Redemption (7 page)

When
Julian took a breath to argue, Ben shot him a dark look and marched
toward the door.

“How
dare you come in here and tell me what I should and shouldn’t do in
my own house?” Julian countered in hot pursuit.

Ben
stopped in the middle of the hallway, took a breath, and threw him
a dark look.

“I dare
because as far as I see it you had an altercation with your
step-sister last night, and this morning she has gone missing. Your
hatred toward her was perfectly clear for the world to see.” He
narrowed his eyes on Julian and shook his head. “If I don’t get her
exact location within three days I shall raise my suspicions with
the magistrate. Three days, Pendlebury.”

Ben
could only hope and pray that Julian wasn’t sinister enough to hurt
Lizzie. He was selfish and harsh, but also the laziest man Ben had
ever known. But, without any way of knowing what had actually
happened to the woman he had come to care about, Ben couldn’t trust
a word the man said. As far as he was concerned, no man’s sister,
or step-sister, should be able to just walk out of the house, with
their belongings, and simply vanish.

Either
Julian knew where Lizzie was and wasn’t prepared to tell him, or
Lizzie had flounced out in a huff and Julian didn’t care where she
had gone, and hadn’t bothered to go after her. Either way, Ben
could only hope that at the end of the three days his worry would
be over, Lizzie would be found, and they could put this entire
fiasco far behind them and get on with their future
together.

To his
horror, he was an exhausted and emotionally desperate man when he
stood outside Pendlebury House four days later and watched the
magistrate’s men force their way into the property. Investigations
over the past several days had found no trace of Lizzie since she
had been heard by the staff arguing with Julian on the night of the
ball.

“Damn
you to hell, McArthur,” Julian swore as he was dragged through the
front door toward the jailer’s cart. From the look of his alcohol
stained shirt and bloodshot eyes the man had just been hauled out
of bed, or had fallen into a booze fuelled sleep in his armchair.
Whatever the case may be his unkempt appearance spoke of excesses
far beyond someone who was concerned for their loved one’s
whereabouts. This was a man who had spent last night whoring and
gambling, and without a care for anything other than his own
pleasure.

“If you
have nothing to hide, why aren’t you out there searching for your
sister?” Ben challenged.

“I
didn’t kill her,” Julian yelled, and redoubled his efforts to
wrench his arms free of his captors’ hold.

“Where
is she then?” Frustration made Ben’s voice as sharp as it was loud.
“Why? If you didn’t want her, why in the hell didn’t you send her
around to me? Why didn’t you insist that I offer for
her?”

“You
know nothing,” Julian snarled disparagingly. “I wouldn’t want a
McArthur in my family.”

“You
have no family,” Ben argued. “Lizzie was all you had and you
couldn’t even treat her properly.”

“’
Ere, step back,” one of the magistrate’s men ordered. In
spite of his order, the jailer side-stepped around Ben, and
continued to drag Julian toward the cart. “In you get.”

“No,”
Julian spat. “I demand to be released at once. I haven’t done
anything wrong.”

“You
killed her, admit it.” It choked Ben to actually say the words but
desperation drove him to provoke Julian, and get some answers
before he disappeared into the depths of the jail and was never
heard from again. When Julian merely glared at him, and lifted both
feet up to place them on the side of the jailer’s cart door so he
couldn’t be pushed inside, Ben moved closer.

When he
spoke this time his voice was more conciliatory.

“Where
is she, Julian? If you don’t want to get arrested for her murder
then tell me where she is. I will go and fetch her and bring her
back, and prove to the magistrate that she is still alive. It will
secure your release and all of this can be forgotten
about.”

Julian
snorted, but temporarily lost his belligerence. He looked at Ben
with eyes that were startlingly solemn, and considerably more sober
than his visual appearance portrayed him to be. “There is nothing
you can do to help me, McArthur. Not now. It is far too late for
that.”

“Did you
kill her?”

“No, I
did not kill her,” he declared somewhat pompously. “I just don’t
know where she has gone, that’s all.”

“Julian,
you were heard mumbling about bodies and Lizzie being gone,” Ben
warned him. His heart ached at the thought that she might actually
have been taken from him permanently, but he firmly forced the raw
pain aside and focused on getting the answers he needed.

“The
staff told the magistrate when he questioned them. Last night, or
early this morning, when you finally found your way home, you were
rambling about Lizzie being gone, dead bodies, and nobody finding
you. Why would you do that if you hadn’t killed her? What were you
talking about? Even drunk, you have to admit that it is odd for
anyone to mutter such things.”

There
was something in Julian’s eyes that warned Ben there was more he
wanted to say but he wasn’t going to talk about it right there and
then. Ben lifted a hand to beckon to the magistrate’s men to wait
for a moment and leaned toward Julian conspiratorially.

“Where
is she likely to have gone? Do you have any relatives anywhere that
she might turn to?”

Julian
shook his head. “I haven’t killed her, McArthur. She was my
step-sister. I am no good at looking after myself. I am not fit to
look after someone like her. She deserves better. I told her to get
out but I didn’t think she would actually do it, especially before
I got up.”

“What
aren’t you saying? What’s going on?” Ben knew from the shifty way
Julian studied the dirty cobbled street that he was deciding
whether to tell him or not. In the end, Julian threw a look at Ben
that was full of sorrow. He shook his head sadly.

“They
might have taken her in payment for my debts,” he whispered. He
then turned his attention to one of the magistrate’s men who
suddenly yanked on his arm in an attempt to get him into the cart
so they could leave.

“Enough
gabbing now. In you go,” the man groused.

“Who is
likely to have taken her? Just what the hell have you gotten
yourself into?” Ben called after him.

