The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (2 page)

“Wherever your mouse has wandered off to, it’s not here,” Ames was saying. “Likely she’s in the lady’s retiring room. I say we go back to the fun. You can always tell your mother you had words with her in the library.”

“True enough,” Gardley said. “And I don’t need to mention that she wasn’t present for them—it’s not as if she would have said anything in response, even if she had been here.”

Footsteps receded; the door creaked once more, and the men walked out.

Miss Pursling didn’t look at Robert once they’d left, not even to acknowledge his existence with a glare. Instead, she pushed herself to her knees, made a fist, and slammed it into the hard back of the sofa—once, then twice, hitting it so hard that it moved forward with the force of her blow—all one hundred pounds of it.

He caught her wrist before she landed a third strike. “There now,” he said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself over him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

She stared up at him, her eyes wide.

He didn’t see how any man could call this woman timid. She positively crackled with defiance. He let go of her arm before the fury in her could travel up his hand and consume him. He had enough anger of his own.

“Never mind me,” she said. “Apparently I’m not capable of helping myself.”

He almost jumped. He wasn’t sure how he’d expected her voice to sound—sharp and severe, like her appearance suggested? Perhaps he’d imagined her talking in a high squeak, as if she were the rodent she’d been labeled. But her voice was low, warm, and deeply sensual. It was the kind of voice that made him suddenly aware that she was on her knees before him, her head almost level with his crotch.

Save that for later, too.

“I’m a rodent. All rodents squeal when poked.” She punched the sofa once again. She was going to bruise her knuckles if she kept that up. “Are you planning to poke me, too?”

“No.” Stray thoughts didn’t count, thank God; if they did, all men would burn in hell forever.

“Do you always skulk behind curtains, hoping to overhear intimate conversations?”

Robert felt the tips of his ears burn. “Do you always leap behind sofas when you hear your fiancé coming?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly. “Didn’t you hear? I’m like a book that has been mislaid. One day, one of his servants will find me covered in dust in the middle of spring-cleaning. ‘Ah,’ the butler will say. ‘That’s where Miss Wilhelmina has ended up. I had forgotten all about her.’”

Wilhelmina Pursling? What a dreadful appellation.

She took a deep breath. “Please don’t tell anyone. Not about any of this.” She shut her eyes and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Please just go away, whoever you are.”

He brushed the curtains to one side and made his way around the sofa. From a few feet away, he couldn’t even see her. He could only imagine her curled on the floor, furious to the point of tears.

“Minnie,” he said. It wasn’t polite to call her by so intimate a name. And yet he wanted to hear it on his tongue.

She didn’t respond.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” he said. “If I don’t see you downstairs by then, I’ll come up for you.”

For a few moments, there was no answer. Then: “The beautiful thing about marriage is the right it gives me to monogamy. One man intent on dictating my whereabouts is enough, wouldn’t you think?”

He stared at the sofa in confusion before he realized that she thought he’d been threatening to drag her out.

Robert was good at many things. Communicating with women was not one of them.

“That’s not what I meant,” he muttered. “It’s just…” He walked back to the sofa and peered over the leather top. “If a woman I cared about was hiding behind a sofa, I would hope that someone would take the time to make sure she was well.”

There was a long pause. Then fabric rustled and she looked up at him. Her hair had begun to slip out of that severe bun; it hung around her face, softening her features, highlighting the pale whiteness of her scar. Not pretty, but…interesting. And he could have listened to her talk all night.

She stared at him in puzzlement. “Oh,” she said flatly. “You’re attempting to be kind.” She sounded as if the possibility had never occurred to her before. She let out a sigh, and gave him a shake of her head. “But your kindness is misplaced. You see,
that
—” she pointed toward the doorway where her near-fiancé had disappeared “—that is the best possible outcome I can hope for. I have wanted just such a thing for years. As soon as I can stomach the thought, I’ll be marrying him.”

There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice. She stood. With a practiced hand, she smoothed her hair back under the pins and straightened her skirts until she was restored to complete propriety.

Only then did she stoop, patting under the sofa to find where she’d tossed the knight. She examined the chessboard, cocked her head, and then very, very carefully, set the piece back into place.

While he was standing there, watching her, trying to make sense of her words, she walked out the door.

M
INNIE DESCENDED THE STAIRS
that led from the library into the darkened courtyard just outside the Great Hall, her pulse still beating heavily. For a moment, she’d thought he was going to start interrogating her. But no, she’d escaped without any questions asked. Everything was precisely as it always was: quiet and stupefyingly dull. Just as she needed it. Nothing to fear, here.

The faint strains of the concerto, poorly rendered by the indifferent skills of the local string quartet, were scarcely audible in the courtyard. Darkness painted the open yard in a palette of gray. Not that there would have been so many colors to see in daylight, either: just the blue-gray slate making up the courtyard and the aging plaster of the timber-framed walls. A few persistent weeds had sprung up in the cracks between the paving stones, but they’d withered to sepia wisps. They had scarcely any color in the harsh navy of the night. A few dark figures stood by the hall door, punch glasses in hand. Everything was muted out here—sight, sound, and all of Minnie’s roiling emotions.

The musicale had drawn an astonishing number of people. Enough that the main room was mobbed, all the seats taken and still more people skirting the edges. Odd that the weak strains of badly played Beethoven would draw so many, but the crowd had come out in force. One look at that throng and Minnie had retreated, her stomach clenching in tight knots. She couldn’t go into that room.

Maybe she could feign illness.

In truth, she wouldn’t even have to pretend.

