Chalgrove watched her eyes when she spoke. Eyes dark, but not afraid. Her chest heaved with deep breaths, but she had no fear in her eyes. None.
Miranda knew something he did not. An innocent would not want to protect someone so deranged. He wondered if he’d misjudged her as he had the woman he’d loved.
He sat on the bed.
He’d met a man named Manwaring once at Tattersall’s and they’d both admired the same gelding. They’d crossed paths several other times. A robust old man—a mite insipid, perhaps. He couldn’t bring to mind more, although they’d talked for a quarter-hour or so. And the man had funds. His daughter surely wouldn’t be a governess. But she said she’d been disowned.
He caught her perusal of him. Nothing else moved, except the rise and fall of their chests and their contemplations as they gauged each other.
‘Well, Miss Manwaring. We might be together longer than we’d hoped.’
He would find out more from her, not only by asking her direct questions, but by speaking with her and watching her actions and seeing what she tried to avoid.
He rubbed his wrist, but truly he was feeling the place where his hand had caressed her. ‘How did that mindless old fraud capture you?’
‘A man told me... He told me someone I used to know was dying and that her last wish was to speak with me. I thought... I guess I didn’t think. But I trusted him and he shoved me into this room and locked me in.’ She shivered.
Her face wasn’t as plain as he’d perceived at first. She had a pert nose and a certain grace when she moved. Her form, well—with those prim clothes—she tried to hide herself, but that would only work when she stared in her own mirror.
Her slender fingers straightened her skirt. He wagered he could get her to rearrange her skirt or straighten her hairpin again with very few words. Yet it was as if she tried to make herself less attractive instead of more alluring.
He wanted to let her think he was satisfied with her answers. Perhaps lull her into believing that he trusted her.
He ate some bread and left some for her. He decided to see if he really could get her to re-fluff herself.
He remembered the old woman at the window and she’d smiled, as if things were going as she’d planned. And she’d called herself a matchmaker. She was as daft as any soul in Bedlam. He shoved the knowledge from his mind. It didn’t matter. She might be witless, but she was cunning and they were trapped.
He let his lips relax. He needed to find out what Miss Manwaring knew that she wasn’t telling him and he wanted to thaw the ice around her. ‘You’ve a good arm. If the window hadn’t been so boarded up, you’d have clouted her with the shoe.’ He added assurance to his words. ‘Wellington would have been proud to have you in his army.’
Sure enough, she glanced away, adjusted the hairpin, fiddled with her sleeves, then patted her skirt.
He felt comforted for some reason.
He wondered who’d given the pin to her. She wore nothing else of colour or fashion.
Her eyes moved to him and he could tell she didn’t believe he had confidence in her.
‘I do not encourage the attention of lawful people, much less criminals. This room seems to become smaller every hour and I am thinking we will have to gnaw ourselves out of here.’ Her eyes flickered over him. ‘I didn’t want this to happen. To you or me. I assure you.’
‘When that bottle came at me from out of the darkness, I didn’t take that as a sign you wanted me here.’ Then he checked the scratches on his head, acknowledging her force, and indicated his shoulder. He moved to the light, and the thin fabric of his shirt showed a darkening underneath. ‘I would have woken up dead this morning if you’d had your way.’
‘My apologies.’ Her eyes dipped.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he said. ‘But I certainly couldn’t show this bruise to my friends as I could when my horse kicked me. They might ask how it happened and I can hardly tell them about a woman with a waist half as big as the bottle in her hand and as spirited as any ten Viking wenches. They’d be wanting an introduction.’
‘I want no such introductions and I am nothing like a Viking wench.’
‘You need no such introductions. And please don’t tell me you aren’t as spirited as ten Viking women.’ He patted the bruised area. ‘My pride might be hurt.’ He delivered the words in a way to bring a smile to her lips, though she quickly replaced it.
‘Did you have a governess who taught you boxing along with your stories of Peter the Great?’ he asked, voice soft, intent on finding out more about her.
She studied him, gauging his words and her own. He’d not deluded her. She saw through him as easily as a pane of glass.
Still, she answered.
‘Miss Cuthbert, a dear companion who reminded me of a pigeon when she moved about the house. We have remained close, but after my father married again she was not welcome in the new household. I miss her. She found me the governess position.’
He paused. ‘She taught you well.’
She accepted his words and a barrier fell from between them.
‘It was like losing my mother twice in the same year. Mother died, then Father brought in a new wife and Miss Cuthbert had to leave. She wasn’t precisely sacked, but she said she could not countenance living under the same roof with my stepmother. After all, I didn’t need a governess and Miss Cuthbert had become a companion to both my mother and me. She helped so much when Mother passed.’
