“Damn it, Kevin, I’m not making this up!”
His hands dropped and he scowled. “Now look, I’ve just about had enough of this. I will not hear any more of it, especially when it concerns some dead man who was probably your lover. Confound it, Cass, before you met me did you have every man that came along?”
She could not stop herself. Her palm cracked across his cheek, leaving a livid red blotch that he touched at gingerly with one finger.
“I think I can forgive you that, Cass.”
“Well, good for you.”
Suddenly he softened, searching her eyes until she could not help but squirm under his scrutiny. “Cass … it’s silly, I know, but I’ve heard a lot of stories about women who are—I mean, they’re always getting upset about little things, and they imagine things that aren’t there, and they … they …”
When he stammered into an awkward silence, she almost laughed. “If you’re trying to find out if I’m expecting our child, Kevin, the answer is no. I am perfectly healthy, sane, and I know what I am talking about. There was a man named Forrester, there was a man named Hawkins and he is not dead, and they are, both of them, after me because of that … that … thing I told you about. And damn it, last night he … spoke to me again, and he’s going to come for me sooner or later and I want protection!”
“All right, all right,” he said, his manner infuriatingly placating. “When I get home this evening, I’ll—”
“Kevin, for God’s sake!”
“For God’s sake yourself, woman! Don’t I have enough troubles without my wife suddenly losing her mind because of a few harmless snubs from some idiotic old women? Jesus, I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”
“I am,” she said, “and you damned well know it.”
He hesitated; Cass hoped; and then he disappointed her by brushing past her and out the door. She sagged against the wall, too tired suddenly to follow him, fighting the tears of dismay and rage that burned her eyes. Then she slammed the door as hard as she could and ran back to her room.
He’s impossible, she thought bitterly; he didn’t believe a single word I said. Not a word! She paced the floor frantically, having no idea what to do next, no notion at all when Geoffrey would make his next move. I should have told him about the rape, she told herself, and shrugged. No. He would only have thought I somehow lured Geoffrey on, actually wanted to be taken. If he believed it had happened at all. She dropped onto the padded stool in front of the vanity, and stared at her reflection in the oval mirror. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffed, her cheeks flushed, and it seemed the luster had gone from her midnight hair. She yanked at it furiously, winced, and pounded a fist on the table. Damn him for a man! Then, abruptly, what felt like a packet of ice settled in her stomach.
She frowned. From almost the first moment she’d brought the subject up once they’d awakened, Kevin had treated her as she’d feared; but there was more, she now knew, much more to it than he’d said. A gnawing sensation tickled the back of her mind and she tried to reconstruct the dreadful conversation, the words and the emotions as the gnawing grew into a seed of fear. There was something not quite true, something she had not noted at the time because she was too overwrought, too excited, and too hopeful, before he had dashed those hopes on the rocks of his cynicism.
“This man,” he had asked offhandedly, “this man Forrester. What does he look like?”
“What does it matter now?” she’d said in exasperation. “He’ll be back; I’ll show him to you. I’ll even give you an introduction before he kills me if you insist. Damn it, who cares?”
“Confound it, woman,” he’d shouted, “what does he look like?”
They had gotten off onto something else, then, and she had forgotten his demand. But now that she recalled it, she wondered why he was so insistent about it. It would be safe to believe that he merely had to know so that he could hire some men to seek Forrester out, and in the current phrasing, do him well; or perhaps he sought to prove that she was hysterical and could give no description at all of a man who did not exist except in her fancy. Or he wanted the description because he knew the man and wanted to be sure. Knew him, though perhaps not his name.
She shook her head when she saw the fear in her reflection. She refused to believe it. If Kevin had had any dealings at all with Forrester, he would have told her, and would have believed her. He would have. He would!
Unless, until now, there had been no reason for him to make the connection.
