Judith Ivory (34 page)

He turned, like a child in her arms, shocked recognition spreading over him visibly. Everything. Everything lost. Nothing to do but run.

She explained rapidly with infallible logic, “Everyone knows that the two of you have been arguing horribly, especially about that statue. All the bills of sale make it his. So he ends up dead, and you have it? They’ll think you killed him for it or conspired at least.” She put the liner ticket into his fingers, then curled them over the paper with her own hands as affectionately as she could, and sealed his fate, she hoped, with a quick kiss on his cheek. “We’re both leaving it,” she said. “There are other works of art, but we each have only one life. Let’s go!”

She gathered up her own coat and bag—Leonard was too dazed to help. She pulled him along by his arm toward the fire escape. Sure enough, in the hall she could hear people stomping up the stairs.

Outside, at the base of the fire escape, Leonard repeated as if to make sure, “Cheyenne, Wyoming.”

“Yes,” Emma said and smiled radiantly. “I’ll see you there, dearest.” You toad of a human being.

Leonard took off in one direction, she in the other. Emma, however, only circled around to the side entrance of the hotel and went in the lobby and through the foyer-reading room, quite calm.

Cheyenne, Wyoming. May you live long and prosperously there, Leonard. And never, ever return.

Stuart, meanwhile, with Mary the maid’s help, wiped off his face, yanked off his shirt, and put on a fresh one. When the
hoards of curious from downstairs finally appeared, he explained that Mary had seen a mouse, but that he had dispatched it. Disappointed, people dwindled away. It took less than ten minutes.

Where after, he went calmly downstairs and out the front door of the hotel. There, he proceeded to have an argument with his coach driver—all the while, in the back of his mind, feeling he had left Emma alone to cope with a madman.

What if Leonard suddenly wanted better proof? What if he turned on her? What if he saw her go back for the statue? Stuart worried he shouldn’t be running off for his own purposes. He should be helping.

And his driver agreed to an extent. “The horse, my lord, if you’ll forgive my saying, ain’t worth the trouble.”

“I want to argue for him. I’ll tell them I’ll pasture him. He won’t be put on the road or near people again.”

“He should be put down.”

“That’s nonsense. We don’t run him with the team anymore. I’ll hire another trainer, a new one.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” the driver insisted, then realizing what he’d said, added, “with all due respect, m’lord.”

Stuart blinked. The man had spoken out to him, defied him.

The coachman himself backed up, aware of what he’d done. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right.” He was having a dispute with a coachman. New territory. He had to take a breath and remember it could be good. He might learn something. “Why do you think the horse should be put down?”

Encouraged, the man said, “He bit me, then tried to kick me. He veered toward the lamb, sir.”

“He what?”

“He goes after small things in the road. This horse is insane.”

“He was beaten,” Stuart said, thinking to defend the animal to his own coachman. Why was this horse so important?
Even as he fought for the stupid animal, some part of him thought the whole thing was out of proportion.

“The others were beaten, too, with all due respect. This one is crazy.”

Was it true? Was the horse past redemption? Honesty. He wanted Emma’s brand of integrity, the way she faced reality. It was what he wanted for himself, though it felt faintly nauseating at the moment: to embrace the idea that his horse, a favorite prize, was exactly as he most feared—irredeemable.

No, he reminded himself. Seven horses were doing fairly well. Only one was a menace. One. Perhaps his father hadn’t even made the animal thus, only contributed to it. What was reasonable to do with such an animal? What was right?

With a kind of release, he realized, he hated to lose the horse, but if the law stepped in, so be it. The horse wasn’t helping. He couldn’t save the damned creature without the creature’s cooperation, though he’d certainly been trying.

And it didn’t matter anyway in light of the fact that Emma was handling alone what they had intended to handle together. He had to go back, see if she was all right, if Leonard got off as planned. What had he been thinking? He didn’t have time for a horse that wouldn’t stop hurting things. Not when Emma might need him.

“All right, fine,” he told his driver. “You go. Tell them I don’t want him put down, that I’ll pasture him, if they turn him over to me. I can’t think what more to do. Tell them, then let things run their course. I’ve lifted the last finger to help that animal. He’s on his own.”

