Never Too Late (25 page)

“It’s . . . I . . . I’m with child, miss. Oh, if my parents saw me now, they’d be so ashamed!”

“Oh, no!” She embraced the young woman whose sobs grew into great hiccupping, body-shaking misery. “Can you tell me, Min? Were you forced? Have you been harmed?”

“No, miss. I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t abused, but I don’t know my own mind. I am the soul of evil. When temptation came, I welcomed it. I knew it was wrong, but when he kissed me and touched me, I just wanted more. I couldn’t control my lust, and he seemed overwhelmed by it too. I thought we must be in love.”

Honoria couldn’t trust herself to speak. What Minnie described was so very close, eerily close, to what she felt in Lord Devin’s arms. Were women universally so stupid? Or were she and Minnie just such a monumentally pathetic pair?

“I thought . . . well, I thought he would marry me and I’d have a house of my own and a family. No offense to you, miss, but I thought he would free me from a life of service. Now I have to do what he says so he will claim my child and see to the baby’s welfare.”

“Minnie, think carefully. With all you know about him now, do you really believe he’ll keep his word about taking responsibility for the child?”

Minnie’s face fell as she answered, “I have to believe him. I have no choice. I have to believe he will do right by this babe, as long as I do what he says.”

Honoria couldn’t let it go.

“Has he kept any promise he has made to you thus far?”

Minnie shook her head slowly.

“Then you do have choices. You have choices to make about what you are going to do next to protect yourself, about how you are going to take care of yourself and your child. Assume you cannot count on him.”

“No one will hire me like this. I have nowhere to go. I can’t raise this child on my own.”

“Oh, Minnie.” She held the young woman tightly. “You will always have a home here, or at least for as long as I have a home here. Try to sleep. You need to rest, now more than ever. We will think this through tomorrow.”

Day came much too soon, as did the heavy, solid footsteps of Lord Devin as he made his way through the house toward them. Funny how she already recognized his step. Funny how she
didn’t
find it presumptuous for him to keep a key to the shop. When he entered, he looked almost as if he wanted to come to her, take her in his arms, but instead he halted at the far side of the bed. At that moment, she wanted desperately to go to him and take comfort in his embrace. She gripped the arms of her chair tightly. Minnie slept on.

“Mr. Hearsh will be here within the hour,” he said, quietly. “He implied last night that he may know who is responsible for distributing the photographs.”

“Have you met him before? The two of you seemed somehow acquainted.”

“Our paths have crossed once or twice. He shall explain all to you when he arrives.”

Since he didn’t seem inclined to expand on that cryptic response, she went on to more pressing concerns. “You don’t think he would go to confront the culprit alone, do you?”

He shook his head but appeared grim. “He needs our help. There is undoubtedly more than one person involved in this operation. In fact, I have already sent word to a friend in case we have need of him, or proper authorities.”

“How can Erich know so much about this already?”

He seemed to brace himself before he spoke again. For some reason, it took him quite a while, during which he avoided looking directly at her. When his eyes met hers again, she knew what he would say.

“I said he would explain, but perhaps it is best that you hear this from me. Mr. Hearsh was the messenger who came to visit me at Sharling Worth.”

She froze. Not Erich too.

“Withersby sent him to give me an ultimatum,” Devin continued. “When you returned to London, it would be to close up shop for good. I do not know how long young Erich has been in his employ, but now I have no doubt that all of this is interrelated. That house you found when you followed the little girl—Peaseblossom House, it is called—is bound up in this. It must be the headquarters of these purveyors of obscenity, and I suspect it reaches much further than you or I could have predicted. Otherwise, their efforts to destroy you would not have gone this far.”

She’d listened for as long as she could. Until the bile rose in her throat. Until her pulse hammered in her ears, and she couldn’t breathe. Whatever else Lord Devin had to say must wait. She had to get out of that room, get out of his presence. She needed to find air before reason and reality collapsed entirely. She rushed past him and thanked heaven that he did nothing to stop her. If he so much as reached for her, she might strike him. She wanted, needed, to strike out at something. She ran down the stairs and out to the showroom.

It all seemed so farcical now. She’d devoted her entire life to this store, to establishing a safe and stable life around this store, and yet those closest to her had secretly been tearing it down, bit by bit. Those she’d trusted most destroyed everything she held dear. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear the sight of this place, the only true home she’d ever known, the haven where she’d grown into an adult. She’d given up her soul to it. Now it turned out to be just another fantasy built on ashes and air.

She yanked the nearest books from the shelves and threw them across the room. So many had been beyond repair; the ones that remained no longer held any worth to her. She’d thought them all a kind of magic bound in leather and paper, but she’d been a fool. She began throwing books harder, faster. She couldn’t clear shelves fast enough. Covers tore, pages scattered, and still none of it mattered anymore.

She caught a glimpse of Lord Devin from the corner of her eye. He stood in the doorway, watching. Waiting.

“I guess you told her, then.” She whirled around to see Erich at the shop entrance. She backed away from him until she realized she was moving closer to Devin and stopped.

“What have you done, Erich?” she asked.

To his credit, he did not look away. He also did not look proud.

“I never meant to hurt you, Miss Honoria.”

“I hope you understand that’s of no purpose right now. What I need to know is what you did. Who are you working for? What do you know about their dealings?”

“I didn’t know about the pictures, ma’am. Honest, I didn’t.” His fists were so tight, his knuckles went white. “I didn’t know they got to Min.” He shook his head hard, as if still unbelieving. “Why would they bring her into it? I was getting the job done.”

