She knew her name.
Her own name.
She must.
Meggie. Meg.
Tears escaped the corners of her eyes, hot and streaming. Everything hurt. Her head. Her heart. She was empty, hollow, like a book ripped of all its pages.Dear God, please help me.
But the prayer remained unanswered, and when she finally glanced back into Lord Cunningham’s confused eyes, a sob shuddered out of her. “I do not know.”
CHAPTER 3
Dusk bled hues of blue and purple across the countryside, dimming the patchwork meadows and rutted road. If Tom rode through the night, he’d make it to Sunderlin Downs, a neighboring village, in nearly three hours.
That is, if he didn’t bang on the door of every cottage or hovel he passed.
Mayhap he should.
The chance that some work-worn farmer or busy fishwife had been awake the night Meg was stolen seemed preposterous. That they had glanced out the window and could tell him who took her, why, or where was even more of an impossibility.
But he had nothing else.
No traces to follow, save for the ratcatcher. Meade was on it now.
Help me.The words rose up inside him, without direction, as if he spoke to the soul of every man and woman in North Cornwall. Meg would tell him to pray to God.
Meg didn’t know he already had.
Once.
Digging his heels deeper into the hide of his mount, he leaned forward and trotted faster. The rent of the mare had dwindled the spare shillings in his sock. What little he’d saved for his bride. For their cottage. As if it mattered now.
Why?
Moisture stung his eyes. The wind in his face, not tears.Why them?The Foxcrofts were friends to everyone in Juleshead. They went wassailing the streets at Christmastide. They fed the stray cats out their back door. They visited the sick during lazy afternoons, occupied the same box pew every Sunday at church, and hung caricatures on the shop windows to make passersby laugh.
No one should have ever wanted to hurt them.
Maybe Tom.
But not them.
The twilight faded to night, and only a pale glow of moonlight illuminated the winding country road. His legs twitched. The horse slowed. For miles, hours, he focused on hunting his brain for anything amiss these past weeks.
Had Mr. Foxcroft been more irritable? Had Tom missed an uneasiness in the man he should have detected—something more than his usual grumbling and ill-humored complaining? Had Meg been hiding something? Did she, like Tom, have secrets she was never brave enough to tell?
His shoulders drooped forward. He shook his head, forced himself upright again, but a yawn already stretched his lips. He had not slept in too long. His muscles cramped, his wounds burned with as much pain as the night Papa had dragged him behind their small brick cottage in North Brumcastle.
“Hands on the wall.”
Papa’s face a splotchy red. Moisture at the edge of his eyes.
The shirt ripped from Tom’s back as he faced the house.
Whack.
Birch twigs lashing across his skin. Cutting but not cutting deep enough.
