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Catherine sighed and looked toward the door. “Forgive me if I have little faith in any of our safety when there is a constable in my house and one of my maids dead.”

The shudder wouldn’t be suppressed, and with it came the images. The blood, the stocking-clad legs, the dress hiked up too far, the shoes peeking from under the stairs.

Rowena frowned. “It was an odd place for her to be, don’t you think? I mean, in such a position. If someone were to . . . to attack her . . . why there, so near everyone?”

Catherine shook her head. “One of the constable’s men said it looked as though she had been in the closet beneath the stairs. It is connected to others in the bowels of the house, so who knows where the man actually found her. Their conjecture was that she had got away and was trying to go and find help when he . . . stopped her.”

Sinking back onto the bed, Rowena forced air into her lungs. “That was no mere happenstance, then. Whoever did it must have followed her. Been
hunting
her.”

With a snort, Catherine waved that off. “More likely is that she arranged to meet someone and then it didn’t go as she planned. Hannah was always looking for a way out of her lot in life, and it could be she thought to blackmail one of the lords—or convince him to set her up as a mistress. Which I will, of course, tell the constable when he speaks to me.”

So desperately she wanted the idea to bring a morsel of comfort—maybe, just maybe, the girl hadn’t been violated, had gone to someone’s arms willingly—but it wouldn’t take hold. Rowena had been alone with Malcolm of her own will too, had wanted to give him a kiss before he left the next day. That didn’t mean she had been offering any more than that. It didn’t mean she deserved the treatment she received.

“I had better get back down there. I only wanted to speak with you before you left.”

“I’m glad you did.” Rowena pushed herself up again, though she felt so very heavy. “Would you . . . would it be all right if I were to write to you?”

The light reentered Catherine’s eyes. “Of course it would. And I’ll write back—though using a different name, or who knows if it would make it to you. My mother’s maiden name, perhaps. Julia Rigsby.”

Should she offer to do the same, for Catherine’s safety? No—Rushworth would probably be glad to see his sister corresponding with her, given that Brice had the diamonds. Let it appease him. She smiled, nodded, and clamped all other emotions down until the door clicked shut behind Catherine . . . and then she fell back onto the soft mattress and let it envelop her. Closed her eyes.

A mistake. Images came. The mattress turned to stone, hard and cold, and the coat that had half-fallen on her became as heavy as Malcolm. Her collar choked her. The fragrant potpourri on her bedside table turned dank and musty, suffocating.

Fighting him off had been impossible—fighting off the memories proved even harder, for the impressions wouldn’t leave her. They were always there, waiting to pounce. Would they be so always? Or would they eventually fade? The nightmares cease?

At length she managed to get her breathing under control and sat up. Her face felt clammy, but she had just moved toward the basin when another knock sounded. Lilias, she hoped. “Come in.”

Brice entered, though only a step. His face was guarded, yet his concern for her nevertheless clear. “The constable is talking to our party first, but it will still be an hour or more before they will all be back to their rooms to pack. We could wait if you preferred, or we could leave now—”

“Now.” Abandoning the thought of freshening up, she darted up and grabbed her coat and hat again.

The memories wouldn’t leave her—but the more distance between her and all the reminders, the better. Then, when her mind was clear enough, she could focus on how to free Catherine—and for that matter, the Nottinghams—from the Fire Eyes’ curse.

Seventeen

O
NE
M
ONTH
L
ATER
M
IDWYND
P
ARK

T
he screams awoke him. They weren’t loud—they never were. But Brice’s ears had become attuned to the sound of Rowena’s face turned into her pillow, Rowena’s anguish pouring out in the dead of night.

He rose, slipping his arms into the robe he’d taken to keeping draped on the chair just beside his bed. The fires were banked, the room cool. He’d grown accustomed to that too. Silently, he slid over to the door adjoining their suites—the one she kept locked, never seeming to realize he had a key. But oh, how grateful he’d been that he had, when those screams had first woken him their second night here.

The key slid surely into the lock, turned with a promising
click
. The door had squeaked that first night, but not since. Not since he’d ordered it discreetly oiled and planed. The last thing he needed was her waking to realize he was in her room, sending her into even more of a panic.

But he was the only one near enough to help. He could have asked Cowan to take a room up here, he supposed, but . . . but it didn’t seem right somehow. It
should be
a husband who gave his wife comfort in those moments she needed it most.

He knew her room better by night than he did by day, knew which board to avoid and when to sidestep the table. Knew exactly how she’d look with the moonlight trickling through the window and glazing her with silver. Small, fragile . . . lonely. She slept on her side, a pillow clutched to her middle, her face buried in it.

And she cried.

The words varied from night to night. Sometimes she muttered of mazes and closets and Hannah. Sometimes of stones and fog and Malcolm. Sometimes in Gaelic that he couldn’t understand. Always with the same panic. The same fear. The same sorrow.

He eased to a seat on the edge of the bed opposite her face, though he was fairly certain she wouldn’t wake up. She never did. He wasn’t even sure she remembered these nearly nightly dreams. In the morning, she always seemed cheerful, her eyes without shadow as she bombarded him over and again with pleas to be rid of the diamonds.