But—

A door opened behind her. “Miss Pursling. There you are.”

Minnie jumped at the voice and swiftly turned around.

Leicester’s Guildhall was an ancient building—one of the few timberwork structures from medieval times that hadn’t perished in one fire or another. Over the centuries, it had acquired a hodgepodge collection of uses. It was a gathering hall for events like this, a hearing room for the mayor and his aldermen, storage for the town’s few ceremonial items. They’d even converted one of the rooms into holding cells for prisoners; one side of the courtyard was brick rather than plaster, and made a home for the chief constable.

Tonight, though, the Great Hall was in use—which was why she hadn’t expected anyone from the mayor’s parlor.

A stocky figure approached in quick, sure strides. “Lydia has been looking for you this last half hour. As have I.”

Minnie let out a breath of relief. George Stevens was a decent fellow. Better than the two louts that she’d just escaped. He was the captain of the town’s militia, and her best friend’s fiancé.

“Captain Stevens. It’s so crowded in there. I simply had to get some air.”

“Did you, now.” He came toward her. At first, he was nothing more than a shadow. Then he drew close enough for her to make out details without her spectacles, and he resolved into familiar features: jovial mustache, puffed-up sideburns.

“You don’t like crowds, do you?” His tone was solicitous.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I just never have.” But she had, once. She had a dim memory of a swarm of men surrounding her, calling out her name, wanting to speak with her. There’d been no possibility of coquetry at the time—she’d been eight years old and dressed as a boy to boot—but there had once been a time when the energy of a crowd had buoyed her up, instead of tying her stomach in knots.

Captain Stevens came to stand beside her.

“I don’t like raspberries, either,” Minnie confessed. “They make my throat tingle.”

But he was looking down at her, the ends of his mustache dipping with the weight of his frown. He rubbed his eyes, as if he wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

“Come,” Minnie said with a smile. “You’ve known me all these years, and in all that time I’ve never liked large gatherings.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “But you see, Miss Pursling, I happened to be in Manchester last week on business.”

Don’t react.
The instinct was deeply ingrained; Minnie made sure her smile was just as easy, that she continued to smooth her skirts without freezing in fear. But there was a great roaring in her ears, and her heart began to thump all too swiftly.

“Oh,” she heard herself say. Her voice sounded overly bright to her ears, and entirely too brittle. “My old home. It’s been so long. How did you find it?”

“I found it strange.” He took another step toward her. “I visited your Great-Aunt Caroline’s old neighborhood. I intended to merely make polite conversation, convey news of you to those who might recall you as a child. But nobody remembered Caroline’s sister marrying. And when I looked, there was no record of your birth in the parish register.”

“How odd.” Minnie stared at the cobblestones. “I don’t know where my birth was registered. You’ll have to ask Great-Aunt Caroline.”

“Nobody had heard of you. You
did
reside in the same neighborhood as the one where she was raised, did you not?”

The wind whipped through the courtyard with a mournful two-toned whistle. Minnie’s heart pounded out a little accompanying rhythm.
Not now. Not now. Please don’t fall to pieces now.

“I have never liked crowds,” she heard herself say. “Not even then. I was not well-known as a child.”

“Hmm.”

“I was really so young when I left that I’m afraid I can be of no help. I scarcely remember Manchester at all. Great-Aunt Caro, on the other hand—”

“But it is not your great-aunt who worries me,” he said slowly. “You know that keeping the peace forms a part of my duty.”

Stevens had always been a serious fellow. Even though the militia had been called on only once in the last year—and then to assist in fighting a fire—he took his task quite seriously.

She no longer needed to pretend to confusion. “I don’t understand. What does any of this have to do with the peace?”

“These are dangerous times,” he intoned. “Why, I was part of the militia that put down the Chartist demonstrations in ’42, and I’ve never forgotten how they started.”

“This still has nothing to do with—”

“I remember the days before violence broke out,” he continued coldly. “I know how it starts. It starts when someone tells the workers that they should have a voice of their own, instead of doing what they’ve been told. Meetings. Talks. Handbills. I’ve heard what you said as part of the Workers’ Hygiene Commission, Miss Pursling. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”

His voice had gone very cold indeed, and a little shiver ran up Minnie’s arms. “But all I said was—”

“I know what you said. At the time, I put it down to mere naïveté. But now I know the truth. You’re not who you say you are. You’re lying.”

Her heart began to beat faster. She glanced to her left, at the small group ten feet away. One of the girls was drinking punch and giggling. Surely, if she screamed—

But screaming wouldn’t do any good. As impossible as it seemed, someone had discovered the truth.

“I cannot be certain,” he said, “but I feel in my bones that something is amiss. You are a part of
this.”
So saying, he thrust a piece of paper at her, jabbing it almost into her breastbone.

She took it from him reflexively and held it up to catch the light emanating from the windows. For a second, she wondered what she was looking at—a newspaper article? There had been enough of them, but the paper didn’t have the feel of newsprint. Or perhaps it was her birth record. That would be bad enough. She retrieved her glasses from her pocket.

When she could finally read it, she almost burst into relieved laughter. Of all the accusations he could have leveled at her—of all the lies she’d told, starting with her own name—he thought she was involved with
this?
Stevens had given her a handbill, the kind that appeared on the walls of factories and was left in untidy heaps outside church doors.

WORKERS,
read the top line in massive capital letters. And then, beneath it:
ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE!!!!!

“Oh, no,” she protested. “I’ve never seen this before. And it’s really
not
my sort of thing.” For one thing, she was fairly certain that any sentence that used more exclamation points than words was an abomination.