Читать книгу Promise Me Tomorrow - Candace Camp, Candace Camp - Страница 9

“A BOW STREET RUNNER!” MARIANNE GASPED. “Sweet Lord, I thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

Winny reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which she unfolded to reveal a pencilled scrawl. “It’s very difficult to read. Ruth never learned to read and write very well. What she said, I think, was, ‘There was a man—two men at—’I think she means different ‘—times. They was asking about Mary C. But nobody knows about her, and I didn’t tell. I thought I should warn you. Bow Street Runners’.”

“Could we have been found out? Has someone—but no. No one I’ve met the past few years would know I was Mary Chilton or that I worked for the Quartermaines.”

Winny nodded. “I know. It’s got to be someone from the past.”

“But who? Why?”

“Do you—do you think it could be your family?” Winny asked tentatively, voicing every orphan’s dream. “If they went to St. Anselm’s, they’d have told them you’d gone on to the Hall.”

“After all this time?” Marianne suppressed the little spurt of hope that had leapt up in her at Winny’s words. It was foolish to think that there was family who wanted her after so many years. “I haven’t any family, or they would have looked for me years ago. It’s been over twenty years.”

“Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe you were stolen from them.”

Marianne smiled. “That’s a child’s dream. I used to tell myself that that was what had happened, that my parents were still alive, still wanted me, that a wicked person had taken me from them. But that’s nonsense. It’s the stuff of dramas. Why would someone steal a child and then drop it at an orphanage? Besides, she said ‘warn.’ There must have been something sinister about the man.”

“Well, if Ruth thinks he’s a Bow Street Runner, then she would think he’s wantin’ to arrest you.” Winny gnawed at her lip. “It worries me.”

“It is unsettling,” Marianne agreed. “If someone who knew me as Mary Chilton, who knew I was only an orphan and a housemaid, saw me masquerading as a lady, they could have guessed, I suppose, that I was doing something havey-cavey.”

“And gone to the trouble of hiring a Bow Street Runner?” Winny asked skeptically. The Bow Street Runners, though they pursued criminals, had to be hired.

“That seems rather absurd, too, doesn’t it? The thing is, if it was someone we nabbed a few things from, someone with the blunt to hire a Bow Street Runner, they would know me as Mrs. Cotterwood. They wouldn’t send the man to Quartermaine Hall looking for Mary Chilton.”

“Maybe it was someone like you said, who saw you and had known you as Mary Chilton.” Winny’s eyes widened as a thought struck. “Maybe it was someone who had visited the Hall, and when they saw you again, they knew you were a housemaid.”

“You think they would remember a maid that well?”

“One that looks like you, they would,” Winny replied bluntly. “And then they saw you at a party, say, in Bath.”

“And when some things went missing, they suspected me?” Marianne nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense. But they had been introduced to me as Cotterwood. They would have looked for me under that name. Surely they would not have remembered my name from ten years ago.”

“But what if they looked for Mrs. Cotterwood and couldn’t find you? What if it was after we came back to London?”

“So they decided to trace me through the Quartermaines.” Marianne sighed. “Oh, Lord! As if things weren’t bad enough! Winny, what should I do? If I’ve brought the Bow Street Runners down upon us—” Tears sprang into her eyes. “I’m ruining everything!”

“No, you’re not,” Winny assured her friend stoutly. “They’ve all made ever so much more money because of you, and you know it. This is just a patch of bad luck. It happens sometimes. You couldn’t help it if someone recognized you.” She smiled and added, “Cheer up. Maybe it’ll turn out to be your long-lost relations after all. The gypsies took you, and they just now found out where you went.”

Marianne smiled. “Perhaps. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. And apparently they found a dead end at the Hall, so they won’t know where to come looking for me.” She reached out and hugged Winny. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Don’t be daft. It’s me who’d a been lost without you. Go on with you, now. You need to be getting to bed.”