T
hree hours later, after a great deal of indecision, guilt, and false starts, she stood in front of the yellow-windowed door of the Quill and Court, praying for the nerve to go in. She had gone to Kevin’s office to confront him again, only to learn that neither he nor Hiram were in their rooms. And neither was David Vessler, the man she had gone to see. Titus McWilliams, a stick of a man with a perpetually dour expression who wore his clothes as though they were bought secondhand, told her that David could most likely be found with his fiancée at the popular tavern where most of the area’s businessmen lunched during the week. He had pressed for some details, his smile fairly fawning, but she had only smiled sweetly and excused herself in a hurry, feeling his eyes on her back as she walked back out of the cul-de-sac. She did not like McWilliams, his manner, his presumptuousness. She could not like him, no matter how often Kevin raved about the sharpness of his mind and his extensive legal knowledge; she could not because she thought it unnecessarily cruel of both her husband and his partner to bring someone new into the firm when David had been working so hard, for so long, to make himself a place there. And then, to keep the young man on, like rubbing salt into a wound …
She pushed through the door and paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the tavern’s dim lighting. To her right was a large, post-studded room filled with heavy oaken tables, edged with high-backed booths, and lighted by a random series of lanterns strung from the exposed-beam ceiling. It was crowded, filled with quiet laughter and talk, and a cloud of swirling smoke writhed beneath the beams. Directly ahead and sweeping off to a smaller room on her left was a magnificently polished mahogany bar behind which two buxom, flaxen-haired women with low-cut barmaid gowns worked furiously to keep up with the orders from the well-dressed gentlemen standing shoulder to shoulder along the bar’s length. Two other maids and a black-aproned landlord wound their way through the maze of tables, stems in their hands, trays balanced precariously on their forearms as they dodged the gesticulations and pinches of the customers. No one seemed to notice Cass’s solitary entrance, nor seemed to think it unusual. After waiting a moment for some attention from the landlord, obviously not forthcoming, she took a hesitant step forward, peering through the haze anxiously until she spotted a hand waving at her frantically. She sighed her relief, nodded, and made her way to the back of the room and the rear booth, next to a spring-hinged door apparently leading into the kitchen behind the bar.
David Vessler rose quickly, a grin on his face, and Cass thought that in the two years or so that she had known him, he had grown perceptibly older. There were marked lines now about his eyes and mouth, lines of weariness and, she thought, melancholy. His hair, though still a rich light brown, was already showing strands of gray about his temples. And one other thing, too, had changed, and for that she felt the slightest pang of amused regret; when she had first come to the city, she had known that he had been struck by her, a puppy love really, but that had vanished with the cloak of his innocence. The looks he used to sneak in her direction were now openly reserved for the woman seated by the wall. She was quite thin, though her bosom was substantial enough, and quite pale. Her red lips and red-touched cheeks seemed all the more stark for it, especially under a flow of hair that was so blond as to be nearly white. Her eyes were large and blue, and Cass thought she looked like a doll that should never have been taken down from its shelf.
“Mrs. Roe,” David said eagerly, taking her hand and guiding her into the seat opposite, “I’m surprised to see you here.” A light cough, and he grinned shyly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Roe, I’m being impolite. I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Melissa Miles. Missy, Mrs. Roe is one of our most distinguished clients.”
“Charmed,” Melissa said, her smile forced, her head still.
Wonderful, Cass thought, the child is jealous. She began to doubt that she had done the right thing in coming to the Quill and Court, second thoughts about whether David was the one she should talk to, the one she could trust. With Melissa present and obviously not in the most receptive mood, she nearly changed her mind and excused herself, but the memory of Kevin’s expression when he had left the house that morning was still too vivid to be dismissed. She accepted a small glass of port from the landlord, and sipped at it while David took Melissa’s right hand and held it possessively.
“David,” Cass finally said, “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch, but I must know a few things only you can tell me, and I must know them now. It’s very important. Please,” and she spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness, scowling at herself when she felt the tears creeping back to burn beneath her eyelids. Damn it, she scolded herself; behave yourself, woman!
David looked puzzled. “But I don’t understand, Mrs. Roe, Why not one of the others? Surely you can’t expect me to—”
“David, does my husband have many visitors during the day? I mean, other than those clients you know?”
Vessler seemed stunned by the question, immediately wrapping his hands around a tall stein of ale and rolling it between his palms. Melissa, frowning, shrank back into the corner of the booth and stared at Cass, the original hostility now tempered by a quizzical curiosity.
“I don’t mean another woman, if that’s what you’re worried about. I mean a man. Rather tall, having what’s called ‘rugged good looks,’ always wears a gray suit and carries a stick with a knob as thick around as a fist. Ivory, it is. He’s well educated, or at least speaks that way, and—”
David snapped his fingers. “Of course! Yes, yes,” and he looked at Melissa with a grin. “He comes in every week or so, I think. In fact, he was—”
“For how long?” Cass demanded. “I mean, when did he start coming to the office?”
