Linda Needham (8 page)

“Any sign of my belongings? I was hoping that’s why you’d come.”

“Not for a few hours.” It wasn’t until she was shrugging out of the huge frock coat that he realized where he’d seen it. “That’s my coat, madam.”

She clutched it against her chest. “And your socks.”

“My what?” She slipped her foot out of the tall boot and showed him a long white sock drooping off the end of her toes, the cuff bunched down enough to reveal the angry bruise she’d gotten from the damnable shackle.

“Mumberton was busy enough without me bothering him about socks and such.” She rucked the sock up her shapely calf all the way to
her perfect knee and then jammed her foot back into the boot, prepared to do battle against the furniture, while the boy dodged between them on his errand.

“I suppose you stole those boots off my greensman while he was still wearing them.”

“Do let me know if he complains, and I’ll return them instantly.” The genuine teasing of her smile stunned him, caught him in the gut, and filled him with a callow wanting. Wanting to sample her mouth and savor her laughter, to bury his face in her hair. And damned if she hadn’t crossed the distance between them to stand just a foot from him, turning her back to him, sweeping up the scattering of curls off her fine shoulders, and exposing the ivory column of her neck, the snowy shell of her ear.

“Buttons, if you please, my lord.” The back of her dress was gaping but for two tiny buttons. “I could only reach a few of them.”

A whole line of open little buttons exposing her bare back.

Her absolutely bare back.

Bloody hell, Mumberton had found the dress but forgotten a set of small clothes. This insubstantial little gown was hardly more decent than her flannel nightgown and certainly no barrier to his imagination. No wonder she’d borrowed his coat and the boots and his stockings.

Hell, that’s just what he needed. To be carrying this image with him all day and well into the
night—her breasts unbound inside her bodice, just beyond the muslin, just beyond his hand.

Far beyond that, if he had any sense, any decency at all. He hadn’t slept well last night, wondering how this ruse was going to play out, wondering if she longed for her coward of a husband. Had she lain awake praying that he would scale the walls of Everingham Hall and rescue her? Most of all, he’d wondered why the thought of her being married at all had set his blood to boiling.

He fastened the buttons as swiftly as he could manage, given their pea size and his large fingers, trying not to brush the downy silk of her skin in the breach.

“There.”

“I’m obliged, sir.”

And I am standing on quicksand, aroused and wanting you, madam.

“May I send for food from the village? There’s little in the kitchen.” She brushed past him in her scent of peach and vanilla and laid a folded sheet on a side table. “You can mark it against my account.”

Her account! “You’ll take meals in the house.” The barked order came out of nowhere and drew a suspicious frown to her mouth.

“That’s not necessary.”

“It is, and you will.”

She hesitated, her hand rounding against her hip, defining too many lush curves for a misty
soft morning in a secluded cottage. “Does this mean that I’m your prisoner after all, my lord? Doomed to obey your every whim?”

It was plain to him which of them was doomed in this inequitable arrangement between them. “It means, Miss Finch, that you’ll starve if you don’t come to dinner in the hall.”

She blinked at him and looked to the boy across the room, madly rolling up a sheet. Her smile was fond and unfeigned, her gaze gentled from its usual wariness.

“Well, Chip, it seems as though you and I’ll be taking our meals together with his lordship in the hall.”

The boy smiled. “Good, Hollie! We’ll pretend that you’re my mama!”

Doomed, indeed.

C
harles spent the rest of the early afternoon with his estate agent, an autumn ritual that he’d once detested for the way it tied him to the inscrutable harvest accounts, to the bushels per acre, the rents and tithes and the leaseholds. He’d feared the accounting most of all for the disorienting array of facts and figures that flew through his head before he could capture them.

But he’d long since mastered his dread as well as the complexities of the accounting, and in recent years he’d come to enjoy the process, looked forward to the scents of the estate and the textures of the changing seasons.