Marianne nodded and went upstairs, but before she went to her bedroom, she stopped at the small room next door to hers and tiptoed inside. The curtains were open, as Rosalind liked them, and moonlight cast a pale wash across the room. Marianne moved to the side of the bed and stood for a moment gazing down at her daughter. Rosalind’s dark curly hair had escaped from her braid, as was usually the case, and spilled across her pillow. Long, dark eyelashes shadowed her porcelain cheeks, and the little rosebud mouth was open slightly. She was a handful during the day, smart and lively, full of questions about everything, but now she looked like an angel. Marianne reached down and moved the covers up over her shoulders and brushed a kiss across her forehead. She might despise the man who had done this to her, but she had never felt anything but an intense love for this child. Rosalind was her life, and the desire to protect her and nurture her was always uppermost in her mind. Whoever this man was looking for her, and whatever he wanted, she must make sure that nothing he did harmed Rosalind.

Finally she turned and left her daughter’s room, slipping down the hall to her bedroom. She undressed quickly and efficiently, hanging her dress in the wardrobe and placing her thin slippers in the neat row on the floor of the wardrobe. She pulled on a plain cotton nightgown, at odds with the expensive dress she had worn this evening, then set about the task of taking down her hair and brushing it out. Before she got into bed, she opened the small japanned box on her dresser. Inside lay her small assortment of jewelry. She lifted out a compartment and reached underneath it to pull out a locket. It was a gold locket on a simple chain, not the chain that had come with it, for that had long since been too short and she had replaced it. But the locket itself had been with her since she could remember; she had kept it through thick and thin, refusing to sell it even when she was starving. It was all she had of her past life.

The front of the locket was engraved with an ornate M, and when she slid her thumbnail between the edges, it came open to reveal two miniature portraits. Marianne sank down on the stool in front of the dresser and gazed at the man and woman pictured inside the locket. She was certain that the couple were her parents, though she could not be sure that she actually remembered them or only thought she did from having gazed at the pictures so many times. Sometimes she fancied she saw a resemblance in her own chin and mouth to the woman in the portrait, but she could not be sure whether it was real or only wishful thinking. Certainly neither one of them had her flaming red hair. Still, she knew they must be her parents—even though a cynic would have pointed out that parents wealthy enough to have miniature portraits drawn for a locket would have been unlikely to have left no provision for their child.

This locket had been her talisman all through the dark, dreary days at the orphanage. She had worn it under her dress every day and even slept with it on. As the years had passed, she had gradually forgotten whatever her life had been before the orphanage. She thought she remembered the woman in the portrait laughing, and she remembered a permeating sense of fear, of running and being so scared she thought her heart would burst. That, she thought, must have been when she was brought to the orphanage. But she could no longer remember arriving at St. Anselm’s or who had brought her there, and, of course, the matron had steadfastly refused to answer her questions about the event. She was not even sure if Mary Chilton had been her real name or merely one the orphanage had given her.

Marianne rubbed her thumb over the delicate tracery in an old habit, remembering the stories she had made up about her parents to help sustain her. She had imagined them wealthy and noble and very loving. A wicked man had stolen her from them and taken her to St. Anselm’s, but she knew that her parents were still out there looking for her. They would never give up.

She smiled a little sadly and set the locket back into its case. Children’s stories, that was all they were. No one was searching for her to bring her back to her family. Her only family was here: her daughter, Rosalind, and Winny and the others. Yet, as she climbed into bed and settled down to sleep, she could not quite still the ache in her heart for the family she had never known.

LORD LAMBETH GAZED DOWN INTO THE brandy snifter, circling it idly in his hand, and watched the liquid swirl around the balloon glass. Marianne Cotterwood. Who the devil was she?

He found it decidedly irritating that she had managed to slip away from him. Justin was not accustomed to being thwarted, least of all by a woman. Women usually hung upon his every word, smiling and fluttering their lashes, eager to be the one on whom he decided to settle his sizable fortune. He was cynical enough to realize that while his good looks might make the effort more palatable, it was his money that was the real lure. Marriageable girls had been after him since he reached his majority ten years ago. The truth was that he found all of them dead bores, and the thought of shackling himself to one of them for the rest of his life was enough to make him shiver. He supposed that someday, when he could delay it no longer, he would marry Cecilia Winborne, as she and his parents expected. Her family was equal to his in birth—or close enough to it to make the match a good one—and a future Duke had to produce a few heirs, after all. Then, of course, they would go their separate ways, and he would have mistresses to counteract Cecilia’s coldness.

