Revenge in a Cold River (28 page)

“Then I have all I want,” she whispered. “But we must see that Monk does also. I shall call on Miriam and see if I can oblige her to tell me the truth about Piers Astley, and anything she knows about Monk in California.”

“Please, be careful!”

“I have weathered and survived a great deal worse than an uncomfortable conversation over the tea cakes, I assure you.”

“But—”

“I have cultivated a serene and perhaps fragile look because it has served me well, but it is only skin deep.” Then she wondered if she had said too much. She had meant it to be light, but some of the old pain must be visible. He was too clever to have missed it.

He was also too sensitive to acknowledge his understanding now. But the time would come, and perhaps soon.

“I will call on Miriam Clive today,” she said decisively. “The hour is a little late, but needs must, and it is certainly the devil who is driving!”

Rathbone did not answer but all the unspoken words were in his look.

W
HEN
R
ATHBONE HAD GONE,
Beata called her footman and asked for the coach to be made ready to take her immediately to visit Mrs. Clive. She did consider going to see Hester, so that they might compare notes with each other and so work more effectively. But she knew that Hester would be distracted with anxiety, or perhaps think Beata was taking too much upon herself. Maybe she was, but she was beyond worrying about who approved of her, or who did not. She had been in San Francisco and she knew Miriam. It had been a world different from anything a London woman could imagine, even one who had nursed in the Crimea. Better to do this first, and ask forgiveness afterward if she had committed any social gaffes.

She did not bother to change her clothes to a dress suitable for afternoon visiting. Appearance was irrelevant. A hat was sufficient, and of course a coat. The weather was bitterly cold.

When the carriage was brought around to the front door she requested the footman to accompany her, and gave the coachman instructions to make the best speed he could, without jeopardizing the horses.

All the way through the wet, windy streets she weighed what she was going to say to Miriam. Certainly she would ask for privacy. Miriam might be kind enough to instruct that all other callers be invited to leave cards rather than intrude.

She would like to prepare her words, but experience had taught her that hardly any conversation went the way one had anticipated. Well-thought-out responses became irrelevant, even absurd. She had once been very close to Miriam, and in many ways the qualities she had cared for were still there: the quick humor, the love of beauty, the passion for life, the ability to feel others' wounds as well as her own. But people can change. Old virtues could not always be relied on.

Despite the weather it was a pleasant journey and the classic Georgian façades of houses were graceful even under gray skies. The bare trees in the squares had their own beauty. The traffic was light: a closed-in carriage with a coat of arms on the door and a liveried coachman driving. An older couple walked arm in arm along the pavement, heads bent toward each other in conversation.

Beata arrived at the Clives' house in Mayfair and was received by the footman with courtesy and well-concealed surprise. There was a fire in the morning room where she was greeted by Miriam. She looked as beautiful as ever in a deep forest-green gown, the warmth of her own coloring making it seem richer than it was.

“Beata! Are you all right? You look very pale,” she said with concern. “Has something happened?”

“Yes, it has.” Beata seized the opening without hesitation. “How sensitive of you to notice. May I ask you the favor that should anyone else call, they might be asked merely to leave a card? I need most urgently to beg your assistance.”

“Of course,” Miriam said immediately. “Would you like tea?”

“Thank you, that would be excellent.” She was not in the least thirsty, but she was cold. More important, tea gave the visit a nature of hospitality that would be less easy to break than mere conversation.

Miriam rang the bell. When the footman arrived she told him they were not to be interrupted, except by a tray of tea, which was to be brought, and then the parlor maid should withdraw.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, then left and closed the door behind him.

Beata began immediately. “Commander Monk has been arrested and charged with the murder of the customs man Pettifer,” she said. “Of course it is ridiculous. He was trying to save him and the man panicked and more or less drowned himself. But the charge springs from an old enmity, and will be desperately difficult to disprove.”

