phantom knights 04 - deceit in delaware (21 page)

“Unhand my wife, fiend,” Jericho said as he came up behind me.

“Afraid she might kiss him?” Dudley asked in a scathing voice.

“I was not, but now I am,” Jericho retorted, never losing his good humor.

Setting Mariah down, I took hold of Jericho’s neck and pulled them both to me. It had been eight months since last we were together. After spending years with them, living in the same house, working on the same missions, they were as much my family as Leo, Levi, and Bess.

Mrs. Stanton interrupted our group by introducing Mariah to Dudley and Hannah. They remembered her as Bess’s maid from Philadelphia, but Hannah took it further.

“Oh, you are Artemis! How I have longed to make the acquaintance of one who can wield the bow as well as you.” Hannah’s earnestness was writ on her face as she came forward and clasped Mariah’s hand.

“It is true then. When Jeanne told me that you were her daughter, I could scarce believe it. Though seeing Mr. Stanton here surprises me all the more.” Mariah cast a curious look to me.

“Oh, Dudley is my husband,” Hannah said, as if it were the most natural occurrence in the world.

Mrs. Stanton looked down her impressive nose at me. “Perhaps we should return to important matters. Your wife is safe.”

Mariah smacked Jericho’s arm and he leaned back, rubbing his arm.

“What did I do?” Jericho demanded.

“It is what you did not do. Here is poor Jack, worrying about his wife and you say nothing to relieve his mind.”

I smiled triumphantly at Jericho. His brows descended lower over his brown eyes. His strong jaw tightened as he cast me a mock scowl.

Mariah’s black hair was pulled back, which always made her vibrant blue eyes more prominent. They were the first feature that anyone noticed on her because they were so remarkable. Clear blue that shone as beautiful as a clear sky. Her exquisite face was the next feature that people were privileged to look upon. A face that had succeeded in gaining us many successful missions in the past.

“We thought it would be safest if we split everyone up so that Luther’s guards could not get us all in one swoop. Levi has your wife safe, with her sisters, Freddy, Leo, and Reverend Reid,” Mariah explained.

“So you know then, about Guinevere and her sisters?” I asked.

Mariah’s eyes widened. “Indeed we do, and never were we more astonished. Jeanne has kept us informed, and she wrote to us when Bess was captured by General Harvey. Our astonishment grew by leaps when we heard that he was the leader of the Holy Order. Levi then wrote to us and asked for our assistance in keeping Edith Harvey safe, and we came as soon as we could.”

The front door opened and a rush of people came into the cottage. Bess was first, calling out my name. When she entered the parlor and saw first Jericho and then Mariah, my calm, mature sister squealed. They took turns with her as Sam, Betsy, and James entered the house.

“We could not allow you to have all the fun,” Mariah was saying with a laugh to Bess.

Sam stared at Mariah and then a smile bloomed across his face. “You, I remember. At my uncle’s house.”

Mariah grinned at him. “And again when you came to call on Bess. Imagine my surprise to learn that the same man who had so wholly infuriated her had been the one to win her hand at last.”

“At last? You make me sound so disagreeable,” Bess said as she linked arms with Mariah.

“Never that, but having received as many offers as you had,” Mariah said, making Sam’s eyebrows rise in question, “we began to despair of you ever finding your heart’s desire.”

“Well I did,” Bess said, meeting Sam’s gaze. His smile turned soft.

“Monroe’s guards and the constables are staying at the Delaware hotel. Two of each will be stationed outside each of the houses, switching off every five hours,” Jericho told me, and I wondered how he knew that they were coming.

“Levi received an express from Leo while you were in Baltimore,” Jericho told me in answer to the question that I had not voiced.

When all of the introductions were made and we were all seated around the parlor wherever we could find a chair, we spoke of what was next to come.

We would begin by scouting out the house where Luther was keeping himself, and we would make our plans accordingly.

When Mariah and Jericho took everyone else off to show them their bedchambers, Mrs. Stanton asked that Bess and I remain behind.

