Miranda (18 page)

“Of course not.” She put her foot on the first step. “I didn't have to.”

He muttered something in Gaelic.

“I'm not ashamed of what we did,” she declared. Then she added with tears thickening her throat, “I just don't know if I can trust you.”

He grasped her shoulders. “What did you feel, lass? Can you trust that?”

She would not let herself answer. She pulled away from him and started up the stairs. “I must go to my room.” She would not let herself look back at Ian, would not let herself see the shape of his beautiful mouth and remember his rough, evocative kisses.

Once she found the refuge of her chambers, she leaned back against the door.

“Mademoiselle needs something?” asked Yvette, bustling in and tilting her head to one side.

Miranda hesitated. She could not afford to trust anyone now. “I'm fine, Yvette. Perhaps you could take Macbeth to one of the footmen for a run, so that I can rest.”

She waited for the maid to leave, and then she hastened down the back stairs. She had to make this all-important quest alone.

* * *

“Gone!” roared Lucas, startling the sweating horse beneath him. The animal sidled, and savagely he dragged back the reins to steady it. “What the hell do you mean, she's gone?”

Ian sat his own horse, regarding Lucas with an icy calm he did not feel. He had ridden hard to Blackfriars, where Miranda and her father had once shared a shabby flat, thinking to find a clue about Gideon's country place. Instead, in the roadway outside the house, he had encountered Lucas.

To make matters worse, Lucas was wearing a sword. A rapier, designed for dueling.

“To my knowledge,” Ian said easily, “there is only one way to interpret the phrase. She's gone. Fled to parts unknown. Decamped.”

Lucas, whose golden hair had blown askew from a fast and furious ride, struggled visibly for self-control. “And how, pray, did you manage to lose her?”

“Damn it, man, she's not a rabbit's foot I keep in my pocket.”

“So she fled you.” Grim satisfaction grated in Lucas's voice. “It's because her memory came back, isn't it?”

Ian refused to flinch. He refused to admit that Lucas might have guessed correctly. He said nothing.

Lucas plunged on. “She discovered that you've been lying to her all along, that she never knew you—”

“Positive, aren't we, my lord?” Ian asked with an ironic twist to his mouth.

Lucas held his reins in a death grip. “She never knew you. It was
me
she knew,
me
she loved.”

“Indeed. Yet you claim you had no friends in common. You did not even dare to tell your family about her.” Ian watched the color drain from Lucas's face. He should pity the man, but instead he twisted the knife. “Perhaps you did know Miranda—I'll allow you that. But she spoke of you not at all, my lord.”

“Not to you, she didn't. She never spoke of you either, MacVane.”

Ian lifted one black eyebrow. “Are you quite sure? Were you with her every single waking moment?”

The question leeched the last of the color from Lucas's normally ruddy face.

Touché, MacVane, Ian said to himself. He had managed to plant a seed of uncertainty in Lucas's mind. “No doubt you amused her, Lisle,” he said in a bland voice, “but which of us did she turn to last night?”

With an ominous whisper of steel, Lucas drew his sword. “I'll send you to hell for that, you philandering Scottish bastard.”

Ian pretended to have no reaction to the blatant provocation, though his every sense went on alert. The blank windows and smoke-blackened facades of Blackfriars brooded indifferently at them. There was no foot traffic in the street. No one stood about to observe them.

“That I am Scottish, there is no doubt,” he said easily. “That I am lying is likely, for men of our station lie constantly for our own purposes, do we not? That I am a bastard, my lord, is an insult I might decide I cannot tolerate.” He stroked his chin, pretending to think hard, when in fact he was thinking of the throwing dagger concealed in his boot cuff. In seconds he could deliver a mortal wound to Lucas Chesney, could do it with the icy dispatch of a mercenary.

He knew this without vanity or even any sort of satisfaction. Life had taught him to be swift and ruthless. If he left His Lofty Lordship bleeding on the ground, he could explain his way out of it. Lord knew he had done so before.

