“Friends can be generous,” she went on.
Or horrified if they knew I attempted the vilest of methods to multiply my miserable inheritance. Even that failed. They would despise me.He felt sick.
“Major?” she repeated.
Jamie stared into an abyss. His mind filled with the fate of one hundred and thirty-two souls chained below deck of a ship bound for the Charleston slave market. It sank with all hands and Jamie’s inheritance.Of course they would despise me if they knew. I despise myself. At the thought of losing the respect of the friends who mattered most, despair filled him.
“So, Mother,” he began on a shaky breath, desperate to change the subject, “how do you think?—”
That time the chapel bells rescued him, chiming time for Isabella to leave.
He walked his employer to the gate.
“I’ll bid you good night, Major Bently,” Nora Haley said.
His only response was a grunt. She raised an eyebrow.
“Aren’t you going to offer to escort me to my rooms so that I can say no?” she asked, amusement plain on her face.
It had become a ritual with them. Every afternoon he offered to escort her home. Every afternoon she refused, saying she didn’t pay him to escort her; she paid him to interpret. Every afternoon he pretended to give in and then followed her home.
Sunk in his own hell, he had no response.
“Until tomorrow then,” she said.
“Of course,” he growled sourly.Tonight the stubborn woman can have her way.
Jamie had other concerns. The screams of one hundred and thirty-two drowning men echoed in his head. He knew he could never tell his friends.I certainly won’t tell my abolitionist, temperance-happy employer,he thought. I need a drink.
Nora suckedin a panicked breath and wished she had allowed the major to follow her home. Someone else had. She sped up.
The footsteps sounded behind her soon after the major had turned away toward his own rented room. She knew it wasn’t the major. Cold needles of fear stabbed at her spine.
When Nora began to run, the steps kept pace. She glanced over her shoulder, but the furtive little man kept to the deepening late afternoon shadows.
She stayed to the center of the road, avoided alleys, and sidestepped dark doorways toward her boarding house. Her rooms lay uphill in a more respectable neighborhood across the river from the major’s dilapidated room. Respectability made it empty and quiet.
She felt a fool as she scurried to her rooms. The major’s teasing haunted her.Why didn’t I let him walk me home?
Nora climbed the stairs, locked the door, and hurried to the partially shuttered window in the back from which she could look down on the inner courtyard.
A man passed through the passage to the street, the passage Nora had used to access her stairway, into the courtyard. Tall, thin, andsomberly dressed, he bent in furtive conversation with her landlady. Coins passed from his hand to hers before an oily smile slid across his face, and he disappeared into the passage.
On the stone pavement below, the landlady counted coins, dropping them one by one into her pocket.The evil old woman!
Nora sagged against the wall, utterly alone.Who can I dare trust in this place? Even the sisters have other loyalties, ties to country, to Church, and to family.Nora had only Robert, and he faded daily.
The major’s shaggy head with its sad brown eyes swam before her. Whatever plagued him after his conversation with Mother Margarita, she wished again that he had followed her home.
The tremor in her hands and the fluttering of her heart embarrassed her. She loathed weakness, but knew her pride for the root of her problems. Another woman would have let him walk her home.
“Don’t be a chicken heart!” she said to the empty room.I never succumb to nerves.At least, I never did before. She had managed alone in Dorset, in her own home, among people she knew.
At least the major understands me when I talk. She didn’t know when that had begun to matter, but it did now.
“He owes you nothing,” she told herself. “You hired him to interpret, not to be your watch dog.”
The pounding of her heart would not be quieted.It wouldn’t hurt to have a simple conversation with my employee would it? With the furtive little man gone, it would be safe enough to go to him, wouldn’t it?
