Clandestine (30 page)

Though she had no appetite at all, Sarah helped herself to food from the sideboard, then sat down and allowed him to fill her coffee cup for her. His eyes were very dark, a deep, watchful gaze.

“I thought you might have already left Wyldshay,” she said.

“You'd rather I had?”

She stirred a lump of sugar into her cup. “My loyalty is only to my cousin, sir. If that means that I must continue to risk your company, then so be it.”

“I'm honored by your forbearance, ma'am.”

Sarah cut toast and buttered it. “Very well! I still don't think that Rachel can have transformed so dramatically. It's like her to be careless and unthinking; it's not like her to be deliberately cruel. So the only question that matters is: What happened to change that?”

He pushed away from the table to gaze out of the window. Another lovely summer day, undermined, as if by a river, by their disaster.

“No,” he said. “The only question that matters is how the devil you and I can go on together from here.”

“Warily?”

He spun about to meet her gaze, then laughed. “Because we're still caught together in this maze—though perhaps it's been more like sharing a boat on a trackless ocean.”

Sarah took a few deep breaths. When he laughed, her heart turned over. When he seemed hurt, or watchful, or angry, her treacherous pulse still resounded to his moods and his presence. Yet an abyss of pain yawned beneath all of that awareness.

She pushed her plate away, leaving her food untouched. “Either way, sir, there's no other option. Though it might be accurate to say that I, at least, have been feeling a little demented. Nevertheless—though with the utmost caution—I'm forced to insist that we agree to join forces again.”

“Neither of us has much choice in that,” he said.

“Yes, because Rachel's true nature lies at the heart of our problem, and we each have our different perspectives to offer. In spite of your…intimacy with her, I'm her cousin. We grew up together. Whatever the evidence might suggest, I refuse to believe that she's really wicked, or even entirely frivolous.”

“Even though she pretended to you that she was working as a governess when she was in fact at Knight's Cottage, or living in Hampstead with me? And before that, when she claimed to still be working for Grail, even though she'd left his house that Christmas?”

“Even then. We'll never learn the truth unless we uncover all of that past history.”

“Are you prepared to face whatever that might be?”

Sarah stood up. Her heart pounded as she reached into her pocket for Rachel's last letter.

“Yes, I am. And if we're truly to go on together, we must share everything that we know. So you'd better see this.”

Tall, vigorous, Guy strode around the table to take the folded paper. He glanced at the superscription and his nostrils flared.

“From Rachel?” He looked up. “When?”

“Delivered by hand the morning I left Buckleigh. It came with the rest of the post the day before. But if you remember the way that you and I parted, sir, you'll realize that you left me no way of telling you.”

“I understand. I don't blame you.” He flipped open the letter and read rapidly. Anger sparked in his eyes as he looked up. “How dare Rachel write you such a cavalier note! She should have known what her bizarre requests must already have cost you.”

“I admit that my first reaction was as much resentment as relief. But that letter may also be further evidence of just how desperate she is.”

Guy crumpled the paper in one fist. “If you can still defend your cousin after this, you're a nobler soul than I am.”

“Destroy it, if you like,” Sarah said. “I can still remember every word.”

He took the tinderbox from the mantel, crouched at the grate, and set fire to Rachel's letter.

Guy knelt for a few more moments, watching the paper char into ash.

“At least we know now that she's still in Devon,” Sarah said, “though we didn't find her.”

“Instead she found us, though by then her purpose was only to get rid of us again.” He thrust away from the fireplace. “Why the devil did you decide to share something so damning?”

Sarah looked down. How could she still be breathing when her chest hurt so much, when her throat was filled with ashes? She lifted her cup, though the coffee was now getting cold.

“Because we can go nowhere unless we share all of the truth. Miracle thought you must have learned something vital from Lord Jonathan. Did you? You said that you and he were corresponding.”

He stopped to stand with one shoulder braced against a bookcase, his arms folded over his chest.

“Jack and I have been following up every lead we could think of, ever since the duchess's ball. I sent a man to Norfolk, who learned nothing new, while Jack took care of Grail Hall. Before she left there that Christmas, Rachel engaged a servant lad—just as she did at Knight's Cottage—to intercept your letters and forward hers. Once Jack knew who'd so abused the earl's franking privileges, he visited the boy and exercised a little of his deadly personal charm—”

Sarah's cup slipped from her hand to crash to the floor. Cold coffee spilled across the carpet. Guy calmly rang for a footman and pointed. The man nodded and retreated without a word.

