She looked back at him. The sunlight in the window framed her face and gave it almost an ethereal glow. If it was a calculated effect, it was working. “No one who comes looking for them is allowed to see my students.”
“Not even their family?” He was nearly dumbfounded. Could she really be running so noble an enterprise so quietly that he had never heard of it? Impossible.
“Not all family should get a second chance, and not everyone who claims a familial attachment actually holds one.” That truth hit very close to home when it came to his supposed cousin. Had she guessed?
“This school,” she continued, “is their haven, a place to heal and work for a new chance at life.”
“But surely—”
She held up her hand. “When they are ready, they contact their families if that is their wish. Some are reunited. Some move on to new lives.”
“But her parents are in an agony of waiting.” He moved around the corner of her desk and joined her at the window. “Is there not some way?”
He looked down into the courtyard. A line of young women dressed in modest gray or light blue gowns, white aprons, and caps carried chairs into sunlight.
“Some of my students . . .” She spoke so quietly he had to strain to hear her despite being so close. “. . . choose to lose touch with their families because of the poor choices they made. Because of shame.”
She looked up at him. Tears shimmered in the stormy gray depths of her eyes.
Understanding surged.
“Is that what happened to you?” He could hardly credit that he had asked such an intimate and surely unwelcome question. Something about this woman, her surprising honor despite her role in Stanhope’s world, reached deep inside him and brought out the oddest reactions.
Her tears hovered a moment longer before spilling over to streak dual paths down her cheeks. She looked horrified. Her gaze fled from his. “No. Yes. For a time.”
She shifted to face the windows, one shoulder pointed toward him, and he could see her troubled profile. She swallowed several times.
Sympathy twisted inside him. If she was trying to disarm him, it was working. He knew far too many people suffering similar fates through no fault of their own. It was the reason he followed the path he was currently on.
“Does your family know where you are?” He touched her arm.
She nodded as she looked back at him. “Now. Yes. They know about the shop and something of the school. But they did not . . .” She sighed. “. . . they did not know about . . . the other choices until long after I made them. My first choices.”
“Did you have a choice?” He had no right to ask. He had no reason. But he asked anyway as the anger he’d been feeling and the concern he couldn’t stem collided.
“Aye.” She nodded. “I had a choice.”
He could see how hard it was for her to answer. He knew instinctively she rarely talked about herself, that he was receiving the rare gift of her trust. A gift he didn’t truly deserve.
“I was one of the lucky ones.” The tears glistened again in her eyes. “I was lucky.”
Her gaze returned to the courtyard below. “Some of the girls down there have not yet celebrated their fifteenth birthday. I was seventeen when I accepted my . . . first post.”
Her first post. It sounded like an ordinary position.
Maura drew in a long, quavering breath. The heat of Garrett Lynch’s hand on her shoulder spread warmth and unexpected reassurance through her. She could hardly believe she was speaking to this man at all, let alone so intimately and so personally. She hadn’t talked to anyone like this in years. But he’d brought the sudden and unexpected collision of her private and public worlds when he walked into her office. Now she couldn’t seem to stop herself from telling him everything.
Why him?
All she knew of Garrett Lynch was that he was a gambler who lived, for all anyone could tell, by his wits and his winnings. Or so Stanhope had related during their evening of chess last night. Perhaps that was the appeal. A man who knew what it was to live on the edges of acceptable behavior.
She looked down at the girls in the courtyard. They were giggling and jostling one another as they finished setting up their chairs for their lesson. One took a knotted handkerchief out of her pocket and tossed it in the air, and soon several of the girls were engaged in a game of
Imithe Coinnigh
while others formed a circle to watch and clap their encouragement. Shrieks of carefree laughter echoed skyward as they kept the bit of cotton and lace aloft and out of one another’s hands.
I was lucky,
isn’t that what she’d just declared? She knew she had been because, unlike many of the girls, at the very least she’d had a choice. Having dangled that tidbit, she felt compelled to at least give a minimal explanation. Perhaps it would give him hope for his young relation as well.
“I came to Dublin as a nurse–governess for a cavalry officer, Colonel Whyte, and his wife. They were touring the countryside with their two sons and infant daughter when Mrs. Whyte took ill. My father was desperately ill. Money was very scarce and opportunities even more so. I knew how lost and alone those children felt. What I didn’t know was how lost their father would feel. How alone I would be.”
“He took advantage of you?” The deep timbre of Garrett’s voice held no condemnation, no judgment. It shivered through her, giving her the acceptance she needed to go on with a story she had never related before.
She shook her head. “Not in the way you fear for your cousin. He was so lonely, especially as his wife’s illness progressed. I was so homesick.”