Rather
than answer, Julian merely stared blankly back at him as he was
hauled bodily into the cart. For a moment, Ben didn’t think he was
going to answer, and stood helplessly to one side while the cart
door was slammed shut and locked tightly. His eyes met Julian’s
through the bars.

“Some of
my somewhat more questionable creditors threatened to take her if I
didn’t pay them. They are some of the most disreputable people in
town. Believe me, if they have taken her you won’t want her back by
the time they have done with her. There is nothing you can do
now.”

Ben
wanted to punch the cart driver to get him to stop, and grabbed
hold of the bars to block out the sounds of the magistrate’s men
shouting orders at each other.

“Where?
Who is it, Julian? Tell me where to find her and I will go and
search for her personally. If she is there then she can come
forward and stop you going to the gallows for her
murder.”

“She is
Trent’s now, I suspect. If she is, she can be found at the
Riverside Club somewhere. Speak to Trent if you dare.”

When the
pavement ran out beneath his feet, Ben let go of the bars and
stared in abject horror as the cart disappeared down the road. His
stomach roiled alarmingly at the thought of what might have
happened to her in the few days since she had first gone missing.
If Julian had only told him this the morning after the ball, Ben
might have been spared having to scour every tavern and hotel in
London in an attempt to find out if she had even left
London.

At least
now he had some place he could start to look for her; where he
might get the much needed answers. With one last dark glare at the
cart before it disappeared out of the end of the road, Ben went in
search of his horse. The sooner he could find Trent, the quicker he
could get Lizzie back.

One
thing he knew for certain was that whatever she had endured over
the past few days, nothing could ever change the way he felt about
Elizabeth Pinner. If she was still alive she was going to be his
wife, it was as simple as that.

CHAPTER
THREE

In
Derbyshire, Lizzie put her bag on the ground at her feet and dug a
small piece of parchment out of her pocket. She re-read the
address, looked at the aged plaque on the gate, and studied the
small cottage that stood at the end of the narrow, meandering path
that was bracketed by a somewhat wild and unkempt
garden.

“Morningside Cottage,” she whispered.

Her
stomach was in knots. Not only because she was hungry but because
she wasn’t entirely sure what – or who - she was going to find
inside. She had spent the last two days travelling to this small
house in the Derbyshire Dales on a whim with no idea whether her
plans were going to backfire on her. It was too late to go back now
though. London; and the man in it who owned her heart, was now far
behind her.

Taking a
deep breath, she picked up her bag and cautiously opened the gate.
It squeaked loudly in protest and shuddered as she swung it closed
behind her, but thankfully didn’t fall off its hinges as it
threatened to do. She side stepped and shimmied her way through the
dense foliage until she reached the front door where she knocked
upon the solid wooden surface tentatively and stood back to
wait.

When
nothing happened, she knocked again. While she waited she turned
around to study the nondescript little village of Little Puddleton.
It was the back of beyond really with nothing surrounding it but
the Dales; miles and miles of them. She knew there were miles
because she had walked most of them just getting there from the
large town of Upper Puddleton several miles away.

She
turned her attention back to the peeling paint on the front door
beside her. Her worry began to build the longer she stood waiting
for someone to answer the door. The heavily curtained windows
prevented anyone from looking inside so she took several steps
backward so she could peer up at the empty voids of the windows
upstairs. It appeared that nobody was home. With her worry growing,
she ventured around the side of the cottage and hoped desperately
that the house wasn’t abandoned.

“Hello?”
she called as she pushed her way through two particularly spiky
rose bushes and emerged in what appeared to be a somewhat better
maintained rear garden. “Is anyone home?”

“Oh,
hello, my dear. How are you today? I have been expecting you,” a
small voice suddenly gasped from beside her.

Lizzie
squealed and spun around. At first, all she saw was the back door
to the cottage. She looked down, way down, until her somewhat
relieved gaze landed on a small, white-haired woman who stood
smiling supremely at her from the kitchen doorway.

“Hello,”
Lizzie said tentatively.

“Well,
come in, come in. I don’t stand on ceremony, you know. You can’t
stand out there all day, now can you? No, that will never do. Come
inside, that’s it now,” the woman twittered.

Before
she could reply, Lizzie was ushered into the blessedly warm
kitchen, and immediately wrapped in the delicious scent of freshly
baked cakes. Her stomach growled hungrily at the delicious aroma.
She opened her mouth to apologise for her unexpected arrival once
the hostess closed the door but, before she got a chance to say a
word, she was relieved of her bag and ushered into a chair at the
table.

“Take a
seat, dear. That’s it now. Sit down and rest for a while. How about
a nice up of tea? I will put the pot on. It will take a while but
we can have a nice bit of cake with our tea. That will be lovely,
won’t it?”

Lizzie
stared at her, unsure what to call her. “I apologise for just
dropping in on you like this. I should have written first but I
just didn’t get the chance to do so before things went
wrong.”

“That
Julian scoundrel has been worrying you, has he?”

Lizzie
stared at her. “Julian? You know about him?” she asked in
astonishment.

“Of
course, dear. I may not have been in London for many a good year
but I do keep abreast of the latest news and gossip. I have been
expecting you long before now. I don’t know how you have managed to
stay in the same house as him for so long, I really
don’t.”

Lizzie
felt as though she had just stepped into some surreal world where
nothing was quite how she expected it. The small hairs on the back
of her neck stood on end but then she cautioned herself not to be
so foolish. The conversation was a little odd, but friendly enough.
There was no reason to be worried or suspicious about this lovely
elderly lady who had just welcomed her so warmly into her
home.