The Brynthwaite Boys - Season One - Part Three Page 13

  “Knows what?” Matty asked through painful tears.

  “Knows I know,” she whispered, barely audible.

  “What do—”

  Matty’s question died on her lips and her jaw dropped open. Her heart pounded against her ribs, up to her throat, nearly choking her. That night, that horrible, horrible night, rushed back to her once more, clearer this time. It wasn’t just her own cries and those of her mother as Hoag strangled her that Matty had heard. Connie had screamed too. Connie. She’d been there, at the table, through the whole argument. She hid when Matty jumped up to defend her mother against Hoag. Hid, but she didn’t leave the room.

  Connie had seen the whole thing. She was the only witness to the murder.

  Hot panic poured down Matty’s back. “Dear God, Connie. You have to get away from him. You have to get as far away from him as you can.”

  “I can’t,” Connie sobbed. “He’s…he’s selling me at night. He won’t let me out of his sight otherwise.” She groaned and sniffed. “It hurts, Matty. They’re mean to me, and it hurts so much.”

  Matty reached through the bars as best she could to hug her sister. “I’m so sorry,” she wept. “I wish I could stop it, get you away from him. You have to get away from him.”

  She could feel the trembling in Connie’s skinny body as she shook her head. “He says if I don’t do it, he’ll sell Elsie. She’s only six.”

  Horror spilled through Matty. She couldn’t imagine that kind of evil.

  The door at the end of the hall opened, and a voice called, “Oy. You. No one said you could come back here.”

  “Go,” Matty whispered, pushing her sister back. “Do whatever it takes to get away from him. I’ll do something, try anything to help you in any way I can.”

  “But you can’t,” Connie wept, pulling away and standing. She turned to go, crying, “You can’t,” as she went.

  When the door thumped shut again, Matty crumpled against the bars of the cell, hugging herself and weeping. She would gladly have given up every memory of her former life if it would have saved her from the pain she felt now. But then, forgetting her siblings was the worst sin to come out of the whole, wretched business. She’d forgotten them, and now she could do nothing to help them.

  She drew in a breath, forcing herself to keep a hold on her senses. Connie had witnessed the murder. Connie could prove Hoag was the murderer and that she was innocent.

  With renewed energy that bordered on mania, Matty leapt to her feet and began pacing the cell.

  “So you didn’t do it?” Kate asked. Neither she nor Lottie had moved through the entire encounter with Connie.

  Matty only shook her head in reply. She returned to her pacing, three times as fast, hugging herself twice as tight. There had to be a way to get Connie away from Hoag, to rescue the children. Hoag didn’t truly care about them. They were not people to him, merely money waiting to be made. It all came back to her now. He’d used them, used them all, as tools from the time they were tiny. She could now recall countless hours slaving in his store, walking miles in bad weather to do his bidding. She remembered beatings and shouting, not just for her, but for all of them. They had only each other to rely on, and now he was trying to break that down too.

  She wasn’t sure how long it was until key rattled in the door at the end of the hall once more. This time, the figure that strode swiftly into view as soon as the door was open was Lawrence.

  “Thank God,” Matty shouted and flew to him.

  Lawrence stretched his arms through the bars to reach for her as usual, but this time there was no time for comfort and murmured words of reassurance.

  “What’s wrong?” Lawrence asked, his brow dropping to an alarmed frown.

  “Connie,” Matty whispered, pressing herself as close to him as possible. There was no telling what kind of spies Hoag might have, even in the prison. “Connie was here.”

  “Connie?” Lawrence’s frown deepened.

  She swallowed, willing her heart to still long enough to tell the story. “Hoag came to see me.”

  “What?” Lawrence barked. “He’s been barred from entering the jail. There’s a court order. Whoever broke that—”

  Matty shook her head frantically, squeezed his arms. “He brought the children with him, Connie, Willy, and Elsie. They made me remember everything.”

  “What do you mean? I thought you already remembered everything.”

