Miranda
Miranda
Susan Wiggs
WHO WAS SHE?In Regency London, a woman escapes from a burning warehouse only to realize she doesn't know her own identity. Although the locket around her neck bears the name Miranda, she has no recollection of her past. Nor does she know why two very different men want her—the devilishly handsome Scotsman Ian MacVane, and Lord Lucas Chesney, the nobleman who claims to be her betrothed.In a race against time to discover who she is and which man she can trust, Miranda embarks on a soul-stirring journey that takes her from the dazzling salons of London to the craggy Highlands of Scotland. All of her beliefs—about herself, her world and the nature of love—are tested to their limits as she seeks the truth about her past and finds an unexpected passion that ignites the hidden fires within….
WHO WAS SHE?
In Regency London, a woman escapes from a burning warehouse only to realize she doesn’t know her own identity. Although the locket around her neck bears the name Miranda, she has no recollection of her past. Nor does she know why two very different men want her—the devilishly handsome Scotsman Ian MacVane, and Lord Lucas Chesney, the nobleman who claims to be her betrothed.
In a race against time to discover who she is and which man she can trust, Miranda embarks on a soul-stirring journey that takes her from the dazzling salons of London to the craggy Highlands of Scotland. All of her beliefs—about herself, her world and the nature of love—are tested to their limits as she seeks the truth about her past and finds an unexpected passion that ignites the hidden fires within….
Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs (#ulink_9a6a054d-c47c-5b1c-900f-8dc6e3e78303)
“Wiggs’s storytelling is heartwarming…clutter free…[for] romance and women’s fiction readers of any age.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Susan Wiggs writes with bright assurance, humor and compassion.”
—Luanne Rice
“Wiggs’s talent is reflected in her thoroughly believable characters as well as the way she recognizes the importance of family by blood or other ties.”
—Library Journal
“Susan Wiggs paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master.”
—Jodi Picoult
Miranda
Susan Wiggs
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#uba4dd05d-6ca6-5268-916c-8d694a7e5ec1)
Back Cover Text (#u50fab8fa-6a6b-523f-b813-230d3f38d2f7)
Praise (#udb198391-b3f5-5a69-8d4a-e041b830f6b4)
Title Page (#u81c4de14-f849-5b80-9a16-2b60fb02c737)
Prologue (#ua8f2249a-11e5-5161-8950-01ec8bb9a31f)
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Prologue (#ulink_0ca2523e-9b7e-56e9-ac8b-e5f3825b0a90)
London
June 1814
The writing paper held the scent of violets, and that was the first clue.
The difficult cipher, based on a momentous day in the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, became clear after study. The key was not his birthday, after all, but an event far more significant: the date the defeated emperor went into exile on the Isle of Elba—4 May 1814. And that was the second clue.
The Allies believed the wars were finally over. At last a Bourbon king again sat upon the throne of France. Bonaparte would never return to seize power.
But the sender of the message disagreed.
M——
The hour of glory approaches. The crowned despots of Europe and their butchering battle commanders will all arrive in England before the end of summer.
They believe they have come to celebrate a lasting peace. Only you and I know their true destiny.
The final solution lies within our grasp, thanks to Miranda Stonecypher. Once we learn her secret, she must die. Else half the men of England will be after Miranda.
La Couleuvre
The hand holding the message clenched into a fist, crumpled the perfumed paper and hurled it into the hearth fire.
One (#ulink_01bfc693-4b7a-5fd5-a10f-22976cfa3740)
How weak and powerless I am in this
whirlwind of plotting and treachery.
—Empress Marie-Louise,
second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte
London
June 1814
In the beginning, there was a single point of light. It narrowed to the tiniest tip of a needle, piercing in its intensity, cold and white as the brightest star. She went toward it, a dreamer compelled by a quest of the soul. Closer, closer she drew, the light her only guide along the inexorable journey. Closer, closer. She was almost there; soon she would be able to reach forward, to tumble into the light...
The pinprick grew and exploded into searing, shattering pain. A cry started in her chest and rose through her, emerging ragged and desperate from her mouth.
A fog of noxious sulfur corrupted the air. She could see the yellow-tinged cloud in the deadly flashes erupting all around her. The menacing whine of flying rockets screamed in her ears. A bomb soared and careened against the roof beams of the warehouse.
She stood amid hellfire and brimstone, confused yet feeling oddly unafraid. She had bruises on her body, and her wrists were burned by the rope that had bound her. Perhaps knowing she was doomed, knowing the matter of her own death was now out of her hands, banished the fear. Gripped by a peculiar, numb tranquillity, she watched a wooden crate catch fire.
Eerily beautiful flames flared with a dreamlike slowness, licking along the edges of the crate and then climbing to the boxes stacked above it.
A single word was stamped on the face of each box: Explosives.
Even as a sense of peril registered, she knew with a strange feeling of detachment that it was too late to run. A second later, the crates and boxes exploded, bursting outward from a force within.
She felt pain, but from a distance. The force of the explosion hurled her backward. She waited for the impact of the wall, something to stop her, but the wall had disappeared. Just for a moment she was flying, flying into the black night.
She landed against a mound of baled cotton piled in an alleyway adjacent to the warehouse. The breath left her in a whoosh. She lay still, with the pain dancing madly, like a dervish, in her head.
The fireworks soared, turning night to day, angry lightning bolts in the sky. She began to realize, with dawning wonder, that she had done the impossible. She had survived. Perhaps, after all, she might live.
If she wished to.
Then a new flash cleaved the night. A plume of fire and smoke erupted in the alley. She could feel the roar of heat in her face. The flames reached for her, golden talons stretching closer, touching off the bales, sealing off her escape route. She tasted death again, its nearness, its allure whispered in her with a breath of fire.
Still unafraid, she started to surrender. Some part of her rejoiced. It was over. At last, all over. No one had won. All was lost.
A ball of fire rolled toward her, hungry, angry. Trapped in the alley, she slid deeper and deeper into submission, welcoming the end. But some tenacious hesitancy niggled at her, some sense that she was not ready yet. Someone needed her.
She staggered to her feet, swaying, the brick wall too hot to touch. Unfinished business. Benignly she noted that the bodice of her dress had been torn and then hastily repaired with a curved dressmaker’s pin.
Unfinished business. Her mind groped for the nature of that business, but smoke filled her lungs, and thoughts skittered away.
Concentrate, she told herself, closing her eyes. And she began to open up, to let in the unthinkable, and it almost surfaced. Then her awakening sense of reason snapped shut like a closing mantrap.
“Lass!” a voice called. It sounded faint, but she realized it was because the explosions had deafened her. “Give me your hand!” the stranger yelled.
She opened her eyes. Turned toward the deep, urgent voice. Through a veil of fire she saw him, tall and broad, a fluid, racing shadow backlit by shooting stars.
“Lass,” he shouted again, “you’ve got to come away from there now, while there’s still time.”
She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only stare as the blaze rose higher around him. He was wonderful, an archangel of shadow and light, bursting through the curtain of flame. Gloved hands snatched her up as if she were a poppet doll.
She tucked her face into the shelter of a huge shoulder. The frock coat reeked of sulfur and smoke and sweat. She felt the jarring thud of his footsteps as he ducked his head and spirited her away from the exploding building.
Shouts and whistles echoed through the streets. A brigade was already strung along down to the wharf, passing buckets frantically from the river.
He set her on her feet in the recessed doorway of a brick building, gripped her shoulders and leaned down to peer into her face. “What in God’s name were you doing there? Are you all right?”
Dust and ash clogged her throat and mouth. Her vision was blurred by cinders and tears. She could not see his features, could make out only the shape of her savior against the roaring light of the fire behind him.
“Lass!” He gave her a gentle shake.
She managed to nod, to croak, “I am not badly hurt.”
The shadow man swung off his frock coat, draped it around her shoulders. She had a swift impression of a broad chest, powerful arms. Safe. She would feel safe in those arms. She desperately needed to feel safe.
“Aye, then,” he said. “Take care you don’t—”
“Help! Help me!” The cry pierced through the bellow of flames and the crash of falling timbers. High in a tenement across the way stood a boy, just a little child, waving from a window. The roof above him had caught fire. So had the stairwell below him.
Her rescuer uttered a foreign word; it sounded like a curse. Before he even spoke or moved, she knew he would leave, and she felt an inexplicable sense of grief and yearning.
Stay with me, she wanted to plead. She longed to draw him into the light, to look at his face, to know the man who had snatched her from death.
Yet she felt no surprise when he shoved her toward a red-faced man overseeing the brigade. “Are you the watchman?” her savior asked.
“Aye, on patrol I was, and found myself in hell.”
“Look after this one,” he said, indicating her with a nod of his dark head. “I’ll go for the lad.”
“Christ, you’ll die trying,” the watchman said. “There’s no way to get to the child.”
But the man was gone, rushing toward the flames, disappearing into the burning building. The watchman pulled her to the end of the alley, where people were starting to gather.
A kaleidoscope of horrors wheeled around her. She saw the walking wounded, people with blackened burns and bleeding cuts, their faces lacerated by flying debris. Shredded paper made a snowstorm of confetti that flurried through the night sky. A woman ran past, cradling a child in her arms. A man walked by, his face as blank as a sleepwalker’s. From the front, he appeared unscathed, his starched shirt and cravat perfectly white. Then, making no sound, he pitched forward and landed facedown at her feet. In the back, his clothes had been burned and shredded away. Smoke rose from his blistered flesh.
She bent to help him, scooping water from a bucket onto his skin. He screamed and shuddered, choked out a prayer, fell silent. She gestured frantically to two men who were bearing off the wounded on litters made of bedsheets and rough blankets. While they moved the victim onto the litter, she chanced a look at the tenement. The stranger who had helped her was now climbing the burning stairs toward the child. For a big man, he moved swiftly, gracefully, as if accustomed to performing with great competence during a disaster. He snatched up the boy. For a fraction of a second, he simply stood and clasped the child to his chest, holding the small form as if it were infinitely precious. An orange glow formed a halo around them so that they were beautiful together, bejeweled in flickering light.
Ah, she knew what the child must be feeling. Those all-powerful arms enveloping her, bearing her to safety.
She had just decided that he was an angel when the stairs collapsed. She half expected him to sprout wings and fly. A whimsical notion, a fleeting hope. Both the man and the child plummeted into a pit of burning timber. Sparks gushed upward from the broken skeleton of the building.
Choking with sobs that tasted of sulfur and soot, she tried to go to them. A wall of flame obscured them from view.
Someone grabbed her roughly, drew her back. “Too late,” the watchman said. “You’re needed here.”
She heard someone else shout, “Miss, over here! Help us with this one!”
She struggled with the watchman, but he held her fast, shoving her to her knees beside a man with something metal embedded in his leg. “Concern yourself with the living, for chrissakes,” the watchman ordered.
The eyes of the wounded man pleaded with her. She had no choice but to stay with him.
Moving like a dreamwalker, she survived the night, helping, grieving, casting glances down the alleyway and hoping against hope that the tall man would come out, unscathed, with the little boy in his arms.
She had no sense of the passing of time, but rain began to fall as dawn tinged the sky. People raised grateful, smoke-blackened faces, welcoming the rain, letting it deal a final death blow to the fire they had battled all night.
The watchman found her as she was offering sips of water to a shaken old man. She looked at the blackened remains of the tenement. He shook his head. “There were no other survivors, miss. I tried to stop him, but...” He lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “You’d best be finding your way home.”
Home. She mouthed the word. No sound came out.
“Your family’ll be asking after you.”
She stared at the harsh, weary face, the small, speculating eyes. Despair trickled through her, drizzling like the rain.
“Miss?” He cocked his head. His singed brows drew together. “Shall I send for someone?”
She felt a great well of emptiness open up within her. Heard a silent scream inside her soul. And finally forced herself to face the truth she had avoided all night.
She had no memory, no notion at all of who she was, no knowledge of what she had been doing in the warehouse.
Or why someone would want her dead.
The thought chilled her, but she knew she was the reason for the disaster, knew it just as certainly as if the devil himself had whispered it in her ear.
She gave a strangled cry and put her hand to her dry, raw throat. Her fingers encountered a metal object there, something round, suspended from a thin chain.
A silver locket. She pulled it from her bodice and squinted at it through smarting eyes. Something was engraved on the locket. A word. Someone’s name. Her name.
Miranda.
* * *
Ian MacVane stared out the window of his fashionable Hanover Square house, watching a piece of torn silk blowing on the breeze and feeling a cold sense of doom.
“You didna tell me there was a girl involved,” he said in a low, furious voice. Its tone was even deeper than usual because of the smoke and fumes he had inhaled from the warehouse explosion.
His visitor followed his gaze to the window. Heavy velvet draperies framed a view of elm and cherry trees, elegantly understated wrought-iron fences in front of handsome houses. A blue-eyed stare sharpened on the bit of blowing silk.
“What do you suppose that is, flying about like an infernal kite? A piece of someone’s parade flag or aerial balloon, no doubt. London is simply crawling with dignitaries this summer. One can hardly take a chaise down Regent Street without stumbling upon a Prussian prince or a grand duke or some war hero draped with decorations.”
The speaker turned to face Ian where he lounged on the bed, naked from the waist up. “These are interesting times we live in, darling, are they not?”
Ian glared at Lady Frances Higgenbottom. “The girl,” he repeated. “You didna tell me the traitor was a girl.”
Lady Frances sighed. She took out her silk fan and idly waved it in front of her round, beautiful face. “If I had mentioned a girl, you might have gone and had a fit of scruples and possibly refused to help us. We are charged with safeguarding all the crowned heads of Europe while they’re in London. That duty must come first.”
Ian shifted on the satin sheets, wincing as the fabric brushed his burned shoulder and back. He told himself to be grateful to be alive at all. God knows he had wished for death in that moment when he’d looked down, realized that he had climbed to such a great height to fetch the child.
More than death, more than heated battle, even more than the past locked up tight in his heart, Ian MacVane feared heights.
The fall should have killed him, but somehow both he and the lad had managed to survive. He remembered being dragged to safety on a length of sailcloth. Gingerly he lowered the sheet farther so the fabric wouldn’t chafe him.
Lady Frances fell so still that her golden ringlets stopped bobbing. “Good Lord, MacVane. Must you be so damnably alluring? The fate of Europe is at stake, and all I can think of is your body.”
“You don’t even like me, Frances.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
A wry smile curved his mouth. “I think it was the time you made me fight a duel with an unloaded pistol, or perhaps your sending me by unarmed tender to deliver a message during a naval battle. I began to suspect—” Ian stopped himself, for she had done it again. Twisted the conversation away from the point he was trying to make. It was one of her many talents, and one that made her so effective in her secret role as chief spymaster of the Foreign Office.
“The lass,” he said grimly. “I’m still waiting for an answer.”
Frances snapped her fan shut and slapped it against the palm of her gloved hand. “You would have balked. Or gotten—heaven forbid—passionately entangled.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, giving her the full force of an icy glare. “When have I ever gotten passionately entangled?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if the room had grown chilly. “God, MacVane. You’re as cold as a Highland winter. I’ve always wondered why.”
There was a reason, but Frances was the last person he would tell. She knew far too much already.
She went to a cherrywood butler’s table and poured sherry from a crystal decanter. Ian studied each dainty, deceptive movement. Her costume was a confection of pink silk and frills, with little pink topboots showing beneath the scalloped hem of her skirt. To anyone but the most astute observer, she was an empty-headed miss with no more on her mind than a plumed cap. The one concession to her true vocation was a tiny black lily stamped on the heel of her left boot.
She tasted the sherry and regarded Ian with a half smile. “We had been watching Miranda Stonecypher for some time—along with her father, Gideon. She is presumed to know very little.” Frances’s sweet, kiss-me-you-fool mouth twisted into an ironic smile. “Even less now.”
“Bitch.” Ian blew out a sigh and flung his forearm over his brow, scowling out the window again. The scrap of silk had caught in the branch of an elm tree, fluttering red and royal blue on the summer breeze.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to see the wounded with their bleeding faces and wide, wondering eyes, the eyes of innocents caught in the maelstrom of the explosion, eyes that asked the one unanswerable question: Why?
Ian himself had wondered that, all those years ago, back when he had been innocent, when he had been a victim.
“Everyone who is anyone is coming to London this summer,” Frances continued, ignoring his insult. “There will be an assassination attempt, an elaborate one. So far, that is all we know. Our task is to find out the rest, and then keep it from happening.”
“Go on,” he said through gritted teeth.
“There’s nothing more to report.” She took a dainty sip of sherry. “Traitors are a dangerous lot, MacVane. They often turn upon their own.” She paused dramatically. He caught her meaning.
“So it wasna you nor any of your agents who set off the explosion?”
Her nostrils flared. “I’ll pretend you never asked me that, MacVane. Innocent people could have died last night, damn your eyes. As it happened, the only casualty was the traitor.”
“You just said the woman knew very little,” Ian pointed out.
She glanced at herself in the mirror over the washstand and primped. “As we know, looks can be deceiving.” She cleared her throat. “The demise of a woman is a regrettable thing. But in this case, it is serendipitous and will—at least for a time—disrupt the plans of Bonaparte’s conspirators.”
Ian thought for a long time. His bed was unspeakably comfortable, his home luxurious and a delicious luncheon was set out on a tray. No one would blame him for spending the day in idleness, nursing his wounds and resting.
Damn. The notion tempted him.
And so it was all the more excruciating for him to brace his arms on the mattress and lever himself up. He swung his legs to the floor.
Lady Frances squealed and clapped her hands over her eyes. “MacVane! My virtue!”
He had to laugh at that. “Virtue is surely the least of your worries, Fanny. Don’t fret, I won’t tell your precious Lucas you were here.”
“He is not my Lucas,” she retorted. “Yet.”
He stuffed his legs into buckskin breeches and swore with the pain as he drew on his freshly polished Hessians.
She peeked through her splayed fingers. A tiny gasp slipped from her.
“You’re cheating, love,” he said with a wink, but he couldn’t resist flexing his chest muscles.
Her fingers snapped shut. “You’re insolent. And what the devil do you think you’re doing?”
He swore louder now, in English and Gaelic both. “Putting on my shirt. Which is not a comfortable operation given the condition of my shoulder.”
“You shouldn’t have gone into that tenement, MacVane. But I’m not surprised you’d insist on playing the hero.”
“Saving a child from certain death is not heroic,” he told her. “Merely human.”
“Then you should have let some other human risk it. I need you. Whatever became of the child, anyway?”
A loud crash sounded from somewhere belowstairs, followed by the patter of running feet and a childish giggle. Ian bit back a grin. “Does that answer your question, my lady?”
“God, MacVane! We’ve got enough troubles without becoming an orphan asylum.”
“Then adopt the little mite, and he’ll be an orphan no more. You’d make such a charming maman.”
She borrowed one of his choice oaths, and the word sounded incongruous coming out of her cupid’s-bow mouth. Then she said, “Are you decent yet?”
He let out a bark of a laugh. “Fanny, my dear, I have never been decent. That’s what you like about me.”
She dropped her hands to plant them on her dainty waist. “So?”
“She didna die, Fanny.”
Her sweet red mouth formed an O. “What?”
“The girl. She survived the explosion. I had no idea she was the one or I would not have misplaced her.”
“But that’s imposs—”
“How would you know?” he snapped. “Unless you ordered her killed.” He watched her closely. “Och, I didna mean that, Fanny. For all that you are, you’ve never resorted to murder.”
“Yet,” she reminded him, fixing him with a lethal glare. “So where are you going?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t guessed yet.” He selected a waistcoat from the clothes press. It was made of tweedy Lowlander stuff, but he had no time to be selective. He donned the waistcoat and said, “I’m going after Miranda.”
Two (#ulink_1b809fb4-882b-5501-bf9b-1ab80abfcb10)
Leave me alone. I am looking into hell.
—King George III,
during an episode of madness
Miranda stood beneath an imposing gray stone lintel. A pair of statues with mouths agape and staring eyes glared down at her, and she recognized them—Cibber’s statues of Madness and Melancholy. She looked at the words engraved in the stained granite: Bethlehem Hospital.
Her heart drummed against her breastbone. Reeling with dread, she turned to her escort, the watchman who had been with her at the fire. “This is Bedlam.”
“Aye, miss.”
“It’s a hospital for people who are mad.”
He moved closer to her, put his hand on her arm. She supposed it was meant to comfort, but instead she felt nervous, trapped.
“Miss,” he said, “at least you’ll have a roof over your head, a meal—”
“I’m not mad.”
His hand tightened on her arm. “You say you don’t know who you are, where you live, who your family are.”
The black gulf of emptiness invaded her again, as it had each time she’d tried to remember before. Before the night, before the fire, before the terror and the insanity.
She stared at the ground, studying the cobbled street and the sparrows and rock doves poking at crumbs. London Wall. It wasn’t a wall, but a roadway at the edge of Moorfields. How was it that she knew the name of this street if she could not even name herself?
The heavy door of the entranceway creaked open on iron hinges. She found herself looking at a beefy man with a mustache that swept from ear to ear.
She shouldered back her weariness, lifted her chin. “I don’t belong here.” Despite the show of resolve, she staggered, on the brink of exhaustion, and her vision swam. “I belong in...in...” Her chest squeezed with dread. “In hell,” she said before she could stop herself. “Just not here,” she finished weakly.
The warden exchanged a fleeting look with the watchman behind her, and she felt their unspoken exchange: Mad as a March hare.
“That’s what they all say,” the warden remarked in a bland voice. “Does she need restraints?”
Restraints. They would chain her like an animal.
She took a step back. Bumped into the watchman. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders.
“Sir!” she choked out. “Unhand me! I do not belong here, and I certainly don’t need re—”
“You did well this time, Northrup. Got here before Dr. Beckworth makes his rounds.”
“He oughtn’t to complain, the stupid cit. The gate fees pay his wages,” Northrup said. His hand snaked into her hair. He pulled, forcing her head up. “Such a pretty piece will be a nice addition to the menagerie.”
“I’ll be able to charge the gawkers double. They like the pretty ones.”
Miranda gasped. “You mean, I am to be sold like a monkey to a zoo?”
The warden lifted a bushy eyebrow. “A show of spirit is always welcome. She’ll be an interesting specimen.”
“This is criminal!” she shouted. “Kidnapping!”
The warden captured her wrists in one hand and brought them up high behind her. A wrenching pain seared her elbows and shoulders. She could smell his sweaty body, could feel the heat of his breath on the back of his neck. Could hear the clink of coins in the small cloth purse he gave the watchman.
Outrage gripped her in a choke hold. The man who was supposed to be helping her—a man she had trusted—had sold her to a madhouse.
The watchman slipped away, ambling down the fog-shrouded lane.
Miranda shuddered out a long sigh. “Please, sir,” she said, affecting a small, meek voice. “It has been a rather long, eventful night for me, and I am quite exhausted. Truly, I need no restraining whatever.”
He laughed unpleasantly. “So you’ll make it easy on both yourself and old Larkin?”
She swallowed. Her throat still burned from the smoke. Her mind held nothing but emptiness—and fear. “Certainly, Mr. Larkin,” she forced out through dry lips.
The hard grip eased. She rotated her aching shoulders. Think, think, think...
The man called Larkin opened the door wider. The sharp smells of lye soap and urine gusted out, along with the roars and wails of the inmates.
Miranda ran.
Bunching her tattered skirts in one hand, she plunged down the lane. Her feet, laced into sturdy brown leather boots she did not remember putting on the previous morning, clattered over the uneven cobblestones.
With the curses of the warden ringing through the rows of close-set buildings, she ran blindly. She had no idea where she was going except away.
Away. The thought pounded in her head, counterpoint to the rhythm of her running feet.
Away, away, away.
Why are we going away again, Papa? And why must we leave in the middle of the night, without even saying goodbye?
It was a very old memory, incomplete, a vague impression of a slender man in a shabby coat, a warm hand closed around her small, cold one.
“Stop, thief!” the warden bellowed. His big voice roused a few sleepy-looking pedestrians as they walked along the street. Here and there, shutters opened and heads poked out.
“Stop her!” Larkin called again. “Stop her, I say!”
Miranda plunged on. She had a fleeting impression of inquisitive glances, but no one seemed inclined to stand in her way. There was, she decided, some small advantage to having one’s face and clothing soiled with black soot. No one wanted to touch her.
Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t— Another memory, this one dark and disturbing. She was almost grateful when it evaporated like the fog.
She careened around a corner, nearly colliding with a costermonger’s cart. The coster swore. Loose onions and potatoes spilled out, filling the narrow lane. She hesitated, then tried to leap past the cart.
Brutal hands dug into her shoulders. She turned to see Larkin’s face, red with fury.
“That’s the last time you’ll run from me, my fine lady fair,” he said, huffing with exertion. Even as she fought him, he hooked his leg behind her knees and forced her to the hard ground. He settled his weight on her, filling his fist with a handful of hair and giving it a cruel twist. “You want to earn your keep on your back, eh?” His eyes were small and hazel in color, hot and hungry. “I can arrange that.”
