Chapter 25
Weakness crawled through her, cold and tingling as she gave one pathetic writhe against Abraham’s hold. Air stagnated in her lungs. Uncle, no. He lied to save her. He lied because they were about to die.
Her chest convulsed.
They would die anyway.
“You killed little Ned Thatcher nine years ago.” Mrs. Musgrave dried her face. “He hobbled into your shop with a bruised rib, and they carried him out on a handbarrow.”
“Bone punctured his liver.”
“He was six.”
“Nothing I could do.”
“There was always something you could do, but you were too busy feigning you were God.” Moisture weighted her white lashes, and redness lined the underside of her eyes.
She returned to her wingback. “Tell Miss Foxcroft how you used her. How you would send her off with that little basket and people perished because of it.”
The accusation speared through Meg, gouging her with all the things she could not remember. Not even Tom’s stories or the memories she’d created for herself could stem the blood flow. She was drenched in the crimson of her own dread.
The very thing she’d feared all along.
Herself.
“It is not true.” Her gaze flung to Tom, who lifted his head from the floor with hazy, squinted eyes. Then to Uncle, who bore no expression at all. “You could not have done that to me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake, Mr. Foxcroft.” Mrs. Musgrave scowled. “Do you truly think Elias would not tell me? Perhaps you do not remember. Fifteen years ago. Shortly after you brought little Meg home … you left her with a neighbor and visited Kingfisher’s Tavern.”
Uncle barred his teeth and stared up at the ceiling, face blanching.
“You were inebriated. Elias tucked your arm over his shoulder and walked you home.”
“Just kill me.”
“Then you do remember.” Mrs. Musgrave stood again. “You were crying and blubbering about the life you had taken. How you had alleviated his suffering, but his face was everywhere. In your coffee. The reflections in your shop. Your sleep.”
“Stop.”
“But that was not enough. You could not cease with killing one man. You had to kill another and another and another—but it was not until Elias was gone that I realized what you had done.”
Across the room, Tom elbowed himself up. His throat worked fast, as if he could not catch his breath, and his eyes stayed on Meg.
Something about their intensity, their strength, corded the parts of her that were crumbling. She breathed in time with him. She wished she were not breathing at all.
“I never wanted to become this.” Mrs. Musgrave approached Meg, reached around her, and backed away with the double-barrel pistol from Abraham’s pocket.
The circle was black.
All the faces, furniture, and candles blurred away. With slowing speed, she was aware of the herbal-sweet smell of chrysanthemum in a nearby vase, Abraham stepping aside, and Pippins scratching at the closed drawing room doors because there was no one about to stroke him.
He should be with Violet.
Upstairs.
Safe.
Her heartbeat whooshed in her ears, a humming rhythm, as a flash of movement tingled into her alertness.
The frantic thump, thump of footsteps.
Mrs. Musgrave weeping, shoulders withering, eyes closing.
Then Tom. With a shout of protest, he lunged between the gun and Meg, just as a sharp crack resounded throughout the room.
No.
His body whipped back.
Another shot, and fire pinched her shoulder, jerking her body. All her muscles wilted.
“Tommy!”
Meg didn’t know who croaked his name. She didn’t know anything.
Except that the room flipped and no one was there to make her stand.
Tom, Tom. Veins strained in her neck as her mouth opened and a soundless scream unleashed.
Everything was flashing colors and flitting blackness, but she reached across the rug and groped for his still body—
“I did not want to do this.” Mrs. Musgrave’s dress swished as she edged closer to Mr. Foxcroft’s chair. “But you will relinquish your lies. The world will know the truth.”
Everything faded but Tom’s face.
His eyes were dazed.
His skin already draining.
No, no.
“Confess to the murder of every single life you took.” Mrs. Musgrave’s voice cracked. “Or watch the only person you love, and the only person I love, bleed to death.”
Move. The command quivered throughout all of his muscles as he turned on his side and faced her. He swept his fingers to her face, grabbed the back of her neck, and scooted her closer to him.
Her eyes stayed closed. For too long she had pressed into him and staunched his blood flow with the folds of her dress. Prayers had breezed from her lips. He knew, not because the words possessed sound but because they’d stirred from her so many times before.
In the apothecary shop as she leaned over the white-covered bed, draping some cool cloth across the skin of a fevered brow. Or late at night, when she prepared a poultice. Or at church, the Sunday after someone died.
He never thought she would pray this way for him.
That he’d pray the same way back.
That he’d beg again.
God, please. His eyes closed too. The room was empty. Too long ago, the old goat had gone limp in his chair and the three blackguards had scattered to guard the house. “A horse,” someone had said, their voice rough and faded. “Comin’ up the drive.”
Mrs. Musgrave had whimpered something. Tom couldn’t remember what.
Then everyone was gone, the room was silent, and a long stream of sunlight shimmered in through a crack in the drawing room draperies. Colors flitted across his vision. Every time he blinked, the weight was stronger, the pull deeper, luring him into blackness with the cool siren of numbness.
Dinnae let her die.
Meg’s face nuzzled closer. Her nose against his.
“I’m sorry.” Did she hear him? When she didn’t answer, he drew nearer still, the rug chafing his cheek. “Ye need to run.”