Women of lighter virtue, of course, were rather more fun, not bound by the rigid rules of propriety that afflicted their more genteel sisters, but he found them just as vapid, primarily interested in their looks and his pocketbook, with few thoughts in their head. His friend Buckminster sometimes teased him that he should try his luck with a bluestocking female if he was so interested in intelligence, but the truth was that they were as serious and dull in their own way—and usually without the spark of beauty to ignite his interest.

The truth was, he had never met a woman who didn’t bore him within a short amount of time—and above all things, Lord Lambeth despised boredom. In fact, tonight he had been just about to leave Lady Batterslee’s rout, having judged it deadly dull, when he caught sight of the redhead.

He had had no idea who she was. He had never seen her before; he knew he would have remembered her if he had. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Just looking at her across the room had sent a thrill of pure sexual desire through him, and his first thought had been that he wanted to see that flaming mass of hair spread across his pillow. Then she had looked at him in that haughty way, lifting her chin, and had turned away, snubbing him. It was a reaction he was not used to receiving from a woman, and his interest in her had heightened. Nothing that had happened afterward, from discovering that she was an apparent thief to kissing her in Lord Batterslee’s study, had lessened his interest.

He smiled faintly to himself, his lips softening sensually as he remembered their kiss. He rubbed his thumb over the smooth glass of the snifter, wishing it were her skin. This was a woman, he thought, who could hold his interest longer than most. She was somewhat infuriating, of course…Unconsciously, he raised a hand and rubbed it along the cheek that she had slapped. The sting had been well worth it, given the kiss that had preceded it. Her mouth had been soft and sweet, and there had been a certain awkward naïveté to her kiss that had been curiously arousing. It had left him wanting a good deal more—and he intended to have it.

The only problem, of course, was that he hadn’t the slightest idea where to find her. He knew only her name—if she had not been lying to him about that, which was a distinct possibility. Thieves, in his experience, rarely balked at lying. However, she was scarcely the usual thief. She spoke and acted like a gentlewoman. Was she a lady who had fallen on hard times and chosen this way to keep herself afloat? It seemed absurd. More likely she had been blessed with good looks and learned to imitate the upper classes—a lady’s maid, perhaps? Then she had somehow managed to worm her way into Society. But whatever her background, it seemed to Justin a particularly daring and unusual thing for a woman to do. He certainly could not fault her for her courage.

Damn that fool Batterslee for barging in when he did! If only he had had a few more moments with her, Justin was sure that he could have wormed more information out of her, could even have convinced her that he did not intend to use his knowledge of her illegal activities to bludgeon her into coming to his bed. As it was, she thought him the basest of men and had fled without a trace.

He was not without resources, however. He had seen her with Penelope Castlereigh and Lord Buckminster. Perhaps they knew who she was and where she lived. He would make it a point to drop in on Bucky tomorrow and pump him for information. However long it might take, he was determined that he was going to find that girl.

RICHARD MONTFORD, THE SIXTH EARL OF EXMOOR, leaned back in his chair, contemplating the man standing in front of him. “Well, well…It’s been a while since we have talked, hasn’t it? Sit down, sit down.” He waved toward the chair facing his desk. “No need to stand there like a gapeseed.”

The other man shook his head, frowning. He was younger than the Earl, and there was only a hint of gray in his hair yet. He was conservatively dressed, though his clothes were well-tailored, and his features were attractive but not memorable. He was the sort of man one might pass on the street and never notice, but anyone who met him would immediately classify him as a gentleman.

“What is this all about, Montford?” he asked, his voice rough with irritation and something else, perhaps a touch of apprehension. “We are scarcely what one would consider friends any longer.”

“No. One would hardly recognize in you the flamboyant youth I once knew.”

“Flamboyant? Hardly. In a haze of opium and alcohol, more like. But as we both know, I have put that life behind me. I cannot conceive why you should wish to speak to me.”

“It is not so much ‘wish’ as necessity, dear chap. You have heard, I presume, the gossip about this American heiress who married Lord Thorpe, Alexandra Ward?”

“Of course. The Countess’s granddaughter whom everyone thought was dead. Is that what you called me here for—to rehash yesterday’s gossip?”

