He didn’t think he could stand it, this cold, indifferent Kate, even if it was only an act.
“What did you do, anyway, to get Freddy to tell you where I was?” she asked huskily, her gaze on the ground. “Threaten to tell his mother about that soprano of his, or something?”
He shook his head. “I told him the truth,” he said. “That I need you.”
He ought, of course, to have stopped right there. Because there was a perceptible softening in those eyes, which she’d seemed determined to keep every bit as cold and flat as that sea just beyond the cliffs.
But he was too new at love, and had been rubbed too raw by it to consider what that softness might mean. Instead, he lumbered clumsily on, saying, “It’s Isabel, you see.”
The softness turned to alarm. “Isabel?” she echoed. “What about her? Is she all right?”
He shook his head. “She’s run off, Kate.”
She stared up at him, seemingly unconscious of the fact that the wind had picked up a stray curl of her hair, and was buffeting it against her cheek. “Run off,” she said. “Run off? Where to?”
“To Scotland,” he said. “With Daniel Craven.”
Her lips fell open. “Daniel?” she echoed, in tones of, if he was not mistaken, horror. “But how? What happened to—”
“You’ve got to help me, Kate,” Burke interrupted desperately. “Only you can convince her to come home. I know I haven’t any right to ask it of you …. Only I didn’t know what else to do. You’ve got to help me. For Isabel’s sake.”
She dropped her gaze. He could no longer see what she was feeling. He only barely heard her murmured, “Yes. Yes, of course.”
And then she was walking past him, hurrying toward the cottage.
But all he was aware of was the fact that she had agreed to come with him. He didn’t see what she took haste to hide from him, which was a sudden smarting at the corners of her eyes, which could, she told herself, be easily blamed on the wind. Well, and what had she been expecting, after all? It had taken him nearly three months to come after her, and then he’d only done so because Isabel was in trouble.
Grave trouble, too, from the sounds of it. Daniel Craven. God help her. Daniel Craven.
What on earth could he want with Isabel?
Falling into step beside her, Burke held on to the laundry basket and thought, She’s angry. Of course she’s still angry. But I can explain it all. It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late until she marries Bishop. Until then, I’ve still got a chance.
Nanny Hinkle, however, apparently didn’t think so.
“So you’re the one,” she said, ten minutes later, as Burke sat across from her at the kitchen table. Kate had gone upstairs to “get a few things together,” as she’d said to the old woman. “Lord Wingate and I will be going away for a few days, Nanny,” was Kate’s brief explanation of things. “Just a few days, on an urgent errand. And then I’ll be back.”
She’d added this last with a quick glance at Burke, as if he might be tempted to dispute it And, indeed, he had drawn in a breath to do so. Because the only way she was coming back, he’d decided during their walk from the wash line, was for the occasional visit, maybe with their children, after they were married. He hadn’t the slightest intention, now that he’d found her again, of ever letting her out of his sight.
But he couldn’t say this out loud. Not when Kate was still in such high dudgeon. So instead, he’d said to Nanny Hinkle, whom he felt might like a more detailed explanation than Kate had offered, “Miss Mayhew is trying to be discreet. But this is a secret I feel I can safely share with you, Miss Hinkle. It’s my daughter, you see. She’s run off with a man, and I need Miss Mayhew’s help in convincing her to come home.”
“Oh,” Nanny Hinkle had said. She had put a pot of tea on the fire and a plate of scones in front of him the minute he’d followed Kate through the door. It was almost as if the old woman had been expecting him. But that, of course, was impossible.
As soon as Kate had slipped upstairs, the old woman pinned him with her milky stare, and said, “It won’t work, you know.”
Burke had let his tea go cold in front of him. He hadn’t had a drop of whiskey in twenty-four hours, but that did not mean in its place he was prepared to start sipping the type of beverages favored by elderly women.
At first he thought to dissemble, and pretend he hadn’t the slightest idea what the old lady was talking about. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he said politely.
“I think you do.” Nanny Hinkle had spooned four heaping spoonfuls of sugar into her own cup, and now, much to Burke’s disgust, she was sipping the steaming brew as if it tasted delightful. “I raised Katie from a baby, and was with her until she was sixteen. And I never in my life met a stubborner person.”