“No.”
“The window.”
“They will see me.”
“Lass—”
“I have no strength.”
He said nothing, because he didn’t have strength either. Her pulse throbbed beneath his palm and kept him alive. “Ye’re crying.”
She nodded.
“Dinnae cry.”
“I wanted to sew more of them.”
“What?”
“Curtains. For the windows. In the cottage.”
“They dinnae need curtains.”
“I knew you would say that.” She smiled, the frailest laugh brushing his face. “I wanted to find an armchair too. I think you would have looked nice in it … sitting in front of the hearth.”
“I dinnae like to sit.”
“I would have sat with you.”
“Och.”
“You do not believe me?”
“Nay.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” Heat flushed his skin, stoking embers of grief, stillness, memories, loss.
He thought of the seashore and the fishing boat anchored among lichen-covered rocks.
Sand under her fingernails. Her shoes washed away by the tide.
“We would have never married, lass. Ye know we would have never married.”
“No. Of course not.”
“I made ye furious.”
“You stole my stockings.”
“Even before.” Hot liquid pooled at the edges of his eyes. “Even before ye forgot, ’twouldnae have worked.”
“No.” Her lips lifted to his. At first slow, moist, her kiss there then gone, like a feather tickling his senses. “Never.”
He hesitated.
She hesitated.
Then her mouth fell into his, her lips burst with vigor, and her hand raced up his cheek. She traced her fingers—her precious, blood-stained fingers—along his hairline. Her taste was sweet, her head angling with his as their lips slid back and forth in dancing motions.
All of his senses resurrected.
Like a whirlpool, he was sucked into the vortex of their love—a love he had not possessed since the night the apothecary shop went up in flames.
He tried to remind himself this wasn’t Meg.
This wasn’t the girl he’d snuck to the assembly ball with nor chased into Brownie’s loft with a bucket of cold water.
But she was.
Everything about her.
She loved him. Like she used to love him. Almost—maybe. He wasn’t certain because it felt old and new at the same time and he didn’t understand. He didn’t know if she wanted the cottage red or brown or green or yellow.
If she would have married him.
If he could have had this … this moment—her touch, her softness—for the rest of his life. He’d never wanted to hold onto life so desperately. Never longed so much, nor groped so frantically, to live.
Against his will, his hand slackened on her face. She faded. A door whined open and closed.
Mrs. Musgrave’s voice echoed across the dimming valley of death. “Someone is here. We have not time.”
Save Meg. Tom clutched her as the life seeped from his veins. God, answer me. This time. Please.
“We have to kill them both.”
“I won’t let you.” He was dead, and the room reeked of blood. The parts of her she knew—Margaret Foxcroft of silk dresses and abbey finery—wanted to fold her arms over her head and cower.
Against everything she wanted to believe, mayhap Mrs. Musgrave spoke the truth. Maybe Meg had been an instrument of death, as guilty as Uncle. If not for premeditation or wicked intention, then for ignorance.
For living with him, loving him, and never suspecting.
For always seeing good in his eyes when she should have seen iniquity.
Shoulder throbbing, mind dimming, Meg stood.
She couldn’t look anywhere—not at the rug nor Tom’s hand sprawled open nor the enormous splotches of heavy blood on her clothes.
Devastation permeated her bones. “You said in your letters God would not blame you for this. That you were doing what is right.”
“I am.”
“I know you cannot believe that.”
Like threads unraveling from a spool of yarn, Mrs. Musgrave wobbled and framed her cheeks with both hands. “Do it, Abraham.”
“I won’t let you—”
“I said do it!”
The brute leveled his gun on Uncle the same time Meg sprinted. Her body shielded him. Just as Tom had done for her. Just as he would have done again and again and again.
If she wanted to die with the strength of anyone, it was him.
And the girl he’d loved.
Meg of then, who had survived the alley, who had smiled anyway, who had been brave enough to take off her shoes and run. Who had trusted herself.
Tears rushed her throat, and her trembling fingers curled into fists. “Tom told me stories. The things we did together. About Lenox and that time we brought you home an injured puffin. How it was shivering, so we all sat in front of your kitchen hearth while you wrapped its wing.”
“You wrapped it too, dear. You were so gentle. There was so much good in you.”
“I want to do good.”
“I know.”
“Why won’t you let me? How could you do this to us?” Her throat burned. “To Tom?”
“It may surprise you to know that Tom was not the only one I loved.” Mrs. Musgrave’s head angled, her voice motherly, a little cooing. Sadness moistened her words. “I loved you too, my dear.”
Abraham raised the gun.
“I’m sorry, little Meg.”
No.
“You were so sweet and kind in those younger years. I watched you grow. I wish your uncle would have stopped, just once, to realize he was taking your life too.”
Dead silence charged the room.
With tears trekking her cheeks, Mrs. Musgrave gave the faintest nod to Abraham—but he never fired the gun, because the drawing room doors busted open.
Distant shouts poured in.
Motion.
A sea of unfamiliar faces, grunts, dizziness, the ceiling above her face. Then Meade, with his strong and coal-fuming clothes, lifting her head off the floor. “You’re alive.”
A cry nearly broke loose from within her.
Because Tom wasn’t.