Richard did not answer except to give him a thin, tight smile that conveyed the opposite of amusement. His visitor looked at him for a moment, trying for an air of unconcern, but the tapping of his fingers against his thigh gave him away.

Finally, when the Earl said nothing else, he burst out, “What the devil does it have to do with me? She is your cousin, not mine.”

“Ah, but your past is intertwined….”

“Not with hers! I never saw the child. You said she was dead.”

“So I believed.” Exmoor’s hazel eyes hardened in his thin, almost ascetic face. “The damned woman lied to me!”

“I don’t know why you care. You had nothing to do with her disappearance. From what I heard it was her mother—her supposed mother—who pretended that she died.”

“Yes, but Alexandra’s return alerted them to the fact that the other two children did not die in Paris, either. The Countess knows that this Ward woman brought them to Exmoor House.”

“But you were not implicated, surely. I thought their disappearance was blamed on this woman who confessed, the Countess’s companion, and she is dead.”

“The Countess suspects me. She knows that I am the only person who would benefit from the boy’s death. For all I know, that fool Miss Everhart told her I was involved.”

“But she cannot prove it, or surely she would have by now.”

“Yes, and I don’t want her to be able to prove anything in the future. She won’t drag the Exmoor name through the mud for no reason, but if she were able to prove that I was involved, even the fear of scandal would not hold her back.”

“How could she possibly prove it? The Everhart woman is dead, and I certainly am not going to say anything. I have as much to lose as you.”

Again the Earl’s lips curled up in a cruel smile. “I know. That is why I sent for you. The Countess is looking for the girl, Marie Anne.”

The other man stiffened, his fidgeting hand going still. After a long moment, he cleared his throat nervously. “She cannot find her.”

“They’ve put a Bow Street Runner on it. I understand that he has tracked her down to the orphanage.”

“St. Anselm’s?” Sweat dotted the man’s lip.

“I’m surprised you remember.”

“How could I forget?” His mouth twisted bitterly. “Not all of us are blessed with your lack of conscience.”

Richard raised one eyebrow. “It wasn’t your boringly pedestrian morality I questioned. Frankly, I’m surprised you remember anything from that time.”

The other man pressed his lips together. “It was a sobering experience.”

“That was what caused you to give up your old life?” Richard’s voice was tinged with amusement.

“Yes. When I found myself standing in my room holding a pistol to my head.”

“How very dramatic.”

“I am sure the scene would have afforded you a great deal of amusement. But I realized then that I had to die or I had to change. I could not go on as I was. I chose to give up my vices. God knows, there were moments in the weeks that followed when I wished that I had pulled the trigger.”

“I, for one, am glad that you did not. I have a task for you.”

“A task?” He looked astonished. “You think that I am going to do something for you? I paid my debt to you when I took those children for you. I wouldn’t lift a finger for you again.”

“Ah, but what about for yourself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am not the only one who would suffer if certain details from the past came to light.”

“How could it? The older one, the boy, didn’t even live, did he? He was at death’s door when I left him.”

“The boy is dead,” Richard replied curtly. “That is not the problem. It is the girl.”

“She can’t have been more than five or six. She couldn’t remember.”

“Perhaps not. But if she saw a face—the face of the man who had ripped her from her brother, say, who had taken her to an orphanage and placed her in that hellhole—who is to say that she might not remember then?”

“Surely—you’re not telling me that they have found her.”

Richard shrugged. “I doubt it. Not yet. But I sent a man to St. Anselm’s, too, when I heard that the Countess was looking for the chit. They told me where she went when she left there.”

“Where was that?” The words seemed pulled from him, as if he did not really want to know, yet could not stop himself from asking.

“She went into service with one of the local gentry. Family named Quartermaine.”

“Good God!” He paled a trifle. “The daughter of generations of earls, a maid.”

“Mmm. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Tragic, I would say.”

“She was cast out of the Quartermaine house—pregnant.”

The other man closed his eyes. “God forgive me.”

“God may, but I doubt the polite world would.”

“I did not want to!” he lashed out, goaded. “You know I tried to argue you out of it. Sweet Jesus, when I handed the little thing over to that dragon of a matron, and she was kicking and screaming and crying….” His hands clenched into fists at his sides.

“Yet you did it.”

