Linda Needham (15 page)

“H
is name is Briscoe, Hollie, and he lives right there in the stables with the other horses.” Chip slid down off the hunter and into Hollie’s arms.

“Briscoe looks tired and hungry,” Hollie said, distracted from Chip’s bouncing joy by her blazing curiosity about Everingham and Bowles’s message from Sidmouth.

She’d wanted to race down the steps and embrace them both when she heard Everingham introduce Chip as his son; wanted desperately to know how they had managed to find each other. But she’d kept her joy in check and let her heart fill with admiration for the contrary man.

“Carlson’s gonna feed Briscoe some oats.” Chip patted the horse on the flank as the
amused stableman uncinched the girth and lifted the saddle off.

“I think it’s time we go feed
you
, Chip. Do you like oats?”

He laughed and scrambled out of her arms. “I like oatmeal cakes!”

And he was off across the stable yard on his lean little legs. Hollie followed him to the kitchen and ate a dinner of bread and butter and soup with Chip, then carried him up to his bed when his eyelids began to droop.

He was snoozing softly before his head hit the pillow.

Now she would join Everingham’s impromptu Peterloo commission meeting. Casually, as though she’d stumbled upon it. And she nearly did just that, barely missing Mumberton as he was coming out of the kitchen with a tray of tea.

Tea! “Is that for his lordship, Mumberton?”

“It is indeed, Mrs. MacGillnock.”

“I’ll be happy to take the tray in to him and Lord Bowles. You’re a very busy man.”

“But not nearly as busy as I was a few days ago, ma’am. I’m very grateful that you’ve taken charge of the lad.”

“A pleasure, Mumberton.” Hollie took hold of the tray with determined hands, praying that she wouldn’t have to wrestle it from him. “No trouble at all.”

“Thank you, then, Mrs. MacGillnock.” Mumberton released the tray with a rattle of cups and saucers, then went on his shuffling way back to the servants’ hall.

Feeling like a sneak thief, Hollie notched her chin into the air and hurried off toward the murmur of voices coming from inside Everingham’s office.

They were squaring off across Everingham’s desk, Everingham’s face stony, Bowles obviously trying to explain himself.

“No one could say, exactly, Everingham. No word from Trafford and apparently that fellow Nadin wouldn’t talk. Seemed uncommonly stubborn.”

“I don’t care how stubborn the man is. If the men under his watch dismounted after the mob had dispersed and then stood about while the dying and the wounded were writhing on the field, then someone in authority must have been there to attend to the casualties. Someone local, to record the names and the injuries.”

“Apparently not.”

“Where were the damn magistrates?”

Hollie didn’t hear Bowles’s answer for the thundering roar in her ears as the command was given:
Take their flags!
The horses surged into the people, and then the groans and the screams and the confusion began. She’d grabbed her father’s hand in the first wave, but they were separated
in the second. And he fell beneath the slash of a sabre in the next. She swam through the crushing panic to find him, to hold him as he lay dying.

But she wasn’t on the field at St. Peter’s. This was the office of Charles Stirling, and the great earl was looking at her, his brows drawn in dark suspicion.

“Yes, Miss Finch?” he asked abruptly.

Feeling thoroughly exposed, she slid the tray onto the side table. “I thought I’d give Mumberton a hand with the tea.”

Everingham’s glower turned to flint, and his frown deepened. “Lord Bowles is just leaving.”

“Alas, I am, Miss Finch.” The carnal interest had returned to Bowles’s eyes, to the pressure of his hand as he bent over her own. “A long journey back to the City, I’m afraid. Perchance we’ll meet again.”

“Come, Bowles.” Everingham caught the man’s arm before Hollie had a chance to answer and marched with him through the doorway, leaving her alone in the office—with the table spread with papers from the Peterloo files.

The treasure trove she’d been seeking since she arrived nearly a week ago.

Bowles’s voice still rang out in the hall above Everingham’s thunder. She hadn’t long, didn’t want to be caught snooping. She sloshed herself a cup of tea and then sauntered to the far side of the table, against the windows, putting the table and its treasure between her and the door.

