‘There are always two sides to every story, Sephora.’
‘Then who was Ralph Kennings?’ She watched with a growing disquiet as a flush of anger crossed over his humour, cancelling it out.
‘Who told you about him?’
‘Maria. She said you were with Adam Stevenage’s cousin out at Hutton’s Landing and that Kennings tried to murder you.’
* * *
Hell, he had not expected Sephora to know that name and the shock of it made his heart beat so fast Francis could feel the blood throb around the bullet hole in his shoulder.
‘Ralph Kennings is a man I killed. I shot him three times, once through each knee and then a third time through the heart. He had not drawn a weapon.’ Better to say it with nothing missing. Better to let her understand just how much he had lost of himself out there in the canyons above Hutton’s Landing.
‘Why?’
The face of Seth Greenwood came to mind, gasping his last in the mud below the ruined platform, a bullet deep inside him and his blood turning the water scarlet. But it was not that death that Francis dwelt on.
‘He’d killed two children and their mother before he came upon us. He wanted gold.’
‘Who were these people? These children?’
‘Seth’s family. He had twin boys. They were babies, for God’s sake, barely walking.’
He could not tell her it all. He did not tell her what had been done to him that evening after the platform had collapsed, but the rope burn at his throat tightened about the little there was left of his breath. He could see the horror in her eyes, the brittle shocked blue even as he wondered what was reflected in his own.
This was the truth of him, the brutality and the tragedy. Thinking of Hutton’s Landing negated any softness or goodness that he might have nurtured had he walked the finer line of gentility.
‘Your parents want you home, no doubt? They want you safe and well away from me? Perhaps they are right.’
But she shook her head and drew in breath, holding it until she spoke again. ‘Life would be different, then, in the Americas? Wilder. Savage, even.’ He could hear the hope of it in her voice.
‘Honour is honour, Sephora, and mine was lost there in those three easy shots. I was a marksman in the army and damn good at my job. I knew I would not miss.’
‘Why are you telling me this? Why do you not defend yourself when you can only suffer from the consequences?’ She stood and her hands were shaking, wound around each other in front of her, every nail bitten back to the quick.
‘Because I should have told you of it before we were married. Because I am not the safe harbour you imagine me to be and your sins in the eyes of the ton are nowhere near as dark as the guilt I hold. I ought to have given you a choice, to have me or to not, and I didn’t and for that I am sorry.’
She looked as if he had struck her.
‘Richard never apologised to me once in all the years of knowing him and I didn’t expect him to either because by then I’d lost whatever it was that gave me worth.’
‘Worth?’ He could not quite understand what she meant.
‘Opinions. Beliefs. The ability to say no and to mean it. People can die by small degrees just as easily as they can by the quick slam of a bullet and sometimes justice isn’t so easily measurable. Those murdered would most certainly think your honour intact given your actions and even the Bible has its verses urging an equitable vengeance.’
‘An eye for an eye?’
‘And a life for a life.’
Unexpectedly she leaned down and took his hand in her own, tracing the lines across the inside of his palm in a gentle touch. ‘You saved mine in the water under the bridge and also perhaps out of it. Is there some sort of celestial scales, do you think, one that places human souls in arrears...or not?’
‘The thought is tempting.’ He liked her reasoning. He liked her smile. He liked the quiet sense she spoke and her conviction.
‘If it were left to me to decide, yours would be a balanced tally sheet. And with Anna...’ Dropping his hand, she pointed to the thick bandages under his shirt. ‘With this I would imagine you are now ahead.’
He’d never had another person who believed in him like this, someone who would hear out his worst confessions and come up with an answer that made sense.
‘Strong opinions are always valuable, Sephora, and if Richard Allerly only wanted to hear his thoughts parroted back by those around him then he is more of a fool than I took him for.’
She smiled, but he could see she was not happy. ‘I believed I deserved what he gave me in the end. I think sometimes I didn’t even want a different life because I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.’ She told this unexpected truth flatly, as though what she described had happened to someone else; a public truth rather than a private one.
