“Your father?” Aidan scoffed. He put a hand up to stop him from stepping past the threshold.
“She was my father’s wife.”
“Kate, what the hell is he talking about?” When she didn’t answer, he looked over his shoulder. “Kate?”
“I’m sorry.” Her face twisted into a sob before she pressed her fingers to her mouth to stop it.
“My name is Gerard Gallow,” the man said, stepping through and shutting the door behind him. “And I don’t know what she’s told you or who you think she is, but there is no Mrs. Hamilton and there never has been. She’s a fraud, and the authorities in Ceylon want to question her about my father’s death.”
Aidan didn’t know what to do, so he went with his overriding impulse and grabbed Gallow by the lapels of his coat to push him against the wall. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? You don’t even know who she is!”
“You’re the fool,” Aidan said softly. “I’ve known her since she was a girl.” Despite his confusion, Aidan was supremely satisfied to see the man’s face pale at that. “You don’t get to tell me who Kate is. I know who she is.”
But his words were far more certain than his heart. His heart was holding on to Kate’s expression of horrified regret. “If you’re not her husband, then you have no right to be here. None. So get the hell out and never return.”
“She’s coming back with me.”
Aidan pulled the man closer, only to give himself the satisfaction of slamming him back into the wall. “She’ll never go back!”
“She has no choice. She may have killed my father, and she has to answer for that.”
Kate gasped. “I’ve told you what happened! Aidan, I had nothing to do with it.”
But Aidan didn’t need to hear that. He actually smiled at the audacity of the man’s lie. “You’re ridiculous. Whatever she’s done, it wasn’t that.” He cocked his head and stared into Gallow’s stone gray eyes. “Even you don’t believe that.” Something dark and liquid moved behind those eyes. “You don’t believe that,” Aidan repeated.
Gallow held his gaze and didn’t say a word.
“Kate, did he hurt you?”
“No,” she whispered.
Aidan slowly loosened his hold and stepped back. He dusted his hands off while Gallow tugged his coat into place. “Then go get his things. All of them.”
“Aidan.” Her hand touched his arm, then fluttered away. “He’ll tell everyone. The truth. And the lies. You should go. Your reputation and your family . . . You don’t need to be involved.”
“Go get his things. He won’t tell anyone anything.”
Gallow laughed, but Aidan watched Kate calmly until she’d turned up the stairway and he heard her steps ascend. Then he swung back to Gallow. “How did your father die?”
“He was poisoned.”
“By whom?”
“The authorities suspect Katherine. They meant to arrest her. I am the one who stopped them.”
“And what does she say?”
His eyes shifted to the side. His cheeks reddened. “She says he took the poison himself.”
“Did he?”
Gallow shrugged, his jaw so tight that Aidan could see the muscles straining beneath. “The authorities will have questions about it. That’s why she must return.”
The stairs creaked behind him. Kate set a small trunk on the floor and pushed it forward with her foot.
“Is that everything?”
She nodded.
Aidan picked up the trunk, strode to the door, and tossed the trunk outside. “Which ship has he booked passage on?”
“The
Talisman,
” she whispered. “It sails tomorrow night.”
“Wait here,” he said to Kate before gesturing for Gerard Gallow to step outside.
“Aidan . . .” She reached out as if she’d touch him, but Aidan pulled away. “What are you going to—”
“I said
wait here
.”
He was left with the image of her stricken expression as he stepped into the street. Gerard Gallow rounded on him, fists clenched and face purple with rage. “I won’t stand for this. She will be ruined and arrested. I’ll see to it.”
Aidan gathered up all his hurt and fear and rage. He thought of the lies she’d told him and the danger she was in. And then he let it all gather in his fist and drove it into Gerard Gallow’s face.
The man went down like a sail with its rope cut. The crowd that had gathered around them gasped and drew back. Several of the ladies shrieked.
“Drunkard,” Aidan explained as he heaved the trunk up to his shoulder. He was crouching down to grab the back of Gallow’s collar so that he could drag the man to the dockyard, but Penrose raced up to take the trunk from Aidan’s shoulder.
“I’ll take that, sir. Is there someone you need me to get? A constable, perhaps?”
“No, thank you, Penrose. I’ll take it from here.”
Aidan bent down, lifted the unconscious man by the shoulders and slung him over his back, staggering a little at the weight. “Find out where the
Talisman
is docked.”
“Yes, sir.”
Penrose raced off, running right past Lucy Cain without seeing her. Aidan made a point of nodding in greeting as he passed her, and smiled a little to try to erase some of the fear from her eyes. But her startled blink told him that his smile was more of a snarl, so he ducked his head and walked toward the docks.
Once there, it was a simple transaction. He paid the captain of the
Talisman
to keep Gallow locked in a cabin until he set sail. “He’s to have no visitors. I’ll return tomorrow to ensure he’s still here. There’ll be another hundred pounds in it for you if he’s still aboard when you shove off. And I’ll have a letter to be delivered to the governor of Ceylon. Agreed?”
“Absolutely. An honor to do business with you, Mr. York.”
Two sailors disappeared below with Gallow slung between them. A third toted his trunk. God willing, Aidan would never see the man again.
Still . . . he’d rather fight Gerard Gallow like a dog in the street than return to Kate and find out why she’d lied to him. About everything.
He had no choice, but he eyed the train station as he passed it, wishing he could simply board a train and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. But he walked on until he reached the door of her shop. The small groups of people still loitering on the walk studied him as he approached. Lucy tried to stop him, but he shook his head and did not pause once. He could not stop or he might not be able to start again.