She gulped another breath and condemned herself with the truth. “We gave each other what comfort we could. Two lost souls trying to escape the horrors of our lives if only for a few stolen moments. What we shared was more consolation than passion.”
Tears streamed her cheeks. Not tears of shame for freely admitting her adulterous affair with her employer’s husband, but tears for the grief she’d felt when the news came of her father’s death, when she’d known she would never be able to go home to her mother and brothers and take up her life again, and for the colonel when he’d finally arranged to transport his wife’s body home to England. She had felt far older than her youthful seventeen years at that point.
She still did.
Garrett Lynch handed her his handkerchief, and she smoothed the tears from her cheeks.
“Still, you were Whyte’s responsibility. He took you from your family. How could he abandon you?”
“He paid the lease on the house for an additional six months when he resigned his commission and took his children home to Suffolk. And he arranged for Sir Reginald to look after me, to provide me with references and help me secure either a respectable position or a suitable marriage.”
At some point, Garrett had moved his arm across her back to brace her other shoulder. His strength flowed through her, accepting the scandalous behavior she was relating so matter-of-factly with a gesture where words would surely have failed.
“I held no illusions that marriage was an option for me after the colonel and his family departed. I could not deceive a future husband regarding my behavior. I possess neither birth nor fortune that might allow a man to overlook the truth, even if I were to wish an alliance with someone whose standards were for sale.”
Silence lay between them for a moment.
“Any regrets?” he voiced softly.
She shook her head. “Not on that count. Neither of my parents would have wanted me to be so dishonorable. Sir Reginald became my friend first as we tried to decide what sort of position he could recommend for me—governess or companion. Unfortunately my age and my . . . appearance worked against me. Eventually we settled on his becoming my patron.”
It sounded so much colder than it had been, so much more deliberate. Her arrangement with Sir Reginald had saved her from the edge of despair and given him comfort and unexpected joy as he had assured her throughout their time together.
Garrett’s grip on her arm tightened. She could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest as he pulled her closer. There had been less than a handful of men who had ever been this physically close to her, all save her father had ended up in her bed, but she sensed no danger of such persuasion in Garrett Lynch at this moment. Only unimagined support and open compassion.
“That would be Sir Reginald Manchester, the late barrister?”
She nodded.
Memories of Sir Reginald brought a smile to her lips as they always did. True, he’d been her second lover, the one who really made her into a member of the demimonde by setting her up in her own house and providing for all her needs including funds she could send home to her mother and younger brothers, to help provide after her father’s death. But he had been so much more. Confidante, friend, tutor, and benefactor—his untimely death had left her very bereft and alone.
“His generosity allowed me to help the first girl who needed me. She was my housekeeper’s niece, turned out into the street without references when her employers discovered she was pregnant. The fact that the family’s eldest son was the father made no difference to them. She would have been forced into prostitution to support herself and her child.”
She glanced up to see Garrett’s gaze intent on the girls below, his mouth a grim line. She turned slightly in his arms, and his gaze bore into hers. “So you have no regrets on his account, either?”
“Sir Reginald’s legacy allowed me to purchase this shop and adjoining house. He gave me the means to help other girls find a way out of impossible situations, just as he helped me. I cannot regret the consequences of my choices when they include such a result.”
“And what of Stanhope?”
This question came so quietly she was not sure if Garrett had spoken or if it whispered from her own conscience. Somehow it did not matter. Like the tears that had flooded her eyes, she could not hold back the last of her sordid story, not at this point.
“When Freddie first arrived on my doorstep, it was as bearer of the news that his godfather, Sir Reginald, had died after a brief illness he had kept hidden from me and from most of his friends. He had no family.”
Garrett held her securely in his arms. She felt as oddly safe as she had when she’d stumbled into him the other night. “Reggie had tried to take care of me in every way. Leaving me the title to the house I occupy and enough money to remain independent.”
Wordlessly, Garrett reached under her chin and gently pulled her face up so he could look at her directly.
Eyes to steal a woman’s soul.
Her tears kept falling, wetting his hand as he cupped her jaw and traced his thumb over her cheek.
“I think he was doing the same for Freddie,” she repeated. “Not with money. But he was in his last year of schooling, very naïve and lacking direction. His elder brother had just died in a sailing accident. His father had passed away only a few months before. He needed a friend.”
“The way you had when Sir Reginald entered your life.” A statement not a question.
“This was before the accidents and illnesses that claimed his two uncles and three elder cousins and left him heir to the Clancare title and a legacy he never aspired to. He was very sweet and fun. He made me laugh.”
