Authors: Kate Noble
“Good heavens, my dear,” the Duke asked, after one particularly colorful word rang clear as day from the library, “whatever is going on?”
Jane shot a glance at the stewards. Mr. Hale, being the head of the castle estate, and Mr. Thorndike, being in charge of the London property, both were acquainted with the Duke’s deterioration. They wisely held their tongues, as Jane smoothly lied. “Dr. Berridge is in the other room, Father,” she said—and at least that part was true. “I believe he is pulling a tooth for one of the footmen.”
It was past noon before Dr. Berridge departed, with the much calmer Sir Wilton and Mr. Cutler in tow. Luncheon was then served, the Duke was taken upstairs for his afternoon rest, and the stewards were finally able to lock a nervous but determined Jason in the library with a half dozen ledgers and piles of official ducal correspondence.
The house was silent. All the members occupied.
If Jane didn’t run now, she would no doubt be assaulted with demands from the kitchen to accommodate the new guests, or a crisis with the linens, or—she suppressed a shudder—more callers.
She was out the door and on the path to Byrne’s house within three seconds.
When she got there, she had gone from relief to annoyance. How could he have acted such a bear that morning? He was reconfirming his status as hermit at the very least, and at the very most, he would be lucky to escape tar and feather from the villagers, who Jane wagered would hear of his recalcitrance inside the hour. Why would he be so cruel? Why wouldn’t he, after Sir Wilton’s impassioned plea, let them into the house?
What was he hiding?
As she emerged out the other end of the path, her annoyance had turned into curiosity.
And when she climbed onto the porch and knocked on the front door, she was practically rabid.
“What?” he called out, and she threw open the door—terribly dramatic of her, she thought—and took one good solid look at Byrne.
He was sitting at his writing desk, poring over some pages, his eyes never looking up, his hands rolling that cane back and forth as was his habit.
She knew he was aware of her, standing in the doorway. She could feel him listening, waiting for her to make a move. And in that instant, she knew he was hiding something.
“Am I barred from the house, too?” she asked, transforming her voice into a wry, airy confection. “I didn’t know, you see, if you had decided that no one shall ever enter this house again.”
He looked up and smiled—smiled!—at her. “You are always welcome—even though you took little advantage of that fact in the past week. Would you perhaps care for a cup of tea? I’m working my way through the green varieties.”
She ignored his jibe and his offer of refreshment. His unnerving, disconcerting smile was a bit harder to ignore, but she suppressed the tiny flutter it caused. She was here for a reason, after all.
“You of course realize you have just destroyed any goodwill you’ve earned in the past week.”
“I am aware,” he replied, his eyebrow going up. His gaze followed her as she crossed the room and took a seat on the sofa.
“Sir Wilton has likely already told his wife, and she has likely already told everyone in Reston.”
“I am aware, Jane,” he repeated, bemusement apparent in his voice.
“And I frankly am shocked that you managed to avoid arrest, if only for being a complete brute!”
“As am I.”
She turned to him then. “The only question then,” she said, her voice dripping with innocence, “is why?”
“Why what?” he asked, far too calmly for his own good.
“Why you would not allow a search,” she replied, veritably lounging on the seat. “Sir Wilton, I thought, made his case very passionately and practically. Why would you not allow him inside?” She leaned in then, letting her voice drop low, seductive. “What are you hiding, Mr. Worth?”
For the first time since she entered, his smile faltered, his jaw became set. “What if I believed deeply in the right to privacy?”
“I find it hard to believe from someone who made his name invading privacy as a spy during the war,” she countered easily. “What are you hiding, Byrne?”
He held silent for a moment, his hand stilled on his desk. Then he glanced at the papers.
“Perhaps I was protecting Miss Victoria,” he replied.
“Victoria?”
“And by extension, you,” he smiled again, relief apparent in his demeanor, as he held up the papers. “The pages she copied. Sir Wilton would not take well to discovering these in this house.”
But Jane just shook her head. “They would be looking for stolen property, not papers. I will ask one last time, and then I will leave for good. What are you hiding?”
He held her gaze then, regarded her for what felt like a full minute. At first she thought he was trying to stare her down, make her submit to his will. But then she realized he was deciding what to say.
He chose to say nothing. Instead, he stood abruptly and hobbled to the stairs in the small house. One look over his shoulder told her to follow.