‘What happened?’
‘The maid went to wake Mother and she was already gone, but her health had always been fragile. Miss Cuthbert said seeing me grow had kept Mother alive more years than she would have lived otherwise.’
She paced to the opening and peered out. ‘This is easy compared to losing her.’
Miranda had returned to the bed, her back against the wall again and her knees up so she could prop her arms on them. The room had no chair and, somehow, sitting the way she did seemed more proper than any other way.
He’d not wanted to speak after she’d mentioned the horrible year of her life and neither had she.
She’d spread the skirt around her, covering her stocking feet. But she’d had no wish to put her shoes back on after using them against her grandmother.
She no longer felt like a governess with all the proper gestures. She felt like a beggar. The beggar her father’s new wife had called her. Begging for freedom and the return of her life.
‘The old woman wouldn’t be feeding us if she wanted us dead. That is, if she is sensible.’ He broke the silence.
Her grandmother was all machinations and trickery and whatever else at hand. She wouldn’t let them starve, but the food she gave them might be stolen.
Miranda had once walked through an orchard with her grandmother at night, filling her basket.
The gamekeeper, who they’d lived with, was the biggest poacher of them all and she’d sometimes had to stay with him while her grandmother went to fairs.
One night, they’d all traipsed out and he’d kept the dogs quiet so they would not alert anyone that the orchard apples were being picked, which had amused her grandmother.
Her grandmother had once taken in and fed a little mouse with a broken leg, but then after it had got well, she’d let the cat into the house to catch the mouse.
Yet she would leave crumbs of food on rocks in the wintertime for whatever creature might find it. She claimed to be feeding good fortune.
Well, the fortune had dissolved for Miranda and might have grown tentacles.
The old woman wanted Miranda to get married and so she’d locked them in a room, not caring about repercussions.
‘Might anyone search for you?’ she asked.
‘I’ll not be missed until the Earl of Kenton’s house party.’ He gave a quick shake of his head. ‘I’d been with my mother yesterday for an early celebration of her birthday and I was going to a cousin’s house to escape the evening festivities she had planned for her friends. I had mentioned to my cousin I might visit, but I’d not been certain. He’ll think I stayed at my estate.
‘You are to attend an earl’s house party?’ Her stomach would have fallen to the floor had it been able.
This unshaven man was a friend of an earl?
‘Yes. His wife is my aunt.’
Related to an earl.
‘Well...’ her throat scratched to get out the words ‘...I’m sure they will miss you soon.’ Although it was highly doubtful they’d know where to search for him. ‘Did the old woman know who you are?’
‘The men were told I was a tailor.’ He stopped and leaned his back against the wall opposite Miranda, his hands behind him. ‘Beau Brummell’s. If I am to be a tailor, I suppose that is the one to be, although I understood Mr Brummell himself has moved to France.’
‘Did she say why she took you?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He pushed himself from the wall. ‘She laughed when I asked. Although the men who helped her said I was to be held for ransom.’ He paused. ‘Which is strange. I control most of the family funds,’ he mused, as if talking to himself. ‘The person to kidnap would be someone I care about. I can bundle funds together much more easily than they, which is no secret. I even have an elderly aunt, Agatha Miles, in London, who is coddled by the same servants who’ve been with her for her lifetime. She could have been a much easier target.’
She swallowed. ‘You’re very wealthy?’
He stopped, his body still and his gaze on her face. ‘I’m not just Chal. I’m Lord Chal. Lord Chalgrove.’
Her jaw dropped and she didn’t even hear the end of his sentence. If the truth came out, the whole truth, she would never again find work. She might be considered an accomplice. It would be easy for a man such as this to have witnesses against her. The courts could do as they wished to please an influential man. A lord.
The trials were held one after the other and, at the end of the session, the criminals were led to the gallows. No long waits. No long goodbyes.
‘I care for the Duke of Chalgrove’s properties because they’re mine. My father died about five years ago.’
Then she remembered hearing of the old Duke of Chalgrove and how his son had taken the title, and she’d forgotten about it because it had happened in the year her mother had died. She’d completely disregarded it. She dropped her head, bumping her knees with it. ‘I am going to die.’
‘You know. You know more than you’re telling me,’ he whispered into the room, but the words had as much portent as a shout. He realised she knew more than she admitted, but not everything. She’d not known who he was.
‘You should be overjoyed to be with someone who might have friends to sway others to help rescue us.’ His voice lowered. ‘Yet you give the impression you’re displeased.’
She raised her head, her eyes on his. Face pale even in the shadows.