Miranda screamed.
* * *
Lucas Chesney grew impatient, waiting for Miranda. She had never been late before. He plucked a gold watch—one of the few items he had yet to pawn—from his pocket and thumbed it open, just to make sure.
Yes, it was half noon. She was late. Was she still angry about their ridiculous quarrel? What a barbarian he’d been, ripping her dress like that.
He paced, noting his surroundings with idle curiosity. The clutter of low buildings was dominated by soot-blackened churches, St. Mary-le-Strand, St. Clement Danes, St. Brides. The area near Blackfriars Bridge was not quite a slum, though it had its share of press gangs and flash houses. Some of the residences still possessed a smidgen of old-fashioned charm in their sandstone edifices and boxy gardens, but the neighborhood was clearly a place for people of less than modest means.
The perfect spot for you, old chap. Lucas slammed a door on the thought. He could not allow himself to dwell on the state of disaster known as the Chesney family fortune. He was Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, heir to the duke of Montrond, and he had a reputation to uphold.
Even if that reputation hung on the flimsiest string of lies and excuses since the Whigs had dominated Parliament.
The crumbling neighborhood had one distinct advantage, Lucas observed. No one here knew him.
No one except Miranda.
As always, his heart beat faster at the thought of her. A beauty, she had no particular use for her appearance. Though brilliant, she did not use her cleverness as a verbal lash, to cut and belittle people. While her radical views worried him, he had no doubt that in time she would temper her opinions. She was a delicious enigma, sometimes sweet-natured in a distracted, absentminded fashion, other times fiery and tempestuous.
She was fascinating, funny and passionate. Dazzlingly beautiful. She had but a single flaw. It was the one matter that haunted Lucas, troubled his dreams at night and made him feverish to find some solution.
Miss Miranda Stonecypher was penniless.
She made money and possessions seem unimportant, but Lucas loved his family and felt compelled to provide for them. Ever since the hunting accident that had left his father bedridden and staring mad, Lucas had taken on all the duties and debts of his office. And perhaps, he thought with a surge of hope, perhaps he had found an answer at last.
He had recently made the fortunate acquaintance of a—what was Mr. Addingham? A benefactor?
Lucas shook his head and laughed at himself. Silas Addingham was a ruthless social climber who had more money than shame. He wanted an entrée into polite society. Lucas could give it to him.
For a price.
He had tried to explain it to her the previous night, just before their row. Addingham’s money would enable Lucas to marry Miranda at last. To bring their relationship out in the open instead of sneaking around, hoping they wouldn’t get caught.
Eager to patch things up after their quarrel, he did something he had never done before. He went to her lodgings.
Lucas stood outside Number Seven Stamford Street. He knew only that Miranda lived here with her crack-brained father and a servant called Midge.
Feeling conspicuous, he rang the bell pull, then waited on the stoop. The air was filled with the smells of cooking and rubbish, the occasional laughter of children and shouts from watermen on the river.
When no one answered, he rang again. Not being able to introduce Miranda to his family, to his friends, had always brought him a faint sense of shame. It would be a relief to be open now.
He laughed to himself, picturing the look on Lady Frances Higgenbottom’s face when he appeared in public with Miranda.
Lady Frances, as lovely as she was wealthy, had been after Lucas for years. Though her relentless pursuit flattered his manly pride, he had long since grown weary of her shallow, tiresome ways. She swore that only by marrying her could Lucas save his family’s estate from the auctioneer’s hammer. But he had found another way. He had found Silas Addingham.
There was no response to his second ring. Lucas pushed open the door.
“Hello!” he called out. The smell of sulfur hung in the air. Miranda and her infernal experiments. She was always dabbling in some chemical reaction or other, trying to generate nitrous gases or hydrogen. Once they were wed he would delight in giving her a new outlet for her inventiveness—their marriage bed.
As he mounted a flight of creaky, uncarpeted stairs, he became aware of a subtler scent—acrid, hot and rusty.
Blood.
Lucas took the stairs two at a time, calling Miranda’s name. He emerged into a dim sitting room that reeked like an abattoir. The last time he had smelled death this sharply had been in a field hospital in Spain.
He forced away the nightmare memory of his soldiering days and went searching through the flat. It was a ghastly quest marked by a thickening trail of blood, overturned furniture, broken lamp chimneys, scattered papers.
He came to a tiny room with a single bedstead, the coverlet trailing along the floor.
A muffled moan issued from beneath the frayed cloth.
Lucas plunged to his knees. “Miranda!” With a shaking hand, he moved the blanket aside. A death-pale face stared up at him. The odor of fresh blood slammed through him.
And Lucas felt a shameful flood of relief, for the face of the dying woman was not Miranda’s.
“You must be Midge,” he said gently. “I am Lucas, a special friend of Miranda.”
The woman’s crusted lips moved. He bent forward to hear.
“’Randa...has no friends,” the servant whispered.
Lucas’s heart constricted. “She has one,” he said. “She has me.”
A bloodied hand clutched his sleeve. “They took her. And...Gideon.”
Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. Somehow he had known from the moment he’d set foot in this house. Damn! He should never have let her storm off in anger last night.
“Who?” he forced out as grief and rage and panic tore into him. “Please. For Miranda’s sake, you must tell me. Who did this?”
She spoke again, her voice fainter than ever. “Vi... Violet.” The word was more sigh than speech.
Despite a pounding sense of urgency, Lucas could not leave her. He held her for what seemed a long time. Her hand, icy cold on his sleeve, went slack and dropped. A rattling sound he remembered from the field hospital filled the silence.
He felt strangely calm as he relinquished his hold on Midge, poor Midge, whom he had never known. He put her head on a pillow and settled the coverlet around her as if she were a child being tucked in for the night. For eternity.
Then, still seized by an eerie serenity, he went through the apartment, seeking clues.
The problem was, someone had been here before him. Someone had ripped out desk drawers and rifled through papers and books. Someone had taken three innocent lives and cut them short.
He must contact the authorities. He would do so anonymously, of course, taking care that his name not be connected with this whole unsavory affair.
As he left, he passed through the vestibule. On a peg behind the door hung Miranda’s plain blue wool shawl. He pictured her in it, strolling along with him, gesturing as she spoke, her eyes brighter than stars as she gazed up at him.
He snatched up the shawl and buried his face in the soft wool. It smelled of Miranda and memories.
He had been too damned late to save her.
Ah, God, Miranda. I’m so sorry.
The dam broke. Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, hero of the Peninsular Wars, sank to the floor and sobbed.
* * *
Miranda forced herself to stop screaming as Larkin yanked her to her feet and dragged her back to Bedlam. “I have a wealthy family,” she said. Her voice had taken on a surprisingly cultivated tone.
“Have you, then?” Larkin asked cynically. “I thought you didn’t remember.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t,” she said in a singsong voice. “The question is, will you risk it?”
Larkin paused at the entranceway to the hospital. “Risk—”
She barked out a laugh. “Your decision, Mr. Larkin. Are a few moments of fleeting lust worth losing a handsome reward?”
He studied her for a long moment, his mustache twitching. “You’re a skinny, filthy wretch anyway,” he muttered. Then he hauled her through a corridor with cracked plaster walls, stopping at a wide, barred door. “Your home away from home, milady,” he spat.
He shoved her into the women’s gallery. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle another scream. A high fanlight let in streams of the afternoon sun. Dirty straw covered the floor. The plaster walls were crumbling and weeping with moisture. And everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on each rickety bench or moldering pallet, some dangling from manacles and leg irons, were the insane.
A few of them looked up when she entered. Most continued their mindless rocking and moaning, some screeching or muttering to themselves. One had plucked out the hair on the left side of her head. Another sang a tuneless, repetitive melody. But for the most part, the women lay as unresponsive as corpses.
“Hey, warden!” A buxom woman with bad teeth and jet black hair sidled toward them. “What have you there? A new jade ornament?”
“Stand aside, Gwen, she’s none of your affair.”
Ignoring him, Gwen put her face very close to Miranda’s. “’Neath all that dirt and soot, she looks a bit too fine for the likes of you, Larkin.” Gwen lifted an eyebrow. “What say you to that, mistress?”
A spark of outrage flared to life inside Miranda. She jerked her arm from Larkin’s grasp. “What I say, Mistress Gwen, is that any woman in this room is too fine for the likes of Warden Larkin.”
In the stunned silence that ensued, more women lifted their faces toward Miranda, like broken blossoms seeking the sun. Gwen let out a laugh of delight, braying loudly until the warden backhanded her across the mouth.
She barely flinched. A group of women ambled closer, baring their teeth. Sweat broke out on Larkin’s brow. He took a coiled leather lash from his belt. A few inmates shrank back, but still more advanced.
Barking an oath, Larkin stepped outside, slammed the door and shot the bolt home. Gwen laughed again, and others joined her, their shouts of mirth no longer eerie, but strangely joyful.
Miranda stood with her back to the wall of iron bars and stared. When at last she found her voice, she asked, “Why did you do that, all of you? Why did you defend me?”
Gwen clasped Miranda’s hands in hers. “Because of what you said, girl. About us all being too fine for Larkin.”
“I spoke no more than the truth.”
“Aye. But no one’s ever said it before.”
* * *
The explosion was four days past and Miranda’s trail was growing cold. Ian MacVane had inquired at churches, poorhouses, bawdy houses, almonries. He had paid bribes to wharfside idlers and shipmasters, to innkeepers and stablers, all to no avail.
His superiors were growing more insistent by the hour. Frances had been shocked to learn the young woman had survived the explosion, and she was frantic to speak to her—or so she said. But Ian knew instinctively that Frances was not particular. She merely wanted the girl found—alive or dead.
Frustrated, he stalked through the ransacked house in Stamford Street for the tenth time. Curses trailed like a black banner in his wake.
Four days, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been after the night of the disaster.
And to think he had held her in his arms!
The thought haunted him. He remembered how fragile she had felt, remembered the fright and confusion in her eyes. The urge to protect her had been powerful. He should have heeded his instincts rather than entrusting her to the watchman.
“You should hae listened to the voice in your noggin rather than shunting her off on that peeler,” Duffie said, shouldering open the door and stepping inside. “You knew that, did you not?”
Ian glared at his assistant, Angus McDuff. “Not before you did, it seems. Truly, you give me the willies.” Duffie had an uncanny gift for reading a man’s thoughts. “If I were the superstitious sort, I’d call you a devil’s imp and banish you to the Outer Hebrides.”
“The London peelers are as corrupt as the criminals themselves,” Duffie said. “It takes no great gift to figure that out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be looking after Robbie?”
“The lad’s fast asleep in the coach, bless his wee heart,” Duffie said with fondness. His bristly, graying beard outlined the bow shape of his broad smile. “At the moment, you need me more.”
They stood together in thoughtful silence, surveying the place that had been the home of Miranda Stonecypher.
It was a modest suite of rooms with scuffed plank floors, threadbare upholstery and papers crammed on shelves or strewn about. Black smears of dried blood marred the walls and floors.
Books were piled on every available surface. The topics ranged from works on moral philosophy to scientific tracts on physics and cosmography.
Had Miranda read them, or had they been her father’s? The Englishwomen Ian knew did not trouble themselves to read anything more challenging than La Belle Assemblée. God forbid they should actually have to think.
By far the most disquieting item in the room was a painting over the mantel. It was a reproduction of The Nightmare by Fuseli, Swiss painter and darling of the radicals. A sleeping woman, clad in a gauzy night rail, reclined on a draped bed. On her bosom perched a creature with a burning gaze and a wicked leer, and in the background loomed a horse with glassy eyes and flaring nostrils.
“Now that,” Duffie said, “gives me the willies.”
“Be certain Robbie doesna see it.” Ian turned away from the picture. The room was in a shambles, destroyed by the murderers and then rifled by officers from Bow Street who had been alerted by an anonymous citizen.
Ian grinned humorlessly. Lady Frances hated the Runners. This was not the first time they had interfered in her work.
He and McDuff picked through the rubble that was left. A half-written letter responding to a lender’s dun for money. Greek symbols sketching out some mathematical formula. A mundane list in a more feminine hand: foolscap, ink, silk thread...
In a carpetbag he found a stocking to be mended, along with an unfinished needlework project depicting a spray of forget-me-nots around an old-fashioned tower house. The caption read, “One father is more than an hundred schoolmasters.” A faint floral scent clung to the bag. Ian dropped it and raked a hand through his hair.
He knew nothing about this woman.
Except that she read wonderful books and liked dangerous paintings and loved her father.
And that when he’d held her, he had felt a reluctant stirring in his heart.
“Och, I dinna believe my eyes,” Duffie exclaimed.
“What do you mean?” Ian asked in annoyance.
“The great MacVane of the Highlands actually felt something other than hatred and rage. Ah, dinna deny it. I saw it in your pretty face. You care about the lass, don’t you?” Duffie gave a sly wink.
Ian clutched the back of a wooden chair and glared down at his gloved hands. The gloves spared him from seeing the stump of his finger, from remembering the past.
“She’s a puzzlement, Duffie. There was something...not right about her that night.”
“People dinna generally appear their best following a massive explosion,” Duffie observed helpfully.
“It was more than just panic and confusion. It was—” Ian nearly strangled on his own words as a blinding flash of memory cleaved his thoughts. Just for a moment, he was in another place, another time...
Burning buildings, thick smoke, people running to and fro. And his mother, unable to stand what they had done to her, had that same look in her eyes. That look of madness...
“Madness, you say?” Duffie asked.
“Did I say that?”
“Well, if people were to perceive the poor lass to be mad, then...”
Duffie and Ian looked at each other. At the same time, they snapped their fingers and spoke the same thought.
“Bedlam.”
Three (#ulink_9c57a56d-c762-58b9-a808-2433ed676a95)
Marriage is for life. If I were in your place,
I should tie my sheets to a window and be off.
—Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,
grandmother of Empress Marie-Louise
Ian disliked Dr. Beckworth on sight. It had taken a small fortune in bribes to get this far into the horror chamber that was Bedlam, and now Beckworth stood in the middle of his office, the implacable guardian at the threshold.
“What do you mean, you willna take my coin?” Ian demanded.
“I am a man of ethics as well as science, sir. I do not take bribes.” Above a boiled collar, he lifted his chin to a haughty angle.
“Would you consider a grant in the name of charity, then?”
Beckworth tightened his mouth until it resembled a sphincter. “Please.”
“I merely want to see Miss Stonecypher.”
Beckworth’s hands gripped the lapels of his frock coat. “Stonecypher.”
Ian cursed himself for showing a card to his opponent. He needed to play them closer to the chest. “There, you see. The poor lass has been here four days and you haven’t even found out her family name.”
Beckworth sat down behind a writing table. He fingered a quill stuck in the inkwell, staring at the feathers, turning it this way and that. “It’s very irregular. I can speak of this case with no one save the girl’s family...”
“She has no family.” Ian said. Then, gambling all, he added, “Except me.”
The doctor lifted a monocle to one eye. “You are related to Miss, er...”
“Stonecypher.”
“Stonecypher.” Beckworth tasted the unusual name again.
“I am betrothed to her,” Ian assured him. Lying had always come easily to Ian. He had learned it at an early age and considered it one of the most fundamental of survival tactics. Please, sir, I canna work today. My cough is infectious...
“Why didn’t you explain that right from the start?” Beckworth asked.
He’s as suspicious as I am, Ian thought. “Perhaps, like you, I prefer to guard my privacy.”
“Ah.” Beckworth tucked the monocle into the pocket of his waistcoat and took a deep breath. “Have you any proof of this betrothal?”
“I do.” Ian levered himself up out of his chair and paced the office. He ducked his head beneath the lime-washed ceiling beams. He stopped in front of the table and slammed his palms down on the surface.
Beckworth flinched.
Ian leaned forward and said, “Aye, I have proof, but she’s locked up like some moonstruck lunatic, damn your eyes!”
“She can’t remember anything,” Beckworth blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut, clearly angry at himself for having divulged Miranda’s condition.
This, Ian realized, was no gamble after all. She would not recognize him, but that, of course, would all be part and parcel of her affliction.
“I want to see her,” Ian stated. “Now.”
Beckworth hesitated. Ian subjected him to the coldest, most menacing stare he could summon. The stare worked. The doctor stood. “Follow me.”
Moments later, Ian wondered if Beckworth was leading him along a circuitous route just to punish him. They passed through a long gallery lined with barred cells. Dank shadows hung in the unlighted corners. Sleek rats scurried in and out through cracks in the walls. A babble of nonsense talk, moans and tuneless singing joined with the foul stench to make the air almost unbreathable.
Fashionable people strolled along with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and they stopped to gape at the inmates. It was a common diversion to buy a ticket to view the insane. Ian, who had looked madness in the face, found the practice more disgusting than anything he could see behind bars.
“Oh, look at that one,” a lady exclaimed, giggling and pointing. “What is he doing with his—”
“Surely he is thinking of you,” Ian whispered in her ear as he passed behind the woman.
She gave a little shriek. She and her gentleman friend hurried out.
A cleric clutching a prayer book nodded mournfully as he passed. Several inmates reached through the bars, grasping at the air as if it represented freedom itself. Ian fought the urge to run, far and swiftly, away from this place that evoked such uncanny reminders of his past.
This was different, he told himself. Perhaps this woman could be saved. He despised the idea that the girl with the large brown eyes had been trapped in this place for four days. If she wasn’t insane before, she surely was now.
When Beckworth brought him to a large, barred common room for female inmates, Ian spied her immediately. She sat on a wooden stool in a flood of sunlight that streamed through a high window. On a bench in front of her, a chess board was scratched into the wooden surface, small light and dark stones serving as chessmen.
She wore an unbleached muslin gown, plain and much mended, and her abundant brown hair was tied back with a bit of string. Her face looked clean but weary, her complexion smoother and richer than the heart of a rose.
In her lap, propped on her knees, she held a broken piece of slate. She was reciting aloud to a group of uncannily attentive women. “It is time to affect a revolution in female manners—a time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves, to reform the world.”
Ian was familiar with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. He had discovered a set of treatises by the female zealot while waiting out a long calm during a sea voyage. But hearing Miranda recite the words aloud, with such conviction, and to such rapt women, was stirring indeed. “You said she had no memory,” he whispered to Beckworth.
“She has perfect recall of general knowledge. It’s really quite astonishing. Yet she has no recollection of personal matters.” Beckworth motioned him into the common room.
“Och, ’tis Bonny Prince Charlie!” An elderly woman, her hair a dirty gray mop, scuttled over and dipped a curtsy to Ian. “I’d know ye anywhere, laddie,” she said in a thick Highland brogue. “Ah, the midnight hair, the eyes of blue. Been waiting for you to return since me granny’s time, we have.” She gave him a toothless smile and remained there, one knee on the floor, quivering slightly, clearly unable to move.
Ian flushed and glanced back at Beckworth, who stood just inside the door. The doctor stared straight ahead. Ian had no choice but to hold out his hand and help the old woman up.
“And a fine gentleman you are, sire, and always have been,” she declared. She turned to address the ladies. “Well, what are ye waiting for? ’Tis our own rightful prince come back to us, just like I told ye he would. And he’s a ghostie, he is. ’Tis why he stays so young and bonny.”
A few of the women, their faces blank, inclined their heads. Ian’s ears heated. He cleared his throat. “It is a high honor to meet you, but I am not Bonny Prince Charlie. Regrettably, he died some years ag—”
“Weesht!” The old woman held a finger to her lips. “We ken. You’re in disguise, eh?” She tugged at his waistcoat. “I thought there was a purpose to that MacLean tartan.”
He nodded in exasperation. “I am here to see Miranda.”
Some of the women began to hiss and whisper among themselves. Ian cleared his throat again. “You are...dismissed.”
The old woman backed away, bowing as she retreated to another part of the room. Most of the others—those who were not chained or bound—went with her. Miranda looked up anxiously.
There was one thing Ian had not remembered from the night of the fire. And that was how stunningly beautiful she was.
Even like this, in a plain shapeless gown, her hair and face unadorned, she was like the moon. Pale skin, sable hair, a study in light and dark. He felt something unexpected and ecstatic in the center of himself as he looked at her. She had a sort of heart-catching innocence that sat ill with his sense of who she was, what she was capable of.
“Hello, Dr. Beckworth,” she said in a soft, cultured voice. Then she looked at Ian, the huge brown eyes showing—not surprisingly—no recognition at all. “Good day to you, sir.” Then she frowned.
“Is something wrong?” Beckworth asked.
“No. For a moment I thought...” She waved her hand distractedly. “It was nothing.”
“My dear,” Beckworth said, his meddlesome manner irritating, at least to Ian. “Do you recognize this man?”
“Hello, Miranda,” Ian said softly. He lowered himself so their gazes were level and sent her his kindest smile. “It’s a high relief to find you at last.” Another of his well-honed skills was the intimate whisper. Women succumbed to it almost too easily, tumbling into his arms in fits of ecstasy. He waited for Miranda to melt.
Instead she cocked her head to one side and asked, “Do you play chess?”
He blinked. “Chess.”
She frowned in concentration at the chess board. “It seems that I do. Perhaps too well. Each time I play myself, it ends in stalemate.”
“This gentleman claims he knows you,” Beckworth said. “He says you were betrothed.”
She caught her breath. “To be married?” She stared at Ian with new, keen interest.
“That’s right, love,” Ian said, amazed that he felt guilty deceiving her. According to Fanny, this woman was a deadly traitor and the key to a hideous plot to assassinate the crowned princes of Europe. Yet suddenly he felt as if he had stepped on a kitten. “You canna remember?”
“No.” She bit her lip. It was a full lower lip, the very sort that begged for a kiss. This could prove to be dangerous indeed, Ian thought. In ways he had not yet considered.
“Darling.” He took both her hands in his and drew her to her feet. The top of her head just reached his chin. “Surely you remember me. I am your one true love, your Ian.”
At this the other women clustered round, jabbering and clucking like hens.
“Kiss her!” one of them urged.
“Yes, kiss her, kiss her!” The others took up the chant.
It was odd, Ian thought, looking at these hopeless, disheveled creatures. After all they’d been through, they still wanted to believe in a happy ending.
“Kiss her!” they continued to chant. A buxom woman with black hair and laughing eyes made a smooching sound with her mouth.
“Ian,” Miranda repeated. Her breathing quickened, and she made a sound of distress. “Dr. Beckworth, may we please have some privacy?”
Ian was more stunned than the doctor by her request. He felt a jolt in his chest. God. She was falling for the ruse. He ought to feel pleased by his own cleverness. Instead he sensed a faint edge of panic. He might very well find himself with a fiancée before this day was out.
“Miranda, I shouldn’t allow it,” Beckworth said. “It would not be prop—”
“The lady made a simple request,” Ian broke in.
“You may go to the empty cell across the hall.” The doctor held the door for them. “I shall be outside.” He aimed a meaningful stare at Miranda. “You need only call out and I’ll come.”
“She’ll call out, right enough,” said the black-haired woman. “But not for you, Beckie.”
Ian glared at the doctor as they left the room. Officious little toad. Does he think I would ravish her right here in this rank cell?
Rather than seeming absurd, the very idea made him hard. Perhaps he was crazy, too, lusting after a woman in Bedlam, of all places. His chest felt tight when he turned to Miranda. “Does the name Stonecypher mean anything to you?”
“Stonecypher.” She tasted it like an exotic fruit. “No. Should it?”
“That’s your name, my love. You are Miranda Stonecypher, and I am Ian MacVane.”
“My betrothed.”
“Your betrothed.”
She clasped her hands demurely in front of her. “Were we in love?”
The question took him by surprise. In love. He almost laughed aloud at the thought. Love was something that didn’t happen to Ian Dale MacVane. It simply wasn’t meant to be. Yet here she stood, all innocence, brimming with hope.
“Well?” she prompted. “Was it a love match?”
“Very much so.” How easy it was to gaze into her wide, trusting eyes and lie. “We were deeply in love.” He traced his fingers along her jawline. “I still am.”
“Oh, my.” Her slender throat moved sinuously as she swallowed hard. “And we were to be married?”
His thoughts came together swiftly. “Aye, we were going to Scotland so there would be no need to secure a special license.” Recklessly he plunged on. “And of course, you wanted to meet my people in the Highlands.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve not met you, lass, and—”
“That’s not what I meant.” She pressed her palm to his chest. Her warmth burned into him. “Why were we going to be married?”
“I thought I explained that. We love each other. We—”
“But why marriage?” Her hand crept along his chest and slid upward to skim his collarbone. He wondered if she was at all aware that by touching him this way, she was breaking every rule of proper behavior. He wondered if she cared.
“Marriage is the institution of a corrupt society, designed to enslave women,” she stated.
Ian could barely think. Was she naive or simply bold, touching him like this? He had been caressed more intimately by more brazen women, to be sure, but there was a compelling quality to the way Miranda slid her long-fingered hands over him.