He’d even started making excuses to spend more time at Everingham Hall and less in London.

What he dreaded now were the cartons and crates from Miss Finch’s shop, stacked everywhere in his library. Each one was filled with an indiscriminate collection of bottles and banners and scraps of fabric and stacks of paper. The work table looked just as daunting, with neatly indecipherable piles of placards and letters and newspapers that would finally and forever bring Spindleshanks to his knees.

With some help from the man’s uncompromising wife.

Blazing hell, what was he going to do with it all?

And with the woman standing in the midst of it like a defeated but dangerously determined general, surveying the scattered remains of her beloved army.

At least she was now more fully dressed in a gown of her own, stockinged and slippered, and wearing a nearly shapeless, ink-stained muslin apron that went from her shoulders to her ankles. The color was high in her cheeks, a dazzling light in her eye. The effect made her look as though she were halfway through an exceptionally healthy pregnancy.

The astounding fantasy that she was with child and that he’d planted it there made his heart skip and roll.

“My husband isn’t going to like this intrusion into his business, my lord.”

He couldn’t have asked for a stronger dose of reality. She wasn’t his; she never would be.

“Your husband isn’t meant to like anything about our transaction, madam.” He touched his fingers to the blocky printing on one of the placards on the table and tried to shrug off the uneasiness that settled over his shoulders.

The trick would be gaining her cooperation in a way that she would never think to guard against. He was plenty practiced at it; with any luck Miss Finch would be too engaged in her own trickery to notice his own.

Too caught up in her defense to notice that he couldn’t read a word.

“Your men picked up everything willy-nilly and just dropped it into boxes.”

Sedition, high treason, and all, Miss Finch.
He took a breath and cleared his head. “Nothing damaged, I assume.”

“It’s too soon to tell.”

“I wouldn’t want the evidence ruined. The path to your husband’s whereabouts is in this room somewhere. Make no mistake, I’ll find him.”

She snatched a leaflet off the table and wagged it at him as though it meant something to him. “Well, then, my lord, here’s something that will certainly help you locate his hideout. ‘Putney’s Cheltenham Salts. By appointment to His Majesty King George, for the relief of bilious livers and dropsical dispositions.’”

Charles kept his silence as the woman flicked her way through the stacks on the table, ticking off titles as she went, sniffing at him as she found another to read.

“Ah, now this might be just the evidence you’ve been looking for: ‘Stove grate radiators—for ornamental comfort and everlasting heat. Fenders, fire-irons, and patent baths.’” She tapped at the engraving. “That’s it, my lord. Find this stove grate radiator and you’ve found Captain Spindleshanks.

“Oh, and let’s not dismiss this blasphemous page from
The Handbook of Song Birds
. Note the civilly disobedient woodcuts.” She had worked her way around the table to his elbow, pointing to four delicate, fine-lined engravings on a single large sheet of thick paper, the top two panels upside down. “I need hardly explain to you that this nested starling was designed to incite the heart of any weaver to rise against his master. Sedition, to be sure. And due to my customer in just two weeks.”

She was marvelous to watch, dancing with her words to distract him from his investigation of her bloody beloved Adam. He took the page from her when she offered it—a marvelous display of intricacy. A common nuthatch in every detail, down to the faint lines of the small feathers at its eye.

“Who is your customer for this?”

“The Dunsmere Avian Society. For their
Christmas volume. I have another hundred copies to print and bind.”

A disorienting art, this printing business; different rules from those he was used to. “Why are these two upside down from the others?”

“This was drying, my lord, when it was packed. And ruined here where the ink smeared across the wing.”

“My apologies.”

She glanced sharply up at him, doubt in her eyes or surprise that he could apologize for anything. “Yes, well, I was still to print another set of birds on the reverse of this page. Two sides of a sheet of paper folded twice for a total of eight pages, four per side. Upside down, because of the deckling on the edge.”

“Which is…?”

