Days of Gold (29 page)

It was when he put his tankard down that he saw the handbill on the wall. It was the same one that had been posted in Scotland, and it was the picture that Edilean had drawn of him when his hair was wild and his face covered with whiskers.

For a moment Angus stood still, paralyzed, unable to move as he stared at the picture hung on a nail in the wall. The handbill hadn’t been there yesterday.

When Dolly came back to the bar, he was still standing there. She got drinks and put them on a tray, but Angus still didn’t move. When Dolly started out with her full tray, he caught her arm.

“Where did this come from?” he whispered, unable to make his voice work properly.

“A man brought it here last night. I thought it looked a bit like you.” She was teasing him.

“Did you tell him that?” Angus asked.

Dolly took only a second to see what was on his face. “No. I told him nothing. I didn’t like him. He’s a beautiful man, but he knows it. He treated me like I was his slave.”

“Where is he now?” Angus asked, swallowing hard.

“Asleep, I reckon. Go,” she said in the next breath. “Do what you need to do. I’ll hold him off as long as I can. A man like him won’t like soup poured on his clothes, but I’ll do it.”

“Is he alone?”

“No. He has two thugs with him. Frightening-looking men. Angus...” Her face was full of fear and concern for him. “You can’t stand up to all of them. You
must
go!”

For the second time in two days, Angus kissed Dolly’s cheek, then he swiftly left the tavern. When he got to his room, he stopped outside the door. His instinct was to wake Edilean and tell her that James was there, that he’d come to America with his handbill and the warrant for Angus’s arrest, and that he hadn’t come alone.

Angus had always known it was a possibility that James would come to America to seek him out. You couldn’t humiliate a man like James Harcourt and not expect retribution. But still, seeing the handbill had shocked him. If James had only come the day before! If he’d only come before Edilean and Angus had spent the night together, things would now be different. Angus could slip away, and no one would be hurt.

But now he was going to have to leave, and there would be a great deal of pain. Angus knew that he couldn’t stay with Edilean. He couldn’t even tell her that he was leaving. She would never agree that Angus had to get away and leave her behind. She’d want to go with him.

For a moment he rubbed his eyes to clear them. Above all else, he couldn’t let Edilean know the truth. He couldn’t go to her and say, “I love you but I have to leave you behind to protect you.” She’d never agree to their parting, but that’s what was going to have to happen. They’d have to separate forever.

It was as though he could see in a crystal ball and he knew the future. James would hunt Angus down wherever he went—and if Angus had a wife and children, he’d still find him. And then what? If James didn’t have Angus killed outright, he would enjoy seeing Angus taken to jail. Imprisoned. If he couldn’t be prosecuted in America, it was for sure that James Harcourt would find a time when Angus wasn’t alert and he’d kidnap him and take him back to Scotland. There he’d be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death or maybe he’d receive “just” a lifetime to rot away in a stinking prison.

Then what would happen to Edilean? To their children? To the home they’d wanted to build?

Angus knew what Edilean would do. She’d fight for him. Just as she’d fought for him with the jewels, she’d fight in the courts. She’d fight James Harcourt; she’d fight the world to keep Angus out
of prison. But she’d not win. Angus had run away with a girl who was still under the supervision of her guardian. The fact that he’d later married her would make him look worse rather than better. It would seem that he’d used her when she was but a girl and against her guardian’s wishes.

And of course there was the gold. When Angus and Edilean ran off, legally, that gold was under the care of her uncle. Angus had “stolen” it from him.

No, there was no way that a court would listen to his side or understand the truth. They’d never believe Angus’s preposterous story, and he’d be condemned for life.

Could he take Edilean with him? Is that what he wanted for her? To spend her life in hiding so he wouldn’t be captured? Then if he were taken, would she be condemned to daily trips to prison to see him? Or would she have to stand by and see him hanged?

He stood outside his bedroom, knowing that Edilean was in there, still asleep, and he was going to have to leave her. Again. Yet again, he was going to have to slip away from her and let her think that he... What? Didn’t love her? Is it possible that she could believe that of him?