“Who told you that?” he asked. “Did you learn it by reading Mary Wollstonecraft?”
“I suppose so. Dr. Beckworth urged me to remember things. It is odd. I can recite whole passages by heart, yet I can’t even recall my name—” She backed away as a violent shudder racked her. “You can’t know how frustrating it is.”
An outraged female yell drifted in from the common room.
He saw something flicker in her eyes—fear. Settling his hands on her shoulders, he asked, “What is it?”
“This is a place of corruption. I—I wasn’t prepared for that.”
A chill prickled down his neck. “What do you mean?”
She folded her arms in front of her. “There is a warden called Larkin. He wanted—that is, he would have—” She looked away, pressing her lips together as if loath to speak further.
“Miranda, did he hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No, and it’s silly of me to dwell on it. I convinced him that it might be dangerous to harm me.” A fond smile curved her lips. “I said I was undoubtedly a great lady, with a vast fortune and a title, and that as soon as my memory was restored, I would reward those who befriended me.”
Ian gave silent thanks for her quick thinking.
“But lately,” she said, “he’s been eyeing me. I think he’s starting to suspect it’s a lie.”
Ian trapped her hands in his. “I want you to come away with me. Now that I’ve found you, you need not stay here a moment longer.”
“I know you claim me, but you’re a stranger. I’m sorry—”
“You’ll be safe with me,” he said.
“I want to believe you, but I do not know you. I cannot go with you.” She shivered. “It’s awful here, but it’s familiar. It’s all that I know.”
“Believe me,” he whispered, lowering his mouth toward hers, wanting just a taste of her. “Do, Miranda. Believe me.”
His mouth hovered closer. She gasped and parted her lips slightly. At the last second, he changed his mind. He must not kiss her. He knew better than to kiss a woman when he wanted her this badly. He brushed his lips across her brow. “I’ll keep you safe,” he heard himself whisper, not knowing whether or not he was lying. “I’ll keep you safe.”
She glided her hands up his chest, pressing closer, skimming his shoulders.
He hissed and broke away, barking a curse. His shoulder was on fire, and for a moment he saw nothing but a red haze of pain.
“Mr. MacVane!” Miranda cried. “What happened?”
“My shoulder, lass. I was burned in the fire.”
“You were in the fire?” she asked. “My fire?”
“Aye, lass, if you’re claiming it.”
“Lass,” she whispered, wonder dawning on her face. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“That depends on what you’re accusing me of.”
“You’re the man in the flames. You called me lass. You pulled me to safety. Gave me your coat.”
“Aye,” he said again, wishing his shoulder would stop throbbing.
“You ran off to help a small child, and that was the last I saw of you.” She shuddered. “The watchman said you had both perished.”
“The watchman turned out to be quite unreliable.”
“You would have come back for me, but you were unable?” she asked, unwittingly making it easy for him to deceive her.
“Injured,” he admitted. “Not mortally, as you can see.”
“Thank God. How is the child?”
“Robbie is fine. Some bumps and bruises, a burned hand that’s healing nicely.”
She subjected him to a wide-eyed, wondering look that made him feel as if he had grown a foot taller. “How grateful his mother must be.”
“Robbie’s an orphan. He had been staying at a flash house, where they were training him as a cutpurse.” Ian decided not to tell her the worst of it, the other things they were forcing Robbie to do. “He ran away from there and was living alone in an abandoned building.”
“How sad. What will become of him?”
“After my assistant, McDuff, tutors him, Robbie’ll be bound for public school, perhaps university.” An old dream flickered in Ian’s mind. A lad like Robbie should live free, racing through Highland dales and shouting with laughter, just as Ian had so many years ago.
Miranda clasped her hands to her chest. “You kept the child.”
“He had nowhere to go.”
She crossed to the door.
“Miranda?” he asked. “Where are you going?”
“With you.”
“But you just said you wouldn’t.”
“I changed my mind.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She gave an incredulous laugh. “I have two choices. I can stay locked in this asylum. Or I can leave with a man who not only saved me from a fire, but rescued an orphaned child and is raising him to be a gentleman.”
“So you changed your mind because of my sterling character?”
“No.” An unexpected glint of humor winked in her smile. “It was your devastating blue eyes.”
Her wry statement caught him off guard. He stared at her for a moment, then started to laugh. To his amazement, she joined him. “And of course,” she said, “you’d never lie about something that can be so easily disproved.”
Dr. Beckworth appeared at the door. “Are you quite well, Miranda?”
She bathed him in a radiant smile that made the poor man all but squirm with delight. “Oh, indeed I am, Doctor. Surely your patience and care prepared me for a full recovery of my lost memory.”
It was all Ian could do to keep panic at bay. What was this? She remembered? If so, that meant she realized Ian MacVane was no part of her past.
“God be thanked.” The doctor raised his eyes heavenward.
Miranda rested her fingers on Ian’s sleeve and sent him an adoring look. “My dear fiancé will, of course, send a large endowment to the hospital.” She glanced at the women’s ward. “Enough for some sweeping improvements,” she added, and the subtlest note of warning hardened her voice. “Of course, I shall check on the progress of the reforms.”
With a decided spring in her step, she walked toward the main foyer. She stopped at the common room. “Things will get better here,” she said to the women.
Some of them looked up, waved and blew kisses. “We’ll take care, ducks,” Gwen assured her. “See if we don’t.”
“We still think you should kiss her,” said the old lady who thought he was Bonny Prince Charlie.
I still want to, Ian realized. He followed Miranda out, joining her amid the foot traffic on the street. He stared at her, filled with bafflement and delight that quickly froze into icy suspicion.
Just how much did she recall?
“You say you remember?” he demanded.
“Lies,” she said breezily, turning a giddy circle on the cobbled walk. “All lies.”
“But you did it so well,” he said, impressed. “I know of no one who lies quite so well, except perhaps—” He broke off, taking her elbow to steer her out of the path of a pieman’s cart.
“Except whom?” She had an engaging way of tilting her head and regarding him sidewise. The look was both charmingly naive and artlessly seductive.
He thought better of elaborating. “Never mind. You were quite magnificent.”
She sobered for a moment. “To survive in a place like Bedlam, one must develop certain skills.”
It was not what she said, but what she did not say that told Ian she had lived a nightmare. He grimaced, imagining her bedding down in filth amid lunatics. Without volition, he slipped his arm around her shoulders. In a matter of moments they had violated a dozen rules of propriety and decorum. Either she had forgotten those rules or, like him, took pleasure in disregarding them. Or perhaps she had never known the rules in the first place.
She peered up at him with that slanted look. “So now you have rescued me. Again. If you persist in being this kind to me, our future is very bright indeed.”
Though his customary long strides never faltered, Ian felt his stomach knot. He couldn’t even reply. In a very short time, he would have to deliver her to an address in Great Stanhope Street. Only God knew what would happen to her then.
Four (#ulink_9fc04f04-d58a-5fc7-9f42-599dc333d214)
There is no greater sorrow than to recall,
in misery, the time when we were happy.
—Dante
The authorities would try to extract information from her. Ian would not allow himself to think about the methods they might use. He worked for the English, aye, but only because they were the highest bidder for his services. He had no false ideas about their compassion for a woman they perceived as a traitor.
He brought Miranda south through London, along the crumbling river walks. When they reached the west side of London Bridge, they would take a barge and then a hansom cab to the rendezvous in Great Stanhope.
“So we will leave the city today?” she asked, standing at the edge of the river and watching the traffic of boats and barges with rapt fascination. Before he could reply with an appropriate falsehood, she said, “I know that I lived in London before the...” She hesitated, looking so vulnerable for a moment that he had to glance away. His heart was pure steel—he had made it so. Yet he sensed that this woman could turn steel to ash if he let her.
“Before what?” he asked.
“Just...before. But I don’t remember it being so vital. So alive and exciting. Look at all the people. I wonder if I should know any of them.” She sobered. “It is the oddest feeling, Mr. Mac... Ian. It’s happened a few times. I feel as if I’m on the brink of something—some discovery or revelation—and then everything disappears into a fog. Dr. Beckworth said my memory would return.” She raised bewildered brown eyes to him. “The question is, what made me forget this in the first place?”
Ian’s heart gave a lurch. “It was the accident,” he said quietly. “’Twas a miracle you survived.”
“But what was I doing there?”
His gut twisted. “I don’t know, love,” he said. “I’m only glad I was there to get you out in time.”
“I wanted to die in there,” she whispered.
He hoped he had heard her wrong. “No, Miranda—”
“It’s true. A calmness came over me, an acceptance. I wanted it, Ian, I did.”
“You were overcome by smoke.” The idea that she had craved death disturbed him deeply. In God’s name, Miranda, he wanted to say. What happened to you?
But he couldn’t ask that. She expected him to know.
She frowned and rubbed her temple, swaying a little.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“A headache. They come and go.” She walked a few steps along the quay, then turned and walked back. Ian watched her, trying to analyze the effect she had on him.
What was it about the lass? She was almost waiflike in the faded dress, yet the worn fabric failed to conceal the body of a temptress. And in her eyes he could see ancient, veiled secrets. A wealth of memories lived inside her. His task was to unlock them, even if he had to batter down the door.
She rubbed her temples again, wincing at the pain and closing her eyes.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” he asked again.
She nodded, eyes still closed. “Can you take me to the house where I live?”
He thought swiftly of the ramshackle rooms in Blackfriars, the overturned furniture, the dried blood. “You should rest.”
She opened her eyes. A shroud of shadows crept over her face. Without moving, she distanced herself from him, receding to a place he could not imagine. For a moment it was as if she lived somewhere else, in a world of her own fancy. Or was it the past?
“Miranda?” he prompted. The syllables of her name tasted sweet, spoken with his Scottish burr. He was a sick man indeed. He took a perverse pleasure in simply saying her name.
She blinked, and the distant look passed. “I try, truly I do. I try to remember.” She clasped both her hands around his. Her fingers were chilly; he could feel it through his gloves. He rubbed his thumbs over them, to warm her. Or himself, he was not sure which. But in that moment he felt something—they both did; he could see it in her eyes. The startlement. The recognition. The deep inner twist of captivation that defied all logic.
“You must tell me, Ian,” she said. “You are my betrothed. Surely you know my home.” She hesitated. “My family. For the love of God, what was my way of life?”
Falsehoods came to him swiftly. “Ours was a whirlwind courtship, so I confess there is much about you I do not know.”
“Then tell me something you do know.”
“You lived,” he said, hating himself for lying but lying anyway, “to love and be loved by me.”
She caught her breath, a dreamy softness suffusing her face. “Ah, Ian. That is what I want to remember most of all. Loving you, and you loving me.”
He stroked her cheek, and when her eyes opened, he let a devilish smile curve his mouth. “Does this mean I must teach you all over again?”
She laughed throatily. “Perhaps. Do I have family?”
“Alas, no.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t want to see her reaction. “You’re a scholar, Miranda. A teacher. A...private tutor.”
“Then I lived with a family. With children.”
“The family recently repaired to Ireland.”
“Then we must write to them.”
“Aye, we must.” He knew such a letter would never go farther than his waistcoat pocket. “You’re tired, my darling.” He did not know whether it was part of his ruse or an untapped softness in his heart that made him slip an arm around her shoulders. She nestled against his chest as if seeking shelter from a tempest. And perhaps she was, from the storm of confusion inside her.
Her hair smelled of harsh soap, yet he also detected a hint of her own unique essence, something earthy and faintly herbal, evocative as a whisper in the dark.
“Ah, Miranda, forgive me. I know so little of your former life.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Tell me anything.”
“’Tis melancholy.” The lie spun itself with quick assuredness, like a silken web produced by a spider. He borrowed from the truth but seasoned it liberally with fiction.
He explained that her mother had died in childbirth, even though Frances had found out Helena Stonecypher had run off with a lover years earlier. Miranda’s father, an impoverished scholar of indifferent reputation, had raised her in haphazard fashion and had passed on more recently. Miranda had been employed as a tutor, but she had scarcely taken over the duties when the family had gone to Ireland.
“When I met you, Miranda,” he finished, “you were alone, in leased rooms near Blackfriars Bridge.”
She extracted herself from his arms and walked to the edge of the river. She stared at the rippling surface for so long that he wondered if her mind had wandered again.
“Did you hear me, lass?” he prodded, standing beside her.
She raised her face to him. Her cheeks were chalk pale, her eyes wide. “I was quite the pathetic soul, then,” she said in a low voice.
She was as fragile as spun glass. So easy to break. He had no doubt he could crush her with words alone. Rather than softening him, the notion made him angry. She was a gift he did not want, a responsibility he could not shirk.
Determined to stir her out of her sadness, he cupped her chin in his palm and glared down at her. “Did you expect to hear that you’re some long-lost princess, and I a blue-blooded nobleman? That I’ll conduct you to a vast and loving family who have been waiting for your return?”
She flinched and tried to pull away, but he held her firmly, forcing himself to regard her with fierce steadiness. She would need a stiff spine for the trials ahead. If she broke now, dissolved into tears, he would take her directly to Frances and wash his hands of the entire affair.
She swallowed, and he felt the delicate movement of her throat beneath his fingers. “Touché, Mr. MacVane,” she said, surprising him with a calm regard. “Though actually I had hoped I was a lady of great learning. There are things I know, things I have read, that Dr. Beckworth considered quite extraordinary.” She squared her shoulders. “But that is a common hope even for people who remember the past, is it not? To wish to be something better than we are?”
“Touché yourself,” he said. He let his hand trail down to her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Forgive me. I’m not angry at you, but at myself. I want so much more for you.”
Her smile trembled, then steadied, and she looked amazingly winsome. And also weary. “There now,” he said. “You must rest, and later we’ll speak of the past.”
“And of the future.”
“That, too,” he admitted, as foul a liar as had ever crossed the border from Scotland into England. Her future was a short trip up the Thames to Biddle House, where she would endure an interview with Lady Frances.
Yet when a barge arrived and the ferryman asked where they were bound, Ian rapped out his own address. He told himself it was because information obtained under torture was notoriously unreliable. Aye, that was why he didn’t want her tortured. He’d find out her secrets in his own way. In his own time.
* * *
Miranda turned in a slow circle in the foyer of Ian’s opulent residence, her head angled up so she could take in the spiraling sweep of a marble staircase, the tall windows of beveled glass, the painted cherubs and clouds on the ceiling and wainscoting.
“Have I been here before?” she asked. She nearly reeled with weariness, her hair escaping from its single frayed string, yet a sense of exhilaration buoyed her up.
“Nay, lass. It’s not proper for an unchaperoned lady to call on a gentleman.”
The word lady rolled elegantly off his tongue. His Scottish burr turned mere words to poetry. She felt a ripple of delight course through her. “Have I always loved the way you talk...Ian?” It felt delicious and right to call him by his Christian name.
He looked at her with his gentian blue eyes, and the shiver up her back turned to a warm river of sensation. “You never told me so,” he said.
“I should have.”
He gave her the oddest sensation, a sort of breath-held anticipation that lodged behind her heart. Had he always had this effect on her? How in heaven’s name could she have forgotten?
Miranda saw a movement from the corner of her eye. Turning, she noticed a window in the wall. A woman stood in the window, watching her. And then it hit her—this was no window, but a mirror. The first mirror she had encountered since her terrifying journey into madness had begun. Her heart pounded as she looked into the glass. A complete stranger looked back at her. Miranda lifted one hand to her cheek, skimming it along a cheekbone and across a straight dark brow. The stranger did the same.
A feeling of utter panic swept over her. What sort of oddity of nature was she, a woman so addled in the brain that she did not know her own face? Brown eyes—what had they seen that was so horrible she had hidden from the memory? Dark curls falling across a high, clear brow—had her unremembered father ever kissed her there? An ordinary nose and a wide mouth—had she opened it to scream the night of the fire?
Who are you? she asked the image silently. What have you done with your life?
The stranger stared silently back at her. There were no answers in the unfamiliar brown eyes. Only questions. Only an endless string of questions, and the answers were locked up inside the creature in the mirror.
She looked back at Ian, feeling more lost and helpless than ever, and wanting more than ever to be swept into his world, where she knew she would be safe.
For long moments they simply stared at each other like two figures in a painting. His face was inscrutable, while Miranda felt certain every inch of her yearning for him surely showed on her features. She wanted to tumble right into the middle of his life, and she had never been so aware of her own desire. Had she?
Then Ian looked past her and broke the spell. He said something in a rolling, guttural tongue that she recognized as Gaelic but did not understand.
“My assistant,” Ian said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her around. “Angus McDuff.”
She turned to see a cherubic man of middle years, dapper in black breeches and a tartan waistcoat, his gray beard forming a bristly U from ear to ear.
Angus McDuff spoke with Ian in Gaelic, then swept low in a courtly bow. “How good it is to see you safe and sound, Miss Miranda.”
She inched her head. He seemed to know her, or at least to know of her. “It is good to be safe,” she said. “But sound?” She looked helplessly at Ian. “I cannot remember my life before the moment of the explosion.”
“So he was just explaining. Some things are for the best, my dear. ’Tis a thing I have always believed.”
“Thank you, Mr. McDuff.”
“Call him Duffie!” piped a loud, childish voice. “He’ll insist on it.”
With a squeal of skin on wood, a little boy slid down the banister. He landed with a flourish, wobbled, then fell on his backside.
“And I insist,” Ian said with exaggerated severity, pulling the child to his feet, “that you greet the lady properly, scamp.”
Full to bursting with mischief and merriment, the boy bowed from the waist. He had a clean bandage wrapped around one hand, and she realized he was the child Ian had saved from the fire.
“Robbie MacVane, at your service, mum,” he said in a clear soprano voice.
“MacVane?” Ian asked, lifting a dark eyebrow.
“Aye, if it’s all the same to you,” Robbie said.
Ian did not smile, but looked solemn as he nodded. “You do honor to the name, lad.”
“Besides,” Robbie said, “It’s the only name I know how to spell.”
Miranda stifled a laugh. She found the boy enchanting, from the top of his tousled head to the tips of his scuffed leather shoes. Ian hooked a thumb into the band of his breeches. Robbie did the same, perfectly copying Ian’s stance. Miranda looked from the boy to the man. It was extraordinary to think that in an age when some parents abandoned their children or sold them into apprenticeships, Ian had taken in this enchanting little stranger. He was a special man indeed.
When did I fall in love with you? she wanted to ask him. What did it feel like?
And was it happening again?
Thinking hard, she absently brushed a deep brown lock of hair out of her face.
“Cor, mum, I know you!” Robbie was staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
All the hairs on the back of her neck seemed to stand on end. “Do you, Robbie?” she asked in a low, shaken voice.
Duffie took the boy by the hand. “Come along now, my wee skelper. We’ll leave the master and—”
“No,” Ian said hurriedly. “What do you mean, you know Miss Miranda?”
Robbie lifted his shoulders to his ears in a shrug. “Not by name, mind you. But she gave me tuppence when she passed me in the road. I knows it were her because she’s got a face like the mort in that painting in St. Mary-le-Bow, the one what looks all holy even though she ain’t hardly got a stitch on.”
Duffie made a choking sound and put his hand up to his mouth. Robbie scurried away from him.
“Gave you tuppence?” Miranda asked. “When?”
“Just before you went in there,” Robbie said, puffing up to find himself the object of such rapt attention.
“In where, lad?” Ian asked.
“Well, you know.” Like a monkey, he hung in the knobby banister rails at the bottom of the staircase. “In that building what blew to smithereens.”
Miranda felt nauseated. Her head started to throb. She had been there. Inside the warehouse. Sickening guilt crept up her throat, gagging her. She thought of the twist of stiff, sulfur-smelling rope she had found in her apron pocket, along with tinder and flint. She had almost caused her own death and that of this innocent child.
She remembered the victims of that night, the bleeding faces slashed by flying glass, the burned flesh, the screams and moans of the wounded. Why would she hurt them? Why? She swayed, and the question she dared not ask screamed through her mind. Am I a murderer?
“There, see?” Duffie said with comforting brusqueness. “The lady’s well nigh exhausted. I’ll just have the housekeeper show her to—”
“Not so fast.” Ian spoke in his customary low voice, but his words rang with authority. “Robbie, was Miss Miranda alone?”
“Oh, aye, sir, and she were in a great hurry—but she took the time to toss me a copper and bid me to get myself home.” His round cheeks flushed. “She didn’t know about me having no home.”
Ian contemplated the boy with a look that was fierce, but protective rather than frightening. “Run along, then,” he said. “See if Cook’s made more of those gooseberry tarts.”
Robbie scampered off, and Duffie followed him out of the foyer.
Miranda faced Ian with trepidation. He knew something. But what? Was it more than she herself knew about that night? Or less?
The icy speculation in his eyes was unmistakable. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat. “I don’t suppose,” she said, “you could explain why I was down at the wharves, unchaperoned.”
His large and powerful hand, still sheathed in its black glove, came to rest on her arm. A shiver coursed through her.
“I’m certain you had your reasons, love,” he said, leading her into an opulent parlor furnished with dark wood and deep green hangings. “Come and sit down, and we’ll—”
“Excuse me, sir.” A cheerful-looking man with a peg leg came into the room. On his hand he balanced a salver, and he approached them with an ease that belied his infirmity. “This just arrived for you.”
Ian took the letter from the tray. “Thank you, Carmichael.”
“You’re welcome, sir.” Carmichael sent a pleasant smile to Miranda. “And welcome to you, too, miss. We’ve heard so much about you—”
“Thank you, Carmichael,” Ian said, louder this time. “That will be all.” He helped Miranda to a settee as the servant withdrew.
“How did he lose his leg?” she asked.
“The Battle of Busaco. We were in the Thirty-second Highlanders together.”
Ian MacVane, she decided, was a man who took in strays. As Miranda watched him open his letter, she wondered what sort of stray she had been when they’d first met.
“Damn it,” he said.
She jumped. “Damn what?”
He crumpled the letter in his hand. “Cossacks in Hyde Park.”
She felt no surprise; her knowledge of local events had remained intact. Arriving with fanfare and entourages that often occupied entire flotillas, an extraordinary group was convening in London this summer. All the crowned heads from Tsar Alexander of Russia to the prince of Saxe-Coburg had come to celebrate Bonaparte’s defeat. The Cossacks, under their hetman Count Platov, were serving as life guards to the tsar.
“Have they done something wrong?” she asked.
“It seems they’ve challenged the Gentlemen Pensioners to a horse race. A few of them had too much to drink and are terrorizing people.” Ian went to the door. “I’d best go and see that order is restored.”
“Why you?” She was suddenly aware that she had no notion of Ian’s role in all of this.
He grinned. “It is my métier. I’ll tell you more when I get back. Duffie will see to your needs.”
“Ian, wait!” A flush suffused her cheeks. “Is it true—what you said earlier? About...going to Scotland?”
“Upon my oath,” he said, then was gone.
* * *
The next morning, Ian awakened to the dreadful notion that he had pledged to take Miranda to Scotland and make her his bride.
“A simple enough idea, when you consider it,” Duffie said as he laid out a clean shirt and morning coat. “Marriage happens every day.”
Ian sluiced cold water over himself from the yellow-glazed Newcastle ware bowl on the washstand. “Not to me.” He turned the ewer sideways and took a long drink directly from it. “Never to me, McDuff.”
The diminutive man seemed to swell to twice his size. “What are you saying, then?”
Ian grabbed a towel and began scrubbing his face and hair dry. Craning his neck, he inspected his burned shoulder. He closed his eyes, felt a sickening terror pitch in his gut as he relived the moment of rescuing Robbie. Only the desperate need of a child had prodded him out of his paralyzing fear of heights, prodded him just as the bigger boys had, so many years ago, sticking pins in his bare feet to urge him to climb higher, higher through the tight, narrow passageways of the chimney pots he had been forced to clean.
“I’m waiting for an answer.” Duffie snatched away the towel and gave Ian’s shoulder a casual glance. “Healing nicely,” he pronounced, “which is more than I can say for your paper skull if you don’t answer me. What are your intentions toward the girl?”
Ian grabbed back the towel and rubbed it across his chest. Only from Angus McDuff would he tolerate this constant meddling. He heaved a sigh. “You sound like a fierce papa.”
The salt-and-pepper brows beetled. “Lord knows she could use one. She’s helpless as a lamb, man. Dinna eat her alive.”
Ian began dressing in traveling garb of black breeches and boots, a starched and snowy shirt, a waistcoat, and a cravat. “I’m taking her to Scotland.”
“To Scotland.”
“Aye.”
“To marry her.”
“Nay.”
For an older man, Duffie moved with surprising speed. In one swift movement he had Ian shoved back against the wall, showing no sympathy for the wounded shoulder. His face was florid, his eyes hard. “Damn you to hell, Ian MacVane. I ought to skelp your stubborn hide for you. Have you taken a knife, then, and carved out your own heart?”
