The red cottage, p.20
The Red Cottage, page 20
The graveyard.
Tom had knelt next to Mr. Foxcroft’s grave, and his smooth voice—with its musical Scottish lilt—had been fond as he told her stories.
Then the curiosity shop. The building had been old, the shelves a little bowed, and the dull collection of useless trinkets had been anything but interesting. Tom had made it so anyway. Perhaps she should not admit that.
But it was true.
He had slipped on a glove puppet of Punch, mimicking the same rasping, swazzle-sounding voice that might be heard from a street show. She had shaken her head at him, tickled with mirth.
Side by side, they’d weaved through the clutter. He had plucked things off the shelves, made jesting remarks, laughed now and again.
All of it, everything they said, had been pointless and little.
Nothing like Lord Cunningham’s poems.
Or his medicinal knowledge.
Even so. She jabbed a pianoforte key with too much gusto. Tom was … well, fun.
“Is that what you think?”
Meg nearly fell from her seat as Lord Cunningham strode into the music room. Embarrassment warmed her cheeks, as if he’d comprehended her thoughts. Which he hadn’t, of course. Had he?
“Lady Walpoole, she plays the pianoforte with grave unhappiness.” Lord Cunningham moved behind her to inspect the sheet music. “Perhaps this is too difficult a piece for one who has never played anything.”
“I shall ask Tom.” Meg did not mean for the words to slip. “After all, we cannot be certain I was entirely without musical skill.”
“It is no mystery to me.” Lady Walpoole rose from her armchair, her grimace patronizing. “Good afternoon, my lord. I hope you have the afternoon free and might join me in encouraging Miss Foxcroft to exercise more patience.”
“She has every virtue. You cannot convince me otherwise.”
“Virtue without accomplishment is imbalanced.”
“But still beautiful.” Lord Cunningham swept Meg’s hand from the ivory keys. He kissed her knuckles. “In fact, I do indeed have the afternoon free and was hoping it would not be too troublesome for me to steal your pupil away.”
Lady Walpoole feigned a smile. “You are quite at your leisure, my lord. I have letters to finish in my chamber if my presence is no longer needed.” She curtsied. “Until dinner.”
When she had departed the room, all grace and easy movements, Lord Cunningham turned to Meg. He sank down to his knees, gathering her hands. “Violet tells me you have spent every night with her. I came here to scold you for being too kind, but now I want nothing more than to devour you.”
An odd vibration worked through her. Like a note she’d played wrong in an otherwise beautiful song. “Violet is lonely.”
“We are all lonely, my dear.”
“You should endeavor to spend more time with her.”
“My hours are devoted to her in other ways. She is not old enough to understand. You, of course, must see the need—”
“She is less in need of your study and more in need of your company, I think.” Meg gave his hands an encouraging squeeze. “I say this not to injure you, my lord. Only that you might not regret a moment passed when …” A dam constructed in her throat.
The same emotion mirrored in Lord Cunningham’s eyes. He lowered his head. Nodded. “You are right. Of course. You are all wisdom, and I am all fool.”
“Do not say such a thing.”
“Who was I until you came to me?”
“My lord—”
“I was betrothed at fourteen to the daughter of my father’s most substantial business acquaintance. We had known each other our whole lives, and she was as interested in science as I was in medicine.” He gazed over her face—from her chin, to her nose, to her eyes, to her lips, where he lingered too long. “We were compatible. We matched each other in both intelligence and sensibility, and though our hearts were not united with romantic fervor, we were both quite content without it.”
“You did not love her?”
“No.” He swallowed. “Yes. I do not know. I wept when she died, but more from loss of companionship than any true bereavement.” He released her hands. “You must think me terrible.”
“I think you honest.”
“What I feel for you is—”
“I must be no less honest with you.” Meg squirmed away from the bench, ridding herself of his bothersome touch as thoughts flitted back through her mind. The places her mind had lingered these past days. The laugh she heard in her sleep. “You speak of romantic fervor as if it were the missing link to your happiness.”
He followed her to the window. “You are the missing link to my happiness.”
“I know so little of myself. Least of all my own heart.”
“I am many things, my dear, but naive is not among them.” He turned her around. “I know, of course, the complications of your involvement with Tom McGwen. Even a stranger, he possesses power over you.”
“That is not true.” Was it? Why else did every encounter with the infuriating man make her uncomfortable … and warm?
Too warm.
As if she were holding frigid hands too close to the flames.
“I am not blind to the realization that even in anger, he has the tantalizing ability to make you flush. To make these pretty eyes of yours …” He stroked her temples, then said in a sultry voice, “Burn like fire.”
“You wish me to end my time with him.”
“On the contrary. I wish you to see him as much as you wish.” Lord Cunningham smiled. “If I am ever to win your affections, I must first be certain it has not already been done.”
Before she could answer, the double music room doors parted. The butler stepped in with a dubious bow. “A visitor has arrived.”
“I shall come presently.”
“Very good, my lord, only …”
“Only what?”
“It is not you the man requests, my lord.” The butler turned his gaze to Meg. “It is her.”