She sipped her tea and read swiftly and watched the door, never touching a single sheet of paper. Oh, what a great lot of hocus pocus it all was, smoke and shadows and official prevarication! Depositions from magistrates and merchants and mill owners, articles from
The Times
, letters and testimonials, sworn affidavits. One-sided poppycock.

And nothing from Sidmouth, at least, that she could see. Her fingers itched to shift the papers and read more, but Everingham could walk in at any moment—

“Worth the reading, madam?”

Hollie glanced up at him over the rim of her teacup, at the animal grace of him in the doorway, schooling herself and her heart to take the dark midnight of his eyes and his accusation in her stride, chiding herself for letting her attraction to him wedge itself into her spying. Yet she was plagued suddenly with the unreasonable suspicion that he’d left her here with his files apurpose, not to catch her with them, but to spark a debate.

Thoroughly unreasonable, given his thunderous staring.

“Interesting, my lord, but nothing more than I had expected. One side of the case only. And Joseph Nadin refusing to talk doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

“Why is that?” he asked easily, pouring a cup of tea for himself.

Hmm. Was her stubborn commissioner at last making a stab at interviewing her?

“Ask anyone in Manchester. The Deputy Constable made his fortune there as a thief-catcher, a man known for arresting innocent people because he’s paid £2 and a Tyburn ticket for every person convicted of a felony. God knows he’ll die a rich man.”

She couldn’t read his silence or the perilous ease of his posture.

“As for Trafford and the other men of the yeomanry, they were hardly professional soldiers, merely cowardly publicans, watchmakers, insurance agents, farriers. Each with too much to lose to offer the truth in a sworn statement, and none of them friendly to the idea of reform.”

Everingham idly picked up an affidavit from the disarray on the table and lifted his eyes to her from under those silky black lashes that stirred her pulse. “You must have seen the ambulance carriages brought in that afternoon to convey the wounded to the Manchester Infirmary.”

“Only hours later. In the meantime, the town was patrolled by the troops, the streets were nearly empty, and the shops closed because everyone was terrified of enraging the yeomanry to more violence. Did Bowles find you a casualty list?”

“No. Apparently there’s no such item available at the moment.”

But there was; the Peterloo Relief Committee
was collecting the information to give aid to the families of the fallen. It was volatile information, not to be trusted to anyone in the government.

“Did Bowles verify that the marchers came with their wives and children and fathers?”

Everingham dropped the affidavit onto the pile with the others. “Which makes the marchers all the more foolish than I’d first imagined. Manchester was a powder keg, a dangerous place for anyone, let alone children. I don’t care what their intentions were. And now it seems, madam, that your Captain Spindleshanks has made another appearance.”

“Has he?” Absurd, of course, the costume was safely hidden in the attic of the gatehouse. But she ought to at least look worried in a wifely way. “Oh, no! My Adam? When?”

He eyed her from beneath his brow, as though she already must have known this. “The night before last.”

Impossible. She was already here at Everingham by then. “Oh, where, my lord? Is he well?”

He hadn’t blinked. “In the north, outside a mill in Yorkshire.”

The Leeds Reformers. She had intended to put in a fleeting appearance there this week to rally support for the victims of the massacre. But it wouldn’t be the first time that Captain Spindleshanks had been the subject of a well-placed rumor. She’d been seen riding at midnight along the Liverpool road when she’d actually been in
London at a suffrage convention. This was no imposter, just the active and convenient imaginations of her supporters, with a bit of help from the press.

But Everingham could think whatever he liked. She laid an anxious, wifely hand across her bosom. “Dear me, he wasn’t caught, was he? Adam isn’t in jail?”

“He’s not. It must be difficult for a devoted husband like yours to choose between making a costumed appearance in Leeds and coming to rescue his wife.”

She hadn’t meant to snort and dared not look at him. “I don’t think I need rescuing, do I?”

“I don’t know? Do you?” He was crafty and dodging, this earl.

“Why haven’t you told your commission members who I am?”

Charles had been waiting for that question, though he still hadn’t formed a satisfactory answer. “You would only distract from the facts, madam. A temptation for the Privy Council to overreact.”