“So now you know where Rachel was living during those missing five months,” Sarah said. “This servant boy told Lord Jonathan, who sent you the news in his last letter?”

“It's why I had to leave Buckleigh as quickly as possible.”

As if all the pages opened simultaneously in a book, she saw multiple implications, none of them comfortable. “But first you wanted to send me away?”

“Do you think I should have left you to the tender mercies of Lottie Whitely?”

She dropped into her chair. “No. No, of course, you wanted me out of the way, but only because you were still trying to prevent my discovering the truth.”

“Alas,” he said gently, “a little late for that now.”

A maid came in with a bucket and cloth. Guy watched her mop up the stains. His eyes were unfathomable. Sarah waited in agony until the girl finished and left the room.

“So where was Rachel living?” she asked. “What was she doing?”

He glanced back at her. A dark caution still haunted his gaze. “She rented rooms not far from the Three Barrels from a Mrs. Lane in an alley called Cooper Street, a stone's throw from the docks. She went there directly from Grail Hall.”

“But why?”

“I don't know. Neither does Jack. He needed to get home to Anne, so that quest is now mine.”

“No,” she said.
“Ours!”

He walked to the window to gaze out. “Even in the face of what else may be discovered, Sarah?”

She stood up and braced herself to face his dismissal, his scorn, or his careful excuses. Any of them would take all of her courage to fight, but more pain was irrelevant.

“The alternative is that in a vain attempt to save my sensibilities you'll leave me here at Wyldshay, while you ride off alone?”

He turned and raised a brow, then he laughed like a man on a runaway horse.

“On the contrary, ma'am! I've already ordered our carriage. Unless you have some objection, my intention—once you have finished breakfast—is that you and I shall go there together, even if we scrap like fishwives every step of the way.”

M
RS
. L
ANE
'
S BUILDING WAS SHABBY, SANDWICHED BETWEEN
a chandler's shop and a butcher's. The afternoon had already worn away to evening by the time Sarah and Guy left their servants and carriage at a busy posting house, and walked together to Cooper Street.

The Three Barrels—the inn where Guy had first met Rachel over fourteen months ago—lay closer, but Guy had said merely that he didn't think it wise that they stay there, so he had taken rooms at the Anchor on the other side of the port.

They had not fought like fishwives. They had not fought at all. One of the maids from Wyldshay, a girl named Ellen, had shared the carriage, and as the miles rolled by, Guy had led Sarah into a discussion of the Celtic myths: the casual conversation of mere social acquaintances with no history of either passion or strife.

With that same fragile amity, her hand was now tucked into his arm. Yet, however calm their conversation, her heart was alternately racing and sliding to ragged stops.

They stopped in the doorway beside the chandler's: one that must lead to the stairs up to the apartments above the shops. Her fingers closed involuntarily on his coat sleeve, the clutch of a woman about to be thrown to the Minotaur.

Guy smiled down at her. “It's all right,” he said. “We may find the past, but I don't think we'll find monsters.”

Sarah swallowed her apprehension and smiled. “Unless this lady approaching us from the right is the landlady. In which case, you're entirely wrong, sir, and we have a monster by the tail.”

He glanced around and laughed. A heavyset woman was fast bearing down on them, her face flushed with annoyance. She stopped, panting, to glare at them.

Guy bowed with exquisite charm and indicated the door they were blocking.

“Mrs. Lane? These are your premises, ma'am?”

“Might be!” She looked him up and down. “Perhaps that depends on who's doing the asking!”

“Not the taxman,” he said gaily. “Merely an idle gentleman on a quest, who believes you may help him. The name is David Gordon, ma'am. Perhaps we may further our acquaintance over a jug of brown ale?”

The woman laughed, and her face creased into a quite different shape.

“Well, I'd not say no to that, sir! Especially when the gentleman doing the asking is such a well-set-up young fellow as yourself.” She nodded at Sarah. “Your lady wife, sir?”

“My dear companion, for better, for worse, Mrs. Lane,” he said, patting Sarah's gloved hand. “Married six years last Friday.”

She could hardly object to such an obviously necessary ruse, yet his words resounded very oddly in Sarah's heart:
For better, for worse…for richer, for poorer…

“Then you've caught yourself a pretty fine fish, Mrs. Gordon.” Mrs. Lane grinned crudely at Sarah. “No offense, m' dear, but—plain as you are—you've done very well for yourself and anyone would be a fool to deny it.”

