Chapter 1 #2
Robby frowned. “Dickie didn’t tell me about no other pris’ner.”
“I saw him today when I cleaned the hearth,” she said. “You’d better take him up a bowl, too.”
“Yes, Miss Josephine,” Robby said meekly, and she dished more stew out. He towered over her and didn’t seem very bright, but he would sometimes follow her around like a puppy unless she sent him off to do an errand for her.
“Take it to… the minister for his dinner, and then you may have your own.”
Obediently, Robby trotted off and Junia huffed a sigh to brace herself before she went down the hallway to the dining room.
It wasn’t much—just a table and four chairs—but Dickie insisted he and Jasper should eat there rather than in the kitchen, where she would be much more able to eavesdrop on them.
As usual, Dickie was drinking deep of the cheap gin he brought with him by the case from London, and Jasper wasn’t in much better condition.
As she cleared their plates, their only discussion was a drunken argument about the latest prizefight they had seen in London.
She ignored Dickie’s hard pinch on her bottom.
He was already too drunk to do anything, and even if he had wanted more, she wedged her bedroom door shut every night to make it not worth his trouble to molest her.
“But why a parson?” Jasper whined, and Junia slowed her movements to listen as she cleaned up.
Dickie took another swig of his tankard of gin and belched. “That’s the way it goes sometimes in this business. People stick their noses in where they don’t belong and have to get cut out. Best not to worry about it.”
“Havin’ a parson around makes me feel guilty,” Jasper muttered. “Like I shoulda gone to chapel like me mum wanted.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dickie said, and the conversation turned again until Junia felt she could not dawdle in the room any longer without drawing attention.
Back in the kitchen, she dished out stew for Robby and Jem, the other guard, and cleaned the kitchen up around them as they ate, banking the fire and preparing the ingredients she would need to make porridge in the morning.
Robby pushed his bowl away. “That was right good, Miss Josephine.”
“Thank you,” Junia said, a thread of nervousness creeping up her spine. Jasper and Jem were indifferent to her, but she was starting to suspect Robby was developing… feelings for her.
If she encouraged those feelings, it might help her carry out her plan, make him more careless about his guard duties.
But, no, she could not bring herself to lead a man on like that, even in the service of freeing her father.
Not to mention that it was potentially dangerous, since he was a criminal participating in a kidnapping. Two kidnappings, now.
Junia turned away to finish her cleaning, ignoring him. Robby hovered for a long moment before Jem punched him lightly on the shoulder and Robby obediently followed the other man out the kitchen door to their posts for the night.
Suppressing a yawn, she lit a candle from the banked fire and made her way to the tiny scullery maid’s room behind the kitchen’s fireplace.
There was barely enough space for her straw pallet and the chest which held an extra work dress and a few chemises, but she preferred the windowless quarters to a more spacious room that would be easier for one of the men to sneak into.
She pushed the wooden wedge under the door, undressed and washed, combed and wrapped her hair, and lay herself down for the night, head still spinning.
As she lay on the thin pallet, memories she had pushed aside flooded back.
His profile against the setting sun as they stood at the rail watching dolphins swim beside the ship.
Walking around and around the deck with her mother on his arm, mesmerized by the broad shoulders inside his scarlet uniform coat as she and her younger sister Zillah followed behind.
The way he would throw his head back and laugh and she would stare at his strong throat, even knowing he thought of her as a younger sister, at best. She had been desperately infatuated, and he could not have been kinder or more remote.
After the Battle of Waterloo, she had read the published lists of the names of the dead officers over and over again, heart in her throat, relieved beyond words his name had never appeared.
She knew he was still alive, and that knowledge allowed her to continue to dream that, one day, she might look up and there he would be, rounding a corner of the street to greet her, like magic. Or destiny.
She flopped onto her other side, angry with herself.
She was not that young refugee any longer.
The success of her father’s counting-house and the support of other black Londoners had provided a comfortable middle-class life far beyond what she ever could have dreamed when her family had been held in bondage in Maryland.
So why must she now dream of even more merely because Major Avondale had at last re-appeared in her life, handsomer than ever but seemingly in a disguise of his own?
Why had they kidnapped Major Avondale? And why did they think he was a clergyman?
As Philip listened carefully that evening, he could hear movement on the other side of the wall. The one to the north, as far as he could tell.
A short murmur of voices quickly faded away. To his surprise, footsteps returned a few minutes later and the door unlocked and opened to reveal a large but dull-looking man holding a tray with a bowl and a piece of bread on it.
“She said you was to have it. Miss Josephine.”
“Ah. Thank you, then.” Philip took the tray and set it on the floor. The other man left as abruptly as he had arrived, locking the door behind him.
At least someone had remembered to feed him. He suspected it was all Junia. He likely could have starved for all Dickie and… what was the other name? Jas? They did not strike him as the most diligent of wardens.
He could not help but wonder again what had brought her to this pass.
He had made it a point to be present when her family debarked the ship upon their arrival, giving first her mother and then her younger sister a steadying hand as they picked their way down the rope ladder to the boat that would bring them to the shores of England.
Junia had allowed her hand to rest in his for a long moment as she looked up at him, her dark eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “You’ve been so kind, Major. I will never forget you.”
He had laughed, to conceal his own emotion. “Of course you shall, Miss Reynolds. You have a whole new life ahead of you.”
Ducking her head, she squeezed his hand one last time before letting go to follow her mother and sister down to the boat. Swallowing hard, he turned and shook her father’s hand with a smile.
“Goodbye, Mr. Reynolds.”
“Goodbye, Major. Why not stop in and see us sometime once we get settled?”
Philip shook his head, but smiled. “I’m afraid my duties will not allow it. But I wish you and your family all the best.”
Caius Reynolds had cast a shrewd glance at him before following his family down to the boat. Philip turned his back and walked away, knowing he could not bear to watch her be rowed away from him.
He would always wonder about her once she was gone from his life, but both honor and duty required him to let her go without allowing her to suspect his emotions. She was only seventeen; she would soon forget him.
The pacing began again on the other side of the wall, drawing Philip back from his memories.
Up and down. Back and forth. Repetitive, purposeful, as if to fill the time.
It was the deliberation of the movement that convinced him the person on the other side of the wall must be a fellow prisoner.
Why else would someone pace like that, in repetitive steps which rarely seemed to vary?
If there was another prisoner, a possible reason for Junia’s presence in the house occurred to him in a flash.
Philip waited until the coals in the fire burned low and all sound in the house died down to tap experimentally on the wall, rapping twice in quick succession, pausing, and then repeating the two raps, trying to make it loud enough for the sound to reach through the plaster but quiet enough not to be heard by the guards below the window.
There was a long pause. Then a series of soft footfalls to the wall.
Two raps in response, then a pause, then two more, in the same quick succession.
If one of the kidnappers had been the man in the other room, they would have shouted at him to quiet down, or even burst into the room to silence him. Only a fellow prisoner would be interested in communicating.
And Philip now had a suspicion as to who it could be.