So in Love (27 page)

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What a foolish thing to say, Jeanne,” he said gently. “Of course it matters.
You
matter.”

He pulled back and surveyed her in the faint lantern light. There was a red mark forming on her cheek that would soon lead to a bruise. Her eyes looked haunted, the shadows accentuated below her eyes. His thumbs traced over the fragility of her lovely face. How could his happiness be so contained within this one woman? How could she be all that he needed?

“It doesn’t matter
now,
” she amended.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, gently circling her reddened skin.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

In the distance, Douglas heard the faint sound of laughter, and nearby came the skittering sound of rats.

“I don’t think he knows where Margaret is,” Jeanne said.

“Who is he?” Douglas asked, glancing at the man who still lay huddled on the floor.

“Charles Talbot, a jeweler.”

The name was familiar to him, but he ignored the niggling memory in favor of leaving this place.

As they headed for the door, Jeanne turned and looked at the far wall and that’s when Douglas saw the other body.

“My father,” she said. “If he knew where Margaret was, Douglas, he didn’t say.” She looked at him helplessly. “What do we do now?”

“Get out of here,” he said, taking her arm and leading her up the steps.

He turned, still holding an arm around her, and surveyed this small room. In this dimmest of dungeons, in this place of horror, he had almost lost her again. How many times could a man resurrect himself without hope?

How had she done it?

He glanced at her, realizing the depth of her strength.

Even now, when most women would have been justifiably in hysterics, she was calm. She didn’t tremble. Nor did she cry, and as he looked, the expression in her eyes softened.

“I almost lost you,” he said, and he didn’t just speak of tonight’s adventures.

She nodded, and it was as if she understood the depth of his horror. “No,” she said softly and curled her fingers around his bloody hand.

He led her up the stairs into the clean night air. At the top, he glanced up at the sky and the sparkling stars. The world was too large, the universe too vast. One little girl could so easily become lost.

If they didn’t find Margaret, he would need to borrow some of Jeanne’s strength.

L
assiter was given the task of turning Talbot over to the authorities, which he looked pleased to do. When she and Douglas returned home, he led her to his library. “How do you feel?”

Moving to the sideboard, he poured them both a glass of sherry, and then brought both glasses to where she sat and placed them on the lion table between the wing chairs.

She smiled. “I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “I thought him dead, and seeing him alive was a shock. But I don’t know how I feel about his death. Isn’t that odd?”

He studied her, a look that was particularly intense.

“You’ve not realized it completely, I think,” he said, handing her one of the glasses. She stared at it for a long moment before she finally began to drink.

“I don’t mourn him. I hated him for too long for that. I thought he had Margaret,” she said. “If I regret anything, it’s that he didn’t tell us where she was.”

He nodded. “I’m sending some men into Mary King’s Close. I can’t overlook the possibility that Margaret is there.”

“She could be anywhere,” Jeanne said, beginning to tremble.

Douglas set down his own glass before taking hers and placing it on the table. Slowly, he pulled her into his arms. She leaned against him, wishing that she could absorb some of his strength. As she gave a shuddering sigh, he tightened his embrace.

Douglas. Even his name seemed to give her comfort.

Wrapping her arms around him, she flattened her hands against his back and placed her cheek against his chest.

“We’ll find her, Jeanne. We’ll find her.”

She nodded, and prayed that his words weren’t simply meant to be reassuring. Let them be a portent, an omen. Or even a prayer.

A little while later he led her to the chair and then bent and laid a fire.

“You’ve done this often,” she said, watching his easy movements.

“Often enough,” he said, smiling back at her.

“I wondered what you’d done for ten years,” she admitted. “Now I know. You were making fires, tea, and a fortune.”

“I sailed for the first three,” he said, returning to sit beside her. “Until I decided that a life aboard ship wasn’t the best for Margaret.”

She leaned back against the wing chair, staring into the fire. Although it was the middle of summer, the room felt chilled.

“Tell me about her,” she said, turning and forcing a smile to her face. “I want to know everything.”

For the rest of the evening, they kept a vigil as they waited for word to come from the hundreds of people still looking for Margaret.

She already knew that her daughter had a quick mind, but as the hours passed, Jeanne learned of Margaret’s love of sailing, apples, and Chinese puzzle boxes. Besides
Gilmuir, she liked James’s home of Ayleshire, and visiting the dolphins outside Inverness.

Together they sat in the wing chairs facing the fire, Douglas talking while Jeanne listened. Toward midnight, he replenished the fire. He was solicitous of her, providing a footstool, plying her with endless glasses of wine. She took a few sips from each, thinking that it might be pleasant to maintain a fogginess from drink. But nothing would mitigate the sense of loss she felt, so deep and pervasive that it mimicked the day they took baby Margaret from her.