“An odd request, Mr. McGwen, even for you.” A faint puff of smoke departed the vicar’s nostrils as he tossed his cigar into one of the scraggly church bushes. “Follow me inside if you please.”
This marked the second time Tom had entered a church without Meg next to him. He rubbed the back of his neck and almost grunted. She would have been proud.
Mr. Sprigg led the way inside the nave, where two skinny girls washed the windows and a young boy polished the box pews with a rag and tung oil. The scent of soap perfumed the air.
“Two years, you say?” The vicar found his parish registry in the shelf of his three-decker pulpit. He carried it to a stool and sat. “Here it is. The column of burials. Seven and twenty names.”
“May I see?”
Mr. Sprigg raised a cynical brow but surrendered the book. “Far be it from me to deny you anything. This is the most concern you have displayed in holy affairs for a long time.”
“ ’Tis nae spiritual matter, sir.”
“Hmmm.”
“Do ye remember the causes of death?” Tom dragged his finger along the column of names. “Enoch Rowe?”
“Consumption.”
“Jane Pearce.”
“Whooping cough.”
Tom read the list aloud. Some he remembered, like little Grace Phipp. The child had borne tiny red blisters across her face, her arms, then everywhere. Meg had been quiet weeks after the child passed of smallpox. “Elisabeth.” No surname.
Mr. Sprigg cleared his throat, his breath reeking of cheroot. “Apoplexy.”
Awareness pebbled the flesh on the back of Tom’s neck. The same demise as Mr. Musgrave. “Elisabeth who?”
“The woman had no name.” The vicar took back the book, scanning through the last few entries. He rattled off the causes of death—more consumption, a fall from a ladder, measles. He snapped shut the registry. “I hope this has been enlightening. At the very least, I pray the reality of our susceptible nature will have you listening more intently during Sunday prayer.”
Tom grinned, a little sheepish at the reprimand, but shoved back the creeping darkness of man’s mortality. “One more thing. The woman named Elisabeth. Do ye know anything about her?”
“The entire ordeal was one of delicacy.” The vicar slid off his stool. “She had no name because, like many others of her nature, she did not wish to be remembered.”
“Where can I find her family?”
“She had none.”
“Lodgings? Employment?”
“I think it best you end your search in the church and not—”
“Please, sir.” Tom grabbed the man’s arm, stopping him, then withdrew with a hurried look of apology. “Forgive me. I didnae expect ye to understand what I’m asking, but I swear to ye I’m only trying to do good.”
“Swear neither by the heaven nor the earth, Mr. McGwen.”
“Och, aye. But the girl—”
“You listen as little to my private instruction as you do to my sermons.” The vicar scowled and shook his head, incredulous. “Very well. There is an establishment on the east side of Juleshead. It is a house of sin, whose end shall be bitter as the wormwood if they do not repent. Elisabeth, God have pity on her soul, did not.” He skewered Tom with a look of warning. “I advise you to stay away. You have enough of the devil pulling at your soul without handing him the reins.”
The words sounded too much like the hatred in Papa’s eyes.
Tom nodded, grumbled his thanks, and fled from the church. The same need to tell Meg the truth, what he had done, cramped inside him again. Just as it’d done all these years.
But he was too much a coward to face Meg.
And he was too much a coward to face God.
“I thought ye’d forgotten me.” Tom sat at his rustic wooden table, his beard trimmed tight and his hair a little damp and ruffled, as if he’d just scrubbed his face with soap and water. He finished off the last of his porridge.
Meg shut the cottage door behind her. Already, his nearness set her heart to scampering. “You have chairs,” she observed.
“Built them yesterday.” He scooted out from the table and turned the chair for inspection. The craftsmanship was lacking, the design primitive compared to Lord Cunningham’s lustrous armorial chairs. But the carpentry seemed solid, like something that would last for centuries.
“Look at this.” He moved to the hearth, where a large, brown-and-green braided rug now spread across the floorboards. “Mrs. Dickey learned how to make them in America. She brought it over. Said it was for dragging Mr. Dickey home all those nights.”
“Mr. Dickey?”
“He dips a wee bit too deep sometimes.” When she raised a brow at him in question, he said “Ye know” and guzzled an imaginary bottle.
“Oh.” Meg nodded her understanding. “I see.”
“Hungry?”
“I’ve eaten.”
“Ye dinnae like porridge anyway.” He rubbed his fingers through his hair, eyes bright, and some of his vivaciousness tried to penetrate her own disposition.
She attempted a smile. And failed.
“I’ve work to do in the garden.” He moved for the peg, shrugged on his familiar brown coat, and grabbed a linen seed bag. “If ye’ve a mind to help, I can fetch ye my trousers again.”
“I can assist you perfectly well in this.”
He smirked as if he’d expected as much. Outside, they hiked to the left of the cottage, where he’d already tilled several long rows beneath the crab apple tree. The morning sun was high, the warmth rippling on the back of her neck as she knelt in the dirt beside him.
They planted seeds together.
She with the bag, dumping them into his palm.
He digging into the soil, dropping seeds into holes, covering them up with dirt-ringed fingernails. Their shoulders brushed. Fingers touched. She smelled him along with earthy moisture as the back of her dress dampened with sweat.
