For Elise (17 page)

Elise couldn’t stop the sob that rose to her throat. “I wish he had.”

“Don’t say that, Elise.” Miles sounded as though his own emotions were barely in check. “Please don’t even think that.”

“It would be better to be dead.” Elise allowed her anguish to spill over. “I don’t want to remember any of this. I just want it to be over. To be gone. Done.”

Miles pulled the horse to a stop. “Please, Elise.” Emotion thickened his words. “Don’t say that. You are all I have.”

She wept, but crying didn’t lessen the pain. She’d lost her papa. She’d lost Mr. Linwood. She’d rather have died one hundred times over than endure what she had.

She felt Miles press a kiss to her rain-soaked forehead. She leaned against him. He held her as he always had. Miles would help. Somehow, he would find a way to help.

“Elise?”

She jumped back to the present.

“You are crying,” Miles said.

Crying? Elise wiped at her eyes. Tears were indeed spilling from her eyes. The pain she had felt at fifteen was raw and new again, as if that moment had only just happened.

“What is it?” Miles asked, his voice filled with concern.

“There are so many memories attached to all of this.” Elise shook her head. She couldn’t form the words to explain how heavy she felt, how broken.

“We’ll save this for another day.” He motioned to the piles of papers. “In fact,
I’ll
sort through them and see what I can find. Then, when you are feeling more equal to the task, we’ll go over it together.”

“Thank you, Miles,” she whispered, forcing steady breaths. He’d known precisely what she needed. How like the Miles she’d once known. “Thank you.”

Miles sat in the library,
horrified at reading about and reliving the terror of the night his father had been killed. The inquiry papers were detailed, almost too much for his peace of mind. The runner had assumed, as had Miles, that with an aim as good as the killer’s had been—Miles’s father had been shot directly through his heart, Mr. Furlong in the center of his forehead—Elise’s wound, several inches from her heart, had been intentionally nonfatal. But Miles kept returning to the first of the anonymous letters Elise had received at Tafford.

So will my aim.
The shooter admitted that his aim had been off. Her survival, it appeared, had been nothing more than an accident. The realization sat like ice water on Miles’s heart. Elise was not supposed to have lived.

She had never said much about that night. Her brief testimony, which the runner had written down, gave no indication of why she might not have presented a clear target. It had been dark and possibly raining. But so had it been when the killer had shot his other three victims. Had she been running? Struggling to get away? Had the murderer been injured or held back somehow?

Miles was reluctant to ask her. Her trust in him was still very fragile, and this was not a topic she seemed at all equal to discussing. Simply sitting in the same room as these papers had nearly broken her.

Another question rose in his mind. Four shots were fired that night. Elise hadn’t spoken of the killer reloading. Either she’d been too distraught to mention that, or the killer had carried more than two loaded weapons. Surely if he’d stopped to reload, Miles’s father, perhaps even Mr. Furlong, if he had not already been dead at that point, could have taken the opportunity to overpower their assailant.

To have access to multiple weapons, the killer would have had to be quite well off or a hardened enough criminal to have stolen them. The accuracy of his shooting indicated not only experience but also superior weaponry. The runner had suggested the shooter had used Mantons. No other pistol was as precise. But Mantons were single-shot, which meant the murderer must have carried four of them.

Miles’s own father had owned a set of Mantons. They, like everything else, had been sold. Elise’s father’s weapons had also gone at auction—another set of Mantons. If only they’d had those weapons with them that night instead of locked in their homes.

The runner had questioned Mr. Cane about the existence of an heir to the Furlong estate had Elise not survived the attack. A review of Mr. Furlong’s will and family tree revealed his estate would have simply reverted to the crown. There was no would-be heir willing to kill for his inheritance. Even if one had existed, it wouldn’t have explained why the murderer had killed Father as well.

Scribbled in the margins of the runner’s notes was a question that now haunted Miles, for he had a feeling the answer held the key to the entire mystery.

Which victim was the primary target?

