Archer put a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “We will find him. I promise you.” He turned to the nurse, an older, kind-faced woman hovering nervously at her mistress’s side. “Where has he gone in the past, when he wanders?”
The old woman gathered herself with a shaking breath. “In London he often heads for the mews. He’s fond of horses. But he doesn’t know his way around these grounds.” She glanced with dread at the lake. “And he doesn’t know how to swim.”
“Miles,” Archer commanded the underbutler, “gather the footmen and see that they surround the perimeter of the lake with torches at once. And send another group out to search the pleasure gardens. He couldn’t have gone far.”
Poppy took a torch from a footman. “I will check the garden outbuildings. Maxwell keeps animals there. Perhaps he saw them from his window.”
“Miss Cavendish,” Lady Rosecroft objected, “thank you, but you mustn’t walk out alone.”
“Don’t think of it. I have been over every inch of these grounds. I daresay I am as equipped as anyone to find the boy quickly.”
“I’ll accompany Miss Cavendish,” Archer said. “In the meantime, Hilary, stay here in case he returns.”
He took his own torch from a footman and together they walked briskly away from the lights and music, following the path to the outbuildings west of the house. A single mule stood loose before the stall, munching on grass. The door to its pen was ajar.
“Christ,” Archer swore, and broke into a run. She jogged along behind him, fearful of what they would find inside. If the tiny boy had indeed made his way in and managed to open the pens, he would be in danger of being kicked or bitten.
“Georgie?” Archer called, ducking under the low roof.
Inside the dim building she could hear the breathing of sleeping animals. It made her uneasy. The calm rhythm of their breath in the moonlit pen brought back memories of her own childhood, when she’d crawl up into the loft of her uncle’s stables when she was terrified and missed her mother.
“He’s not here,” Archer said, shining the light across the stalls.
She leaned up on her tiptoes, looking for the smallest, darkest spaces.
She could still feel that child’s fear, that primal urge to burrow into the darkest, smallest nooks. Hiding in the shadows, listening to the breath of animals the way she’d once listened to her parents sleep when they had lived, had been the only way to outrun the nightmares. She had sorely tried the patience of several relatives before her uncle had taken her in, for no one knew what to make of a lonely little girl as liable to be found at dawn trembling in a manger as asleep in the nursery. No one knew what to do with a child who screamed through the night, stricken by terrors no one could account for. Her parents’ deaths, after all, had been so ordinary—weak lungs, a fever following the loss of a child. The visions that had tormented her—her father’s coffin, the tiny, wizened baby, the deluge of maternal blood, the soiled sheets—had struck her aunts as ghoulish and unnerving, out of all proportion to her loss.
Only Bernadette had understood. Bernadette, the nurse her uncle had hired at Bantham Park, had lost her own parents. She’d sensed innately what Poppy had really wanted when she’d hidden herself away.
To be found.
For to be found was the only way of knowing you were wanted.
In the farthest corners, she saw a recess under the roof, just low enough that a child might clamber up the stall beside it and tuck himself inside.
“Georgie?” she called out. “Georgie, darling, are you about? You mustn’t be scared. We’re here to bring you home. Your mama misses you very much.”
A small voice laden with tears whispered from a corner stall. “I’m frightened.”
Poppy raised her torch.
The boy was tucked up in a pile of straw, his frilled nightdress and cap covered in bits of hay. Archer handed her his torch and lurched for him. “Come here, my boy,” he murmured. “It’s all right. You’re safe.” Georgie snuggled against him with a frightened sob, his blond ringlets crushed against Archer’s neck.
She watched as Archer rocked the child back and forth and whispered soothing words to him. His face was poetry, haggard with quiet devastation. She stared at it. That face was one she knew. She knew.
That fierce slash of a nose, the tousle of dark hair. The torchlight in the near blackness of the stables, the grassy smell of manure, a whispered voice amidst the murmuring of sleeping animals.
The wind fell out of her.
She knew exactly who he was.
Why she had recognized him that first evening when he’d driven her to Greenwoods House.
Why, in the grips of laudanum, the man in her bed had seemed no more real than the figure in her nightmares.
Why lately her thoughts had turned so frequently to that night when no one had found Poppy hidden in the stables, because Bernadette had disappeared.
She had sensed Westmead had a secret. But never, ever, had she imagined it was something like this.
He was indeed his father’s son.
She’d been a fool.
It had grown late. The last of the guests were making the sleepy walk to their chambers or carriages. Outside, footmen tiptoed across the shadowy lawn, removing abandoned flutes of champagne.
Archer had meant to use this night to find a wife, and instead he’d spent it on the floor of the nursery, watching his godson build and destroy towers of blocks until the dying notes of the orchestra had faded.
Not that he minded. He felt curiously aloft. He had forgotten the way that children of that age smiled and laughed at the slightest provocation. How their large eyes looked at you with the purest kind of trust, the darkness the world could bring not yet impressed upon their minds. The clean and milky smell of them as they drifted off to sleep.
He grabbed a bottle of chilled wine from a silver ice chest and snatched two crystal glasses from the tray of a passing footman. Now that the ball had concluded, festivities were in order. And he knew just the person he wanted to toast.
He strolled to his wing of the house and glanced down the hall. Firelight flickered beneath the door. He gave it a light tap. “Cavendish?” he said quietly, through a smile. “A word, if you’re awake?”
There was no answer. Perhaps she had gone to his study.
But that room, too, was empty. The fire was nearly dead in the grate and her things were no longer on the table. All that was left of her pile of drawings and chalk was a single slip of paper and the crown of plumeria he’d had made for her—torn now, as if she had ripped it from her head without removing the pins.
He picked up the note.
I once asked you how it was I seemed to know you. I now understand why you lied.
Stay away.
He stared at it blankly. When she’d inquired if he’d known her late uncle, he had answered truthfully. Of course, he had been to Bantham Park once or twice, if furtively, during the years when she would have been a child. But certainly never as a guest of the house. Certainly not in any circumstance in which he would have been introduced to a little girl.
He strode back to her door and knocked on it firmly, not much caring who heard. When still she didn’t answer, he tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. He poked his head inside, averting his eyes in case she was indecent.