Ian glared at him coldly. “Oh, aye. You know I have.”
Duffie dropped his hands to his sides, but he did not retreat. “That doesna mean others are made of ice. I’ll not let you ruin the girl. Not let you whisk her away, destroy her reputation, destroy any chance she has to settle down one day and find happiness.”
“She’s happy now,” Ian said, his mouth a cruel twist, “when she knows nothing of the past.”
“Fine. She knows nothing. And you care nothing for her future. It’ll be no future at all if you skulk off with her, wooing her with false promises. What decent man would have her after she goes adventuring with Ian MacVane?”
“No one need know.” The back of Ian’s neck prickled. He didn’t like feeling this way—knowing he was wrong but lacking the conscience to stop himself.
“She will know,” Duffie said obstinately. “To her core, she is a sweet and decent soul.”
“Frances thinks she is a traitor. Oh. Do pardon me. A sweet and decent traitor.” Ian raked a wooden comb through his close-cropped hair. “Look, would you rather I do what I should have done in the first place?”
“And what is that?”
“Take her directly to the authorities. I could make this all very simple by marching her before them and letting them be the ones to unlock her secrets.”
Duffie’s cheeks paled beneath his beard. “She’s a wee, fragile thing. I suspect you guessed that or you wouldna have brought her this far. There is only one solution.”
Ian set down his comb. He was tired of arguing. It had taken half the night to get the hard-drinking Cossacks to return to their residence at the Pulteney Hotel. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“Because it’s the kind and proper thing, which is not what you are used to doing.” Duffie pointed a stubby finger and narrowed an eye as though taking aim at his employer. “You’ll do exactly as you promised, my fine gentleman. You’ll marry the girl. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, you’ll find out her secrets. And if you’re luckier still, I willna skelp you.”
Five (#ulink_6a54223b-fcb3-535e-bde6-e2675bac9aa0)
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
—Robert Browning
The inmates at Bedlam were not nearly as entertaining since the endowments had started to arrive. Dr. Brian Beckworth, for one, did not regret the change. He did not miss the gawkers who paid their coppers to come and stare at the moonstruck inmates. He did not miss Warden Larkin, given the boot the same day Miranda had left.
The till at the door had dwindled, but the anonymous payments drawn on a London bank account more than made up for that. Before long, the hospital would relocate to a new building in Lambeth, and this moldering pile of rubble would be abandoned.
For years Dr. Beckworth had wanted the institution to be a place of healing. A place where people who had lost pieces of their souls could find themselves again—or at least find solace. Now there was a chance that it could happen.
Some of the women were hopeless, it was true. But others simply needed care and compassion. And now the doctor could afford to give it to them. All because of Miranda.
Feeling a rare sense of accomplishment, Beckworth smiled up at Gwen, who came in with his morning tea and the London Times. She had started doing a few tasks around the place and seemed to take her new responsibilities in stride.
“Nice and strong like you favors it, sir,” she said. Today her hair was caught back neatly with a bit of ribbon, and her hands and face were scrubbed clean. She hid less and less behind her brash, uncaring facade.
Beckworth inhaled the fragrant steam and held up the paper, scanning the front page. Gwen turned to leave, but her eyes widened and she bent close. “Sir, look there! ’Tis our own Miranda, and no mistake.”
With a frown, Beckworth turned the paper over and laid it on his desk. He saw a small sketch of a woman with large eyes and a swirl of thick, dark curls. The caption identified her as “Miss Miranda Stonecypher.”
For no apparent reason, an icy claw of fear clutched at his gut. There was something sinister about seeing her likeness, her name in bold print.
“What’s it say, sir? Please.” Gwen propped one hip on his desk and bent over the sketch.
Beckworth cleared his throat. “It seems her family is looking for her. Requests a reply to an anonymous box at the paper. Claims she has been missing since...” He scanned down the article. “Since the day before she arrived here.”
“But that can’t be,” Gwen stated. “Mr. MacVane already collected her.”
Beckworth’s mouth went dry. “He claimed he knew her, but I was never quite convinced.”
“Hell and damnation,” Gwen burst out. “Then MacVane played us false and stole poor Miranda away!”
From the corridor outside came a scuffle of feet and the murmur of voices, but Beckworth was more preoccupied with the extraordinary notice in the paper.
“So it would appear.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. The cold clench of fear in his gut tightened. Had he let a stranger spirit the girl away?
With a less than steady hand, the doctor dipped quill in ink and scribbled an urgent message. “I shall have this delivered to the Times,” he said, thinking aloud for Gwen’s benefit as he blotted the ink. “And another to the lodgings of Ian MacVane. I have a few questions for him.”
She took the note. “I’ll see that it goes out with today’s post.” She left through the rear door of the office.
A moment later, the other door banged open and two people pushed inside.
“How do you do?” he asked, recognizing both of his visitors. They had come before to gawk at the inmates, but he noticed they’d paid particular attention to Miranda. “I just composed a message to the Times. I do hope—”
“Where is she?” asked the one with the French accent.
Dr. Beckworth was taken aback by the abruptness of the voice. “She left with the Scotsman, Ian MacVane.”
“When?”
“Thursday. That is why the notice in the paper surprised me. You see—”
A strong hand plunged into his hair. Dr. Beckworth found himself forced to his knees. A foot pressed into his back, shoving his chest hard against the floor. “Who took your message to the Times?”
By now, Beckworth understood the peril. He must not lead them to Gwen. “P-posted it myself. Just this morning.”
The visitors exchanged words in French. Beckworth tried to fight, but he wasn’t trained for brawling. His arms flailed, and he managed to choke out one word: “Why?”
The hand holding his hair jerked his head up and pulled back, baring his throat. An expert hand wielded the sharp, cold blade quickly, neatly. As he bled to death swiftly on the floor of his office, Dr. Brian Beckworth answered his own question. He was dying because of Miranda.
* * *
“I’m certain I’ve never done this before.” Miranda gripped the forecastle rail of the sleek, swift frigate Serendipity and gazed out at the churning North Sea. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the fresh, salty air, and threw back her head, wishing she could unbind her hair and let the wind ripple through it. She knew the winds. Somewhere in her forgotten past she had studied wind and weather, though she had no idea why.
“Done what?” Ian stood beside her. With a swath of plaid draped diagonally across his chest, he looked as regal as a Highland chieftain. She shivered with admiration at the very sight of him. How plain and mousy she felt next to her betrothed, yet at the same time, his appearance empowered her. To have the devotion of such a man was heady indeed.
“Gone on a sea voyage,” she said, watching the endless rush of the waves below the bow. “I feel quite sure I’ve not experienced this before.”
Sailors in the mizzentop raced along wooden booms, working the sails as the wind made the ship yaw back and forth. Miranda hugged herself and smiled at the sky burnished like copper by the setting sun. “It all feels brand-new. And so exciting... Ian—” She broke off when she saw the way he was looking at her.
As if he wanted to eat her alive.
She sometimes caught him at it, eyeing her in a manner that was both fierce and tender. Was that the way he had always loved her, with that mixture of intensity and gentleness?
“What is it?” he asked, laying one gloved finger on her wind-stung cheek.
She wondered if he had ever told her why he always wore gloves, but it felt too awkward to ask. Besides, there was something mysterious and romantic about it.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just that I know you’re frustrated because I can’t remember anything.” His touch made her tingle in secret places. Were these places he had touched...before?
She could not quite bring herself to ask him that, either. “I do want to, Ian. Truly I do.” She felt a stirring inside her, a sharp but unfocused yearning that ached in her heart. A sense of loss and longing and emptiness came over her.
“I did recall one thing,” she said.
Clear as ice shards, his gaze focused on her. His hands gripped her upper arms. “Yes?”
She so hated to disappoint him. She wanted to please him, to bring a flicker of cheer to his brooding eyes, to feel his smile like the sun on her face. “I’m afraid it’s not terribly important,” she confessed. “When I woke up this morning, I realized that I know Homer’s Iliad by heart.”
His grin looked strained. “Lovely.”
“In Greek.”
“There has never been any question of your cleverness,” he said. “You trouble yourself too much, lass. The memories will come when they come.”
“What if that never happens?”
“Then we’ll start over,” he said.
She moistened her lips, tasted the faint bitter tinge of spindrift on her mouth. The maintop men called to one another, gathering in sail from their lofty perches, and their shouts were like a sea chantey, rhythmic and pleasant.
She studied Ian for a long time. How magnificent he was, tall and lean and rugged, his black hair and sharp eyes creating a magnetism that ran deeper than his appearance. She felt drawn to him in a hundred little ways—the brush of his gloved hand on hers, the way one corner of his mouth lifted in wry amusement, or the warmth in her chest when he gazed at her.
“Is this what love is, then?” she asked impulsively.
He frowned, clearly startled. “What?”
“The way I feel when I look up at you. Is it love?”
For a rare moment, his composure seemed to slip. He appeared raw and unguarded, unnerved and vulnerable. In the blink of an eye, his customary regard of lazy amusement returned. “This is not a conversation we’ve ever had before.”
“It’s important to me, Ian. It is.” She could not take her eyes off him. “I shall describe it, then, and you can tell me if it is love or not.” She kept one hand on the rail to steady herself. “You make me feel something quite jolting inside. I find myself wanting to touch you rather boldly, to hang on to you and discover your smell and your taste and— Why on earth are you laughing?”
He made no attempt to stifle himself. “That isna love you describe, delicious as it sounds, Miranda. It’s lust.”
Miffed, she poked her nose in the air. There was more to it than that. There had to be, for he was the only man she regarded in this way, and she had made it a point to study the sailors and officers of the Serendipity. She had been on the verge of baring her heart to him, and he was laughing at her.
“Not that I am averse to lust,” he said quickly.
In spite of herself, she felt mirth tugging at her. “But I truly want to know,” she said, sobering. “What did it feel like to love you? And will I ever feel that way again?”
He turned away, but not before she detected a glimmer of torment in his craggy face. “Not if you know what’s good for you.”
“What?”
Still he did not look at her. “There are things about me—” He broke off. His hands clenched around the ship’s rail. “Ah, listen to me.” When he turned to her again, he was smiling. “I dinna want you to have any doubts, sweet.”
“Then teach me,” she said, desperate to fill the emptiness inside her. “Show me how we used to love. I want to remember, Ian. Truly I do.”
He said something gruff and Gaelic. “Lass, you don’t know what you’re asking.”
She watched a gull dive for a fish in the distance, then studied the horizon, the gray edges of sea and sky, as if the answers were written there. After a while, she glanced back at him. “Help me, Ian. Help me remember.”
“I don’t know how,” he said. “I canna simply give you your memories back, all wrapped up in a tidy parcel.”
“Then tell me something, anything. A tidbit to spark my remembrance.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “What sort of tidbit?”
“Conversations we’ve had. Experiences we’ve shared.” She could not explain how fearsome it was, this yawning black gulf inside her. It was like missing a leg or an eye. She was not whole, and she did not know how much longer she could go on. “Please,” she said. “I need to know.”
He watched her for a moment, the wind mussing his glossy black hair. “I taught you to dance the waltz,” he said, speaking reluctantly, as if the words were pulled from him against his will.
She cocked her head. “The waltz. It’s a dance, then?”
“Aye. All the rage in London this Season. The tsar and his sister, the grand duchess of Oldenburg, have made it the sport of choice.” He winked, then gripped her lightly by the waist, with one hand around hers. “The rhythm is like a heartbeat. One, two, three, one, two, three... Do you feel it?” He began to hum a soft melody in her ear.
“You have a beautiful voice,” she said.
He kept humming and drew her along the forecastle deck, neatly avoiding coils of rope, lashed-down barrels and the envious stares of the sailors. She followed his lead, letting his graceful maneuvering make up for her inexperience. Round and round they spun, the rich melody lilting in her ear until the rhythm finally penetrated her very bones. They moved as one, and she reveled in the way they seemed to fit together, in the light scrape of their feet on the wooden deck and the hiss of the ocean speeding past the hull.
“There is,” she murmured, “something magical about dancing. Why is that?”
His hand moved in a circle on her back. “Well,” he said, stretching out his Scottish burr, “dancing involves two people, holding each other, moving in a rhythm both understand, their goal to stay together, for no reason other than sheer physical pleasure.” He smiled wickedly, and a shiver shot down her spine. “There is only one other circumstance in which all that is true.”
She snatched her hand out of his. Hot color surged to her cheeks. “Ian!”
He leaned against a tall spool of rope and watched her, clearly amused. “Aye, love?”
“Have we...did we...”
He threw back his head and laughed. “My dear, if you had forgotten that, I’d say there’s not much hope for us.” Seeing her unamused expression, he took both her hands in his. “Believe me, Miranda. To my eternal frustration, and through no choice of my own, we have never made love.”
“We were waiting, then.”
“Aye.”
“For marriage.”
He hesitated. “Aye.”
“Mary Wollstonecraft didn’t believe in marriage on principle.”
“She may have a point.”
Miranda found herself laughing again, feeling giddy.
“You’re an incredibly desirable creature, Miss Stonecypher,” Ian said.
She wondered if he had any idea how entrancing he was. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel that if I could remember even one moment, if I could just look back and know, then everything would come right.”
“I dinna think it’s that easy.”
“Indulge me,” she said. “Please.”
“The Orangery in Hyde Park,” he said.
“Should that be significant to me?”
“Oh, aye.” He paused. “Your first kiss.”
She felt her color deepen. “Surely a significant event if there ever was one.”
“And you dinna remember it.”
“No.” She stared at his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He took her hand and led her toward the bow of the ship, where they stood in the cool evening shadows. Sails luffed in the wind, and the cry of a cormorant droned mournfully across the swells. “Actually, it’s rather an advantage.”
She began to tingle inside. “An advantage?”
“Oh, aye. You can have your first kiss...all over again.”
With a discreet movement he took off his gloves, dropping them on the deck at their feet.
She felt faint, yet dizzily aware all at once. Nervously she licked her lips. “I’m afraid I don’t know what to do.”
“What you’re doing now is just fine. For the moment.”
“What am I doing?” she asked.
“Standing there. Looking bonnier than heather in bloom.”
He took a step closer. His hands drifted down the length of her arms, heating her skin. The pads of his thumbs found her racing pulse.
“Was it like this...before?” she asked.
“Nay, love. This is better.” His hands traveled up and over her shoulders. His fingers threaded their way into her hair, sifting through the curls.
“Now what?” she whispered.
Though he did not smile, amusement glinted in his eyes. “Just keep your head tilted up. Aye, like that.” He bent low, his face looming close, his breath, with the tang of his evening brandy, caressing her. He touched his lips tenderly to her eyes, first one and then the other, so that they were closed. Then he kissed her mouth, softly, tentatively.
“I can stop at any time,” he whispered, “if this makes you uncomfortable.”
She smiled dreamily. “Uncomfortable is not quite the word for what I feel.”
He kissed her again, tugging gently on her lower lip until her mouth opened and she surged toward him, hungry, wanting. The taste and smell of him filled her—sea and leather and maleness, seasoned with the brandy they had drunk after supper. The sensation of kissing him caused passion to leap up inside her until she was straining almost painfully for him.
His hands slipped from her hair and traveled down, tracing the inward curve of her waist and the outward flare of her hip. Then he touched her breasts, hands brushing, fingers skimming the tips. Warmth seared her in places he wasn’t touching, places that begged for his caress.
Then, as gradually and inevitably as the kiss began, it receded. He lifted his mouth from hers, and his hands dropped to her waist.
She kept her eyes closed, holding the moment, hovering in uncertainty and wonder and delight.
“Miranda?” he asked.
She forced her eyes open. She reached up and touched his cheek. His tanned skin was rough with evening stubble. “I feel completely starstruck, Ian. Bowled over like a ninepin. Was it like that for me before?”
“You never said.” His voice sounded gruff and uneven.
“I was trying to remember what it was like to love you,” she said. “But I feel as if I’m learning for the first time.” That something so simple as a human touch could shake the foundations of her heart was a staggering notion. “Ah, Ian.” She spoke his name on a sigh. “You are so good to be patient with me.”
He took her hand, removed it from his cheek and kissed the back of it. To her surprise, his own hand trembled. “You make it easy, Miranda.” She thought she detected a note of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Too bloody easy.”
* * *
Guilt was a new and decidedly unpleasant sensation for Ian MacVane. Yet as he lay awake in his narrow, damp quarters each night of the voyage, he knew guilt in all its sharp and bitter shades.
He was manipulating the feelings of a naive young woman. Whatever else Miranda’s crimes might be, she was innocent when it came to matters of the heart.
But not for long, if they stayed on their present course.
I was trying to remember what it was like to love you. Her words snapped back at him like a lash. She was driving him insane with her unwavering trust in him.
Trust. Miranda trusted Ian MacVane. She was by far the first woman foolish enough to do that.
She wanted memories, and he was giving them to her. False, hollow tales he dredged from his paltry stores of sentiment.
If ever a man had a past that begged to be forgotten, it was Ian MacVane.
Instead here he was building a castle of lies in order to win Miranda’s faith and perhaps, if he was very lucky, find the memories she kept locked away in her mind.
He kept wondering if he should have simply handed her over to Frances. Perhaps that would have been better all the way around.
The morning they’d taken ship, Frances had shown her customary lack of surprise at his flagrant disobedience. She’d even sent him a message in cipher: Perfect, darling. I do so love it when you do something scathingly clever and cruel. Yes, sleep with the girl. It is the best way to—dare I be so tasteless?—get her to reveal herself to you.
At the bottom of her note, he had scribbled a reply in cipher and sent it back to her: When I bed a woman, my dear, it’s for my own reasons, not because anyone orders me to.
Even then he had known he would find a reason. The whole matter was sordid. He had a sudden notion to turn his back on the entire affair, but he knew he would not.
Time was not critical yet. The duke of Wellington was still in Paris, ambassador to the newly restored King Louis. But once Wellington returned to England, Napoleon’s allies would put their plan into motion.
Ian had pledged to foil the insane plot. Bound by his own private sense of honor, he knew he would not rest until he succeeded in stopping the conspiracy.
Even if it meant filling Miranda’s head and her heart with his lies. Even if it meant a cruel betrayal of her trust. Even if it meant taking her innocence and ruining her reputation.
He pounded his fist into his hard pillow. Surely it wouldn’t come to that. Surely she would regain her memory and divulge the plan before things had gone too far.
When the smoky gray mist of a Scottish dawn tinged the sky, he gave up on sleep. He had lost sleep over only one woman before Miranda, and that was his mother.
For all that Mary MacVane knew or cared.
Shoving aside thoughts of a past he could not change, Ian got up and bathed with water from a basin, then dressed in the black trousers and white shirt Duffie had set out the night before. Soon they would make landfall.
Today Ian would begin a journey from which there was no return. For him, Scotland was a place of memories and madness. Here, his world had been torn to unrecognizable bits by a stranger with greed in his eyes. His soul had been damned by the woman who had given him life.
Once he had escaped Scotland, Ian MacVane had been reborn, a creature of darkness, his past scoured clean through sheer force of will.
Perhaps that was why Miranda held such fascination for him. She had achieved what he had been trying to do all his adult life. She had obliterated the past.
Her means of doing it, however, held little appeal for him. In his soldiering days, he had seen men wake up the day after battle with no notion of the horrors they had seen, of acts that had been committed upon them, of atrocities they themselves had carried out.
At first, the postbattle blankness had seemed a blessing. But the memories always returned in one form or another, weeks or months or years later. Nightmares. Fits of rage or terror. An inability to cope with everyday life. Was that to be Miranda’s fate?
He donned a waistcoat of boiled wool and reached for his gloves. Before pulling them on, he braced his hands upon a sea chest at the end of his bunk and studied them. They were large and squarish, hands suited to the son of a hardworking crofter. Except that the crofter had been murdered in cold blood, his young son sent to toil in Glasgow at tasks so grueling that they were performed only by orphans or slaves.
Ian scowled down at the stub of the last finger on his left hand. The digit had been chopped away at the first knuckle, and the only concession he had gotten after the accident was half a day’s holiday and an extra slice of bread at supper.
Och, how he wanted to forget. Instead he remembered every detail with crystal clarity, as if he were viewing his past through a perfect glass that showed him not only the sights, but the smells and sounds and textures, as well. The reek of soot and blood. His brother Gordon’s bitter curses. Ian’s own horrified screams. The dizzying view of the street far below the rooftop where he had been stranded. The sensation of abject fear that had roared through him as Gordie fell.
He made a fist, hiding his deformity. Then he forced himself to open his hand. Today, no glove. No shoving his hand into his waistcoat à la Bonaparte.
Ian MacVane would return to Scotland as he had left it: maimed and full of rage.
Six (#ulink_f2b4e75f-8e7c-5e42-a8d5-75419ef0f0eb)
On ev’ry hand it will allowed be,
He’s just—nae better than he should be.
—Robert Burns
After the landing, Ian stood on the rocky shore, oblivious to the movements around him, oblivious to the delighted shouts of young Robbie, oblivious even to Miranda, whose presence had consumed him since the moment he had laid eyes on her.
He simply stood, feeling the solid earth beneath his feet and trying to get his mind around the fact that after an exile of fifteen years, he was home. In Scotland.
How much had he changed, he wondered, from that wounded boy, skulking to freedom by hiding in a ship’s hold?
He was staggered by how deeply he had missed his homeland. He drew the feeling in through his pores, and into his lungs with each breath, and the very essence of the land began to pulse through him. This was Scotland, his birthplace.
Here, he had suffered the torments of the damned—but also, in that early misty time of his youth, he had known his greatest joy. Had known the crystal sharp air of the craggy Highlands as he’d raced across the moors after a stray lamb. Had known the sweet, warm scent of a mother and the hearty affection of a father.
Ah, how long ago that had been. The boy who had gamboled through glens and boggy moors, who had fished for trout in the icy streams and chased squealing girls in the kirkyard on Sunday, was as good as dead.
Ian MacVane knew the name of his murderer. Adder, like the snake. Mr. Adder, the sly-eyed Englishman. He had swept like a storm into Crough na Muir, claiming that the crofters were trespassing on his property. And so they were, on land relinquished to him by the laird whom Adder had beggared at the gaming table.
Ian drew in another breath of Scotland. He felt as if he were falling, falling back into the hideous past, squarely into the night Adder and a troop of mercenaries had swooped down upon the croft of the MacVane...
He heard a sound that didn’t belong to the night. Below the living quarters, the cows blew gently in their sleep. Then the sound came again. It was a soft whistle—not an owl or a nightingale, but a human sound. The dog reacted first, leaping down from the loft, yapping wildly.
He heard a sickening thump, and the dog fell silent. By then Ian’s father was up, pitchfork in hand, but it was too late. Too late...
Miranda broke his fall. She did it with something as simple and as complicated as the brush of her hand on his sleeve, a tilt of her head, a querulous smile. “You were a thousand miles away, Ian,” she said. “And it was a sad place.”
He fought the urge to shake her off, to lash out like a wounded wolf, to recoil from her compassion. Instead he managed a wry half smile. “Reading my moods, are you?”
“Didn’t I always?”
“Of course.” Christ, but this was absurd. Inventing a past for them, pretending they had a future.
No one’s future was assured so long as fanatic Bonapartistes kept hatching their plots in England. Ian wondered how the British could be so blind. They and all their allies were convinced that Napoleon would rest content in his defeat in exile. But Ian understood the brilliance and determination of the emperor, the loyalty of his followers. Exile at Elba was surely but a temporary state for such a man. Bonaparte would be back. Already he was coiled like a snake, poised to strike.
Impatience stirred within Ian. He had best make quick work of the marriage—a handfasting would do—and hasten back to London.
“We’ve always been of one mind, lass,” he said, forcing gentleness into his voice as he lied to her. “And my guess is, you’re of a mind for a good bath and a meal.”
“I am.”
Duffie and Robbie had gone on ahead with the baggage. Ian scanned the road that wound up and around the great rising hills. He had not stood on this spot since he was a lad. Yet he knew people would still remember him in the village.
A part of him still dwelt there.
He started toward the settlement, old and tumbled and comforting as a tattered blanket.
After walking along the dusty road for a quarter mile, Miranda stopped him. “Ian.”
“Aye, lass?”
“I don’t remember my own past, save what you’ve told me. But I know nothing of your past, either.”
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Susan Wiggs
WHO WAS SHE?In Regency London, a woman escapes from a burning warehouse only to realize she doesn't know her own identity. Although the locket around her neck bears the name Miranda, she has no recollection of her past. Nor does she know why two very different men want her—the devilishly handsome Scotsman Ian MacVane, and Lord Lucas Chesney, the nobleman who claims to be her betrothed.In a race against time to discover who she is and which man she can trust, Miranda embarks on a soul-stirring journey that takes her from the dazzling salons of London to the craggy Highlands of Scotland. All of her beliefs—about herself, her world and the nature of love—are tested to their limits as she seeks the truth about her past and finds an unexpected passion that ignites the hidden fires within….