Occasionally, Douglas would stand and begin to pace, stopping by her chair to pat her shoulder or brush the back of his hand against her cheek. It was the first time that they had felt a freedom to reveal their deepest thoughts to one another, and yet they did so without words.

She would grab his fingers and place a kiss against his knuckles, wondering if he knew how very much she loved him. The words were too difficult to say. The last time she’d done so, her life had altered in terrible ways. She was twice shy about revealing herself so completely yet again.

“What do we do next?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest and cupping her elbows in suddenly cold palms. The evening was cool, but that wasn’t the reason she felt chilled.

Standing, she moved to the fire, stood watching the blaze as it suddenly wavered, a blur of gold, orange, and blue flames.

“Tell me what happened,” he said, and she knew suddenly what he wanted to know. Not her abduction, but an older story, one of a spoiled yet innocent young girl.

The tale wasn’t long, and he remained silent while she spoke.

“I never believed that he would take her from me,” she said, speaking of the day Margaret was born. “I thought he
would let me go somewhere with her, someplace where they didn’t know the du Marchand name.” She laughed a mirthless laugh. “I had suggested America or England, and he seemed to agree.

“But once the baby was born, everything changed. He had Justine take the baby away and had me sent to the convent and I was a prisoner there, too.”

She glanced at him. “The first thing I did when I left the convent was return to Vallans. I thought that there was a chance that I could find her.” She smiled at her own foolishness and hope. “I found the place where she had been taken. The old man had died a few years earlier, but his wife was still alive. She was terrified of me, and my questions, but she finally told me what had happened.”

The small misshapen cottage on the outskirts of the woods had been a place of horror, not charm. Jeanne could remember everything about that foggy day, the feeling of every breath she’d taken, and every scent she’d inhaled of that foul place rife with decaying wood and slimy leaves.

“She led me to a grave,” she said, her voice trembling. “I stood there and knew that I had failed my child. My actions had led to her death.”

The ground had felt spongy beneath her knees as she’d knelt there, weeping until her eyes were dry.

“I should have been stronger,” she said now at his silence. “I should have found a way to protect her.”

“You were only seventeen,” he said.

She smoothed her damp palms over her skirt. “Yes,” she said, “I was only seventeen.” She looked at him, startled to discover that his eyes hadn’t left her. His quick appraisal was less one of masculine appreciation than it was of concern.

“Jeanne, you were no match for him.”

She smiled, again grateful to him for attempting to ease
her self-reproach, to absolve her of any culpability. “I didn’t want to see, Douglas. I didn’t want to know.” There, the greatest sin of all. She hadn’t wanted to believe the worst could happen. But it had.

“But she’s alive,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, turning to him and holding out her hands. He pulled her into his embrace. “You saved her. And me.” He’d restored her soul by saving their child when she could not.
Please, God, let Margaret be found. Let her be safe.

She continued with her tale. “That morning when I saw her grave, I decided that I would die. There was nothing to live for anymore.”

Closing her eyes, she felt his arms tighten around her. She spoke against his throat, grateful that he was so close.

“I didn’t want to live. But I did. I gradually made my way to Scotland.” She smiled at the thought of the ruby safely tucked away in her locket. The sale of it might have made her journey easier. “I didn’t have any money, but it didn’t seem to matter because I truly didn’t care what happened to me. I existed simply because I didn’t die.

“Until I saw you. Then everything changed. I was terrified you would find out what had happened and despise me as much as I despised myself.” She stretched out her hand, touched his face, smoothing her palm along his jaw.

“I thought you didn’t care all this time,” he said. “That you didn’t want Margaret. Or even me.”

She shook her head. “And I thought you never tried to find me because you discovered I was going to have your child.” She smiled faintly. “We’ve been hiding from each other all this time.”

He wrapped his arms around her, speaking the words next to her cheek. “Forgive me,” he said, the words sounding as if they’d originated from deep inside him. “Forgive me.”

“I do,” she said, finally.

Together they would heal, but only if Margaret was found.
Safe,
she added in a silent, fervent prayer.

Toward dawn, Jeanne fell into a fitful doze, sitting upright in the wing chair. She was awakened when Douglas placed a coverlet around her, tucking it over her knees. Sleepily, she thanked him as he bent and placed a kiss on her forehead.

She opened her eyes and their gazes locked. In that moment she felt as if she had opened the door of her soul and allowed him inside, wandering where no one else had ever ventured. She almost wanted to whisper for him to take care so that he didn’t disarrange anything, or shatter something lovely like an illusion.

