Chapter 24
The silence grew claws and scratched across her throat. Say something.
Orkey had left. “To give m’lord time,” he’d said, “while I see what I can be scroungin’ up in the kitchen.” He’d already finished off the fruit bowl. Evidence that the boy had suffered so much lack.
She wasn’t certain she blamed him for this.
She didn’t know who to blame.
Herself?
Uncle?
Or was the one who penned the letters wrong about everything?
Her back cramped, and she drew her legs up to her chest, resting her face on her knees. For the thousandth time, she looked at him.
He sat stoic beside her. Dazed. The subtle scent of his cinnamon swept to her awareness—a smell that stirred back memories of the elm tree and his eloquent murmurs to keep her safe.
“My lord.” The first time she’d spoken. The windows turned dark. “You realize I have no expectation of you to sacrifice yourself for me.”
He did not so much as blink.
“This is not your fight.”
Nothing.
“My lord—”
“Well, well.” Orkey strode back into the room, his top shirt buttons undone, revealing a protruding collarbone.
He belched. “Half figured you two would be try’n make a run for it.
Vern was sweatin’ and bouncin’ out there, thinkin’ he’d have to club someone again.
” He moved to each wall sconce, lit them with a silver candlestick.
Light sputtered across the room. Sweat chilled the back of her neck.
“Well, m’lord?”
Careful not to brush the broken shards of porcelain, Lord Cunningham scooted to his feet. He looked away from Meg when he whispered, “Take me to my daughter.”
Tears blurred her vision.
Orkey laughed. “Vern!” When the older man appeared in the drawing room doorway, Orkey barked an order for Lord Cunningham to be escorted to his daughter’s chamber.
They left the room with footsteps that thumped in time with her heart.
Her body braced.
The door shut.
Tears coursed free—not in anger that Lord Cunningham had abandoned her, but in the strangest and coldest disappointment she’d ever felt in her life. All his words had been so empty. All his poetry in vain.
Lord Cunningham’s love was as weak as the man himself.
The edges of everything were faint and flickering. His head split. One, two, three. He counted the fabric-covered buttons above his head, gold and faded and lamplit, and had a foggy memory of snagging one loose with his hat once.
“Did you fix the hinge, dear?”
He’d hopped out of the rusty old carriage kept in the mews outside the millinery shop, seldom used except the Sunday afternoons Mr. Musgrave had taken his wife on a drive. Tom whacked the door shut. “Good as new for ye.”
“I suppose it is sentimental to keep this old thing still intact.” She’d blushed a little, fluttering her hands. “But it reminds this old woman of courting, and I’m just foolish enough to climb up in there every now and again, just to sit and remember.”
A swell of nausea overturned his stomach as Tom forced back the last shadows of darkness. Confused, he lifted his head—
Just as the cold barrel of a gun met his forehead.
“That is enough, Abraham.”
The voice steadied Tom. At first. Then memories jarred back into place with lightning speed, and his headache throbbed with new aggression. He pushed the gun away and sat up.
Lord, no.
The carriage was dark, all the faces shadowed save for the faint stream of lamplight filtering in through the dusty windows. The air was putrid. A devastating mixture of body odor and moldy-fabric and Mrs. Musgrave’s pease pottage still wet on his shirt.
He strained his wrists against the coils of rope.
Mrs. Musgrave stared at him.
The bearded man—with his brawny shoulders and heavy breathing—finally seated himself next to her and leveled the gun with both hands.
“Ye wrote the letters,” Tom rasped to her.
“It may surprise you to know, dear, that I have been writing letters for a long time. It did not avail anything. The constable did not believe the truth, and Mr. Foxcroft refused to listen. He would have killed the rest of his life had I not intervened.”
“Meg.” Betrayal soured through him, and the nausea surged with speed up his throat. “Ye did this to her. Ye almost killed her.”
“For which you will thank me when you know the truth.”
“Ye’re wrong.”
“And you are blind, Tommy.” Leaning across the carriage, she reached out and covered his bound hands with her soft, wrinkled ones. “None of this is your fault. You are as much the victim as my Elias and that poor Elisabeth and countless others they have destroyed.”
Tom should have writhed from her touch, but he couldn’t move. She blurred a little. He blinked harder. Disbelief fractured him as he whispered, “Ye lied, all this time, for something ye cannae even prove.”
“Which is why I must do this.” She squeezed him. “You sought the truth, Tommy. I am giving it to you.”
Hair whipped at her face, her mind screamed as she darted around a wingback chair and stumbled for the drawing room doors. She slung herself against them, fumbling with the knobs, thrusting her body against the paneled wood.
No, no, no.
“Got you!” Orkey’s sticky fingers fisted the back of her hair. He yanked. Pain flared. “No more runnin’ or I’ll—”
She twisted around, spit in his face, and ripped out of his grip with a cry of agony. Her scalp stung. She made it halfway across the drawing room before the full weight of his body lunged on her back.
Her forehead smacked the rug with so much force she wilted. Tom. She tethered herself to his name, pulled it around her like a cocoon as Orkey turned her over.
Panting, he hauled her back to her feet. He shoved her backward into the glass-paned bookshelf. “You dirty little rich thing.” Face scrunching, he barged his knuckles across her chin.
The impact snapped back her head. The bookcase rattled. She whimpered, tried to hide her face, but another blow pummeled into her stomach.
Again.
Then again.
Glass fragmented behind her. No, please. She crumpled, but he snatched her hair and dragged her up. “Let me go.”
Tossing off his hat, he threw her to the chaise lounge and slung away the cylinder pillow.
“Please. I beg of you—”
He backhanded her mouth.
She tasted blood, warm and metallic, and her lungs suffocated when his face dipped inches above her face.
