Miranda. Susan Wiggs
marked by a thickening trail of blood, overturned furniture, broken lamp chimneys, scattered papers.
He came to a tiny room with a single bedstead, the coverlet trailing along the floor.
A muffled moan issued from beneath the frayed cloth.
Lucas plunged to his knees. “Miranda!” With a shaking hand, he moved the blanket aside. A death-pale face stared up at him. The odor of fresh blood slammed through him.
And Lucas felt a shameful flood of relief, for the face of the dying woman was not Miranda’s.
“You must be Midge,” he said gently. “I am Lucas, a special friend of Miranda.”
The woman’s crusted lips moved. He bent forward to hear.
“’Randa...has no friends,” the servant whispered.
Lucas’s heart constricted. “She has one,” he said. “She has me.”
A bloodied hand clutched his sleeve. “They took her. And...Gideon.”
Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. Somehow he had known from the moment he’d set foot in this house. Damn! He should never have let her storm off in anger last night.
“Who?” he forced out as grief and rage and panic tore into him. “Please. For Miranda’s sake, you must tell me. Who did this?”
She spoke again, her voice fainter than ever. “Vi... Violet.” The word was more sigh than speech.
Despite a pounding sense of urgency, Lucas could not leave her. He held her for what seemed a long time. Her hand, icy cold on his sleeve, went slack and dropped. A rattling sound he remembered from the field hospital filled the silence.
He felt strangely calm as he relinquished his hold on Midge, poor Midge, whom he had never known. He put her head on a pillow and settled the coverlet around her as if she were a child being tucked in for the night. For eternity.
Then, still seized by an eerie serenity, he went through the apartment, seeking clues.
The problem was, someone had been here before him. Someone had ripped out desk drawers and rifled through papers and books. Someone had taken three innocent lives and cut them short.
He must contact the authorities. He would do so anonymously, of course, taking care that his name not be connected with this whole unsavory affair.
As he left, he passed through the vestibule. On a peg behind the door hung Miranda’s plain blue wool shawl. He pictured her in it, strolling along with him, gesturing as she spoke, her eyes brighter than stars as she gazed up at him.
He snatched up the shawl and buried his face in the soft wool. It smelled of Miranda and memories.
He had been too damned late to save her.
Ah, God, Miranda. I’m so sorry.
The dam broke. Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, hero of the Peninsular Wars, sank to the floor and sobbed.
* * *
Miranda forced herself to stop screaming as Larkin yanked her to her feet and dragged her back to Bedlam. “I have a wealthy family,” she said. Her voice had taken on a surprisingly cultivated tone.
“Have you, then?” Larkin asked cynically. “I thought you didn’t remember.”
“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t,” she said in a singsong voice. “The question is, will you risk it?”
Larkin paused at the entranceway to the hospital. “Risk—”
She barked out a laugh. “Your decision, Mr. Larkin. Are a few moments of fleeting lust worth losing a handsome reward?”
He studied her for a long moment, his mustache twitching. “You’re a skinny, filthy wretch anyway,” he muttered. Then he hauled her through a corridor with cracked plaster walls, stopping at a wide, barred door. “Your home away from home, milady,” he spat.
He shoved her into the women’s gallery. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle another scream. A high fanlight let in streams of the afternoon sun. Dirty straw covered the floor. The plaster walls were crumbling and weeping with moisture. And everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on each rickety bench or moldering pallet, some dangling from manacles and leg irons, were the insane.
A few of them looked up when she entered. Most continued their mindless rocking and moaning, some screeching or muttering to themselves. One had plucked out the hair on the left side of her head. Another sang a tuneless, repetitive melody. But for the most part, the women lay as unresponsive as corpses.
“Hey, warden!” A buxom woman with bad teeth and jet black hair sidled toward them. “What have you there? A new jade ornament?”
“Stand aside, Gwen, she’s none of your affair.”
Ignoring him, Gwen put her face very close to Miranda’s. “’Neath all that dirt and soot, she looks a bit too fine for the likes of you, Larkin.” Gwen lifted an eyebrow. “What say you to that, mistress?”
A spark of outrage flared to life inside Miranda. She jerked her arm from Larkin’s grasp. “What I say, Mistress Gwen, is that any woman in this room is too fine for the likes of Warden Larkin.”
In the stunned silence that ensued, more women lifted their faces toward Miranda, like broken blossoms seeking the sun. Gwen let out a laugh of delight, braying loudly until the warden backhanded her across the mouth.
She barely flinched. A group of women ambled closer, baring their teeth. Sweat broke out on Larkin’s brow. He took a coiled leather lash from his belt. A few inmates shrank back, but still more advanced.
Barking an oath, Larkin stepped outside, slammed the door and shot the bolt home. Gwen laughed again, and others joined her, their shouts of mirth no longer eerie, but strangely joyful.
Miranda stood with her back to the wall of iron bars and stared. When at last she found her voice, she asked, “Why did you do that, all of you? Why did you defend me?”
Gwen clasped Miranda’s hands in hers. “Because of what you said, girl. About us all being too fine for Larkin.”
“I spoke no more than the truth.”
“Aye. But no one’s ever said it before.”
* * *
The explosion was four days past and Miranda’s trail was growing cold. Ian MacVane had inquired at churches, poorhouses, bawdy houses, almonries. He had paid bribes to wharfside idlers and shipmasters, to innkeepers and stablers, all to no avail.
His superiors were growing more insistent by the hour. Frances had been shocked to learn the young woman had survived the explosion, and she was frantic to speak to her—or so she said. But Ian knew instinctively that Frances was not particular. She merely wanted the girl found—alive or dead.
Frustrated, he stalked through the ransacked house in Stamford Street for the tenth time. Curses trailed like a black banner in his wake.
Four days, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been after the night of the disaster.
And to think he had held her in his arms!
The thought haunted him. He remembered how fragile she had felt, remembered the fright and confusion in her eyes. The urge to protect her had been powerful. He should have heeded his instincts rather than entrusting her to the watchman.
“You should hae listened to the voice in your noggin rather than shunting her off on that peeler,” Duffie said, shouldering open the door and stepping inside. “You knew that, did you not?”
Ian glared at his assistant, Angus McDuff. “Not before you did, it seems. Truly, you give me the willies.” Duffie had an uncanny gift for reading a man’s thoughts. “If I were the superstitious sort, I’d call you a devil’s imp and banish you to the Outer Hebrides.”
“The London peelers are