Miranda (5 page)

Full to bursting with mischief and merriment, the boy bowed from the waist. He had a clean bandage wrapped around one hand, and she realized he was the child Ian had saved from the fire.

“Robbie MacVane, at your service, mum,” he said in a clear soprano voice.

“MacVane?” Ian asked, lifting a dark eyebrow.

“Aye, if it's all the same to you,” Robbie said.

Ian did not smile, but looked solemn as he nodded. “You do honor to the name, lad.”

“Besides,” Robbie said, “It's the only name I know how to spell.”

Miranda stifled a laugh. She found the boy enchanting, from the top of his tousled head to the tips of his scuffed leather shoes. Ian hooked a thumb into the band of his breeches. Robbie did the same, perfectly copying Ian's stance. Miranda looked from the boy to the man. It was extraordinary to think that in an age when some parents abandoned their children or sold them into apprenticeships, Ian had taken in this enchanting little stranger. He was a special man indeed.

When did I fall in love with you?
she wanted to ask him.
What did it feel like?

And was it happening again?

Thinking hard, she absently brushed a deep brown lock of hair out of her face.

“Cor, mum, I know you!” Robbie was staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes.

All the hairs on the back of her neck seemed to stand on end. “Do you, Robbie?” she asked in a low, shaken voice.

Duffie took the boy by the hand. “Come along now, my wee skelper. We'll leave the master and—”

“No,” Ian said hurriedly. “What do you mean, you know Miss Miranda?”

Robbie lifted his shoulders to his ears in a shrug. “Not by name, mind you. But she gave me tuppence when she passed me in the road. I knows it were her because she's got a face like the mort in that painting in St. Mary-le-Bow, the one what looks all holy even though she ain't hardly got a stitch on.”

Duffie made a choking sound and put his hand up to his mouth. Robbie scurried away from him.

“Gave you tuppence?” Miranda asked. “When?”

“Just before you went in there,” Robbie said, puffing up to find himself the object of such rapt attention.

“In where, lad?” Ian asked.

“Well, you know.” Like a monkey, he hung in the knobby banister rails at the bottom of the staircase. “In that building what blew to smithereens.”

Miranda felt nauseated. Her head started to throb. She had been there. Inside the warehouse. Sickening guilt crept up her throat, gagging her. She thought of the twist of stiff, sulfur-smelling rope she had found in her apron pocket, along with tinder and flint. She had almost caused her own death and that of this innocent child.

She remembered the victims of that night, the bleeding faces slashed by flying glass, the burned flesh, the screams and moans of the wounded. Why would she hurt them?
Why?
She swayed, and the question she dared not ask screamed through her mind.
Am I a murderer?

“There, see?” Duffie said with comforting brusqueness. “The lady's well nigh exhausted. I'll just have the housekeeper show her to—”

“Not so fast.” Ian spoke in his customary low voice, but his words rang with authority. “Robbie, was Miss Miranda alone?”

“Oh, aye, sir, and she were in a great hurry—but she took the time to toss me a copper and bid me to get myself home.” His round cheeks flushed. “She didn't know about me having no home.”

Ian contemplated the boy with a look that was fierce, but protective rather than frightening. “Run along, then,” he said. “See if Cook's made more of those gooseberry tarts.”

Robbie scampered off, and Duffie followed him out of the foyer.

Miranda faced Ian with trepidation. He knew something. But what? Was it more than she herself knew about that night? Or less?

The icy speculation in his eyes was unmistakable. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat. “I don't suppose,” she said, “you could explain why I was down at the wharves, unchaperoned.”

His large and powerful hand, still sheathed in its black glove, came to rest on her arm. A shiver coursed through her.

“I'm certain you had your reasons, love,” he said, leading her into an opulent parlor furnished with dark wood and deep green hangings. “Come and sit down, and we'll—”

“Excuse me, sir.” A cheerful-looking man with a peg leg came into the room. On his hand he balanced a salver, and he approached them with an ease that belied his infirmity. “This just arrived for you.”

Ian took the letter from the tray. “Thank you, Carmichael.”