When he opened the door, he found Kate standing in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around her middle. “Aidan. Are you all right? What happened?”
He could not speak yet, so he only gestured toward the stairway. Kate trudged up the stairs and Aidan followed. He tried to sit down, but his muscles twitched beneath his skin, so he rose again. And every second, Kate watched him with eyes so wide he thought he’d fall into them. “Tell me,” he finally rasped. “Tell me the
truth
.”
He heard the rush of air in her throat as she inhaled. “I’m sorry.”
“Just say it!”
“My husband died ten months ago,” she whispered, and Aidan felt his stomach drop so far that he felt hollow.
“I didn’t know how to tell you. Or when.”
“What does that mean, you didn’t know
how?
You simply do it! And when? When I asked about him. When we made love. When I begged you to divorce him! Jesus Christ, Kate!”
“I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. You heard Gerard. He’d accused me of killing my husband!”
“Did you?”
“No!”
Aidan scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I feel like I’m going mad. Was any of it true? Any of what you told me? Were you even sent away at all?”
When she didn’t answer, he looked up to find her so pale that she looked gray. She nodded. Her hands gestured as if she’d say more, but when Aidan saw the way they shook, he cursed and moved to hold her. Her skin felt cold when she leaned into him. “You need to sit down, Kate.”
He settled her close to the stove and fed the fire. Then he poured her a glass of Madeira and pressed it into her hand. “You have to tell me everything. Everything or I’ll leave right now. This is cruel, what you’ve done to me.”
“I know,” she murmured.
Aidan paced to the window and stared out. He waited and she finally spoke.
“I was sent to Ceylon, not India. And you were right, you know. I didn’t want to go. I fought them at every turn. But when I stepped onto that ship, part of me thought, ‘Well, this will show him. He’ll feel sorry when he hears I’m gone.’”
Aidan winced, hating her in that moment.
“But,” Kate said quietly, “I got over that soon enough, long before I arrived in Ceylon. . . .”
Determined not to offer comfort, he clenched his jaw to bar any soft words from escaping.
“I thought I’d be able to talk my way out of it somehow. But when the ship docked, a cart was waiting to take me into the jungle. Two servants and me and a pastor . . . He did not even introduce himself, my husband. I didn’t have time to change out of my dusty clothes or wash up. I was led into the house and the pastor married us. And then, I think . . . I disappeared.”
Aidan turned to her to find her staring down at her hands as if she’d never seen them before. “What do you mean?”
“I still thought it wasn’t too late. I was shown to a bedroom, and when he came in . . .”
Aidan tensed and held up a hand, thinking he would stop her, but it was too late.
“I told him it was all a mistake. That I’d been promised to you. That I’d already made love with you. I thought he would send me back, but he didn’t.”
“Kate—”
“He only said, ‘This will be easier then,’ and he laid me on the bed and h-h-he—”
“Kate, please—”
“—he
had
me. Just like that. As if it meant nothing to him.”
Pain spiraled through Aidan as if a knife was twisting straight through him. He’d said those words to her. That those women had meant nothing to him. But he couldn’t imagine . . . He didn’t want to imagine what those words had meant to Kate.
“So yes, I was telling the truth about that, but I was married in Ceylon, and his name was David Gallow.”
She went quiet then, but Aidan could hear his own breathing, too loud and fast. “And he’s dead,” he growled.
“Yes.”
“So I will not have to kill him?”
She looked up, surprise in her eyes. “He didn’t deserve to be killed.”
“He did!” Aidan shouted. When she shook her head, he pounded his fist onto the table as hard as he could. “He did, Kate. How can you say that? He
raped
you.” He thought of her, young and bright, laughing over her shoulder as he’d teased her. Looking up at him as he’d eased inside her body while his heart shook like a bird in his chest. Smiling across the table the first time they met.
He didn’t know how she’d lived with what had happened to her. Aidan wasn’t sure that he could.
“I thought he was a monster,” she said quietly, “but he was just a man. He was in love with a woman named Iniya. He’d bought her from her father when she was sixteen and made her his mistress, and that was why he needed me. The good Englishmen of Ceylon all had women they kept, but he was too open about it. He took his children into town to buy them treats. He lived in her cabin instead of the big house. He scandalized the other wives with his indiscretion. None of them wanted the truth flaunted in their faces. He needed me as a shield against scandal, and that was all. David was as miserable as I.”
Aidan eased down to sit next to her. “How can you say that? No one forced him to anything. No one put their hands on him.”
Kate shrugged one shoulder and stared down into her glass.
“How did you live like that?”
She flashed a quick smile with no humor in it. “I didn’t. I ate and breathed and slept. I existed. Nothing more. Sometimes I took laudanum to help me sleep longer because there were so many endless hours in the day. Have you ever noticed that? How many hours there are?”
He shook his head.
“One night I woke up and I simply walked out. It was the middle of the night. I had nowhere to go, but I just couldn’t stay another moment in that house. I walked for miles. Miles. Into the jungle. Into the rain. I just kept walking. After the sun rose, I heard hoofbeats behind me; it was David. He didn’t say a word, he just put his hand out to pull me up. I tried to run up a hill, and he followed. The hillside wasn’t stable, and the horse slipped. . . . The whole world seemed to fall away.” She touched her cheek and the scar that lay there. “In the end, his spine was broken. He was never the same, but I came to know him as a person after that. I helped care for him. Iniya moved into the house. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I was alive.”
“Did he kill himself?” Aidan asked.