Outside, lightning flashed. Then, off in the distance, thunder rumbled. Burke glanced around the cottage. It was a pleasant enough looking place, though the raftered ceilings were a bit low for someone his height. He rather liked the idea that this, contrary to all his wild imaginings, was where Kate had been all the time they’d been separated. It was a good place to be, he thought. A safe place. Though this old woman … she was not the kindly nanny she appeared to be, that was certain.
“I think you’ll find, Miss Hinkle,” he said, when his gaze fell on a familiar-looking tabby cat who’d draped herself across the clean sheets in the laundry basket the moment he’d lowered it, “that I can be quite stubborn, as well.”
“Not as stubborn as her,” Nanny Hinkle said, with another glance at the ceiling, “or you wouldn’t be here.”
Burke watched as the cat let out an elaborate yawn, then began kneading the sheets with her front paws. “Maybe not.” Burke couldn’t help pointing out, a bit smugly, “But she’s coming with me, isn’t she?”
“For the sake of your daughter.” The old woman bit into one of her scones. When she spoke again, she sprayed crumbs in his direction, without seeming to care in the least. “That’s all.”
Burke, irritated, and not just because of the crumbs, said, “I don’t believe that’s all. I don’t believe she’s only doing it for Isabel.”
“That,” Nanny Hinkle said, with a shrug of her spindly shoulders, “is your prerogative, of course, my lord.”
He stared at her. “You can’t put me off her, Miss Hinkle,” he said. “You can go on telling me how stubborn she is, and I’ll go right on nodding politely, but you won’t be able to put me off her.”
“Won’t I?” She looked at him, then grinned. “No, I can see that I can’t. Well, that’s a shame. You’ll only be disappointed.”
Kate’s voice came floating down the narrow staircase, sounding suspicious. “Nanny,” she called. “What are you telling him?”
“I’m not telling his lordship anything at all, my sweet,” the old woman shouted, at a volume that belied her fragile looks. Then, dropping her voice, she said to Burke, “I remember when your divorce was in all the papers.”
Burke stiffened. He said carefully, “Oh?”
The old woman waved a veiny hand in the air. “Quite the scandal, that was.”
“Are you trying to imply, Miss Hinkle,” he said, “that I am not good enough for Kate?”
She looked at him steadily. “You know about her parents, of course.”
Surprised at the blunt way she’d introduced this new topic, he nodded.
“People called that a scandal, too,” Nanny Hinkle said. “And it made all the papers, like your divorce.” She sipped her tea. “Their friends—grand people, like yourself—dropped them. None of them could go anywhere without being followed by jeers and whispers. Jeers and whispers from them that had once called themselves friends. It can scar you, something like that.”
“Certainly,” Burke agreed, not certain where, precisely, the old woman was headed.
“It scarred you,” she said. “But in a different way than it scarred Katie.”
“What,” Burke demanded, losing patience, “are you trying to tell me?”
“She won’t go back.” The old woman regarded him unblinkingly.
Burke assumed, then, that the old woman knew what he’d done, what he’d tried to make Kate. Which was embarrassing, certainly. But it was also a moot point. Because he fully intended to right that wrong.
Accordingly, he leaned back in his chair, and said, “I think you underestimate me, madam.”
The old woman snorted. “I think you underestimate Kate. But what is the point of telling you that? Why would you listen to me? I’m an old woman. And no one listens to old women.”
Kate appeared on the stairs, carrying a valise and dressed in traveling clothes. “I do,” she said. “Now, Nanny, are you going to be all right while I’m gone? I’ll stop at Mrs. Barrow’s on the way out of town, and ask her to look in on you. And there’s the meat pies from Saturday in the larder, don’t forget. And the milk comes tomorrow ….”
Nanny Hinkle’s face changed when Kate came back into the room. She became once again a sweet old nursemaid, rather than the sharp-eyed inquisitor she’d been when in the sole company of the marquis.
“Ah,” she said, as Burke rose, and hastily took hold of the valise Kate held. It was, he discovered, disconcertingly light. “But there’s one thing you’ve forgotten, my love, haven’t you? What about Lady Babbie?”