“You're welcome, sir.” Carmichael sent a pleasant smile to Miranda. “And welcome to you, too, miss. We've heard so much about you—”

“Thank you, Carmichael,” Ian said, louder this time. “That will be all.” He helped Miranda to a settee as the servant withdrew.

“How did he lose his leg?” she asked.

“The Battle of Busaco. We were in the Thirty-second Highlanders together.”

Ian MacVane, she decided, was a man who took in strays. As Miranda watched him open his letter, she wondered what sort of stray she had been when they'd first met.

“Damn it,” he said.

She jumped. “Damn what?”

He crumpled the letter in his hand. “Cossacks in Hyde Park.”

She felt no surprise; her knowledge of local events had remained intact. Arriving with fanfare and entourages that often occupied entire flotillas, an extraordinary group was convening in London this summer. All the crowned heads from Tsar Alexander of Russia to the prince of Saxe-Coburg had come to celebrate Bonaparte's defeat. The Cossacks, under their hetman Count Platov, were serving as life guards to the tsar.

“Have they done something wrong?” she asked.

“It seems they've challenged the Gentlemen Pensioners to a horse race. A few of them had too much to drink and are terrorizing people.” Ian went to the door. “I'd best go and see that order is restored.”

“Why you?” She was suddenly aware that she had no notion of Ian's role in all of this.

He grinned. “It is my métier. I'll tell you more when I get back. Duffie will see to your needs.”

“Ian, wait!” A flush suffused her cheeks. “Is it true—what you said earlier? About...going to Scotland?”

“Upon my oath,” he said, then was gone.

* * *

The next morning, Ian awakened to the dreadful notion that he had pledged to take Miranda to Scotland and make her his bride.

“A simple enough idea, when you consider it,” Duffie said as he laid out a clean shirt and morning coat. “Marriage happens every day.”

Ian sluiced cold water over himself from the yellow-glazed Newcastle ware bowl on the washstand. “Not to me.” He turned the ewer sideways and took a long drink directly from it. “Never to me, McDuff.”

The diminutive man seemed to swell to twice his size. “What are you saying, then?”

Ian grabbed a towel and began scrubbing his face and hair dry. Craning his neck, he inspected his burned shoulder. He closed his eyes, felt a sickening terror pitch in his gut as he relived the moment of rescuing Robbie. Only the desperate need of a child had prodded him out of his paralyzing fear of heights, prodded him just as the bigger boys had, so many years ago, sticking pins in his bare feet to urge him to climb higher, higher through the tight, narrow passageways of the chimney pots he had been forced to clean.

“I'm waiting for an answer.” Duffie snatched away the towel and gave Ian's shoulder a casual glance. “Healing nicely,” he pronounced, “which is more than I can say for your paper skull if you don't answer me. What are your intentions toward the girl?”

Ian grabbed back the towel and rubbed it across his chest. Only from Angus McDuff would he tolerate this constant meddling. He heaved a sigh. “You sound like a fierce papa.”

The salt-and-pepper brows beetled. “Lord knows she could use one. She's helpless as a lamb, man. Dinna eat her alive.”

Ian began dressing in traveling garb of black breeches and boots, a starched and snowy shirt, a waistcoat, and a cravat. “I'm taking her to Scotland.”

“To Scotland.”

“Aye.”

“To marry her.”

“Nay.”

For an older man, Duffie moved with surprising speed. In one swift movement he had Ian shoved back against the wall, showing no sympathy for the wounded shoulder. His face was florid, his eyes hard. “Damn you to hell, Ian MacVane. I ought to skelp your stubborn hide for you. Have you taken a knife, then, and carved out your own heart?”

Ian glared at him coldly. “Oh, aye. You know I have.”

Duffie dropped his hands to his sides, but he did not retreat. “That doesna mean others are made of ice. I'll not let you ruin the girl. Not let you whisk her away, destroy her reputation, destroy any chance she has to settle down one day and find happiness.”

“She's happy now,” Ian said, his mouth a cruel twist, “when she knows nothing of the past.”