“So you fell in love and lived happily ever after?”
For the first time she caught a hint of condemnation in Garrett’s gaze. Perhaps not condemnation, but something hard enough to make her pull back and step away from his embrace.
“Not love.”
Her denial sounded hollow even to her own ears because for a time she had allowed herself to believe she loved Freddie Vaughn. The knowledge still hammered at her guilt over the depth of his attachment to a woman so totally unsuitable to become his wife. She did love him, in a way. But for a brief time before his meteoric rise in social status, she had indulged herself in the illusion of a future much as Freddie still wanted to believe was possible.
She felt uncomfortably bereft outside the circle of Garrett Lynch’s arms, bereft and vulnerable as she had not during all of her gushing confession. What had possessed her? Whatever it was that had made her pour out her sordid descent to this man shook her to her core. Her head ached, and she had the distinct feeling she was about to be ill.
She grabbed the bellpull and tugged it vigorously. Silas Polhaven or his wife would surely be upstairs in no time.
“If you will excuse me.” She didn’t trust herself to even look at him again. If she burst into tears she’d be hard-pressed to prevent either of the Polhavens from ringing a peal over his head at the very least.
“I will send someone to give you a limited tour so you can ascertain for yourself if your cousin is here.”
With that, she scooted around the far side of her worktable and fled the room.
Chapter Six
“Here ye go, Mrs. Fitzgerald. A nice tea tray ta fix ye right as rain in no time.”
Teresa entered Maura’s salon bearing a silver tray laden with enough food for three women. Obviously, Dorothy Kelly had taken one look at her employer as she came through the door at this uncharacteristically early hour and decided she had returned home in search of sustenance besides the tea she had requested.
“Mrs. Kelly says ye’re ta eat every bite on these plates or she’ll be in ta have a word with ye jest as soon as she returns from the greengrocer’s.” The maid set the tray on the Pembroke table by the bow window overlooking the back garden.
“Seems the last two batches of taters he sent round were spoilt at the bottom of the crate. And she means ta have a word with him herself.” Teresa busied herself setting out the afternoon tea as she talked.
Maura looked at the feast being spread before her. “I cannot possibly—”
“Mrs. Kelly says I’m ta remind ye of the last time she had a word with the greengrocer, should ye kick up any kind of fuss over eating this here tray.” Teresa interrupted Maura’s protest.
She stifled the urge to giggle over the exaggerated roll of the little maid’s eyes or the way she wagged her eyebrows as she related the housekeeper’s dire warning. If this was anything like the last, there could very well be a slight . . . delay in the timing of Mrs. Kelly’s shopping trips, just to remind the greengrocer just who shopped from whom and paid for what.
“She did get a little carried away with her umbrage last time,” Maura admitted when her inner mirth subsided.
The pounding in her head had not subsided in the hour since she’d fled her office at the draper’s shop. Despite letting her hair down, shedding her shoes, and changing out of her stays and work clothes into a soft blue Indian muslin day dress, she found the headache made doing anything else, including resting, impossible. “Perhaps a little something to nibble with my tea would be in order.”
“Good thinking, missus.” Teresa nodded her endorsement. “I would not wish ta be the next one in Mrs. Kelly’s sights when she’s through with him.”
Maura sighed. “Well, there is no way I will be able to finish an entire plate of sandwiches, crème horns, and biscuits with preserves by myself. Could you be persuaded to join me? I could use some company, and an extra mouth, if I’m to dissuade Mrs. Kelly from the need to reform me.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t.” Teresa looked longingly at the crème horns, her favorite treat. “Ye spoil me as it is, missus. And I still have linens ta fold. Mrs. Kelly will have me in her sights if I don’t finish stacking the laundry in the upstairs service chests.”
“But if you take a small break from your duties to distract me with one of your stories, I am sure she will relent. After all, they might prove just the thing to perk up my appetite, although I will never be able to finish all this bounty.”
Teresa had a wonderfully expressive voice and face. Everything she felt or thought showed when she talked. Maura had done more than enough talking herself for one day. Perhaps listening to someone else would distract her from her troubled contemplations for a few minutes and allow her some peace. “Please help me by eating at least one of those horns.”
“If ye insist.” Teresa’s broad grin belied the reluctance she voiced. “I do have one tale I heared taday when I went ta the baker’s.”
Teresa poured a piping cup of Bohea for Maura and then passed her the plate of sandwiches before helping herself to the sweets and settling onto the edge of a brocaded chair opposite the settee Maura occupied.
“More adventures in derring-do for your Green Dragon?”