In what had become routine, he touched a hand to her shoulder. “Shh. You’re all right. They’re gone.” His voice barely made a whisper in the room, as light as the fingers he trailed down over her back. The same soothing motion his mother and nurse had once used to calm him after a nightmare when he was a boy. Fingers up, fingers down, a circle around. The softest touch, the softest words. There but not there.

He prayed as he continued his ministrations, as her pillow-muffled sobs quieted into gasps, then into whimpers, and finally into silence.

A stirring inside told him he must go.
Now.

The prompting always came sooner than he wished it would. Every night it was harder to force his knees to straighten, to force himself to leave when everything within him shouted that his place was here, by her side. Holding her until the nightmares stopped coming. Everything within him told him that if they could get to know each other as just themselves, all thoughts of curses and victims and diamonds aside, then their marriage would improve. Everything, that is, but the voice of the Lord.

He stood, careful to hold in the sigh. As he had twenty times before, he slipped back through the door, slid the key back in the lock. Listened to it turn.

As he had twenty times before, he settled on his knees on the rug beside his bed and let his head fall to the mattress. “How long, Lord? How long until we sort through this? Until she lets me comfort her when she is awake? How long until she lets me be at least a friend? Until she trusts my decisions? Everything I try, every time I think I’m making progress . . .” It seemed there was a wall between them, and though she stretched from one side and he from the other, neither could cross it. Between them always loomed this curse.

He was beginning to think it real. For neither he nor his wife had any greed or lust for the jewels, and yet they were coming between them. Just as the curse said they would.

He prayed the wall would come tumbling down. But the Lord offered no assurances. No peace. No direction on what he should say to his wife in the light of day. Just that same, eternal instruction he had been hearing in answer to all his prayers lately.
Listen
.

Listen. He
was
listening, had been all through his six weeks of marriage. Listening for the Lord to reveal how to act and when. Listening for that next instruction. But it seemed he’d have to wait for it. Wait for her to understand. Wait for a time not yet upon them.

He crawled back into his bed and stared up at the darkened ceiling. He didn’t like it. Not when one thing he was waiting on—Lady Pratt to make her move—could well interfere with the other. Not when he didn’t know who among his staff he could trust. But he would wait, listening.

Even if it killed him.

Where in the world could he have put them? Rowena peeked behind yet another painting of yet another long-gone Duke of Nottingham. No safe. She hadn’t expected one, really. There was only the one built into the wall, Brice had said, and he had made no secret of it to her—rather he had told her not to ever bother using it, because everyone in the house knew it was there.

But there had to be a strongbox or something
somewhere
. He wouldn’t have put the red diamonds just anywhere, would he? He’d keep them close—she was sure of it—and secure.

Not that she intended to toss them into the sea without his knowledge, tempting as it was, nor turn them over to be sold without his permission. But maybe, if she could hold them in her hand before him, he would finally listen to her. Maybe they could have a conversation as . . . Well, not as equals. They would never be equals. He was so
. . . much
. Handsome and kind and funny, always so quick to make her laugh, to take care of her and everyone else in his charge.

But the longer they drifted beside each other, putting on a happy face in public but so very distant when alone, the more she wondered if maybe her husband didn’t
want
to trust her. Didn’t want to value her. Didn’t want to love her.

She still wasn’t enough.

If she found the diamonds, though, perhaps it would at least rouse him to anger enough that he would cease with smiling at her when he didn’t really mean it.

She let out a long breath and stared down the hallway. She must be daft, to
want
her husband to grow angry, when all she’d ever wanted was to avoid her father’s wrath. But anger she knew how to deal with—this smiling silence she did not.

In the distance, she could hear the murmur of the housekeeper giving a tour, the hushed exclamations of her audience as they took in the grandeur that was Nottingham. Rowena should get away before they turned the corner and glimpsed her. Only once had she made the mistake of getting caught by one of the tour groups, and oh, the
staring
. She’d felt like a stuffed pheasant on display.

The ancient dukes weren’t watching over the diamonds anyway. Bidding them all farewell with a curtsy, she hurried around the corner.

And nearly screamed when she collided with Mr. Abbott.

He steadied her with a chuckle and promptly released her. “I must say, Your Grace, you’re the only one I’ve seen who curtsies to the paintings as one would to the dukes themselves.”

She grinned and motioned him to follow—no need to explain why. Mrs. Granger had turned the far corner, and her tour-guide voice echoed along the gallery. Only once they were safely a hall away did she speak. “One never knows when a ghost might be sticking around, and I’d just as soon not offend any o’ Brice’s ancestors.”

Abbott arched a brow that said a sermon was forthcoming.

She’d already heard this particular one—thrice. Any time she dared mention something he deemed “superstitious nonsense.” She tried to check her tongue against such things, but it was so ingrained in her to speak of spirits and ghosts and brownies. Of blessings and curses. She hurried to cover it with another grin. “I’m only jesting, Mr. Abbott.”