Miriam was startled. “Enmity with Pettifer? Isn't that beneath Monk?”

“Of course it is. He was never even acquainted with Pettifer.” Beata tried to control her emotion and speak only with reason. “The enmity is with McNab.”

Miriam did not hide her surprise. “Really?”

Beata hesitated only a moment. “You know him. He called upon you when I was here. Do you honestly find it so difficult to believe?”

“I know him only as a professional acquaintance of Aaron's, because of his position in the Customs service. Import and export requires Customs clearance all the time.” Miriam's face was almost expressionless. Only the tiniest wavering in her glance betrayed uncertainty or perhaps deceit.

Beata retreated and approached from a different angle. “The enmity is very old. Many years ago, around the early fifties, McNab's half brother committed a very violent and horrible crime. Monk caught him and he was tried and sentenced to death. McNab begged Monk to ask for clemency, and Monk refused. The young man was hanged. McNab has not forgiven Monk for that.”

Miriam was looking openly confused, but Beata thought she saw a shadow in her eyes of something else, something quite distinct that showed she understood very well.

This needed a great deal of care. If she mishandled the situation she might lose the chance for Miriam's help. If she insisted at the wrong moment, or with the wrong words, she could make an enemy instead of a friend. Perhaps she should retreat again, show her own vulnerability, painful as that was.

How well did she really know Miriam? It had been twenty years since they had been young women together in gold rush California. Had they been friends by nature, or by circumstance? They had both lost husbands, and that alone had drawn them together. They had both found freedom impossible to women in the older, more rigidly civilized worlds. They had traveled to extraordinary places, of both beauty like the breathtaking Californian coastline, and desolation like the inland deserts where skulls of men and beasts littered the sand.

They had become inventive, creating the things they needed and could not buy. They had mixed with people they would never have spoken to on the east coast of America, let alone in England.

But how different had they been inside, in loneliness or hunger for a place where they belonged, where they did not need to imagine and create simply to survive?

Beata had returned to England, and married Ingram York, and regretted it bitterly. She had still to feel the deep happiness in the soul of knowing that she was truly loved. It was the most profound hunger there was.

Miriam had mourned her first husband, but she had been comforted and protected by the richest and most charismatic man on the entire west coast, and then courted by him. It seemed as if the hand of fate had given her everything she might have dreamed of…except children. But was that chance, or choice? Perhaps after losing Astley's child with the shock of his death, she had not been able to have another? But she had love.

Beata would have had children, had she been able to, but not with Ingram. That thought was too horrible to entertain.

So had she anything in common with the woman in front of her, except memories of a unique time and place, twenty years ago? A friendship of sharing, born of necessity.

But they were going to hang Monk if no one managed to find a way out of this tightening noose. Whether she married Rathbone or not, whether she could find a way to be honest with him, and not drown him in her own ocean of pain and humiliation, was swept aside.

“However,” she said with sudden urgency, “Monk did not kill Pettifer on purpose. He had no motive, did not even know the man or that he worked for McNab. But there is only his word for it, or that of his own men, and a jury would weigh that with some skepticism.”

“But you believe him?” Miriam said curiously. “Why?”

Beata hesitated. What was her own dignity worth? No one's life!

“Because I know Oliver Rathbone well, and he has known Monk for fourteen years through good times and bad, and he believes him absolutely. They have fought some fierce battles side by side, and never failed each other. Monk never gave up on Oliver when he was in terrible trouble and facing ruin.”

Miriam smiled with quick, complete understanding. “You know him well? Sir Oliver Rathbone?” All the light and shadows of meaning were there in the question: pain again, and the sharp, empty feeling of loss.

“Yes,” Beata answered.

“And I think perhaps you are fond of him?” Miriam asked. The shadows in her eyes, in her face, showed plainly that it was not an idle question.

Another stripping away of the masks of comfort. Beata felt almost naked. She found herself avoiding Miriam's eyes, not because she was lying, but because she could not bear this poised, beautiful woman, so deeply loved, to see into her feelings. One thing would lead to another until everything was laid bare.