Teresa nodded. She never failed to report the latest adventures from her hero, always with breathless belief that each detail was true. Maura settled herself comfortably against the cushions anticipating just the sort of distraction she had hoped for when she’d invited her maid to join her.
Legends recounting the exploits of the Green Dragon had been around for generations. To accomplish all that was attributed to him, he’d have to be well into his second or even third century, but that did not stop Teresa. She attributed his feats to ancient magic like tales of the Fian of Old or the even more ancient Tuatha de Danan, the first people to settle in Ireland.
“Sheila, the baker’s shopgirl, her uncle works on the mail coach. He’s a driver fer the Belfast route. And he saw the whole thing whilst on a layover at The Red Lion just outside Bardsgate.”
Teresa stopped to nibble her treat. Maura knew from past experience not to try and rush her in the telling of her tales. There was a rhythm and order to the recounting; questions only threw her maid off the flow.
“Do ye remember me telling ye of the young man I saw standing on the bridge the other week when I had my day ta go and visit my mam?” Teresa wiped a smear of crème from the corner of her mouth with her fingertip.
“He was unusually handsome and handing out pamphlets?” Maura dimly recalled the incident.
“Aye.” Teresa sighed. “He had a head of red curls and eyes so green ye’d think he’d sprung straight from a mountain pasture.”
How Teresa, who’d never ventured beyond Dublin’s city boundaries, would know what a mountain glen looked like Maura refrained from asking. Her role was to listen and supply only the answers she was called upon to give. And try not to remember another pair of green eyes, all too determined to remain in her thoughts.
“Turns out he was arrested that very day. Thrown right into Newgate Gaol over by the Royal Barracks fer handing out Catholic literature. Seems he wishes ta become a priest, more’s the pity. But lacks the funds ta travel abroad and get his training. Charged him with sedi . . . seduction?”
“Sedition?” Maura offered.
“That’s the word.” Teresa pressed her lips in a line and then nodded. “Sedition and agitation. Sheila says he’d been in trouble fer the very same thing up north so the soldiers was takin’ him there the other day ta stand trial fer his crimes.”
She stopped and fixed Maura with a probing look. “Do ye know what the punishment fer sedition or agitation is, missus?”
Maura shook her head.
“Neither me nor Sheila either, although the baker himself said it was most likely hanging or transportation. Imagine hanging fer wanting ta be a priest.” She shook her head in disbelief. “There’s reason enough there ta marry.”
Maura doubted threat of death would persuade the truly religious to so completely abandon their beliefs. And this man sounded like a true believer. Why else would he have been standing on a bridge in the middle of the city making himself a target?
The Catholic suppressions of the past might have been officially repealed years ago, but the English still ran Ireland and there were stories aplenty of the horrors practiced against those who did not conform sufficiently to their rule.
“In any event, the soldiers taking the man ta Belfast stopped fer a pint or two at The Red Lion jest the other side of Bardsgate and left him tied up in the stables with the horses and only one of them to guard him. Ye’ll never guess what happened next.”
“He overpowered the guard and escaped?” Teresa’s tales almost always had a happy ending.
“Worse.” The maid shook her head in denial. “Them Orangemen what’s been harassing good folk of late, showed up and took him fer themselves. There was close to a dozen of them all wearing the orange sashes and masks.”
“The soldiers did not stop them?”
“Nay, they didn’t utter so much as a protest. Sheila’s uncle said they jest shrugged and got on their way back ta Dublin quick as can be. Sheila says her uncle thinks they was in on it. He says the more of us they takes, the less they have to deal with.”
“How shameful. What happened to the prisoner?” Maura wasn’t sure she really wanted to know, but she asked anyway, putting her faith in the righteousness of Teresa’s tales.
“The men that took him planned ta give him a pitch cap.”
Maura sucked in her breath. She’d heard of this brutal practice, putting a pitch-soaked cap on a man’s head, then setting it aflame. Horrible.
“They took him ta a glade a little ways from the tavern,” Teresa continued. “And invited all ta come and witness what happened ta them what went against king and country.”
Not for the first time, Maura wondered if the king on the other side of the Irish Sea had any idea of the horrors invoked in his name.
“They had a big bonfire going in the center of a ring of trees. Out of sight of the road, probably ta cut down on the chances of being discovered. Not that there’s many what will go up against a mob armed with muskets and pistols and out fer blood. The prisoner jest kept praying, loud as he could fer his soul, and fer theirs.”
“Remarkable.”
“Indeed,” Teresa agreed. “If it was me I’d be cursing them. The leader took his pistol butt and whacked him ta shut him up. Then they threw water on him so he would be awake when they killed him. He looked doomed fer sure.”
Maura leaned forward. “But?”
