whatever you want, take it.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” The boy laughed and slung orange peeling over his shoulder. “Vern, get outside and watch the drive. Let me know when they come.”
“B–but—”
“You want me to throw this knife in your gizzard?”
“No, Orkey.”
“Then do as I say. And take this.” He lobbed an apple across the room. “You ain’t ate all day. Something that ain’t never gonna happen to us again when this is over.”