Chapter 21
Their case against Penharrow was growing. Webb had finally arrived back from Wales with Mrs. Griffth’s sworn testimony all witnessed by a solicitor from London who’d accompanied him. She was too ill to come herself, but she was thrilled when she heard Megan was safe and with her family.
Webb said they had encountered some hostility form Penharrow’s men but had managed to evade them.
In the letter Mrs. Griffth swore that James had been at the lodge and was escorted away by Penharrow’s men, but she had not witnessed his death.
So they still didn’t have him for James murder.
But the Bow Street runners had men in Wales and suspected that the minute Penharrow was arrested for fraud, someone would talk.
And as suspected Penharrow had filed his guardian documents which they could prove were fraudulent.
They at least had him on that, but Oliver wanted more.
Harry had hired Bow Street Runners to look into Penharrow’s operations they had collected evidence of unscrupulous behavior of violence and extortion and illegal trading.
Given all of that, they’d become too complacent.
Megan thought that now she was a lady, and with her prestigious family welcoming her into their distinguished fold, Penharrow wouldn’t risk taking her again, given it would give her family the proof they needed to charge him.
But once again she underestimated his desperation or was it his determination that she should not escape his clutches.
The morning had started innocuously enough.
It had been her mother’s idea. Three days had passed since the dinner at Newbury House, and Margaret Fairfax, Duchess of Newbury, had woken with the particular restlessness of a woman who had been confined indoors for too long, worrying about too many things she could not control.
A carriage ride, she had declared at breakfast. A short one.
The dressmaker’s on Bond Street had sent word that two of Megan’s new gowns were ready for a final fitting, and it was not, her mother reasoned firmly, reasonable to ask a woman to live as a prisoner in her own home simply because one wicked man wished it so.
Oliver would not have agreed. Megan knew it with certainty as she settled into the carriage beside the Dowager Duchess of Saxton, who had arrived at Newbury House early that morning and declared herself delighted to accompany them.
The thought of his reaction had sat at the back of her mind all through breakfast, a small persistent voice she had chosen, quite deliberately, to ignore.
She was tired of being sensible. She was tired of sitting in rooms that other people decided were safe for her and waiting for someone else to determine when she might come back to life.
“He will be furious,” Dorothea observed pleasantly, arranging her skirts.
“Then we shan’t tell him until after,” her mother replied with a serenity that Megan suspected was at least partly performance.
There were four outriders, a coachman, and two of Harry’s men riding ahead and behind.
It was not, her mother had argued, as though they were unprotected.
And in truth, Megan had looked at the carriage with its guards and the bright midmorning sun slanting across the street and thought that perhaps they were worrying too much.
Penharrow had filed his fraudulent documents.
The Bow Street Runners were building their case.
He was in a precarious enough position that surely, surely, he would not risk anything so brazen as this.
She had been wrong before, of course.
But she was tired of being afraid. She was tired of letting him take even this from her, even ordinary mornings, even something as simple as riding through her own city in daylight with her mother beside her and her betrothal ring warm on her finger.
She pressed her thumb against the green stone as the carriage moved out into the street and told herself it was enough.
The guards were enough. The daylight was enough.
She was a duke’s daughter with a marquess for a future husband and an entire family surrounding her like a fortress, and Penharrow was a desperate man running out of road.
She believed it entirely, right up until the moment she didn’t.
The carriage had made it as far as St. James’s Street before everything came apart.
The first indication was the shout from the lead outrider, cut off so abruptly that the silence after it was worse than any sound.
Megan’s head turned toward the window at the same moment the carriage lurched to a violent halt that pitched the Dowager Duchess forward into her daughter-in-law’s arm.
Horses screamed somewhere behind them. There was a crash of wood against wood, a second carriage drawn up sideways across the road, and then the sounds of struggling that Megan recognized with a lurch of sick horror because she had been cataloguing violence her entire adult life and her body knew it before her mind had caught up.
“What in heaven’s name…” her mother began.
The carriage door wrenched open.
Megan had one clear look at the men outside before Dorothea’s hand closed around her wrist like a vice.
They were not liveried. They were not constables.
Two of them were dealing with Harry’s outriders with a calm efficiency that told her they had done this before, that this had been planned down to the minute, that nothing happening outside that door was accidental.
The third man was already at the carriage step with his eyes fixed on Megan and nothing in his expression at all, no cruelty, no satisfaction, only the blank professional attention of someone who had been paid to collect her and intended to do exactly that.
“Lady Megan,” he said. A courtesy, of sorts.
The sound of her title in his mouth made her stomach turn over.
“You will not—” Her mother’s voice was magnificent in its fury, the full authority of a duchess at its height, and entirely useless. Megan heard it and loved her for it and felt the futility of it like a stone dropping through still water.
Dorothea did not waste words on futile commands.
She had, in her eighty-one years, faced down enough men to know precisely which battles could be won and which could not.
Her grip on Megan’s wrist tightened for one fierce moment, and in it Megan felt everything the old woman wanted to say and could not.
Then the man in the doorway reached for Megan’s arm, and the grip broke.
Megan looked at her mother’s face. White with terror and rigid with the effort of containing it.
Her eyes were bright in the way that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with the sheer force of will required not to come apart entirely.
Behind her, Dorothea sat very straight, and her expression was grief, clear and unguarded, the kind Megan had never seen on that particular face before.
Something in Megan went very quiet.
“It’s all right,” she said. She kept her voice even, because the last thing she would do, the absolute last thing, was let them witness her break apart while Penharrow’s man watched from the doorway. “It’s all right. Don’t follow.”
She let them take her because the alternative was watching them hurt two women she loved, and she had years of practice in calculating exactly what could and could not be prevented.
She stepped out of the carriage herself.
She would not be dragged. She had made that decision in the space of a single breath and she held to it, because it was the only thing she had left to hold to, that small and furious scrap of dignity, the choice to walk when she could not choose anything else.
They moved her quickly through a side street she did not recognize, bundled her into a second carriage that was already waiting with its blinds drawn, and the door shut behind her before she had time to do anything useful.
Her hands were not bound. That surprised her.
The man who settled into the seat opposite was not one she recognized from the lodge in Wales, and he did not speak.
He simply watched her with the careful attention of a man paid to deliver something intact.
Megan sat with her spine straight and her hands folded in her lap and gave him nothing.
But inside, in the place she had learned at sixteen to keep entirely separate from her face, everything was screaming.
She had thought she was past this. She had genuinely, foolishly, catastrophically believed that the worst was behind her.
She had sat at her mother’s dinner table with Oliver’s hand warm around hers in the candlelight and told herself, in the wordless private language of a woman finally daring to hope, that she was safe now.
That the cage was open. That she had walked out of it into sunlight and the door could never be shut again because now there were people who knew where she was and who she was and would tear the world apart if anyone tried to take her back.
She had forgotten, somewhere in the warmth of these last weeks, how very good Penharrow was at taking things.
The ring on her finger caught a blade of light through the carriage blind and she pressed her thumb against it hard, harder, until the stone bit into her skin, and she breathed.
Just breathed. The way she had learned in the earliest years at the lodge, when panic was a luxury, she could not afford and composure was the only weapon she possessed.
It would not be like before. She told herself this with the deliberate repetition of someone assembling a wall brick by brick.
It would not be like before because she was not a little girl any longer, ignorant and unprotected and entirely alone.
She was not going back to be his slave. She had a mother who would already be dispatching every resource at her disposal.
She had a brother who had hired Bow Street Runners and a solicitor and would not stop until he found her. She had Oliver.