He maneuvered the stairs with practiced ease, pivoted at the top. Jane had never been upstairs in widow Lowe’s house—and rampant curiosity had her following and finding a small loft, its ceiling low and sloped, the walls unfinished. There was a chair by a small, square window, which was thrown open to abate the stuffiness of the space. In the farthest corner, a wrought-iron bed, unmade—its feather mattress still indented from Byrne’s body. A dozen books lay scattered by the bed, under the bed, on the bed. Jane would not be surprised if upon inspection, she found dirty china hidden in the mess.
While Jane silently criticized the lackadaisical life of a bachelor, Byrne went to stand by the wall, where the chimney lay against the house. He took his cane and poked the end through a knothole in a floorboard. A twist and the proper amount of leverage, and the floorboard came up.
Jane approached the space in the floor, her curiosity stronger than her trepidation. Peering down, she saw a black leather satchel.
“Open it,” he said calmly.
She reached down and pulled the satchel out. It was stiff, heavy. She could feel the fragility of its contents. She placed it on the floor, knelt in front of it as she unlatched the metal closure, and looked inside.
In velvet-lined compartments sat a dozen empty bottles, except one. She lifted it out. It was half-filled with a yellowish liquid.
“Laudanum,” she read the small inscription in the silver cap.
He lifted a brow. “Read the side of the case.”
Jane rotated the case. On the side, written in faded gold lettering, was Dr. F. J. Lawford.
Her eyes flew to Byrne’s face. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
A wry smile twisted his lips.
“I stole it.”
“YOU stole it?”
The case sat between them on the floor. Jane stood, paced, shifted her weight from side to side with nervous incomprehension. Byrne, however, leaned casually against the bricks of the chimney, let his weight settle.
“Why?” Jane asked, her eyes wide.
Byrne reached over, picked the half-filled bottle out of her hands. He turned it over in his hand, momentarily mesmerized by the way the afternoon light caught in the liquid, sunbeams and gold all at once.
“I’m sure by now you’ve realized the . . . hold this substance has over me,” he said quietly as he replaced the bottle in its compartment.
Jane stilled in her agitation, her eyes still on the bag on the floor, as she nodded solemnly.
“But it’s Dr. Lawford’s bag. How did it get here?” she asked softly.
And so he told her.
It had been winter. And winters, as Byrne had come to learn, were not kind in the Lake District. Cold and wet, more effort was expended keeping the firewood dry than actually collecting it. The lakes and rivers took on ice, the little fells became capped with snow as early as October, and the whole of the north blanketed by All Saint’s Day.
His superiors at the Home Office were told he had decamped to Merrymere to rest, to recover. But really, his brothers had forced him to leave London and all the temptations there that indulged his weakness. Actually, his elder brother, Graham, had desired him to go to their family’s small estate in Kent, but Byrne couldn’t take the good intentions of his sister-in-law, Mariah. He didn’t want to subject her to him. He would be alone. He would conquer his demons, his pain, alone.
It hadn’t worked.
By that winter he was practically a ghost. Rabid, wild, and lost, the pain in his leg never abated, the hollowness of his life all-consuming. He didn’t sleep because his dreams never let him be—he was either forced to relive seeing his brother lanced through the side by a bayonet, and being powerless to stop it—hell, having been cocky enough to think nothing like that would ever happen as long as he was with him—or he was struggling to walk to safety on a beach in France, blood leaking from a bullet hole in his thigh. Or the time he had seen a young boy, a dispatcher, having his throat slit in an alley. Or the day he had found himself in an open field, and shots rang out from the trees beyond . . .
He wanted so badly to just forget. For a little while.
It was just past New Year’s. The little town of Reston still had garlands over the doorframes, the high street littered with footsteps in the snow, tamped down by the villagers having traveled to and fro for the season’s festivities. Byrne had been in the village because Dobbs—ever-present and loyal—had gone to his sister’s in Manchester for the holidays, leaving Byrne the unfortunate task of doing his own shopping and forcing the gruff and recalcitrant man to actually interact with the villagers.
As previously stated, that hadn’t gone well, either.
In the winter, night came by early afternoon, and people retired early, so when Byrne made his way up the street that fateful evening, it was pitch-black and deserted.
He’d gone into the village for a cord of wood, bought begrudgingly from Mr. Morgan for the price of one stone fish figurine. Byrne had been attempting to hold to his principles then, and not use any of the obscene amounts of money he earned during the war . . . although it is amazing what living through a cold northern winter will do to one’s principles. Now he had no such qualms.
