He didn’t sound sarcastic, but she thought he must be, to be so obedient, and she struggled out of his grasp. He let her go, but her mind lingered on him, his motivations and aims, as she walked beside the mill. What had brought this change? He’d been so convinced he was right to protect her, to treat her like a fragile flower and dismiss the knowledge that might have made her a useful partner to him. And she’d been willing to behave as she thought he desired—like a lady whose head was filled with nothing but the ringing of the servants’ bell and the color of embroidery threads.
But now he was talking to her, saying that he valued her opinion and acting as if it were the truth. Somehow, in the confusion that her life had become, she’d lost sight of the truth. It taunted her in her nightmares and leaped at her at the most inappropriate times, but it came to her now and again that she didn’t know who she was.
She was so deep in thought that when a man rose from the wreckage, she jumped and shrieked.
“Beg pardon. Didn’t mean to scare ye…Yer Grace?”
Blushing at her foolishness, she nodded at the smiling, broad-shouldered youth. It wasn’t that she expected to see Garth’s ghost—or any other ghost, for that matter—but a pall hung over the place.
The man dropped an armful of wood and pulled his forelock with a gleam of curiosity in his eye. “Yer Grace, I’m Jeffrey the carpenter. I hope ye don’t mind, but I’ve come to salvage what I can from the mill. It’ll be a hard winter, and I can use the boards for repairs.”
“I…well, I…” She glanced back at Rand, but he was standing and stretching as if some cramp had caught him unaware. “Recover what you can. I’m sure my husband won’t mind.”
One by one, Jeffrey picked up the boards he’d dropped. “Been hoping to get a glimpse of you. The village women talk about you all the time, and Nanna is me cousin, ye know.” She flushed, imagining censure in his tone, but he continued cheerfully, “’Course, everyone is my cousin. Most of the village and the farms is family.”
That caught her attention, and she watched Jeffrey carefully for his reaction as she said, “You’d hate to see them move.”
Jeffrey’s grin slipped. “I would. I wish that—”
“That—?”
“Ah, I hate to nag, but I wish His Grace could see his way clear to rebuild the mill. Then there would be jobs for everyone. We’d all be rich.” His ingratiating grin appeared, and again he bowed and pulled his forelock as Rand strolled up. “Yer Grace, we was just talking about ye, and how ye’d profit from opening the mill.”
Rand took Sylvan’s hand. “We’re thinking about it.”
After one gasp of joy, Jeffrey bowed, then bowed again. “Glad to hear it, Yer Grace. It’ll mean so much to all of us.” The boards slipped from his grasp once more, and he scrambled after them, still talking. “I’ll be fer telling them in the village, shall I?”
Rand looked at Sylvan, and she understood the questioning lift of his brow. If they gave Jeffrey permission to announce their plans, the news would spread like wildfire and the whole chain of events would be set in motion once more. It frightened her, and thrilled her, too. She nodded at Rand, and he nodded at Jeffrey.
“Yes. Tell them.”
Jeffrey’s queries and babblings of joy kept Rand in place, but Sylvan slipped her hand free and wandered into the mill. She didn’t plan to go anywhere specific; just to walk and see the condition it was in.
Opening the door to Garth’s office, she glanced inside. No one had stripped anything from this room. The door was still closed firmly, and the contents were still intact. Much of the building around his office still stood with its roof and walls, and what remained of the machinery had been pushed under the shelter to protect it from the weather. In fact, only the mill’s far wall had been completely removed, and the walls beside it tapered from nothingness to their full height. Some of the giant oak beams tilted from the roof to the floor where the roof had been destroyed, and she found herself glad she was a merchant’s daughter, for she could estimate how much of the building they could restore.
She believed she wished only to estimate, but as she walked, she found herself at the place where Nanna had been pinned. Blood stained the flooring, only slightly faded by the rains and sun. It gave her an odd feeling to stand where she had inflicted so much pain. She’d had help in that horrible task: the white-faced Rand had been her main assistant, and the Reverend Donald had given himself over to Nanna, to shield her as he could. Vaguely Sylvan remembered a wet rag passing across her forehead and a dry one blotting the tears from her eyes, and later, when the job was done, she remembered someone holding her head. Obviously, the mill women had remained to give support to their friend, and they’d given her support as their friend’s only hope. But…unwillingly she stared at the darker stain beside the great beam that so many men had had to struggle to move.