“This was given to me for safekeeping until the moment when I thought it best that you receive it.” She placed a leather bound book on the table and I picked it up. Opening it, it was all written in Danish, but I recognized my mother’s name at once. Eleanora. As I flipped through the pages, I realized that it was my mother’s journal, from her life as a young girl.

“Father gave it to you,” Bess said with assurance.

“He took it with him when he left to become Harvey. He did not want you learning about your history before he could be there to explain it to you. With what we are facing, you deserve to know the truth. Take it. Read it, and then we will speak.”

She left Bess and me alone, and together we sat upon the sofa and began at the beginning. When my mother was preparing to leave her home country of Sweden to go with her dearest friend Elisabeth as she was to marry a prince named Eric.

Elisabeth was the name of Guinevere’s mother.

The more we read, the more that we understood about our parents’ past. We came to understand why our mother was so adamant that we learn Danish as children. She was trying to teach us about our heritage without telling us the truth.

The revelation struck as to why our father did not want us reading this until now. He was trying to soften us toward him, toward what he had done in lying to us and hiding himself away for three years. He wanted us to believe that he was doing this for us.

That was not how we took it.

It was evening when Mrs. Stanton poured out tea for us as she spoke. “Now you know the truth about how your parents met.”

“Yes, we know the story, but you never told us, when we spoke before, that Eric’s father was murdered during that attack that gained our father a knighthood.”

“We also know why father wanted us to read the journal now. He was hoping that it would soften us toward our parents,” Bess explained.

“Has it?” Mrs. Stanton asked over the rim of her cup.

“To my mother, perhaps, but not my father. He may have loved her so tremendously then, as she thought, but I have never witnessed such evidence of his devotion.”

Bess brought forth the journal and laid it upon the table. The first entry was from when our mother was preparing to leave for Lutania and her excitement and nervousness.

“Why is it written in Danish instead of Swedish?” Bess asked Mrs. Stanton.

“Your mother is well versed in many languages. It was part of her training to be a lady in waiting.”

The journal was supposed to tell us why our father swore to protect the girls.

For hours we had poured over the words as if they were a story unfolding before us. I pictured my mother as a young maiden arriving in a new country. Young, beautiful, stubborn if some of her accounts were to be believed, and devoted to her friend Elisabeth.

My mother’s life had been one large adventure. My parents’ romance was like reading about someone else’s life, for I had never known my parents when they were affectionate. The greatest show of affection that my father expressed was when he brought my mother a bouquet of flowers every time he returned from a trip.

Her life had been wrought with grief, excitement, anger, joy, and a number of society parties. They did things differently in Lutania than we did in Philadelphia, as my mother had little freedom of her own. She was at the call of her queen both day and night.

My favorite parts were the entries she wrote about meeting my father. Discovering that our parents’ names were truly Willem and Eleanora, and that they had changed them after leaving Lutania, as Guinevere, Rose, and Edith had done, made me feel that I was reading about some other couple’s life, and not my parents. The way they met was fantastic, and the reasons why they had to flee Lutania had me grinding my teeth in anger. A moonlit run to the coast with Luther’s guards pursuing them. It was enough to make me want to seek out Luther and finish what my father had begun all those years ago. To know that Luther was almost successful in ravishing my mother lit a flame within me, a flame of revenge.

Reading about her past, it became evident why my father refused to allow her to become a Phantom. He had been protecting her from the moment they first met.

He had once told her that he did not wish for a life of poverty for one who deserved the sun, and the moon, and the stars. She may not have been accustomed to living in poverty, but she never wrote about resenting him for any of their trials. She loved him, and she believed in him, but not from their first meeting.

She had written of her utter dislike for him in the beginning, until he had rescued her from Luther’s advances. Which, incidentally, was her own fault. She was trying to show my father that he was not the only man who favored her. She actually wrote that she was weary of his kindness. She wanted a spark of fire. She wanted him to overcome the distance that she had placed between them. She wanted to know that he was more than an imitation of every other soldier.