  “Connie was there that night,” she hissed, panic causing the edges of her vision to blur. “She was there. She saw everything. She knows that Hoag was the one who killed Mama, not me. She saw. She witnessed.”

  “Dear God.” Lawrence held her tighter, the light in his eyes shining with victory.

  Matty shook her head. “Hoag still has her. She doesn’t know if he suspects her of knowing or being able to tell, but he’s…he’s been cruel to her.” Her voice cracked.

  “How?”

  Matty shook her head.

  “You have to tell me how,” he said, voice softer.

  “He’s been making the younger children beg,” Matty went on, voice nothing more than a squeak of misery. “And he’s been…selling Connie.”

  Lawrence’s face went red with rage.

  A moment later, it was brilliant with hope. “If Connie testifies in court, you’ll be found innocent. Hoag will be convicted.”

  “She’s only twelve,” Matty said. “Hoag will try to discredit her.”

  “She’s still a witness.”

  “Hoag has her. If you go anywhere near him, he’ll kill you. He said so.”

  Lawrence let out a breath. He drew his arms back through the bars so that he could run a hand through his hair. “You let me worry about that. He won’t touch me if I have anything to do about it.”

  “But Connie. And the others. He’ll kill them too if he thinks they’ll turn against him.”

  For a moment, Lawrence was still and silent, thinking. It was only after a long pause, when Matty thought her lungs would burst from holding her breath, that he shifted closer to her and reached for her hands through the bars.

  “You leave it to me,” he said. “If Connie is the only one who saw the murder, if she can testify and help set you free, then I will find her and get her away from Hoag, no matter what else happens.”

  Alexandra

  It was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. Four days prior, as Alex suffered through supper—George sitting across the table from her, chatting about pheasant or some other nonsense—the announcement came.

  “Lady Charlotte and I have something we’d like to tell you all,” Anthony Fretwell said, standing from his place near the head of the table.

  Alex only barely registered his gesture as she stared at her pudding, swirling her spoon through the cream. Exhaustion pressed down on her after close to three weeks of treating the influenza outbreak. At least the end was in sight. They’d only had one new case that morning, and she and Marshall had spent most of their time working side-by-side in one routine surgery after another. She wasn’t certain how either of them had managed to hold their arms up as they snipped and cut, extracted and closed, but somehow everything had flowed. They worked so well together that sometimes—

  “Good heavens, Alexandra,” her mother snapped. “Pay attention.”

  “What?” Alex lifted her head from contemplation of her dish. Her thoughts were slower to focus. Marshall Pycroft was in love with her. Dour, suffering, genuine Marshall. The idea still scattered her mind and sent her into anxious daydreams.

  “Really, Alex. It’s as if you don’t even care,” her mother huffed.

  Alex blinked quickly. “I’m sorry. What?”

  Slowly, she realized that all eyes around the table were on her—her mother’s and Anthony’s, George’s, Elizabeth’s, and the Hustons’ and Zarates’ who had come all the way from Windermere on her mother’s request for supper. A prickling flush filled Alex’s face.

  Her mother bore a look of hurt a
nd offense. “I cannot believe it. My own daughter, off wool-gathering when her mother announces that she is to be married.”

  All at once, reality bore down on Alex. She caught her breath, glancing from her mother to Anthony, then darting an irresistible look across the table to George. George grinned at her with a flash of triumph in his eyes.

  Alex had been waiting for this, expecting it, but it didn’t soften the blow one bit. Still, she pulled herself together enough to smile and say, “Congratulations. I wish you well.”

  She’d been forced to sit through the rest of the evening, feigning felicitation as her mother and Anthony accepted the good wishes of their friends, Elizabeth, and George. She’d been able to make an excuse to leave early after supper and to return to her room. By that point, the only thing she cared about was seeking the oblivion of her bed and waking up to another day at the hospital.

  But while the hospital provided a degree more comfort and distraction than Huntingdon Hall in the wake of her mother’s announcement, it was fraught with its own problems. She and Marshall had worked with each other and around each other since his admission, but rarely did they meet each other’s eyes. None of their conversations lately had been of anything more than medical matters or inquiries about the girls and how efforts to get them back were going along. Marshall was as reticent to speak to her at any length as she was to engage him in conversation.