‘And now?’
The fierce anger was unmistakable. ‘Now I am different.’
‘Good for you.’
When she laughed the sound of it ran through the memory of three shots high up above the canyons near Hutton’s Landing. Sometimes at night Francis imagined he had seen Kennings go for his gun, there on his hip just before he had fired, the movement against a silver dawn small but real. Today he hoped that this was true for her sake as well as for his own.
‘The doctor said I would be well enough to travel down to the family seat in Kent in a few days.’
‘I’d like that.’
He felt some of the tension inside him ease. His wife would come with him even knowing about Kennings? Being in the country would give him some time to work out how to protect Anna, too, and away from the gossip of the ton he wouldn’t have to worry about what other things might reach Sephora’s ears.
The tiredness that had consumed him since the accident needed to go. He wanted his energy back to look after the family he had somehow been gifted with.
* * *
The screams in the night woke her, shrill, loud, screams with desperation imbued in every one.
Coming to her feet, Sephora ran into the room down the corridor to find Anna sitting up in bed white as a sheet and covered in sweat.
‘I am fine.’ The curt voice was underlined by blind fear.
‘Well, you do not look it to me and when I am worried about something it is always so much easier when you have a friend beside you to share it with.’
Taking her hand, Sephora sat down beside the girl, holding on even as she tried to pull away. Anna’s fingers were as freezing as they had been the last time Sephora had held them. It was as if the blood had not reached them at all in its course around her body, but left her shivering in the extremities. A child made frozen by anger.
‘You are safe, Anna. There is nothing here that will hurt you. I promise.’ She knew the instant the dreadful terror receded for the long and thin fingers relaxed. The girl’s fear was heartbreaking, a child with demons snapping at her heels and enough fury to keep others at bay.
‘If they come here to get me, you won’t let them do it?’
‘I won’t.’ Sephora was not quite sure just who Anna meant, but now was not the right time to dwell upon it, the child’s heart beating so fast she could see the lawn of her nightgown going up and down. ‘You belong to us now, to this family. We will never let you go.’
‘No one has wanted me to stay anywhere with them before. Clive said he did, but he never meant it. Not at the end.’
Sephora had no idea who this Clive was or where the child’s mother had gone, but she squeezed the thin hand and stayed quiet.
‘This is the first house where I have my own room. And books,’ she added. Small fingers still held on tightly. A lifeline perhaps, a raft across the deeper waters of her past?
‘You helped me in the street. The man kicked you, I felt it, but you still didn’t let me go.’
Tears now trickled down her face, the beauty of the Douglases stamped on her, too, but so much harder to see in the anger and under the ill-shorn lanky hair.
‘If Uncle Francis had died...’
‘Well, he didn’t. He is making good progress and by tomorrow I think he will be up and about once again.’
‘You are certain of it?’ For the first time the girl made true eye contact, the dark green of the earl’s own eyes looking out at her.
‘Most certain. But we need to get you to sleep now so that you have some energy for that stray dog I saw you with today. He will be scared by all the change and worried you will send him away so you’ll need to be calm and kind when you handle him.’
‘Like you are? With me?’
Sephora blushed in pleasure. ‘People come to others in different ways, Anna. Dogs, too. Sometimes in life there is no reason for things, but it just feels right.’
The girl smiled and as she tucked down under the blankets again Sephora began to hum some of the songs her mother had sung to her when she was young. A movement by the doorway had her turning and Francis St Cartmail stood there, leaning against the frame for balance, fresh blood staining the linen of his shirt where it had seeped through the bandage. He gestured to Anna, asking silently of the young girl’s welfare, and when Sephora nodded he was gone.
She wondered at the pain and determination such a foray must have cost him even as she kept on singing, his Douglas stubbornness an exact copy of Anna’s.
A few moments later she looked into the earl’s room. He was sitting on a chair with a cloak around himself and the chamber was freezing. Every window was open.