WHO WAS SHE?
In Regency London, a woman escapes from a burning warehouse only to realize she doesn’t know her own identity. Although the locket around her neck bears the name Miranda, she has no recollection of her past. Nor does she know why two very different men want her—the devilishly handsome Scotsman Ian MacVane, and Lord Lucas Chesney, the nobleman who claims to be her betrothed.
In a race against time to discover who she is and which man she can trust, Miranda embarks on a soul-stirring journey that takes her from the dazzling salons of London to the craggy Highlands of Scotland. All of her beliefs—about herself, her world and the nature of love—are tested to their limits as she seeks the truth about her past and finds an unexpected passion that ignites the hidden fires within….
Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs (#ulink_9a6a054d-c47c-5b1c-900f-8dc6e3e78303)
“Wiggs’s storytelling is heartwarming…clutter free…[for] romance and women’s fiction readers of any age.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Susan Wiggs writes with bright assurance, humor and compassion.”
—Luanne Rice
“Wiggs’s talent is reflected in her thoroughly believable characters as well as the way she recognizes the importance of family by blood or other ties.”
—Library Journal
“Susan Wiggs paints the details of human relationships with the finesse of a master.”
—Jodi Picoult
Miranda
Susan Wiggs
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#uba4dd05d-6ca6-5268-916c-8d694a7e5ec1)
Back Cover Text (#u50fab8fa-6a6b-523f-b813-230d3f38d2f7)
Praise (#udb198391-b3f5-5a69-8d4a-e041b830f6b4)
Title Page (#u81c4de14-f849-5b80-9a16-2b60fb02c737)
Prologue (#ua8f2249a-11e5-5161-8950-01ec8bb9a31f)
One (#uff2958c5-f5ef-5958-983d-5cb999ecb82f)
Two (#u054c3b43-0a0f-5f54-bcc1-1bef449f03a1)
Three (#ufb1c0e5d-d261-52b4-86f0-e067dea79b71)
Four (#u1a755e29-cba9-5a4f-b884-806475596b8e)
Five (#ucf1e2d0e-f2d8-5e13-ab51-c6b8f6a3a064)
Six (#ufb8eacdc-5dfd-5807-b2e5-a4fe3973c71c)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_0ca2523e-9b7e-56e9-ac8b-e5f3825b0a90)
London
June 1814
The writing paper held the scent of violets, and that was the first clue.
The difficult cipher, based on a momentous day in the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, became clear after study. The key was not his birthday, after all, but an event far more significant: the date the defeated emperor went into exile on the Isle of Elba—4 May 1814. And that was the second clue.
The Allies believed the wars were finally over. At last a Bourbon king again sat upon the throne of France. Bonaparte would never return to seize power.
But the sender of the message disagreed.
M——
The hour of glory approaches. The crowned despots of Europe and their butchering battle commanders will all arrive in England before the end of summer.
They believe they have come to celebrate a lasting peace. Only you and I know their true destiny.
The final solution lies within our grasp, thanks to Miranda Stonecypher. Once we learn her secret, she must die. Else half the men of England will be after Miranda.
La Couleuvre
The hand holding the message clenched into a fist, crumpled the perfumed paper and hurled it into the hearth fire.
One (#ulink_01bfc693-4b7a-5fd5-a10f-22976cfa3740)
How weak and powerless I am in this
whirlwind of plotting and treachery.
—Empress Marie-Louise,
second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte
London
June 1814
In the beginning, there was a single point of light. It narrowed to the tiniest tip of a needle, piercing in its intensity, cold and white as the brightest star. She went toward it, a dreamer compelled by a quest of the soul. Closer, closer she drew, the light her only guide along the inexorable journey. Closer, closer. She was almost there; soon she would be able to reach forward, to tumble into the light...
The pinprick grew and exploded into searing, shattering pain. A cry started in her chest and rose through her, emerging ragged and desperate from her mouth.
A fog of noxious sulfur corrupted the air. She could see the yellow-tinged cloud in the deadly flashes erupting all around her. The menacing whine of flying rockets screamed in her ears. A bomb soared and careened against the roof beams of the warehouse.
She stood amid hellfire and brimstone, confused yet feeling oddly unafraid. She had bruises on her body, and her wrists were burned by the rope that had bound her. Perhaps knowing she was doomed, knowing the matter of her own death was now out of her hands, banished the fear. Gripped by a peculiar, numb tranquillity, she watched a wooden crate catch fire.
Eerily beautiful flames flared with a dreamlike slowness, licking along the edges of the crate and then climbing to the boxes stacked above it.
A single word was stamped on the face of each box: Explosives.
Even as a sense of peril registered, she knew with a strange feeling of detachment that it was too late to run. A second later, the crates and boxes exploded, bursting outward from a force within.
She felt pain, but from a distance. The force of the explosion hurled her backward. She waited for the impact of the wall, something to stop her, but the wall had disappeared. Just for a moment she was flying, flying into the black night.
She landed against a mound of baled cotton piled in an alleyway adjacent to the warehouse. The breath left her in a whoosh. She lay still, with the pain dancing madly, like a dervish, in her head.
The fireworks soared, turning night to day, angry lightning bolts in the sky. She began to realize, with dawning wonder, that she had done the impossible. She had survived. Perhaps, after all, she might live.
If she wished to.
Then a new flash cleaved the night. A plume of fire and smoke erupted in the alley. She could feel the roar of heat in her face. The flames reached for her, golden talons stretching closer, touching off the bales, sealing off her escape route. She tasted death again, its nearness, its allure whispered in her with a breath of fire.
Still unafraid, she started to surrender. Some part of her rejoiced. It was over. At last, all over. No one had won. All was lost.
A ball of fire rolled toward her, hungry, angry. Trapped in the alley, she slid deeper and deeper into submission, welcoming the end. But some tenacious hesitancy niggled at her, some sense that she was not ready yet. Someone needed her.
She staggered to her feet, swaying, the brick wall too hot to touch. Unfinished business. Benignly she noted that the bodice of her dress had been torn and then hastily repaired with a curved dressmaker’s pin.
Unfinished business. Her mind groped for the nature of that business, but smoke filled her lungs, and thoughts skittered away.
Concentrate, she told herself, closing her eyes. And she began to open up, to let in the unthinkable, and it almost surfaced. Then her awakening sense of reason snapped shut like a closing mantrap.
“Lass!” a voice called. It sounded faint, but she realized it was because the explosions had deafened her. “Give me your hand!” the stranger yelled.
She opened her eyes. Turned toward the deep, urgent voice. Through a veil of fire she saw him, tall and broad, a fluid, racing shadow backlit by shooting stars.
“Lass,” he shouted again, “you’ve got to come away from there now, while there’s still time.”
She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only stare as the blaze rose higher around him. He was wonderful, an archangel of shadow and light, bursting through the curtain of flame. Gloved hands snatched her up as if she were a poppet doll.
She tucked her face into the shelter of a huge shoulder. The frock coat reeked of sulfur and smoke and sweat. She felt the jarring thud of his footsteps as he ducked his head and spirited her away from the exploding building.
Shouts and whistles echoed through the streets. A brigade was already strung along down to the wharf, passing buckets frantically from the river.
He set her on her feet in the recessed doorway of a brick building, gripped her shoulders and leaned down to peer into her face. “What in God’s name were you doing there? Are you all right?”
Dust and ash clogged her throat and mouth. Her vision was blurred by cinders and tears. She could not see his features, could make out only the shape of her savior against the roaring light of the fire behind him.
“Lass!” He gave her a gentle shake.
She managed to nod, to croak, “I am not badly hurt.”
The shadow man swung off his frock coat, draped it around her shoulders. She had a swift impression of a broad chest, powerful arms. Safe. She would feel safe in those arms. She desperately needed to feel safe.
“Aye, then,” he said. “Take care you don’t—”
“Help! Help me!” The cry pierced through the bellow of flames and the crash of falling timbers. High in a tenement across the way stood a boy, just a little child, waving from a window. The roof above him had caught fire. So had the stairwell below him.
Her rescuer uttered a foreign word; it sounded like a curse. Before he even spoke or moved, she knew he would leave, and she felt an inexplicable sense of grief and yearning.
Stay with me, she wanted to plead. She longed to draw him into the light, to look at his face, to know the man who had snatched her from death.
Yet she felt no surprise when he shoved her toward a red-faced man overseeing the brigade. “Are you the watchman?” her savior asked.
“Aye, on patrol I was, and found myself in hell.”
“Look after this one,” he said, indicating her with a nod of his dark head. “I’ll go for the lad.”
“Christ, you’ll die trying,” the watchman said. “There’s no way to get to the child.”
But the man was gone, rushing toward the flames, disappearing into the burning building. The watchman pulled her to the end of the alley, where people were starting to gather.
A kaleidoscope of horrors wheeled around her. She saw the walking wounded, people with blackened burns and bleeding cuts, their faces lacerated by flying debris. Shredded paper made a snowstorm of confetti that flurried through the night sky. A woman ran past, cradling a child in her arms. A man walked by, his face as blank as a sleepwalker’s. From the front, he appeared unscathed, his starched shirt and cravat perfectly white. Then, making no sound, he pitched forward and landed facedown at her feet. In the back, his clothes had been burned and shredded away. Smoke rose from his blistered flesh.
She bent to help him, scooping water from a bucket onto his skin. He screamed and shuddered, choked out a prayer, fell silent. She gestured frantically to two men who were bearing off the wounded on litters made of bedsheets and rough blankets. While they moved the victim onto the litter, she chanced a look at the tenement. The stranger who had helped her was now climbing the burning stairs toward the child. For a big man, he moved swiftly, gracefully, as if accustomed to performing with great competence during a disaster. He snatched up the boy. For a fraction of a second, he simply stood and clasped the child to his chest, holding the small form as if it were infinitely precious. An orange glow formed a halo around them so that they were beautiful together, bejeweled in flickering light.
Ah, she knew what the child must be feeling. Those all-powerful arms enveloping her, bearing her to safety.
She had just decided that he was an angel when the stairs collapsed. She half expected him to sprout wings and fly. A whimsical notion, a fleeting hope. Both the man and the child plummeted into a pit of burning timber. Sparks gushed upward from the broken skeleton of the building.
Choking with sobs that tasted of sulfur and soot, she tried to go to them. A wall of flame obscured them from view.
Someone grabbed her roughly, drew her back. “Too late,” the watchman said. “You’re needed here.”
She heard someone else shout, “Miss, over here! Help us with this one!”
She struggled with the watchman, but he held her fast, shoving her to her knees beside a man with something metal embedded in his leg. “Concern yourself with the living, for chrissakes,” the watchman ordered.
The eyes of the wounded man pleaded with her. She had no choice but to stay with him.
Moving like a dreamwalker, she survived the night, helping, grieving, casting glances down the alleyway and hoping against hope that the tall man would come out, unscathed, with the little boy in his arms.
She had no sense of the passing of time, but rain began to fall as dawn tinged the sky. People raised grateful, smoke-blackened faces, welcoming the rain, letting it deal a final death blow to the fire they had battled all night.
The watchman found her as she was offering sips of water to a shaken old man. She looked at the blackened remains of the tenement. He shook his head. “There were no other survivors, miss. I tried to stop him, but...” He lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “You’d best be finding your way home.”
Home. She mouthed the word. No sound came out.
“Your family’ll be asking after you.”
She stared at the harsh, weary face, the small, speculating eyes. Despair trickled through her, drizzling like the rain.
“Miss?” He cocked his head. His singed brows drew together. “Shall I send for someone?”
She felt a great well of emptiness open up within her. Heard a silent scream inside her soul. And finally forced herself to face the truth she had avoided all night.
She had no memory, no notion at all of who she was, no knowledge of what she had been doing in the warehouse.
Or why someone would want her dead.
The thought chilled her, but she knew she was the reason for the disaster, knew it just as certainly as if the devil himself had whispered it in her ear.
She gave a strangled cry and put her hand to her dry, raw throat. Her fingers encountered a metal object there, something round, suspended from a thin chain.
A silver locket. She pulled it from her bodice and squinted at it through smarting eyes. Something was engraved on the locket. A word. Someone’s name. Her name.
Miranda.
* * *
Ian MacVane stared out the window of his fashionable Hanover Square house, watching a piece of torn silk blowing on the breeze and feeling a cold sense of doom.
“You didna tell me there was a girl involved,” he said in a low, furious voice. Its tone was even deeper than usual because of the smoke and fumes he had inhaled from the warehouse explosion.
His visitor followed his gaze to the window. Heavy velvet draperies framed a view of elm and cherry trees, elegantly understated wrought-iron fences in front of handsome houses. A blue-eyed stare sharpened on the bit of blowing silk.
“What do you suppose that is, flying about like an infernal kite? A piece of someone’s parade flag or aerial balloon, no doubt. London is simply crawling with dignitaries this summer. One can hardly take a chaise down Regent Street without stumbling upon a Prussian prince or a grand duke or some war hero draped with decorations.”
The speaker turned to face Ian where he lounged on the bed, naked from the waist up. “These are interesting times we live in, darling, are they not?”
Ian glared at Lady Frances Higgenbottom. “The girl,” he repeated. “You didna tell me the traitor was a girl.”
Lady Frances sighed. She took out her silk fan and idly waved it in front of her round, beautiful face. “If I had mentioned a girl, you might have gone and had a fit of scruples and possibly refused to help us. We are charged with safeguarding all the crowned heads of Europe while they’re in London. That duty must come first.”
Ian shifted on the satin sheets, wincing as the fabric brushed his burned shoulder and back. He told himself to be grateful to be alive at all. God knows he had wished for death in that moment when he’d looked down, realized that he had climbed to such a great height to fetch the child.
More than death, more than heated battle, even more than the past locked up tight in his heart, Ian MacVane feared heights.
The fall should have killed him, but somehow both he and the lad had managed to survive. He remembered being dragged to safety on a length of sailcloth. Gingerly he lowered the sheet farther so the fabric wouldn’t chafe him.
Lady Frances fell so still that her golden ringlets stopped bobbing. “Good Lord, MacVane. Must you be so damnably alluring? The fate of Europe is at stake, and all I can think of is your body.”
“You don’t even like me, Frances.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
A wry smile curved his mouth. “I think it was the time you made me fight a duel with an unloaded pistol, or perhaps your sending me by unarmed tender to deliver a message during a naval battle. I began to suspect—” Ian stopped himself, for she had done it again. Twisted the conversation away from the point he was trying to make. It was one of her many talents, and one that made her so effective in her secret role as chief spymaster of the Foreign Office.
“The lass,” he said grimly. “I’m still waiting for an answer.”
Frances snapped her fan shut and slapped it against the palm of her gloved hand. “You would have balked. Or gotten—heaven forbid—passionately entangled.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, giving her the full force of an icy glare. “When have I ever gotten passionately entangled?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if the room had grown chilly. “God, MacVane. You’re as cold as a Highland winter. I’ve always wondered why.”
There was a reason, but Frances was the last person he would tell. She knew far too much already.
She went to a cherrywood butler’s table and poured sherry from a crystal decanter. Ian studied each dainty, deceptive movement. Her costume was a confection of pink silk and frills, with little pink topboots showing beneath the scalloped hem of her skirt. To anyone but the most astute observer, she was an empty-headed miss with no more on her mind than a plumed cap. The one concession to her true vocation was a tiny black lily stamped on the heel of her left boot.
She tasted the sherry and regarded Ian with a half smile. “We had been watching Miranda Stonecypher for some time—along with her father, Gideon. She is presumed to know very little.” Frances’s sweet, kiss-me-you-fool mouth twisted into an ironic smile. “Even less now.”
“Bitch.” Ian blew out a sigh and flung his forearm over his brow, scowling out the window again. The scrap of silk had caught in the branch of an elm tree, fluttering red and royal blue on the summer breeze.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to see the wounded with their bleeding faces and wide, wondering eyes, the eyes of innocents caught in the maelstrom of the explosion, eyes that asked the one unanswerable question: Why?
Ian himself had wondered that, all those years ago, back when he had been innocent, when he had been a victim.
“Everyone who is anyone is coming to London this summer,” Frances continued, ignoring his insult. “There will be an assassination attempt, an elaborate one. So far, that is all we know. Our task is to find out the rest, and then keep it from happening.”
“Go on,” he said through gritted teeth.
“There’s nothing more to report.” She took a dainty sip of sherry. “Traitors are a dangerous lot, MacVane. They often turn upon their own.” She paused dramatically. He caught her meaning.
“So it wasna you nor any of your agents who set off the explosion?”
Her nostrils flared. “I’ll pretend you never asked me that, MacVane. Innocent people could have died last night, damn your eyes. As it happened, the only casualty was the traitor.”
“You just said the woman knew very little,” Ian pointed out.
She glanced at herself in the mirror over the washstand and primped. “As we know, looks can be deceiving.” She cleared her throat. “The demise of a woman is a regrettable thing. But in this case, it is serendipitous and will—at least for a time—disrupt the plans of Bonaparte’s conspirators.”
Ian thought for a long time. His bed was unspeakably comfortable, his home luxurious and a delicious luncheon was set out on a tray. No one would blame him for spending the day in idleness, nursing his wounds and resting.
Damn. The notion tempted him.
And so it was all the more excruciating for him to brace his arms on the mattress and lever himself up. He swung his legs to the floor.
Lady Frances squealed and clapped her hands over her eyes. “MacVane! My virtue!”
He had to laugh at that. “Virtue is surely the least of your worries, Fanny. Don’t fret, I won’t tell your precious Lucas you were here.”
“He is not my Lucas,” she retorted. “Yet.”
He stuffed his legs into buckskin breeches and swore with the pain as he drew on his freshly polished Hessians.
She peeked through her splayed fingers. A tiny gasp slipped from her.
“You’re cheating, love,” he said with a wink, but he couldn’t resist flexing his chest muscles.
Her fingers snapped shut. “You’re insolent. And what the devil do you think you’re doing?”
He swore louder now, in English and Gaelic both. “Putting on my shirt. Which is not a comfortable operation given the condition of my shoulder.”
“You shouldn’t have gone into that tenement, MacVane. But I’m not surprised you’d insist on playing the hero.”
“Saving a child from certain death is not heroic,” he told her. “Merely human.”
“Then you should have let some other human risk it. I need you. Whatever became of the child, anyway?”
A loud crash sounded from somewhere belowstairs, followed by the patter of running feet and a childish giggle. Ian bit back a grin. “Does that answer your question, my lady?”
“God, MacVane! We’ve got enough troubles without becoming an orphan asylum.”
“Then adopt the little mite, and he’ll be an orphan no more. You’d make such a charming maman.”
She borrowed one of his choice oaths, and the word sounded incongruous coming out of her cupid’s-bow mouth. Then she said, “Are you decent yet?”
He let out a bark of a laugh. “Fanny, my dear, I have never been decent. That’s what you like about me.”
She dropped her hands to plant them on her dainty waist. “So?”
“She didna die, Fanny.”
Her sweet red mouth formed an O. “What?”
“The girl. She survived the explosion. I had no idea she was the one or I would not have misplaced her.”
“But that’s imposs—”
“How would you know?” he snapped. “Unless you ordered her killed.” He watched her closely. “Och, I didna mean that, Fanny. For all that you are, you’ve never resorted to murder.”
“Yet,” she reminded him, fixing him with a lethal glare. “So where are you going?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t guessed yet.” He selected a waistcoat from the clothes press. It was made of tweedy Lowlander stuff, but he had no time to be selective. He donned the waistcoat and said, “I’m going after Miranda.”
Two (#ulink_1b809fb4-882b-5501-bf9b-1ab80abfcb10)
Leave me alone. I am looking into hell.
—King George III,
during an episode of madness
Miranda stood beneath an imposing gray stone lintel. A pair of statues with mouths agape and staring eyes glared down at her, and she recognized them—Cibber’s statues of Madness and Melancholy. She looked at the words engraved in the stained granite: Bethlehem Hospital.
Her heart drummed against her breastbone. Reeling with dread, she turned to her escort, the watchman who had been with her at the fire. “This is Bedlam.”
“Aye, miss.”
“It’s a hospital for people who are mad.”
He moved closer to her, put his hand on her arm. She supposed it was meant to comfort, but instead she felt nervous, trapped.
“Miss,” he said, “at least you’ll have a roof over your head, a meal—”
“I’m not mad.”
His hand tightened on her arm. “You say you don’t know who you are, where you live, who your family are.”
The black gulf of emptiness invaded her again, as it had each time she’d tried to remember before. Before the night, before the fire, before the terror and the insanity.
She stared at the ground, studying the cobbled street and the sparrows and rock doves poking at crumbs. London Wall. It wasn’t a wall, but a roadway at the edge of Moorfields. How was it that she knew the name of this street if she could not even name herself?
The heavy door of the entranceway creaked open on iron hinges. She found herself looking at a beefy man with a mustache that swept from ear to ear.
She shouldered back her weariness, lifted her chin. “I don’t belong here.” Despite the show of resolve, she staggered, on the brink of exhaustion, and her vision swam. “I belong in...in...” Her chest squeezed with dread. “In hell,” she said before she could stop herself. “Just not here,” she finished weakly.
The warden exchanged a fleeting look with the watchman behind her, and she felt their unspoken exchange: Mad as a March hare.
“That’s what they all say,” the warden remarked in a bland voice. “Does she need restraints?”
Restraints. They would chain her like an animal.
She took a step back. Bumped into the watchman. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders.
“Sir!” she choked out. “Unhand me! I do not belong here, and I certainly don’t need re—”
“You did well this time, Northrup. Got here before Dr. Beckworth makes his rounds.”
“He oughtn’t to complain, the stupid cit. The gate fees pay his wages,” Northrup said. His hand snaked into her hair. He pulled, forcing her head up. “Such a pretty piece will be a nice addition to the menagerie.”
“I’ll be able to charge the gawkers double. They like the pretty ones.”
Miranda gasped. “You mean, I am to be sold like a monkey to a zoo?”
The warden lifted a bushy eyebrow. “A show of spirit is always welcome. She’ll be an interesting specimen.”
“This is criminal!” she shouted. “Kidnapping!”
The warden captured her wrists in one hand and brought them up high behind her. A wrenching pain seared her elbows and shoulders. She could smell his sweaty body, could feel the heat of his breath on the back of his neck. Could hear the clink of coins in the small cloth purse he gave the watchman.
Outrage gripped her in a choke hold. The man who was supposed to be helping her—a man she had trusted—had sold her to a madhouse.
The watchman slipped away, ambling down the fog-shrouded lane.
Miranda shuddered out a long sigh. “Please, sir,” she said, affecting a small, meek voice. “It has been a rather long, eventful night for me, and I am quite exhausted. Truly, I need no restraining whatever.”
He laughed unpleasantly. “So you’ll make it easy on both yourself and old Larkin?”
She swallowed. Her throat still burned from the smoke. Her mind held nothing but emptiness—and fear. “Certainly, Mr. Larkin,” she forced out through dry lips.
The hard grip eased. She rotated her aching shoulders. Think, think, think...
The man called Larkin opened the door wider. The sharp smells of lye soap and urine gusted out, along with the roars and wails of the inmates.
Miranda ran.
Bunching her tattered skirts in one hand, she plunged down the lane. Her feet, laced into sturdy brown leather boots she did not remember putting on the previous morning, clattered over the uneven cobblestones.
With the curses of the warden ringing through the rows of close-set buildings, she ran blindly. She had no idea where she was going except away.
Away. The thought pounded in her head, counterpoint to the rhythm of her running feet.
Away, away, away.
Why are we going away again, Papa? And why must we leave in the middle of the night, without even saying goodbye?
It was a very old memory, incomplete, a vague impression of a slender man in a shabby coat, a warm hand closed around her small, cold one.
“Stop, thief!” the warden bellowed. His big voice roused a few sleepy-looking pedestrians as they walked along the street. Here and there, shutters opened and heads poked out.
“Stop her!” Larkin called again. “Stop her, I say!”
Miranda plunged on. She had a fleeting impression of inquisitive glances, but no one seemed inclined to stand in her way. There was, she decided, some small advantage to having one’s face and clothing soiled with black soot. No one wanted to touch her.
Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t— Another memory, this one dark and disturbing. She was almost grateful when it evaporated like the fog.
She careened around a corner, nearly colliding with a costermonger’s cart. The coster swore. Loose onions and potatoes spilled out, filling the narrow lane. She hesitated, then tried to leap past the cart.
Brutal hands dug into her shoulders. She turned to see Larkin’s face, red with fury.
“That’s the last time you’ll run from me, my fine lady fair,” he said, huffing with exertion. Even as she fought him, he hooked his leg behind her knees and forced her to the hard ground. He settled his weight on her, filling his fist with a handful of hair and giving it a cruel twist. “You want to earn your keep on your back, eh?” His eyes were small and hazel in color, hot and hungry. “I can arrange that.”
