Nell (22 page)

Nell shook her head. ‘It is not that.’ She drew a breath. There was no further need for that long-held secrecy. Not with the man she loved—and trusted. ‘You see, my father was killed in just such a fashion.’

Shock leaped in his eyes. ‘And I was patronising about your sufferings! Nell, can you forgive me?’

‘Readily. But there is no need. My experience was nothing to yours.’

‘Who is to say so? How old were you?’

‘Not much older than Hetty is now.’ A little sigh slipped out. ‘My mother had died from an illness, and Papa took care of me so well. It was unfortunate that we were held up that day.’

‘Unfortunate! You have a gift for understatement, my girl.’

Nell became aware that one of her hands was held in his strong grip and that he was on one knee beside her chair. Confusion swamped her, and she shook herself free.

‘Pray get up, sir! There is no need to—to—’

He rose swiftly, and his tone hardened. ‘You appear to be recovered.’ He pushed the glass towards her. ‘Another sip?’

Nell shook her head. ‘I am perfectly well now, thank you.’

Jarrow lifted the glass and tossed off the brandy himself. Setting it down with something of a snap, he shifted away from her, feeling distinctly rebuffed. Did she disbelieve him? Or had the history with which he had regaled her given her a distaste for him? He could scarcely blame her if it had. The whole business was sordid in
the extreme. But he must not dwell on his own troubles. It was that which had caused him to distress her in the first place. He turned to look at her, and caught a faint flush upon her cheek. She looked away from him, and he felt certain he had guessed aright. Perhaps he should not have been so frank. He thrust down the thought, concentrating instead upon her story.

‘What happened to you afterwards?’

She did not look at him, and her voice was low. ‘My aunt took care of me for a while. But she was herself widowed and with little means of support, once Papa died. He was her brother and had taken it upon himself to assist her, for her portion was meagre.’

‘But did not your father’s heirs assist you?’

A tiny grimace crossed her face. ‘He had none, sir. He was not landed, and all his family had been soldiers. Mama and I followed the drum.’

‘Ah, so that is where you learned your self-sufficiency.’

She laughed, glancing up at him briefly, and he felt a degree lighter. ‘By no means. It was instilled into me at the Seminary, where my aunt at length sent me so that I might have a means to earn my own living. I could not blame her. She was barely able to keep herself, poor dear, let alone a niece. I have come to be glad of her common sense.’

Jarrow watched the play of expression in her face and found in himself a strong desire to pull her back from the future that she faced so cheerfully. She was both resilient and resourceful, and he could not imagine that she had need of a knight errant. It was rather he who had need of her! She was speaking again, and in an odd tone that gave no clue to her thoughts.

‘I have never told anyone of this before—not even my
closest friends know the secret of Papa’s death.’ She looked up and met his eyes, a light in her own that spoke to something so deep inside him that Jarrow could not give it a name. ‘I was haunted for years by my helplessness—I could do nothing to save him. Indeed, I sat mumchance and terrified, thereby probably saving my own life, as my aunt once said. I resolved never to speak of it, you see, so that the memory might be blotted out.’

Every good intention flew out of his head. The familiar distress closed in upon him, throwing him out of temper. ‘Impossible! There is no blotting it out. There are griefs involved, and griefs should not be suppressed. Better to let it roam the mind so many times that at last it ceases to have the power to hurt.’

Nell eyed the changed countenance with deadness in her chest. She had lost him again—Julietta would ever win. Nevertheless, she could not withhold it.

‘Has it ceased to hurt, Eden?’

He turned away from her, crossing to the portrait. Harshness was rife in his voice. ‘It is no longer that sort of hurt that I feel.’

‘I do not believe you. Your whole life is an agony!’

He swung round. ‘Because I have not resolved it! Because the truth is so unpalatable that I have refused to confront it. Suspicion is one thing. Confirmation means that I must do something about it, and I don’t know what to do!’

Impelled, Nell rose from her chair and went to him. ‘What do you know? Does it explain what I have experienced in this place? You know something is awry, yet you will not give credence to the one thing I know to be true.’

Jarrow frowned. Was she at that again? ‘You mean Hetty? That I have resolved. Duggan says she had put
the veriest sip of laudanum in the child’s milk, only in hope that she might sleep soundly. I have forbidden her to repeat it.’

