Miranda (3 page)

Then, still seized by an eerie serenity, he went through the apartment, seeking clues.

The problem was, someone had been here before him. Someone had ripped out desk drawers and rifled through papers and books. Someone had taken three innocent lives and cut them short.

He must contact the authorities. He would do so anonymously, of course, taking care that his name not be connected with this whole unsavory affair.

As he left, he passed through the vestibule. On a peg behind the door hung Miranda's plain blue wool shawl. He pictured her in it, strolling along with him, gesturing as she spoke, her eyes brighter than stars as she gazed up at him.

He snatched up the shawl and buried his face in the soft wool. It smelled of Miranda and memories.

He had been too damned late to save her.

Ah, God, Miranda. I'm so sorry.

The dam broke. Lucas Chesney, Viscount Lisle, hero of the Peninsular Wars, sank to the floor and sobbed.

* * *

Miranda forced herself to stop screaming as Larkin yanked her to her feet and dragged her back to Bedlam. “I have a wealthy family,” she said. Her voice had taken on a surprisingly cultivated tone.

“Have you, then?” Larkin asked cynically. “I thought you didn't remember.”

“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don't,” she said in a singsong voice. “The question is, will you risk it?”

Larkin paused at the entranceway to the hospital. “Risk—”

She barked out a laugh. “Your decision, Mr. Larkin. Are a few moments of fleeting lust worth losing a handsome reward?”

He studied her for a long moment, his mustache twitching. “You're a skinny, filthy wretch anyway,” he muttered. Then he hauled her through a corridor with cracked plaster walls, stopping at a wide, barred door. “Your home away from home, milady,” he spat.

He shoved her into the women's gallery. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle another scream. A high fanlight let in streams of the afternoon sun. Dirty straw covered the floor. The plaster walls were crumbling and weeping with moisture. And everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on each rickety bench or moldering pallet, some dangling from manacles and leg irons, were the insane.

A few of them looked up when she entered. Most continued their mindless rocking and moaning, some screeching or muttering to themselves. One had plucked out the hair on the left side of her head. Another sang a tuneless, repetitive melody. But for the most part, the women lay as unresponsive as corpses.

“Hey, warden!” A buxom woman with bad teeth and jet black hair sidled toward them. “What have you there? A new jade ornament?”

“Stand aside, Gwen, she's none of your affair.”

Ignoring him, Gwen put her face very close to Miranda's. “'Neath all that dirt and soot, she looks a bit too fine for the likes of you, Larkin.” Gwen lifted an eyebrow. “What say you to that, mistress?”

A spark of outrage flared to life inside Miranda. She jerked her arm from Larkin's grasp. “What I
say
, Mistress Gwen, is that any woman in this room is too fine for the likes of Warden Larkin.”

In the stunned silence that ensued, more women lifted their faces toward Miranda, like broken blossoms seeking the sun. Gwen let out a laugh of delight, braying loudly until the warden backhanded her across the mouth.

She barely flinched. A group of women ambled closer, baring their teeth. Sweat broke out on Larkin's brow. He took a coiled leather lash from his belt. A few inmates shrank back, but still more advanced.

Barking an oath, Larkin stepped outside, slammed the door and shot the bolt home. Gwen laughed again, and others joined her, their shouts of mirth no longer eerie, but strangely joyful.

Miranda stood with her back to the wall of iron bars and stared. When at last she found her voice, she asked, “Why did you do that, all of you? Why did you defend me?”

Gwen clasped Miranda's hands in hers. “Because of what you said, girl. About us all being too fine for Larkin.”

“I spoke no more than the truth.”

“Aye. But no one's ever said it before.”

* * *

The explosion was four days past and Miranda's trail was growing cold. Ian MacVane had inquired at churches, poorhouses, bawdy houses, almonries. He had paid bribes to wharfside idlers and shipmasters, to innkeepers and stablers, all to no avail.

