His numbness prickled.Cannot.He took three steps forward and stood at the bedside. Letters were scattered across the floor. Hugh’s letters. Letters she had held dear and read a hundred times over.
“She wanted me to read them to her.” Papa smoothed the hair away from her face. Gentle. Achingly gentle because he was always gentle with Mamma. “I was so angry with her after you left…I refused. The first time in my life I did not do what she asked of me.”
Hurt speared through the shroud he couldn’t hide beneath. “Papa, do not say that.”
“She must have tried to get them herself. She fell over there by the stand. She was dead before I could come for her.” He held her closer, his cheek against hers, and his dry eyes blinked faster. “A terrible thing for her. To die alone in this room. I should have been holding her. I should have been holding her like this…to make it easier.”
“You could not have known.” Felton sniffed. He wiped his nose with his arm, bent closer, reached out. He hesitated with his hand over her cheek.
He shouldn’t touch her. He shouldn’t grieve her. Not after everything she’d done, the wickedness she’d hid from them, the lies she’d told them all this time.
But he touched her anyway. He brushed his fingers up and down against the soft skin, and he ached with the memory of her smile the first time he had recited his alphabet. Or the look on her face when he’d picked cornflowers from the garden and handed them to her. Or her laugh—the seldom, beautiful cadence of her laugh—when he’d said something childish that amused her.
“Mamma.” He spoke her name, even knowing she could not hear him. He half expected the lashes to flutter open, for her to stare at him with that worried frown when she saw the blood on his shirtsleeves. “Mamma, I—” His voice cracked. He pulled away, walked to the window, wiped more tears away, and tried to still the bruising throb of his chest.
“All I ever wanted to do was please her.” Papa’s murmur. “And make her happy. I just…I only…I loved her. More than anything under heaven, I loved her.”
Felton moved back to the bed and ran his hand, once more, down the soft tresses of her chestnut hair. “I know, Papa.” He turned away with stinging eyes. “I know.”
The next time Eliza awoke, it was not Minney who sat beside her. ’Twas Lord Gillingham.
He had scooted a high-backed chair next to her bed, with his chin on his knuckles, his elbows on his knees. The wavy hair, more whitened than black since she’d arrived, was uncombed and disheveled. Shadows hung beneath his eyes, as if he’d spent these last days in as much torment as she had.
Which was not possible. Was it? Mayhap such a thing could have been true of Captain, who had known her and loved her.
But Lord Gillingham …
A lump pushed up her throat. Not only did he not know her, but the fragile relationship that had formed between them had been shattered when she ran from him and believed him a killer.
As if he sensed her wakefulness, he glanced at her. Some of the despair, the tightness of his expression, fell away as he leaned over her. “Are you thirsty?”
She eased her tongue across her bottom lip. The swelling must have lessened, and she no longer tasted dry blood.
He fetched a glass of water before she could answer. Instead of the chair, he sat on the edge of her bed, placed his hand behind her neck, and gently slid the water to her lips. When she was finished, he returned to his chair. “How do you feel?”
Feel?She felt a thousand things and nothing. She glanced back at the plaster rose on the ceiling, the intricate design, something that could arrest her attention so she would not have to look into the viscount’s face. “Tell me what happened.”
“You do not remember?”
She strained through the haze. The torch-lit cave, the knife slashing her hair and skin, the beast and his eyes, then Felton, the gun.
She shook her head. “Tell me…please.”
“We could have never found you without Northwood. He realized first who had taken you, then rode beyond the rest of us to bring you back.”
A flood of comfort raced through her. She was still hurting, still in the dark, still confused—but the reality that Felton had come for her was a stronghold. Something she could cling to.Someoneshe could cling to, in a world where she belonged nowhere at all.
“By the time the constable, the men, and myself reached the cave, Northwood had Mr. Bowles down. We had already apprehended the others outside the cave, and much work is being done now to locate the rest of the men and ships involved.” His jaw flexed. “They will hurt you no longer. I suspect the gallows for all of them.”
“And Felton? Is he unharmed?”
“In the way you speak of, yes.” His eyes bequeathed the same pity that pulsed in her own heart. “But in many other ways, he is harmed greatly.”
“Then he knows.”
“Yes.”
“Will Mrs. Northwood…will she hang too?”
