It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (5 page)

T
OMMY WAS IN JUST
a
little
over her head.

This realization solidified the moment she found another message slipped under her door. To anyone else the message might have looked like a bit of detritus carried in from the street on someone’s shoe. She knew better.

She hesitated. Then she plucked it up gingerly between her fingers, and carried it to her table. Nonchalantly she lit a lamp, allowed it to flare into life and set her room aglow, and then settled down at the table, her chin cradled in her hands, and stared down at it.

Postponing the moment when she would need to make a decision.

She didn’t usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple. And if no challenge could be found, she had the dubious gift of creating one. She’d never known any other way, really. Resistance was the headwind into which she sailed.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

She gave a yelp. The entire building, made of kindling as it was, rocked, shuddered, and creaked. She lunged to keep her lamp from hopping off the table.

The thudding stopped.

She smiled. “Greetings, Rutherford!” she shouted at the ceiling.

“Greetings, Miss Tommy!” he boomed.

Rutherford lived in a suite of rooms above hers, and he was huge. When he moved about, the whole building trembled and squeaked and groaned as if it were a ship on the breast of a stormy sea. But he wasn’t generally home. Sometimes he found work on the docks or on a ship or as a builder, and often he was away for weeks at a time, engaged in something far more interesting and dubious.

As he had been, for instance, when he’d last worked for her.

Dubious occupations, in fact, seemed to be one unifying characteristic of the people who lived in her building. It was where her mother had ultimately died, young, ill, and penniless, and it was where Tommy, when she’d found her way back to it, had cobbled together a motley family of sorts, for they had loved her mother. Her rooms were small and as snug as a shoe, filled with the few fine things her mother had left behind when she died, and she was surrounded by the sounds of life, which in this building were primarily thumping: Rutherford walking from one end of the room to another, Maggie’s bed slamming against the wall as she entertained gentlemen callers, the four Beatty children thundering up and down the stairs. Things of that sort.

All in all she had little time to feel lonely. And yet when it was dark, and she’d doused her lamp and the thumping had ceased for the night, she sometimes felt she was on a raft alone at sea, and would awake in a panic, gripping the sides of her bed. Loneliness had a sound, and it was the absence of thumping.

Still avoiding the message, she laid out the medal gently on the table and touched her fingers to it for courage. Last night at the Duke of Greyfolk’s wasn’t really a failure of nerve yet, not really. It had been just a start, she told herself—because honestly, imagine
her
nerve failing! The sky would sooner fall. Jonathan Redmond had interrupted her, that was all.

She took a deep breath and leaned over the scrap of paper, hands clasped against her forehead.

It appeared to have been torn from an old book by someone who couldn’t easily obtain foolscap or ink. In the narrow margin, in tiny painstaking letters, scratched with a burnt stick most likely, were the words:

She’ll be waiting at the place we discussed, at the day we discussed, one of the clock.

She recognized the careful even script of Lord Feckwith’s cook. She hadn’t, of course, signed it. Signing it could mean her death. Not to mention Tommy’s.

She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath. Released it, fluttering her lamp flame.

Would she do it again?

Could
she do it again?

Because the last time had . . . well, it hadn’t gone precisely as she’d hoped.

She absently rubbed at her arm. It didn’t hurt anymore, and there would be a little scar soon—The Doctor, who was never known by anything other than The Doctor, and therefore was clearly as dubious as everyone else—did competent work. Still, it was one more mark her body bore.

It would be the only scar of which she’d ever be proud, however.

The irony was they’d likely been aiming for Rutherford, who was an infinitely larger and more conspicuous target. And what kind of shooting was
that,
if they’d missed him? Pretty sorry shooting, if you asked her.

Now Jonathan Redmond . . . in all likelihood, given what she knew about him, he wouldn’t miss his target.

A little half smile found its way onto her face. The
cheek
of the man. She liked cheek. She liked a man who spoke to her as if she was a person, an equal, as if she were in on the joke. There was a freedom in not
wanting
anything from each other, which so seldom happened between men and women.

