I looked at our hands, clasped together, my knuckles bloody from where I had punched Isabel de Armas MacGregor. I did not look at Stoker, but I could feel his gaze upon us. And then I looked into the face I had once loved, the bright brown eyes, soft and almost pleading.
“My dear Harry, I would not abet a small crime to save him,” I said with a smile. “I would commit a large one.”
I turned to Stoker and straightened my shoulders. “Very well. I accept this is your plan.”
Stoker inclined his head and the look he gave me was enigmatic. He turned to Harry and cleared his throat. “I would entrust her to your care except that I have rather more faith in Veronica to handle herself than I do you.”
Harry smiled, a lopsided smile. “You are not incorrect.” He hesitated, then stepped away. “I will give you a moment to say farewell,” he added with unexpected delicacy.
I moved to where Stoker stood, chained like a Gaulish warrior. “I will come back for you,” I vowed.
“I know.” He bent his head so that his lips brushed my ear. To an observer it might have looked like he was murmuring endearments, but the words he said were not romantic burblings. He issued a swift series of instructions on where to find the diamond and then straightened. He put out a hand as if to touch me, then seemed to think better of it.
I forced a smile. “Soon,” I promised him.
I would have stepped away then, but his control seemed to crack. He reached for me. “Look away, Spenlove,” Stoker ordered hoarsely. When he released me, I staggered a moment as I tried to find my legs. Stoker turned away and settled himself on his mattress as if steeling himself for whatever ordeal was to come.
I moved to the rope where Harry was waiting. “My God,” he murmured. “Little wonder you are so loyal to him.”
I turned, my hand upon the rope. “I have not shot you yet, Harry. Do not make me regret that.”
Climbing the rope with my injured ribs was an interlude upon which I do not care to dwell. It was accomplished only by a tremendous amount of willpower and determination on my part with Harry right below, shoving and cajoling until at last I heaved myself through the coal door and dropped to the grass beside it. I rolled over and began to heave. I was thus occupied for some minutes as Harry emerged and waited politely.
“Finished?” he asked brightly as I sat back, hand pressed to my side.
“I cannot think anything remains,” I assured him in a grim voice. He put out his hand and helped me gingerly to my feet. Ordinarily, I do not care to be guided, but in this instance, I was content to let Harry lead.
“The road is easier going, but the fields are faster,” he told me, eyeing my slippers in the moonlight.
“Just walk,” I ordered, pointing to the nearest field. He did as I instructed, pausing twice to help me over stiles and once through a decidedly aggressive thornbush. My hat was gone, my face covered in bruises and scratches, and one sleeve was hanging by a thread by the time we reached the station of Pettibone, a tiny country halt that was mercifully deserted when we arrived. I hung back in the shadows whilst Harry purchased our tickets, but I needn’t have bothered. The lone clerk was sleepy, barely rousing himself to make change. I kept my face averted, studying the map of the surrounding countryside. Marking the direction we had followed, I was able to plot the location of the villa and was pleased to discover our little station was not far from St. Alban’s. We were not so far out in the country as I had feared, and we were, mercifully, on the correct side of the city in order to reach Bishop’s Folly with ease. Our luck held, and the train arrived shortly after we did.
Harry guided me to an empty first-class compartment and I collapsed onto the seat with an audible groan. “It was clever of you to think of first-class tickets,” I murmured. “No one to bother about us.”
“You paid for them,” he said with a grin. “It is the last of what you made me a loan of this morning.”
Harry stripped off his coat and covered me with it, hiding the worst of my tatters as he gathered me into his chest and wrapped his arms about me. Beneath my cheek, his heartbeat was slow and steady. “Try to rest. I will take care of you.”
I gave a derisive laugh, but it broke, ending in a cracked little sigh. He put a hand to my hair and rested his chin on the top of my head. “At least let me try,” he said.
It would have taken strength to resist him in that moment—strength I did not possess. I felt myself relax into him, floating, drifting, and then I was away, and the last thing I felt was his thumb, gently stroking my hair.
CHAPTER
27
The next thing I knew, he was prodding me awake. “We are here,” he murmured. I sat up and a lightning bolt of pain surged through my side. “Easy,” Harry said. I forced myself to my feet and spoke through gritted teeth.
“I will take my ease when Stoker is free.”
Harry, wisely, made no reply. He left his coat draped about my shoulders, and for all the unorthodoxy of our appearance, we attracted little notice as we moved through the throngs in King’s Cross. A quick journey by cab saw us to the back street that bordered the far side of Bishop’s Folly. Stoker and I had agreed that a discreet entrance would be the wisest course of action. Harry and I slipped in through a small door concealed in a wall of ivy, locking it carefully behind.
I had expected the dogs would assail us, but we were greeted by nothing more active than Patricia, the Galápagos tortoise, lumbering through the shrubbery like a boulder with legs. She lifted her head as we passed, but we did not stop. We hurried on, past the pond and the little arrangement of follies that Lord Rosemorran’s father had assembled at the edge of it. The tiny Gothic chapel was my private domain; the Chinese temple was Stoker’s. It seemed an age since I had slept in my own bed, and I was conscious of a new and unaccountable lowness of spirits as I passed my chapel.
Just beyond the pond was the vivarium, a vast glasshouse where I nurtured butterflies, rearing them from larvae to imago, and then collecting the specimens after Nature had taken her course and their brief life spans finished. I had been training George, the hallboy, to tend them in my absence, and I could just see his slender form through the misted panes of glass, moving about the drifts of foliage, setting out plates of cut fruit and rotting meat. (The latter was for the benefit of my little colony of Apatura iris, a luscious little violet butterfly that feasts on carrion. I was preparing an article for The Aurelian Sisterhood on the subject, and had set up an experiment testing their preferences by providing them with the carcasses of a frog, a mouse, and a rabbit. The frog, the interested reader might care to note, was by far the favorite.)
Atop the rise at the front of the property, the house itself glowed with light from the windows of Lord Rosemorran’s study to the nursery floor, where his children were no doubt busily authoring mayhem. I wondered if Lady Cordelia were amongst them, putting her baby down for his evening sleep, and I felt another sharp pang. I did not envy her having a child—far from it. I had no maternal instincts whatsoever. But I envied her stability, her sense of place in the world. Wherever she went, whatever she did, she would always be Lady Cordelia Beauclerk, sister of the Earl of Rosemorran. She would always have a home at Bishop’s Folly, and she would always move with the assurance of the class into which she had been born. My own sense of authority had been hard-won by experience, and I realized, perhaps for the first time, that it had begun to falter. Being confronted with the specter of Harry Spenlove had knocked my confidence badly. He had been the greatest mistake of my life, and seeing him, I was once more a girl of twenty, following her impulses straight into disaster. I had not been myself since the moment I had come face-to-face with him at Hathaway Hall, and I was suddenly, blindingly furious at him for robbing me of my carefully cultivated sense of sureness.