His superiors were growing more insistent by the hour. Frances had been shocked to learn the young woman had survived the explosion, and she was frantic to speak to her—or so she said. But Ian knew instinctively that Frances was not particular. She merely wanted the girl found—alive or dead.

Frustrated, he stalked through the ransacked house in Stamford Street for the tenth time. Curses trailed like a black banner in his wake.

Four days, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been after the night of the disaster.

And to think he had held her in his arms!

The thought haunted him. He remembered how fragile she had felt, remembered the fright and confusion in her eyes. The urge to protect her had been powerful. He should have heeded his instincts rather than entrusting her to the watchman.

“You should hae listened to the voice in your noggin rather than shunting her off on that peeler,” Duffie said, shouldering open the door and stepping inside. “You knew that, did you not?”

Ian glared at his assistant, Angus McDuff. “Not before you did, it seems. Truly, you give me the willies.” Duffie had an uncanny gift for reading a man's thoughts. “If I were the superstitious sort, I'd call you a devil's imp and banish you to the Outer Hebrides.”

“The London peelers are as corrupt as the criminals themselves,” Duffie said. “It takes no great gift to figure that out.”

“Aren't you supposed to be looking after Robbie?”

“The lad's fast asleep in the coach, bless his wee heart,” Duffie said with fondness. His bristly, graying beard outlined the bow shape of his broad smile. “At the moment, you need me more.”

They stood together in thoughtful silence, surveying the place that had been the home of Miranda Stonecypher.

It was a modest suite of rooms with scuffed plank floors, threadbare upholstery and papers crammed on shelves or strewn about. Black smears of dried blood marred the walls and floors.

Books were piled on every available surface. The topics ranged from works on moral philosophy to scientific tracts on physics and cosmography.

Had Miranda read them, or had they been her father's? The Englishwomen Ian knew did not trouble themselves to read anything more challenging than
La Belle Assemblée
. God forbid they should actually have to
think
.

By far the most disquieting item in the room was a painting over the mantel. It was a reproduction of
The Nightmare
by Fuseli, Swiss painter and darling of the radicals. A sleeping woman, clad in a gauzy night rail, reclined on a draped bed. On her bosom perched a creature with a burning gaze and a wicked leer, and in the background loomed a horse with glassy eyes and flaring nostrils.

“Now that,” Duffie said, “gives me the willies.”

“Be certain Robbie doesna see it.” Ian turned away from the picture. The room was in a shambles, destroyed by the murderers and then rifled by officers from Bow Street who had been alerted by an anonymous citizen.

Ian grinned humorlessly. Lady Frances hated the Runners. This was not the first time they had interfered in her work.

He and McDuff picked through the rubble that was left. A half-written letter responding to a lender's dun for money. Greek symbols sketching out some mathematical formula. A mundane list in a more feminine hand:
foolscap, ink, silk thread...

In a carpetbag he found a stocking to be mended, along with an unfinished needlework project depicting a spray of forget-me-nots around an old-fashioned tower house. The caption read, “One father is more than an hundred schoolmasters.” A faint floral scent clung to the bag. Ian dropped it and raked a hand through his hair.

He knew nothing about this woman.

Except that she read wonderful books and liked dangerous paintings and loved her father.

And that when he'd held her, he had felt a reluctant stirring in his heart.

“Och, I dinna believe my eyes,” Duffie exclaimed.

“What do you mean?” Ian asked in annoyance.

“The great MacVane of the Highlands actually felt something other than hatred and rage. Ah, dinna deny it. I saw it in your pretty face. You care about the lass, don't you?” Duffie gave a sly wink.

Ian clutched the back of a wooden chair and glared down at his gloved hands. The gloves spared him from seeing the stump of his finger, from remembering the past.

“She's a puzzlement, Duffie. There was something...not right about her that night.”

“People dinna generally appear their best following a massive explosion,” Duffie observed helpfully.

“It was more than just panic and confusion. It was—” Ian nearly strangled on his own words as a blinding flash of memory cleaved his thoughts. Just for a moment, he was in another place, another time...