A temptation of another sort for him. That cascade of hair that sought his hands when she stood too near him. The gleam of green in her eyes as she took another proper sip of tea.

“So you admit that Liverpool and his Cabinet have their faults?”

“Would, madam, that we were all as clear-sighted as you.”

She bunched her brow into a frown, then set her teacup on the tray. “I have work to do, my lord. On my Stanhope. And you have the devil’s tail.”

“Where’s the boy?”

“Chip is sleeping. Little boys need a lot of that.”

“Merely a pause in the day when they can store up more energy.”

She bit her lower lip. Whether hiding concealed a smile or a sharp retort, it charmed him, inflamed him. Her little sigh nearly drove him to cross the distance between them and claim some of that neglected, unappreciated passion, spent so generously on a wastrel husband who didn’t deserve her.

“You made him very happy today, my lord.”

Not nearly as happy as you made me.

“Charles,” he said. “My name is Charles. Please use it. ’My lord’ makes you sound like a servant.”

“Ah, that’s right, I’m your prisoner.” She raised a challenging brow, daring him to deny it. “Will you be coming to the conservatory anytime soon?”

“Soon will have to do. I have work of my own.”

“Of course.” She flounced out the door, taking the sunlight with her. And the sweetness of the air.

Leaving him to wonder at the mildness of her
reaction to the news about her negligent husband, who was apparently unconcerned that his wife was being held against his arrest.

Perhaps all wasn’t well at the MacGillnocks’ home.

An hour later, Charles found Miss Finch standing in front of the tilted shelf in the type cabinet, looking ripely pregnant in her billowing apron. She was pinching pieces of metal type out of the cubbyholes and then sticking them from right to left into a long, slotted piece of wood that was corralled inside a contraption much like a small, three-sided picture frame.

“What’s that you’re doing, madam?”

“Getting ready to make a registration test.” Her fingers moved from the bins to the little frame like lightning. “One of a dozen adjustments I need to make before I can start on the song birds.”

“What does that say?” It was oddly easy to ask the question, when he had always been so careful not to show his vulnerability. But few people could be expected to read the type with the skill of the lovely printer, who had a streak of ink on the bridge of her nose.

She held the frame still and read from its confounding landscape. “‘Woodlark. Smaller than the skylark. Voice trilling, sings while airborne.’” She glanced up at him, her eyes luminously green. “And that’s all I’ve gotten so far, my lord.”

“Charles.”

“Yes. It’s a facing page for the woodlark etching…Charles.” She smiled up at him, then shoved an escaped tendril of hair off her brow and went back to her composing.

“You’re very quick at that, madam.”

“Hollie,” she said without looking at him.

He caught a huge smile inside his gut, a bloody bonfire. “You’re very quick, Hollie.”

She made a proud little
harrumph
in her chest. “I can compose a full page of print in less than an hour. As long as the copy is mine and I’m composing on the fly.”

“For the late-breaking edition of the
Tuppenny Press
?”

“Ha! I’ve beat
The Times
to the street in my day.” She turned all that elemental brightness on him, then set down the block she was working on and pulled seven large letter-blocks from one of the drawers, hiding them from him.

“Now what?” he asked, utterly fascinated by the magic in her hands.

“A surprise.” She quickly stacked the seven letters side by side onto a stick that had a channel cut down its center. She transferred the letters into a block, then locked it into the center of a much larger plate that had a border of some sort, and cinched everything down in the bed of the press.

“The chase,” she said, placing a sheet of thick paper into the leaning frisket frame.

He’d never seen a press actually printing anything. The Stanhope was an unwieldy, woebegone creature to assemble. But her movements were like an intricate dance, as familiar to her as breathing, exotic and excluding to him.

“It’s very quiet just now,” she said, glancing up at him too briefly and then going back to her dance. “Chip must still be asleep.”

“He is. I checked.” He’d meant only to glance in on the boy, trying to gauge the next wave of battle, but he’d stayed to marvel. Loose-limbed and flushed and breathing steadily.

She smiled that knowing smile of hers, catching him in the heart: a great, thumping wallop of admiration and gratitude and something else that he’d rather not examine.

Because it involved too much hope and too little honor.