McAlistair's Fortune (9 page)

He shook his head. “Was the driver new? Unfamiliar with the road?”

She set the teapot down. “No.”

“One doesn’t just veer off—”

She twisted her fingers in her lap, then picked up the pot again and poured herself a cup. “He’d been drinking.”

“I hope your father took a horsewhip to him.” His face hardened as he spoke, and Evie had the passing thought that he was growing easier and easier to read.

With what she hoped was an air of nonchalance, she added two spoonfuls of sugar. “Difficult, as my father had been the one driving.” There, she’d said it. “He was killed.”

His expression softened instantly. “I’m sorry.”

I’m not.
The thought came unbidden, and though there was a moment’s instinctive guilt that followed, Evie pushed it aside. She
wasn’t
particularly sorry her father was dead; she was only sorry he hadn’t been the sort of man she could grieve over. If that made her a terrible person, so be it.

She shrugged by way of answering McAlistair and poured a dollop of cream into her tea. “It was a long time ago.”

And not nearly long enough, came the next unwelcome thought. Better he’d driven himself off the road years earlier.

“Do you miss him?”

“Not for a second.” The spoon she’d been using to carefully stir her tea fell to the table with a clatter. “I don’t know why I said that. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Did you mean it?”

“I…” Her eyes fell on her cup. “I’m not even thirsty.”

He nudged her plate with a finger. “Eat.”

Hunger had disappeared as well. But the urge to talk, to tell the part of the story she’d kept from everyone save Lady Thurston, was overwhelming. She swallowed hard and bunched her hands in her lap. “He insisted on driving. He made such a fuss in the drive and likely embarrassed my mother. I remember he was fond of that—shaming her in front of others. One of the ways he kept her cowed.” She frowned at the scarred table. “One of many. I shouldn’t have said I didn’t miss him.” She swallowed hard. “But I meant it.”

“Why should you miss him?” McAlistair asked. “Or lie and say you have?”

“He was my father.”

“He was an ass.” With that matter-of-fact pronouncement, McAlistair picked up his knife and fork and resumed eating.

“He—” She blinked, and then, to her astonishment, felt the corners of her mouth twitch with humor. “Yes, he was. That’s exactly what he was. Nothing more than a habitually drunk ass.”

He cut off a piece of lamb. “An inebriated ass.”

Her smile bloomed. It felt wonderful to make light of it, of
him
—as if she were stealing away his significance. She couldn’t imagine a worse fate for a bully. “An inebriated ass,” she repeated as if testing the words. “Rather catchy, that. Pity we can’t rework his grave marker.”

“Who’s to stop you?”

She laughed now, and reached for her fork. Hunger had returned. “I imagine my mother might. She visits his grave nearly every day, or so I’ve been told.”

There was a pause before McAlistair asked, “How is it you were injured and she was not?”

“Luck, mostly, or lack of it. I was on the side closest to the tree.”

He reached across the table and gently traced a thumb along her scar. “This?”

A shiver ran over her skin. She wanted to tilt her cheek into the palm of his warm hand. And she wanted to pull away and hide her face. “I…I’m not certain. It happened so fast. A sharp bit of splintered wood, I imagine, or a piece of metal from somewhere.”

He drew his hand back. “And your leg?”

She resisted the urge to touch where the warmth of his fingers still lingered. “My memory is fuzzy…I was trapped under part of the wreckage. It was already broken then, but not so badly, or quite so much, I think…There was a fire from the lanterns, and they had to pull me out without freeing it first. It made it worse.”

He nodded in understanding, and to her relief, chose to steer the conversation to happier topics. They spent an hour or more discussing, among other things, the Rockefortes’ son, Whit and Mirabelle’s marriage, Kate’s talent for all things musical. Once or twice, Evie made an attempt to inquire into McAlistair’s past, but he either deftly avoided the question, gave one-word answers, or shrugged and changed the subject. Evie decided it was too lovely an interlude to push the matter and risk an argument. She simply enjoyed the relaxed—if slightly one-sided—conversation. She enjoyed the hearty meal as well, eating until she found she couldn’t take another bite.

“Oh, goodness,” she groaned, and pushed back a little from the table. “I can’t recall ever ingesting quite so much in one sitting.”

“Wasn’t one sitting,” McAlistair reminded her as he finished off the last of his own meal. “You had some in the tub.”