Burning buildings, thick smoke, people running to and fro. And his mother, unable to stand what they had done to her, had that same look in her eyes. That look of madness...

“Madness, you say?” Duffie asked.

“Did I say that?”

“Well, if people were to perceive the poor lass to be mad, then...”

Duffie and Ian looked at each other. At the same time, they snapped their fingers and spoke the same thought.

“Bedlam.”

Three

Marriage is for life. If I were in your place,
I should tie my sheets to a window and be off.

—Queen Maria Carolina of Naples,
grandmother of Empress Marie-Louise

I
an disliked Dr. Beckworth on sight. It had taken a small fortune in bribes to get this far into the horror chamber that was Bedlam, and now Beckworth stood in the middle of his office, the implacable guardian at the threshold.

“What do you mean, you willna take my coin?” Ian demanded.

“I am a man of ethics as well as science, sir. I do not take bribes.” Above a boiled collar, he lifted his chin to a haughty angle.

“Would you consider a grant in the name of charity, then?”

Beckworth tightened his mouth until it resembled a sphincter. “Please.”

“I merely want to see Miss Stonecypher.”

Beckworth's hands gripped the lapels of his frock coat. “Stonecypher.”

Ian cursed himself for showing a card to his opponent. He needed to play them closer to the chest. “There, you see. The poor lass has been here four days and you haven't even found out her family name.”

Beckworth sat down behind a writing table. He fingered a quill stuck in the inkwell, staring at the feathers, turning it this way and that. “It's very irregular. I can speak of this case with no one save the girl's family...”

“She has no family.” Ian said. Then, gambling all, he added, “Except me.”

The doctor lifted a monocle to one eye. “You are related to Miss, er...”

“Stonecypher.”

“Stonecypher.” Beckworth tasted the unusual name again.

“I am betrothed to her,” Ian assured him. Lying had always come easily to Ian. He had learned it at an early age and considered it one of the most fundamental of survival tactics.
Please, sir, I canna work today. My cough is infectious...

“Why didn't you explain that right from the start?” Beckworth asked.

He's as suspicious as I am
, Ian thought. “Perhaps, like you, I prefer to guard my privacy.”

“Ah.” Beckworth tucked the monocle into the pocket of his waistcoat and took a deep breath. “Have you any proof of this betrothal?”

“I do.” Ian levered himself up out of his chair and paced the office. He ducked his head beneath the lime-washed ceiling beams. He stopped in front of the table and slammed his palms down on the surface.

Beckworth flinched.

Ian leaned forward and said, “Aye, I have proof, but she's locked up like some moonstruck lunatic, damn your eyes!”

“She can't remember anything,” Beckworth blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut, clearly angry at himself for having divulged Miranda's condition.

This, Ian realized, was no gamble after all. She would not recognize him, but that, of course, would all be part and parcel of her affliction.

“I want to see her,” Ian stated. “Now.”

Beckworth hesitated. Ian subjected him to the coldest, most menacing stare he could summon. The stare worked. The doctor stood. “Follow me.”

Moments later, Ian wondered if Beckworth was leading him along a circuitous route just to punish him. They passed through a long gallery lined with barred cells. Dank shadows hung in the unlighted corners. Sleek rats scurried in and out through cracks in the walls. A babble of nonsense talk, moans and tuneless singing joined with the foul stench to make the air almost unbreathable.

Fashionable people strolled along with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and they stopped to gape at the inmates. It was a common diversion to buy a ticket to view the insane. Ian, who had looked madness in the face, found the practice more disgusting than anything he could see behind bars.

“Oh, look at that one,” a lady exclaimed, giggling and pointing. “What is he doing with his—”

“Surely he is thinking of you,” Ian whispered in her ear as he passed behind the woman.

She gave a little shriek. She and her gentleman friend hurried out.