But he said nothing at all and only reached out his hand to trail his fingers across her face with the most gentle of touches. He brushed her hair back behind her ear before bending down to place a kiss against her lips.

She felt her heart slowly break at the tender look on his face.

“We’ll find her,” he said. “I promise.”

There was nothing at all certain about the future. Everything was tenuous and they each stepped across a narrow bridge to each other, one built of glass. A tremble, a brush of a hand, or a flick of a finger, and it may come tumbling down. But it was as if they each knew it, and took greater care of one another.

She began to count the hours, one after the other until a dozen had passed and then a dozen more. A day was gone, and then two, the dawns and sunsets ponderously similar.

Douglas traveled routes through Edinburgh every day, making contacts with people he knew, going to his warehouse. There, a selection of employees came to him with reports, none of them positive so far.

Each night he shared her bed, but only to hold her. She
lay with his arms around her and still felt cold, as if this loss of their child were again her fault. Once, she tried to tell him how sorry she was, but tears tightened her throat and made her incapable of speech.

He’d tightened his arms around her, and breathed the words against her cheek. “We’ll find her, Jeanne. Believe me.”

She could only nod.

On the third morning, when one of the maids called out that she had her breakfast tray, Jeanne dismissed her. When she knocked on the door of her room again a few moments later, Jeanne didn’t bother answering. A minute later she heard the door open and close softly.

“I don’t want any breakfast,” she said. She stood at the window staring out at the gray and overcast day.

“Do you intend to stay up here until she’s found?” Douglas asked.

“No,” she said, turning and looking at him. “I am going with you today. And tomorrow, and the day after that. I can’t simply remain here and wait for news.”

For ten years she’d been strong, and it was time she was strong again. They would find their daughter, but together.

“I would welcome the company,” he said, coming to stand beside her.

She leaned against him, closing her eyes, grateful when he extended his arms around her.

“I have to do something,” she explained. “Otherwise, I think I’ll go mad. I’m angry at the entire world. How am I to live through this, Douglas? The first time I lost her nearly killed me.”

He kissed her softly, a gesture meant to be more comforting than passionate. “Together, we’ll live through it.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but at the far horizon, as if he were remembering something particularly grim.

A knock on the door preceded one of Lassiter’s footmen. The majordomo insisted upon searching with the other employees every day. Therefore, his normal duties went to an assortment of young men, each of whom was terrified of doing something wrong. This one looked particularly harried, bending in an awkward bow that looked even more stilted since he was so tall.

“You’ve a visitor, sir. A Mr. Hamish MacRae. He says he has important news about Miss Margaret.”

Douglas preceded the footmen out of the room. Jeanne grabbed her skirts in both hands and raced down the stairs behind him, only to halt at the landing.

“Where is she?” Douglas asked a tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the foyer.

Hamish was the same height as Douglas, but was older and carried more weight. A few scars marred his face, but didn’t detract from his appearance of strength. His brown eyes appraised Douglas quickly, and then his gaze traveled up the stairs to rest on Jeanne.

“Where is she?” Douglas asked again and Hamish must have heard the underlying worry in Douglas’s voice because he held up his hand.

“She’s well,” Hamish said, smiling. “She convinced Henry to bring her to Gilmuir.”

“Gilmuir?” Douglas threaded his fingers through his hair and stared at his brother.

Jeanne held on to the banister and slowly descended the stairs, feeling as if her legs wouldn’t support her.

Hamish nodded. “She needed to see Mary, she said.”

Jeanne and Douglas exchanged a look, both slightly bemused. They had never considered that Margaret might have left Edinburgh of her own free will.

“She’s only nine,” Jeanne said, reaching Douglas’s side. He put his arm around her.

“But determined.” Hamish’s glance encompassed her.

“You must be Jeanne,” he said, his smile broadening. “Remember, she’s your daughter. You both strike me as being more than a little stubborn.”

“But she’s all right?” Douglas asked.

“She is, even though she isn’t sure she wants to talk to you,” he said to Douglas. “And she doesn’t know what to say to you,” he added, directing his attention to Jeanne.

She frowned at him, perplexed. “Why not?”

“It seems that Margaret has been able to piece together that Jeanne is her mother.” He nodded at Douglas. “She believes that you betrayed her. While you,” he said, glancing at Jeanne, “lied to her. I don’t think she’s altogether displeased that you’re her mother,” he added. “She’s just a little confused.”

“But she’s safe?”

“Safe with Mary at the moment.”

The relief that Jeanne felt was suddenly so strong that she thought she might faint from it. She reached out and Douglas enfolded his hand over hers and together they stood, strangely enough almost in the pose of a bride and groom.