Patricia Rice (36 page)

Dawn broke over a bank of clouds as Morgan opened
the cottage door. The mustiness assailed him, and he knew with sinking
heart that Faith had long been gone from these walls. Somewhere in the
back of his mind he had imagined her here, waiting for him, keeping the
hearth fire burning. That was a fool’s thought.

The meager light of daybreak illuminated the
emptiness. Dust coated the tall bed they had shared. She had left the
pallet covered with a single sheet to protect from dirt, and there was
still a faint odor of rosemary coming from the linen.

He smiled, remembering her earnestness in telling
him the uses of the various plants she had grown in their garden. He had
paid little attention at the time, but he remembered the scent now.
Rosemary kept the insects away.

The gleam of white on his trunk caught his eye, and
Morgan crossed the room to touch the lovingly sewn shirt Faith had left
behind. He read her gratitude in the gesture, or perhaps her despair,
and it made him feel more the filthy bastard.

Straightening his shoulders and shoving that thought
away, Morgan turned and faced the table that Faith had polished so
carefully once a week. The surface was coated with dust. A vase of
brittle flowers waited where it had been left, the beauty and life long
since dried and gone, as what had once been now was gone.

Morgan’s heart twisted in remembrance of other such
touches of the home he had left behind. He remembered Faith’s blithe
fingers plucking the flowers and lovingly arranging them, as she had
brightened those portions of his life she had touched. He knew of a
certainty that she had left this bouquet to welcome him. But he had
never come. The emptiness of that lost bouquet tore at what remained of
his heart.

He wondered when she had gone, how long she had
waited, or if she had even come back here at all. Those flowers could
have been picked while he was in Newgate and she was here dying inside,
wondering what had become of him. She had never accused him of
heartlessness, never held him back with possessive words or gazes, but
Morgan knew he had hurt her, and hurt her badly. His Faith wouldn’t have
given herself had she not felt something for him.

Morgan sneered at the sentimentality of his
thoughts. Faith had human needs just as everyone else did. She wasn’t a
saint. He had merely played upon her natural desires. By now she had
probably found some quiet religious man who could offer her home and
family, and she was contentedly sleeping in his bed.

He didn’t want to think about that either. He wanted
to remember Faith as purely his. He needed that tonight. Or this
morning. The dawn was brighter, sending golden rays across the
dust-covered floor, catching on the polished kettle and plate on the
shelves. Creeping across the table, the light illuminated a scrap of
paper held down by the vase, and Morgan felt an odd catch in his throat
as he crossed the room to examine it.

The words were hers, a piece of the past stealing
back to seize him. He recognized the style immediately. Who else would
apologize for saving his life while sacrificing her own? His guilt
crystallized as Morgan read Faith’s farewells. He had done it again,
destroyed another tender life. The bloody Sassenachs held nothing in
comparison to his single-handed destruction of the best thing ever to
come into his life. Someone should just hold a gun to his head and put
him out of his misery.

It was her final words that delivered the fatal
blow. “Thank you for restoring my life, Morgan. I will carry you always
in my heart. Love, Faith.”

Love. Faith. The letter crumpled in his fingers as tears swam to his eyes. Love. Faith. God, but he’d been a fool.

Anguish ripping at his entrails, Morgan strode out
of the cottage he had once called home, carrying nothing with him but a
hand-sewn shirt and a crumpled bit of paper.

***

“Come here, my love. I’ve got an awful itch and I need you to scratch it.”

Since she was lying naked in his bed with her
fingers placed suggestively between her thighs, Thomas well understood
the nature of the strumpet’s itch, but he wasn’t in the mood. She was
too damned demanding. He liked the challenge of the chase, but Sarah
made it too easy.

“Deuce take it, Sarah, you shouldn’t be coming here like this. You’re a pious Methodist, remember?”

The woman in his bed pouted and sat up, pulling her
long legs beneath her. “Well, marry me, and that problem will be solved.
I can’t hide the bun in my oven much longer, you know. That old
harridan has eyes like a hawk.”

