Authors: Charis Michaels
Again and again over the next three days, she experienced the dream. Each time, she awoke with a small, strange hope that it was real. Each time, she found herself alone with Jocelyn or Tiny. Still, she could not deny that the room held the vestiges of what seemed like her husband’s very essence. Once, she even thought she saw his glove lying forgotten on the nightstand. She reached for it, but then Jocelyn was in the way, fussing with her bandages. When she looked again, it was gone.
It wasn’t an unpleasant way to experience delirium, she thought. Eventually, God willing, she would recover, and then she would have years to truly grieve the bleak path that their doomed relationship and marriage had taken. But for now, her arm hurt like the dickens, she still had bouts of fever, and she could scarcely stay awake longer than ten minutes. Even when she was awake, her consciousness was blurry, at best. Why not indulge in the most perfect dream?
On the sixth day in her rented suite, Piety awakened in time for breakfast. It was her first morning meal in more than two weeks. Lemony morning sun coursed through the windows, brightening her groggy mood, and her stomach actually grumbled at the smell of breakfast wafting in from the next room. And for the first time, there was no dizziness when she moved. Emboldened—indeed, energized—she sat straighter, rolled her neck and shoulders, and took several deep, cleansing breaths.
She felt better.
She felt, if not good, then certainly far more like herself than she had in two weeks.
“Jocelyn! Tiny!” she called, smiling at the door to the next room. “Prepare yourselves, I’m sitting. With no discernable light-headedness. And I’m warm! Gloriously, stunningly warm. Hot, actually. Get these covers off. I think the fever may have broken.”
“Wait,” called Tiny, sailing in from the parlor. “You wait just a minute before you go hopping out of that bed!”
“Feel, Tiny,” Piety exclaimed, slapping her hands on her own cheeks. “It’s broken. The fever is gone. Ow, ow, ow!” She cringed as pain traveled down her damaged arm.
Tiny felt her head and cheeks and neck. Next she checked her eyes and pulse and bandages, gently pressing Piety back against the pillows. Piety endured it all, smiling—humming!—to herself, reveling in the first morning in more than two weeks that she felt like a functional, living human again.
“Just in time, too.” Tiny helped to pull back the stack of blankets and quilts piled on Piety’s bed.
“In time for what? Where is Jocelyn?”
Tiny mumbled something again, shaking her head, but then a commotion in the next room drew her attention. She heard Jocelyn’s voice uncharacteristically loud and firm.
She shot Tiny a questioning look, as she craned to hear.
“I beg your pardon, madam,” Jocelyn was warning, “but you may not enter the countess’s sick room. Not only has she been explicit about no callers, the doctor himself has said, no guests.”
“Out of my way, woman!” replied an unmistakable voice. “I have no idea who you think you may be, endeavoring to restrain me from seeing my own daughter, but you are sorely mistaken if you think you can stop me.”
Idelle
. Piety collapsed against the pillows.
Her mother had come. A tumble of male voices followed, along with more footsteps. All of them had come.
Piety locked eyes with Tiny. “How did they find me?” she whispered. “Why have they remained in England?”
Tiny shook her head, her expression grave. “Just showed up ten minutes ago. Miss Breedlowe has been holding them in the hall for the last ten minutes, but I guess they pushed their way through.”
“But what do they want?” Piety asked. It was a stupid question; she knew the answer. There were more than a million of what they wanted, and they were all in the bank.
“Your color is good,” said Tiny, pinching her cheeks and smoothing her hair. “You look like your old self. You’re a countess now. Remember that.”
Idelle burst into the room, and Tiny bowed her head and stepped back, leaving Piety alone on the giant bed.
Idelle gasped. “Piety, my heavens, what have you done?”
“Good morning, Mother.” Piety sighed.
“Have you broken your neck?”
“I have not broken my neck. I have suffered a puncture wound to my arm.”
“Boys!” Idelle called to the men in the parlor. “She is decent. You may enter.”
“No,” said Piety, her head throbbing at the exertion. The effort was wasted. The five brothers, led by Eli, crowded into the room behind Idelle.
“I am not well enough for visitors, Mother,” Piety said emphatically. “I would ask you to leave. All of you.”