Guy clamped warning fingers over Sarah's hand, but her trepidation had given way to an absurd temptation to hilarity.

She gave the landlady a conspiratorial wink. “Then you must be a very good judge of a pretty face, ma'am, since neither you nor I have ever seen one in the mirror.”

Mrs. Lane tossed back her bonnet and roared with laughter.

Five minutes later they all were comfortably seated in her cluttered parlor, cracking open a jug of brown ale. Guy flirted and charmed until Mrs. Lane was twinkling and smiling.

They broached a second jug.

“I was a good-looking woman in my day, I'll have you know,” Mrs. Lane said.

“You still are, ma'am,” Guy said. “And, as it happens, your sound judgment in the matter is most fortunate.”

She dimpled like a girl. “And why would that be, sir?”

“We're looking for news of my wife's cousin, a very pretty lady indeed. We believe she stayed here last year: Rachel Wren, or perhaps Mansard?”

“No, I'm sorry, sir!” The landlady wiped ale from her mouth. “I've never heard of anyone of that name on Cooper Street. And I never forget a tenant. Never!”

“But my cousin is quite remarkable, ma'am,” Sarah said. “Hair like sunshine and eyes like the sky. No one ever forgets her. She'd have arrived here at the end of 1827, around Christmas.”

“Ah! And then she left, sudden like, that next May?” Mrs. Lane downed another draft of ale. “Well, now you describe her, dearie, I know just the lady you mean. Always very quiet. Kept herself to herself. Would that be her?”

Guy sipped his ale casually, as if their inquiries were merely idle curiosity. Sarah damped down her impatience, though her heart raced.

“Very likely,” he said. “So what name did this lady give you, ma'am?”

“Why, that would be Mrs. Grail, sir.”

The word slipped out before Sarah could stop herself.
“Grail?”

“Well, I suppose I should have guessed that was a false name, shouldn't I?” The landlady chortled. “Not likely you'd find one of that family lodging here, is it?” She leaned forward as if sharing a huge secret. “Lord Grail's family seat's not more than fifty miles from here, a great fancy place. You can't miss it.”

Guy set down his glass. “And how did she spend her time here, ma'am? I'm sure any landlady with such a kind heart takes a personal interest in all of her tenants.”

Mrs. Lane simpered. “Well, indeed I do, sir, even if I say so myself! Poor little thing spent all her time writing letters. Then she walked to the post office every day, rain or shine, as if her life depended on it.”

“Did anyone write back?” Sarah asked.

“Only some female relative in Bath, or so she said. So she was disappointed in that, wasn't she?”

Gentle, solicitous, as if they really were married, Guy slipped one arm along the back of Sarah's chair. She glanced up at him, and her heart skipped a beat. Belying his light smile, his eyes were grim and bleak, as if he looked into darkness.

“Did she seem to be expecting letters from someone else?” he asked.

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn't it, sir?” the landlady said. “She hoped to hear from the father.”

“Oh, no, that's impossible!” Sarah said quickly. “My cousin's father died long before she came here.”

Mrs. Lane gave her a look of withering pity. “Not
her
father, dear! The baby's father! But the rogue left her in the lurch. Not the first time that's happened and it won't be the last. So I always thought it was lucky for her that the babe was born dead.”

Sarah's stomach contracted as a painful spasm caught her beneath the ribs. The room went white. Demon voices shrilled as if screaming very far away—somewhere on the edge of Hades—though she could barely make out the sound, because all the cheap china figurines and pottery jugs in the room were clattering together in her ears.

Yet Guy pulled her firmly against his own body, his palm warm on her shoulder.

“Hold on, Sarah!” he murmured in her ear. “Lean your head against me! Do it now!”

His other hand found her fingers under the table and squeezed hard.

She gulped down her nausea and dropped her head against him, while she locked her fingers on his like a drowning woman clinging to a rope.

His heart beat steadily. His strong pulse throbbed against her palm.

At last Sarah found herself emerging into a vast silence, eased only by the calm cadences of Guy's voice, still speaking softly to Mrs. Lane.

“Then she was already with child when she first came here?”

“Why, yes, sir! Must ha' been! A good six months gone. Though she hid it very well, or I'd never have given her the room to start with. Yet she always paid her rent on time, and when her belly got big I felt sorry for her, poor little thing. No, she definitely carried that baby full term, though she ought to have gotten rid of it long before, for it was obvious she was in trouble.”

