Every summer for every year that she could remember back, Georgina had spent in that house. It had been the last thing to go, perhaps that was why she fought so hard to keep it. She shoved away from the tree and moved on.
It wasn’t as hard to get inside this time. She used a tree limb to get over the wall and went straight for the cellar window. For a while she wandered through the house. She moved some of the furniture back into its proper place and took some of the dust cloths off certain pieces.
She sat in chairs in every room, rooms that held memories for her. Her family memories might not have been wonderful, but they were all the memories she had.
For the longest time she sat in the clock room and looked at each and every Bayard clock. She wound them herself and watched them mark time that had no meaning to her anymore.
Time only mattered if you had some place to go. She almost laughed. She didn’t have anything, not even the few things she’d saved in those valises, which she’d left in the wagon. She didn’t have anything, not even a place to go.
As the sky grew darker and the sun set, she made her way upstairs. She slipped off her shoes and jacket and crawled into her bed.
In less time than it took to say good night, she was sound asleep. So sound asleep that she didn’t hear anything, not the opening of the front door, not the footsteps up the stairs. She didn’t even hear her bedroom door open.
She heard nothing until a constable with a gun and a billy club woke her up and arrested her for trespassing and vagrancy.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
No man can be happy without a friend, nor sure of a friend until he’s unhappy.
—Scottish proverb
Georgina sent notes to every person she knew. No one came to bail her out of jail. Not even those who hadn’t left for town yet. Not one person who had danced to music played in the Bayard ballroom. Not one person who had drunk their fill of champagne or eaten food paid for by Bayard money.
Not one person whom she had known for years, some of them all her life. Not one came. Even the servants. The police told her they had been the ones to ransack the place, taking valuables in place of their wages.
So she sat on a dusty bunk covered with a moth-eaten blanket and plenty of fleas. Her hands were shaking, shaking the way they had when she was lost in the park so many years ago. She was that same little girl again, the one who was lost in the crowded park, the one who sat on a sand dune all alone and so very scared inside. She propped her elbows on her knees and pressed the heels of her hands into her burning eyes. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know if she could survive.
A door squeaked open and she could hear her jailer walking down to the cell, his keys jangling too loudly in the emptiness.
“Yep, that’s George.”
Eachann?
Georgina’s head shot up and relief washed over her with such a strong force that she felt too lightheaded to even stand up. But the feeling didn’t last long.
She was up and clinging to the bars. “Get me out of here.”
He looked at the jailer. “What do I need to do?”
“Pay her bail of ten dollars and sign an affidavit accepting full responsibility for her.”
“Sign it, Eachann.”
The officer looked from her to Eachann, then said, “She can’t go back to that house for any reason. It and all of its contents belong to the bank.”
Eachann watched her thoughtfully.
If he makes me beg, I’ll kill him.
“You’ll go back to the island with me?” He didn’t say a word about begging.
“Yes.”
“Willingly?”
“Yes. Just sign that thing and get me out of here.”
Five minutes later, she left the jail in the custody of Eachann MacLachlan, the man who had kidnapped her.
