What she really needed was to go over everything with Solomon. Missing him was an ache that never quite went away except when he was with her.
“Goodbye,” she remembered to say to the old ladies, who were looking both amused and baffled by her haste.
She hurried down the stairs, thoughts rushing through her head while she tried to grasp some important, elusive idea that would explain everything.
Stairs.
Her neck prickled. Instinctively, she grasped the banister and glanced behind her.
Peregrine Mortimer smiled at her from the landing.
Her heart lurched, for it was an ugly smile and there was no one around to see what happened next.
Chapter Fifteen
Solomon barely noticedthe snarled traffic, so eager was he to show Constance the house he had just seen. For the first time, he had felt at home in a strange house, and was sure Constance would feel it too.
When he alighted from the hackney at last at the Silver and Grey office, he realized it was dark. Janey was locking the front door.
“There you are,” she said. “I’d about given up on you. You going back in?”
“Where are you going?”
She stared at him. “Home? You all right, guv? I mean sir?”
Solomon extracted his watch and read it by the light of the streetlamp. He swore under his breath. “I’ve missed the train back to Sutton May.”
“So you have. And I’m missing me dinner. You sleeping in there or back at your own place?”
For a moment, stupidly, he felt lost. He had been looking forward to dashing back to Constance, to telling her the latest about David and what he had set in motion. To telling her about the house…
He shoved aside what he could not change. “Sorry, Janey. Take a cab home.” He shoved some coins in her hand at random and set off for his house. And his brother.
“Abel Drayman,” he said abruptly, striding into the room where David was dining.
David dropped his fork with a clatter. “I remember him!” He stared at Solomon. “I think…it was him, not me, who killed Chase, the merchant?”
“I think he killed him both times. Could it have been Drayman that Chase was drinking with in the Crown and Anchor?”
“I didn’t see his face. His back was to me, and then I was so fixed on Chase that I didn’t look. What made you think of him?”
“I found your Captain Blake.” Solomon cast himself into the chair opposite his brother. Oddly enough, the place had been set as though Jenks had expected him home for dinner. “It was he who took you to the hospital in Marseilles. He thought you would die but was too taken up with Chase and his own problems to find out.”
David shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind.”
“It does matter. You were ill with brain fever, David. The scene you witnessed had such a nightmare quality not because you were mad and imagining things but because you were sick and fevered. That was the illness that deprived you of your memories for so long.”
“I am not mad,” David stated.
Solomon poured wine into both their glasses. “You are not mad. You were never mad.”
David raised his eyes. “Remembering you, pretending to be you… That was just…loneliness.”
“Missing your family. As we missed you. But worse because you were alone and unsafe.” And suffering… Imagining that suffering was unbearable. To both of them.
David picked up his glass and drank a large mouthful. “How was Captain Blake?”
“Not well, and somewhat ashamed. I promised him I would put it right.”
