Scandal in the Night (43 page)

Within a few moments, a flask of unknown content was silently proffered.

“Here.” Thomas uncorked the stopper, and held it out to Catriona. “Take this. You need a drink of this.”

She took the flask with white, trembling hands, and gulped down a healthy swallow, only to come up gasping. “Oh, sweet Saint Margaret!” She breathed out a waft of pungent fumes. “That’s Scotch whisky.”

“Is it?” Thomas took a swig himself, and tried not to gasp as the fiery liquid burned like a smoky peat fire down his throat. “It’s my first taste of whisky,” he wheezed, “so I’ll have to defer to your superior knowledge.”

She did not respond as he’d hoped with either a smile or a laugh, but she did say, “Thank you,” before she blew out a long shaky breath, and straightened her spine as if she were preparing herself to tell him something else he didn’t want to hear.

He took her hand, because despite the fact that she was sitting down, she was still none too steady, and because he could not shake his own compulsion to touch her, to assure himself that she was all right, and alive and near, and not lying on the floor of the bell tower in broken bits. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

She shook herself slightly, as if she were a stack of papers she could tidy by shaking them all together. But her eyes, those clear gray eyes that were incapable of subterfuge, met his steadily. “No. But I will anyway. I had to leave Scotland, much the same as I had to leave India. Because I had killed my father.”

She said it again, and still he could not believe her. Of all the things he had thought and learned about her and her family, this he never suspected. He had read each and every one of her letters—the letters he had found in her satchel, the letters she had received from her absent family—and each and every one of them had spoken of a close and loving family. Each one had been full of love and laughter and close affection for one another. Her parents—and there had been letters from both her mother and her father, but most especially her father—had spoken warmly and openly of how deeply missed Catriona was while she was at school.

“How?” was all he could think to ask, even though he was dreading the answer.

“With a gun. His gun.” She made a hiccup of sound—half groan and half wail—as she drew the piece from the depths of her pocket. “Oh, Lord help me. I had it all along. I had it in my pocket, and I could have used it to—”

She made a small, fleeting gesture of overwhelming revulsion that told him she never could have used the weapon. And then she put her head down, took another deep breath, and made herself continue. “My father gave me this gun for the express purpose of killing him.”

The bone-chilling implication of such a thing had her shaking again. Thomas kept hold of her small, cold hands, and hunkered down in front of her, so he could see her downturned face. “Tell me.”

“That he had been dying—halfway to dead by then—ought to make a difference. But it doesn’t, really. It feels the same.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her face a pale oval against the dark green of the grass and trees behind her. “If I had been found out I’m sure they would have charged me not for the killing—although I’m sure they would,” she contradicted herself. “But for depriving the crown of the opportunity of finishing the job they had started, and stretching his neck.”

Thomas’s mind was scrambling to understand. He started with what little he did know. “Your father was a wanted man?”

“He was.” She took another deep breath and let it out, as if she had to remind herself to breathe. “He had been a newspaperman of some repute, fame even, in some circles. United Irishmen’s circles. He had owned a newspaper in Belfast, and published in support of the United Ulstermen.” In the telling her voice had lost her governess’s polished tones, and returned to the Scots cadence of her youth, the lilting brogue full of color and intonation that he had loved in India. “And when the authorities there began to crack down, he emigrated to Glasgow, as did many others of his political sympathies. I was a baby then, but there was always political talk at our house, growing up. To me it just seemed normal, not seditious, or treasonous. But I suppose it was. That’s why they sent me away to school, to Paris, when I was older. My mother was related to the old Duke of Hamilton, and when things grew uncomfortably dangerous at home, somehow money and a place at a good school were found for me. But I didn’t understand that then. I just thought I had got lucky, although I missed my family terribly.”

She would have done. He imagined she had been much like she was in India, deeply appreciative of her surroundings, but just as deeply aware of what she owed her family in making the sacrifice. “How long were you there?”