The crime seemed very much intentional. This was no robbery gone horribly wrong; it was a murder from the instant the killer rode up to the carriage. Why else would he have been so heavily armed? Why else would he have committed his heinous crime with no intention of robbing them of their valuables? But which of them had the murderer been after, and why?

Too many questions, too few answers.

Miles stepped away from his desk. He’d grown restless, a feeling of oppressive confinement growing with each passing moment. After four years of physically grueling labor in the West Indies, he grew restless quickly, especially when his mind was heavy.

He ventured out to the back meadow. Elise was there chasing Anne around, a footman stationed nearby. The sound of the little girl’s odd laughter echoed around them. Elise seemed happy and at ease. Even with threats looming over her head, there was something inarguably light in her countenance. Miles thought that perhaps he had managed to lift one of Elise’s burdens at last.

Anne spotted him. She ran to where he stood. She pointed alternately at herself and him, then threw her arms in the air.

“Up!” Only after she repeated the word three times did he finally understand it, though he wasn’t sure what she meant by it.

Anne, arms still held high above her head, turned in a circle, eyes closed in apparent joy, smiling brightly and giggling.

“Upon my soul,” Miles whispered, watching her impromptu dance, “you
are
your mother’s daughter.”

Elise used to dance in the Epsworth meadow and smile just like that.

“She wants you to spin her, Miles.” Elise broke into his recollections, a little out of breath.

Her cheeks were pink from exertion, her eyes bright. Her thick black curls had begun escaping their careful knot. Here was Elise as he remembered her. Miles felt an undeniable squeezing of his heart at the sight. He was getting her back.

“I have been obliging her for a full quarter hour,” Elise continued, catching her breath. “I believe it is your turn. You did start this, after all—spinning her in the air as you did at the picnic. It is all she wishes to do anymore. Poor Mrs. Ash is near to leaving us, I am afraid.”

Us.
That sounded so perfectly right coming from her. Elise’s
us
incorporated not only herself and Anne but him as well.

He turned to Anne, who had ceased her dancing and was concentrating on his face. “You want to spin?” He spoke slowly and a bit loudly, as Elise did when speaking to Anne.

The sweet little girl grinned. Yes, she was definitely her mother’s daughter. Her eyes were a different color, but otherwise, she was Elise’s copy at that age—the age she’d lost her own mother. This girl had already lost her father. Why was it tragedy seemed to dog Elise’s heels?

Miles reached for Anne, hands easily wrapping around her tiny frame. He lifted her high into the air and spun around. Anne laughed almost uproariously. From somewhere beyond the spinning edge of his vision, Miles heard Elise’s laughter.

He set Anne on her feet, then pretended to be too dizzy to stand. The absurd display set Anne laughing harder, and soon, she too was enacting her own farce. In a moment’s time, all three of them were laughing too hard to speak, almost too hard to breathe.

“Do you remember doing this when we were tiny?” Elise leaned against him as she continued to laugh. “Spinning and spinning until we couldn’t stand any longer?”

Miles wrapped one arm around her; with the other, he held fast to Anne’s hand. She also leaned against him, though she only came up to his thigh. And in that moment, Miles felt whole in a way he hadn’t since he’d lost Elise. It was as if a part of him had been missing and was finally found once more.

“I was so disappointed when I reached Eton,” he said. “Not a soul in the entire school was nearly as much fun as you were.”

“They were
boys
,” Elise answered as if the reason were obvious.

Miles laughed again. “I believe that is precisely what you wrote to me at the time.”

Elise stepped away from him but slipped her hand in his as she did. She turned her face up to the sun, smiling with her eyes closed. “What is it about a meadow, Miles, that makes one’s heart sing?”

Oh, Elise!
Miles felt like shouting in triumph. This was his Elise! Miles was mesmerized by the look of contentment on her face. Her sweetness and
joie de vivre
had colored so much of his first nineteen years.