‘Then why was she sleepwalking last night?’

‘For the same reason Julietta did,’ he uttered, exasperated. ‘Leave it, Nell!’

She wrenched back, away from him. ‘I cannot. You think it is all innocent trickery, Eden, but I do not. Yet you have all but accused Mr Beresford of—’

‘Don’t speak of it.’

The harsh tone arrested Nell, and she stared at him, dimly conscious of a depth of hidden distress. Then he did think his brother-in-law had killed Julietta, his own sister. Her breath felt constricted. If he could believe that of him, how could he not see that the man was a danger to his daughter? Clearly she had no choice but to pursue it herself.

A burgeoning thought surfaced. A question only Eden could answer. She forgot all the rest, and threw it at him.

‘Tell me this, if you please, my lord. If the emeralds were stolen when Julietta was killed, has no attempt been made to recover them? So important a piece ought to compel the authorities to make a thorough investigation.’

Jarrow stared at her, confused by the sudden change of subject. ‘So they would have done—had I allowed it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

He was goaded into response, unable to prevent the bitterness that rose up into his gorge to choke him. He almost spat the words. ‘Because I would not have them waste their time and energy. The emeralds were worthless!’

Confusion set into Nell’s mind. ‘But you said—’

‘That I had not sold them, yes. I did not say that they were not sold.’

‘I don’t understand. If Lord Nobody stole them—’

‘What he stole were not the Jarrow Emeralds. The necklace was a carefully constructed fake, and the emerald drops were nothing but paste.’

Nell’s brain was reeling. ‘Paste!’

There was impatience in his tone. ‘You still don’t understand, but why should you?’ The dark eyes flicked back to the portrait of Lady Jarrow. ‘How could you guess that all hope of repairing my fortunes had been gone forever, well before the tragic end of my lovely wife? The irony will not escape you. Julietta was murdered for the sake of the emeralds. Only she had long since secretly disposed of them—selling them jewel by jewel.’

Henrietta was in one of her black moods. Nell found her wearing, for she could neither say nor do anything to the child’s satisfaction. She had not realised how exhausting had been her interview with Lord Jarrow until she was obliged to endure in addition the ill temper of a six-year-old child. Attempting to pacify her with the wooden doll failed. Hetty threw it across the room. Nell knew she must be patient, for it was undoubtedly due to last night’s unhappy adventure. The difficulty was that Hetty remembered nothing about it.

There was proof in the little girl’s state that laudanum had been administered last night. If she could glean confirmation from the child’s own mouth, would Eden believe her at last? That was, if his obsession elsewhere could allow him to grant a little thought to this far more pressing matter. Heavens, she was becoming as sardonic as his lordship!

Her careful questions met with no satisfactory answers.

‘Did you drink your milk last night?’

‘Don’t ’member.’

‘Perhaps it tasted nasty again, is that it?’

‘I telled you, I don’t ’member!’

Unwilling to recall to Henrietta’s mind a happening that she would prefer to forget, Nell had found herself at a loss. But the urgency of the child’s safety was paramount. She had to try.

‘Did you have bad dreams, perhaps?’

Hetty knuckled her eyes, growling in her throat. Nell sharpened her tone.

‘I cannot understand you when you insist upon talking like an animal! Speak up, if you please.’

The hands dropped and a pair of black eyes regarded her with a smouldering fury that reminded Nell irresistibly of her father. ‘I did dream, I telled you!’

‘Thank you. Would you like to tell me about the dream?’

‘No!’ said Hetty baldly.

Nell gave it up. ‘Very well. Then I shall read you a story.’

‘Don’t want a story!’

‘Then we shall sit in silence.’

Folding her arms, she sat back in her chair and trained her gaze upon Henrietta’s own. For several moments, the little girl stared back in defiance, her plump cheeks crushed in a scowl, pretty lips mulish and pouting. Then her gaze dropped, and she sank her temples onto tight clenched fists, resting her elbows on the desk. Nell heard the stirrings of tears, and could not help relenting. Her voice softened.

‘Hetty, won’t you tell me what is wrong?’