“Who are
they
, Erich?” Lord Devin asked. She shot him a quelling look. Only she had the right to interrogate Erich. She’d known him all his life. She was the one he’d betrayed.

“I don’t know all of them, my lord. I spoke mainly with Mr. Withersby. He’s the one who gave me assignments.”

Devin continued his interrogation, damn it. “This will take quite some time if you keep giving us information piecemeal. Spill it all, man.”

Erich’s head snapped up, his hard gaze at Devin making him look suddenly older.

“Why don’t you spill your own misdeeds, my lord? I’m trying to confess my sins, but it isn’t easy. Maybe you ought to try it.”

Devin refused to be baited. “Tell us what you know, and I will fill in from my experience. Mrs. Duchamp knows I am not blameless in this. You have some essential pieces of this puzzle, as do I. As does your sister. The sooner we can see all these pieces together, the sooner we can bring these villains to justice.”

“Fine. I did whatever was needed of me. Mostly, I served as a courier, delivering messages and packages. I had no knowledge of any photographs or nasty activities. I visited Mr. Withersby three times a week at ten
A
.
M
.
to find out my jobs. I was given addresses, sometimes written messages, sometimes just spoken ones. Sometimes small parcels. For all I knew, it was a private delivery service.”

“What kind of messages did you convey?”

“More oft than not, they were deadlines like what I gave Lord Devin here. Some job needed to be completed by a certain time, and Mr. Withersby wasn’t satisfied with the progress.”

“There must have been signs,” Honoria prompted. “Something. Anything.”

“More recently, just before the shop was broken into, there were more parcels to deliver. And there were orders to deliver to glass-makers, chemists, sometimes paper mills. And Mr. Withersby started asking me more about the bookshop. He’d asked about it when I first started. After all, delivery is my job here.” With a glance at Honoria, he added, “Was my job here, I s’pose.”

She was sharply reminded of what was left here. Not much. And he was absolutely right. He could no longer work here. Neither could Minnie, truth be told. There was nothing left for them here. Suddenly, she felt very, very old.

“I must go check on Minnie,” she said as she made her way to the back room. “We will continue this discussion later. Neither of you should leave anyway until we’ve sorted this out, or tried to anyway.”

“Miss Honoria,” Erich called after her, “may I go with you? I’d like to see my sister.”

She raised a hand to beckon him toward the back. He looked as dejected as she felt, and her instinct was to comfort him, but her emotions were too raw, the pain of betrayal too keen.

“Lord Devin,” she said, without looking at him, “please make yourself at home.” She didn’t mean it to be cruel, but she heard the ironic echo of his welcome when she’d stayed at Devin House the night of the break-in.

Chapter Twenty

Evans Principle #m: Have faith. In business, in people, in yourself, have faith.

S
atisfied that Minnie was recovering sufficiently and that her brother would now be a caring help to her rather than a hindrance, she left them conferring quietly. She needed time—a moment to think things through. But Lord Devin waited downstairs—at her insistence, she recalled—and the reckoning was overdue.

He’d been tidying up. Instead of reshelving books, he’d stacked them in front of the empty cases. Prudent. She would have to sort through them to see which pieces were still intact, which volumes were still salvageable. At the thought, she laughed out loud, a harsh bark of a laugh. Nothing here could be saved here any longer.

He looked around the shop and said, “You deserve more than this, Nora.”

“Deserve? You’ve said that before. As if the coincidence of my birth into a noble bloodline entitles me to more than someone else.” She grabbed a fistful of pamphlets and thrust them in front of her. “By that logic, these children deserve all the misery and squalor they live in, simply because of the misfortune of their birth into poor families. The people in these stories—any of them would think themselves in heaven to sleep in a featherbed rather than a pallet on the floor. To sleep in a bed of their own, not shared with the rest of their family, would be beyond belief. To have a bedroom of their own would be unthinkable.” She was shaking the pamphlets at him. No—her whole body was shaking. “I have more than I need. If I deserve anything more, it’s only inasmuch as they
all
deserve more.”

“That is not what I mean.” He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “You run this shop because it was your father’s. Because you feel responsible for continuing his legacy. Right now, you are the last of his line. What happens after you? What do you want, Nora? What do you want to accomplish in your life? What do you want to leave behind?”

Her silence compelled him further down the path. He longed to grab her, shake her out of her complacency.

“You are magnificent, and you do not even know it. You know your own mind, you have no fear when it comes to defending the defenseless, and you put everything you are into whatever you decide to do.”

“None of that prettiness is to the purpose right now,” she replied. “I need to figure out who is responsible for this filth and how to end it. Whatever you want of me, whatever you think of me, is on a far lower rung of priority. Get over yourself. Either help me or leave. Distraction and petty, solipsistic meditations do not constitute help.”

His jaw clenched at her hard assessment of the situation, but he could not fault her for it. Her directness and devotion were among the things he loved most about her.

The doorbell chimed as someone entered. She hated that damned clanging. It might as well be a death knell.

“Mother said I would find you here! I must admit I scoffed at the idea that I could find you in a town bookstore.” A young man in traveling dress, hair windswept, and breeches spattered with mud, bounded toward Lord Devin. A lavender scarf was thrown jauntily around his neck. His height, build, and coloring made his identity irrefutable; even if he hadn’t referred to their mother, he could only be Alex’s brother.

“Andrew! My God, what are you doing here?” Alex rushed to him and they embraced heartily.

“The Continent got boring,” Andrew said as they pulled apart. He tossed his hair and affected a jaded expression as he leaned against the nearest shelf. “And it is far too hot to go to Turkey or India.”