“Fine. She knows nothing. And you care nothing for her future. It'll be no future at all if you skulk off with her, wooing her with false promises. What decent man would have her after she goes adventuring with Ian MacVane?”

“No one need know.” The back of Ian's neck prickled. He didn't like feeling this way—knowing he was wrong but lacking the conscience to stop himself.

“
She
will know,” Duffie said obstinately. “To her core, she is a sweet and decent soul.”

“Frances thinks she is a traitor. Oh. Do pardon me. A sweet and decent traitor.” Ian raked a wooden comb through his close-cropped hair. “Look, would you rather I do what I should have done in the first place?”

“And what is that?”

“Take her directly to the authorities. I could make this all very simple by marching her before them and letting them be the ones to unlock her secrets.”

Duffie's cheeks paled beneath his beard. “She's a wee, fragile thing. I suspect you guessed that or you wouldna have brought her this far. There is only one solution.”

Ian set down his comb. He was tired of arguing. It had taken half the night to get the hard-drinking Cossacks to return to their residence at the Pulteney Hotel. “Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like this?”

“Because it's the kind and proper thing, which is not what you are used to doing.” Duffie pointed a stubby finger and narrowed an eye as though taking aim at his employer. “You'll do exactly as you promised, my fine gentleman. You'll marry the girl. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you'll find out her secrets. And if you're luckier still, I willna skelp you.”

Five

We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!

—Robert Browning

T
he inmates at Bedlam were not nearly as entertaining since the endowments had started to arrive. Dr. Brian Beckworth, for one, did not regret the change. He did not miss the gawkers who paid their coppers to come and stare at the moonstruck inmates. He did not miss Warden Larkin, given the boot the same day Miranda had left.

The till at the door had dwindled, but the anonymous payments drawn on a London bank account more than made up for that. Before long, the hospital would relocate to a new building in Lambeth, and this moldering pile of rubble would be abandoned.

For years Dr. Beckworth had wanted the institution to be a place of healing. A place where people who had lost pieces of their souls could find themselves again—or at least find solace. Now there was a chance that it could happen.

Some of the women were hopeless, it was true. But others simply needed care and compassion. And now the doctor could afford to give it to them. All because of Miranda.

Feeling a rare sense of accomplishment, Beckworth smiled up at Gwen, who came in with his morning tea and the London
Times
. She had started doing a few tasks around the place and seemed to take her new responsibilities in stride.

“Nice and strong like you favors it, sir,” she said. Today her hair was caught back neatly with a bit of ribbon, and her hands and face were scrubbed clean. She hid less and less behind her brash, uncaring facade.

Beckworth inhaled the fragrant steam and held up the paper, scanning the front page. Gwen turned to leave, but her eyes widened and she bent close. “Sir, look there! 'Tis our own Miranda, and no mistake.”

With a frown, Beckworth turned the paper over and laid it on his desk. He saw a small sketch of a woman with large eyes and a swirl of thick, dark curls. The caption identified her as “Miss Miranda Stonecypher.”

For no apparent reason, an icy claw of fear clutched at his gut. There was something sinister about seeing her likeness, her name in bold print.

“What's it say, sir? Please.” Gwen propped one hip on his desk and bent over the sketch.

Beckworth cleared his throat. “It seems her family is looking for her. Requests a reply to an anonymous box at the paper. Claims she has been missing since...” He scanned down the article. “Since the day before she arrived here.”

“But that can't be,” Gwen stated. “Mr. MacVane already collected her.”

Beckworth's mouth went dry. “He claimed he knew her, but I was never quite convinced.”

“Hell and damnation,” Gwen burst out. “Then MacVane played us false and stole poor Miranda away!”

From the corridor outside came a scuffle of feet and the murmur of voices, but Beckworth was more preoccupied with the extraordinary notice in the paper.

“So it would appear.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. The cold clench of fear in his gut tightened. Had he let a stranger spirit the girl away?

With a less than steady hand, the doctor dipped quill in ink and scribbled an urgent message. “I shall have this delivered to the
Times
,” he said, thinking aloud for Gwen's benefit as he blotted the ink. “And another to the lodgings of Ian MacVane. I have a few questions for him.”

