“You just?” Eliza didn’t want to push but she felt as though she hadn’t had a private moment with Gabriella in weeks. Each time she’d thought to bring up serious matters, one of their siblings had interrupted the moment or needed something from one of them.
“I’m…”
“Sorry?” Eliza supplied for her, some of her temper returning with her energy now she could eat full meals without worrying there wasn’t enough to go around.
“Sorry?” Gabriella repeated and stared back at her with a question in her dark green eyes. Unlike Eliza, Nathanial and Grace, Gabriella and Ethan had the dark honey-brown hair and green eyes of their father, not the white-blonde hair and blue eyes of their mother. “Sorry for what?”
Before Eliza had the chance to berate her sister as she’d wanted to do several times lately, ask her how she could have done what she’d done, they were interrupted by one of Darius’s men rushing towards them.
“Get inside and hide the children,” Eliza told her sister upon seeing the urgency in the man’s eyes. “Don’t come out until I come for you.”
Gabriella nodded and thankfully didn’t argue. Eliza braced herself for bad news. It usually came running like this.
“A carriage, my lady, coming down the drive.”
“Darius?” Her heart thump-thumped painfully as she asked, the blood roaring in her ears until she almost didn’t hear the answer. He’d ridden out, the only reason to return in a carriage was if he’d been injured or dead. Her vision darkened and blurred and she reached out a hand to steady herself.
The man shook his head as he took her hand and shook it too. “A hired hack.”
“What is your name?” She thought she remembered him as the stringed instrument player from her wedding day but the hours after her marriage to a sea captain were still a little hazy in her memory.
“Benny, my lady.”
Some of Darius’s men spoke with an American accent but Benny was English right down to his manners and address. She wondered what house he had served in before joining the ship’s crew. “Benny, fetch a few of the men and make sure they are well armed. I’ll greet the carriage; you will watch my back.” She wasn’t taking any chances on a visitor. What if it was Harold or Wickham? She found she might actually be able to murder them both if they’d harmed her new husband or his men.
She couldn’t be sure of anything at all as she watched the hired hack approach, but it had to be someone calling on Darius. Although the vicar had had time enough to spread the news of Eliza’s nuptials she had no friends or family in the area. Only gossips would come to call and they would receive the same welcome an enemy would. Perhaps the news had reached as far as London and it was her aunt and uncle?
Settling her skirts and checking the buttons on her coat were still fastened, Eliza had to consciously stop fidgeting. What if it was the magistrate? What if it was another creditor? One of Darius’s enemies? She hoped there were enough guns and that his men wouldn’t hesitate to protect her as Darius had promised.
As the carriage drew to a halt, one sound captured Eliza’s attention more than any other, more than the jingle of harness, or the crunching of hooves on gravel.
She stepped forward, her hands in the folds of her skirts, that one sound unmistakable in this world or any other.
Crying.
More specifically, a baby’s hungry cries for its mother. Ethan had sounded the same while the Penfold household had scrambled to action upon her own mother’s death.
When the door opened and a scruffily dressed maid jumped heavily to the ground, Eliza instinctively stepped back once again. A stench carried on the breeze and made her want to raise her ungloved hand to her nose against the foul intrusion.
“Good day to you,” Eliza called, more to announce her presence than to extend good tidings.
The maid stopped for half of a second to stare back at her. “Milady.” She bobbed but didn’t turn all the way; she just kept reaching into the conveyance and then tossed a large carpet bag onto the wet ground.
“What business do you have here?”
When next the maid turned, in her arms she held a wad of dirty linens, only the wad moved and writhed, the cries fierce and piercing in the afternoon’s silence. “A delivery for Jonathan Meddington.”
“There is no man here by that name,” she told the maid, willing her voice to calm. Only Wickham or Harold would call him Jonathan. She didn’t even call him by his given Christian name.
The maid stopped, her enormous shoulders hunched, her wobbly chin almost against her chest as she gazed down at the infant with love. “There has to be. Sarah needs him.”
“Is it his child?” If her new husband was thinking to follow in the footsteps of his sire, Eliza would certainly not go along with it. Anger rose in her. She didn’t know Darius well at all yet but she did know that his illegitimacy weighed down on his shoulders like the entire world rested on them. How could he behave in the same fashion and send another child to the fate he suffered?
“Not his,” the maid said as she looked up.
Eliza nearly sagged with relief but it was short-lived.
“This here is his sister, I s’pose you could say, if’n you had to say it out loud.”
“Sister?” Eliza breathed, her mind scrambling to keep up. “Wickham?”
The maid nodded. “We can’t hide the child any longer. She isn’t safe under his roof.”
“You are in his employ? The earl’s?”
“Aye, the house is abuzz with the news of his bastard son come to torment him.”
Eliza approached the maid, the smell strong, the baby’s lungs stronger.