He had to
make
her believe that he cared nothing for her, he thought. He had to do all that he could to make her believe that he was the biggest cad in the world. The worst villain. That he’d had what he wanted from her and that was the end of it.

Part of him was sure that no matter what he said, she’d know he loved her—and she’d forgive him. She’d thought the worst of him after the night in her bedroom, but she’d forgiven him. He almost smiled when he remembered how she’d been so cool to him at first. But it had taken little to melt her.

Love was like that, he thought. Cold one moment, fiery the next.

But never in his life had he had to do anything close to what must be done now—and he knew this was unforgivable. Slowly, he opened the door to his room and slipped inside. In her sleep she’d pushed the cover half off of her. He started to replace it, but instead he sat down on the side of the bed and looked at her, at her small body on the bed, her breasts rising and falling as she slept. It had been his plan to ask her to marry him today. As she lay in his arms, he’d thought about the service and that afterward they’d go together to Virginia to start a life there. He imagined building the house they’d created while on the ship. He had the drawings with him, and they were something he treasured.

But that was all gone now. He’d not been cautious enough, hadn’t taken the anger of James Harcourt seriously. It had all seemed so long ago and far away that he’d not put himself in the place of the other man. They had thwarted the long, carefully laid plans of a man who was without conscience or morals. Did they think he was going to sit back and take it?

Angus stroked Edilean’s hair. He knew she was safe from Harcourt. There was nothing he could do to her. She was past eighteen now, and by her father’s will, no longer under her uncle’s care, and the gold was hers. If she married—Angus nearly choked on the thought—her husband could protect her from any claims that Harcourt made up. It would be easy to prove that he’d married the earl’s daughter when he was supposed to be engaged to Edilean.

Angus’s only worry was Harcourt’s sister, Harriet. Would she take Edilean’s side or her brother’s? But he knew the answer to that. Edilean had the money. It was a cruel fact of life, but a true one. From what Edilean had told him of Harriet, she was a sensible woman, and she despised her lazy, conniving brother.

Angus picked up Edilean’s small hand, kissed each finger, and the palm. He held her hand to his face. “Don’t hate me too much,”
he whispered, but he knew that he’d have to make her hate him. If he didn’t, she’d follow him.

He got up and began to throw his clothes into a canvas bag. He hesitated over the diamonds, which were still on the table by the bed, but not to take them would seem disdainful of what she’d done for him. He took the necklace and the other pieces—they were too gaudy for Edilean to wear—but left the single earring.

After another look at her beautiful face and before he got to the point where he’d never be able to go, he left the room, closing the door behind him. Sitting outside was the young man who’d brought her the day before, and he jumped up when he saw Angus.

He looked at Angus as though he didn’t know whether to call him “sir” or to smirk about what must have happened during the night. Behind him the two horses were saddled and ready.

“I didn’t know if she’d be wanting to leave this morning,” Cuddy said, and his anger of the day before was gone. “I can go back into Boston if she wants me to.”

“She can do whatever she wants.” Angus gave the boy a leer, as though they were men together and knew about the world. “I got what I wanted from her, if you know what I mean.”

He saw the way the boy’s spine stiffened, and Angus knew he’d rightly guessed that he was half in love with Edilean.

“Here,” Angus said, tossing the boy a coin. “Take her home now. Wake her up and get her back to”—Angus waved his hand—“to wherever her sort comes from. Do you understand me? Take her
now
!”

“Yes...” Cuddy said. He was looking at Angus as though he wanted to kill him. “I’ll take her away from here. I’ll take care of her.”

“You do that.” Angus threw his pack over the better of the two horses.

“That’s Miss Edilean’s horse,” the young man yelled. “You can’t take that!”

Angus looked down at the boy from the saddle. “This is the least of what I’ve taken from her,” he said with a smirk that was unmistakable.

“If I had a gun I’d kill you,” Cuddy said under his breath.

“And save the devil from work?” Angus did just what Edilean had done and made the horse step backward to leave the stableyard. “Tell her from me that it was
most
enjoyable.”

Cuddy watched the horse and rider leave the barn, then he said the foulest words he knew. He didn’t want to wake up Miss Edilean, but he also wanted to get her out of there. It would be better if she got as far away from this place as soon as possible.