She took the note. “I'll see that it goes out with today's post.” She left through the rear door of the office.

A moment later, the other door banged open and two people pushed inside.

“How do you do?” he asked, recognizing both of his visitors. They had come before to gawk at the inmates, but he noticed they'd paid particular attention to Miranda. “I just composed a message to the
Times
. I do hope—”

“Where is she?” asked the one with the French accent.

Dr. Beckworth was taken aback by the abruptness of the voice. “She left with the Scotsman, Ian MacVane.”

“When?”

“Thursday. That is why the notice in the paper surprised me. You see—”

A strong hand plunged into his hair. Dr. Beckworth found himself forced to his knees. A foot pressed into his back, shoving his chest hard against the floor. “Who took your message to the
Times
?”

By now, Beckworth understood the peril. He must not lead them to Gwen. “P-posted it myself. Just this morning.”

The visitors exchanged words in French. Beckworth tried to fight, but he wasn't trained for brawling. His arms flailed, and he managed to choke out one word: “Why?”

The hand holding his hair jerked his head up and pulled back, baring his throat. An expert hand wielded the sharp, cold blade quickly, neatly. As he bled to death swiftly on the floor of his office, Dr. Brian Beckworth answered his own question. He was dying because of Miranda.

* * *

“I'm certain I've never done
this
before.” Miranda gripped the forecastle rail of the sleek, swift frigate
Serendipity
and gazed out at the churning North Sea. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the fresh, salty air, and threw back her head, wishing she could unbind her hair and let the wind ripple through it. She knew the winds. Somewhere in her forgotten past she had studied wind and weather, though she had no idea why.

“Done what?” Ian stood beside her. With a swath of plaid draped diagonally across his chest, he looked as regal as a Highland chieftain. She shivered with admiration at the very sight of him. How plain and mousy she felt next to her betrothed, yet at the same time, his appearance empowered her. To have the devotion of such a man was heady indeed.

“Gone on a sea voyage,” she said, watching the endless rush of the waves below the bow. “I feel quite sure I've not experienced this before.”

Sailors in the mizzentop raced along wooden booms, working the sails as the wind made the ship yaw back and forth. Miranda hugged herself and smiled at the sky burnished like copper by the setting sun. “It all feels brand-new. And so exciting... Ian—” She broke off when she saw the way he was looking at her.

As if he wanted to eat her alive.

She sometimes caught him at it, eyeing her in a manner that was both fierce and tender. Was that the way he had always loved her, with that mixture of intensity and gentleness?

“What is it?” he asked, laying one gloved finger on her wind-stung cheek.

She wondered if he had ever told her why he always wore gloves, but it felt too awkward to ask. Besides, there was something mysterious and romantic about it.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just that I know you're frustrated because I can't remember anything.” His touch made her tingle in secret places. Were these places he had touched...before?

She could not quite bring herself to ask him that, either. “I do want to, Ian. Truly I do.” She felt a stirring inside her, a sharp but unfocused yearning that ached in her heart. A sense of loss and longing and emptiness came over her.

“I did recall one thing,” she said.

Clear as ice shards, his gaze focused on her. His hands gripped her upper arms. “Yes?”

She so hated to disappoint him. She wanted to please him, to bring a flicker of cheer to his brooding eyes, to feel his smile like the sun on her face. “I'm afraid it's not terribly important,” she confessed. “When I woke up this morning, I realized that I know Homer's
Iliad
by heart.”

His grin looked strained. “Lovely.”

“In Greek.”

“There has never been any question of your cleverness,” he said. “You trouble yourself too much, lass. The memories will come when they come.”

“What if that never happens?”

“Then we'll start over,” he said.

She moistened her lips, tasted the faint bitter tinge of spindrift on her mouth. The maintop men called to one another, gathering in sail from their lofty perches, and their shouts were like a sea chantey, rhythmic and pleasant.

She studied Ian for a long time. How magnificent he was, tall and lean and rugged, his black hair and sharp eyes creating a magnetism that ran deeper than his appearance. She felt drawn to him in a hundred little ways—the brush of his gloved hand on hers, the way one corner of his mouth lifted in wry amusement, or the warmth in her chest when he gazed at her.