There was much to be wary of about him, too. For instance, those vast shoulders, and those cheekbones that called to mind battlements, so chiseled were they, all of which contrived to whip female heads around like compass needles. But she suspected it was something else . . . she would have called it a fine veneer of cynicism, a sort of detachment, as if he’d seen things that others had not, knew things that others did not . . . that lured females into dashing themselves on the allegedly rocky shoals of his heart.

Not
her,
of course.

She liked a little wariness. The rest of the men were so bloody predictable. And there was something about Jonathan Redmond that felt like the first breath of air drawn after you leave a crowded smoky room. She liked him. She supposed it wasn’t more complicated than that.

“It’s a gift you share with your mother, my dear,” the Countess of Mirabeau told her. “Men like themselves better when they’re around you, it’s just that simple. And Carolina, rest your dear mother’s soul, attracted a duke for a reason. Perhaps you’ll do the same.”

As it turned out, the genteelly poor countess—who repaid a good turn done her by Tommy’s mother by taking in hand the fiercely clever, vivacious, half-feral scrap of a girl she’d been after her mother died, and done her best to polish her—had been right. Tommy had rapidly become the chief attraction at the countess’s Wednesday salons near Hanover Square. And it wasn’t as though Tommy didn’t enjoy the salons and all the male attention. And it wasn’t as though she’d never occasionally indulged her sensual curiosity and hot blood. But when she lost her virginity to a gorgeous boy who had promptly disappeared, Tommy’s native pragmatism—surely she hadn’t inherited
that
from her mother—put a stop to further indulgence. It was terrifyingly easy to be swept up in a current of desire. And she wasn’t
about
to live the way her mother had lived, or suffer her mother’s fate.

And yet the money from the occasional, modest, serendipitous win at a hand of cards, and the shilling or two the countess occasionally pressed into her palm dwindled quickly. And though she was accustomed to challenge, the challenge to survive was ceaseless and wearing.

And then the gift of pearls had arrived. Another way in which she was in just a bit over her head. They could very well represent the answer to all of her troubles. They most definitely represented another decision she would have to make. And soon. It wasn’t one she relished making.

She shied away from it for the moment.

Because thanks to something Jonathan Redmond had said, she’d just realized there
might
be another option.

She stared down at the little charcoal letters and reread them, and the bands of muscle in her stomach tightened, and an additional beat seemed to join the rhythm of her heart.

Ah, bloody hell. She was going to do it. There was no question that it was what she was born to do. That she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t.

She was forced to admit, however, that for the first time since it had all started . . . she was a little afraid.

The problem was, she’d begun to
think
about it. And once you did that, you were sunk, she knew. Once when she was very little, she’d been able to walk the narrow stair rail in this very building, one tiny foot carefully placed in front of the other, arms outflung for balance like a circus performer. The very moment she’d begun to exult in her achievement, to really
think
about it, was the moment she toppled and cracked her chin. She still sported a tiny scar.

Not that she didn’t
enjoy
the thrill that followed surviving peril. It was just that, as nearly everything in her life so far, she could easily imagine it eventually crescendoing into a disaster from which she barely escaped.

She lay down the scrap of paper and took up the medal.

“You commanded a whole battalion,” she said to the medal. “Were likely shot at dozens if not hundreds of times. What if you could help me? I
know
you could help. Or would you think I was mad and ought to be locked away?”

She’d had numerous conversations with that medal over the years. Sometimes she’d harangued it, sometimes she’d simply told it about her day. Each time she imagined the medal was loving and regretful and sentimental, all of which she knew deep down was probably very unlikely. And yet, where was the harm in laying down the burden of her pragmatism for just one moment? It was an indulgence, one of her very, very few.

“Thanks for listening . . .” She breathed in. “. . . Papa.”

No matter how many times she said the word, she never felt entitled to it.