“I've decided to let you live,” he said at last, “but pray, put away your sword. Swaggering bravado annoys me.”

Lucas looked nonplussed. “You're refusing my challenge?”

“Do you want to go through that again?”

Lucas swore and sheathed his rapier. Ian tried not to smile. Under different circumstances, he and the pretty viscount might be friends. It was easy to see why Frances was smitten with him. He had the perfect, chiseled looks so favored by the
ton
, manners courtly enough to please the most exacting
maman
and a lithe grace of movement that could ruffle the petticoats of even the most demanding of debutantes.

He tried a different tack. “What are you doing here, Lisle?”

“The same thing you are. Trying to find answers.”

“Do you know where Gideon Stonecypher's country residence is?”

Lisle sniffed. “If I knew, I would not be here.” He dismounted and walked up the steps to the apartment.

Ian considered for a moment, then followed. “Your maid is playing informer,” he said.

“Yvette? I haven't the faintest idea what you mean.”

“Oh, do tell.” Ian took out the note he had seized from the tearful maid earlier.

Lucas paused on the stair and studied it. “Gibberish. I haven't a clue what it says.”

Ian believed him. It was a risk, aye, but he'd find out soon enough if Lucas was in on the conspiracy. “It's in cipher,” he said. “And no, it does not say where Miranda went. She didn't tell the maid.” Wise girl. What she lacked in memory she made up for in common sense. Yvette had pleaded ignorance about the origin of the note.

Methodically he and Lucas began to sort through the apartment. The place had barely been tidied up after the initial horrible discovery of Midge's body and the ransacking. Stacks of books and papers remained on every surface.

Miranda's needlework still lay on the arm of a chair. “One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters,” read the stitching.

He felt a bitter twist of guilt. She was a woman—a frightened, confused woman—yet they had been treating her like a puzzle to be pieced together. Ah, she was so much more than that. So very much more.

He tried to picture her here, a homey scene, Miranda sitting bent over her needlework while she and her father debated—

Ian froze. His gaze locked on the needlework sample. The spray of forget-me-nots encircled a scene that was eerily familiar. A tower house. Hills rising behind it. The tribute to her father stitched in blue silk floss.

And in the bottom corner, in tiny letters formed with a single strand of black, she had stitched the words
H. Wybourne, 19 April 1814.

High Wybourne. That was where she had gone.

Straight into the belly of the beast, if his instincts were correct.

Ian looked at Lucas, who was holding a blue knitted shawl, a look of melancholy on his face. Though hopeless against Ian in a duel of swords or pistols, he was still quick and skilled enough to be of some use.

“Come along, if you've a mind,” Ian said simply. “But remember, I give the orders.”

* * *

“Stop here, please.” Miranda leaned forward and spoke to the driver of the tilbury gig.

“It's the middle of the woods, miss,” he said, scowling beneath the brim of a rough brown cap.

She sighed and parted with yet another coin from the fast-dwindling supply in her reticule. A few days earlier, Frances had insisted on giving her a purse of coins “just in case.” In case of what, Lady Frances had not said, and Miranda had not been inclined to ask.

“Can you take the rig off the road, into that grove of trees?” She pointed.

He pocketed the coin and clucked to the horse. Evening sunlight slanted down between the leaves, creating a fiery beauty she had no will to admire.

“I need you to wait for me,” she said. “Please. That's all I ask.”

He eyed the reticule tied at her waist. She set her jaw but parted with another coin. He nodded grumpily and drew his hat down over his eyes. “Aye, then.”

Though she didn't trust him, Miranda could delay no longer. She gathered her plain shawl around her shoulders, retied her bonnet and climbed down. She had not told the driver what she had seen through a break in the trees.

A tall building of old stone and crumbling mortar. Larkspur blooming riotously along a low fence. A well sweep in the yard. A swift-flowing bourn and hills in the distance. A signpost at the head of the deeply rutted road.

It was exactly the place from her vision, right here on the outskirts of High Wybourne.

Which proved that it had not been a vision at all, but a memory.