Miranda screamed.
* * *
Lucas Chesney grew impatient, waiting for Miranda. She had never been late before. He plucked a gold watch—one of the few items he had yet to pawn—from his pocket and thumbed it open, just to make sure.
Yes, it was half noon. She was late. Was she still angry about their ridiculous quarrel? What a barbarian he’d been, ripping her dress like that.
He paced, noting his surroundings with idle curiosity. The clutter of low buildings was dominated by soot-blackened churches, St. Mary-le-Strand, St. Clement Danes, St. Brides. The area near Blackfriars Bridge was not quite a slum, though it had its share of press gangs and flash houses. Some of the residences still possessed a smidgen of old-fashioned charm in their sandstone edifices and boxy gardens, but the neighborhood was clearly a place for people of less than modest means.
The perfect spot for you, old chap. Lucas slammed a door on the thought. He could not allow himself to dwell on the state of disaster known as the Chesney family fortune. He was Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, heir to the duke of Montrond, and he had a reputation to uphold.
Even if that reputation hung on the flimsiest string of lies and excuses since the Whigs had dominated Parliament.
The crumbling neighborhood had one distinct advantage, Lucas observed. No one here knew him.
No one except Miranda.
As always, his heart beat faster at the thought of her. A beauty, she had no particular use for her appearance. Though brilliant, she did not use her cleverness as a verbal lash, to cut and belittle people. While her radical views worried him, he had no doubt that in time she would temper her opinions. She was a delicious enigma, sometimes sweet-natured in a distracted, absentminded fashion, other times fiery and tempestuous.
She was fascinating, funny and passionate. Dazzlingly beautiful. She had but a single flaw. It was the one matter that haunted Lucas, troubled his dreams at night and made him feverish to find some solution.
Miss Miranda Stonecypher was penniless.
She made money and possessions seem unimportant, but Lucas loved his family and felt compelled to provide for them. Ever since the hunting accident that had left his father bedridden and staring mad, Lucas had taken on all the duties and debts of his office. And perhaps, he thought with a surge of hope, perhaps he had found an answer at last.
He had recently made the fortunate acquaintance of a—what was Mr. Addingham? A benefactor?
Lucas shook his head and laughed at himself. Silas Addingham was a ruthless social climber who had more money than shame. He wanted an entrée into polite society. Lucas could give it to him.
For a price.
He had tried to explain it to her the previous night, just before their row. Addingham’s money would enable Lucas to marry Miranda at last. To bring their relationship out in the open instead of sneaking around, hoping they wouldn’t get caught.
Eager to patch things up after their quarrel, he did something he had never done before. He went to her lodgings.
Lucas stood outside Number Seven Stamford Street. He knew only that Miranda lived here with her crack-brained father and a servant called Midge.
Feeling conspicuous, he rang the bell pull, then waited on the stoop. The air was filled with the smells of cooking and rubbish, the occasional laughter of children and shouts from watermen on the river.
When no one answered, he rang again. Not being able to introduce Miranda to his family, to his friends, had always brought him a faint sense of shame. It would be a relief to be open now.
He laughed to himself, picturing the look on Lady Frances Higgenbottom’s face when he appeared in public with Miranda.
Lady Frances, as lovely as she was wealthy, had been after Lucas for years. Though her relentless pursuit flattered his manly pride, he had long since grown weary of her shallow, tiresome ways. She swore that only by marrying her could Lucas save his family’s estate from the auctioneer’s hammer. But he had found another way. He had found Silas Addingham.
There was no response to his second ring. Lucas pushed open the door.
“Hello!” he called out. The smell of sulfur hung in the air. Miranda and her infernal experiments. She was always dabbling in some chemical reaction or other, trying to generate nitrous gases or hydrogen. Once they were wed he would delight in giving her a new outlet for her inventiveness—their marriage bed.
As he mounted a flight of creaky, uncarpeted stairs, he became aware of a subtler scent—acrid, hot and rusty.
Blood.
Lucas took the stairs two at a time, calling Miranda’s name. He emerged into a dim sitting room that reeked like an abattoir. The last time he had smelled death this sharply had been in a field hospital in Spain.
He forced away the nightmare memory of his soldiering days and went searching through the flat. It was a ghastly quest marked by a thickening trail of blood, overturned furniture, broken lamp chimneys, scattered papers.
He came to a tiny room with a single bedstead, the coverlet trailing along the floor.
A muffled moan issued from beneath the frayed cloth.
Lucas plunged to his knees. “Miranda!” With a shaking hand, he moved the blanket aside. A death-pale face stared up at him. The odor of fresh blood slammed through him.
And Lucas felt a shameful flood of relief, for the face of the dying woman was not Miranda’s.
“You must be Midge,” he said gently. “I am Lucas, a special friend of Miranda.”
The woman’s crusted lips moved. He bent forward to hear.
“’Randa...has no friends,” the servant whispered.
Lucas’s heart constricted. “She has one,” he said. “She has me.”
A bloodied hand clutched his sleeve. “They took her. And...Gideon.”
Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. Somehow he had known from the moment he’d set foot in this house. Damn! He should never have let her storm off in anger last night.
“Who?” he forced out as grief and rage and panic tore into him. “Please. For Miranda’s sake, you must tell me. Who did this?”
She spoke again, her voice fainter than ever. “Vi... Violet.” The word was more sigh than speech.
Despite a pounding sense of urgency, Lucas could not leave her. He held her for what seemed a long time. Her hand, icy cold on his sleeve, went slack and dropped. A rattling sound he remembered from the field hospital filled the silence.
He felt strangely calm as he relinquished his hold on Midge, poor Midge, whom he had never known. He put her head on a pillow and settled the coverlet around her as if she were a child being tucked in for the night. For eternity.
Then, still seized by an eerie serenity, he went through the apartment, seeking clues.
The problem was, someone had been here before him. Someone had ripped out desk drawers and rifled through papers and books. Someone had taken three innocent lives and cut them short.
He must contact the authorities. He would do so anonymously, of course, taking care that his name not be connected with this whole unsavory affair.
As he left, he passed through the vestibule. On a peg behind the door hung Miranda’s plain blue wool shawl. He pictured her in it, strolling along with him, gesturing as she spoke, her eyes brighter than stars as she gazed up at him.
He snatched up the shawl and buried his face in the soft wool. It smelled of Miranda and memories.
He had been too damned late to save her.
Ah, God, Miranda. I’m so sorry.
The dam broke. Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, hero of the Peninsular Wars, sank to the floor and sobbed.
* * *
Miranda forced herself to stop screaming as Larkin yanked her to her feet and dragged her back to Bedlam. “I have a wealthy family,” she said. Her voice had taken on a surprisingly cultivated tone.
“Have you, then?” Larkin asked cynically. “I thought you didn’t remember.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t,” she said in a singsong voice. “The question is, will you risk it?”
Larkin paused at the entranceway to the hospital. “Risk—”
She barked out a laugh. “Your decision, Mr. Larkin. Are a few moments of fleeting lust worth losing a handsome reward?”
He studied her for a long moment, his mustache twitching. “You’re a skinny, filthy wretch anyway,” he muttered. Then he hauled her through a corridor with cracked plaster walls, stopping at a wide, barred door. “Your home away from home, milady,” he spat.
He shoved her into the women’s gallery. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle another scream. A high fanlight let in streams of the afternoon sun. Dirty straw covered the floor. The plaster walls were crumbling and weeping with moisture. And everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on each rickety bench or moldering pallet, some dangling from manacles and leg irons, were the insane.
A few of them looked up when she entered. Most continued their mindless rocking and moaning, some screeching or muttering to themselves. One had plucked out the hair on the left side of her head. Another sang a tuneless, repetitive melody. But for the most part, the women lay as unresponsive as corpses.
“Hey, warden!” A buxom woman with bad teeth and jet black hair sidled toward them. “What have you there? A new jade ornament?”
“Stand aside, Gwen, she’s none of your affair.”
Ignoring him, Gwen put her face very close to Miranda’s. “’Neath all that dirt and soot, she looks a bit too fine for the likes of you, Larkin.” Gwen lifted an eyebrow. “What say you to that, mistress?”
A spark of outrage flared to life inside Miranda. She jerked her arm from Larkin’s grasp. “What I say, Mistress Gwen, is that any woman in this room is too fine for the likes of Warden Larkin.”
In the stunned silence that ensued, more women lifted their faces toward Miranda, like broken blossoms seeking the sun. Gwen let out a laugh of delight, braying loudly until the warden backhanded her across the mouth.
She barely flinched. A group of women ambled closer, baring their teeth. Sweat broke out on Larkin’s brow. He took a coiled leather lash from his belt. A few inmates shrank back, but still more advanced.
Barking an oath, Larkin stepped outside, slammed the door and shot the bolt home. Gwen laughed again, and others joined her, their shouts of mirth no longer eerie, but strangely joyful.
Miranda stood with her back to the wall of iron bars and stared. When at last she found her voice, she asked, “Why did you do that, all of you? Why did you defend me?”
Gwen clasped Miranda’s hands in hers. “Because of what you said, girl. About us all being too fine for Larkin.”
“I spoke no more than the truth.”
“Aye. But no one’s ever said it before.”
* * *
The explosion was four days past and Miranda’s trail was growing cold. Ian MacVane had inquired at churches, poorhouses, bawdy houses, almonries. He had paid bribes to wharfside idlers and shipmasters, to innkeepers and stablers, all to no avail.
His superiors were growing more insistent by the hour. Frances had been shocked to learn the young woman had survived the explosion, and she was frantic to speak to her—or so she said. But Ian knew instinctively that Frances was not particular. She merely wanted the girl found—alive or dead.
Frustrated, he stalked through the ransacked house in Stamford Street for the tenth time. Curses trailed like a black banner in his wake.
Four days, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been after the night of the disaster.
And to think he had held her in his arms!
The thought haunted him. He remembered how fragile she had felt, remembered the fright and confusion in her eyes. The urge to protect her had been powerful. He should have heeded his instincts rather than entrusting her to the watchman.
“You should hae listened to the voice in your noggin rather than shunting her off on that peeler,” Duffie said, shouldering open the door and stepping inside. “You knew that, did you not?”
Ian glared at his assistant, Angus McDuff. “Not before you did, it seems. Truly, you give me the willies.” Duffie had an uncanny gift for reading a man’s thoughts. “If I were the superstitious sort, I’d call you a devil’s imp and banish you to the Outer Hebrides.”
“The London peelers are as corrupt as the criminals themselves,” Duffie said. “It takes no great gift to figure that out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be looking after Robbie?”
“The lad’s fast asleep in the coach, bless his wee heart,” Duffie said with fondness. His bristly, graying beard outlined the bow shape of his broad smile. “At the moment, you need me more.”
They stood together in thoughtful silence, surveying the place that had been the home of Miranda Stonecypher.
It was a modest suite of rooms with scuffed plank floors, threadbare upholstery and papers crammed on shelves or strewn about. Black smears of dried blood marred the walls and floors.
Books were piled on every available surface. The topics ranged from works on moral philosophy to scientific tracts on physics and cosmography.
Had Miranda read them, or had they been her father’s? The Englishwomen Ian knew did not trouble themselves to read anything more challenging than La Belle Assemblée. God forbid they should actually have to think.
By far the most disquieting item in the room was a painting over the mantel. It was a reproduction of The Nightmare by Fuseli, Swiss painter and darling of the radicals. A sleeping woman, clad in a gauzy night rail, reclined on a draped bed. On her bosom perched a creature with a burning gaze and a wicked leer, and in the background loomed a horse with glassy eyes and flaring nostrils.
“Now that,” Duffie said, “gives me the willies.”
“Be certain Robbie doesna see it.” Ian turned away from the picture. The room was in a shambles, destroyed by the murderers and then rifled by officers from Bow Street who had been alerted by an anonymous citizen.
Ian grinned humorlessly. Lady Frances hated the Runners. This was not the first time they had interfered in her work.
He and McDuff picked through the rubble that was left. A half-written letter responding to a lender’s dun for money. Greek symbols sketching out some mathematical formula. A mundane list in a more feminine hand: foolscap, ink, silk thread...
In a carpetbag he found a stocking to be mended, along with an unfinished needlework project depicting a spray of forget-me-nots around an old-fashioned tower house. The caption read, “One father is more than an hundred schoolmasters.” A faint floral scent clung to the bag. Ian dropped it and raked a hand through his hair.
He knew nothing about this woman.
Except that she read wonderful books and liked dangerous paintings and loved her father.
And that when he’d held her, he had felt a reluctant stirring in his heart.
“Och, I dinna believe my eyes,” Duffie exclaimed.
“What do you mean?” Ian asked in annoyance.
“The great MacVane of the Highlands actually felt something other than hatred and rage. Ah, dinna deny it. I saw it in your pretty face. You care about the lass, don’t you?” Duffie gave a sly wink.
Ian clutched the back of a wooden chair and glared down at his gloved hands. The gloves spared him from seeing the stump of his finger, from remembering the past.
“She’s a puzzlement, Duffie. There was something...not right about her that night.”
“People dinna generally appear their best following a massive explosion,” Duffie observed helpfully.
“It was more than just panic and confusion. It was—” Ian nearly strangled on his own words as a blinding flash of memory cleaved his thoughts. Just for a moment, he was in another place, another time...
Burning buildings, thick smoke, people running to and fro. And his mother, unable to stand what they had done to her, had that same look in her eyes. That look of madness...
“Madness, you say?” Duffie asked.
“Did I say that?”
“Well, if people were to perceive the poor lass to be mad, then...”
Duffie and Ian looked at each other. At the same time, they snapped their fingers and spoke the same thought.
“Bedlam.”
Three (#ulink_9c57a56d-c762-58b9-a808-2433ed676a95)
Marriage is for life. If I were in your place,
I should tie my sheets to a window and be off.
—Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,
grandmother of Empress Marie-Louise
Ian disliked Dr. Beckworth on sight. It had taken a small fortune in bribes to get this far into the horror chamber that was Bedlam, and now Beckworth stood in the middle of his office, the implacable guardian at the threshold.
“What do you mean, you willna take my coin?” Ian demanded.
“I am a man of ethics as well as science, sir. I do not take bribes.” Above a boiled collar, he lifted his chin to a haughty angle.
“Would you consider a grant in the name of charity, then?”
Beckworth tightened his mouth until it resembled a sphincter. “Please.”
“I merely want to see Miss Stonecypher.”
Beckworth’s hands gripped the lapels of his frock coat. “Stonecypher.”
Ian cursed himself for showing a card to his opponent. He needed to play them closer to the chest. “There, you see. The poor lass has been here four days and you haven’t even found out her family name.”
Beckworth sat down behind a writing table. He fingered a quill stuck in the inkwell, staring at the feathers, turning it this way and that. “It’s very irregular. I can speak of this case with no one save the girl’s family...”
“She has no family.” Ian said. Then, gambling all, he added, “Except me.”
The doctor lifted a monocle to one eye. “You are related to Miss, er...”
“Stonecypher.”
“Stonecypher.” Beckworth tasted the unusual name again.
“I am betrothed to her,” Ian assured him. Lying had always come easily to Ian. He had learned it at an early age and considered it one of the most fundamental of survival tactics. Please, sir, I canna work today. My cough is infectious...
“Why didn’t you explain that right from the start?” Beckworth asked.
He’s as suspicious as I am, Ian thought. “Perhaps, like you, I prefer to guard my privacy.”
“Ah.” Beckworth tucked the monocle into the pocket of his waistcoat and took a deep breath. “Have you any proof of this betrothal?”
“I do.” Ian levered himself up out of his chair and paced the office. He ducked his head beneath the lime-washed ceiling beams. He stopped in front of the table and slammed his palms down on the surface.
Beckworth flinched.
Ian leaned forward and said, “Aye, I have proof, but she’s locked up like some moonstruck lunatic, damn your eyes!”
“She can’t remember anything,” Beckworth blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut, clearly angry at himself for having divulged Miranda’s condition.
This, Ian realized, was no gamble after all. She would not recognize him, but that, of course, would all be part and parcel of her affliction.
“I want to see her,” Ian stated. “Now.”
Beckworth hesitated. Ian subjected him to the coldest, most menacing stare he could summon. The stare worked. The doctor stood. “Follow me.”
Moments later, Ian wondered if Beckworth was leading him along a circuitous route just to punish him. They passed through a long gallery lined with barred cells. Dank shadows hung in the unlighted corners. Sleek rats scurried in and out through cracks in the walls. A babble of nonsense talk, moans and tuneless singing joined with the foul stench to make the air almost unbreathable.
Fashionable people strolled along with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and they stopped to gape at the inmates. It was a common diversion to buy a ticket to view the insane. Ian, who had looked madness in the face, found the practice more disgusting than anything he could see behind bars.
“Oh, look at that one,” a lady exclaimed, giggling and pointing. “What is he doing with his—”
“Surely he is thinking of you,” Ian whispered in her ear as he passed behind the woman.
She gave a little shriek. She and her gentleman friend hurried out.
A cleric clutching a prayer book nodded mournfully as he passed. Several inmates reached through the bars, grasping at the air as if it represented freedom itself. Ian fought the urge to run, far and swiftly, away from this place that evoked such uncanny reminders of his past.
This was different, he told himself. Perhaps this woman could be saved. He despised the idea that the girl with the large brown eyes had been trapped in this place for four days. If she wasn’t insane before, she surely was now.
When Beckworth brought him to a large, barred common room for female inmates, Ian spied her immediately. She sat on a wooden stool in a flood of sunlight that streamed through a high window. On a bench in front of her, a chess board was scratched into the wooden surface, small light and dark stones serving as chessmen.
She wore an unbleached muslin gown, plain and much mended, and her abundant brown hair was tied back with a bit of string. Her face looked clean but weary, her complexion smoother and richer than the heart of a rose.
In her lap, propped on her knees, she held a broken piece of slate. She was reciting aloud to a group of uncannily attentive women. “It is time to affect a revolution in female manners—a time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves, to reform the world.”
Ian was familiar with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. He had discovered a set of treatises by the female zealot while waiting out a long calm during a sea voyage. But hearing Miranda recite the words aloud, with such conviction, and to such rapt women, was stirring indeed. “You said she had no memory,” he whispered to Beckworth.
“She has perfect recall of general knowledge. It’s really quite astonishing. Yet she has no recollection of personal matters.” Beckworth motioned him into the common room.
“Och, ’tis Bonny Prince Charlie!” An elderly woman, her hair a dirty gray mop, scuttled over and dipped a curtsy to Ian. “I’d know ye anywhere, laddie,” she said in a thick Highland brogue. “Ah, the midnight hair, the eyes of blue. Been waiting for you to return since me granny’s time, we have.” She gave him a toothless smile and remained there, one knee on the floor, quivering slightly, clearly unable to move.
Ian flushed and glanced back at Beckworth, who stood just inside the door. The doctor stared straight ahead. Ian had no choice but to hold out his hand and help the old woman up.
“And a fine gentleman you are, sire, and always have been,” she declared. She turned to address the ladies. “Well, what are ye waiting for? ’Tis our own rightful prince come back to us, just like I told ye he would. And he’s a ghostie, he is. ’Tis why he stays so young and bonny.”
A few of the women, their faces blank, inclined their heads. Ian’s ears heated. He cleared his throat. “It is a high honor to meet you, but I am not Bonny Prince Charlie. Regrettably, he died some years ag—”
“Weesht!” The old woman held a finger to her lips. “We ken. You’re in disguise, eh?” She tugged at his waistcoat. “I thought there was a purpose to that MacLean tartan.”
He nodded in exasperation. “I am here to see Miranda.”
Some of the women began to hiss and whisper among themselves. Ian cleared his throat again. “You are...dismissed.”
The old woman backed away, bowing as she retreated to another part of the room. Most of the others—those who were not chained or bound—went with her. Miranda looked up anxiously.
There was one thing Ian had not remembered from the night of the fire. And that was how stunningly beautiful she was.
Even like this, in a plain shapeless gown, her hair and face unadorned, she was like the moon. Pale skin, sable hair, a study in light and dark. He felt something unexpected and ecstatic in the center of himself as he looked at her. She had a sort of heart-catching innocence that sat ill with his sense of who she was, what she was capable of.
“Hello, Dr. Beckworth,” she said in a soft, cultured voice. Then she looked at Ian, the huge brown eyes showing—not surprisingly—no recognition at all. “Good day to you, sir.” Then she frowned.
“Is something wrong?” Beckworth asked.
“No. For a moment I thought...” She waved her hand distractedly. “It was nothing.”
“My dear,” Beckworth said, his meddlesome manner irritating, at least to Ian. “Do you recognize this man?”
“Hello, Miranda,” Ian said softly. He lowered himself so their gazes were level and sent her his kindest smile. “It’s a high relief to find you at last.” Another of his well-honed skills was the intimate whisper. Women succumbed to it almost too easily, tumbling into his arms in fits of ecstasy. He waited for Miranda to melt.
Instead she cocked her head to one side and asked, “Do you play chess?”
He blinked. “Chess.”
She frowned in concentration at the chess board. “It seems that I do. Perhaps too well. Each time I play myself, it ends in stalemate.”
“This gentleman claims he knows you,” Beckworth said. “He says you were betrothed.”
She caught her breath. “To be married?” She stared at Ian with new, keen interest.
“That’s right, love,” Ian said, amazed that he felt guilty deceiving her. According to Fanny, this woman was a deadly traitor and the key to a hideous plot to assassinate the crowned princes of Europe. Yet suddenly he felt as if he had stepped on a kitten. “You canna remember?”
“No.” She bit her lip. It was a full lower lip, the very sort that begged for a kiss. This could prove to be dangerous indeed, Ian thought. In ways he had not yet considered.
“Darling.” He took both her hands in his and drew her to her feet. The top of her head just reached his chin. “Surely you remember me. I am your one true love, your Ian.”
At this the other women clustered round, jabbering and clucking like hens.
“Kiss her!” one of them urged.
“Yes, kiss her, kiss her!” The others took up the chant.
It was odd, Ian thought, looking at these hopeless, disheveled creatures. After all they’d been through, they still wanted to believe in a happy ending.
“Kiss her!” they continued to chant. A buxom woman with black hair and laughing eyes made a smooching sound with her mouth.
“Ian,” Miranda repeated. Her breathing quickened, and she made a sound of distress. “Dr. Beckworth, may we please have some privacy?”
Ian was more stunned than the doctor by her request. He felt a jolt in his chest. God. She was falling for the ruse. He ought to feel pleased by his own cleverness. Instead he sensed a faint edge of panic. He might very well find himself with a fiancée before this day was out.
“Miranda, I shouldn’t allow it,” Beckworth said. “It would not be prop—”
“The lady made a simple request,” Ian broke in.
“You may go to the empty cell across the hall.” The doctor held the door for them. “I shall be outside.” He aimed a meaningful stare at Miranda. “You need only call out and I’ll come.”
“She’ll call out, right enough,” said the black-haired woman. “But not for you, Beckie.”
Ian glared at the doctor as they left the room. Officious little toad. Does he think I would ravish her right here in this rank cell?
Rather than seeming absurd, the very idea made him hard. Perhaps he was crazy, too, lusting after a woman in Bedlam, of all places. His chest felt tight when he turned to Miranda. “Does the name Stonecypher mean anything to you?”
“Stonecypher.” She tasted it like an exotic fruit. “No. Should it?”
“That’s your name, my love. You are Miranda Stonecypher, and I am Ian MacVane.”
“My betrothed.”
“Your betrothed.”
She clasped her hands demurely in front of her. “Were we in love?”
The question took him by surprise. In love. He almost laughed aloud at the thought. Love was something that didn’t happen to Ian Dale MacVane. It simply wasn’t meant to be. Yet here she stood, all innocence, brimming with hope.
“Well?” she prompted. “Was it a love match?”
“Very much so.” How easy it was to gaze into her wide, trusting eyes and lie. “We were deeply in love.” He traced his fingers along her jawline. “I still am.”
“Oh, my.” Her slender throat moved sinuously as she swallowed hard. “And we were to be married?”
His thoughts came together swiftly. “Aye, we were going to Scotland so there would be no need to secure a special license.” Recklessly he plunged on. “And of course, you wanted to meet my people in the Highlands.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve not met you, lass, and—”
“That’s not what I meant.” She pressed her palm to his chest. Her warmth burned into him. “Why were we going to be married?”
“I thought I explained that. We love each other. We—”
“But why marriage?” Her hand crept along his chest and slid upward to skim his collarbone. He wondered if she was at all aware that by touching him this way, she was breaking every rule of proper behavior. He wondered if she cared.
“Marriage is the institution of a corrupt society, designed to enslave women,” she stated.
Ian could barely think. Was she naive or simply bold, touching him like this? He had been caressed more intimately by more brazen women, to be sure, but there was a compelling quality to the way Miranda slid her long-fingered hands over him.