“Or what?” said Edward from the back.
“Silence, Eddie!” Eli advanced on Piety’s bed. “Piety wasn’t threatening us.” His voracious snake eyes barely blinked as he studied her.
Piety huddled deeper against the pillows, her pulse thudding in her head. If she thought they unnerved her when she was healthy and in command and surrounded by friends, she felt positively demoralized when she was sick and alone.
“But where is your husband?” Eli continued, clearly amused by her fear. “No doting earl wringing his hands beside your sick bed,
my lady
? Called away, perhaps? Pressing matters require his attention, no doubt, considering his vast new fortune.”
“
Eli
, stop.” Piety imbued her voice with strength she did not feel. “Not another step. You are not welcomed here.”
Eli chuckled and opened his mouth to say something more but was interrupted by a scuffle in the adjoining parlor. A door slamming. A gasp and Jocelyn’s hushed exclamations. A snarl of rage and—
“Who?”
said a man’s voice, speaking over Jocelyn’s whispers.
Eli had the good sense to pause, take a step back, and glance over his shoulder.
The double doors to Piety’s bedroom flew back against the wall.
Standing in the light of the morning sun, his face a mask of rage, was Falcondale.
“Your life is worth little as it is, Limpett,” he said. “I’d step away from the bed if you value what’s left.”
Eli was stunned into stillness for half a second. His mouth dropped open. He backed away to the far wall.
“Get out, the rest of you,” Falcondale said, striding to Piety’s side.
“I will not get out,” Idelle said indignantly. “My daughter is injured. How dare you think to keep her from me. I am her mother!”
“I
will
think it, and you
will
do it,” he said. When he neared Piety’s bed, his expression softened. It was a look of tenderness she had never known.
She looked back through the sting of tears. He was here. In flesh and blood. It had been days—weeks—since she laid eyes on him. The sight of his face caused her heart to lurch. And the tears, they couldn’t be stopped.
At the foot of the bed, Idelle said, “I will not leave until I have been informed of the ailment from which she suffers and the expectations for her recovery.”
“She suffers from nothing that will involve a reading of a will,” Falcondale said, not taking his eyes off of Piety. “Get out.”
“Your treatment of me—
of us
—is an abomination, sir. Now see here—”
Falcondale spun. “How is it that you remain in this country? We had an agreement about your immediate departure for New York. Pray, what has detained you?”
“Yes, and how did you find me?”
Before the brothers could stop him, Eddie said, “We followed Falcondale, coming and going every day.”
Falcondale went still. He shot Piety a frantic look over his shoulder.
She opened her mouth, closed it, blinked.
Came and went? Every day?
Realization covered her like a cloak that someone else had whipped on her shoulders.
The dream . . .
There were no words. Perhaps for the first time ever. No words.
Falcondale turned to the Limpetts. “And what did you hope to discover with your spying?” He jerked the nearest Limpett by the arm. Little Eddie stood by the door, and he yanked him with his other hand, dragging them both along through the double doors and into the parlor.
“You will secure passage on the next ship back to New York,” he said. “Your ambitions here have come and gone. You may wait from now until doomsday to discover a fresh inroad into the countess’s fortune, but even then, you will not find it.”
Idelle allowed the brothers to be herded out while she scrambled to Piety’s side. “But you did not even know he was here, did you?” She searched her daughter’s face. “How curious. It causes me to wonder, why were you removed from Lord High-and-Mighty’s home to begin? Propped up in a rented room across town, almost as if you had been turned out by your new husband.”
Falcondale appeared behind her. “Will you go of your own accord, madam? Or shall I call the authorities?”
Idelle ignored him. “Tell me, Piety, if you’re so injured then why aren’t you at home in your own bed?”
“The first option is easy,” Falcondale said heavily, “the second, a bother. But both are preferable to the third option, which is me removing you from the premises myself.”
Idelle skittered away, hovering near the headboard, holding out a hand. “I will not be bullied from looking after my daughter’s well-being!” To Piety, she insisted, “Why such surprise at finding him here?”
Piety looked from Falcondale to her mother and back again. “You were here, Trevor? In my room? You came
here
? But how did you find me?”