A muffled sob, and a frantic kicking at the footrest below. But no response.

‘Hetty?’

The fists came down with a crash, beating on the lid of the desk, and rage issued forth. ‘My head ache!
My head ache!
’

‘Then you did drink the milk last night!’ uttered Nell involuntarily.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t
’member
!’

The protest ended on a burst of sobs, and Nell hastily left her seat and went to catch the child up. She said nothing, but only held Henrietta in a gentle embrace, not wishing to add to her frustrations—which were undoubtedly increasing the pain. The very thing that could possibly soothe her must be denied. At the Seminary, laudanum was infrequently but judiciously used to alleviate severe pain.

‘Come, my dear, try to stop crying,’ Nell urged. ‘You will only make the pain worse.’

‘It hurt, Miss Fallyday!’ sobbed Hetty. ‘It
hurt
.’

‘Yes, I know, little one. I understand, truly I do.’ She glanced out of one of the windows and saw that the sun had gone in. ‘Let us go out onto the roof. The fresh air may clear your head a little.’

Still whimpering, the little girl allowed herself to be persuaded to remove from the schoolroom and walk up and down the battlements for a short time. It was warm, but the light was dim with the sun behind cloud, so that she need not fear it might worsen the child’s pain.

While Nell soothed aloud in response to the grumbles of her charge, inwardly she was seething. Why could Eden not look at what was under his nose? Had he examined Hetty’s conduct with an open mind—impossible in the circumstances!—he must have seen that those precise symptoms he took as showing Hetty’s tendency to dementia were in fact caused by laudanum. The Duck
had deprecated excessive use of it, citing just those instances of conduct that had alerted Nell to the possibility. Sleep that resembled a stupor was an initial result, often accompanied by nightmares. But it was then as the effects wore off that the moodiness set in, which in turn led to tantrums and rages. What Hetty was experiencing was the type of headache that came after a heavy bout of liquor consumption, for excessive laudanum had the same effect.

Of those who used it on the little girl for their own nefarious ends—would she might discover what they were!—she blamed Duggan the more. Beresford had the callousness of the insane. But what was the nurse’s excuse for indulging in so wicked a proceeding? What had she to gain? Which brought Nell full circle.

The object could not be merely to make Henrietta believe that her mama had returned to the castle. There must be some purpose behind that—and this morning Nell had suddenly thought that she had it. Only Lord Jarrow had blown that theory out of the water. If the emeralds were paste, there could be no future in setting Hetty to search for them. Yet some sort of ‘treasure’ undoubtedly existed.

She looked down at Hetty’s bent head, as the little girl trotted along where she led her, quieter now. The child could not remember where it was. Did Beresford hope that the drug and a dreamlike state would jog her memory? But in any event, there was no point in going down that road now. Unless Mr Beresford did not know that the emeralds were paste?

She found herself once again going over Eden’s uncompromising reaction. He had known what she was about to say—and stopped her dead. Faced with the necessity to believe in his lordship’s innocence, Nell had
only one other option for the identity of Lord Nobody. There could be no doubt that Mr Beresford had pulled the trigger. But had he done it deliberately? Was this what tortured Lord Jarrow? Had he been certain, Nell could not believe he would tolerate the presence in his house of his wife’s murderer.

It was a terrible dilemma, and Nell felt for him with her whole heart. She recalled that night—far off now, it felt—when she had first mentioned Hetty’s treasure. Eden had identified it, only he had first sat staring through her. It must have been this question revolving in his mind. Nell had no question. She did not know whether Toly Beresford had intended to kill his sister, but she could not acquit him of complicity in the matter of Henrietta. Alone, Duggan could have no motive. As Toly Beresford’s paramour, the motive became immediately visible.

Hetty was dragging at her hand. Nell halted. ‘Are you tired?’

The child nodded, moving to place herself in one of the gaps in the battlements. Nell went with her, afraid of her falling in her present state. Loath to mention the headache, Nell skirted it with a general question.

‘How are you feeling now?’

Henrietta sighed. ‘Hurting not so much.’

‘That is excellent. And have you remembered anything about last night?’

The black eyes looked up at her. ‘Didn’t sleep good. Dreamed and dreamed.’