“I find him very agreeable,” Beata answered. How empty that sounded, and how artificial. Surely Miriam would see right through it? Would she imagine something far more…intimate? She felt the blood hot in her face, as if she had lied already.

She must remember what she was here for. “Miriam…I want to help Oliver to defend Monk, and win. McNab has nursed a long revenge, sixteen years long. It was not Monk's fault McNab's half brother committed a crime for which he was hanged. Even if revenge is ever just, which I am not certain it is, this one is not.”

Miriam gave a tiny, sad smile. “McNab's revenge is not just, but society's revenge on his brother was?”

“Monk was not guilty of Nairn's crime, and he isn't guilty of killing Pettifer. But he'll hang for it if we don't find the truth, and prove it. Do you remember him from San Francisco? I suspect McNab is going to try to link Monk somehow with Piers's death, in order to show a pattern of violent behavior.”

Miriam looked stunned. “But that's…that's absurd! Why on earth would Monk have killed Piers?”

“I don't know!” Beata tried not to sound impatient. “Maybe for money. Heaven's sake, Miriam, there were enough adventurers along the Californian coast who would do anything for enough money to get a stake to buy land that might have gold. Life was wild and terrible and exhilarating…and deep. Of course Monk would have fit in then, as a young man looking for the chance of adventure and a future.”

Miriam seemed to look for words without finding them, unable to comprehend what she was hearing.

Beata dismissed it. “Never mind. What did you want McNab to do, and what does he want from you?”

Miriam remained silent.

The parlor maid came in with tea, put the tray on the table, and left, closing the door behind her.

Miriam poured the tea for each of them. She remembered exactly how Beata liked it, with no milk, and a tiny drop of honey.

“What do you want from McNab?” Beata repeated.

Miriam passed the tea across and Beata took it. “I suppose you will tell Rathbone if I don't explain it to you,” she said.

Beata put the cup down. With no milk in it, the tea would be scalding hot. “Yes. I'm not going to let McNab have his revenge.”

Miriam smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes. “You always were more straitlaced than you looked. Still, I'm surprised you stayed married to a High Court judge. It must have been like wearing an iron corset….”

“Red-hot iron…”

“I'm sorry. You think I don't know, but I do.”

“Do you?” Beata doubted it.

“There are different kinds of pain: that the loss of dreams leaves, and the pain of emptiness that gradually starves the soul.”

“McNab…” Beata reminded her. Only the present mattered now.

“He wanted information about Monk, and the gold rush years,” Miriam replied.

It all made sense. “I see. And what did you want from him in return?”

There was no mistaking the color in Miriam's cheeks now.

Beata waited.

“Information about Monk,” Miriam replied. “I needed to know Monk's skills and what kind of a man he is now. I remember him from those days. He was like steel—hard, supple, almost beautiful in his strength of will—and razor sharp. If he was the same man I knew, I knew he would not rest if he knew an injustice had been done to Piers and if anyone could help me get my revenge, it would be him.”

Beata was stunned. “Your revenge? For what? Upon whom?”

Miriam was pale now, all the color gone from her face like a vanished tide.

“On the man who killed Piers, of course. He was never caught, never punished.” The look in her eyes was fury, but far deeper than that, it was pain, utter and devastating loss.

Beata opened her mouth to speak, and found no words adequate for what she was feeling. The sense of loss emanating from Miriam was so strong, it was as though something had crawled beneath Beata's own skin and torn her own heart out.

“I loved him so much—more than I think he ever knew.”

Beata had a glimpse of understanding. This turbulent, passionate beauty who stirred a kind of madness in some men. Was it possible that Clive could have killed Piers? To have Miriam? No! No, that was…absurd. Aaron and Miriam…the great love story? Aaron the beautiful man, the King of the Barbary Coast?