Elise’s eyes twinkled suddenly, and Miles knew from years of experience that a bit of mischief had just entered her thoughts. “Do you know what Anne and I discovered by your tree?” she asked mysteriously, playfully.

Lands, it was like seeing Elise as she’d been before the murders. How long would the transformation last? How long before she came crashing back to reality again, before she clamped down her emotions and put up the wall between herself and the world? Miles hoped a very long time.

Anne was following their conversation with her eyes. How many of their words could she hear or understand? Likely not many.

He hunched down in front of her. “Do you know a secret about the tree?”

Her smile remained, but he could see she didn’t understand.

“A secret?” he tried again. “By the tree?”

“Like this, Miles.” Elise crossed her fingers in an
x
over her lips. “It means a secret or something she doesn’t want to tell you.”

Miles made the sign.

She made the gesture back, the same mischievous look in her eyes that lit her mother’s. Then she pointed in the direction of the tree.

He turned back to Elise. “What is this grand secret the two of you have unearthed?”

“There are fallen leaves tucked under an exposed root,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a vivid shade of gold. They must have fallen in the autumn months and months ago and, yet, are still vibrant. As near as I’ve been able to make out, Anne is convinced it is a magic tree.”

Precisely what Elise would have believed at that age.

“Will you teach me how to talk to her?” he asked. “I can make out her words with some effort, and she understands me once in a while. But I don’t know her gestures. I can’t supplement what I say with the signs you use.”

“You really want to learn?” Elise asked, looking at him intently.

“I really do.”

She seemed to study him a moment longer. “Why?”

“Why? So I can talk to her. So she can talk to me if she wishes.” He touched Anne’s darling little face, equally enamored and heartbroken at the look of earnestness that always accompanied her efforts to understand him. He sensed she longed for a connection as much as he did. “I want to know what she thinks and feels. I want her to be able to talk with me.”

“No one else has ever wanted to learn to talk to her.” Confusion etched into Elise’s gaze.

The conversation had become too serious. Miles wanted the lighthearted moment back. “And, I’d wager, no one else has ever had a magic tree.”

That earned him a slight smile. “Perhaps not.”

“Then you’ll teach me?” Miles pressed his advantage while Elise was at least smiling.

She shrugged. “I guess I do owe you for the dresses that continue pouring into my room.”

“Those were—”

Elise pressed her fingers to his lips and cut off his justification. Miles’s pulse quite suddenly jumped to life. She’d shushed him precisely that way hundreds of times in their childhood. But now the feel of her fingers on his lips sent a shiver through his body.

“I am only teasing, Miles.” She lowered her hand from his face and laid her head on his shoulder. “I think every home should have a meadow.”

He’d barely managed to refrain from kissing her fingertips when she’d pressed them to his lips. And, heaven help him, the temptation to kiss her—and not on the fingertips—only grew as they stood there. He absolutely could not do
that
.

“It isn’t a terribly complete language,” Elise said from his shoulder.

“Language?” Miles’s brain had simply stopped working. What in heaven’s name was wrong with him?

“Anne’s gestures,” Elise explained. “We create them as we need them. She
can
hear. If a person is patient and speaks slowly, she can make sense of many things. She doesn’t need a gesture for every word. And honestly, until we came here, she didn’t try very hard to communicate with anyone other than Mama Jones and me.”

Anne leaned more heavily against Miles’s leg. Her eyes looked sleepy, her posture weary.
Is it nap time, perhaps?

“She is a very intelligent girl.” The hint of defensiveness in Elise’s words spoke of past insults.

“I am certain she is.” Miles turned his attention back to Elise.

She watched him very closely. Miles couldn’t look away. Lands, she’d grown into a beautiful woman. He’d noticed it before but always as an afterthought. Until that moment, he’d seen only the remnants of the girl overshadowing the woman she had become. There was a hint of flowers about her, so light one had to be close to even detect it.

“Elise,” he heard himself say, his voice oddly thick.

Someone nearby cleared his throat.