“But.” Teresa smiled. “Jest as they was fixin’ ta put the cap on him and set it aflame, out of the trees rode—”
“—the Green Dragon.”
“That’s right, missus.” Teresa’s eyes shone with excitement. “The Green Dragon and his men rode out of the trees. They fired their pistols in the air and ran straight at the bad men holding their prisoner by the scruff of his neck. Sheila’s uncle said there was a terrible fight. Pistols, knives, and fists ’til ye couldn’t tell who was what. Some of those Orangemen grabbed the pot of pitch and tried ta toss it straight on the prisoner, the Green Dragon, and whoever was in their path.”
Teresa brushed a few crumbs from the bib of her apron as she paused for breath. “Sheila’s uncle got a large gob on his cheek. He got a welt ta prove it, too, she says, from scrubbing it off. But the Green Dragon, he reached down and pulled the prisoner up in front of him on his great black steed and rode off with him.”
“How do you know it was the Green Dragon?”
“Sheila’s uncle saw his ring, missus.” Teresa nodded her head once for emphasis. “Gold with a emerald dragon carved in the center. He rode off and his men followed, leaving the Orangemen to cart off their wounded.”
“I suppose your red-haired preacher is halfway to Europe now.” Maura speculated. “He should be able to study for the priesthood there if he wants.”
The housemaid nodded. “So Sheila’s uncle believes. More’s the pity.”
“But you wanted the man rescued by your hero, did you not?”
“Oh, aye,” Teresa sighed. “I’m right glad he’s not in a gaol, nor suffering those horrid burns. But making a man that handsome into a priest is surely a waste.”
Maura could have laughed out loud at that remark. She looked down and surprised herself to find the entire plate of sandwiches had disappeared, along with her headache.
“I’d best be getting on ta folding the laundry now, Mrs. Fitzgerald.” Teresa stood up and took the plate back to the tray. “Thank ye fer the crème horn. Would ye like me ta freshen yer cup afore I take this back to the kitchen?”
“Aye, thank you. I will take this to the desk and get to some long overdue correspondence.” The shadows in the garden were starting to lengthen. She wasn’t expecting Freddie to call this evening so she’d have as much time as she’d like to write to her brother. He was in his third year at school and seemed to look forward to her letters, and the cakes Mrs. Kelly usually sent along with them.
“Mrs. Kelly will be so pleased.” Teresa handed her back her cup, sounding thoroughly pleased herself. “She thought a little distraction would prove jest the thing ta get ye to eat more than a nibble or two.”
With that, the maid picked up the tea tray and sailed out of the salon with a springy step, leaving Maura wondering if the latest tale of the Green Dragon’s adventures she had just heard had been nothing more than a well-intentioned diversion, a true tale, or a little of both.
Garrett scanned the interior of The Brazen Head as he entered its smoky depths. This was a man’s world: dim lighting reflecting on highly polished brass railings and gleaming oak counters, the chink and clink of glass and pewter, the scraping of stools and benches on worn floor planks. He took a deep breath of the tobacco and spirit-laden air, then flipped the tapman a crown for keeping his usual corner open and ready for the game to come.
He took note of each cluster of men inside the tavern, who was with whom, who was alone, who was a regular, who a stranger. He’d track each one throughout his stay, not looking so much for the ebb and flow pattern of the pub trade, but for that which did not fit in. Each of his men would do the same as they entered and made their way to the corner. So far, this alertness had paid off, allowing them to maintain the pose of a group of card-loving comrades as they discussed their business.
“Hullo, luv.” Dana, the tapman’s niece, greeted him by plunking a pint of stout on the table in front of him as he settled into his seat. “Ye’re here a little early. Got plans fer later this evening?”
“Not if you’ll clear your dance card for me,” he answered, then took a sip of the foaming brew in his mug.
“If only ye meant it, I’d be sorely tempted.” She flicked the table with a rag, chasing away imaginary crumbs. For the rest of his time in The Brazen Head she’d make a show of refilling his mug, but he’d never actually drink more than this first one.
“Whatever would make you think I’m not serious? There’s nary a man in the place that wouldn’t lay the city at your feet if you’d but snap your fingers.”
With her blond curls and wide brown eyes, Dana was one barmaid who looked good to her uncle’s patrons even before they were in their cups. But her uncle kept a strict eye on her and never let things get out of hand. Anyone who laid a wayward hand on her or even grew too bold in his remarks was shown the door.
She snapped her fingers and looked around the pub with a laugh. “Ye’re full of bog gas, Garrett Lynch, and that’s a fact. I see the first of yer mates is about ta join ye. Enjoy yer game.”