“Iknowyou are,” she countered. “Fear not. I have worked with a great deal of men such as yourself over the course of my career as a Pinkerton. I am entirely prepared to deal with you.”
“To deal with me,” he repeated, thinking surely,surely, he could not have heard the woman before him correctly.
“You are having difficulty accepting the fact that you are being forced to accept a partner,” she added. “To make matters worse, I am a woman. An American woman, at that. You consider me an interloper, and you think me intellectually and physically incapable of performing the same tasks as you, a man.”
She spoke with such certainty, as if she already knew every word she spoke was irrefutable fact. But to his utter shame, he realized she was not entirely wrong. She had read him as if he were a book laid open before her.
“I am not pleased about being forced to accept a partner,” he allowed, “as it casts a shadow over my abilities. Furthermore, forgive me, but I cannot help but to feel, down to my marrow, that a native Englishman will have a much better understanding of the current wave of Fenianism than an American.”
If possible, she sat even straighter, and as well as she could read him, he could read her. She was infuriated. Arguing with her had not been his intention for this meeting, but it would seem they found themselves in dubious footing upon a slippery slope.
“Most of the men who have already been arrested, or who are actively plotting now, are Americans with roots in Ireland,” she countered, her voice firm.
He admired her tenacity. Her ability to find success in a predominantly male profession did not surprise him in the least, now he’d seen it in action. And he had to admit, she was correct about her assertion concerning the American ties to many of the Fenians who had been caught thus far. However, he still disagreed with part of her argument. Quite vehemently, in fact.
“That is an incontrovertible fact. However, running covert operations in a city you are familiar with is decidedly different from running them here in London.” He tapped his fingers against the surface of his desk to drum away some of his vexation. “Surely you must admit the difference, Miss Montgomery.”
“You fancy me from New York?” She laughed then, and the sound was rich and true and sultry.
Damn him if her laughter did not send a trill straight down his spine.
“Is that not where you hail from, Miss Montgomery?” he asked coldly, nettled by his reaction to her—all over again—and her amusement. No one laughed at him. He was the Duke of Arden, by God. Leader of the Special League.
“No,” she said, the remnants of her luscious laugh lingering in an equally tempting smile. “I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Or, at least, that is where my recollections begin. I am an orphan, you see, no memories of my mother or father, and I am sure that is just as well. Atlanta is where I remained until the city was burned in the war. After that, I moved whenever and wherever I had to, a child of misfortune, as it were. I have found my home in a dozen states. I am not bound by geographical location, Mr. Arden.”
He had returned to mister status once more. Somehow, that concerned him far less than the notion of a young Miss Montgomery, in an orphanage within a burning city, in the midst of the chaos of war. Something inside him shifted.
Softened.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“When?” she asked, seemingly unaffected by the harrowing childhood she had just described.
“When your city burned,” he clarified.
He knew he should not care. That he ought not waste his precious time on inquiring after personal details about her, which would never matter when she had been dismissed from her position and sailed back to America. And yet, unable to help himself all the same. He wanted to know more about this irksome, intriguing woman.
“Nine years old, or thereabouts,” she said. “No one can be certain, since I was abandoned as a small child. No birth date on record for me, I am afraid.”
“A girl,” he concluded, thinking of how Miss Montgomery may have looked, bright-eyed, with a halo of dark ringlets around her heart-shaped face.
And despite his every instinct to the contrary, he allowed himself to entertain, just for a moment, a sense of kinship with her. Hidden deep within him was an orphan as well. His mother had died in his youth by her own hand, drowning herself in the North Sea. His father had died not many years later, leaving Lucien and Violet with no one in the world but each other.
And Aunt Hortense, of course, who was not to be forgotten.
But he related to Miss Montgomery, for he too knew what it was like to be motherless and fatherless. To be adrift in the world, without the guidance of those who should have loved him best.
“I was old enough to find my way when the time came,” she said then, her gentle drawl dispersing his heavy thoughts. “I tell you this, not so you pity me, but so you see I have never called any place home. I find my home wherever I am, and I am not daunted by the prospect of conducting an investigation in a country I have only just recently arrived in. If anything, I am eager.”
He believed her when she said those words. He did not discredit the vehemence in her voice, or the strength of her convictions. “My mother drowned herself in the sea when I was a lad,” he found himself revealing to her.
Why, he had no idea. Merely that she was there, and for this brief moment, the connection between them seemed a bridge, and he was blindly crossing it. Reaching out, not an olive branch, but a hand, from one orphan to another.
But she did not wilt as most ladies would. Her eyes filled, not with sympathy, but with something far more valuable: understanding. “Perhaps you have more in common with this American interloper than you initially suspected, Arden.”
He swallowed against the rush of bile which inevitably rose in his throat whenever he thought of his mother. How beautiful and pale she had been in death, how unlike herself. She had finally been at peace, but she had left him behind in torment.
“Perhaps,” he allowed at last, gaining control over his emotions.
