Miranda (11 page)

“I went straight to the authorities. It was a notice in the
Times
that finally led me to Bethlehem Hospital.”

“You put a notice in the
Times
?”

“No. An anonymous person ran a drawing—a rather good likeness.”

“So someone else is looking for me.”

“Someone who means you harm.” He stared down at his hands, and his discomfiture softened her toward him.

“It could be my father.”

“I doubt it.” He drew a deep breath. “Another murder had occurred at Bedlam. A Dr. Beckworth had been killed in his chambers, and the entire place was draped in mourning black.”

Miranda gripped the edge of the bench until her hands ached. “Dear God. Not Dr. Beckworth.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes. He was a decent man. At least I think he was.” She regarded him pointedly.

“They say he had been making bold reforms at the hospital. But the inmates I saw were being treated like animals. Only one woman—her name was Gwen—was lucid enough to speak to me. She told me a dark Scotsman had come and taken you away.”

A dark Scotsman. It was the perfect description of Ian MacVane. She remembered him in his Highland regalia, looking like a bridegroom out of every young girl's dreams. She had gazed at him with her heart in her eyes and declared that she loved him.

The memory stung. She jumped up from the bench and paced the deck. She could not let herself love anyone—not Ian MacVane, not the handsome Viscount Lisle—until she discovered the truth.

“Miranda, please listen.” Lucas got up and followed her. “There's so much to discuss—” The rest of his words were drowned out by a shrill whistle. Sailors swarmed over the decks and up into the rigging as the ship prepared to weigh anchor and set sail.

Miranda's heart ached. She was leaving Ian behind. Leaving behind the green mountains and fields of heather and people who made her feel as if she belonged with them.

A moment later, a trumpet sounded. Lucas mounted a short ladder to the sterncastle deck. “What is it, Edgerton?”

“A dory there, my lord.” He pointed.

Miranda followed, holding her skirts in one hand and squinting through the shrouds of morning fog that seethed across the shifting water. A lone man rowed toward the ship. Her heart jolted as she went to the rail and clutched at the smooth wood.
Ian.

Cloaked in pale shrouds of fog, he had come for her. Part of her acknowledged that she had hoped and prayed for him to do so. To assert his claim on her. To prove to her that he had not been lying.

Yet she knew that his coming here, now, could mean only trouble. She glanced up at Lucas Chesney and froze.

He stood behind three soldiers as they aimed their muskets at the approaching man.

“Just a warning shot, mind you,” Lucas said.

Something was wrong with her voice. Her throat was full and constricted by panic. “No!” she forced out, but it was little more than a whisper. “Ian, look out!”

The three muskets discharged, shattering the foggy stillness of the morning. Miranda saw a blinding flash of light, heard a voice screaming in her head:
It's the only way to stop them, Papa. I must destroy the warehouse...

Then a waking nightmare scoured the memory from her mind as the sulfurous smoke cleared. She saw one oar hanging limply from its oarlock. Ian MacVane lay slumped over in the dory.

Suddenly her voice returned with a vengeance. She screamed loud and long, screamed until her throat felt near to bursting.

“You shot him! You shot my Ian!”

Nine

Here malice, rapine, accident conspire
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.

—Samuel Johnson,
London

“W
ill there be anything more, ma'am?” asked a portly, smiling maid.

Miranda looked up at the woman, blinking slowly. “Pardon me...? Oh. No. Thank you.” She viewed the world through a gray mist like the one that had enshrouded Ian MacVane the moment he was shot.

She'd been in London for three days, but it might have been three years for all that she noted the passing of the hours. The enormity of her loss was almost too much to grasp. She had been wedded and widowed the same day. Fate—in the form of an Englishman's musket—had robbed her of the chance to be a wife.

It was like some tragic theatrical play, almost ridiculous in the sweep of its drama. But in the center of all her grief and confusion, like a poison pellet, lay one terrible question. Who was Ian MacVane?

Lucas had promised to find out. Twisted into knots of guilt, he exuded a sympathy that seemed genuine. Still, he failed to penetrate her icy cocoon of shock and grief. She had sworn to learn the truth about her past, but since arriving in London, she had done nothing.

She was terrified of finding out she had been wrong about Ian.

Since she had no other place to go, Lucas Chesney had brought her to his family's town residence, a rambling house set too close to the river, where the furnishings were just a little shabby, the soup just a little watery, the company just a little dotty.

“Dotty Aunt Dorcas,” Lucas called his kinswoman, and so she was, spending most of the day sleeping. During her waking hours she was a benign presence, so advanced in years that she had no notion who Miranda was, nor any urge to find out.