David’s delight that he had pinpointed the man suddenly vanished. “Well, I don’t know if I ought—”
“David, this is extremely important. You must tell me everything you know about him. And don’t say you don’t know anything.” She smiled to soften her temper. “I’ve known you a long time, David Vessler, and there’s little in that office you don’t get a finger on sooner or later. Come on, tell me.”
“Well,” he said, staring into the stein with great absorption. “Well, I do try to keep up.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Davy,” Melissa said suddenly, her voice startlingly deep for the image she presented, “will you please tell the poor woman what she wants to know? Men,” she said directly to Cass, “are so insensitive, don’t you think? Like rocks. They only move when an earthquake forces them to. Come on, Davy, Mrs. Roe needs that information.”
Cass could only smile, and chide herself for judging the young woman incorrectly on first impressions.
“Oh, all right, Missy,” he replied softly. “I just want you both to know that I don’t make a habit of prying.”
“It’s not prying,” Cass said. “Please, David, I haven’t much time.”
He took a long drink of his ale, then snared a passing waitress, set his empty stein on her tray, and lifted another to take its place. After a second swallow, he took a deep breath.
“It was just after you and Mr. Roe were married Mrs. Roe. He came in asking to see Mr. Roe, not giving his business, and since Mr. Roe wasn’t particularly busy that day, they got together. It wasn’t more than a few days later that this man came back, and it was pretty regular from then on. I thought maybe they were friends, and I know they went to New York together last August when Mr. Cavendish needed some things from the bar up there.
“His name is Sampson, I think. I don’t know his Christian name. And I wouldn’t have thought anything about it except that there was never any work for me to do on whatever they were doing, and I thought I already knew most of Mr. Roe’s friends who drop in now and again. I mean, there were never any titles, wills, judgments, things of that nature. Of course, sometimes they like to do those things for themselves, the important matters, but at that time we were pretty busy, what with affairs to be settled now that the war was over, and I knew they hadn’t the time to do their own work. Not then, anyway.”
He stopped, took a drink, and wiped the foam from his upper lip with a swipe from the sleeve of his worn but well-kept frock jacket. “Of course, they’ll have to learn soon if they don’t hurry up and get someone else before the weeks out. Even then, it’ll be too late, I expect.”
Cass, trying hard to follow him, blurted, “Someone else? What in heaven’s name are you talking about, David?”
David looked surprised. “But I’m leaving Cavendish and Roe, Mrs. Roe.”
“What?”
“You mean … you mean, Mr. Roe hadn’t told you?”
Cass shook her head mutely.
“Well, I’ll be—” He shrugged, and took Melissa’s hand again. “Well, Missy and I, we’re getting married tomorrow, you see, and—”
“What?”
“Mrs. Roe, doesn’t your husband tell you anything anymore?”
“Obviously not,” she said. “Lord, David, I’m sorry. I—well, naturally I’m pleased at the news, and very happy for you, for you both. It’s just that—well, as you say, no one bothered to tell me.”
“No matter,” he said with a shrug. “The old man doesn’t know either. I mean, I told him weeks ago, but he doesn’t believe it. See, Missy and I, Mrs. Roe, we got to thinking about things, the way they are now that the war is over and all. I watch the papers pretty closely and I keep an ear to the ground, so to speak.” He swallowed hard. “Mrs. Roe, I’m not a city boy, not really. My father knew Mr. Cavendish, and he sent me down here to study and things, and I came because I thought the city would be kind of exciting. See, my folks own a small farm on the Hudson ditch before the English came in and took most of it. I guess I didn’t much like the quiet life.” His grimace of regret was intentionally comical, and the two women laughed lightly. “Well, Missy’s from down where you’re from, that’s why I think you’d understand, Mrs. Roe. Mr. Cavendish, he sure doesn’t. It’s simple. We don’t want this kind of life for our kids. Too many rogues on the streets after dark, people looking down on you because of where you’re from, not caring what you do, too many people crammed into one place. Like what’s happening to the Irish up in New York, you see? So we’ve decided to head on out to St. Louis, then to Independence, and on to California or Oregon.”