“Who told you that?” he asked. “Did you learn it by reading Mary Wollstonecraft?”
“I suppose so. Dr. Beckworth urged me to remember things. It is odd. I can recite whole passages by heart, yet I can’t even recall my name—” She backed away as a violent shudder racked her. “You can’t know how frustrating it is.”
An outraged female yell drifted in from the common room.
He saw something flicker in her eyes—fear. Settling his hands on her shoulders, he asked, “What is it?”
“This is a place of corruption. I—I wasn’t prepared for that.”
A chill prickled down his neck. “What do you mean?”
She folded her arms in front of her. “There is a warden called Larkin. He wanted—that is, he would have—” She looked away, pressing her lips together as if loath to speak further.
“Miranda, did he hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No, and it’s silly of me to dwell on it. I convinced him that it might be dangerous to harm me.” A fond smile curved her lips. “I said I was undoubtedly a great lady, with a vast fortune and a title, and that as soon as my memory was restored, I would reward those who befriended me.”
Ian gave silent thanks for her quick thinking.
“But lately,” she said, “he’s been eyeing me. I think he’s starting to suspect it’s a lie.”
Ian trapped her hands in his. “I want you to come away with me. Now that I’ve found you, you need not stay here a moment longer.”
“I know you claim me, but you’re a stranger. I’m sorry—”
“You’ll be safe with me,” he said.
“I want to believe you, but I do not know you. I cannot go with you.” She shivered. “It’s awful here, but it’s familiar. It’s all that I know.”
“Believe me,” he whispered, lowering his mouth toward hers, wanting just a taste of her. “Do, Miranda. Believe me.”
His mouth hovered closer. She gasped and parted her lips slightly. At the last second, he changed his mind. He must not kiss her. He knew better than to kiss a woman when he wanted her this badly. He brushed his lips across her brow. “I’ll keep you safe,” he heard himself whisper, not knowing whether or not he was lying. “I’ll keep you safe.”
She glided her hands up his chest, pressing closer, skimming his shoulders.
He hissed and broke away, barking a curse. His shoulder was on fire, and for a moment he saw nothing but a red haze of pain.
“Mr. MacVane!” Miranda cried. “What happened?”
“My shoulder, lass. I was burned in the fire.”
“You were in the fire?” she asked. “My fire?”
“Aye, lass, if you’re claiming it.”
“Lass,” she whispered, wonder dawning on her face. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“That depends on what you’re accusing me of.”
“You’re the man in the flames. You called me lass. You pulled me to safety. Gave me your coat.”
“Aye,” he said again, wishing his shoulder would stop throbbing.
“You ran off to help a small child, and that was the last I saw of you.” She shuddered. “The watchman said you had both perished.”
“The watchman turned out to be quite unreliable.”
“You would have come back for me, but you were unable?” she asked, unwittingly making it easy for him to deceive her.
“Injured,” he admitted. “Not mortally, as you can see.”
“Thank God. How is the child?”
“Robbie is fine. Some bumps and bruises, a burned hand that’s healing nicely.”
She subjected him to a wide-eyed, wondering look that made him feel as if he had grown a foot taller. “How grateful his mother must be.”
“Robbie’s an orphan. He had been staying at a flash house, where they were training him as a cutpurse.” Ian decided not to tell her the worst of it, the other things they were forcing Robbie to do. “He ran away from there and was living alone in an abandoned building.”
“How sad. What will become of him?”
“After my assistant, McDuff, tutors him, Robbie’ll be bound for public school, perhaps university.” An old dream flickered in Ian’s mind. A lad like Robbie should live free, racing through Highland dales and shouting with laughter, just as Ian had so many years ago.
Miranda clasped her hands to her chest. “You kept the child.”
“He had nowhere to go.”
She crossed to the door.
“Miranda?” he asked. “Where are you going?”
“With you.”
“But you just said you wouldn’t.”
“I changed my mind.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She gave an incredulous laugh. “I have two choices. I can stay locked in this asylum. Or I can leave with a man who not only saved me from a fire, but rescued an orphaned child and is raising him to be a gentleman.”
“So you changed your mind because of my sterling character?”
“No.” An unexpected glint of humor winked in her smile. “It was your devastating blue eyes.”
Her wry statement caught him off guard. He stared at her for a moment, then started to laugh. To his amazement, she joined him. “And of course,” she said, “you’d never lie about something that can be so easily disproved.”
Dr. Beckworth appeared at the door. “Are you quite well, Miranda?”
She bathed him in a radiant smile that made the poor man all but squirm with delight. “Oh, indeed I am, Doctor. Surely your patience and care prepared me for a full recovery of my lost memory.”
It was all Ian could do to keep panic at bay. What was this? She remembered? If so, that meant she realized Ian MacVane was no part of her past.
“God be thanked.” The doctor raised his eyes heavenward.
Miranda rested her fingers on Ian’s sleeve and sent him an adoring look. “My dear fiancé will, of course, send a large endowment to the hospital.” She glanced at the women’s ward. “Enough for some sweeping improvements,” she added, and the subtlest note of warning hardened her voice. “Of course, I shall check on the progress of the reforms.”
With a decided spring in her step, she walked toward the main foyer. She stopped at the common room. “Things will get better here,” she said to the women.
Some of them looked up, waved and blew kisses. “We’ll take care, ducks,” Gwen assured her. “See if we don’t.”
“We still think you should kiss her,” said the old lady who thought he was Bonny Prince Charlie.
I still want to, Ian realized. He followed Miranda out, joining her amid the foot traffic on the street. He stared at her, filled with bafflement and delight that quickly froze into icy suspicion.
Just how much did she recall?
“You say you remember?” he demanded.
“Lies,” she said breezily, turning a giddy circle on the cobbled walk. “All lies.”
“But you did it so well,” he said, impressed. “I know of no one who lies quite so well, except perhaps—” He broke off, taking her elbow to steer her out of the path of a pieman’s cart.
“Except whom?” She had an engaging way of tilting her head and regarding him sidewise. The look was both charmingly naive and artlessly seductive.
He thought better of elaborating. “Never mind. You were quite magnificent.”
She sobered for a moment. “To survive in a place like Bedlam, one must develop certain skills.”
It was not what she said, but what she did not say that told Ian she had lived a nightmare. He grimaced, imagining her bedding down in filth amid lunatics. Without volition, he slipped his arm around her shoulders. In a matter of moments they had violated a dozen rules of propriety and decorum. Either she had forgotten those rules or, like him, took pleasure in disregarding them. Or perhaps she had never known the rules in the first place.
She peered up at him with that slanted look. “So now you have rescued me. Again. If you persist in being this kind to me, our future is very bright indeed.”
Though his customary long strides never faltered, Ian felt his stomach knot. He couldn’t even reply. In a very short time, he would have to deliver her to an address in Great Stanhope Street. Only God knew what would happen to her then.
Four (#ulink_9fc04f04-d58a-5fc7-9f42-599dc333d214)
There is no greater sorrow than to recall,
in misery, the time when we were happy.
—Dante
The authorities would try to extract information from her. Ian would not allow himself to think about the methods they might use. He worked for the English, aye, but only because they were the highest bidder for his services. He had no false ideas about their compassion for a woman they perceived as a traitor.
He brought Miranda south through London, along the crumbling river walks. When they reached the west side of London Bridge, they would take a barge and then a hansom cab to the rendezvous in Great Stanhope.
“So we will leave the city today?” she asked, standing at the edge of the river and watching the traffic of boats and barges with rapt fascination. Before he could reply with an appropriate falsehood, she said, “I know that I lived in London before the...” She hesitated, looking so vulnerable for a moment that he had to glance away. His heart was pure steel—he had made it so. Yet he sensed that this woman could turn steel to ash if he let her.
“Before what?” he asked.
“Just...before. But I don’t remember it being so vital. So alive and exciting. Look at all the people. I wonder if I should know any of them.” She sobered. “It is the oddest feeling, Mr. Mac... Ian. It’s happened a few times. I feel as if I’m on the brink of something—some discovery or revelation—and then everything disappears into a fog. Dr. Beckworth said my memory would return.” She raised bewildered brown eyes to him. “The question is, what made me forget this in the first place?”
Ian’s heart gave a lurch. “It was the accident,” he said quietly. “’Twas a miracle you survived.”
“But what was I doing there?”
His gut twisted. “I don’t know, love,” he said. “I’m only glad I was there to get you out in time.”
“I wanted to die in there,” she whispered.
He hoped he had heard her wrong. “No, Miranda—”
“It’s true. A calmness came over me, an acceptance. I wanted it, Ian, I did.”
“You were overcome by smoke.” The idea that she had craved death disturbed him deeply. In God’s name, Miranda, he wanted to say. What happened to you?
But he couldn’t ask that. She expected him to know.
She frowned and rubbed her temple, swaying a little.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“A headache. They come and go.” She walked a few steps along the quay, then turned and walked back. Ian watched her, trying to analyze the effect she had on him.
What was it about the lass? She was almost waiflike in the faded dress, yet the worn fabric failed to conceal the body of a temptress. And in her eyes he could see ancient, veiled secrets. A wealth of memories lived inside her. His task was to unlock them, even if he had to batter down the door.
She rubbed her temples again, wincing at the pain and closing her eyes.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” he asked again.
She nodded, eyes still closed. “Can you take me to the house where I live?”
He thought swiftly of the ramshackle rooms in Blackfriars, the overturned furniture, the dried blood. “You should rest.”
She opened her eyes. A shroud of shadows crept over her face. Without moving, she distanced herself from him, receding to a place he could not imagine. For a moment it was as if she lived somewhere else, in a world of her own fancy. Or was it the past?
“Miranda?” he prompted. The syllables of her name tasted sweet, spoken with his Scottish burr. He was a sick man indeed. He took a perverse pleasure in simply saying her name.
She blinked, and the distant look passed. “I try, truly I do. I try to remember.” She clasped both her hands around his. Her fingers were chilly; he could feel it through his gloves. He rubbed his thumbs over them, to warm her. Or himself, he was not sure which. But in that moment he felt something—they both did; he could see it in her eyes. The startlement. The recognition. The deep inner twist of captivation that defied all logic.
“You must tell me, Ian,” she said. “You are my betrothed. Surely you know my home.” She hesitated. “My family. For the love of God, what was my way of life?”
Falsehoods came to him swiftly. “Ours was a whirlwind courtship, so I confess there is much about you I do not know.”
“Then tell me something you do know.”
“You lived,” he said, hating himself for lying but lying anyway, “to love and be loved by me.”
She caught her breath, a dreamy softness suffusing her face. “Ah, Ian. That is what I want to remember most of all. Loving you, and you loving me.”
He stroked her cheek, and when her eyes opened, he let a devilish smile curve his mouth. “Does this mean I must teach you all over again?”
She laughed throatily. “Perhaps. Do I have family?”
“Alas, no.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t want to see her reaction. “You’re a scholar, Miranda. A teacher. A...private tutor.”
“Then I lived with a family. With children.”
“The family recently repaired to Ireland.”
“Then we must write to them.”
“Aye, we must.” He knew such a letter would never go farther than his waistcoat pocket. “You’re tired, my darling.” He did not know whether it was part of his ruse or an untapped softness in his heart that made him slip an arm around her shoulders. She nestled against his chest as if seeking shelter from a tempest. And perhaps she was, from the storm of confusion inside her.
Her hair smelled of harsh soap, yet he also detected a hint of her own unique essence, something earthy and faintly herbal, evocative as a whisper in the dark.
“Ah, Miranda, forgive me. I know so little of your former life.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Tell me anything.”
“’Tis melancholy.” The lie spun itself with quick assuredness, like a silken web produced by a spider. He borrowed from the truth but seasoned it liberally with fiction.
He explained that her mother had died in childbirth, even though Frances had found out Helena Stonecypher had run off with a lover years earlier. Miranda’s father, an impoverished scholar of indifferent reputation, had raised her in haphazard fashion and had passed on more recently. Miranda had been employed as a tutor, but she had scarcely taken over the duties when the family had gone to Ireland.
“When I met you, Miranda,” he finished, “you were alone, in leased rooms near Blackfriars Bridge.”
She extracted herself from his arms and walked to the edge of the river. She stared at the rippling surface for so long that he wondered if her mind had wandered again.
“Did you hear me, lass?” he prodded, standing beside her.
She raised her face to him. Her cheeks were chalk pale, her eyes wide. “I was quite the pathetic soul, then,” she said in a low voice.
She was as fragile as spun glass. So easy to break. He had no doubt he could crush her with words alone. Rather than softening him, the notion made him angry. She was a gift he did not want, a responsibility he could not shirk.
Determined to stir her out of her sadness, he cupped her chin in his palm and glared down at her. “Did you expect to hear that you’re some long-lost princess, and I a blue-blooded nobleman? That I’ll conduct you to a vast and loving family who have been waiting for your return?”
She flinched and tried to pull away, but he held her firmly, forcing himself to regard her with fierce steadiness. She would need a stiff spine for the trials ahead. If she broke now, dissolved into tears, he would take her directly to Frances and wash his hands of the entire affair.
She swallowed, and he felt the delicate movement of her throat beneath his fingers. “Touché, Mr. MacVane,” she said, surprising him with a calm regard. “Though actually I had hoped I was a lady of great learning. There are things I know, things I have read, that Dr. Beckworth considered quite extraordinary.” She squared her shoulders. “But that is a common hope even for people who remember the past, is it not? To wish to be something better than we are?”
“Touché yourself,” he said. He let his hand trail down to her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Forgive me. I’m not angry at you, but at myself. I want so much more for you.”
Her smile trembled, then steadied, and she looked amazingly winsome. And also weary. “There now,” he said. “You must rest, and later we’ll speak of the past.”
“And of the future.”
“That, too,” he admitted, as foul a liar as had ever crossed the border from Scotland into England. Her future was a short trip up the Thames to Biddle House, where she would endure an interview with Lady Frances.
Yet when a barge arrived and the ferryman asked where they were bound, Ian rapped out his own address. He told himself it was because information obtained under torture was notoriously unreliable. Aye, that was why he didn’t want her tortured. He’d find out her secrets in his own way. In his own time.
* * *
Miranda turned in a slow circle in the foyer of Ian’s opulent residence, her head angled up so she could take in the spiraling sweep of a marble staircase, the tall windows of beveled glass, the painted cherubs and clouds on the ceiling and wainscoting.
“Have I been here before?” she asked. She nearly reeled with weariness, her hair escaping from its single frayed string, yet a sense of exhilaration buoyed her up.
“Nay, lass. It’s not proper for an unchaperoned lady to call on a gentleman.”
The word lady rolled elegantly off his tongue. His Scottish burr turned mere words to poetry. She felt a ripple of delight course through her. “Have I always loved the way you talk...Ian?” It felt delicious and right to call him by his Christian name.
He looked at her with his gentian blue eyes, and the shiver up her back turned to a warm river of sensation. “You never told me so,” he said.
“I should have.”
He gave her the oddest sensation, a sort of breath-held anticipation that lodged behind her heart. Had he always had this effect on her? How in heaven’s name could she have forgotten?
Miranda saw a movement from the corner of her eye. Turning, she noticed a window in the wall. A woman stood in the window, watching her. And then it hit her—this was no window, but a mirror. The first mirror she had encountered since her terrifying journey into madness had begun. Her heart pounded as she looked into the glass. A complete stranger looked back at her. Miranda lifted one hand to her cheek, skimming it along a cheekbone and across a straight dark brow. The stranger did the same.
A feeling of utter panic swept over her. What sort of oddity of nature was she, a woman so addled in the brain that she did not know her own face? Brown eyes—what had they seen that was so horrible she had hidden from the memory? Dark curls falling across a high, clear brow—had her unremembered father ever kissed her there? An ordinary nose and a wide mouth—had she opened it to scream the night of the fire?
Who are you? she asked the image silently. What have you done with your life?
The stranger stared silently back at her. There were no answers in the unfamiliar brown eyes. Only questions. Only an endless string of questions, and the answers were locked up inside the creature in the mirror.
She looked back at Ian, feeling more lost and helpless than ever, and wanting more than ever to be swept into his world, where she knew she would be safe.
For long moments they simply stared at each other like two figures in a painting. His face was inscrutable, while Miranda felt certain every inch of her yearning for him surely showed on her features. She wanted to tumble right into the middle of his life, and she had never been so aware of her own desire. Had she?
Then Ian looked past her and broke the spell. He said something in a rolling, guttural tongue that she recognized as Gaelic but did not understand.
“My assistant,” Ian said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her around. “Angus McDuff.”
She turned to see a cherubic man of middle years, dapper in black breeches and a tartan waistcoat, his gray beard forming a bristly U from ear to ear.
Angus McDuff spoke with Ian in Gaelic, then swept low in a courtly bow. “How good it is to see you safe and sound, Miss Miranda.”
She inched her head. He seemed to know her, or at least to know of her. “It is good to be safe,” she said. “But sound?” She looked helplessly at Ian. “I cannot remember my life before the moment of the explosion.”
“So he was just explaining. Some things are for the best, my dear. ’Tis a thing I have always believed.”
“Thank you, Mr. McDuff.”
“Call him Duffie!” piped a loud, childish voice. “He’ll insist on it.”
With a squeal of skin on wood, a little boy slid down the banister. He landed with a flourish, wobbled, then fell on his backside.
“And I insist,” Ian said with exaggerated severity, pulling the child to his feet, “that you greet the lady properly, scamp.”
Full to bursting with mischief and merriment, the boy bowed from the waist. He had a clean bandage wrapped around one hand, and she realized he was the child Ian had saved from the fire.
“Robbie MacVane, at your service, mum,” he said in a clear soprano voice.
“MacVane?” Ian asked, lifting a dark eyebrow.
“Aye, if it’s all the same to you,” Robbie said.
Ian did not smile, but looked solemn as he nodded. “You do honor to the name, lad.”
“Besides,” Robbie said, “It’s the only name I know how to spell.”
Miranda stifled a laugh. She found the boy enchanting, from the top of his tousled head to the tips of his scuffed leather shoes. Ian hooked a thumb into the band of his breeches. Robbie did the same, perfectly copying Ian’s stance. Miranda looked from the boy to the man. It was extraordinary to think that in an age when some parents abandoned their children or sold them into apprenticeships, Ian had taken in this enchanting little stranger. He was a special man indeed.
When did I fall in love with you? she wanted to ask him. What did it feel like?
And was it happening again?
Thinking hard, she absently brushed a deep brown lock of hair out of her face.
“Cor, mum, I know you!” Robbie was staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
All the hairs on the back of her neck seemed to stand on end. “Do you, Robbie?” she asked in a low, shaken voice.
Duffie took the boy by the hand. “Come along now, my wee skelper. We’ll leave the master and—”
“No,” Ian said hurriedly. “What do you mean, you know Miss Miranda?”
Robbie lifted his shoulders to his ears in a shrug. “Not by name, mind you. But she gave me tuppence when she passed me in the road. I knows it were her because she’s got a face like the mort in that painting in St. Mary-le-Bow, the one what looks all holy even though she ain’t hardly got a stitch on.”
Duffie made a choking sound and put his hand up to his mouth. Robbie scurried away from him.
“Gave you tuppence?” Miranda asked. “When?”
“Just before you went in there,” Robbie said, puffing up to find himself the object of such rapt attention.
“In where, lad?” Ian asked.
“Well, you know.” Like a monkey, he hung in the knobby banister rails at the bottom of the staircase. “In that building what blew to smithereens.”
Miranda felt nauseated. Her head started to throb. She had been there. Inside the warehouse. Sickening guilt crept up her throat, gagging her. She thought of the twist of stiff, sulfur-smelling rope she had found in her apron pocket, along with tinder and flint. She had almost caused her own death and that of this innocent child.
She remembered the victims of that night, the bleeding faces slashed by flying glass, the burned flesh, the screams and moans of the wounded. Why would she hurt them? Why? She swayed, and the question she dared not ask screamed through her mind. Am I a murderer?
“There, see?” Duffie said with comforting brusqueness. “The lady’s well nigh exhausted. I’ll just have the housekeeper show her to—”
“Not so fast.” Ian spoke in his customary low voice, but his words rang with authority. “Robbie, was Miss Miranda alone?”
“Oh, aye, sir, and she were in a great hurry—but she took the time to toss me a copper and bid me to get myself home.” His round cheeks flushed. “She didn’t know about me having no home.”
Ian contemplated the boy with a look that was fierce, but protective rather than frightening. “Run along, then,” he said. “See if Cook’s made more of those gooseberry tarts.”
Robbie scampered off, and Duffie followed him out of the foyer.
Miranda faced Ian with trepidation. He knew something. But what? Was it more than she herself knew about that night? Or less?
The icy speculation in his eyes was unmistakable. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat. “I don’t suppose,” she said, “you could explain why I was down at the wharves, unchaperoned.”
His large and powerful hand, still sheathed in its black glove, came to rest on her arm. A shiver coursed through her.
“I’m certain you had your reasons, love,” he said, leading her into an opulent parlor furnished with dark wood and deep green hangings. “Come and sit down, and we’ll—”
“Excuse me, sir.” A cheerful-looking man with a peg leg came into the room. On his hand he balanced a salver, and he approached them with an ease that belied his infirmity. “This just arrived for you.”
Ian took the letter from the tray. “Thank you, Carmichael.”
“You’re welcome, sir.” Carmichael sent a pleasant smile to Miranda. “And welcome to you, too, miss. We’ve heard so much about you—”
“Thank you, Carmichael,” Ian said, louder this time. “That will be all.” He helped Miranda to a settee as the servant withdrew.
“How did he lose his leg?” she asked.
“The Battle of Busaco. We were in the Thirty-second Highlanders together.”
Ian MacVane, she decided, was a man who took in strays. As Miranda watched him open his letter, she wondered what sort of stray she had been when they’d first met.
“Damn it,” he said.
She jumped. “Damn what?”
He crumpled the letter in his hand. “Cossacks in Hyde Park.”
She felt no surprise; her knowledge of local events had remained intact. Arriving with fanfare and entourages that often occupied entire flotillas, an extraordinary group was convening in London this summer. All the crowned heads from Tsar Alexander of Russia to the prince of Saxe-Coburg had come to celebrate Bonaparte’s defeat. The Cossacks, under their hetman Count Platov, were serving as life guards to the tsar.
“Have they done something wrong?” she asked.
“It seems they’ve challenged the Gentlemen Pensioners to a horse race. A few of them had too much to drink and are terrorizing people.” Ian went to the door. “I’d best go and see that order is restored.”
“Why you?” She was suddenly aware that she had no notion of Ian’s role in all of this.
He grinned. “It is my métier. I’ll tell you more when I get back. Duffie will see to your needs.”
“Ian, wait!” A flush suffused her cheeks. “Is it true—what you said earlier? About...going to Scotland?”
“Upon my oath,” he said, then was gone.
* * *
The next morning, Ian awakened to the dreadful notion that he had pledged to take Miranda to Scotland and make her his bride.
“A simple enough idea, when you consider it,” Duffie said as he laid out a clean shirt and morning coat. “Marriage happens every day.”
Ian sluiced cold water over himself from the yellow-glazed Newcastle ware bowl on the washstand. “Not to me.” He turned the ewer sideways and took a long drink directly from it. “Never to me, McDuff.”
The diminutive man seemed to swell to twice his size. “What are you saying, then?”
Ian grabbed a towel and began scrubbing his face and hair dry. Craning his neck, he inspected his burned shoulder. He closed his eyes, felt a sickening terror pitch in his gut as he relived the moment of rescuing Robbie. Only the desperate need of a child had prodded him out of his paralyzing fear of heights, prodded him just as the bigger boys had, so many years ago, sticking pins in his bare feet to urge him to climb higher, higher through the tight, narrow passageways of the chimney pots he had been forced to clean.
“I’m waiting for an answer.” Duffie snatched away the towel and gave Ian’s shoulder a casual glance. “Healing nicely,” he pronounced, “which is more than I can say for your paper skull if you don’t answer me. What are your intentions toward the girl?”
Ian grabbed back the towel and rubbed it across his chest. Only from Angus McDuff would he tolerate this constant meddling. He heaved a sigh. “You sound like a fierce papa.”
The salt-and-pepper brows beetled. “Lord knows she could use one. She’s helpless as a lamb, man. Dinna eat her alive.”
Ian began dressing in traveling garb of black breeches and boots, a starched and snowy shirt, a waistcoat, and a cravat. “I’m taking her to Scotland.”
“To Scotland.”
“Aye.”
“To marry her.”
“Nay.”
For an older man, Duffie moved with surprising speed. In one swift movement he had Ian shoved back against the wall, showing no sympathy for the wounded shoulder. His face was florid, his eyes hard. “Damn you to hell, Ian MacVane. I ought to skelp your stubborn hide for you. Have you taken a knife, then, and carved out your own heart?”
Ian glared at him coldly. “Oh, aye. You know I have.”