“She's the perfect chaperone,” Lucas had explained, his gaze warm with affection as he'd bent to kiss his sleeping aunt on the forehead below the lacy fringe of her old-fashioned mobcap. “With her present, there will be no breach of propriety, but just the same, there will be nothing for us to explain.”

Lucas had such a smooth way about him. He made everything so
easy
. So comfortable. Ian had been just the opposite. Challenging her. Making her think difficult thoughts. Rousing emotions so powerful, they left her dazed. She wondered if, in the past, she had been capable of such extremes of passion.

It was so much simpler to be pulled along in the wake of Lucas's buoyant charm.

Miranda made no move when she heard the door open and close as the maid let herself out. “Good day, my lord,” the servant murmured, and then there was a clump of leather boots as Lucas Chesney entered.

Aunt Dorcas, dozing on a tufted chaise by the hearth, blinked vaguely. “Mind the step, Alfonso,” she muttered, addressing her dead husband as she often did. “We'll have no accidents today.”

“Of course, dear heart.” Lucas bowed and kissed her hand. “I am yours to command.”

Miranda kept her gaze trained out the window. It was a brilliant summer day. Brisk traffic passed by in the roadway, and flowers rioted along the verges. Yet all she saw was the fog, the endless gray fog that seemed to swallow up the world.

“I'd hoped,” Lucas said tenderly, “to find you less melancholy today.” A chair creaked as he seated himself across from her.

She forced herself to look at him, to look at his perfect, bronzed face. “You'll pardon me,” she said, “if I fail to exude gaiety after watching a man shot to death in cold blood.”

Lucas hissed as if her words were a poisoned dart. “Ian MacVane was a dangerous man.” He spoke gently, but with conviction. “I've spent the past three days trying to find out who he was, why he would kidnap an innocent young woman and force her to marry him.”

“There was no force involved, my lord.” Briefly she shut her eyes. She remembered her excitement the night of the wedding, the sturdy feel of Ian's arms around her and the dark, sweet promises in his eyes as he gazed down at her. She had refuted those promises with her doubts and her insistence on tracing down her past. And Ian had paid the price.

Lucas captured her hands in his. He had beautiful hands, long fingered and elegant, the nails neatly pared. So unlike Ian with his blunt workman's hands and the missing finger he loathed to show the world.

“Miranda, please listen to me. I've been all over London inquiring about this man. The clubs are full of gossip. MacVane had an unscrupulous nature. He was a liar. He manipulated you for his own purpose—”

“And what might that purpose be?” she asked dully. “What possible interest could he have had in me?”

“Of that, I'm not certain,” Lucas admitted. “But it's bound to be an evil one.”

She surged to her feet and stalked across the room, her movement causing an antique tapestry to waft against a wall, raising a small cloud of dust. “I won't listen to this.”

Lucas brought her to a halt next to a pianoforte. “You will. You must face facts, Miranda.”

“My lord, I would love to face facts. It's just that I don't know what the truth is.”

He leaned closer, commanding but not threatening. “Then work with what you do know. Miranda Stonecypher, if I had been your bridegroom that night, all the powers of heaven and hell could not have torn you away from me. Yet MacVane simply stepped aside and let you leave with me.”

“He came after me and paid with his life,” she spat.

“Do you think a man who truly loved you, truly wanted you, would have let you out of his sight? He let you go because he knew you'd find out he'd played you false. What other lies did he tell? What other promises did he break?”

She twisted away from him and went to the window, clinging to a musty drape and staring out, seeing nothing but a blur of summer color, softened by the fog that hung between her and the world.

“Miranda, listen. Ian MacVane is a Scottish mercenary. He came to the attention of the British authorities after joining a regiment in 1805 under the duke of York.”

“I remember that,” Aunt Dorcas said to no one in particular. “Couldn't get decent wine for a king's ransom. Family fortune went to hell in a handbasket that year, didn't it, Alfonso?”

There was a clink of glass as Lucas poured himself a drink at the sideboard. “MacVane had a reputation for being hot tempered and disobedient, and a habit of volunteering for hazardous—sometimes hopeless—duties. When they needed a man who did not care whether he lived or died, they chose MacVane.”

She closed her eyes, remembering Ian. The report had the ring of truth. There was a darkness about him she'd noticed from the start, a recklessness. The night of the explosion, he had plunged into a burning building to save her, then Robbie, with no thought to himself. “What else did you learn?” she asked softly.

“He saw battle action in the Peninsular Wars. In 1810 he was drafted to perform specialized acts of espionage and sabotage for England. His training made him into a master of disguise, the perfect counterfeit Highland laird, a popular guest at any gathering of the
ton.
” Lucas gulped down his brandy. “At White's club, he was a familiar face. He was extravagant—both at winning and at losing. I'm told that women found him fascinating.”

