In the Brief Eternal Silence (29 page)

James. It has been a pleasure seeing you
again.”

St. James placed his now empty tea cup and
saucer aside, rose from the chair. He bowed again before the Queen.
“And it has been an honor and a pleasure seeing you also, Your
Highness.”

Then the butler was there once again, seeming
to come from the darkness like a shadow to escort him, and St.
James was at the door when Queen Victoria said, “St. James?”

He turned. “Your Highness?”

“You may give Miss Murdock my
congratulations, as I extend them to you also.”

St. James gave a single taut smile. “I will,
Your Highness. Thank you.”

Then he walked from the room, his mind
turning and stretching in all sorts of new directions. Two things
took precedence in his mind: Her unexplained knowledge of his
coming marriage. And the promise of his father's files.

When he reached the coach, the lad opened the
door for him as smartly as if he had been doing it all his life.
St. James held the door. “Lad, tell the driver that we will be
going to my grandmother's house.”

“Aye, m'lord!”

“And what is your bloody name?”

A single look of startled gray eyes. “Steven,
sir. Me name is Steven.”

“Very well, Steven. Carry on.” St. James
pulled out his pocket watch, glanced at it. It was nigh on midnight
and he cursed the lateness of the hour, but as usual, he was not to
be denied.

Chapter Thirteen

Wednesday Morning

Miss Murdock awakened in the wee small hours
of the morning and she was not sure why. The room flummoxed her for
a moment and then it took on the vague familiarity of the room she
had spent the night before in. She was at the Dowager Duchess of
St. James' home. With this realization, she let out a long sigh,
turned in her bed to face the windows where a gentle beam of light
came in between the drawn curtains: a combination of silver moon
from above and gold street lamp flame from below. An unnatural
shadow moved beyond the small opening and Miss Murdock sat up with
the sharpness of one drenched with cold water. A little involuntary
gasp left her lips.

She sat for a moment in the midst of her bed,
her heart pounding, and she studied the window. The shadow moved
again and there was the slightest of tappings on the pane. The very
gentleness of the tapping was somehow as reassuring as it was
terrifying. She did not light a lamp but instead fumbled for her
robe on the chair beside her bed in the dark, struggled into it and
climbed from beneath her covers. She tiptoed to the window, went
not to the revealing middle gap in the curtains but to one side of
it and cautiously pulled the curtain back a miniscule amount.

A boy was outside her window, causing her
heart to do a quick flutter. He was perched precariously on the
slight ledge that separated the first and second floor and even as
she watched with apprehension, he tightened his grip on the outside
of her sill with one hand and made a motion of questioning with his
other to someone below.

As he was looking away from her hiding spot,
Miss Murdock drew the curtain back a small amount further, pressed
her face to the glass to look below her. The sight that met her
eyes there caused her to suppress a little surprised laugh. A dandy
dressed in a turquoise coat, and God help her, yellow shirt and
pantaloons stood on the pavement of the mew beneath her window. He
held a cane in one hand and as Miss Murdock watched, he signaled up
to the boy at her window with it, holding it in mid-air and miming
taps. The boy outside her window gave a disgruntled shrug and
turned back to do as he was bid.

But Miss Murdock did not draw back and
conceal herself in the curtain, for something about the man below
had made her draw a quick breath of recognition. His eyes had
glinted gold in the darkness.

As if to confirm her suspicion, another man
moved into her view, and the very height of him next to the dandy,
the very powerfulness of him next to that other slight, lithe
figure, told her it was none other but Tyler. And that foppish
dandy could be none other than St. James!

She moved now with quickness and drew back
the curtain so that she could unlock the window and draw up the
sash of it, nearly surprising the young boy off the ledge. “Am I to
come down?” she whispered to that startled lad.

“Aye, miss, if you please,” he answered in a
short breathless burst.

Miss Murdock nodded once. “Typical,” she said
with cryptic crispness. Then she drew the window up further. “You
may as well come in and go down with me. I wouldn't be risking my
neck further for him if I were you.”