His breath poured over her. Foul, hot, panting. “You beg.” Spittle sprayed her. “You have no idea how many years I been begging the streets. People like you never did nothing. You never cared about the likes of filth like Vern and me—”
A crash shook the room.
The doors banging open.
Help.
Orkey’s hand pressed across her mouth before she could screech the word, but just as quickly, someone barreled into his body and tackled him away from her.
She caught a flash of red hair, familiar brown trousers, one second before a gunshot reverberated throughout the room.
Rage ignited Tom, blasting heat beneath his skin as his fingers clamped tighter around the man’s neck. He’d kill him. He’d rip out every cursed bone and feed it to the dogs.
“That will be enough, Tommy.” Mrs. Musgrave’s voice was calm, slow, easy, devastating.
Another gunshot.
A nearby chandelier wobbled, and glass sprayed in a pinging shower.
Ducking out of the downpour, Tom slung the young blackguard to the ground and whirled to Meg.
She’d risen from the chaise lounge, one hand on the armrest as if to steady herself. Her cheeks were pink. Her chin purpling. Her eyes locked on him—unblinking and wild—with a stricken look he’d only seen on her face once.
The night she told him about the alley.
Stomach hitching, he rushed for her—
A hard force rammed into Tom’s shoulder, sending him stumbling. He hit a wooden stand and chess pieces scattered around him.
“Do not hurt him, Abraham.” The drawing room doors thudded open again. “Vern, I wish you to stand guard over Tommy by the mantle. He is not to move and he is not to be injured, but he is to witness the proceedings.”
The rat called Vern bullied Tom to the mantle with his cudgel. His face soured with a frown, one almost of remorse, before he straightened his stance like a sentinel.
Tom’s heartbeat racketed out of control. He brought the ropes to his mouth. Bit at them with his teeth. “Mrs. Musgrave.”
“Orkey, can you stand?”
“Yes’m.”
“Then go and fetch Mr. Foxcroft.”
Orkey bounced up, turned circles until he spotted his hat, and mashed it on his head as he fled the room.
“Mrs. Musgrave.” Tom’s voice deepened a pitch. “Ye cannae do this.”
“Abraham, you must hold her still.”
“No.” Tom sprang forward. The cudgel brought him down with a wind-stealing blow to his spine. “I willnae let you hurt them,” he wheezed. He stood again. Pain crackled along his back as he staggered to Mrs. Musgrave, and when he caught her frail elbow, no one stopped him.
Her eyes were mellow, her voice tear-laced. “I know this will be difficult for you to watch, my dear. If it were not so necessary, I would spare you as you have always tried to spare me.”
“Listen.” He grabbed her tighter, breathing harder. “Yer husband wouldnae have wanted this. Ye know that. Look at me.”
“I am not doing this for my husband. Elias is dead. There is nothing else I can do for him.” Snot dripped from her nose. Her hand trembled as she wiped it with her floral sleeve. “I am doing this for the ones who are still alive. The innocents he has not yet touched.”
“Meg is an innocent.”
“No, my dear. You are.” Her eyes lifted, a faint nod, and the cudgel battered the back of his skull.
Instant blackness stole him again. The last thing he heard was Meg scream.
She wasn’t certain if it was morning. They’d drawn the heavy draperies shut hours ago, and the candles were all dripping into extinction. Everything was shadows and languid movements and voices so quiet they skittered across her consciousness without making sense.
Nothing made sense.
Abraham’s fingers were hard, digging into her arms, forcing her to stand—to watch.
“Do not hurt him.” The plea broke from her cracked lips, but the cudgel swung in the darkness and Uncle’s chair toppled over. More sounds. Their boots destroying his face.
“Up, up.” Mrs. Musgrave perched on the edge of a wingback chair. The same one Meg had curled into with a book too many times, or Lord Cunningham had frequented with his afternoon tea.
Mrs. Musgrave appeared different now. Her wrinkles were deeper, like cracks gnarling through tree bark—and she looked at Meg too often. Always quietly, pensively, as she intertwined her hands over and over. “That is enough, my dears.”
Vern wiped the blood off his cudgel.
Orkey massaged his fists.
Abraham breathed hot and tickling moisture onto the back of Meg’s neck.
“Mr. Foxcroft, can you hear me?”
When Uncle’s head drooped to his chest, Mrs. Musgrave stood and lifted his chin with a careful finger. “Your silence shall not deter me. Miss Foxcroft deserves the truth. It is unfair she should die for something she does not hold in recollection.”
“Didn’t kill him.” Uncle spat. Blood sprayed from his lips.
“You killed Elias and so many others.”
“No.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Am.”
“I will not let you do this again.” Mrs. Musgrave’s face dipped closer to his, and a strain of anguish rippled in her voice.
“You have lied and you have lied, and you have hurt people and you have hurt people. All these years, you have done nothing but destroy.” She waved a hand behind her to where Tom lay curled limp and motionless in the corner of the room.
“You do not even realize the lives you have darkened. That boy among them. He needs this. He needs to know what you’ve done.
” Her voice cracked. “I need to know. Why can’t you give that to me? ”
Emptiness churned through Meg. The hollowness of not knowing if Uncle put sugar or honey in his tea, if he took naps between grinding new powders, if he smiled at her unabashed or tried to hide his love with bashful grunts.
If he killed the people he swore to heal.
If Meg had helped him.
“Tell her.” A cry throbbed in Meg’s throat. She stared into Uncle’s face, his eyes, and the unspoken bond between them crossed the divide of lost memory. “Tell her you never took a life.”
Uncle swore. Blood dripped from his lips to his neck and stained his white shirt collar red. Then he said the words that suffocated the light inside her soul. “I can’t.”