When Emma returned, thinking to collect her bags and possibly the money, she was shocked to discover Stuart, in hat, coat, and gloves, standing perfectly healthy in her front sitting room.

“Oh, you’re all right,” he said with genuine relief. “Did he leave? Did he take the ticket?”

“Like a baby to a bottle. So far as I know, he won’t consider any other possibility but the reality we made for him till he hits New York.” She shrugged, smiled. “Maybe all the way to Cheyenne.”

What to do about Stuart though?

At that particular moment, there was a knock on the door. “Ah,” said a constable, standing at her door. “I have a report of a commotion, screaming, someone thought perhaps even a shot. Is everything all right?” The law officer walked into the room.

Emma took one look at Stuart, waiting for her, the dear man, then a look at the law enforcement officer, and she said, “Actually, it’s not. If you look in the rubbish there, you’ll find a summons for this fellow here, sir, to Yorkshire. The man who served it was just here, but Lord Mount Villiars refused to go. He clubbed the man till he fled. If you look in the waste-bin in the bedroom, you should find a shirt with blood on it.”

Stuart stood up straight, his mouth opening a little, but his shoulders slumped. Oh, she hated this. She wanted to tell him, I have to, dear heart. I have to go, and you can’t follow me.

The constable came back with the shirt and the rather poor summons she’d tossed in the bin for lack of liking her own work. It was good enough, apparently, for a London policeman. “It certainly looks legal.” To Stuart, he asked, “This true, sir—I mean, your lordship? Did you refuse to answer a summons?” He looked down at it. “For contempt of court in a matter involving killing a sheep?”

Stuart blinked, then said, “No, it isn’t true.” Contempt of court was one of the few exceptions to the no-arrest rule.

“It sure looks incriminating,” the constable said, making a suspicious, hard roll of his mouth, while eyeing Stuart.

Stuart lifted his eyes to Emma and stared steadfastly.

She grew slightly fearful. If this didn’t work, God knew what he’d do. She recognized in his quiet a kind of alertness that was worrisome.

She said. “The other fellow’s mistake was, Mount Villiars here said he’d go in quietly, and then he didn’t.”

She and the small constable both turned toward a man over six feet tall who looked larger still in a thick, wide-shouldered coat.

Emma added, “He’s dangerous and tricky. You won’t keep hold of him if you don’t restrain him.”

Stuart gawked. “Pardon me?”

She walked up beside the constable and murmured, “He knows no limits. He’s strong as blazes. You’d best contain him, or be prepared to face the worst for your incaution.”

“I am a gentleman,” Stuart said. Then to the constable as he picked up his hat, he said, “We’ll settle the matter at the station, if that’s what you’d prefer.” To Emma, “I’ll take care of
you
later.”

“You should take him in handcuffs at the very least,” Emma said directly to the police officer.

Stuart’s head rotated around, his mouth open, disbelief. If she had been within distance, she thought, he might truly have swatted her.

When he did lean a little, trying to make eye contact with her around the police officer, she ducked behind the constable, and the lawman thought the worst.

He took Stuart by the arm brusquely. “Sorry, sir,” he said, following the words with a satisfying rattle of steel.

With a firm snap and latch of metal, Stuart’s hands were cuffed behind him in a new and shiny piece of police equipment. Stuart was startled. She saw the first flick of anger in the twitch of one eye, in the rising color of his cheeks.

Whether out of fear—goodness, did his temper rise fast, his expression quickly livid—or from amusement at the turned tables, Emma would never knew. But a drop of meanness in her, she supposed, made her brush against the constable and light-finger his pockets till she came up with the key to the cuffs. Behind him, she showed it to Stuart.

Who sputtered, “She took the key.”

“Who took the key?” asked the man in uniform. “The key to what?”

“The handcuffs, would be my guess. And Mrs. Hotchkiss took it. Look.” Stuart nodded his head toward her, his eyes never leaving her face.

The constable patted his pocket. “Don’t be foolish, sir. I have it right here.”

“Check. You don’t.”