“So much in so short a time, then,” she said and then watched, a little stunned, as he began to stack the dishes neatly on the tray. The man certainly was tidy. She rose to help him. It wasn’t until they’d finished and he reached for his overcoat that she grew confused.

“What are you doing?” she inquired.

“The tray needs to be returned.”

“Of course it does.” She gestured to the far wall. “There’s a bell pull right there.”

He shook his head and lifted the tray. “Faster this way.”

“And doesn’t require I hide behind the screen again,” she guessed.

He nodded and headed for the door.

“But why your coat? Isn’t the kitchen in the main building?”

“Probably.”

She moved around him to open the door. “What of the tub, won’t they come for that?”

“Tomorrow.” He maneuvered his form to block any view of her from the hallway, and his voice took on an authoritative tone. “Get back inside. Lock the door behind me.”

Whit and Alex often took that tone with her. It had ceased being effective years ago. She rolled her eyes at him.

McAlistair gave her a dark look as he stepped back into the hall. “This isn’t a game, Evie.”

“No, it’s a very bad farce,” she responded, and softly shut the door before he could argue.

M
cAlistair had been gone for ages.

Well, half an hour, anyway.

Much too long, to Evie’s mind. She wandered to the window without any expectation of being able to see through the rain and dark. The yard was black, with only a few dim lights from the inn and the surrounding houses illuminating the perimeter.

If it hadn’t been for the flash of lightning, she would never have seen the solitary figure striding between the inn and the stable, and if that figure hadn’t been glancing at her window at just the right moment, she would never have recognized McAlistair.

Baffled, she leaned forward and peered into the darkness, hoping to catch another glimpse, but he had disappeared into the night.

What the devil was he doing?

They’d only just gotten dry, hadn’t they? Granted, his overcoat had done a better job of shedding the rain than her wool cloak, but he had still been soaked down to his waistcoat. And with his overcoat still damp, he was likely now to be soaked down to the bone.

He’d catch his death. If he wasn’t struck by lightning first or felled by a falling tree branch or hit with flying debris from the crumbling inn or—

She was more than a little tempted to push the window open and call out to him—or, to be more accurate, in the general direction of where she’d last seen him—but she could well imagine what his reaction to that might be.

Well, no, she realized, she hadn’t the faintest clue what his reaction might be. In fact, under other circumstances, she rather thought it might be worth drenching her head just to find out. But she intended to confront him over this nonsense when he returned, and it was only wise to begin that confrontation with her own behavior safely beyond reproach.

She resigned herself to scowling through the glass and waiting for his return. A return that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. Frustrated, she looked for ways to occupy herself. She stoked the fire, brushed out her damp and dusty gown, and cleaned her teeth. She paced the space between the table and the window until her stiff muscles complained, then sat on the edge of the bed to glare at the door. And when fatigue made the soft mattress beneath her all too tempting, she rose and paced again. Was the man taking a bloody tour of the entire town?

She stopped to peer out the window for the dozenth time in the last ten minutes, and saw nothing in the flashes of lightning that punctuated the dark, nothing but an empty yard. McAlistair was nowhere to be seen.

She was nearly fuming, and even closer to throwing on her disgusting cape and heading out to search for him—she had a very nasty image of McAlistair trapped somewhere, neck deep in rising water—when he let himself into the room with a soft click of his key.

She opened her mouth, prepared to confront him, but snapped it shut when she saw the frighteningly intense expression on his face. With barely a glance at her, he closed and locked the door and strode straight past her to the window. He yanked the drapes shut.

“Don’t stand in front of the window,” he snapped.

“I…you’re annoyed with
me?”

“I want you to stay away from the window. I saw you from the yard—”

“Yes, and I saw you,” she cut in, finding her footing again. “What the devil were you thinking, strolling about in a storm?”

The hard lines of anger drained from his face, and his mouth hooked up in a half smile. “I don’t stroll.”

She glared at him.

He shrugged out of his overcoat. “I was making a search of the grounds.”

“And did you find anything? Besides great oceans of mud?”

He tossed his coat in front of the fire. “No.”

“No,” she repeated. “And do you know
why
you found nothing?”

He stripped off his waistcoat, revealing a mostly dry shirt. “Either he doesn’t know where we are or he’s holed up in the weather.”