  She didn’t know how she felt about that. If she was being honest, she didn’t know how she felt about him. Days later, as she busied herself in her uncle’s room in the early morning before heading to the hospital, she rolled over the question of whether it was a good thing Marshall was keeping his distance from her or whether she missed his easy manner, his sense of humor, whether she missed talking to him.

  “Great scot, girl, I wish you would stop fiddling with things that don’t concern you,” her Uncle Gerald grumbled as she rolled back the bedcovers to check on his gouty legs.

  It was a sign of her immense distraction that she answered him with nothing more than a hum. Her will to do battle had evaporated.

  “I said stop,” Uncle Gerald insisted as she sat on the bed and began unwinding the dressing around his feet. “That’s no job for a woman.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow at her uncle. “Apparently it’s not a job for whoever applied these dressings yesterday.”

  “Dr. Wolpers came all the way from Carlisle to treat me yesterday.”

  Alex’s other eyebrow joined the first in a look of surprise. “You brought an outside physician into this house?”

  “Dr. Pycroft has been too busy with that damned influenza to come, and I won’t have any of those jumped-up nurses in this room.”

  “And you didn’t inform me?” Alex would have enjoyed a chat with another doctor, though like as not, Dr. Wolpers would have dismissed her as a hobbyist rather than seeing her as a fellow.

  Marshall treated her as a colleague and an equal. Precious few people in her life accepted her for who she was. Perhaps she should make some sort of gesture of friendship to him, reassure him that all was well, their friendship was not damaged by a slip of the tongue in an hour of distress. She could tell him about Dr. Wolpers. Perhaps they could suggest he come again to have lunch one afternoon or—

  “Well, that’s done and over,” her mother declared, sweeping into the room in the middle of the first marginally cheerful thoughts Alex had had for weeks.

  Uncle Gerald huffed out a breath and pressed his head back into his pillows. “First I have this one in here meddling where she shouldn’t,” he nodded at Alex, “and now I have you bursting in, talking nonsense.”

  “I’m not talking nonsense, Gerald,” Lady Charlotte said, unperturbed by the manner of her greeting. “I’ve simply come to inform Alexandra that George Fretwell has flown off to Juniper Abbey to visit his fiancée.” She fixed Alex with a look that was as good as fifty lashes.

  “Excuse me, mother, but I need to change Uncle Gerald’s bandages,” Alex replied. “You may not want to be present for this.”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that,” Lady Charlotte said. She crossed the room in one graceful glide and seated herself with regal splendor in the window seat past the head of the bed where she could keep an eye on Alex but not the gruesome sight of Uncle Gerald’s legs.

  “Fair enough.” Alex focused on removing her uncle’s bandages and setting them aside. “And I don’t care a wit about George Fretwell.”

  It was a lie, but perhaps not as much of a lie as it had been two weeks ago.

  “Sour grapes if ever I heard them,” Lady Charlotte replied with a wave of her hand. “I’m convinced you could have had the man if you’d spent more time at the house party and less at that ridiculous hospital.”

  Alex clenched her jaw, resentful of the flush that came to her cheeks. Oh, she’d had George Fretwell, all right. With disastrous results. “George was after money, mama,” she fired back. “More than he could have gotten from me.”

  “Title and position more than make up for lack of funds,” her mother insisted.

  “Yes, and we have neither,” Alex informed her.

  “Perhaps not now,” Lady Charlotte said, “but your grandfather’s estate is not entailed away from the female line, like so many others.”

  “Hang on,” Uncle Gerald interrupted. “I’m not dead yet, you know.”

  Alex rewarded him for challenging her mother with a quick grin as she reached for a bowl of fresh water to bathe his feet and calves.

  “I’m not saying you are,” Lady Charlotte continued. “Only that James’s share of your father’s estate will pass to Alexandra upon my death or when she marries.”