Emma delicately dropped it back into the pocket the second before the constable fished down into it. He brought the key out, holding it before Stuart’s face. “Shame,” he said. He pocketed the key again. Or thought he did, for Emma lightly held the pocket closed and let the key drop directly into her own palm.

“She took it again,” Stuart said, this time resigned. He didn’t show much hope of the man’s believing him, only shaking his head at her, staring.

Emma stepped back toward the forced-air fireplace. She cleared her throat as she dropped the key into its wall grate, then coughed to cover its fall down somewhere into the mortared masonry, gone forever unless they wanted to tear the fireplace out.

“Good-bye, Stuart,” she said as he was unceremoniously hauled out of her rooms. Good-bye, dear.

All easier than she’d thought. From here, resigned, she knew what she would do. Or thought she did. She took the envelope containing the two thousand pounds and picked up the hatbox with the statue.

So many options suddenly opened out to her. Yet only one truly appealed. At the curb outside, her bags loaded into a hansom, she gave the driver Stuart’s house address. “Then wait for me, please. From there, King’s Cross.” The train station. She had her fifty-six pounds he’d let her keep. That was enough of a start, and it was hers.

Once inside Stuart’s house, however, still empty of staff, she found things she never expected.

She discovered his library. It wasn’t as large as the one in the country, but it was very like him. A large desk sat by a window. She opened the hatbox, took out the statue, and unwrapped it. Like a present, she set it squarely in the middle of the desk. Then she took from her drawstring the envelope containing two thousand pounds and stood it up against the statue. It looked quite suitable there.

That was when she noticed the wads of crumpled paper on the floor. Some, she realized, were strewn even across the far corner of the desk.

They were a lot of wadded-up notes: none good enough apparently.

She couldn’t help but see what one of them said. “Emma”—the next crossed out—then, “would you please do me the honor,” then a long slash that ran off the page.

Another said, “My dearest Miss Muffin, you are the only woman I have ever” then said nothing more.

While yet another said, “I love you, be my”—the slash ran to the bottom where he’d scribbled—“damn it anyway, wife, Miss Muffet, share my tuffet, oh, strumpet whom I love.”

Your nervy bum
, she thought and smiled.

There was a box by a crumpled paper behind where she’d put the statue. In it was a ring, a diamond ring. He’d picked a pretty one, but then Stuart would, wouldn’t he? She let the box close with a snap.

But the notes—ah, he’d made eleven attempts. These, she gathered up, every one, taking them into her skirts, then turning toward the light by the window. She read them and read them and read them, till there was no more light, till it was dark. Then she folded them up and took them with her as she left.

The cab was gone. The driver had unloaded her bags, set
ting them just inside Stuart’s gate. She walked away from them too. All the things he’d bought her. Good-bye.

She only got down the street, though, as far as the first streetlamp. There, she found herself sitting on the curb, where, one by one, by streetlight, moonlight, she unwrinkled her unfinished love notes, spreading them over her knees, her skirts. One after another, she pressed each out into full light, pushing at the crumples as if she could smooth out her own actions, as if she could take out the creases. She smoothed them all, one by one, till each was soft, all but limp from rubbing, then she organized them into a stack, righting the edges till they were neat—a tidy pile of misunderstood, stuttering emotion: hers, every last inchoate, only partially realized emotion, her own, only fully realized too late.

Trust. It was the one thing you always had to do in the game. Trust your partner. Never doubt him.

It had never occurred to her to trust Stuart to do this: to make her happy. To flout everything else, even his own desire for the statue, and think of her. Why not? Where had her faith in others, in a special other, gone? Had she ever had it? Had she ever believed a worthy man would find her, want her, seek her out in favor of all others, against all objections, even her own, and ask to have her for his own for life?

If she ever had, she’d given it up somewhere. She’d lost it, lost him. Locked him out and, literally, thrown away the key.

She hiccuped once as she stared down at her would-be love letters, then folded herself over them, pulling them to her belly as she put her arms between her knees. She buckled over into this lapful of skirts and papers and arms and despair for herself. She cried like that, rocking, her face in her knees, hugging her own shoulders, bawling for half an hour, perhaps more. She wasn’t sure.