There was the crux of it. Thomas kicked the
washstand. He had to marry her as long as she was parading as Faith, or
the marquess would have his head. Or something a little more personal.
His loins shriveled at just the thought. But marrying Sarah now was
pointless. He’d already soaked every guinea out of the old man he would
ever get, and the old lady was growing deuced suspicious. There wouldn’t
be much more forthcoming from that direction unless she had a sudden
apoplexy and died. He wasn’t even certain her granddaughter would be
provided for in that alternative, either. Not unless he proved beyond a
shadow of a doubt that Sarah was the real Faith Montague.

Thomas played with the thought awhile. There were
any number of paths he could take. After all, he couldn’t be certain the
real Faith was alive. The man he had sent to the Raging Bull couldn’t
even locate Alice Henwood. Like Faith, she had disappeared off the face
of the earth. Deuced suspicious, but not impossible. The kind of lowlife
inhabiting that den of iniquity would soon make mincemeat of any gently
bred female hapless enough to fall into their hands. No doubt Faith and
her counterpart, Alice, were long since raped and dead of disease, or
used and forgotten in one of London’s brothels. He would be doing
everyone a favor to prove Sarah was the true Faith.

The damned highwayman was the sticking point. He’d
seen the rogue in a gambling hell just the other night, parading as a
gentleman. De Lacy, he called himself. De Lacy, hell. A damned Irishman,
and a highwayman to boot. But the rogue knew what the real Faith looked
like, he’d wager his last ha’penny on that. And he might even know
where to find her original papers.

The threads thickened as he neared his goal. He
would have to be cautious not to get caught in one. Turning and finding
his mistress gazing in a mirror and worrying at a blemish, Thomas began
to unbutton his breeches. Women were easily disposable. He’d not worry
about the wench just yet.

But wouldn’t it be amazingly fortunate if the
highwayman should take it into his head to rob and murder Earl Stepney,
the man who had turned him over to the law?

***

“Mrs. O’Neill! Will you come here and tell this
rascal we won’t pay a ha’penny more for this watered-down rum than we
paid last week? He don’t seem to be hearing me.”

Faith looked up from her books to find the sturdy
frame of Acton Amory in the doorway. He was not an over-tall man, but
there was strength in his solid shoulders and broad chest, and he served
very well as their bartender.

Unfortunately, he could neither read nor write, and
the merchants took advantage of him when they could. But he was clever,
and he knew the price of things in his head. She nodded at his request
and picked up her ledger.

Amory instantly reached to help her up. Gratefully
she took his arm. Although the babe was not large, he drew on her
strength, and she felt awkward and ungainly when she moved about. She
found her balance and released Amory’s arm, but he continued to frown
upon her with concern.

“You ought to be resting, Mrs. O’Neill. You’re not
big enough to carry such a burden. My wife was a large, healthy woman,
but carrying a babe worked on her, it did.”

Amory’s wife had died of fever, not childbirth, but
he never failed to mention his concerns. Faith offered him a smile and
set out to find the rum merchant. She didn’t need to hear about Amory’s
fears. He meant well, but he had been left with a small daughter to rear
and he was searching for someone to take his wife’s place. She hadn’t a
mind to be that woman.

After dealing with the merchant, Faith stopped to
talk with the cook, agreed on the market list, and went in search of
Mrs. Needham. The widow had taken on the responsibility of dealing with
the housekeeping staff, such as it was. She had a granddaughter who
worked hard when there were no men about to flirt with, and an
indentured servant who did as little as she could. Faith had some
sympathy with that attitude and thought it might be preferable to hire
someone for wages rather than buy a person’s life, but the inn belonged
to Mrs. Needham and she couldn’t change her ways.

Bess Needham took one look at her new manager’s
weary face, took her arm, and steered Faith toward her bedroom. “That’s
enough. You’re to lie down now and not get up until morning. Mary will
bring you your dinner. I don’t know where I’d be without you, and I mean
to take care of you.”

“You’d probably be a wealthy woman sitting in luxury
with servants at your beck and call,” Faith responded wryly. “I’ll sit
down for a bit, but I need to see that the new tavern maid doesn’t turn
out like the last one. I persuaded you to keep this place open. I’ll not
let it become overrun with the types she attracted.”