Sarah swallowed hard, tasting cheap ale and the dregs of heartbreak as she clung to Guy's hand.

“Yet her baby was stillborn?” he asked quietly.

“Dead as a drowned sailor. I'm very sorry, Mr. Gordon, sir, if that's upsetting to you and your wife, but it's the plain truth. Would have been a boy, too, so the midwife said, but what use is another bastard to the world? So, like I said, she was better off.”

“And exactly when did all this happen?”

“Let me see, now! That would have been in March of last year—1828. She was poorly afterwards, poor lamb, for quite two months, though she had her color back by May. Lucky for her that she did! For she'd entirely run out of money and she asked if I would let her stay another month on credit.”

“Of course, you couldn't do that,” Guy said. “No one could.”

“I work for my keep,” Mrs. Lane said, bridling. “There was no reason she couldn't do the same. She took a position at the Three Barrels—though I doubt if that would have kept her, and if she'd turned to the street, as so many girls do, she'd have had to find another place to live. I keep a respectable house, sir. As I said, if I'd known she was in trouble when she came, I'd never have let her have the rooms.”

“But did she give you any reason to hope that she expected further funds?”

“She said that she did. She still thought that her lover would come for her, you see, even after all that time. And I suppose he must have done, for she walked in here the very next day, merry as a grig, and paid up in gold. Then she packed up her things and was off. I've never heard hide nor hair of her since.”

“So your kindness was well rewarded.” Guy slid a small purse across the table. “I'm sure you won't take amiss this small token of our personal appreciation?”

The landlady slipped the purse into a pocket and dimpled. “Not at all, sir! Most generous! I did no more than my Christian duty, I'm sure.”

Guy helped Sarah to her feet. Still dizzy, she clung to his arm.

“You recall the midwife's name, Mrs. Lane?” he asked.

“Why, yes, sir! I knew her very well.” She laughed. “Bess Medway would have delivered the devil for a bottle of gin.”

“And her address?”

Mrs. Lane shifted her large bulk and sighed. “I can tell you where she is, sir, but it won't help you. Bess died last April, not two weeks before Easter, and she's buried at St. Michael's.”

“L
IE
back,” he said. “It's all right, Sarah. I'm here.”

She glanced up. His eyes were dark with concern, his lips white at the corners as if he knew some terrible, heart-wrenching pain. She turned away as hot tears choked her vision again.

Somehow, they had walked back to the Anchor. Guy had supported her every step of the way with a silent, absolute compassion.

He pounded a pillow into shape for her head and helped her onto the bed.

“So I'm proved wrong,” she said bitterly. “I should have gone back to Bath, as you wished.”

“Hush,” he said gently. “No one's to blame. However hurtful, we can handle this truth, Sarah.”

Her throat hurt. Her eyes stung with sand and salt, as if she had been staring for hours into the teeth of a storm.

“Yet Rachel was in such deep trouble and she never…why didn't she trust me to help her? Instead, she wrote all those silly letters about still living at Grail Hall—”

“Don't!” He untied ribbons and set her bonnet aside. “What, really, could you have done? You were already sending her all the funds you could spare. And she really believed, if Mrs. Lane's correct, that she'd hear any day from the father of her baby.”

“Daedalus?” She shivered. “She met him at Grail Hall?”

“Perhaps.” He lifted her feet onto the cover, then sat down on the end of the bed to tug the laces from her boots. “We'll sort all that out later.”

“She must have felt so ashamed,” Sarah whispered. “And then—after all of that—to lose the baby!”

Guy eased away her boots and set them on the floor.

“You need to rest,” he said.

“I've been wrong,” she said, “about so many things, though of course I can handle this truth. It's just that—”

“Hush! You need to cry and you need to sleep. You can do both quite safely right here. No one will disturb you.”

Sarah turned her face into the pillow. Anguish choked her.

Would have been a boy, too, so the midwife said, but what use is another bastard to the world
—

She closed her eyes, lost in grief.

He sat in silence for a few moments, just his presence a comfort. But then he began to tug away her hairpins, gentle little tugs, easing away the tight plaits that bound her head. His fingers began to massage her scalp and the back of her neck. The gentle, soothing rhythm spread through her veins to spread balm into her aching heart. Little circles, little circles, undermining tension and anguish, taking away pain.