She didn’t bother asking who “he” was; instead she threw up her hands in disgust. “For pity’s sake, there is no conspiracy against my life. You found nothing, because there is nothing to find.”

He didn’t respond.

Evie felt frustration become a living, breathing thing crawling under her skin. She fisted her hands at her sides and made herself speak slowly and carefully. “One week ago, I overheard a conversation between Lady Thurston, Mrs. Summers, and Mr. Fletcher, a conversation that culminated in the decision to send me a threatening letter so that a gentleman of their choosing might have the opportunity to play knight-errant. This, all of this…” She struggled for the right word and tossed up her hands again when she couldn’t find it. “This monstrous stupidity is nothing more,
nothing
more than an ill-designed, meddlesome, and arguably cracked attempt to see me wed.”

“Yet you can’t explain why Mrs. Summers sent you with me,” he said softly.

“There are a dozen possible explanations,” she countered, wracking her brain frantically to come up with at least one. “Perhaps it was merely for drama. Perhaps the man they’ve chosen will arrive at the cottage as a surprise and so it mattered not one jot with whom I rode off into the woods, so long as I was properly terrified.” That made Mrs. Summers and the rest sound positively diabolical, she realized. “Terrified might not be the right word. Convinced might be more accurate.”

“It might be, if you were right.”

She waited for him to say more. He didn’t. “You do realize that a mere ‘you’re wrong’ is not a particularly compelling argument?”

He considered her for a moment. “I’m not compelled to argue with you.”

She blew out a short breath. Now that he was back in the room, safe and relatively dry, the portion of her temper that had been fueled by worry—and she was beginning to think that comprised the majority share—was starting to fade. “I am not eager—”

“But perhaps it’s unavoidable.”

“Arguing?” She felt her lips twitch. “It would certainly seem so.”

He stepped over to take one of the chairs from the table and set it in front of the fire. “Sit down, Evie.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He stared back. “I can’t imagine what you find offensive in that.”

“I find taking orders offensive.”

“Everyone takes orders from someone,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but I don’t take mine from you.”

She thought perhaps his jaw tightened a little, but the movement was so brief, she couldn’t say for certain. He gestured again to the chair. “Please, sit down.”

“I—thank you.”

A little wary at how easily she’d won that particular battle, she took her seat and waited for him to start the war.

McAlistair positioned the second chair facing Evie, not quite close enough to brush knees, which he would have found distracting, but close enough for a quick grab if she took it into her head to bolt. He didn’t really expect it of her, but then Evie, he was fast discovering, had a knack for doing the unexpected.

And he wasn’t certain how she would react to his questioning.

He sat down and resisted the urge to roll the tension out of his shoulders. “I need to know more of your work.”

“My work?” she asked, jolting a little in obvious surprise.

McAlistair nodded, relieved it wasn’t a jolt in the direction of the door. “I should have asked earlier.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You were tired.”

“I’m tired now,” she pointed out.

“I wanted to…” He wracked his brain for the right words. “To give you time.”

She blinked. “Time for what?”

“To become accustomed to the idea.”

She looked utterly, hopelessly lost. “To the idea of telling you about my work? Fairly unlikely, as I hadn’t a clue you were interested. Although—” She broke off as the light of realization dawned. “Accustomed to the idea that the threat, the danger, is real—
that’s
what you mean, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“I don’t understand. I told you I knew it to be a lie.” Sudden disbelief dimmed the light on her face. “Surely, you didn’t expect that simply because you said differently, I would—”

“Yes,” he cut in. He didn’t need his own mistake explained to him. “I did.”

She gaped at him in the way one does when one is uncertain whether to be utterly appalled or terribly amused. “That is
remarkably
arrogant.”

It wasn’t arrogance. It was experience. “I have cause.”

She sat back in her chair with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “Your sort always does.”

You’ve never met my sort.
Because he couldn’t very well say that, he said nothing.

She waved her hand at him. “Well, then have at it. What do you want to know?”

He felt one eyebrow lift. “Just like that?”

“Certainly,” she assured him. “I’m proud of what I do, and I so rarely have the opportunity to discuss it.”

“Even with your friends?”

She pursed her lips. “From time to time, but I limit those conversations, and I speak only in generalities. I’d rather they weren’t directly involved.”