Bess helped Faith to a chair and then stood with
hands on hips, glaring at her. “You only persuaded me to do what I
wanted to do in the first place but didn’t have the courage on my own.
There’s no reason I can’t tame a saucy maid as well as you. Acton is
about to chew my ear off for letting you downstairs in the evening, and
he’s quite right. You no more belong in that taproom than I belong in a
duke’s ballroom. You earn your keep. There’s no need for you to risk the
babe for naught.”

Faith murmured words of assent, but by the time the
April darkness fell, she was nimbly maneuvering the stairs to greet
their regular guests and check that the cook did not leave the lamb on
the fire too long. It still surprised her that their customers treated
her with respect.

Of course, she had to take into account that Needham Inn attracted a much better class of customer than the Raging Bull.

She shouldn’t be appearing in public now that her
skirts couldn’t hide her pregnancy. Faith did her best to stay behind
her desk in the room off the front lobby, but she had begun to make
friends here, and they didn’t hesitate to search her out.

Toby was the worst of the lot. He haunted the place
on a regular basis, bringing his brother and his brother’s new wife,
introducing their neighbors, and proudly showing off his newfound
respectability.

Faith had to laugh when Mary always seemed to appear
whenever Toby was about, or his gaze swept the inn in search of her if
she did not appear. Faith had no illusion that she was the reason Toby
came into town.

Tonight the young solicitor who had taken permanent
rooms hovered in the office doorway, telling her of the latest
activities in the Assembly, nervously working up the courage to ask her
to dine with him. He was a nice young man with a great deal of
intelligence. Faith was certain he would go far someday, but she had no
words to tell him that her world was closed, that all she wanted right
now was to stay busy and care for Morgan’s child. She had no thought
beyond the babe.

Except to occasionally wonder where Morgan was now.
She had sent a letter to Miles giving her new direction but imploring
that he not reveal it to anyone. She merely wished to be kept informed
of what was happening in London, she had told herself at the time. The
fact that Miles’s letters never mentioned Morgan brought home the truth.
She continued to read each one eagerly in hopes of some grain of
information.

But it had been well over half a year since she had
last seen Morgan, and she was learning to resign herself to his loss. It
wasn’t as if he had ever really been hers in the first place. She would
never know another man like him, would probably never marry because of
that, but he had given her a child to make her days brighter. When she
felt the familiar longing build inside her, she could always imagine the
future when a young Morgan would romp at her feet, and the blackness
receded for a while.

Faith placed her hand in the small of her back where
an ache had begun to build earlier in the day. Perhaps she was working
too hard. It wouldn’t do to harm the child. She would go up early and
get some rest.

Waving a hand to some new arrivals, Faith began to
take the steps to her room. The simple task of lifting her foot to the
next step brought a pain across her middle, and she halted, grabbing her
abdomen as the contraction increased rather than passing on.

As a flood of hot liquid burst down her legs,
someone screamed, but Faith was no longer conscious of anything but the
pain as she crumpled toward the floor.

All eyes focused on the tiny woman sitting straight
and stiff on the bow-legged damask chair near the fire. Behind her stood
an incongruous sight in rough-woven, ill-fitted coat and a wig that
looked as if it had been made for another. The men lounging around the
room glared at the burly intruder, but in respect for the elderly woman,
they held their tongues.

“Thomas, I believe it is time you had the banns
declared. If you wish to pass that woman off as my granddaughter, I will
not have her bearing a bastard. If Harry will not, I suppose I could
settle a sum on you so you will not starve, but do not expect more than
that. I do not believe for a minute that she is my granddaughter.”

Thomas jerked, then relaxed into his usual sprawl
against the mantel. “I’m sorry if she does not live up to your
expectations, Lady Carlisle, but there is no doubt as to who she is. We
were only waiting for an appropriate time to announce our intentions. If
you wish to provide Faith a dowry, we will gladly accept your gracious
gift, but Uncle Harry has already offered a generous allowance. You need
not burden yourself.”