  “James’s share,” Uncle Gerald snorted. “James’s share isn’t enough to keep a man in fresh woolens, let alone live off of. As you well know,” he added, pointing a bony finger at Lady Charlotte. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be marrying that puffed up old fool, Fretwell.”

  Alex’s smile widened. She liked her uncle more by the moment, in spite of the fact that he held the lion’s share of the Dyson fortune and the title of Lord Thornwell. “It would be more than enough for me,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask you,” Uncle Gerald snapped.

  Alex lost her grin.

  “I am marrying Anthony for love, if you must know.” Lady Charlotte sat straighter, her chin lifted. “We will live a comfortable and modest life in Hampshire. I won’t miss your estate or your finery one bit.”

  “And you won’t inherit so much as a blade of grass of it either,” Uncle Gerald added.

  Alex’s brow dropped in a frown. “Hampshire?”

  “Yes, of course,” her mother answered. “When Anthony and I marry in a fortnight, we shall all retire to Hampshire.”

  Alex’s hands froze midway through applying fresh salve to her uncle’s legs. “I have no wish to return to Hampshire,” she said, and continued her ministrations.

  Her mother’s brow rose as though Alex had thrown a vase across the room. “Whatever do you mean, you have no wish to return to Hampshire?”

  “Just that,” Alex said. “I have a job here, a life and friends here.”

  Besides, the blow to her pride that moving within a hundred yards of George Fretwell and his bride represented would be the end of her.

  “I won’t hear of it,” her mother said with a sigh, tucking a strand of her hair into her hairstyle, as if Alex’s pronouncement was trivial.

  “I will not return to Hampshire,” Alex said with just as much force.

  Her mother’s back went stiff and her eyes narrowed as if she had just realized what she was up against. For a moment, she was tense with anger from head to toe. Then she blew out a breath and said, “Don’t be difficult, Alexandra. You fought me when I told you we were moving up here. I’ll not have you fight me when I tell you we’re returning to the home you didn’t want to leave to begin with.”

  “I didn’t want to leave Hampshire because I had a medical practice there, albeit a small on
e,” Alex insisted. She rose from her uncle’s bed to retrieve fresh bandages, then returned to bind his wounds. “I reuse to leave Brynthwaite now because I have a much more vital position at Brynthwaite Hospital. I cannot, I will not leave that.”

  “Ha,” Uncle Gerald barked. “She’s got James’s spirit, that’s for sure.” Alex smiled at the compliment only to have her uncle go on with, “But that kind of spirit has no place in a woman. You’ll go with your mother or hear about it from me, young lady.”

  Alex stopped halfway through winding the clean bandage around his leg. “Uncle Gerald, that is not fair.”

  “Why not?” He shrugged. “I never approved of this medical nonsense You should find yourself a husband and have babies.”

  Alex scowled. “You would say that to me as I sit here, treating your gout?” If she was a lesser woman, she would give his bandage an extra tug to cause a jolt of pain.

  “Good morning, all.” The downward spiral of tension was broken as Elizabeth waltzed into the room. She wore one of her finer, organdy dresses with fashionable sleeves and a line that made her seem even more slim and lithe than she was. Her hair was done up in expert style with fresh-cut summer flowers tucked near the nape of her neck. Far too formal for an audience in the sick room.

  “You look entirely too splendid for your own good, my dear,” Uncle Gerald greeted her as she swept past Alex and leaned over to hiss his cheek. “Going to see that hotelier of yours?”

  “Yes, Father.” Elizabeth smiled, taking his hand and sliding to sit by his side on the bed.

  Uncle Gerald’s scowl was as firm as ever. “That man propose to you yet?”

  Alex stiffened in surprise, curious about the answer. She’d been vaguely aware that the cat-and-mouse game Elizabeth and Mr. Throckmorton had played since the man arrived in Brynthwaite had flipped so that the mouse was now chasing the cat, but after the bond she had seen between Jason Throckmorton and Flossie Stowe while treating both for influenza, she had assumed Elizabeth would let her game drop.