A cleric clutching a prayer book nodded mournfully as he passed. Several inmates reached through the bars, grasping at the air as if it represented freedom itself. Ian fought the urge to run, far and swiftly, away from this place that evoked such uncanny reminders of his past.

This was different, he told himself. Perhaps
this
woman could be saved. He despised the idea that the girl with the large brown eyes had been trapped in this place for four days. If she wasn't insane before, she surely was now.

When Beckworth brought him to a large, barred common room for female inmates, Ian spied her immediately. She sat on a wooden stool in a flood of sunlight that streamed through a high window. On a bench in front of her, a chess board was scratched into the wooden surface, small light and dark stones serving as chessmen.

She wore an unbleached muslin gown, plain and much mended, and her abundant brown hair was tied back with a bit of string. Her face looked clean but weary, her complexion smoother and richer than the heart of a rose.

In her lap, propped on her knees, she held a broken piece of slate. She was reciting aloud to a group of uncannily attentive women. “It is time to affect a revolution in female manners—a time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves, to reform the world.”

Ian was familiar with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. He had discovered a set of treatises by the female zealot while waiting out a long calm during a sea voyage. But hearing Miranda recite the words aloud, with such conviction, and to such rapt women, was stirring indeed. “You said she had no memory,” he whispered to Beckworth.

“She has perfect recall of general knowledge. It's really quite astonishing. Yet she has no recollection of personal matters.” Beckworth motioned him into the common room.

“Och, 'tis Bonny Prince Charlie!” An elderly woman, her hair a dirty gray mop, scuttled over and dipped a curtsy to Ian. “I'd know ye anywhere, laddie,” she said in a thick Highland brogue. “Ah, the midnight hair, the eyes of blue. Been waiting for you to return since me granny's time, we have.” She gave him a toothless smile and remained there, one knee on the floor, quivering slightly, clearly unable to move.

Ian flushed and glanced back at Beckworth, who stood just inside the door. The doctor stared straight ahead. Ian had no choice but to hold out his hand and help the old woman up.

“And a fine gentleman you are, sire, and always have been,” she declared. She turned to address the ladies. “Well, what are ye waiting for? 'Tis our own rightful prince come back to us, just like I told ye he would. And he's a ghostie, he is. 'Tis why he stays so young and bonny.”

A few of the women, their faces blank, inclined their heads. Ian's ears heated. He cleared his throat. “It is a high honor to meet you, but I am not Bonny Prince Charlie. Regrettably, he died some years ag—”

“Weesht!” The old woman held a finger to her lips. “We ken. You're in disguise, eh?” She tugged at his waistcoat. “I thought there was a purpose to that MacLean tartan.”

He nodded in exasperation. “I am here to see Miranda.”

Some of the women began to hiss and whisper among themselves. Ian cleared his throat again. “You are...dismissed.”

The old woman backed away, bowing as she retreated to another part of the room. Most of the others—those who were not chained or bound—went with her. Miranda looked up anxiously.

There was one thing Ian had not remembered from the night of the fire. And that was how stunningly beautiful she was.

Even like this, in a plain shapeless gown, her hair and face unadorned, she was like the moon. Pale skin, sable hair, a study in light and dark. He felt something unexpected and ecstatic in the center of himself as he looked at her. She had a sort of heart-catching innocence that sat ill with his sense of who she was, what she was capable of.

“Hello, Dr. Beckworth,” she said in a soft, cultured voice. Then she looked at Ian, the huge brown eyes showing—not surprisingly—no recognition at all. “Good day to you, sir.” Then she frowned.

“Is something wrong?” Beckworth asked.

“No. For a moment I thought...” She waved her hand distractedly. “It was nothing.”

“My dear,” Beckworth said, his meddlesome manner irritating, at least to Ian. “Do you recognize this man?”

“Hello, Miranda,” Ian said softly. He lowered himself so their gazes were level and sent her his kindest smile. “It's a high relief to find you at last.” Another of his well-honed skills was the intimate whisper. Women succumbed to it almost too easily, tumbling into his arms in fits of ecstasy. He waited for Miranda to melt.

