He leaned up and stilled her words with a finger to her mouth. Her trembling, moist, perfect mouth. He shook his head. “No more. We must return home now.”
She nodded and stood, brushing the sand from her wet dress, grabbing their boots. Partway up the hill, in sight of the gig, she stopped and glanced back. “I wish I could keep it forever.”
If only they could.
Bowles slammed his window shut against the night air, grabbed the letter from his nightstand, and slipped in bed. The wood frame creaked as he turned on his side, positioning the letter so the tallow candle’s glow would illuminate the words:
She remembers just as I told you she would. It is only a matter of time before she knows everything and we are all ruined. You must act quickly. If I am brought back into this shame, yet again, think not that I shall go alone. We will both hang, dear brother. Remember that.
He closed his fingers around the letter. Crumpled it into a ball. Tossed it across the tiny chamber, where Miss Reay would see it come morning and hurry it away.
His blood surged with heat. ’Twas not the image of the gallows that so bothered him. Or even the pressure of finding and eliminating this troublesome Eliza Gillingham whom he should have killed many years ago.
’Twas the tone. The voice in the letter. Telling him what to do, ordering him about with a lack of respect so great it made him want to load his dueling pistol, ride to the Northwood home, and end the only sibling his father had left him.
But he wouldn’t.
He would do as he was told.
With so much at stake, he had very little choice.
The next morning, Felton never came for Eliza. She remained in her chamber until the octagonal mantel clock struck nine, at which time Dodie swept in and chattered as she helped Eliza dress for the day.
“Oh no, Miss Gillingham,” said the girl, as she pulled the shift over Eliza’s head. “Master Northwood rode out early, he did, and ne’er said a word to me when he should come home.”
“When does he usually?”
“Usually what, Miss Gillingham?”
“Come home?”
“Oh me, who can know?” Dodie laced the stays with expert speed. “Why, I was just tellin’ Mrs. Northwood the other day, I says to her, ‘Mrs. Northwood, Master Northwood be gone all the time anymore.’ And she says to me, ‘Dodie, you be mindin’ your own matters, you hear me?’ So that’s what I be tryin’ to do all the time. Mind my own matters.”
A smile started at Eliza’s lips. Dodie and Minney, perhaps, would make well-suited friends.
When her petticoat and muslin gown were donned, her stockings fastened, and her boots tied, she moved to the round mirror above the washstand and allowed Dodie to run a comb through her tresses.
The reflection of herself stared back at her, a girl she hardly knew. Where was the child she’d seen in the ripples of the stream so many times? The laughing little thing who carried no care in her eyes, nor frown upon her lips, nor pale shade of fear in her cheeks?
Alas, but she was gone. She was buried in the forest somewhere, like the corpse of a once-happy fairy, now cold and spiritless and rotting in the hole of a tree.
Like Captain.
She looked away before she witnessed her own pain and trained her features to remain stoic, lest Dodie should notice. The last thing she needed, or wanted, was more pity.
“There. You be all finished, Miss Gillingham. Oh—and ’ere.” Dodie dug into her pocket and fished out a small paper. “I ne’er read this. I ne’er so much as looked at it, on account of me tryin’ like Mrs. Northwood told me to mind my own matters.”
Eliza glanced over the elegant invitation.“Miss Eliza Gillingham is invited to attend a private ball at Jaxhill Hall, Friday evening, September eleventh, at six o’clock.”Signed, in lovely script, by Miss Haverfield.
“What it say, Miss Gillingham?”
She placed the invitation on the mantel. “Did the Northwoods receive this too?”
“Yes, Miss Gillingham. But I ne’er read it either.”
Eliza smiled, nodded, and headed for the door.
“Miss Gillingham?”
