Miranda. Susan Wiggs
idea, when you consider it,” Duffie said as he laid out a clean shirt and morning coat. “Marriage happens every day.”
Ian sluiced cold water over himself from the yellow-glazed Newcastle ware bowl on the washstand. “Not to me.” He turned the ewer sideways and took a long drink directly from it. “Never to me, McDuff.”
The diminutive man seemed to swell to twice his size. “What are you saying, then?”
Ian grabbed a towel and began scrubbing his face and hair dry. Craning his neck, he inspected his burned shoulder. He closed his eyes, felt a sickening terror pitch in his gut as he relived the moment of rescuing Robbie. Only the desperate need of a child had prodded him out of his paralyzing fear of heights, prodded him just as the bigger boys had, so many years ago, sticking pins in his bare feet to urge him to climb higher, higher through the tight, narrow passageways of the chimney pots he had been forced to clean.
“I’m waiting for an answer.” Duffie snatched away the towel and gave Ian’s shoulder a casual glance. “Healing nicely,” he pronounced, “which is more than I can say for your paper skull if you don’t answer me. What are your intentions toward the girl?”
Ian grabbed back the towel and rubbed it across his chest. Only from Angus McDuff would he tolerate this constant meddling. He heaved a sigh. “You sound like a fierce papa.”
The salt-and-pepper brows beetled. “Lord knows she could use one. She’s helpless as a lamb, man. Dinna eat her alive.”
Ian began dressing in traveling garb of black breeches and boots, a starched and snowy shirt, a waistcoat, and a cravat. “I’m taking her to Scotland.”
“To Scotland.”
“Aye.”
“To marry her.”
“Nay.”
For an older man, Duffie moved with surprising speed. In one swift movement he had Ian shoved back against the wall, showing no sympathy for the wounded shoulder. His face was florid, his eyes hard. “Damn you to hell, Ian MacVane. I ought to skelp your stubborn hide for you. Have you taken a knife, then, and carved out your own heart?”
Ian glared at him coldly. “Oh, aye. You know I have.”
Duffie dropped his hands to his sides, but he did not retreat. “That doesna mean others are made of ice. I’ll not let you ruin the girl. Not let you whisk her away, destroy her reputation, destroy any chance she has to settle down one day and find happiness.”
“She’s happy now,” Ian said, his mouth a cruel twist, “when she knows nothing of the past.”
“Fine. She knows nothing. And you care nothing for her future. It’ll be no future at all if you skulk off with her, wooing her with false promises. What decent man would have her after she goes adventuring with Ian MacVane?”
“No one need know.” The back of Ian’s neck prickled. He didn’t like feeling this way—knowing he was wrong but lacking the conscience to stop himself.
“She will know,” Duffie said obstinately. “To her core, she is a sweet and decent soul.”
“Frances thinks she is a traitor. Oh. Do pardon me. A sweet and decent traitor.” Ian raked a wooden comb through his close-cropped hair. “Look, would you rather I do what I should have done in the first place?”
“And what is that?”
“Take her directly to the authorities. I could make this all very simple by marching her before them and letting them be the ones to unlock her secrets.”
Duffie’s cheeks paled beneath his beard. “She’s a wee, fragile thing. I suspect you guessed that or you wouldna have brought her this far. There is only one solution.”
Ian set down his comb. He was tired of arguing. It had taken half the night to get the hard-drinking Cossacks to return to their residence at the Pulteney Hotel. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“Because it’s the kind and proper thing, which is not what you are used to doing.” Duffie pointed a stubby finger and narrowed an eye as though taking aim at his employer. “You’ll do exactly as you promised, my fine gentleman. You’ll marry the girl. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, you’ll find out her secrets. And if you’re luckier still, I willna skelp you.”
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was— But then, how it was sweet!
—Robert Browning
The inmates at Bedlam were not nearly as entertaining since the endowments had started to arrive. Dr. Brian Beckworth, for one, did not regret the change. He did not miss the gawkers who paid their coppers to come and stare at the moonstruck inmates. He did not miss Warden Larkin, given the boot the same day Miranda had left.
The till at the door had dwindled, but the anonymous payments drawn on a London bank account more than made up for that. Before long, the hospital would relocate to a new building in Lambeth, and this moldering pile of rubble would be abandoned.
For years Dr. Beckworth had wanted the institution to be a place of healing. A place where people who had lost pieces of their souls could find themselves again—or at least find solace. Now there was a chance that it could happen.
Some of the women were hopeless, it was true. But others simply needed care and compassion. And now the doctor could afford to give it to them. All because of Miranda.
Feeling a rare sense of accomplishment, Beckworth smiled up at Gwen, who came in with his morning tea and the London Times. She had started doing a few tasks around the place and seemed to take her new responsibilities in stride.
“Nice and strong like you favors it, sir,” she said. Today her hair was caught back neatly with a bit of ribbon, and her hands and face were scrubbed clean. She hid less and less behind her brash, uncaring facade.
Beckworth inhaled the fragrant steam and held up the paper, scanning the front page. Gwen turned to leave, but her eyes widened and she bent close. “Sir, look there! ’Tis our own Miranda, and no mistake.”
With a frown, Beckworth turned the paper over and laid it on his desk. He saw a small sketch of a woman with large eyes and a swirl of thick, dark curls. The caption identified her as “Miss Miranda Stonecypher.”
For no apparent reason, an icy claw of fear clutched at his gut. There was something sinister about seeing her likeness, her name in bold print.
“What’s it say, sir? Please.” Gwen propped one hip on his desk and bent over the sketch.
Beckworth cleared his throat. “It seems her family is looking for her. Requests a reply to an anonymous box at the paper. Claims she has been missing since...” He scanned down the article. “Since the day before she arrived here.”
“But that can’t be,” Gwen stated. “Mr. MacVane already collected her.”
Beckworth’s mouth went dry. “He claimed he knew her, but I was never quite convinced.”
“Hell and damnation,” Gwen burst out. “Then MacVane played us false and stole poor Miranda away!”
From the corridor outside came a scuffle of feet and the murmur of voices, but Beckworth was more preoccupied with the extraordinary notice in the paper.
“So it would appear.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. The cold clench of fear in his gut tightened. Had he let a stranger spirit the girl away?
With a less than steady hand, the doctor dipped quill in ink and scribbled an urgent message. “I shall have this delivered to the Times,” he said, thinking