“Because you know it to be dangerous,” he guessed, and watched as she shifted in her seat, recognizing the trap.

“Well, yes, there is that. But more…I don’t think either of them is cut out for the work, really. I don’t mean that to sound disparaging. It’s…Well, honestly, can you picture Kate trying to go anywhere incognito?”

Whit’s sister was renowned for her clumsiness. McAlistair imagined she’d get her veil caught in a door at the first opportunity. He didn’t bother asking why Evie had kept things from Mirabelle. They both knew that until recently, Mirabelle had been busy fighting her own battles.

“Who knows what you do, in general or specifics?”

“Outside of family—and that includes the Rockefortes—only those of us on this little adventure, Mr. Fletcher, and Lizzy.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Lizzy could be the key, he thought, but knew better than to disparage the woman in front of Evie. “What about those who work with you?”

“None of them know who I am. The vast majority of our conversations take place by mail, and most of us make use of pseudonyms. The few times I have met with others, I have kept my face hidden.”

“Someone must know. How did you discover the group? Who vouched for your legitimacy?” One didn’t just stumble across an organization that relied on secrecy, and that organization wouldn’t endanger itself by taking on a new member without a recommendation.

“Ah, yes.” She bobbed her head. “Lady Penelope Cutler, a friend of my aunt’s, and a great financial contributor to our group. Lady Thurston was aware of her work and arranged to introduce us when it became apparent we held similar interests.”

“It was your aunt’s idea?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. That support and the work it allowed had no doubt been invaluable in restoring the confidence a heartless father had destroyed. “How long ago was that?”

“Oh…” She scrunched her face up in thought. “Six years ago, more or less. Lady Thurston made certain I had first experienced at least one London Season without distractions.”

“And where is Lady Penelope now?”

“She passed. Four years ago.”

“I’m sorry.” He felt foolish saying the words. Just as he’d felt foolish and helpless when she’d spoken of her father. He wanted to offer her something more eloquent, more substantial, than “I’m sorry,” and “he’s an ass.” But it had been years since he’d had to find any words, let alone the right words.

Evie shook her head. “It’s all right. I didn’t know her well.”

He didn’t allow the air in his lungs release with a sigh of relief. But he did change the subject. “What is it you do, specifically?”

“Well it differs by time, place, and necessity. I write letters to members of parliament and press, anonymously, of course. I keep track of—” She broke off and tilted her head at him. “I suppose you’re interested only in the potentially dangerous bits.”

It was all dangerous, he thought, but nodded rather than commenting. Better to hear the worst of it first.

“Right. I’ve been acting as a sort of liaison for women—occasionally women and their children—who wish to escape from an intolerable life.”

“How?”

“Their trip—generally, though not always out of the country—is arranged beforehand, but there is always the risk that a woman might change her mind and return to her husband or father, or what have you, and confess all. As a precaution, she is given only enough information and funds to see her through one leg of her journey at a time. A member of the group meets with her at the end of each leg and provides the funds and information for the next. That is what I do.”

His heart caught in his chest. “You meet with these women.”

“Yes, but I keep my face hidden under a veil and stay only long enough to pass off the coin—”

“And no one in Benton has noticed a veiled woman haunting the coaching station?”

Her tone turned haughty. “Do give me a little credit, if you please. I’ve met a grand total of two women at the Benton coaching station in the last year.”

“Two women?” That certainly narrowed the field as to who might be seeking revenge.

“At the Benton coaching station, yes. I also met two women at the bookseller’s. One woman, sent by hired coach, on the side of a rarely used road. And three women in outlying villages. The year before was similar except that I used Maver’s tavern instead of the bookseller’s, didn’t meet anyone on the road, and met only one woman at the station.”

McAlistair frowned. Over several years, that was still a significant amount of time spent wandering around, wearing a veil. And nothing invited curiosity so much as a mysterious woman.

“Someone will notice eventually,” he pointed out.

She made a face and, to his surprise, agreed with him. “I know. After next year, I’ll have to give it up for a time. Work on something else or somewhere else. It was the same for London.”

“You met women in London?” His palms went clammy at just the
idea
of Evie sneaking around London alone.

She didn’t appear to notice his discomfort. “Oh, yes, and with far more frequency, but then, there are more women and more places to meet, aren’t there? Still after a while, I thought it best to reduce the amount of time I was there.”