‘Miss Manwaring?’ His eyes studied her.
She let out a deep breath.
‘Why aren’t you happy that I’m a duke with the resources to have justice done?’
‘I am. Happy you’re a duke. It’s the situation that’s upset me. The old woman doesn’t care how close she dances to the noose.’ She moved back and pulled herself into a tighter ball, her arms circling her propped knees and her brow against her arms. ‘Your father died the same year as my mother. And I may have seen him once. A man who stood rather like some sea god with flowing white hair and people would bow and shake as he walked by.’
She whispered. ‘Thank goodness he is dead.’
‘Miss Manwaring.’ He could say nothing else. Her rudeness was unthinkable.
She jumped. ‘It would be very difficult for him to know you were taken and not know where you are.’
‘He’d be tearing the world apart to find out what happened.’ As the current Duke of Chalgrove planned.
This was the first time in his life anyone had appeared crushed when finding out he was a duke. She had her head down so low he could only see the top of it.
‘I am in trouble. I’ve been bundled together with a duke. My employer will let me go. My stepmother will use this as an excuse to cast more aspersions at me.’
Her knees were still raised, her arms crossed over them, and her chin rested there. Her eyes were closed so he studied her face. The lashes rimmed her eyes so thickly he wanted to brush his cheek against them to see if they felt as lush as they appeared.
Then he called himself a fool.
His fascination with Susanna had not taught him anything.
Again, he was enthralled by a pretty face. A woman who seemed to need his help. Another woman with secrets. ‘You had no more choice in this than I.’
‘No one will believe that.’
He wondered why she would think such a thing. Unless she, too, had thought he was a tailor and was in on the plot to kidnap him. She might be brave enough to help in the abduction of a tailor without influential friends, but a duke might cause her pause.
Apparently, it did.
And based on the shoes flying about, her cohort had betrayed her.
Miranda could almost feel the heat wafting from her skin like steam from a pot, but that felt better than the dread roiling inside her.
The Duke had turned away. The Duke of Chalgrove.
She didn’t know why she’d not recognised him at first, but then she’d only seen his father a few times.
Plus, this duke had not been shaven when she’d first seen him. She’d always, somehow, assumed that dukes woke up clean shaven, perfectly groomed and perhaps occasionally needed their hair dusted, not with powder, but to remove the earth that had surely been stirred up as people scurried around to do their bidding.
This man did not fit her vision of a duke.
He couldn’t seem to stop himself from moving. She expected that he also retraced every word she’d said, searching for all he could figure out about the situation.
She’d watched his back as he worked. The thin lawn of his shirt, sometimes dampened by sweat, did nothing to hide his muscles as he strained to find an escape. She knew at times he had concentrated so hard he forgot she was there, mumbling curses.
He’d once stopped and pulled a splinter from his thumb with his teeth. The way his eyes had darkened and his teeth snapped, he’d appeared wilder than anyone she’d ever seen. Dukes did not have feral glints in their eyes.
Oh, goodness, perhaps they did. Perhaps they were just like her grandmother, except on the other side of the societal ladder. They kept to the top rung, her grandmother on the bottom, and everyone else was trapped between them. And now her grandmother was shaking the ladder.
An irritation flashed in her. She didn’t want to be at either end of the hierarchy.
She just wanted to hang on to the ladder and be left alone.
She recognised that little things about him had seemed to change now that she knew he was a duke. It didn’t seem possible. He appeared bigger, stronger and more capable. And he was scruffy, especially since he wasn’t wearing the coat with the one button ripped away.
But now she saw the truth. He acted as a leader would.
He’d not been able to stop trying to escape because his life was his to control. Always. Now it was not and he could not accept it.
Whenever he rested, he did so by moving about the edges of the room, searching again for something he might have missed to free them.
‘You’ve tried the floor, walls, the door and both windows. A thousand times over.’
‘The alternative is to do nothing,’ he said. ‘Which will result in nothing. I will find a way out. If for no other reason than to keep her from having the last laugh.’ He paused, but then sat on the bed. ‘You’re correct, though. This is not a game of movement, but of strategy. To move accomplishes no preordained result if it is not planned properly.’
Her grandmother worked by the same principles, but she claimed the stars told her which way to move.
‘If something she imagined told her to do something wrong, she should not have listened. Because she didn’t listen when you told her to set us free.’ Miranda waved her hand about, her voice becoming falsetto. ‘I must do this or that because the stars tell me. Well, if the moon had told her to stick her finger in a fire, I dare say she would have doubted that.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Chalgrove whispered. ‘Perhaps, in a sense, that is what the stars told her and she did it.’
