Every bit of it. From the name of the man who’d accosted Felicity on her way back from the theatre, to his likely location, to the inn at which Mama was presently residing. More than enough to render even the tiniest possibility of Mama’s escape moot, provided the information which Grace had given proved to be correct.
“Yes. All.” Ian blew out a breath. “Ludlow—the brute who attacked you—was found sleeping off a night of drink at a tavern. He was less than happy to be rudely awoken at the hour I found him.” His fingers flexed on her hip and he gave a little hiss of pain.
Felicity glanced down, surprised to find spots of blood dotting his knuckles, the skin red and raw. “Ian! What did you do?”
“Pummeled him,” he said, without so much as a shred of remorse. “Don’t glower. I would have preferred to kill him. Regrettably, the arse hasgot the hardest head I’ve ever encountered and I’m far less practiced than once I was. I think I dislodged a tooth or two.”
“Ian.”
“I left him still breathing,” Ian said. “And in more capable hands than mine. He’s a ruffian, but not one of any particular intelligence or wit. Last I saw of him, he was pressing the thief-takers to tell him which of his crimes had seen him done in. The damned fool hadn’t even the presence of mind to shut his mouth; he’s going to end up talking himself straight into a lengthy prison sentence, if not transportation.” The pressure of his fingers eased. “He was only hired muscle,” he said. “Bought for the price of a few pints of ale on the nights your mother had need of him, and the promise of more when she’d received the payment she expected. I don’t believe she ever intended to pay him what she’d promised, given that she intended to be on the first post coach this morning.”
Felicity might have managed to spare a shred of pity for the man—another unwitting victim of Mama’s—had he not frightened her so terribly that evening after the theatre. “And Mama?” she asked.
“Was not well pleased to find herself taken into custody the moment she stepped out of her room at the inn this morning. Screeched fit to wake the dead, right up until she was told she was to be taken before the magistrate to answer for her crimes. Then, I am given to understand, her tune changed rather drastically.”
“Oh?” She leaned her shoulder against his. “How so?”
“She began asking for you,” he said. “Insisted there had been a dreadful misunderstanding, and if she could only speak with you, you would see it for yourself.” He hesitated. “Do you want to?”
“Want to what?”
“See her,” he said. “Speak with her. Before she is taken away. It is…unlikely in the extreme that you will ever have another opportunity.”
“There is nothing she could say that would alter my opinion of her,” Felicity said. “I know now who she is.” There had once been a time that she had wondered after the mother she had lost. But after today—she never would again. “Do you know,” she said softly. “She might simply have come to call. Made a show of caring about me. About any of us; all of us. Asked for funds instead of demanded them. But she didn’t. Probably she could not have maintained the fiction of caring long enough. Probably,” she said, “it was simply easier to send a few threatening notes and wait.” Perhaps even more satisfying.
It had suited her purposes to conceal her involvement—to a point. But once she had been caught out, she hadn’t cared enough even to don a mask, to present the façade of a loving mother. Extortion had been the lesser effort to a woman who had never given so much as a passing thought to the daughters she had abandoned beyond what service they might be of to her.
“No,” Felicity said firmly. “I never want to see her again. I never want even to think of her again.”
“Charity and Mercy said much the same,” he said, and his hand slid up her spine in a soothing stroke. “I’m so sorry. Felicity, I’m so sorry for what she did to you. To all of you.”
Yes; it had been a tragedy. But it was over at last. And now she knew the answers to those questions that had haunted her since childhood. It wasn’t a relief, per se, but something more akin to a resolution. As if she had come full circle, confronting the spectres of her past. Healed the wound of abandonment that had been left upon the child she had once been, when she had been too young to bear it. Now she could examine it with an objective eye; this scar that had shaped her, but which had now been deprived of its power to hurt.
She said, quietly, “I don’t know how to forgive you for things for which you are not sorry. I’m not the sort of person who can overlook them, who can simply pretend that they never happened. I cannot manipulate those things in my mind into something less than they were, or make excuses for them. Even if—even if some good came of them, even if I do find myself grateful for certain things—”
“The ends do not justify the means.” He uttered the words with a deep, fatalistic inflection. Almost as if he had reached a similar conclusion himself. “I am sorry,” he said. “For trapping you into marriage. For using your friend against you and ensuring you had no other choice but to stay.”
The words were…not quite enough. Not now; not yet. Felicity scrubbed at her eyes with a corner of her sleeve. “I don’t know how—hownotto be resentful of things that cannot be changed.” Things which had been decided for her without her consent. “I don’t know how to mend it,” she said, hearing a shameful little squeak in her voice, born of that aching part of her thatwantedto forgive. That desperately wished there were something that could ease the hurt, that wished the clock might turn back upon itself and give her the opportunity to choose for herself, knowing what she now knew.
A long, low sigh. “I do,” he said. His fingers fell from her back as he leaned away from her to snatch that leather folio from where he’d tossed it on the neighboring chair. There was the rustle ofpapers within as he resettled himself.
She’d seen that folio before, she realized. The cover still bore the marks her nails had scratched into it on her frantic flight home that first night she’d come to his house.
Ian withdrew a stack of papers. “This is every copy of that agreement between us that was ever drafted,” he said. “No others exist.”
She believed him. She simply didn’t understand what he meant to imply with the words.
“I can’t change the past,” he said. “But the future is still mutable. Your future is for you to decide.”
And with a flick of his wrist, he cast the papers straight into the fire.
Chapter Twenty Six
Ian saw the death of every dream he’d ever cherished in the roar of the flames as they consumed with a voracious appetite the pages he’d tossed into them. He’d killed them himself, but it had had to be done.
How was it right, how was itfairthat he should have his happiness at the expense of hers? It wasn’t. It wasn’t at all, and he—he didn’t want the pretense of love any more than she did. And it could never be real unless those strings by which he’d bound her were cut clean through.
He said, “Graves, being now apprised of our situation, has raised some concerns.”