The boy climbed through the window with a
good deal of finesse which Miss Murdock had to admire. “Risked me
neck for a lot less honur'bul reas'ns, Miss.”

'“If you judge waking a poor girl in her
bedchamber in the middle of the night and scaring her half from her
wits as being more honorable than what you've been about before,
then you are in very sad shape, indeed,” Miss Murdock replied in a
tart, hushed voice. “But here, I do not mean to abuse you, for I
well know who has put you up to this stunt,” she added in the cause
of fairness. “Just allow me to put these slippers on and then we
will go down.”

“Yes, miss,” the boy said, not in the least
chastised at any rate. “Coo, miss, this is a grand room!” he
whispered in admiration.

“So it is,” she agreed and taking him by the
shoulder she opened the door to the hallway, looked quickly up and
down it and then shoved him without ceremony out into it. “And you
may wait for me out here for you have no call to be in a lady's
bedchambers,” she whispered back. Then she shut the door, ran to
her closet, dug out the same cloak she had worn on her journey to
London and put it on over her robe. She buttoned it up quickly, as
quickly as she could, for to her surprise, her hands were shaking,
and then she paused a moment to look in the mirror, and wished she
hadn't, for of course the beautiful hairstyle she had worn earlier
that evening was quite gone except for a mass of tangled, ratty
curls.

“Oh, why in God's name do I have to look like
a perfect shrew each and every time I see that man?” she asked
herself in exasperation, and then gave a little sigh and a laugh.
It did not matter. It could not matter.

She opened the door, found the boy in the
hallway, looking rather subdued at being left alone by himself in
the luxurious expanse of it. “I am Miss Murdock,” Lizzie whispered.
“And I had better get your name, I suppose.”

“It is Steven, miss. I'm pleased to meet you,
miss.”

“All right, Steven, this way.”

They snuck along the hallway and down the
staircase, Miss Murdock having a moment's doubt about what she
should say if they were caught, but the house with the most of its
servants being nearly as elderly as their employer remained quiet.
Miss Murdock realized it would have been more expedient to go out a
different entrance than the front, but as she was unfamiliar with
anything but the main front rooms, she did not want to be stumbling
about any more than she had to. So she carefully unlocked the large
front doors, opened one enough for she and the boy who was nearly
as tall as she at any rate to slip through, and then clicked it
closed again, seeing to it that it remained unlocked.

Then Steven was skipping ahead of her,
laughing in the night. “You're a right cool one, Miss. I was made
sure that you would scream when I came to your window, but his
lordship, he said he thought not, and so he was right. Was you
expecting him then?”

“No,” Miss Murdock replied a little crossly.
“I am certainly not in the habit of slipping out of the house at
night to meet gentlemen, so you can disregard that notion out of
hand! I would not be down here now, but would have sent his
lordship packing except that I have something I expressly need to
talk with him about.”

“Oh,” Steven said, much of his pleasure taken
out of the escapade as she had managed to make it all seem very
reasonable and respectable. But then they rounded the corner and
Miss Murdock sighted St. James and was impaled by the gold gleam of
his eyes. She drew up for a second, having forgotten just how
overpowering his gaze could be, then she continued to walk and her
pace was slower, as if she were measuring him with every step she
took.

He came toward her, using the cane as
elegantly as it was useless to him. He stopped in front of her and
Steven went ahead to where the carriage, the driver and Tyler were,
leaving them in semi-privacy beneath the moon and the street lamp
at the corner of the house. “Miss Murdock,” he said with a wicked
little flickering of an eyebrow, “you are looking very well
tonight.”

To Miss Murdock's disgust, she felt her face
heat into a blush. “I know very well how I look! And I fear it is
not half as well as you, milord,” she managed to say. “Your sudden
pressing engagement must needs you to look very fine, indeed.”

“Ah, yes,” St. James returned and gave a
self-deprecating glance down at his clothing as though he had
forgotten it until her reminder. “Ludicrous is it not? You suspect
I did not put on this peacock attire to come and visit you?” he
asked.

