“You’re here.”
“Aye,” he replied as he leaned toward the bed and gently stroked my forehead.
Other thoughts surfaced. “The charges against you? Abberline?”
“It’s over.”
I felt his finger gently brush my bloodied lip.
“Are you all right?” I asked, or at least as near as I could say the words. A split lip was new to me.
“Go back to sleep, lass.”
I slowly nodded, reached for his hand, and slept.
Brodie was gone when I wakened in the morning.
The other side of the bed was still neatly tucked. It appeared that he had spent the night in that chair.
I was stiff and sore as I rose slowly and took stock of my bruises. I grimaced at my reflection in the dressing table mirror. There was no concealing my bruised and swollen lip, however a bit of color added to my cheeks improved my pale complexion.
I had very nearly dressed, when there was a knock at the bedroom door, and Mrs. Ryan appeared. I was prepared for shock and then a lecture. There were neither, as she entered the room as if it was any other day, with a tray that included coffee and a tray of scones—the bracing aroma of the coffee was wonderful! And Rupert.
“It was all I could do to get the scones out of the oven,” she commented with only a glance—albeit a slightly startled glance, then continued across to the sitting room, where she set the tray out of the hound’s zealous attempts to steal a scone.
“He’s had three already,” she announced as she returned with a forced smile.
“Mr. Brodie?” I asked, ignoring her obvious curiosity and concern.
“He was here when I arrived last night, then left early this morning. Said there were things he needed to take care of.” She went about the room, retrieving my soiled clothes from the night before with a frown.
“Did he say when he would return?”
“No, he didn’t.” She paused at the door. “I do remember him telling the driver to take him...to the Tower of London?” she added in that way that indicated she would have liked to ask more about that, and waited.
The Agency, I thought. Of course, he would go there first. There was a vague memory of something I had asked him, about the charges against him and Abberline.
“My great-aunt?” I asked, aware of how gossip traveled. If she had heard anything of the events of the previous day, she might have been concerned.
“Mr. Brodie spoke with her and assured her that you were both quite all right. All things considered,” she added with a single arched brow.
I thanked her for the coffee and scones, then asked her to call for a cab.
I finished dressing and pulled my hair up into a roll, my fingers brushing that knot at the back of my head.
There was someone I needed to see—Adelaide Matthews.
By now, I was fairly certain she would have been informed about the arrest of her husband.
It was more than that. I wanted to make certain that she was all right. The revelation that her husband had commissioned the murder of her son was going to be devastating, only adding to the pain and grief she’d experienced through the years.
Would she mourn what was essentially the end of her marriage? Or would she cling to it as some might, the only thing she had ever known of that relationship?
And what of the revelation that it was her husband who had ordered the death of her son all those years before, because of the scandal of fathering an illegitimate child with Ellie Sutton? Repeating the circumstance of his own birth from an affair that Adelaide had?
I thought of something Sir Walter Scott had written years before,“What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
Sir Edward had deceived so many people, and in the end caught in his own deceptions.
