Harriet shook her head. “I wasn’t screaming because he was dead. I thought he’d come back to life from the grave. I felt this cold hand catch me by the ankle, and when I looked down-you know how you can’t stop yourself from looking at something horrible-I saw him grinning up at me like a ghoul.”
She lowered her hands. Griffin thought he might expire himself. “It’s too much to bear, Harriet,” he heard his aunt say like a dirge. “It is all too much to bear.”
He walked from the bed toward the door. His aunt reached for his hand.
“I forgot until now,” he said. He turned back slowly. “You left a string of glass beads in my carriage. I kept them, not knowing what they might mean to you.”
“They’re nothing. Toss them.”
He frowned. “They were from your father?”
He wondered if she might be crying. But when she looked up, she was composed. “He never gave me anything but grief in his life. Go back to bed, the both of you.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
She slept for three more hours. Once she thought she heard a soft knock upon her door, but she couldn’t muster the energy to crack open her eyes, let alone call out to ask if anyone was there. By late morning she wondered if it had been the rain that disturbed her. When she dressed and went downstairs, the house was full of Boscastle cousins who had come to offer their support. The ladies comforted Lady Powlis in the drawing room. The male members of the clan had sequestered themselves in the library with the duke.
She listened for a long time to the low drift of their voices. She couldn’t bear feeling useless. How could pouring tea find a missing girl? Lady Powlis’s paid companion, a graduate of an elite lady’s academy in London, had promised that she would not put herself at risk during this personal crisis. But Harriet had given the duke notice.
She slipped out the kitchen door to the garden. The grass glistened with drops of rain. She’d be back before anyone even knew she had gone.
She didn’t look around. She blended in with the pedestrians hurrying to and fro, a young woman of modest appearance on an errand for her employer. She walked past the lavender sellers, who stood discussing the fate of the duke’s abducted niece and wondering how girls like them could expect to be safe when a proper lady could be stolen from a private school.
“Harriet?” one of them said in a startled voice, breaking away from her competitors. “Harriet, is that you?”
Harriet put her finger to her lips. The girl shrugged, muttering, “Sorry, I thought I knew you,” and Harriet continued briskly down the street. By the time the hackney coach she hailed deposited her a few streets from her old home, she wished she’d had the foresight to buy a bunch of lavender to hold to her nose. She was more concerned about stepping in a puddle of slop than about her personal safety.
There were few enough people to worry about, anyway, at this time of day, even though the over-leaning dwellings shadowed the street in a perpetual twilight. She recognized the elderly surgeon standing outside the public house. He stared at her without a trace of acknowledgment.
A group of boys and girls in ragged clothing clustered around her. “Got ’alfpence to spare, milady?”
“You ought to be at school, you little beggars,” she scolded, slapping the grimy hands that tugged at her skirt.
Nicholas Rydell lived in the cellar of a back lane lodging house. The windows had been boarded up, but she knew the moment she opened the door that she had been followed. She hunched her shoulders to climb down the steps that led to his room. He was feigning sleep on the floor pallet beneath a pile of stolen fur-lined cloaks. Harriet detected the scent of cheap perfume in the air, the clatter of heels echoing from the room above.
She stood over his bed, a pistol gripped in her right hand. “I know you’ve got a knife under your pillow, Nick, and I truly do not trust you. But I’ve a favor to ask, and you owe me one for digging that bullet out of your leg when you were careless enough to get shot.”
He laughed, his dark eyes slowly opening. He had long black hair and a hard-angled face, both cheeks bisected with knife scars. Half the girls on the street imagined themselves in love with him and believed he could be redeemed. Harriet knew otherwise. She knew what had made him who he was. His soul was dead. “You never needed an invite to my bed, love,” he said amiably. He folded his arms under his head. “What’s the matter, then? The duke ain’t livin’ up to your dreams?”
“I could shoot you dead, and your own mother would probably cheer. Now I just want to know one thing-do you or my father have anything to do with that girl’s abduction?” “I wish I’d thought of it.”
Her nape tingled. A step creaked in the stairwell behind. Nick lowered his arms. “Your father’s dead,” he said, staring at the broken looking glass collecting dust in the corner. “What makes you think ’e’d be clever enough to pull off a kidnapping, anyway?”
“It isn’t cleverness. It’s spite. He never forgave me for leaving. He made no secret of the fact. And as you and I both know, he’s as alive as one of the rats scratching inside these walls at night.”
He frowned. “I dunno where ’e is. Maybe ’e’s really gone this time. You can move in ’ere if you’re lonesome.”
“Lonesome?”
He laughed. “Oh, I’m good company in the dark.”
She backed away from the pallet. He sat up, his hand sliding under the pillow. “There’s a reward for that girl’s return,” he said with a shrewd look.
“You don’t know her family like I do. If you’ve got even a finger in this, they’ll hunt you down. And I’ll do everything in my power to help.”
She was gone before he could stop her, climbing up toward the figure who blocked the stairwell. The duke’s eyes glowed in anger. “I have more than enough to worry about without losing you.”
“I’m not afraid to walk in this neighborhood.”
“But I am afraid for you. Give me your word that you will not come here again.”
She hesitated, pushing against his tall, unyielding form. He stood his ground. She realized in resignation that he meant to exact the promise from her before he’d allow her past. “We cannot stay here like this forever,” she whispered.
“Then give me your word,” he said coldly. “It is a simple thing.”
She looked up into his eyes. “I don’t know if I can. Could we make a compromise?”
He cursed softly. “Of what sort?”
“I’ll come only with your permission.”
He gave her a grim look. “Absolutely not.”
“Then…” She hesitated. She knew that Nick could hear everything being said. “Fine. Then what if I promise that I will not come here unless you escort me?”
His mouth thinned. “That I will consider, but not right now.”
The man who was watching them in the mirror gave a quiet laugh. “I never laid a hand on ’er, your grace. But if you need my ’elp with your other problem, I’d be more than glad to give it.”
It was still early enough when they returned to the town house to revisit the afternoon that Edlyn had spent in the park. By unspoken accord, Griffin, Harriet, and his aunt decided to exclude Lady Constance from this encore performance. She would most likely have refused to cooperate, anyway. Yesterday evening, before the news of Edlyn’s abduction became public knowledge, Lord Chatterton had announced her betrothal to an elderly earl who doted on her.