“Years. Long enough so that I was blinded to their real situation at home. How far in poverty they were descending. And then the typhus took root in Glasgow, and they succumbed, one by one—my mother and my brother and my sister. I came home against their wishes, as quickly as I could, but it was too late to do anything to save them. They all died but Da. One by one. And I was supposed to be thankful that I was spared.”

He could not tell her he was glad—glad beyond thankfulness that she had been spared. Deeply thankful that she had not arrived at the height of the contagion only to succumb herself. “I’m sorry,” was what he said instead, though it was little enough in the enormity of her loss.

“Me, too.” Her voice was small and tight. “Grief swallowed my da whole. It made him rash, and reckless. And treasonous. He printed pamphlets and broadsheets publicly blaming the epidemic on all the inequities of the government, and the crown, and most especially on the new Duke of Hamilton, the old duke’s nephew, who had closed his door to us poor relations when my mother had gone to him for help, asking him to take my brother and sister in, to keep them safe from the epidemic. He did nothing for them, and nothing for the people.”

James had come into the garden to stand quietly a little ways away, and listen, and Thomas was suddenly conscious and glad of the strange blessing of his own family, there to help and support him.

“And he would not cease, my father,” Catriona continued, “saying and printing more and more incendiary things, until the magistrates put out a warrant for his arrest for sedition and treason. And they almost got him. My God, they almost did. But he got away, through some damp alleyway or fetid gutter the magistrates knew nothing about. He took me up into the hills. I thought we were going to walk away from it all. Make our way to Edinburgh or Dumfries. That’s what he talked of anyway. Until he didn’t.”

There wasn’t much he could say of comfort, though the raw pain in her voice tore at him.

“He had taken a bullet that I wasn’t aware of. I … I should have realized.” She was shaking her head, and swallowing, trying to speak though her voice was cracked with strain. “But…”

“You were young, Cat.” He held on to her clenched hand.

“Not that young.” She wouldn’t take any comfort, though the effort to tell him her story was clearly taking its toll. “I was nearly nineteen. A woman grown. I should have seen. But I was angry at him for the chaos and the poverty in our life. Angry that things … had deteriorated. And I was too full of my own discomforts that day, walking out into the wild. I didn’t understand that he was so badly hurt until we were well away from any shelter, out in the hills above Avon water.”

She pressed her lips between her teeth. “When he couldn’t go any farther he lay down. And then he handed me his gun. And asked me to do it. To kill him, so he couldn’t be hanged.”

The shock that gripped his gut was grief for her. All this time she had had this pressing on her soul, weighing her down. And he had never seen it. Oh, he had known there were untapped depths in her, he had admired the steely strength in her spine, but he had never thought about the forces that might have created those depths. Or how deep they really went. Or what they might have cost her.

He took another look at her then, without the prism of Tanvir Singh’s lonely admiration to make her into something fresh and naïve. He had certainly wondered about her—wondered what made her different from the other memsahibs, what made her seem like a living bloom in a vase full of wilted hothouse flowers. But he had never imagined this—the horror she must have endured. “And you did it, of course. You would do whatever was asked of you by your family.”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

Her quiet admission tore him apart, but his anger was all for her father, who had professed to love her, for asking such a thing. “He should have had the resolve to do it himself. To send you away, and finish himself off.”

“He didn’t want to be a suicide. He didn’t want the sin of it on his soul.”

“So he put it on yours?” His voice was full of his pain for her, mingled with shock and disbelief.

A solitary tear broke loose from the corner of her eye and fell freely down the pale slide of her cheek. “He said I’d have time to be forgiven, and be shriven of my sins.”

“And do you feel forgiven? Have you been shriven of your sin?” He did not wait for her answer. “You will have to forgive me if I think your father a selfish bastard.”

Catriona let out a weary sigh, and closed her eyes to let the tremulous tears streak down her face. “Perhaps. Perhaps he was. But what’s done is done, and can’t be undone. So, as I was saying to the Viscountess Jeffrey last evening, I’ll have to be leaving you. I have no want for you, or Wimbourne, or your family to be tainted by the accusation that you harbored a murderer.”