The purchase was necessary as Byrne no longer had the strength to split wood by himself—God, he hated being so helpless. He loaded the cord of wood on a sled, and pulled it back toward his horse and cart, left at the blacksmith’s for a new shoe. He would have to trade a porcelain figurine for that service. It would have been smarter, more cautious, he supposed in hindsight, to wait for his horse to be reshod and then go fetch his wood. But frustration belies logic, and Byrne just wanted to go home. So, on the high street, sled of wood in tow, Byrne passed Dr. Lawford’s residence.
And he stopped. And stared.
It was dark. Even the upper level, where the doctor had his apartments, was blackened. The other shops on the street were closed and shuttered, true, but there were lights in the upper stories, meaning the shopkeepers were at home, likely enjoying a good dinner.
Also meaning that it was far more difficult for them to see out their windows into the darkness and spy him there.
Perhaps the doctor had retired early. Perhaps he had to ride out for a house call. The snow on the street was so packed and muddied, Byrne was unable to distinguish new footprints, if there were any.
His hand was on the doorknob before he realized he had made the decision to enter. It wasn’t locked. Who in Reston would feel the need to lock their front door? It stuck a bit, so he had to shoulder his way in, but luckily, the noise went unnoticed.
Did Dr. Lawford have a housekeeper? Byrne didn’t know, but the possibility was there. So, using skills long thought dormant, he slunk in the shadows, silent as a breath on the wind. He found the doctor’s office easily, and his surgeon’s room. He scoured, searched the shelves of all their various bottles and creams. He became more and more desperate, discarding vials to the floor, shuttling papers aside, rummaging drawers. He was a qualified physician, he had to have something, anything Byrne could use to abate the pain in his leg, to let him sleep . . .
Then he found it. The satchel. Held away from the other potions, kept in a drawer in the doctor’s desk. He opened it up and saw bottle after bottle of that sweet nectar, and nearly began to cry. He would have drunk from a bottle then and there, if he did not have the one stray thought, that instinctual knowledge that if he did so, he would be found on the floor, whether in minutes or in the morning, and that would be the end of it all. And he had just gotten his hands on what he craved. What he needed.
Byrne gave up on subterfuge then, hobbling to his feet and running as best as he could back to the sled of wood, back to his horse, back to his cottage, and back to his oblivion.
“I didn’t even close Dr. Lawford’s door,” Byrne finished, aware that Jane did not blink or speak, merely watched him as he told his story. “What I took . . . was likely meant to meet the needs of the entire county for a full year.” His voice became a bit too raw for his liking, as he said, “I went through it in a matter of months.”
“Not all of it,” Jane replied softly, her eyes falling to the one half-filled bottle.
“No, not all of it,” Byrne conceded. “I want you to know—” He swallowed, then began again. “I want you to know that I haven’t used a drop in the months since I came back from London. Not a single drop.”
She nodded mutely, then her eyes fell to the bag. “What happened after you took this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember going back up that street, or how I got home . . . and I don’t remember breaking Mrs. Hill’s window or Mr. Davies’s front door, but I must have, because by the next morning, they were broken, and the town was forming a . . . a posse to find the culprit. I didn’t know any of this then, of course.” His eyes flitted to the bottles in their case. Nay, he didn’t remember any of it. He had been in oblivion.
“How did you, er, escape scrutiny?” she asked, and at that, Byrne had to laugh.
“Pure dumb luck,” he replied, as his guffaw fell into silence. “The very next evening, the highwayman first attacked. The crimes of the high street were either forgotten or lumped in with the attacks of the weeks to come. By the time they began to suspect me, no one asked me my whereabouts the night of the robberies on Reston High Street.”
“More fool them,” Jane quipped softly.
“Not Dr. Lawford,” Byrne disagreed. “Mere weeks later, Dr. Berridge had come to join his practice, invited obviously to make it so the doctor’s offices are never empty.”
Jane’s gaze remained on the dusty, worn bag, the one bottle that remained half-full. He could not help but look at it, too. The source of all his shame, hidden beneath the floorboards.
“The town is right to suspect me, Jane,” he intoned quietly. “They are right to hate me. I did them harm.”
“But not the whole of what they accuse you!” she cried.
