“Do not hurt him.” The plea broke from her cracked lips, but the cudgel swung in the darkness and Uncle’s chair toppled over. More sounds. Their boots destroying his face.
“Up, up.” Mrs. Musgrave perched on the edge of a wingback chair. The same one Meg had curled into with a book too many times, or Lord Cunningham had frequented with his afternoon tea.
Mrs. Musgrave appeared different now. Her wrinkles were deeper, like cracks gnarling through tree bark—and she looked at Meg too often. Always quietly, pensively, as she intertwined her hands over and over. “That is enough, my dears.”
Vern wiped the blood off his cudgel.
Orkey massaged his fists.
Abraham breathed hot and tickling moisture onto the back of Meg’s neck.
“Mr. Foxcroft, can you hear me?”
When Uncle’s head drooped to his chest, Mrs. Musgrave stood and lifted his chin with a careful finger. “Your silence shall not deter me. Miss Foxcroft deserves the truth. It is unfair she should die for something she does not hold in recollection.”
“Didn’t kill him.” Uncle spat. Blood sprayed from his lips.
“You killed Elias and so many others.”
“No.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Am.”
“I will not let you do this again.” Mrs. Musgrave’s face dipped closer to his, and a strain of anguish rippled in her voice. “You have lied and you have lied, and you have hurt people and you have hurt people. All these years, you have done nothing but destroy.” She waved a hand behind her to where Tom lay curled limp and motionless in the corner of the room. “You do not even realize the lives you have darkened. That boy among them. He needs this. He needs to know what you’ve done.” Her voice cracked. “Ineed to know. Why can’t you give that to me?”
Emptiness churned through Meg. The hollowness of not knowing if Uncle put sugar or honey in his tea, if he took naps between grinding new powders, if he smiled at her unabashed or tried to hide his love with bashful grunts.
If he killed the people he swore to heal.
If Meg had helped him.
“Tell her.” A cry throbbed in Meg’s throat. She stared into Uncle’s face, his eyes, and the unspoken bond between them crossed the divide of lost memory. “Tell her you never took a life.”
Uncle swore. Blood dripped from his lips to his neck and stained his white shirt collar red. Then he said the words that suffocated the light inside her soul. “I can’t.”
CHAPTER 25
Weakness crawled through her, cold and tingling as she gave one pathetic writhe against Abraham’s hold. Air stagnated in her lungs.Uncle, no.He lied to save her. He lied because they were about to die.
Her chest convulsed.
They would die anyway.
“You killed little Ned Thatcher nine years ago.” Mrs. Musgrave dried her face. “He hobbled into your shop with a bruised rib, and they carried him out on a handbarrow.”
“Bone punctured his liver.”
“He was six.”
“Nothing I could do.”
“There was always something you could do, but you were too busy feigning you were God.” Moisture weighted her white lashes, and redness lined the underside of her eyes. She returned to her wingback. “Tell Miss Foxcroft how you used her. How you would send her off with that little basket and people perished because of it.”
The accusation speared through Meg, gouging her with all the things she could not remember. Not even Tom’s stories or the memories she’d created for herself could stem the blood flow. She was drenched in the crimson of her own dread.
The very thing she’d feared all along.