“When the pages are cut in half and assembled correctly, the uneven edges appear consistently at the bottom and the right edge and the cleanly cut edges across the top and inside the binding.”

She was very good, if this was truly her work and not MacGillnock’s. Though the business had been her father’s.

“And you printed this on your Stanhope? Just you?”

“You still don’t believe me! The Tuppenny Press is mine. See.” She stuck out her hands, flipped them palm up. “These are the hands of a
printer. Ridged with ink, smelling of linseed. Inspect them if you will; you’ll find all the proof you want.”

Charles slipped her hand inside his—selfishly, for no reason but the chance to lace his fingers between hers.

Long fingers, strong and beckoning; neat fingernails, healthy half-moons, clean, trimmed, and unmistakably inked. Her delicate wrists were still chafed from the handcuffs.

“Not linseed-scented, madam.” Peaches and warm summer days. Though he shouldn’t be noticing another man’s wife. Especially this particular wife.

“The printer’s brand, my lord. A handful of ink. It’s probably in my veins.”

“And does it flow as readily through your husband’s veins? Is he a printer?”

Hollie couldn’t reply; her heart was still stuttering from the man’s singular touch, the lightning and its afterglow that skipped across her skin and pooled low in her belly. Worst of all, she couldn’t recall what she’d told him last night, what—if anything—she’d said about her husband’s job when he wasn’t out being the dashing Captain Spindleshanks.

Should Adam Gillcrest be a printer? No, not Gillcrest,
MacGillnock!
Or was he a scholar? Or a newspaper reporter from New York? Yes! In America, where the press was free and uncen
sored. She opened her mouth but shut it again quickly. She’d told him that her Captain Spindleshanks was from Scotland.

“My husband is an accomplished printer.” And she was becoming an accomplished liar. “He’s every bit as good as I am. Better, I think. Though I might be seeing him through the eyes of a loving wife.”

Everingham studied her in silence, a tic of impatience at the corner of his mouth. “What was the last item Adam MacGillnock printed in your shop?” He was good, this commissioner of inquiry into the massacre in St. Peter’s Fields, surprisingly insightful for a peer of the realm. “Is it here?”

“Why?”

His eyes narrowed, deepening the demon look of him and reminding her that she couldn’t let down her guard for a moment.

“Because I asked, madam. Because I am conducting an investigation into his crimes.”

“I don’t recall what projects my dear Adam was working on.” She escaped to the boxes that lined the wall on the other side of the table, on the lookout for anything that would point directly to her.

Like Captain Spindleshanks’s costume! The hat and the coat, the wig! Oh, lord, was it here somewhere, just waiting to be discovered?

“My husband spent so little time at home, my lord. And when he was at home…well—”

Everingham growled suddenly and picked up the page of starlings. “Not this damn bird book?”

“No, that’s mine.”

“And this?” He grabbed a handful of loose paper from the table and came toward her, causing her to sit down hard in an upholstered chair.

Hollie looked down at the first page in his hand and suffered a moment’s panic.

“The Old and Wicked Corruption…”

Dear God, her notes. Her raw, unfettered, seditiously radical thoughts, laid bare for anyone to read. Page after page of helpless sorrow and private rage and probably high treason.

And a trail that led directly to Spindleshanks.

To her.

Unless she appeared to purposely betray her beloved husband once again. Hardly a noble heart. Because she would never do such a terrible thing to the man she loved.

“Read it, Miss Finch.”

Needing to be free of his influence, she ducked under his arm and pretended to scrutinize the paper in her hand, trying to decide how to explain it to him.

“The Peterloo Massacre!!!!” it read, with all those points of exclamation that she always hoped would snag her reader’s attention. “It’s only an idea for a publication, my lord. I never printed it.”

“This is
your
hand?”

Now he’d know the ebb and flow of her handwriting. But he’d have learned it soon enough; bits of herself were strewn about everywhere in his library. “It is.”

“Read,” he snapped.

