“John.” His eyes squinted open, bleary and confused. “Mercy.”
“They are not yet found.” She should have lied to him, told him something soothing that would ease the desperation from his face. But he deserved the truth. “We shall find them. Mr. Wilkins would not have…he would not have…” She did not finish the sentence, for tears clogged her throat and Simon was already gone again anyway.
She fled from the room with warm trails streaming her cheeks.
Mr. Oswald still waited outside the door.
“You must help me find the children,” she said.
“Of course. In the morning.”
“No. Now.” She squared her shoulders. “We must find them tonight.”
Morning already pinkened the sky by the time Georgina and Mr. Oswald knocked on the fifth workhouse door.
A black-coated porter opened to them, shook his head when Georgina described the children, and slammed the door shut.
Cold, numbing dread tingled through her. She had been so certain Mr. Wilkins had placed them in an institution. What else could he have done with two children? Where else could he have disposed of them without anyone finding out?
“We shall find them.” Mr. Oswald’s hand stayed on her back, as they went back to the carriage. He swung her inside. “I have two menservants scouring the asylums, another hunting the poor farms, and another…”
Air stuck in her lungs. “And another…where?”
He pulled the door shut, met her eyes as the carriage lurched into motion again. “You do not appear well, Miss Whitmore, and as it is already light, I think perhaps it best you return to Sowerby.”
“I will not return until I find them.”
“You are as stubborn as I.” He leaned forward. “Perhaps more so.
A quality that both infuriates and tantalizes me.”
She had no strength for his flattery. She had strength for nothing—except holding up her head, blinking out the window, pushing away the incessant thought that the children were missing and Simon was dying.
She was not certain she could return to Sowerby House today, even if the children were discovered. She was too afraid of what they would say. That the doctor would shake his head outside the chamber door. That the room would be silent. The bed linens pulled over his face. His wonderful face. The face she needed.
“Georgina.” Mr. Oswald’s hand squeezed, firm. “You must not succumb to these dark and foreboding fears. I shall resolve them all. I promise.”
Empty words. They meant nothing. All of his money, all of his arrogance could not keep a man from death.
“Whatever happens, you need not fear being left without attachment.”
“You have no idea what I fear, sir.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps your fears, along with your secrets, are still just as much of a mystery to me as they were from the beginning.” The carriage pulled to a stop, but he blocked the door with an arm and squeezed her fingers tighter. “I think you are the one puzzle I am content to never solve.”
“I am not a game.”
“Nor am I.”
“Mr. Oswald.” She squirmed from his hand. “Please, we must go.”
He drew back, almost too quickly—and the hard press of his unsmiling lips faintly wiggled into her awareness. Had she ever seen him so grave?
But she could not think of that now. She hurried from the carriage and gathered her dress as they approached another grimy, redbrick workhouse, with black smoke fumes rising from the chimneys.
Before she entered the gates, the squalid odor flipped her stomach.
“One more, and then you shall have something to eat and drink.”