T
HE
G
YPSIES, BEING
Gypsies, had a tendency to roam, so they couldn’t always be found camped on the outskirts of Pennyroyal Green, and were often as difficult to pin down as quicksilver, particularly when it came time for the Cambridge Horse Fair. But Jonathan had seen the smoke from the cook fire at a distance, and so after a great show of reluctance, he decided that Violet would get her wish before he returned to London. The following morning they packed her up like blown glass, and transported her in a well-sprung carriage, hauled by four horses driven with great delicacy, as though they were arthritic and lame.

It was a
long
trip. For Jonathan, anyway.

Leonora Heron emerged from her tent at the encampment when she heard the carriage wheels, wiping her hands on her apron, smiling a greeting, then curtsying.

Her aspiring tart of a daughter—if Gypsies could be said to be tarts—peeked out from behind her, and her round harvest moon-colored eyes widened. Her habitual pout transformed into a sultry one, and she twined a strand of curly black hair round one finger.

Jonathan studiously avoided her gaze.

“Dukker fer ye, brother?” she said anyway, offering to use the tarot to read his fortune.

“I’m simply an escort to my sister. So bat your eyelashes in another direction if you will, please.”

“Jonathan!” Violet scolded.

“Martha!” Leonora Heron scolded. To no avail, in both cases.

“But it’s why we came today, Mrs. Heron. If you would be so kind as to read the tea leaves for the countess?” he asked pointedly to Mrs. Heron.

“I would be pleased to do it.” Mrs. Heron gestured for them to enter. Inside the tent they were assailed by the usual clean, pungent smell of herbs. Mrs. Heron clucked and found a chair that would safely accommodate Violet, and they all helped get her settled into it. Martha stood against the back of the tent, her arms crossed over her chest in such a way that her bosom was lifted nearly to her collarbone.

She brewed the tea for Violet, who drank a sip. And then Leonora swirled it about, tipped the rest gently onto a saucer, and finally peered into them, scrying with the leaves floating over the bottom.

“I see the leaves have formed the shape of a harp. This means harmony and happiness for you.” Leonora looked up, smiling. “I am pleased to tell you this.”

Violet had just begun to beam when, “She will break hearts!” Martha suddenly blurted, sounding startled. Her eyes were wide, as if someone else had borrowed her mouth without permission.

Violet swiveled to look at her. “She? Do you think I’m having a girl? Am I having a girl?”

Martha shrugged with one shoulder.

Violet’s face suffused with pleasure, and it was wonderful to see. Jonathan enjoyed it. And then she predictably turned an “I told you so!” expression upon Jonathan.

“She will break hearts,” Martha repeated, as if she were in a trance. She wasn’t. She was simply enjoying the dramatic reception of her prediction. Meanwhile, she’d traced the outline of Jonathan’s entire body with her big round eyes so thoroughly he could hardly fail to notice, and when he did, she touched a tongue coyly to her lips.

Jonathan was perilously close to scowling at her. He settled for a mere frown, and returned his attention to Violet.

“Well . . .” Violet took in this information. “That stands to reason, doesn’t it? The breaking hearts bit? It’s what Redmonds do.”

“Well, it wasn’t so much that you broke hearts, as enslaved and terrified them before you married. Isn’t that true, Violet?”

“Shhh,” she said, entirely unperturbed. “And is that all you see in the leaves, Mrs. Heron?”

Martha whirled on Jonathan then, who, much to his later chagrin, for Violet would go on to imitate it for the pleasure and hilarity of their brother Miles and her husband the earl, threw his arms defensively across his face. As if he could prevent her from peering into his soul that way.

“
You . . .
children everywhere.” Martha sounded astounded. And then made a big swooping circle with her arms, in case the word “everywhere” didn’t illustrate it horrifyingly enough.

Jonathan turned his head slowly and sent a sizzling “I told you so” look to his sister. “She’s not helping in the least. Shall we depart?”

“Jonathan, wait.” Violet wasn’t satisfied. “Allow me to help. How
many
children, Martha?”