He took a few deep breaths, then knocked on the bedroom door.

Y
OU DON’T FOOL
me,” Harriet said as she looked at Edilean across the breakfast table. “Something has deeply upset you.”

“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” she said, glaring at Harriet.

Edilean had been back from her night spent with Angus for three whole weeks now. And everything had changed. For her, being cast aside yet again had hurt so much that she was almost unable to feel it. The first time Angus left her, she took her rage out on some furniture and clothes, but this time her anger was so much deeper that she was unable to deal with it. It was as though a red-hot coal had been stabbed into her chest and was growing with each day. Things that had once been pleasurable were no longer. The men who called, with flowers and candy in their hands, didn’t receive smiles. Instead, Edilean glared at them. She didn’t act coy and flirt and make them feel that they were the smartest and wisest men on earth. Instead, she corrected their grammar and their poetry
recitations, then told them they needed to finish school. The men crept out of her house with their faces red, muttering that they were needed elsewhere. They didn’t return.

The first time Edilean repulsed an eligible man, she expected Harriet to give her a scolding, but she didn’t—which was odd. Since they’d met, Harriet’s main occupation had seemed to be to get Edilean married, but since Angus, since the night with the fight with Tabitha, it was as though Harriet had changed.

After her night with Angus, Edilean returned to the house in Boston, and she thought she’d do what she did before and disappear into her room and cry. But she didn’t. She hadn’t shed even one tear since then.

Edilean had expected that Harriet would lecture her about her wounds and her bloody clothes, but she didn’t. Instead, Harriet had ordered hot water to be carried upstairs for a bath and she’d put out clean clothes for Edilean. But she hadn’t asked a question about where she’d been or what she’d done. Instead, Harriet seemed to have her mind on something else, and she jumped at every sound.

After about the twentieth time that Harriet was startled by some everyday sound, Edilean said, “Do you think I’m going to hit you?”

“Why would I think you’d harm me?” Harriet asked.

“Because that’s where I got all these bruises. From a fight.”

Harriet seemed to come to the present enough to look at her in curiosity. “Did you? And who did you fight?”

“Tabitha,” Edilean said. “She—”

“I don’t believe I know her,” Harriet said quickly, but she was distracted again. “Was that a knock on the door?”

“I didn’t hear it,” Edilean said. “If it’s a man, tell him he can go to hell.”

Even the use of that word didn’t make a dent in Harriet’s distraction.
She ran out of the room and Edilean heard her open the front door, but no one was there.

For weeks now, Harriet had been nervous and high-strung, so unlike her usual calm demeanor.

This morning was particularly bad for Edilean. She’d not allowed herself to say it out loud, but she’d hoped that she was with child. It was, of course, wrong to bring a child into the world out of wedlock, but that didn’t keep her from hoping. When her time of the month came that morning, she knew that she and Angus were truly over. Done with. Forever. She didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but she was sure that he didn’t want her—and now she’d never have anything from him.

She looked at Harriet with cool eyes. “If you must know,” she said as she buttered a roll, “I was thinking about Tabitha.”

“Tabitha?” Harriet asked, then jumped half out of her seat when the maid dropped something in the parlor.

The fact that Harriet didn’t remember the many stories that Edilean had told her about Tabitha was another sign that her mind wasn’t on the present. “When are you going to tell me what’s made you like this?” Edilean asked.

“It’s nothing. Go on with your story. What about this Tabitha? Maybe we could have her for tea.”

“With or without her leg irons?” Edilean asked, but Harriet didn’t hear her because the maid dropped something else.

“I can’t stand this!” Harriet said as she ran out of the room.

“No noise allowed,” Edilean said under her breath, and pushed her plate away. Sometimes she thought of the difference between herself now and as she’d been before her uncle took her from school. While it was true that she’d had to be nice to a few people she didn’t care for in order to get the best invitations, she’d had a feeling that she was worth the finest that life had to offer. Edilean Talbot had
been absolutely
sure
that she was better than and above women such as Tabitha. And Margaret. That woman had asked Edilean for a job once they got to America, but Edilean hadn’t even considered the idea.