Isabel stepped to the bassinet and stared down at her nephew. He was peaceful in his sleep, no longer the fractious infant he was for the first few months of his life when Isabel had had to spend most of their remaining savings on hiring Nell to wet-nurse the babe. The girl’s own babe had been stillborn only days before. Oh, how thin and weak he’d been, squirming and crying the house down. Now his cheeks had plumped up, and he was able to rest peacefully.
She bent over and bussed a light kiss on his forehead, inhaling his warm, sweet scent. She straightened, and her hands tightened around the two bags. “Would you like to dress? Or will you wear your night-rail?”
Eva’s eyebrows drew together and released. “Does it make a difference?”
“Not to me.” It only mattered that Eva was safe with her.
Eva stood and turned to the small table at her side. She opened a drawer and removed a small object. When she faced Isabel again, she held a pistol.
“Where did you getthat?” Isabel asked in a shocked whisper.
“Such items can be got. The point is we shall not be defenseless.” Eva’s eyes burned with emotion. “Never again.”
Isabel understood her sister wasn’t leaving without the gun. She nodded, and Eva dropped the offensive item into one of the bags. Isabel stared down at the babe. “Will you carry him? Or shall I call for Nell?”
Isabel’s heart stuttered in her chest as she awaited Eva’s reply. “I,” Eva began and swallowed. “I can.” She reached into the bassinet and lifted the sleeping infant into her embrace, gingerly. Too gingerly.
Isabel wouldn’t ask if this was the first time Eva had held her child. In a strange way, it felt too intimate a question. Eva had so many demons to battle, Isabel wouldn’t add to her sister’s burden by placing judgment upon her shoulders, too. Instead, she asked, “Have you—” She hesitated, not wanting to ask the next question, fearing its answer. “Have you named him yet?”
Eva gazed down at the babe in her arms, a cloud of emotion in her eyes. “Ariel,” she said, almost as if surprised at hearing the name spoken aloud.
A knot twisted inside Isabel. “After Papa?”
“Sí.”
“Mama would have liked that.”
She and Eva didn’t often speak of Mama—she’d died of a lung infection when Isabel had been ten years of age and Eva nine—but she was never too far from their thoughts. Mama was feisty and brave, and Isabel longed to be more like her.
Mouth pressed into a firm line, Eva nodded once, as if she couldn’t trust herself to speak. How Isabel wished Eva would speak, shout, scream, cry, rail in fury at the hand Fate had dealt her. But Eva refused, forgoing emotion in favor of flat stoicism.
“Follow me,” Isabel said. It was time to move before that devastating man in the carriage hunted her down.
Across their small rooms, down the narrow staircase and corridor, through the maze of fabric bolts, they fled, meeting a wide-eyed Nell at the front door. “Nell, do you have the key?”
As Isabel twisted the key in the deadbolt, she experienced a pang in her gut. This was the shop, the life, she and Eva had begun. And now she was leaving it behind and shuttered for an uncertain future. But what choice had she? The business was nothing to those in her care. She would rebuild when—if—she returned.
Door locked behind them, they crossed the short distance to the carriage. The door flew open, and Bretagne’s face appeared, ripe with disbelief. It would be comical, if the circumstances weren’t so deadly serious. “Are you out of your deuced mind, woman?”
Isabel signaled to Eva and Nell to stop and drew herself up to her fullest height. She’d known this fight was coming. “If they don’t go, I don’t go. Tilly?”
Tilly’s face popped into view. “Yes, miss?”
“Come out of there.”
Bretagne’s arm blocked the door opening. “Now, wait a minute.”
This, too, Isabel had predicted. She strode forward, now separated from him by a few inches. If he thought she couldn’t be as fierce as he, well, he would learn. Mayhap she did have a bit of Mama’s spirit. “I shan’t leave them in London to face the danger I’m escaping,” she hissed in rising anger. “Don’t you have a care for another single person in the world?”
He flinched, a flicker of movement, but she caught it. She’d scraped across a raw nerve. Ruthlessly, she pressed her advantage. “It’s all or none.”
A pair of riotous heartbeats galloped through her chest before he drew back and grandly waved their motley group inside. She sensed sarcasm in the gesture, but she cared not. She would take what victory she could manage.
“Miss?” Isabel heard at her back.
“Yes, Nell?”
Nell’s eye darted nervously toward the man inside. “I’ll be ridin’ up top, if you don’t mind.”