“Is this what love is, then?” she asked impulsively.

He frowned, clearly startled. “What?”

“The way I feel when I look up at you. Is it love?”

For a rare moment, his composure seemed to slip. He appeared raw and unguarded, unnerved and vulnerable. In the blink of an eye, his customary regard of lazy amusement returned. “This is not a conversation we've ever had before.”

“It's important to me, Ian. It is.” She could not take her eyes off him. “I shall describe it, then, and you can tell me if it is love or not.” She kept one hand on the rail to steady herself. “You make me feel something quite jolting inside. I find myself wanting to touch you rather boldly, to hang on to you and discover your smell and your taste and— Why on earth are you laughing?”

He made no attempt to stifle himself. “That isna love you describe, delicious as it sounds, Miranda. It's lust.”

Miffed, she poked her nose in the air. There was more to it than that. There had to be, for he was the only man she regarded in this way, and she had made it a point to study the sailors and officers of the
Serendipity
. She had been on the verge of baring her heart to him, and he was laughing at her.

“Not that I am averse to lust,” he said quickly.

In spite of herself, she felt mirth tugging at her. “But I truly want to know,” she said, sobering. “What did it feel like to love you? And will I ever feel that way again?”

He turned away, but not before she detected a glimmer of torment in his craggy face. “Not if you know what's good for you.”

“What?”

Still he did not look at her. “There are things about me—” He broke off. His hands clenched around the ship's rail. “Ah, listen to me.” When he turned to her again, he was smiling. “I dinna want you to have any doubts, sweet.”

“Then teach me,” she said, desperate to fill the emptiness inside her. “Show me how we used to love. I want to remember, Ian. Truly I do.”

He said something gruff and Gaelic. “Lass, you don't know what you're asking.”

She watched a gull dive for a fish in the distance, then studied the horizon, the gray edges of sea and sky, as if the answers were written there. After a while, she glanced back at him. “Help me, Ian. Help me remember.”

“I don't know how,” he said. “I canna simply give you your memories back, all wrapped up in a tidy parcel.”

“Then tell me something, anything. A tidbit to spark my remembrance.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “What sort of tidbit?”

“Conversations we've had. Experiences we've shared.” She could not explain how fearsome it was, this yawning black gulf inside her. It was like missing a leg or an eye. She was not whole, and she did not know how much longer she could go on. “Please,” she said. “I need to know.”

He watched her for a moment, the wind mussing his glossy black hair. “I taught you to dance the waltz,” he said, speaking reluctantly, as if the words were pulled from him against his will.

She cocked her head. “The waltz. It's a dance, then?”

“Aye. All the rage in London this Season. The tsar and his sister, the grand duchess of Oldenburg, have made it the sport of choice.” He winked, then gripped her lightly by the waist, with one hand around hers. “The rhythm is like a heartbeat.
One
, two, three,
one
, two, three... Do you feel it?” He began to hum a soft melody in her ear.

“You have a beautiful voice,” she said.

He kept humming and drew her along the forecastle deck, neatly avoiding coils of rope, lashed-down barrels and the envious stares of the sailors. She followed his lead, letting his graceful maneuvering make up for her inexperience. Round and round they spun, the rich melody lilting in her ear until the rhythm finally penetrated her very bones. They moved as one, and she reveled in the way they seemed to fit together, in the light scrape of their feet on the wooden deck and the hiss of the ocean speeding past the hull.

“There is,” she murmured, “something magical about dancing. Why is that?”

His hand moved in a circle on her back. “Well,” he said, stretching out his Scottish burr, “dancing involves two people, holding each other, moving in a rhythm both understand, their goal to stay together, for no reason other than sheer physical pleasure.” He smiled wickedly, and a shiver shot down her spine. “There is only one other circumstance in which all that is true.”

She snatched her hand out of his. Hot color surged to her cheeks. “Ian!”

He leaned against a tall spool of rope and watched her, clearly amused. “Aye, love?”