Abigail kept her hands moving in slow, steady strokes, though Lord Stephen’s recitation upset her. “I try not to take cases involving children. Such matters can provoke me to an unseemly temper.”
“Abigail, please stop. You need not exercise your temper on my behalf. I had my revenge.”
She ceased massaging his knee but remained on the sofa beside him. “Good. A man such as your father deserves a thorough serving of retribution. That he spent coin on gin instead of providing for his children was his shame, not yours, and that he’d do violence against his own small son…”
Would that she was merely blushing. Instead Abigail felt tears welling. They were not for Lord Stephen, or not exclusively for him. They were for fatigue, and homesickness, old lost love, and all of the children who could not be protected from horrid fates.
“I miss Malcolm.” The stupidest words ever to escape from a woman’s mouth.
“Miss Abbott…Abigail, please don’t cry.” A linen handkerchief so fine as to be translucent dangled before Abigail’s eyes. “You must not cry. I had my revenge. I killed the old devil, so nobody need ever cry for me again.”
She took the handkerchief, which was redolent of his exquisite scent. “You don’t fool me, my lord. Your father needed killing—my Quaker family would disown me for that sentiment—but I killed my mother, and I know taking the life of a parent is a difficult wound for a child to heal regardless of how it happens.”
Chapter Four
As a youth, Stephen had occupied himself with deciding which day had been the worst of his life. The day he’d killed his father had not made the list. The day his father had smashed his knee hadn’t either. At the time, a very young Stephen had shrugged it off as just another beating from old Jack Wentworth. Slower to heal and more painful than others, but all in a day’s suffering.
The day he’d fallen face-first into the grass of Berkeley Square while trying to manage two canes and deliver an ice to a viscount’s blushing daughter was on that list. So was the day Quinn had been marched to the scaffold for a murder he hadn’t committed. What had been Abigail Abbott’s worst day, and why did she weep for the company of an ill-mannered terrier she didn’t even own?
“Did you slip some rat poison into your mother’s gin?” Stephen asked, surely the least genteel question a gentleman had ever asked a lady.
She looked up from his handkerchief. “You laid your father low with rat poison? Very enterprising of you, my lord.”
Nobody had ever referred to Stephen as enterprising in quite those admiring tones. “I was lame, eight years old, and my sisters’ sole protection. Jack was making arrangements to…making arrangements for them I could not countenance. Quinn had gone off somewhere to earn coin, and I had to make do. Quinn was old enough to fend for us, but he lacked the legal authority to take us away from Jack. I remedied the situation as best I could.”
Nobody else outside the family knew this story. Duncan, Stephen’s cousin, had the basic facts, but Stephen didn’t discuss what he’d done with even his siblings. Better that his sisters not know how close they’d come to dwelling in hell itself, better that Quinn never learn of it.
“You saved your sisters’ lives,” Miss Abbott said. “And that is understating the matter.”
To hear the words spoken with such conviction, by a female as decent and estimable as Abigail Abbott, was unsettling.
“Tell me about your mother.” Stephen kept the query general rather than ask specifically how the lady had died.
“I killed her simply by being born. She survived a month past my arrival, but she never stopped losing blood.” Miss Abbott sniffed at Stephen’s handkerchief and bowed her head. “I was too big.”
Those four words held a world of sorrow and despair.
Also a world of injustice. “You were not too big. Babies are whatever size the Almighty decides they should be, and I have it on the authority of no less person than Jane, Duchess of Walden, that her smallest baby gave her the worst trouble in childbed. The larger brats seemed to have some sense of how to go about the business, but the littlest one was contrary. She still is, in fact.”
Miss Abbott’s profile belonged on some martyr of ancient renown. “But the midwife said…”
Clearly, nobody had ever walked the formidable Miss Abbott through some basic reproductive facts.
“Is this why you haven’t married?” Stephen asked. “You punish yourself for biology you had no power to change? Do you know who ought to be examining his conscience? The rutting fool who got your mother with child. Women do not conceive absent the involvement of some fellow or other, unless you’d have me believe divine intervention occasioned your existence? You do know where little dragons come from, don’t you?”
She swung her gaze on him like the port authority swiveling harbor cannon on an enemy fleet.
“Why haven’t you married, my lord? You are in line for a dukedom, you are a gun nabob, and not hard to look upon. Surely if one of us is behindhand matrimonially, you are.”
Stephen rejoiced to see the glitter of battle returning to Miss Abbott’s eyes, rejoiced to earn her upbraiding. That she’d light upon the sad reality of his situation was entirely convenient to his plan.
“You and Her Grace will get on famously, Miss Abbott. She likes you. My entire family will second your opinion that I am behindhand matrimonially, and in a variety of other regards. This is precisely why you must give up on your plan to die for Lord Stapleton’s convenience.”
Miss Abbott folded his handkerchief and rose, stuffing it into a pocket. “Stapleton will not stop, my lord. Nothing less than a permanent end to me will suffice to ensure my safety.”
Why was she so confident of that conclusion, and what exactly had been in those letters?
“Stapleton bides here in London at present, and yet he had the ability to set six ne’er-do-wells on your tail in godforsaken Yorkshire. He nearly managed to have your household drugged, if we accept your version of events, and that took both careful attention to your circumstances and a ruthless exercise of power. Do you suppose he won’t have your corpse dug up, Miss Abbott?”
Grave robbers were a sad fact of life. Miss Abbott’s expression said she hadn’t calculated on Stapleton retaining their services.
“And what if,” Stephen went on, “you die and his search for those letters goes on? Does your companion suffer his wrath? Is Malcolm’s well-being imperiled again? You, being ostensibly dead, could not intervene to protect them. I surmise that if you had the letters, you would have surrendered them, but for two things: A client asked you to keep them safe, or client privacy means you cannot surrender them. That also means you aren’t at liberty to destroy the letters. Destroying yourself won’t destroy the letters.”
Miss Abbott took the seat behind Stephen’s desk. “You really can be quite detestable, my lord.”
“Nonsense. You have been anxious, exhausted, concerned for your household, and had nobody with whom to think the situation through. A half-daft, wealthy marquess makes a formidable foe. What you detest is being out-gunned and out-maneuvered by him.”
She tapped a fingernail against his blotter, like a cat switching its tail. “I hate that too, but I cannot carry on my business expecting every coach I climb onto will be stopped and searched, and every roast I serve will be poisoned. Dying will at least stop the attempts on my person.”