Instead she cocked her head to one side and asked, “Do you play chess?”

He blinked. “Chess.”

She frowned in concentration at the chess board. “It seems that I do. Perhaps too well. Each time I play myself, it ends in stalemate.”

“This gentleman claims he knows you,” Beckworth said. “He says you were betrothed.”

She caught her breath. “To be married?” She stared at Ian with new, keen interest.

“That's right, love,” Ian said, amazed that he felt guilty deceiving her. According to Fanny, this woman was a deadly traitor and the key to a hideous plot to assassinate the crowned princes of Europe. Yet suddenly he felt as if he had stepped on a kitten. “You canna remember?”

“No.” She bit her lip. It was a full lower lip, the very sort that begged for a kiss. This could prove to be dangerous indeed, Ian thought. In ways he had not yet considered.

“Darling.” He took both her hands in his and drew her to her feet. The top of her head just reached his chin. “Surely you remember me. I am your one true love, your Ian.”

At this the other women clustered round, jabbering and clucking like hens.

“Kiss her!” one of them urged.

“Yes, kiss her, kiss her!” The others took up the chant.

It was odd, Ian thought, looking at these hopeless, disheveled creatures. After all they'd been through, they still wanted to believe in a happy ending.

“Kiss her!” they continued to chant. A buxom woman with black hair and laughing eyes made a smooching sound with her mouth.

“Ian,” Miranda repeated. Her breathing quickened, and she made a sound of distress. “Dr. Beckworth, may we please have some privacy?”

Ian was more stunned than the doctor by her request. He felt a jolt in his chest. God. She was falling for the ruse. He ought to feel pleased by his own cleverness. Instead he sensed a faint edge of panic. He might very well find himself with a fiancée before this day was out.

“Miranda, I shouldn't allow it,” Beckworth said. “It would not be prop—”

“The lady made a simple request,” Ian broke in.

“You may go to the empty cell across the hall.” The doctor held the door for them. “I shall be outside.” He aimed a meaningful stare at Miranda. “You need only call out and I'll come.”

“She'll call out, right enough,” said the black-haired woman. “But not for you, Beckie.”

Ian glared at the doctor as they left the room. Officious little toad. Does he think I would ravish her right here in this rank cell?

Rather than seeming absurd, the very idea made him hard. Perhaps he was crazy, too, lusting after a woman in Bedlam, of all places. His chest felt tight when he turned to Miranda. “Does the name Stonecypher mean anything to you?”

“Stonecypher.” She tasted it like an exotic fruit. “No. Should it?”

“That's your name, my love. You are Miranda Stonecypher, and I am Ian MacVane.”

“My betrothed.”

“Your betrothed.”

She clasped her hands demurely in front of her. “Were we in love?”

The question took him by surprise.
In love.
He almost laughed aloud at the thought. Love was something that didn't happen to Ian Dale MacVane. It simply wasn't meant to be. Yet here she stood, all innocence, brimming with hope.

“Well?” she prompted. “Was it a love match?”

“Very much so.” How easy it was to gaze into her wide, trusting eyes and lie. “We were deeply in love.” He traced his fingers along her jawline. “I still am.”

“Oh, my.” Her slender throat moved sinuously as she swallowed hard. “And we were to be married?”

His thoughts came together swiftly. “Aye, we were going to Scotland so there would be no need to secure a special license.” Recklessly he plunged on. “And of course, you wanted to meet my people in the Highlands.”

“Why?”

“Because they've not met you, lass, and—”

“That's not what I meant.” She pressed her palm to his chest. Her warmth burned into him. “Why were we going to be married?”

“I thought I explained that. We love each other. We—”

“But why marriage?” Her hand crept along his chest and slid upward to skim his collarbone. He wondered if she was at all aware that by touching him this way, she was breaking every rule of proper behavior. He wondered if she cared.