His love for her was an ache—a physical pang that radiated from within his chest. “Catriona.” He took her arms in his hands so she would look at him, and understand what he was saying. “What you did that day in the hills does not make you a murderer any more than what I did today makes me. I—we did what we had to do to stop Birkstead. And you did what you had to do. You say the past is past, and cannot be undone—so be it. As far as I’m concerned, you belong with me. If you need protection from some ancient charge, I will protect you. My family will protect you.”

“Don’t you see? I can’t ask them to do that. I can’t—”

“I can,” he said before she could get her next argument marshaled. “I will. And Catriona, I went to Glasgow. I looked for you there. I asked after you. I was a spy—I know how to find things out. I heard the whispers, just like in India. And I don’t care.”

“All this time you knew, and you never said anything?”

“No. Because it didn’t matter to me. It
doesn’t
matter to me.” He tried to swallow down the heat that was crawling up the back of his throat, but he had to tell her. “We’re neither of us saints, Catriona.”

This was the thing. This was that indescribable feeling, the connection, that had called to him from the very first moment he saw her—his soul had recognized its other half.

All along, she had been as morally compromised as he—a remorseful angel, he had thought her. This was what he had seen in her—this unselfish willingness to damage her soul if it meant she could save others.

He could finally see what that resolve, the steely spine he had always admired, had cost her. Her control was in proportion to her fear. If her calm exterior appeared formidable it was because her fear was just as great.

“No one else in the whole of the world knows as much about me as you do. Not Colonel Balfour, nor the Begum, nor any of my family. Only you know. So I can’t—I won’t—just let you go, and leave to try and find another family somewhere, and do what you’ve done here. Not just teaching, but binding yourself to them. I can’t let you try and find another child like Mariah, to whom you can become entirely indispensable. A child who you know will always need you, need someone to care for her. And you want to be that person, so you never have to leave. So you never have to give her up.”

She tried to close her eyes, to shut him out, but he had already seen through her. He had already divined the most secret yearnings of her closed heart. He could see it all now.

“You want a family to belong to, the way you belonged with those children in Saharanpur. You must have loved them extraordinarily to do what you did for them. You gave up your life as Catriona Rowan for theirs. Just as you did for your father. And the deceased you never spoke of, in Scotland, your mother and brothers and sisters. God only knows how you sacrificed for them through the years.”

*   *   *

Not enough. Not enough to save them. Catriona’s failures with her own family haunted her, coloring every decision she had ever made. Urging her now to do what was right, and not what felt pleasing or easy.

Thomas drew back to look at her anew. “Family is the
only
thing that ever really mattered to you.” He said it with a sort of wonder that he had not noticed this telling detail before.

And it wasn’t strictly true. He had mattered to her. They had mattered to each other. But she had to do what was right for everyone, not just the two of them, so she said only, “Yes.”

“Cat.” His voice was full of a kind of bewildered pity. “Don’t you want children of your own?”

It was the question she tried not to ask herself in the quiet, dark moments in the middle of the night when the past could not be kept at bay. It was the question she would not answer, because if she did, the withered stone of her heart would crack even wider under the pressure of hopelessness.

But, oh, how she wanted. Every fiber of her being ached with the need to hold her own child in her arms. To be able to love without restrictions, without waiting for the children to be sent to her, and without watching them run to others when her time with them was up. To know that nothing and no one could separate them.

But there were no assurances, no absolutes. Her own mother had seen two children die in her arms before she herself had succumbed, brought down by her broken heart as much as by the disease that had ravaged them all.

Cat was nearly overwhelmed by the loneliness that hollowed her out. She felt empty, missing. Without whatever it was that gave Lady Jeffrey her purpose and strength.

And now Thomas was here, reminding her of the dreams that still came to her nightly. Reminding her of how long she had been lonely.