“Why? What in the world—”
“Can’t you just trust me? These people . . . they’ll stop at nothing. They proved that with Johnnie.” Her voice cracked.
So did Mabena’s patience. She lurched forward. “What does any of this have to do with Johnnie?”
Beth jumped away before Mabena could grab her. “Just go. Please. I’ll take care of this, I’ll—”
“We’re not leaving you to handle it alone! We’re family!”
Beth shook her head and ran toward the front door, still half-open from where she must have slipped in. Mabena wondered fleetingly how she’d gotten past the lock but just as quickly realized she must still have a key.
All of which served only to distract her long enough that she didn’t see the kitchen chair Beth tipped down behind her as she ran. It tripped Mabena up, tangled with her arms and legs and shouts. And probably inflicted a few bruises in the process.
Beth, blast her, was already gone by the time she looked up and out the door.
Hands landed on her arms, helping her up, but they weren’t Beth’s, as they should have been. Libby. “Should I go after her?”
“There’s no point.” Wincing at the pain in her shin and rubbing at the one in her ribs, she scowled at the door. “She’s faster than either of us, and she knows the island inside and out. No one hides like Beth Tremayne. When she doesn’t want to be found, you don’t find her.”
Libby’s hands fell away. “You said . . . you said you were family.”
She could have claimed she’d meant it metaphorically, as she would have done three weeks ago. But what did it matter now? She sighed. “Cousins. Our mothers were sisters. My family’s the one that’s dragged the Tremayne name down.”
Libby sank to a graceless seat on the floor in a puddle of moonlight from the still-open door. Darling pounced on her again—sans the hat this time—but she didn’t even stroke his fur. Just stared up at her as if her name were Judas Iscariot. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you—you let me think you . . . You knew before we came, didn’t you? You knew something was wrong.”
“Her letters stopped.” It wasn’t how she’d meant to tell her. No, that wasn’t even it. She’d never meant to tell her. She righted the chair, knowing she couldn’t right this misstep so easily.
“So you . . . manipulated me. Into coming here. It was never about me and Sheridan and Bram, it was . . .”
The hurt was so heavy in her voice that Mabena had to brace herself against it. Squeeze her eyes shut, even as she pushed shut the door. Maybe the swinging darkness would blind her to the truth she didn’t want to see on Libby’s face. “Can’t it have been both?”
“No. If it had been both, you would have told me. You would have . . . and you should have. Don’t you think I would have sent you, or come with you if you wanted? Did you trust me so little that you thought lying was the only way to come and help her?”
Mabena turned, slowly. Too slowly. By the time she was facing her again, Libby was on her feet, speeding toward her bedroom. When the door slammed a moment later, Mabena’s new bruises throbbed. “My lady!” She didn’t know what she meant to say, and part of her insisted she shouldn’t say anything. She should just go to her own room and let it rest. Address it in the morning.
But that was the coward’s way. So she limped to Libby’s door instead of her own. She didn’t knock—it would just give her an excuse to tell her to leave. She didn’t try the knob—it was probably locked. She just rested her forehead on the wood. “When I answered your advert—Cador had just left me for some London girl who promised him connections. He said . . . he said I wasn’t good enough. Not for the life he wanted. That I wasn’t fit to be the wife he needed, only a maid to serve her.”
How could it taste so bitter on her tongue, even two years later? “So I . . . decided that if that was all he thought I was, that was what I’d be. I saw the advert in a paper a tourist left behind, and I answered it. Beth wrote my recommendation. My family begged me not to go, but I needed to get away.”
The only sound from within was the squeak of the bed’s springs. She could imagine Libby lying on it, her back to the door, a pillow over her head to try to block out Mabena’s pathetic story.
“When I realized that Beth had found some sort of trouble . . . she’s my cousin. My best friend. I couldn’t just do nothing, my lady, and you had a problem of your own, so . . . It seemed a handy solution. I never meant you to be hurt by it, and I certainly never meant you to get mixed up in whatever she’s mixed up in.”
There. It was the closest thing to an apology she knew how to give, and it was true, every word.
But silence pounded from the other side of the door. And every pulse of it screamed that it wasn’t enough. That she wasn’t forgiven. That she didn’t deserve to be. That it didn’t matter what had chased her from Tresco two years ago. It didn’t matter what had brought her back now. She’d played it all wrong, and while her family here could overlook it, Lady Elizabeth Sinclair could not.
She sighed and tapped a finger once against the door. Then pushed away. Maybe it wasn’t enough. But it was all that she had.
Without another word, she slid back into her own room like a shadow and curled up on the floor under the window. The ocean’s heartbeat melded with her own.
Having lived most of his life on an island that was all of a square mile in size, Oliver was no stranger to tension among his neighbors. Sometimes through a stormy winter there was little to do but argue with whomever crossed your path. But he never liked sensing that angry rod between two people, holding them six feet apart even if they were standing shoulder to shoulder. The mirror erected between them that kept them from seeing each other and showed them only their own frustrations, their own pains.
After the note that came from Mabena, saying she’d seen Beth, he’d expected her and Lady Elizabeth to arrive on Tresco Saturday evening bursting with whatever story they had to tell. Eager—if anxious—to put the finishing touches on their plan for tonight’s visit to Piper’s Hole. Instead, they’d stepped out of Mabena’s boat with a curtain of silence draping them. The kind that wasn’t stiff enough to speak of an argument only minutes past, but whose very heaviness said it had persisted far too long already.
He’d shot Mabena a silent question, but she’d pretended not to see it. As she always did when she didn’t want to address something. No, she’d just shouldered the overnight bags they’d both brought and said with false cheer that she’d better go and see her parents straightaway. He’d taken Lady Elizabeth’s arm and walked with her, but her silence only grew deeper, if that were possible.
Perhaps it was insight that told him she, then, had been the injured party, rather than the injuring one. Perhaps it was bias—he tended to assume that when someone had that windblown, storm-struck look in their eyes, the tempest named Mabena was to blame. Either way, he didn’t know whether to assure the lady that it would blow over, leave it alone entirely, or try to wheedle more information out of her.
Twenty-four hours later, he still wasn’t sure. He’d gotten to know her fairly well over the last three weeks, he’d thought. They’d gone to the other islands together, searching for Beth. He’d visited them on St. Mary’s each Thursday to see what new novelty had been delivered the day before. They’d come to Tresco each Tuesday noon, and he’d met their boat, walked them into town. She’d been at the races each Wednesday morning, cheering him on, offering the same teasing consolation as any islander would when his team lost. Handing out Mrs. Gillis’s tea and no doubt the one who tucked pound notes into her jar—no one ever saw her do it, but who else could it have been? And the fact that she did it, but on the sly, that she dressed like the rest of them, that she helped wherever needed, had resulted in his neighbors’ all coming to call her “our lady.”