She opened her mouth to tell him to read it himself, but he had turned his back and was picking through one of the boxes.

Please, God, don’t let him find the costume! Spindleshanks would have taken it with him.

She watched him in his constant prowling and tried to read. “‘Containing an eyewitness narrative of the events which preceded, accompanied, and followed the fatal meeting in St. Peter’s Fields, 16th August, 1819.’”

“What the devil is this, madam?” He was studying a small type block. The frame was still intact, its letters and slugs locked in place. He looked up at her, frowned in great suspicion, and held the block out to her.

Her heart skidded to a stop, overtaken by a horrible memory of sabre and blood and chaos. “It’s just an obituary.”

Her father’s.

“This is?” Stirling ran his thumb across the letters, then held it up to the late afternoon light streaming through the tall windows. He shook his head and then shot a stormy glance at her. “It’s nonsense.”

“It’s a type block, my lord.” Hollie joined him, rescued the dear composition from his paw be
fore he could accidentally dismantle it. “It’s used to compose a section of type before the whole piece gets locked into the skeleton.” She hadn’t had the heart to knock it down, to resort the letters into the type boxes.

“You can read this?” He lifted her hand and peered even closer at the block of upside down, backward letters.

“The printer’s habit, my lord. Reading backward and upside down and all in a jumble.”

“Go ahead. What does it say?” He folded his arms against his chest and leaned against the table beside her.

“It’s just an obituary.”

“Read it.”

He would know too much about her then. She took a wobbly breath. “It says, ‘Robert Finch. Publisher, printer, beloved father—’”

“Finch?” He startled her with the fierceness of his question, with the concern in his eyes. “This is your father’s?”

“A keepsake.”

“Go on.”

She didn’t want to. Though he couldn’t read the text as well as she could, it would take him only a moment to cipher his way through the backward and reversed letters. And then he’d know everything for himself, all the circumstances of her father’s death, her motives and her methods.

So much for her life as a spy in the earl’s camp.

“‘Born the 14th day of July, 1771, son of a wool merchant. Died the 16th day of August, 1819—’”

“
When
did you say?” She’d rushed through the date, but he’d recognized it anyway.

“‘Died the 16th day of August, 1819 of fatal injuries sustained on St. Peter’s Fields at the hands of the Manchester Yeomanry.’”

He was quiet for a very long time, his fine mouth an undefinable line. “Why didn’t you tell me of this?”

Feeling oddly guilty, Hollie turned away to a nearby box and carefully replaced the type block. “Because my father is my private business.”

“The hell he is, madam.” He wrapped his warm fingers around hers and turned her, his eyes as opaque as the midnight of his hair. “If Robert Finch, your father and the father-in-law of Captain Spindleshanks, was in Manchester with the rest of the radicals, if he met his death there that day, then it damned well is my business. You’ve made it so.”

Hollie tried to pull away, but he’d trapped her against the table with his impossible height and his ferocity. “My father wasn’t a radical, sir. He was a newspaperman. He was there to report the news.”

“I don’t care who the devil he was or why he was there. He was killed in the rioting.” He laid his fiery words against her cheek, the barest brush of his breath at her hairline.

“He was murdered, my lord. Bled to death on
the field, his shoulder slashed through by a soldier.”

He said nothing, then finally nodded. “His name wasn’t on the list of the dead.”

“And it wasn’t a riot. It was a massacre, my lord. But I’m sure that the reports from your commission will lead you to that same conclusion once you’ve studied them carefully. Impartially.”

He pulled away. “Damn the report, madam. Your father shouldn’t have been there.”

“Oh, and why not? It was his job, as it was of every other newspaperman in the country: to record and publish the speeches. A peaceful gathering of citizens that became a bloodbath. My father shouldn’t have died.”

“He wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been there.”

“He was in Manchester to record Henry Hunt’s speech, to report the events of the meeting as they unfolded, nothing more.”