Chalgrove kept his sight on the door. He didn’t want her to see his mistrust.
She let her knees drop and fell to the bed.
She stared at him, determined, it seemed, to convince him.
‘I’m content with my status of governess. I have had men express an interest in courting me, but I see no reason to leave a comfortable life. Granted, it isn’t always easy. But I have children to care for—a family of my choosing and their choosing—and my life is considerably better than a wife’s might be.’
He watched her eyes. He accepted that someone had expressed interest in courting her. She had an expression that captured a glance and stretched it into longer ones.
‘The men who asked to court you—how did you meet them?’
She shrugged away her answer. ‘At the shops. I take the children out for walks, even though I always have Nicky with us. He drives the coach. He’s got a whip and it’s not for the horses, he said.’
‘Protective?’ He could understand someone wanting to take care of her. She did appear fragile. Willowy. But from the thrust she’d landed on his shoulder, he would gauge her sturdy.
He only had her word she was a governess, though. And servants sometimes moved to the wrong side of life.
‘Very. He understands I am a gentle woman. These are extraordinary circumstances.’ She spoke the words rapidly. And she also declared them as if she’d also expressed them, at least to herself, many times. ‘I work hard to be proper at all times. It is my employment and my livelihood. I must.’ She tapped her chest. ‘And the little ones. They are my heart.’
Her eyes softened when she mentioned her charges.
‘I must get back to them.’ Her lips quavered. ‘The children... They are my happiness.’
‘It is a perilous thing for anyone else to hold your happiness.’
‘True. But as soon as I held Willie... I saw him in his nurse’s arms and he had two little teeth, more drool than smile, and I just fell in love with him. There are hours when I don’t love him, but still, he has my heart.’
She’d not even needed to say it. He saw the love reflected in her face and heard it in her voice. So, she did care for the children.
‘He’s a mess.’ She smiled, shaking her head, and the emotion he heard in her words magnified. ‘And Dolly. She is a treasure and the despair of her brother as he doesn’t like to share attention. But Dolly is too precious to even know when she is getting notice.’
She paused, reflecting. ‘I cannot be upset about the misfortunes of my life because it brought me my mother, and then, when she died, it brought me Dolly and Willie. So, I hold no one responsible for the past. But I don’t want an old woman to take my future away from me.’
She slid from the bed, reaching for his coat on the floor, but then she stilled and glanced back at him. ‘It concerns me to see such a garment tossed aside. I feel it should at least be off the floor.’ She indicated a peg. ‘May I?’
Instead of answering, he strode to the peg, then wrenched it free and held it.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked.
‘I realised it might be held in place with a nail and presumed that might help us.’ He tossed the peg aside. ‘But the nail has rusted through. Broke easier than snapping a twig. Easier than losing trust.’
‘Trust?’ She lifted his coat. ‘I would have trusted the old woman to take these buttons. But she didn’t.’ She slipped a finger beneath the rip in the coat. With his strength, he’d torn the button from the fabric.
‘I once knew a woman who would have happily snipped them off and pouted at my mistake of not wearing more,’ he said.
‘You were tricked?’
‘I courted a woman whom I cared for. She was already married. I didn’t know it. No one else knew, except her husband, I suppose.’ He shrugged.
That had sweltered inside him for months, like banked ashes kept from waning, which could still cause pain.
He’d been so convinced Susanna was a jewel. But afterwards, he’d recalled so many little things that should have warned him. He’d recounted them over and over and been amazed at how easily he’d brushed them aside as they occurred. He’d been deceived by an alluring woman and he’d fallen into her machinations.
‘It’s different. For a...duke. You have to marry. I don’t.’
‘I don’t have to marry. The Royal Dukes can take their time. I can be the same. I have many friends. I have my family. My mother. My cousins. My sister. She says I am the twin of her heart, except I am of the wrong gender, the wrong size and the wrong sensibility, and rarely see things as she does.’
‘It isn’t that you don’t have people to show you care in your life. It sounds as though you might have too many. You don’t feel the need for a wife because you have numerous people who love you.’
‘Life isn’t about love. Susanna didn’t put me off marriage. She made me wary of my ability to see the truth.’ She’d misled him so completely. ‘My perceptions were flawed. I truly had faith Susanna was more than she was. I overlooked her mistakes easily enough.’
He moved to his feet, remembering the love Miss Manwaring had in her eyes for the children and realising that even Susanna had cared deeply for a little dog he’d given her. ‘This talk accomplishes nothing. We’re imprisoned and thinking of things we don’t need to concern ourselves with. Escape is all we should consider.’