Blast.A dozen different ways things could have gone awry careened through his mind. “What’s wrong? Where is she?” he demanded, standing abruptly.
“Your Grace—” Rollins shrank back as Edward crossed the room. Before the lawyer could finish, Fiona walked through the door.
Edward’s relief at the sight of her was quickly replaced by a potent fury. Her face was pale, the fresh blood on her swollen lip standing out. Her morning coat was rumpled, stained by muck, and her eyes were rimmed with red.
He was going to kill someone. She just needed to point him in the right direction. “Curse it. What happened?” He cupped her face in both hands and was reminded of how delicate she was. She might be bold. Her presence might command the room, but she was also more fragile than she first appeared.
Her breathing hitched at his touch, from pain or relief, he wasn’t sure. His gut twisted at the sound. “What happened?” he asked her in the gentlest tone he could muster.
She paused, as though debating what to share with him. “Nothing. I’m fine.” She ducked out of his grasp and beelined straight for Rollins’s liquor cabinet.
Frustrated that she wouldn’t share it on her own, he turned to his lawyer. “Explain.”
Rollins looked at Fiona, clearly wanting her to respond.
Fiona simply took the lid off the whiskey decanter and poured herself a drink, throwing it back in one hit.
This is not good.He should have gone to the courthouse, should have paid off whoever he needed to in order to resolve the matter himself, quietly. “Well?”
Rollins took papers from his bag, shuffling them around in his hands as though the key to diffusing Edward’s wrath was somewhere in those sheets. “What Miss McTavish neglected to mention was that she wasn’t arrested forattendingthe protest. She was arrested for throwing rotten vegetables at the authorities. A somewhat irate officer of the King’s Guard attended the hearing to testify against her. He was very determined and…the charges were upgraded to assault. She faces trial in a month.”
Throwing vegetables. Did she truly not have a shred of sense? She’d always been political; it was part of what attracted him to her. They’d spent long nights debating philosophy, religion, and matters of state and not once had she placated him. Butthis. It was idiotic.
“And the bloody lip?”
Rollins’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Given your instructions not to mention your name, Your Grace, she was remanded into custody until the trial commenced. I believe the injury occurred after she reached the prison.”
Fiona in prison. In a cell with criminals. Assaulted. A pounding thundered in his ears. “I told you she was not to go to jail.”
The blood drained from Rollins’s face. “Which is precisely why I asked for a private meeting with the magistrate following the hearing,” he said, his voice shaking. “I explained to him that Mr. Finley McTavish was a personal acquaintance of yours and that you had interest in the case. He agreed to release her…him. With some conditions.”
“Which are?”
“That you would pay a surety of a hundred pounds and that she, he, she would reside under your roof until the trial commenced.”
Curse it.Obviously, he was relieved that she was not in any immediate danger, but to have her under his roof for a full month? The magistrate could not have known how unreasonable a suggestion that was—a single young woman residing with an unmarried man—because Fiona had chosen to hide her true identity, and now Edward was faced with a month of avoiding unnecessary rumors.
If word got out, it would not only put Fiona in the sights of thetonbut also put Charlotte’s chances of a decent marriage this season at risk, as well as his own. Then there was the danger to him: his reputation, his resolve, his heart.
He should have just gone to the blasted courthouse. He should not have trusted something this vital to another. And now, there was no escaping her.
Chapter 7
All Fiona wanted to do was cry but she was too dumbfounded. Really, who went to jail for throwing atomato? She hadn’t even been throwing itatthe authorities. It had been squarely aimed at Tucker as he riled up the crowd. Instead that bloody guard stepped right into the path of it.
Not that his story to the magistrate had even remotely resembled hers. No, to hear him tell it, she’d looked him dead in the eye, sworn at him, and then pelted the tomato at him directly. It was his word against hers, so she’d been bundled up into the back of a wagon for the second time in two days and taken to Old Bailey—not the upper-level holding cell where she’d been yesterday, but deep in the bowels of it.
She’d watched as inmate after inmate was stripped and doused with a bucket of lye before being tossed a bundle of prison rags.
As the line got shorter and shorter and her charade got closer and closer to being revealed, she’d done the only thing she could think of—she’d turned around and thrown a punch at the man behind her, clocking him in the jaw.
Whether that was a mistake or pure genius she still didn’t know. She’d suffered a busted lip and a bruised hand in the all-out brawl that ensued, but instead of being processed with the rest of the criminals, she was dragged away into a cell on her own.
Barely six feet by six feet, it had held just a bucket and a moldy, threadbare blanket. That’s when she should’ve cried. But the tears hadn’t come.
According to Rollins, she’d only been in the cell for an hour, but damn that hour had stretched. It had felt as long as that first night after British troops had tossed her family out of their home during a cold Scottish autumn.
Except this time, she’d at least had a moldy, threadbare blanket.