“There's a surprise,” Miranda murmured with a humorless smile.

Lucas's glass thumped on a leather-topped desk. “He was never to be trusted.”

“The British government trusted him,” she shot back.

“They used him as a bloody mercenary because that's all a man like Ian MacVane was good for. Everyone I spoke with underscored that again and again. No one has any idea what he was doing in London this Season, but he was surely up to no good. What with all the visiting foreign royalty, plots hatch like fleas. He's bound to have been a part of them.”

“Did no one ever teach you to speak kindly of the dead?”

With a shaking hand, Lucas set down his glass. “It was a horrible accident. And after the—” he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief “—after the mishap, I sent out a tender to find him.”

“And you failed to locate him.” The moments after the shooting were all a blur. She recalled shouts, running feet, the whine of rope through a pulley, the splash of the tender hitting the water. The hopeless yell of the search party.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “And so that, as they say, is that. A man who claimed to love me is dead because of a horrible accident.”

“Love you.” An angry flush darkened Lucas's neck and cheeks. “He didn't know you. He had some foul purpose in mind.”

“And what of you, my lord? What is your purpose?”

“Can you not remember, Miranda? Can you not remember me at all?”

She looked at him and concentrated. Gray eyes, sensual lips. An air of weary concern. But...nothing. He was as strange to her as Ian had been when he'd fetched her from Bedlam. “No,” she said quietly.

“We used to meet in secret.”

“Why in secret?”

“No good comes of keeping secrets,” Aunt Dorcas said in a singsong voice.

He hung his head. “That is the worst of it. That is why I can barely live with myself for the shame of it.” He plowed his splayed fingers through his golden mane. “All my life, I was taught that I must make a good marriage. No, a grand marriage. To a woman with a vast dowry, a celebrated bloodline.”

“A duke's daughter or better,” Aunt Dorcas interjected.

He lifted his head and gave Miranda a smile that was tinged with melancholy and regret. “I almost believed I could be content with that sort of existence. And then I met you. After you, I could not bring myself to make a cold business arrangement with some chosen woman, to breed with her and bring up more children who would be as wretched as I was.”

In spite of herself, she grew interested in this man. The fog around her seemed to part a little. He was giving her a glimpse into his soul, and she didn't despise what she saw.

“I love you, Miranda. I have from the first moment I saw you. But I failed you. I was afraid of what my family would say, afraid they'd treat you cruelly because you weren't wealthy or noble.”

Lucas's clear-eyed gaze radiated sincerity. “It would be so much simpler if I didn't care what they thought. But the truth is, I love my family, and they're on the verge of ruin. If I marry well, I could save them all. Give my sisters a proper entrée into society. Give my younger brother a fine education. Make certain my parents will always be free from want.”

“I should like to meet them,” she said. Compassion broke through the numbness that had enveloped her. She could not remember having a family, but she understood the affection and despair in his voice. “Have you ever considered other choices? Why not earn your keep as so many men do?”

He smiled wearily. “In trade, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Seeing me go into trade is the only thing my family would deem worse than—” He broke off.

But he had not caught himself in time. “Worse than marrying a nobody like Miranda Stonecypher,” she finished for him.

“I'm so sorry. I'd dig ditches if I thought it was a way to have you. In fact, we talked about the possibilities. I was going to help you patent your design for the aerial balloon.” His smile glowed with pride. “You're the most clever woman in England. You used to blush when I said that.”

“A balloon.” She tried hard to remember. Riding the winds beneath a billow of silk that looked as big as the globe. Had she ever done it?

“All your designs were attributed to your father, of course. He even signed his name to the plans.”

The mention of her father closed like a fist around her heart. “The plans, then. Where are they now? Perhaps seeing them will help me remember.”

“They were stolen the night of—the night I lost you.”

She felt exhausted, betrayed, confused. Her head ached. Each time she tried to see into the past, she met a black wall.

“We don't need the plans now, darling,” Lucas said. “I've found a way to save the Chesney family fortune. Honorably. Just think, Miranda, we can be together—”

“You assume that's what I want,” she said.

He didn't seem to hear her, but plunged on. “I've met a gentleman called Silas Addingham. Actually, he is not a gentleman, but that's why this will work. He has some very lofty social ambitions and more money than Golden Ball. I, on the other hand, have more social connections than the Hanover family tree. I provide Silas with an entrée into the best circles—”

“And he pays you for the privilege.”

“Exactly. What do you think?”

“I think it proves there is nothing that cannot be bought and sold like a commodity. What shall we package and sell next? Virtue? Honor? Temperance?”

A rueful smile curved his mouth. “It's a sight better than digging ditches.”