The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(33)

“How’s my father?”

Hester hesitated for a moment, and Rob saw Marian’s face fall. “Not well, I’m afraid,” Hester said, accepting Marian’s proffered arm as they descended the stairs. “He’ll be glad to see you. And thank goodness you’re in breeches. How clever of you to think of that. He doesn’t know any time has passed, bless him, and Nurse and I have stopped trying to set him right. We’ve been telling him you’re out for a ride, God forgive us, but it felt cruel to tell him every day that you’re gone. He always took it so poorly.”

“You’ve done the best you can,” Marian said firmly, a hint of steel in her jaw. “Hester, this is Mr. Brooks. He brought me here from town.”

Rob gave the old lady as decent a bow as he could manage while sopping wet and holding a discontented cat. The cat mewled in protest.

While Marian disappeared upstairs, Rob let himself be bustled into the kitchen, where the elderly servant brought him a clean shirt and Rob set about drying both himself and the cat while attempting to salvage his coat. The boots, he feared, would not be long for this world. He reached inside his coat and felt for the packet of letters; they were damp around the edges but might be saved if he laid them out to dry. As for the cat, he crouched by the fire, glaring at Rob with murder in his eyes.

When Rob had got himself as dry as he could without stripping naked, he looked around the kitchen. It was small and square, not so different from the kitchen in the cottage where he had grown up. He decided to make himself useful and brew a pot of tea. Four plain cups hung on hooks over a dresser and a commonplace earthenware teapot sat nearby. On the shelves sat an assortment of vessels and cannisters.

But the sugar cannister was nearly empty and the tea caddy had only an inch or so of leaves at the bottom. He glanced around the room and noticed what he should have seen right away—there was no sign of a kitchen maid, much less a cook. On the hearth was a single pot instead of meat on a spit or the array of dishes he would expect in a grand kitchen.

He scraped a small portion of the remaining tea leaves into the teapot. So it was that Marian found him some time later, carefully pouring weak tea into a pair of cups.

She looked like a drowned rat, with her dark hair plastered against her head. Her lips were pale with cold and her face blotchy with patches of red. But there was the stubborn set of her jaw, the uncompromising slant of her eyebrows, the flinty hardness that sometimes flashed in her eyes. He saw those details, and with them he saw the whole of Marian, and he never wanted to look away.

He handed her the cup because that was all he could do. “I take it your father isn’t well.” He had put together enough from what Hester had said to have a pretty good idea of what was wrong with the earl.

“He didn’t recognize me.”

“I’m sorry.”

She wrapped her hands around the teacup. “It’s worse than last year. I knew he wouldn’t recover. The physicians all said he would only worsen. But I thought—well, I was stupid.”

“You were hopeful.”

“As I said.”

He wanted to take her hand, but instead he sipped his tea. “Why is your father here and not at Chiltern Hall?”

She gave him a level look. “We lived here when I was a child, before my father inherited. He was a younger son, and nobody ever expected him to inherit, least of all himself. That’s immaterial. In any event, when his wits began to leave him, his mind often drifted back to those days. A little over a year ago, when he began to become lost in the grounds and ask after my mother, I thought he’d do better here, in the house that he still seemed to think was his home.” She took a sip of her tea and grimaced, presumably because it was both weak and unsweetened. “Clearly it didn’t work. I ought to stop being surprised when my plans come to nothing but disaster.”

There was more to it than that, obviously. There seemed to be no servants in the house besides the old lady, Netley, and a nurse. The woodpile was down to the last few logs and the kitchen had only the plainest food. How was it that the Duchess of Clare was unable to keep her father in grander style?

From the wrinkle between her eyebrows as her gaze flicked between the weak tea and the contents of the kitchen, he guessed that she was similarly puzzled. He realized that for the first time, he was seeing her worried. She hadn’t been worried when they fled from London, nor when that blasted horse nearly threw her. But now she was distressed.

If he were in his right mind, this shouldn’t matter to him. He had accomplished what he set out to do: he had delivered her to safety and ensured that she didn’t throw Kit to the wolves. Now he could leave her here and return to whatever was left of his life. When he returned to London, he could write her a letter informing her whether she was wanted for the duke’s murder.

But he already knew that he wasn’t going to do any of that. This sense he had that her troubles were somehow his troubles was dangerous; he knew that. But Rob had never been deterred by danger.





Chapter 15




Marian made her way through the house. The furniture was mismatched, all the walls needed painting, and every room was half the size of its counterpart at Chiltern Hall. The chimneys on the east side of the house smoked badly, there were signs of a leak in the roof over Hester’s bedchamber, and every window rattled in its frame and let in great drafts of air.