Kate, busy with her bonnet strings, said, “Oh, Nanny, I’ll be back in a few days, I’m sure. No longer.”
Nanny Hinkle shot Burke a look he construed as triumphant. It wasn’t until Kate had kissed the old woman goodbye, and accepted a bundle of hastily wrapped scones that she pressed upon her, that Burke stooped to kiss the old woman’s hand.
“We’ll be back,” he said with a hearty confidence that, in truth, he only half felt. “For the cat.”
“She’ll be back,” the old woman said, with a shrewd glance at Kate, who’d already stepped outside.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Then you,” the old woman said, “are in for a good deal of heartache.”
Then you—the old woman’s words kept echoing through his head—are in for a good deal of heartache.
A few hours later, Burke was still hearing those words, over and over again. Well, what did she know about it, anyway? So she had known Kate forever. So what?
True, he did not know how much Kate had told her nanny about what had actually transpired between herself and her employer. But that didn’t mean he was destined for failure. Because there was plenty he knew about Kate that Nanny Hinkle didn’t.
He knew, for instance, that when her lips were pressed together—as they had been for most of the time he’d been sitting across from her in the enclosed carriage, several hours of hard riding, and very little conversation—that she wasn’t necessarily angry. In fact, sometimes it merely meant that she was thinking about something.
He felt it most likely that she was thinking about Daniel Craven. She had asked for an account of events leading up to Isabel’s elopement, and had listened quite patiently while he gave them—well, an abridged version of them, anyway, since he could not tell her what Isabel had said concerning his relationship with her former chaperone. Kate had nodded, expressing her confidence that in Isabel’s revealing in her note that they were headed to Gretna Green, she was surely hoping they find her before the wedding took place. “Why else,” Kate asked, “would she have mentioned where they were going?”
It was a strategy for how, precisely, she was going to handle Isabel in the face of this crisis, he assured himself, that Kate was concocting at that very moment. He could see her face quite plainly, though the storm clouds overhead had rendered the sky above the carriage as dark as if it were dusk, even if according to his pocket watch, it was only just past four o’clock. She was dressed—quite becomingly, in his opinion—in a plain brown cloak, and matching bonnet, against which her blond hair looked very light, indeed. And her cheeks, though they were well out of the wind, were still very pink. As, of course, were her lips.
It seemed possible to him that she might keep those lips of hers closed for the entirety of their journey. She had never been a chatterbox, but nor had she ever been this quiet.
She’s angry, he told himself, again. And she has every right to be. It was all his fault, this silence. He had to do something about it. He had to do something about it or go mad.
He said, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the rumble of the carriage wheels and rhythmic clopping of the horses’ hooves, “I’m sorry, Kate.”
She wrenched her gaze from the passing landscape, upon which it had been fastened, and said, obviously startled, “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry. For what happened. That last night in London. I didn’t realize … I thought it was Bishop in the garden with you. I didn’t know it was Daniel Craven—”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he wished them unsaid. He had sworn to himself he wasn’t going to mention anything that might give her cause for pain.
Her cheeks seemed to go up in flames. She looked quickly away, and said in a voice that sounded strangled, “Please just forget it.”
“I can’t forget it,” he said, wishing she would look at him. “How can I forget it, Kate? It’s all I’ve thought about ever since. Why didn’t you say anything?”
She shook her head, her gaze locked on the window. “It wouldn’t,” she said, “have made any difference.”
“What do you mean? It would have made all the difference in the world. Kate, if only you’d told me some little part of your past ….”
She did look at him, then. She turned her head to look at him with eyes shadowed beneath her bonnet brim. “But I did,” she said. “I told you about the fire.”
He was up off the seat opposite hers and onto the one beside her before the words were fully out of her mouth.
“But not,” he said, reaching for her hand, “the whole story. Not about what happened, who you were—”
“What would have been the point?” she asked, tugging on her fingers.
“Because if I’d known who your father was—”
Her mouth popped open, and he was offered a tantalizing glimpse of her tongue before she remembered herself, and shut it again.
“Are you telling me,” she said, “that if you’d known my father was a gentleman, you wouldn’t have—”
“No,” he said hurriedly. “No, I’m quite certain we still would have … but Kate, if I’d known, I’d have done then what I intend to do now.”