Falcondale ran his hand through his hair and exhaled. “We need not speak of it now. Do not exert yourself.”
At the parlor door, the Limpett men had begun to edge back in, peering inside. Falcondale growled, strode to the doors, and slammed them shut.
When he walked back to the bed, he pointed at Idelle. “Here you have it, madam,” he said, “although I hope that you are aware that you deserve no explanation whatsoever, and that you fool no one with your false regard for Lady Piety’s health. I am well acquainted with the manner of your
motherly
concern, and it sickens me. But, just to be perfectly clear—to ensure that you may return to American with full confidence that I, alone, am now wholly responsible for Piety, that there is absolutely no cause by which you may wedge your way into her life or this marriage or her fortune, ever again—here is the situation:
“The injury your daughter suffered was a puncture to the arm. There was a collapse in her new home. I was not with her at the time, a circumstance for which I blame myself every hour.”
“Of course you do,” said Idelle.
Trevor sighed. “Think what you will, but a new carpenter misunderstood his duties and plastered over the foundation of the stairwell before it had been properly tied in to the structure. The oversight was grave, obviously, and he has since been let go. Piety was knocked unconscious in the collapse and took a nail through the upper arm. We were lucky that her injuries were limited only to bumps, bruises, and the puncture, but infection soon set in, and she has been fighting fever and blood poisoning for these last two weeks, although she looks bright and alert this morning.” He flashed Piety a gentle smile. “Her condition has been terrifyingly grave.
“I provided her the very best comfort and medical care in my home, until she made the decision to leave and take up lodging here, so as not to be a burden on me.”
Idelle drew breath to interject, but he spoke over her, “What she did not realize was that she could never, not
ever
—not in a million lifetimes—be a burden to me.” He ventured a look at Piety. “She has become . . . She has become life itself to me, and without her—ill, fine, injured, whole—I hardly care to live at all.”
He turned to Piety, speaking carefully, choosing his words. “I love you, Piety,” he whispered. “I love you with an absoluteness that, likely, I will never be able to fully convey. Please, please let me care for you. Let me love you. Give me the chance to provide for you in the same way your very existence provides for me.” Tears filled his eyes. He rounded the bed and kneeled on the floor beside her.
“How wrong I’ve been,” he continued. “How selfish. This life I thought I wanted—devoid of people, of commitment, of
you
?—you were boldly accurate about all of it. It was lunacy. All I want is you. Wherever I go. Wherever you go. We must go it together. In sickness and in health, just as the vicar said.”
He put his forehead on the bed beside her.
Behind him, Piety’s mother said, “Well, this is a fine operetta if ever I’ve seen one. Such dramatics, such—”
Trevor’s head shot up.
“Get out!”
He shoved off the floor and grabbed Idelle by the arm, dragging her. She gasped and squirmed, but he did not relent. He snatched the door open and shoved her through.
“
This is
your last warning.” Piety heard him shouting. “If you approach the countess again, I will not hesitate to call the authorities, after I beat the lot of you to a bloody pulp. It’s over! The prospect of your daughter’s fortune is gone.”
“Oh, it’s yours now?” Idelle said. “Because you play the lovelorn swain so well?”
“No. Because the money belongs to her!” Piety heard him jerk open the door to the hall. “She may do with it what she pleases, and the very last thing she wishes to do is to give it you. Whether she will have me as her husband remains to be seen, but I will always be her protector. From now until her dying day, which, God willing, is no time soon. Her well-being and happiness are my first concern. My only concern!”
He must have followed them into the hall. Piety heard shuffling, angry whispers, grousing.
The door slammed against the noise.
Before she was able to learn if what he’d said about her was true, or an act, or more of the same, he was gone.
S
omething about the deserted hallway inspired the Limpetts, finally, to fight.
They rounded on Trevor—all five of them—posturing, baring their teeth, putting up their fists. From the stairwell, Idelle urged them on with shouts and waved arms.
Trevor groaned. He hadn’t the time or the energy to fight five men, hand-to-hand. Not today. Piety was a closed-door away, and he was meant to reckon with Straka in an hour. Joseph would have been useful, but he was tailing Straka, making sure he showed up for their exchange in Hampstead.