Duffie dropped his hands to his sides, but he did not retreat. “That doesna mean others are made of ice. I’ll not let you ruin the girl. Not let you whisk her away, destroy her reputation, destroy any chance she has to settle down one day and find happiness.”
“She’s happy now,” Ian said, his mouth a cruel twist, “when she knows nothing of the past.”
“Fine. She knows nothing. And you care nothing for her future. It’ll be no future at all if you skulk off with her, wooing her with false promises. What decent man would have her after she goes adventuring with Ian MacVane?”
“No one need know.” The back of Ian’s neck prickled. He didn’t like feeling this way—knowing he was wrong but lacking the conscience to stop himself.
“She will know,” Duffie said obstinately. “To her core, she is a sweet and decent soul.”
“Frances thinks she is a traitor. Oh. Do pardon me. A sweet and decent traitor.” Ian raked a wooden comb through his close-cropped hair. “Look, would you rather I do what I should have done in the first place?”
“And what is that?”
“Take her directly to the authorities. I could make this all very simple by marching her before them and letting them be the ones to unlock her secrets.”
Duffie’s cheeks paled beneath his beard. “She’s a wee, fragile thing. I suspect you guessed that or you wouldna have brought her this far. There is only one solution.”
Ian set down his comb. He was tired of arguing. It had taken half the night to get the hard-drinking Cossacks to return to their residence at the Pulteney Hotel. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“Because it’s the kind and proper thing, which is not what you are used to doing.” Duffie pointed a stubby finger and narrowed an eye as though taking aim at his employer. “You’ll do exactly as you promised, my fine gentleman. You’ll marry the girl. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, you’ll find out her secrets. And if you’re luckier still, I willna skelp you.”
Five (#ulink_6a54223b-fcb3-535e-bde6-e2675bac9aa0)
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
—Robert Browning
The inmates at Bedlam were not nearly as entertaining since the endowments had started to arrive. Dr. Brian Beckworth, for one, did not regret the change. He did not miss the gawkers who paid their coppers to come and stare at the moonstruck inmates. He did not miss Warden Larkin, given the boot the same day Miranda had left.
The till at the door had dwindled, but the anonymous payments drawn on a London bank account more than made up for that. Before long, the hospital would relocate to a new building in Lambeth, and this moldering pile of rubble would be abandoned.
For years Dr. Beckworth had wanted the institution to be a place of healing. A place where people who had lost pieces of their souls could find themselves again—or at least find solace. Now there was a chance that it could happen.
Some of the women were hopeless, it was true. But others simply needed care and compassion. And now the doctor could afford to give it to them. All because of Miranda.
Feeling a rare sense of accomplishment, Beckworth smiled up at Gwen, who came in with his morning tea and the London Times. She had started doing a few tasks around the place and seemed to take her new responsibilities in stride.
“Nice and strong like you favors it, sir,” she said. Today her hair was caught back neatly with a bit of ribbon, and her hands and face were scrubbed clean. She hid less and less behind her brash, uncaring facade.
Beckworth inhaled the fragrant steam and held up the paper, scanning the front page. Gwen turned to leave, but her eyes widened and she bent close. “Sir, look there! ’Tis our own Miranda, and no mistake.”
With a frown, Beckworth turned the paper over and laid it on his desk. He saw a small sketch of a woman with large eyes and a swirl of thick, dark curls. The caption identified her as “Miss Miranda Stonecypher.”
For no apparent reason, an icy claw of fear clutched at his gut. There was something sinister about seeing her likeness, her name in bold print.
“What’s it say, sir? Please.” Gwen propped one hip on his desk and bent over the sketch.
Beckworth cleared his throat. “It seems her family is looking for her. Requests a reply to an anonymous box at the paper. Claims she has been missing since...” He scanned down the article. “Since the day before she arrived here.”
“But that can’t be,” Gwen stated. “Mr. MacVane already collected her.”
Beckworth’s mouth went dry. “He claimed he knew her, but I was never quite convinced.”
“Hell and damnation,” Gwen burst out. “Then MacVane played us false and stole poor Miranda away!”
From the corridor outside came a scuffle of feet and the murmur of voices, but Beckworth was more preoccupied with the extraordinary notice in the paper.
“So it would appear.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. The cold clench of fear in his gut tightened. Had he let a stranger spirit the girl away?
With a less than steady hand, the doctor dipped quill in ink and scribbled an urgent message. “I shall have this delivered to the Times,” he said, thinking aloud for Gwen’s benefit as he blotted the ink. “And another to the lodgings of Ian MacVane. I have a few questions for him.”
She took the note. “I’ll see that it goes out with today’s post.” She left through the rear door of the office.
A moment later, the other door banged open and two people pushed inside.
“How do you do?” he asked, recognizing both of his visitors. They had come before to gawk at the inmates, but he noticed they’d paid particular attention to Miranda. “I just composed a message to the Times. I do hope—”
“Where is she?” asked the one with the French accent.
Dr. Beckworth was taken aback by the abruptness of the voice. “She left with the Scotsman, Ian MacVane.”
“When?”
“Thursday. That is why the notice in the paper surprised me. You see—”
A strong hand plunged into his hair. Dr. Beckworth found himself forced to his knees. A foot pressed into his back, shoving his chest hard against the floor. “Who took your message to the Times?”
By now, Beckworth understood the peril. He must not lead them to Gwen. “P-posted it myself. Just this morning.”
The visitors exchanged words in French. Beckworth tried to fight, but he wasn’t trained for brawling. His arms flailed, and he managed to choke out one word: “Why?”
The hand holding his hair jerked his head up and pulled back, baring his throat. An expert hand wielded the sharp, cold blade quickly, neatly. As he bled to death swiftly on the floor of his office, Dr. Brian Beckworth answered his own question. He was dying because of Miranda.
* * *
“I’m certain I’ve never done this before.” Miranda gripped the forecastle rail of the sleek, swift frigate Serendipity and gazed out at the churning North Sea. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the fresh, salty air, and threw back her head, wishing she could unbind her hair and let the wind ripple through it. She knew the winds. Somewhere in her forgotten past she had studied wind and weather, though she had no idea why.
“Done what?” Ian stood beside her. With a swath of plaid draped diagonally across his chest, he looked as regal as a Highland chieftain. She shivered with admiration at the very sight of him. How plain and mousy she felt next to her betrothed, yet at the same time, his appearance empowered her. To have the devotion of such a man was heady indeed.
“Gone on a sea voyage,” she said, watching the endless rush of the waves below the bow. “I feel quite sure I’ve not experienced this before.”
Sailors in the mizzentop raced along wooden booms, working the sails as the wind made the ship yaw back and forth. Miranda hugged herself and smiled at the sky burnished like copper by the setting sun. “It all feels brand-new. And so exciting... Ian—” She broke off when she saw the way he was looking at her.
As if he wanted to eat her alive.
She sometimes caught him at it, eyeing her in a manner that was both fierce and tender. Was that the way he had always loved her, with that mixture of intensity and gentleness?
“What is it?” he asked, laying one gloved finger on her wind-stung cheek.
She wondered if he had ever told her why he always wore gloves, but it felt too awkward to ask. Besides, there was something mysterious and romantic about it.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just that I know you’re frustrated because I can’t remember anything.” His touch made her tingle in secret places. Were these places he had touched...before?
She could not quite bring herself to ask him that, either. “I do want to, Ian. Truly I do.” She felt a stirring inside her, a sharp but unfocused yearning that ached in her heart. A sense of loss and longing and emptiness came over her.
“I did recall one thing,” she said.
Clear as ice shards, his gaze focused on her. His hands gripped her upper arms. “Yes?”
She so hated to disappoint him. She wanted to please him, to bring a flicker of cheer to his brooding eyes, to feel his smile like the sun on her face. “I’m afraid it’s not terribly important,” she confessed. “When I woke up this morning, I realized that I know Homer’s Iliad by heart.”
His grin looked strained. “Lovely.”
“In Greek.”
“There has never been any question of your cleverness,” he said. “You trouble yourself too much, lass. The memories will come when they come.”
“What if that never happens?”
“Then we’ll start over,” he said.
She moistened her lips, tasted the faint bitter tinge of spindrift on her mouth. The maintop men called to one another, gathering in sail from their lofty perches, and their shouts were like a sea chantey, rhythmic and pleasant.
She studied Ian for a long time. How magnificent he was, tall and lean and rugged, his black hair and sharp eyes creating a magnetism that ran deeper than his appearance. She felt drawn to him in a hundred little ways—the brush of his gloved hand on hers, the way one corner of his mouth lifted in wry amusement, or the warmth in her chest when he gazed at her.
“Is this what love is, then?” she asked impulsively.
He frowned, clearly startled. “What?”
“The way I feel when I look up at you. Is it love?”
For a rare moment, his composure seemed to slip. He appeared raw and unguarded, unnerved and vulnerable. In the blink of an eye, his customary regard of lazy amusement returned. “This is not a conversation we’ve ever had before.”
“It’s important to me, Ian. It is.” She could not take her eyes off him. “I shall describe it, then, and you can tell me if it is love or not.” She kept one hand on the rail to steady herself. “You make me feel something quite jolting inside. I find myself wanting to touch you rather boldly, to hang on to you and discover your smell and your taste and— Why on earth are you laughing?”
He made no attempt to stifle himself. “That isna love you describe, delicious as it sounds, Miranda. It’s lust.”
Miffed, she poked her nose in the air. There was more to it than that. There had to be, for he was the only man she regarded in this way, and she had made it a point to study the sailors and officers of the Serendipity. She had been on the verge of baring her heart to him, and he was laughing at her.
“Not that I am averse to lust,” he said quickly.
In spite of herself, she felt mirth tugging at her. “But I truly want to know,” she said, sobering. “What did it feel like to love you? And will I ever feel that way again?”
He turned away, but not before she detected a glimmer of torment in his craggy face. “Not if you know what’s good for you.”
“What?”
Still he did not look at her. “There are things about me—” He broke off. His hands clenched around the ship’s rail. “Ah, listen to me.” When he turned to her again, he was smiling. “I dinna want you to have any doubts, sweet.”
“Then teach me,” she said, desperate to fill the emptiness inside her. “Show me how we used to love. I want to remember, Ian. Truly I do.”
He said something gruff and Gaelic. “Lass, you don’t know what you’re asking.”
She watched a gull dive for a fish in the distance, then studied the horizon, the gray edges of sea and sky, as if the answers were written there. After a while, she glanced back at him. “Help me, Ian. Help me remember.”
“I don’t know how,” he said. “I canna simply give you your memories back, all wrapped up in a tidy parcel.”
“Then tell me something, anything. A tidbit to spark my remembrance.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “What sort of tidbit?”
“Conversations we’ve had. Experiences we’ve shared.” She could not explain how fearsome it was, this yawning black gulf inside her. It was like missing a leg or an eye. She was not whole, and she did not know how much longer she could go on. “Please,” she said. “I need to know.”
He watched her for a moment, the wind mussing his glossy black hair. “I taught you to dance the waltz,” he said, speaking reluctantly, as if the words were pulled from him against his will.
She cocked her head. “The waltz. It’s a dance, then?”
“Aye. All the rage in London this Season. The tsar and his sister, the grand duchess of Oldenburg, have made it the sport of choice.” He winked, then gripped her lightly by the waist, with one hand around hers. “The rhythm is like a heartbeat. One, two, three, one, two, three... Do you feel it?” He began to hum a soft melody in her ear.
“You have a beautiful voice,” she said.
He kept humming and drew her along the forecastle deck, neatly avoiding coils of rope, lashed-down barrels and the envious stares of the sailors. She followed his lead, letting his graceful maneuvering make up for her inexperience. Round and round they spun, the rich melody lilting in her ear until the rhythm finally penetrated her very bones. They moved as one, and she reveled in the way they seemed to fit together, in the light scrape of their feet on the wooden deck and the hiss of the ocean speeding past the hull.
“There is,” she murmured, “something magical about dancing. Why is that?”
His hand moved in a circle on her back. “Well,” he said, stretching out his Scottish burr, “dancing involves two people, holding each other, moving in a rhythm both understand, their goal to stay together, for no reason other than sheer physical pleasure.” He smiled wickedly, and a shiver shot down her spine. “There is only one other circumstance in which all that is true.”
She snatched her hand out of his. Hot color surged to her cheeks. “Ian!”
He leaned against a tall spool of rope and watched her, clearly amused. “Aye, love?”
“Have we...did we...”
He threw back his head and laughed. “My dear, if you had forgotten that, I’d say there’s not much hope for us.” Seeing her unamused expression, he took both her hands in his. “Believe me, Miranda. To my eternal frustration, and through no choice of my own, we have never made love.”
“We were waiting, then.”
“Aye.”
“For marriage.”
He hesitated. “Aye.”
“Mary Wollstonecraft didn’t believe in marriage on principle.”
“She may have a point.”
Miranda found herself laughing again, feeling giddy.
“You’re an incredibly desirable creature, Miss Stonecypher,” Ian said.
She wondered if he had any idea how entrancing he was. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel that if I could remember even one moment, if I could just look back and know, then everything would come right.”
“I dinna think it’s that easy.”
“Indulge me,” she said. “Please.”
“The Orangery in Hyde Park,” he said.
“Should that be significant to me?”
“Oh, aye.” He paused. “Your first kiss.”
She felt her color deepen. “Surely a significant event if there ever was one.”
“And you dinna remember it.”
“No.” She stared at his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He took her hand and led her toward the bow of the ship, where they stood in the cool evening shadows. Sails luffed in the wind, and the cry of a cormorant droned mournfully across the swells. “Actually, it’s rather an advantage.”
She began to tingle inside. “An advantage?”
“Oh, aye. You can have your first kiss...all over again.”
With a discreet movement he took off his gloves, dropping them on the deck at their feet.
She felt faint, yet dizzily aware all at once. Nervously she licked her lips. “I’m afraid I don’t know what to do.”
“What you’re doing now is just fine. For the moment.”
“What am I doing?” she asked.
“Standing there. Looking bonnier than heather in bloom.”
He took a step closer. His hands drifted down the length of her arms, heating her skin. The pads of his thumbs found her racing pulse.
“Was it like this...before?” she asked.
“Nay, love. This is better.” His hands traveled up and over her shoulders. His fingers threaded their way into her hair, sifting through the curls.
“Now what?” she whispered.
Though he did not smile, amusement glinted in his eyes. “Just keep your head tilted up. Aye, like that.” He bent low, his face looming close, his breath, with the tang of his evening brandy, caressing her. He touched his lips tenderly to her eyes, first one and then the other, so that they were closed. Then he kissed her mouth, softly, tentatively.
“I can stop at any time,” he whispered, “if this makes you uncomfortable.”
She smiled dreamily. “Uncomfortable is not quite the word for what I feel.”
He kissed her again, tugging gently on her lower lip until her mouth opened and she surged toward him, hungry, wanting. The taste and smell of him filled her—sea and leather and maleness, seasoned with the brandy they had drunk after supper. The sensation of kissing him caused passion to leap up inside her until she was straining almost painfully for him.
His hands slipped from her hair and traveled down, tracing the inward curve of her waist and the outward flare of her hip. Then he touched her breasts, hands brushing, fingers skimming the tips. Warmth seared her in places he wasn’t touching, places that begged for his caress.
Then, as gradually and inevitably as the kiss began, it receded. He lifted his mouth from hers, and his hands dropped to her waist.
She kept her eyes closed, holding the moment, hovering in uncertainty and wonder and delight.
“Miranda?” he asked.
She forced her eyes open. She reached up and touched his cheek. His tanned skin was rough with evening stubble. “I feel completely starstruck, Ian. Bowled over like a ninepin. Was it like that for me before?”
“You never said.” His voice sounded gruff and uneven.
“I was trying to remember what it was like to love you,” she said. “But I feel as if I’m learning for the first time.” That something so simple as a human touch could shake the foundations of her heart was a staggering notion. “Ah, Ian.” She spoke his name on a sigh. “You are so good to be patient with me.”
He took her hand, removed it from his cheek and kissed the back of it. To her surprise, his own hand trembled. “You make it easy, Miranda.” She thought she detected a note of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Too bloody easy.”
* * *
Guilt was a new and decidedly unpleasant sensation for Ian MacVane. Yet as he lay awake in his narrow, damp quarters each night of the voyage, he knew guilt in all its sharp and bitter shades.
He was manipulating the feelings of a naive young woman. Whatever else Miranda’s crimes might be, she was innocent when it came to matters of the heart.
But not for long, if they stayed on their present course.
I was trying to remember what it was like to love you. Her words snapped back at him like a lash. She was driving him insane with her unwavering trust in him.
Trust. Miranda trusted Ian MacVane. She was by far the first woman foolish enough to do that.
She wanted memories, and he was giving them to her. False, hollow tales he dredged from his paltry stores of sentiment.
If ever a man had a past that begged to be forgotten, it was Ian MacVane.
Instead here he was building a castle of lies in order to win Miranda’s faith and perhaps, if he was very lucky, find the memories she kept locked away in her mind.
He kept wondering if he should have simply handed her over to Frances. Perhaps that would have been better all the way around.
The morning they’d taken ship, Frances had shown her customary lack of surprise at his flagrant disobedience. She’d even sent him a message in cipher: Perfect, darling. I do so love it when you do something scathingly clever and cruel. Yes, sleep with the girl. It is the best way to—dare I be so tasteless?—get her to reveal herself to you.
At the bottom of her note, he had scribbled a reply in cipher and sent it back to her: When I bed a woman, my dear, it’s for my own reasons, not because anyone orders me to.
Even then he had known he would find a reason. The whole matter was sordid. He had a sudden notion to turn his back on the entire affair, but he knew he would not.
Time was not critical yet. The duke of Wellington was still in Paris, ambassador to the newly restored King Louis. But once Wellington returned to England, Napoleon’s allies would put their plan into motion.
Ian had pledged to foil the insane plot. Bound by his own private sense of honor, he knew he would not rest until he succeeded in stopping the conspiracy.
Even if it meant filling Miranda’s head and her heart with his lies. Even if it meant a cruel betrayal of her trust. Even if it meant taking her innocence and ruining her reputation.
He pounded his fist into his hard pillow. Surely it wouldn’t come to that. Surely she would regain her memory and divulge the plan before things had gone too far.
When the smoky gray mist of a Scottish dawn tinged the sky, he gave up on sleep. He had lost sleep over only one woman before Miranda, and that was his mother.
For all that Mary MacVane knew or cared.
Shoving aside thoughts of a past he could not change, Ian got up and bathed with water from a basin, then dressed in the black trousers and white shirt Duffie had set out the night before. Soon they would make landfall.
Today Ian would begin a journey from which there was no return. For him, Scotland was a place of memories and madness. Here, his world had been torn to unrecognizable bits by a stranger with greed in his eyes. His soul had been damned by the woman who had given him life.
Once he had escaped Scotland, Ian MacVane had been reborn, a creature of darkness, his past scoured clean through sheer force of will.
Perhaps that was why Miranda held such fascination for him. She had achieved what he had been trying to do all his adult life. She had obliterated the past.
Her means of doing it, however, held little appeal for him. In his soldiering days, he had seen men wake up the day after battle with no notion of the horrors they had seen, of acts that had been committed upon them, of atrocities they themselves had carried out.
At first, the postbattle blankness had seemed a blessing. But the memories always returned in one form or another, weeks or months or years later. Nightmares. Fits of rage or terror. An inability to cope with everyday life. Was that to be Miranda’s fate?
He donned a waistcoat of boiled wool and reached for his gloves. Before pulling them on, he braced his hands upon a sea chest at the end of his bunk and studied them. They were large and squarish, hands suited to the son of a hardworking crofter. Except that the crofter had been murdered in cold blood, his young son sent to toil in Glasgow at tasks so grueling that they were performed only by orphans or slaves.
Ian scowled down at the stub of the last finger on his left hand. The digit had been chopped away at the first knuckle, and the only concession he had gotten after the accident was half a day’s holiday and an extra slice of bread at supper.
Och, how he wanted to forget. Instead he remembered every detail with crystal clarity, as if he were viewing his past through a perfect glass that showed him not only the sights, but the smells and sounds and textures, as well. The reek of soot and blood. His brother Gordon’s bitter curses. Ian’s own horrified screams. The dizzying view of the street far below the rooftop where he had been stranded. The sensation of abject fear that had roared through him as Gordie fell.
He made a fist, hiding his deformity. Then he forced himself to open his hand. Today, no glove. No shoving his hand into his waistcoat à la Bonaparte.
Ian MacVane would return to Scotland as he had left it: maimed and full of rage.
Six (#ulink_f2b4e75f-8e7c-5e42-a8d5-75419ef0f0eb)
On ev’ry hand it will allowed be,
He’s just—nae better than he should be.
—Robert Burns
After the landing, Ian stood on the rocky shore, oblivious to the movements around him, oblivious to the delighted shouts of young Robbie, oblivious even to Miranda, whose presence had consumed him since the moment he had laid eyes on her.
He simply stood, feeling the solid earth beneath his feet and trying to get his mind around the fact that after an exile of fifteen years, he was home. In Scotland.
How much had he changed, he wondered, from that wounded boy, skulking to freedom by hiding in a ship’s hold?
He was staggered by how deeply he had missed his homeland. He drew the feeling in through his pores, and into his lungs with each breath, and the very essence of the land began to pulse through him. This was Scotland, his birthplace.
Here, he had suffered the torments of the damned—but also, in that early misty time of his youth, he had known his greatest joy. Had known the crystal sharp air of the craggy Highlands as he’d raced across the moors after a stray lamb. Had known the sweet, warm scent of a mother and the hearty affection of a father.
Ah, how long ago that had been. The boy who had gamboled through glens and boggy moors, who had fished for trout in the icy streams and chased squealing girls in the kirkyard on Sunday, was as good as dead.
Ian MacVane knew the name of his murderer. Adder, like the snake. Mr. Adder, the sly-eyed Englishman. He had swept like a storm into Crough na Muir, claiming that the crofters were trespassing on his property. And so they were, on land relinquished to him by the laird whom Adder had beggared at the gaming table.
Ian drew in another breath of Scotland. He felt as if he were falling, falling back into the hideous past, squarely into the night Adder and a troop of mercenaries had swooped down upon the croft of the MacVane...
He heard a sound that didn’t belong to the night. Below the living quarters, the cows blew gently in their sleep. Then the sound came again. It was a soft whistle—not an owl or a nightingale, but a human sound. The dog reacted first, leaping down from the loft, yapping wildly.
He heard a sickening thump, and the dog fell silent. By then Ian’s father was up, pitchfork in hand, but it was too late. Too late...
Miranda broke his fall. She did it with something as simple and as complicated as the brush of her hand on his sleeve, a tilt of her head, a querulous smile. “You were a thousand miles away, Ian,” she said. “And it was a sad place.”
He fought the urge to shake her off, to lash out like a wounded wolf, to recoil from her compassion. Instead he managed a wry half smile. “Reading my moods, are you?”
“Didn’t I always?”
“Of course.” Christ, but this was absurd. Inventing a past for them, pretending they had a future.
No one’s future was assured so long as fanatic Bonapartistes kept hatching their plots in England. Ian wondered how the British could be so blind. They and all their allies were convinced that Napoleon would rest content in his defeat in exile. But Ian understood the brilliance and determination of the emperor, the loyalty of his followers. Exile at Elba was surely but a temporary state for such a man. Bonaparte would be back. Already he was coiled like a snake, poised to strike.
Impatience stirred within Ian. He had best make quick work of the marriage—a handfasting would do—and hasten back to London.
“We’ve always been of one mind, lass,” he said, forcing gentleness into his voice as he lied to her. “And my guess is, you’re of a mind for a good bath and a meal.”
“I am.”
Duffie and Robbie had gone on ahead with the baggage. Ian scanned the road that wound up and around the great rising hills. He had not stood on this spot since he was a lad. Yet he knew people would still remember him in the village.
A part of him still dwelt there.
He started toward the settlement, old and tumbled and comforting as a tattered blanket.
After walking along the dusty road for a quarter mile, Miranda stopped him. “Ian.”
“Aye, lass?”
“I don’t remember my own past, save what you’ve told me. But I know nothing of your past, either.”
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Сьюзен Виггс
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: WHO WAS SHE?In Regency London, a woman escapes from a burning warehouse only to realize she doesn′t know her own identity. Although the locket around her neck bears the name Miranda, she has no recollection of her past. Nor does she know why two very different men want her—the devilishly handsome Scotsman Ian MacVane, and Lord Lucas Chesney, the nobleman who claims to be her betrothed.In a race against time to discover who she is and which man she can trust, Miranda embarks on a soul-stirring journey that takes her from the dazzling salons of London to the craggy Highlands of Scotland. All of her beliefs—about herself, her world and the nature of love—are tested to their limits as she seeks the truth about her past and finds an unexpected passion that ignites the hidden fires within….