“You made me! It was the only way I could wipe clean my debt to you. You kept giving me the money, urging me to take it, and I couldn’t stop myself. I had to have that sweet oblivion.”

“I hardly forced it on you. You begged me for the money, shaking and sweating, the color of a corpse. What else could a friend have done? As I remember, at the time you praised me for my generosity.”

“I did not know then why you did it! How you got people in your debt and made them do wicked things! How you twisted and crushed them into monsters scarcely recognizable as themselves.”

“Really. Dear fellow…do you think you would have done it if you hadn’t had it in you already? You could have refused, you know.”

“I know.” Self-disgust filled his voice. “I was weak.”

Richard did not comment. He could have pointed out that the man was still weak or he would not have come in answer to his summons. But there wasn’t any point in antagonizing him unduly. It might put his back up enough to give him some spine.

“Do you think that will help you any? If people know that you took Chilton’s daughter from her family and put her in an orphanage because you had to have money for opium? For gambling and drinking and whoring? Do you think they will feel any sympathy for you?” Richard asked. When the other man glared at him, he went on, “Quite so. You and I both know what would happen to this exemplary little life that you have built up if the ton knew what you had done. Oh, no doubt some people with long memories still can recall that you were wild in your youth—so many men are, and then sober up and become responsible citizens. But none of them know about this.”

“What are you threatening? To tell everyone what I did? It will only implicate you!”

“Oh, no, I shan’t tell…not unless I am forced to. But if the Countess’s man finds the girl…if she tells everyone what happened, and I am brought down because of it, I promise you, I shan’t go down alone. I will take you with me.”

“You are disgusting.”

“What has that to do with the matter at hand? And just think, what if this girl identifies you? You are the one who took her there, you know, the last face she saw. It is you she will remember best.”

“I tell you, she won’t remember! You forget the things that happened to you when you were a child.”

“Even something that changed your life forever? I don’t know. It seems to me to be something she might remember. Or say she chanced to meet you and at the sight of your face those long forgotten memories came back? But if you are willing to risk it…” He shrugged eloquently.

“Damn you! What is it you want of me?”

“I want you to make sure that the Countess’s man doesn’t find her.”

“And how am I supposed to find her?”

“That will not be so very hard. All the servants disclaimed knowledge of her whereabouts, but one of the grooms pulled him aside and told him some interesting facts—for a price, of course. The world is so venal. It seems that little Mary Chilton—yes, that is what she called herself—had a special friend among the other servants, another maid named Winny Thompson. A couple of years after Mary left, this Winny apparently came into some good fortune. She received a letter, and promptly after that she quit her job and took the stage to London. He says the rumor was that Mary had found some means to support herself and had invited her dear friend to come live with her. My man paid him to keep the information to himself, and then he tracked this Winny Thompson to London. It seems that one of the maids gets letters from her every so often, and the housekeeper has seen the most recent address.”

“So he found…Mary?”

“I think so. He found Winny Thompson, in any case. She is the housekeeper for an apparent family, one of whom is a ‘widow’ with a nine-year-old daughter. That is the right age for Mary Chilton’s ‘delicate condition.’ The supposed widow’s name is Marianne Cotterwood. She is in her mid-twenties, and her hair is a bright red.”

The other man groaned.

“Yes. It sounds very much like the girl we seek.”

“If your man has found out so much, why don’t you have him keep her away from the Countess? He sounds quite competent.”

“Oh, he is. He is. But there are two problems. One is that I would like to make sure that Mrs. Cotterwood really is the woman I seek. The other is that I do not like to hire someone for an operation as delicate as this. A paid servant of that type can so easily turn around and gouge more money from you for being silent, you see. You, on the other hand, could scarcely extort money by threatening to break your silence. That is why I realized that you would be the perfect man for the job.”

“What is it you want me to do—pay her to leave London before the Countess’s man can find her?”

“An easy solution, of course, but too unreliable. I find that people so rarely keep their word.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked, his patience obviously wearing thin.

“It’s quite simple. This woman appears to a gentlewoman, not a former maid. She moves in your sort of circle. You could easily meet her and ascertain whether she is, in fact, the woman we seek. Then…”

He paused and fixed a gaze of pure iron on the man. “Then you will kill her.”