“I did plenty!” Byrne growled, thrusting himself off the bricks of the chimney and coming forward. “I did enough to earn their hatred, so let them have their hate of me!” He took another step forward, forcing Jane to take a step back, stalking past her to the little chair, where the little window afforded the only air in the room. And after telling his story, he needed the air. “And now that you know it, I’m certain I’ve done enough to secure your pity, so perhaps it’s best if you let me be.”
He stood with his back to her, but he was certain that he heard her moving for the stairs, her soft slippers on the floorboards . . . but when she spoke, her voice came from right behind him.
“You think I pity you?” she asked, disbelief dripping from every word. He turned, saw the fire in her eyes, the heat spreading across her cheeks in a flush. “You think I walk over here, that I went round the assembly with you, that I took the trouble to find out about the highwayman—that I spent all this time with you . . . out of pity?”
“You must pity me, Jane, because I don’t understand the otherwise,” he argued. “I don’t understand how you can defend me to your brother and Sir Wilton but can’t summon the courage to come and see me any other time this week. Was I so grotesque, lying ill in your library?”
“No!” she cried, her eyes flying to his face.
“Then why do you not avail yourself of the way out? I’ve given you permission to end your little rehabilitation project and consider me a lost cause! Hell, I’ve given you ample reason today.”
“You are not a lost cause! And you’re not a . . . a project to me!”
“Then what am I, Jane? If I’m not a lost cause or a project, you don’t pity me, and won’t hate me, then what else is there?”
He held her gaze then, saw the rise and fall of her chest as her breath came hard and heavy. He felt every nerve in his body come alive, every sensation pool at the base of his spine, as he repeated . . .
“What else is there?”
He saw it then, in her eyes. The awareness of what he was asking. The answer.
“Jane,” he said again, “what else is there?”
The moment fell between them. And then . . .
And then nothing was between them.
It was impossible to tell who kissed whom first. They fell together, grappling with each other. Byrne’s cane clattered to the floor as he grasped her by her shoulders, his fingers burning through the thin linen of her day dress. She pressed into him, her arms coming around his waist, up his back, holding him as close as physically possible.
Oh, this was need. This was what had long been craved, and denied, even if both parties were unaware of it. Byrne had been starved. For over a week. Starved for this redheaded girl, starved for freckles, starved for the feel of those plump lips fastened with his, every sense overwhelmed with her very essence. The feel of her skin, the honeysuckle smell of her hair . . . It was a drug—but better, cleaner. Stronger. He moved his hands to gently cup her chin, the base of her neck, angling her head to allow his tongue entrance—and when he did so, felt her jolt as if a spark of electricity had surged from him into her.
For her part, Jane felt as if every inch of herself, every pinpoint where her body touched his, was not enough—it left the other parts wanting; dreadfully, unhappily untouched. Her hands came up around his neck, fingers threaded through his thick hair—she had to get closer, had to burrow herself into him . . .
And Byrne was more than happy to oblige . . . but his leg was not. He lost his balance, and they stumbled back into the old faded chair. Jane was pulled into Byrne’s lap, scattering the open book that rested on its arm, letting it thud to the floor. But Byrne didn’t hear it. All he could hear were the little sounds out of Jane’s throat—the small catches of breath, the tiniest squeak of wonder when he ripped his mouth away from hers to attend to the soft skin beneath her ear, the delicate, torturous line of her throat . . .
Lost to sensation, it took a moment to realize that Jane had stilled against him. That her arms had drawn back from his shoulders, that those sooty eyelashes had opened and destroyed the cocoon they had wrapped around themselves.
He brought his head up, sought her eyes. She was looking over the top of the chair, still with shock. He turned his head around, followed her gaze.
The bed. She was staring at his bed.
He turned back. This time her eyes caught and held his. And Byrne saw everything. The bewilderment, the fear. Oh, but that warm flush on her cheek was not bewildered or fearful.
“Jane,” he said hoarsely, his voice a rumbled whisper. He lightly stroked his hand up and down her back, soothing, wanting to calm her fears, but it seemed to have the opposite effect.
Abruptly, as abruptly as they had come together, Jane sprang away to her feet. For a moment, the only sound in the room was Jane’s stuttered, uneven breathing. Then . . .
“I have to go,” she said, looking about her for something to anchor her thoughts to. “Thank you,” she continued awkwardly, “er, for the, er . . . tea.”
And then, one last wide-eyed look, like a bird startled by light, and she was gone. The only thing left of Lady Jane Cummings was the delicate footsteps as they echoed down the stairs. And that honeysuckle, cinnamon scent.