Arms flailing and nightdress billowing like a ghostly apparition, Vee hit something solid with a thud before she plunged into some shrubbery.
Giles got to the scene first and stared, because the youngest, and usually the most sedate Merriwell had turned into a raging banshee. One who had used naught but all four of her limbs to pin a wide-eyed and petrified young man faceup on the ground.
“Who are you and what do you want!” Spectacles askew and murder in her eyes, she bellowed in his face before Giles stepped in and unpeeled her. Then he hauled the stripling up by his lapels.
“Cousin Galahad. Fancy seeing you here.” He made a great show of dusting the boy off as if digging intruders out of his rosebushes at two in the morning were a daily occurrence. “Miss DianaMerriwell, Miss Venus Merriwell, allow me to introduce Galahad Sinclair, the idiot son of my evil uncle Gervais.”
“I’m not an idiot!” The belligerent’s drawled vowels and softened consonants were unmistakably American, but the accent was different from Jeremiah’s. The young man glared at Vee affronted while he yanked the thorny twigs from his body, as if she were somehow more in the wrong than he was. “And what sort of a stupid name is Venus?”
“About as stupid a name as Galahad is!”
“My sister asked you a question.” Diana assumed her best girl-from-the-rough-end-of-Clerkenwell street-fighting stance. “What are you doing trespassing on this land?”
“The same thing as you, I reckon. Trying to find clues to the identity ofhisharlot mother.” Galahad Sinclair jerked his thumb at Giles, whose dark eyes had narrowed at the insult.
In case his rigid control over his temper snapped and he took tonight’s disappointments out on the young whippersnapper covered in mud and leaves before him, she touched Giles’s arm. The muscles were tense beneath. “You were right. Your cousin is an idiot. I am sure his charming father will be delighted to learn his son just confirmed that they have no evidence whatsoever to back up their ridiculous claims.”
She turned back to the boy, who now looked a little more panicked but covered it well. “How old are you?”
Galahad Sinclair stood straighter in the hope that his exceptional height would make up for the lack of years on his face. “Old enough.”
“One and twenty?” A brief, surprised flicker of his eyelids confirmed her guess wasn’t wide of the mark. “Tell me, young Galahad,is it your ambition to follow in your foul father’s footsteps and see the inside of a jail cell before your first quarter century? Because trespassing is indeed a crime on this side of the Atlantic, and so is attempted burglary.”
“I’ll admit to the first but know nothing about the second.” He knew. His shuffling feet told her so.
“Of course you’ll admit to the first!” Vee snarled in his face, the sprig of leaves caught in the hinge of her spectacles ruining the menacing effect she was aiming for. “Because I caught you red-handed, you snake!” She jabbed his chest hard and Galahad’s eyes narrowed, but other than that he did not move a muscle in retaliation. A detail that Diana could not help but admire. He might not be the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, but he was a proud blunt instrument.
“Where is your feckless father?” Diana glanced out across the black lawn. “Because believe me, he is not much of a father if he would abandon his son to us while he hides in the undergrowth like a coward.”
Giles had described this boy as the image of his sire, and there was no denying Galahad Sinclair was destined to be an exceedingly handsome fellow if he managed not to get himself hanged before he fully matured, but he had said the eyes were different. If Gervais Sinclair’s were as cold as ice as Olivia claimed, then these were molten.
“He’s likely got his gun pointed right at you, so you’d best let me go before somebody gets hurt.” The lad folded his arms, a cocky expression on his face, but Diana knew bravado when she saw it. Or at least she hoped she did. She had perpetually worn it at Galahad’s age to mask the fear and shame that came alongside being an impoverished criminal’s daughter who wanted to be something but was never given the chance.
She also knew the likes of Gervais Sinclair because she had grown up with a different version of him. It took a lot of strength to fight back to a parent like that when doing as you were told and keeping your head down was easier. It had taken her seventeen years to find the courage to break those shackles and forge ahead alone with her sisters into an even more uncertain future. But if she had had no siblings to walk shoulder to shoulder beside her, that rebellion might well have taken longer.
“He isn’t here, is he, Galahad? He sent a boy to do a man’s job to save his own sorry skin, didn’t he? And he’ll raise merry hell once he realizes you failed.” Those proud, expressive eyes twitched again. “I shudder to think how he’ll react when he realizes you tipped us off that he was here. Makes his job so much harder when he cannot sneak inside to find something to corroborate his letter. All his claims are based on hearsay, aren’t they? One person’s word written in a single vitriolic letter that is so flimsy you need tangible proof before you can use it?”
Young Galahad’s eyes couldn’t hold her gaze, so Diana knew she had read the situation right. As they blinked she saw the fear there and realized he was scared—but now more of his father than of them. She knew that awful feeling, too.
“Go!” She pointed in the direction of the gates. “Get off your cousin’s property and don’t come back or I will personally find and tell Gervais what a blithering idiot you have been.” Galahad nodded, relief replacing the fire in his stare, went to run, only to be thwarted by Vee who caught him by the collar and almost strangled him as she yanked him back.
“We cannot let him go! He’s a filthy trespasser. A crook who wants to steal from Giles! I say we call the constable or lock him in the dungeon!” Vee looked to Giles to back her up even though there was no dungeon. Instead, he simply looked to her. Trusted Diana with the decision because he knew how to trust. How had he managed that when the wounds of his childhood were as deep as hers?
“No, Vee.” She touched her sister’s outraged shoulder and sighed. “He is the helpless son of a crook and we know how that feels better than anyone, don’t we?” Their gazes locked in unspoken understanding as they both remembered their past.
Vee’s fingers loosened their grip and Galahad pulled away. In case anyone changed their mind again, he dashed down the driveway toward the gates then skidded to a stop to glance back at them bemused. Diana smiled. She did not need to hear his thanks to know how grateful he was for that one small act of compassion. Because people from her world rarely ever experienced it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As much as Giles wanted to curl up in a ball and die somewhere quietly in a corner from the gushing new wound in his aching, bludgeoned heart, he knew he had to face her. The sun had been up for hours but he had avoided breakfast, using the excuse of checking on the progress of estate repairs to ride aimlessly while he left Diana and her sister to solve his mystery.
If all his mortified procrastinating had achieved anything, it had highlighted two irrefutable facts. The first was what he had said could not be unsaid no matter how much he was tempted to make excuses for it, and the second was he really did not want to talk about it again.
Ever.
He took a moment to compose himself outside the estate office then breezed in. “Have you found anything useful?”
There was no sign of the woman he had been avoiding but Vee smiled from behind the mountain of account books piled on the desk. “I suppose that depends on your definition ofuseful. I have learned a great deal about estate management and the names of every Harpenden employee over the last half century, though nothing so far about your predicament. But my sister is in thegrip of a theory.” She pointed to the Welsh stonemason’s receipt that Diana had found the night before and had pinned to the middle of the only empty square of wall. He wandered to it to read it for himself. “She is convinced that is significant.”