She lifted her skirts away from the brambles that tore at the hem and hurried down through the woods. She stayed in the shadows, hanging back, uncertain how to proceed.

The place was strange to her, though she knew it had been a part of her life. She and her father used to come here to—

To what? She frowned, pressing her thumbs to her temples as if to squeeze out the memories.

And why would her father come here? If he was here at all. If someone had ransacked their flat in London, had murdered their servant, had left him for dead in the river, why would he come openly to a place where he might be caught again?

A coldness seized her stomach. To protect a secret. Or to protect
her
.

There was no reason, she reflected, that she should not march up to the door and walk in. No reason except a sense of caution she had learned from Ian. So she waited, shivering in the gloom, as the darkness deepened. A black shape swooped over her, and she started, then leaned limply against a tree trunk when she realized the shadow was only an owl.

A single window, low in the tower, was lit with a golden glow. Someone was there!

Dusk. It was time for her to go forward, to find her father. She put her hand on the top of the gate. She remembered a visitor, a dark-haired smiling man stepping through, giving Papa a happy greeting. She had disliked the narrow-faced stranger on sight.

Why?
Why?

Keeping to the deep shadows that fringed the garden, she made her way to the window. Voices drifted, muffled by the glass. She could not see inside, for the window was set too high. She pressed closer to hear.

“What does this mean here?” asked a weary, harassed-sounding voice. “These Greek squiggles.”

“It has to do with the trajectory. I've explained it a dozen times.”

Papa's voice! He was alive! She wanted to shout with gladness, but not yet. Not yet.

“I need to know just how to calculate it. Perhaps your pretty daughter can elaborate, Gideon.”

Miranda's blood ran cold. In her mind, an equation blossomed like a sudden inspiration. Mathematical formulae often ran through her head, and she wasn't certain why.

“She knows nothing, I tell you,” her father said.

He was lying. Lying in order to protect her.

“She is your soft spot, Gideon. If not for that sketch you placed in the
Times
, we never would have learned that you'd survived.” His voice had an accent. Vaguely French, but with a different inflection.

Shaking, Miranda leaned against the building. The stones still held some of the sun's warmth, but she could not stop trembling. Her head throbbed with hammer blows of memory.

The foreigner was questioning him about the rocket. The Stonecypher missile, to be precise. What a lark it had been at first, she remembered, the memories rushing through her like a fever. To take the Congreve rocket, improve on it, make it useful for something more than noise. She had thought, naively, that a missile that could be aimed would prove a boon to miners, allowing them to blast from afar without endangering lives.

But of course, the men who wanted the plans for the rocket were not miners.

Suppressing a whimper of horror, she slid down the wall into the grass, where the dew was beginning to gather. Here was a piece of memory that came back to her almost whole, as if it had simply been waiting for her to bring it out.

You don't know this
, her father had exhorted her, whispering in the dark on the night they had been taken. Dragged off to a dark place.

She stifled a hiccup of hysterical laughter. She had lost her memory because her father had ordered it. Now his life depended on her recalling the complicated formula.

Once he had unveiled the Stonecypher design, Gideon had at last gained notoriety as a natural philosopher. After years of inventions going awry, of being the laughingstock of the scientific community, he and Miranda had come up with a design so singular that Gideon's name was bound to live in infamy.

The Stonecypher model had one asset that could change the face of war. The rockets could be aimed at a target.

Not simply pointed in a vague direction, but aimed along a trajectory. Congreve rockets had been used for a few years, but they were unpredictable, more useful in creating fear and confusion during battle than in destroying a given target.

Neither Gideon nor Miranda had thought much about the use of them. They had simply worked together on a puzzle, just as they had on the weather instruments and the aerial balloon designs. Oh, God, she thought. The balloon, too. There was something about the balloon...

Military minds had seized upon their ideas. She remembered the day the first request had arrived—a parchment dotted with official stamps and signatures.

Characteristically, Gideon had ignored it. And all the ones that came after it. Then someone had come who had refused to take no for an answer.