“You would hardly need to put on boots with a
heel to be higher than me, milord,” Miss Murdock returned with
dryness. “Evidently whoever you have spent the evening calling upon
is taller than I.”

“Let us just say of a loftier stature than
either of us, Miss Murdock, and leave it at that, shall we?” His
tone was light and bantering, but he seemed very preoccupied all
the same, and she fell silent despite wanting to press her own
concerns on him and be allowed to go home.

He turned, so that he was at her side, and of
mutual accord they began to stroll toward the carriage. “By the by,
how is your hand, Miss Murdock?”

“My hand?” she asked. “Oh, the burn. Of
course it does not pain me any longer.”

“I am relieved to hear it,” and as he said
so, he took her hand in his and raised the back of it to his lips.
“Shall we go for a drive, Miss Murdock?”

She did not answer for that swift, careless
gesture he had made toward her had her quite speechless. They were
still several feet from the coach and he stopped, waiting for her
answer. “I—I'm not properly dressed for a drive, milord,” she
managed.

His answer was gentle, “Neither are you
properly dressed to be standing here with me for anyone passing by
to see, Miss Murdock. Which is my fault, as usual, you may point
out, but I had a wish, a need, to talk with you tonight.”

Of course he was right. The fact that she had
been slow in realizing the possible consequences of remaining in
the mew with him for anyone to see, she could only account for as
the result of her hand's tingling where he had kissed the back of
it, and the unexpected rushing of blood to her head. She had the
sudden certainty that if she allowed him to draw her forward and
into the coach, that he meant to seduce her. Which was a ridiculous
thought, for if she had been feeling somewhat attractive earlier
that night, she was in no way attractive now, she reminded
herself.

That sobering reflection brought her more to
her senses instead of standing in the light of the moon feeling a
little moon struck herself, and she nodded. “It is rather chilly
out here.”

“Good lass,” he told her, and they crossed
the few feet to the coach.

Tyler was there, standing next to the
conveyance, and he nodded and pulled his cap, said around his ever
present wad of chewing tobacco, “Evening, Miss,” as though it were
not at all uncommon to see a young lady of quality in her night
clothes with only a robe and cloak to make her closer to (but still
a far cry from) decent.

“And to you, Tyler,” she returned, the very
normalcy of it comforting her and making any remaining thought of
seduction fade away.

The boy, Steven, hurried to open the door for
them and sketched a half nod, half bow while pulling his forelock
in a confusion of motion. Tyler clambered up to join the groom that
was already above minding the horses. St. James climbed into the
conveyance after her and Steven shut the door and ran around to the
back.

St. James unfolded one of the rugs stored
beneath the seats and spread it over her lap. “Warm enough?” he
asked her from his half kneeling position, his gold eyes
disquieting in their nearness.

“Indeed, yes. Thank you,” Miss Murdock
replied, a little breathless. He settled into the seat opposite
her. The carriage began moving at a lazy pace and in the dim
interior, he was silent.

It occurred to Miss Murdock as she watched
the Duchess' house slip from her view and other houses take its
place outside the carriage window that it was somehow very
peaceful. Not a word she would have thought to associate with her
companion. But tonight his preoccupation with his thoughts did not
disturb her, but rather as a person observes a dog when it has
caught the scent of something, and raises its head to more closely
examine this scent, she merely observed him and wondered what
conclusions he was coming to, knowing she would be alerted if said
conclusions were anything to alarm her.

“You are very quiet tonight, Miss Murdock,”
he said at last.

“It is just very peaceful and I am loathe to
interrupt it. Or you in your musings.”

“You've interrupted them quite regularly
today.”

“Oh,” she said, and then, feeling a little
foolish, “I'm so sorry.”

His lips quirked but he did not go so far as
to laugh at her. “I did need to see you tonight, Miss Murdock, and
I very much regret being unable to keep my earlier
appointment.”

“Your grandmother was very disappointed, you
know. She has gotten the wild notion in her head, I believe, that
we should suit. Of course, you are to blame for that, because of
your ill-advised announcement upon my arrival last night. No,” she
shook her head in warning, “I have not forgotten that, nor forgiven
you.”