Lady Walpoole would have a conniption when she saw Meg’s stained knees. Perhaps Lord Cunningham too.
She didn’t care.
She should.
“What’s bothering ye, lass?” They’d spoken back and forth—little things about the weather, the vegetable seeds, the garden. How Joanie was helping Mrs. Musgrave with new hats. How the cottage windows still needed curtains.
This question ripped through her, dragging down the barrier always between them. The one she had built. The one she scrambled to resurrect.
“Nothing, I assure you.”
“Ye’re a liar.”
“And you are insolent.” She grabbed a fistful of dirt and daubed it on his arm, smearing it down his sleeve, lips quirking with a smile.
“Ye’re a sure sailor for one with nae sea legs.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That ye should take care.” He glanced at his sleeve, then back to her face, eyes daring, alive, willful. “I’m a wee bit stronger and faster than ye.”
“Am I supposed to be afraid?”
“If ye had sense.”
“Which you are implying I do not.”
Shaking his head, he went back to work with his hands, then moved to another row. She thought she heard him mumble something under his breath.
Rubbing soil from her dress, she followed him. They fell back into the same rhythm, the silence filled with distant bird songs, her lip between her teeth.
So he was not going to ask again.
That rankled her.
Which was nonsense, because she hadn’t wanted to tell him in the first place.
“Yesterday, I had a visitor.”
Sun pinkened the back of his neck, highlighted the red in his hair, as he remained fixed on his task.
“When the butler showed me into the drawing room, he was gone. No one saw him leave, and no one knew his name.”
“Ye think he was there to do ye harm.”
“No. This was different.” Anxiety pin-pricked her chest. “But I thought … well, I thought he might have …”
“Might have what?”
“I do not know. It is ridiculous. I am ridiculous.” She exhaled and pushed to her feet, dropping the bag of seeds, turning—
“Lass, wait.”
“I told you. I do not wish to speak of it. Not when I have nothing to prove any of this is true, and what little mind I do have left is confused more than it is sane.”
He blocked her on the outskirts of the garden, hands in his pockets, eyes drilling into her. “Prove what?”
“It has only been the past days. Perhaps a sennight. I cannot rid myself of the feeling.” Her shoulders slumped in confusion. “I think I am being watched.”
CHAPTER 17
Meg arrived the very next morning, this time with her hair uncurled and whipped back in one of the braided buns he’d seen her wear before. She wore a blue-and-white-striped dress and worn apron, as if she’d borrowed clothes from one of the Penrose scullery maids.
The first thing she did was bustle to the cottage windows. She measured their length with a notched paper tape.
“What are ye doing?”
“If Lady Walpoole is going to torture me with accomplishments, I might at least use them for something practical.” She spun. “Yellow, I think. Do you not?”
“Dinnae matter to me.”
“I suppose you would leave them bare if you had not someone to sew them for you.”
He shrugged, grinned.
Her lips widened, but she whirled back around before he caught the full sunbeams of her smile. Something inside him shook. Seeing her here, measuring his windows, talking to him, her hair bonnie.
He had not slept last night.
The words had pierced him, like a fish hook catching in his flesh. “I am being watched.” Her imagination likely. Or the men who wanted her dead. The men Tom was supposed to have found, stopped, and locked away by now. “This was different.”
Urgency branded him, a hot iron to his soul. He needed to do something. What? Hunt down the brothel where Elisabeth with the forgotten name was said to have died? Read Mrs. Musgrave’s letter again?
The dead had no tongue.
And the dead were the only ones, right now, who had any hope of snuffing down the lies concerning Mr. Foxcroft. Och, and they were lies. Were they not?
The old man’s face shaped in Tom’s memory. The receding white hair, wiry eyebrows, jerky movements, and inability to look anyone quite in the face. He was strange, the old goat. He’d always been strange.
But Meg had loved him.
In some ways, Tom had too.
“Where is Joanie?”
“Still making hats.” Tom grabbed his rusty shears from the mantel. “Ever trimmed bushes before?”
“I think you would know the answer to that better than I would.”
“I dinnae know everything about ye, lass.” Tom nodded her outside. The four bushes planted outside the cottage were faded, drooping, and lopsided. Only a few wilted flowers bloomed among the branches.
“Go to clipping as ye see fit.” He placed the shears in her hands. “Like this.”
Snip.
Her hands were soft in his, jarring his senses.
Snip, whack.
“Your instructions are far less precise than those of Lady Walpoole.” Meg removed herself from his grip, her cheeks pinkening. She’d blushed at him so seldom before. Little he’d done had ever taken her by surprise.
She’d known him too well. What he thought before he spoke. What mischief drove him to nonsense. Anyone else would have discouraged him or scolded him, but she had matched his folly and been a culprit in all his impish trouble.
“You may finish your work in the garden,” she said. “I can manage here.”
“I’ve a better idea.”
“Oh?”
“It is hot, ye love to swim”—he swooped the gardening tool away from her—“and there’s a stream half a mile away just waiting for the likes of us.”
“The likes of us, indeed.” She resumed trimming the bush, this time snapping them with her fingers. “I hardly think so.”
“Why?”