She had encouraged Luther’s advances, believing him to be a gentleman since he was a prince, and had gone on a picnic with him. He tried to force his attentions upon her and that is when my father appeared and knocked Luther out cold. He was furious with her, but it did not bother her one jot. For she discovered that he had been watching her closely, that he cared about her. She wrote that she fell foolishly in love with him at that moment, and would have followed him anywhere.

They lived on little once they arrived in England, and after they bought the farm. She wrote of her heartache over Father’s desperation to provide for her, until my father was able to find a line of work which suited him. He would not tell her what he was doing at first, but he would disappear for days, and she would not know if he was alive. Then he would reappear without warning, and act as if nothing had occurred, but his pockets would be full of coins. It was only after he returned home with an injury that she discovered that he was a spy for the crown.

After his identity was discovered by his enemy, he packed my mother, me, and Bess onto a boat for America. That is where her journal ended.

The only explanation for my father’s devotion to the princesses was his vow to protect his king, his queen, and the future heirs. He swore the oath when he was knighted, but also when he and my mother were fleeing for their lives. The queen had met them at the harbor and gave them money to help them. She asked him to swear that should she ever have need of him, he would assist her. He swore his allegiance, and my parents departed.

That vow meant more to him than anything else, including his own family. I understood that he felt responsible for the girls. I understood that the king had been his oldest friend, but what I would never understand is why he thought that robbing his own children of their father was the only way.

“What Father did was wrong, no matter how he tries to convince us otherwise,” Bess said to Mrs. Stanton, and to me.

“My dear, if you spend your life staring at the past and regretting the things that you cannot change, you will miss everything good that is ahead of you,” Mrs. Stanton said.

That silenced Bess, but not me. “Why give this to us now, when our father sits in a prison? If it is to make us hate Luther, there is no need. What he did to my wife and her sisters and their parents was enough to ensure my wrath. What other reason do you have?” There was great speculation in both my words and my gaze as I stared at Dudley’s mother. The dragon woman as I had thought of her not that long ago.

She pushed her cup away from her, her gaze never leaving me. “Why? To make you understand what you are going against. To open your eyes to what you will see and what you will face when you come up against Luther.” Mrs. Stanton rose and pushed in her chair. “The man is a lunatic, yes, but he has a great advantage over you.”

“We know that he has Edith,” Bess said, with a catch in her voice. Edith was one of Bess’s greatest friends.

“He does not have Mary Edith,” Mrs. Stanton said with assurance. “But he does have your mother, and he will break her before he allows you to harm him, so you had best be prepared for the greatest battle of your lives, because those you love will die. My question to the both of you is, what are you prepared to sacrifice to protect those you love most?”

CHAPTER 17

GUINEVERE

B
eing with my sisters again should have been a joyous time. That Edith was not taken captive by our uncle as we had believed was a great relief. As much as I tried, I could not banish the thoughts that we had nothing in common anymore. We had lived apart for so long that we were more strangers than sisters. At least I was the stranger. Rose and Edith, after Rose and the others had arrived at the cottage, got along as if they had never been parted. It struck me as I listened to their chatter that they had lived similar lives over the past eight years. It was true that Edith had never had to work, being the supposed niece of General Harvey, but Rose’s work had never been as difficult as mine had been. The Charleston Phantoms watched ships that sailed in and out of port, searching for illegal cargo. If they ever had to fight, it had been a rare occurrence, and Sam had not included the women on his team often. The only member of their team that they had lost had died in a fire when she forgot to blow out her candle before falling asleep. Listening to their chatter was threatening to drive me to madness.

When the Monroe guards, who had been watching the house, told Levi that they were called away to scout out Uncle Luther’s house, I snuck out and followed them. Anything was better than sitting around a small parlor in uncomfortable silence while my sisters reminisced about our home, and the prospect of seeing it again. Or watching Rose’s suitors fawn over her, making excuses to come into the house when they had strict orders from Arthur to guard the house … from the outside.