Shirley had died there. If Sylvan hadn’t been so hesitant when the explosion had occurred…If she’d come to find Shirley instead of binding Beverly’s ribs…
The ifs piled one on the other, and she knew that if she’d seen Shirley, she would have refused to move her for fear of internal injuries. Sylvan herself might have been kneeling beside her when the second big collapse occurred, and she might have died along with Shirley, or instead of Shirley. No matter how difficult life seemed right now, Sylvan couldn’t bring herself to wish for death.
With almost painful resignation, she moved out of the mill and to the place where Garth’s body had landed.
It was easy to find; someone had come here before her and marked it with stones. Not the large, worked stones that were used to build the mill, but small stones, smoothed by a stream or by the ocean and piled into a well-tended pyramid.
“Who has done this, I wonder?”
Rand had followed her, and she hadn’t noticed.
He knelt and touched the little memorial. “I wish I’d thought to do it, but I would have put a carved marker, I suppose, something dignified and quite unlike Garth. This is better.” He looked up, and his smile wobbled. “Don’t you think?”
“Perhaps we should do something similar inside,” she suggested tentatively.
“Where Shirley died?” He nodded. “Yes, if we’re going to reopen the mill, it would be nice to honor our departed.”
“I haven’t been here since the accident.”
“I have.” He sat beside the pile of stones, his hand resting on them as if he could absorb the essence of his brother. “I’ve made several pilgrimages, and brought my mother and my aunt. It seems I’ve got the need to come and look, to get a grasp on the reality of it. He’s gone, but I still expect to see him….”
He faltered, and she looked at him. Tears slithered down his cheeks, tentatively finding their way.
“Sometimes I think I hear him.” His tears flowed faster now, splashing off his dark lashes. “When Aunt Adela starts pontificating, I can almost hear…” Like a child, he wiped his cheeks on his sleeve. “I think she can hear him, too, because she half turns—” He choked on a laugh. “She looks so guilty, saying things she knows would make him furious, and him not there to respond.”
Without volition, her hand reached out to touch his head. Then she caught herself. What would happen if she tried to comfort him? Wouldn’t she reveal her own despair?
“I miss him. I spent the last months of his life in a wheelchair, making him miserable, when if I’d just told him, trusted him, treated him like my big brother, we could have found the bastard who did this.” Great battering sobs began to punctuate his words, tearing at his coherence yet endowing him with eloquence. “Dammit, Garth didn’t have to die.”
His sorrow and guilt brought tears to her own eyes. Tears for him or for Garth, she didn’t know, but she didn’t want to sympathize. She didn’t want to cry. If she started, she would cry for all the men lost or injured on the battlefield, for the women who died or were injured at the mill, for Rand in his agony and for Garth’s memory. If she started her lament,
she wouldn’t stop.
Before her wavering gaze, she saw Rand’s arms reaching out for her, begging her for succor.
Silently she fled, running over the hills to escape her grief, but finding it in every bank and hollow.
20
“I’m fine now, Rand. I just had a whim to run in the hills.” Sylvan took a breath. “I’ve been inside so much, I just had an impulse to stroll in the grass before autumn stole the color…no, that’s not right.” She pressed her fist to her stomach and stared at the looming facade of Clairmont Court. He was inside, she knew. He would expect an explanation for her flight of the morning. He would want to know where she’d been all these hours, and she couldn’t think what to say.
So she stood outside on the lawn in the shade of a hawthorn and practiced her lines. She had to get them right. She’d missed dinner and tea. It would be dark soon…. Oh, but she didn’t want to see Rand. She didn’t want to see any of them. Not anyone in the Malkin family, nor any of the servants, nor Jasper, nor the Reverend Donald. They all acted so kind and anxious about her, asking her what she wanted, giving her everything she needed. She felt like an ungrateful wretch to be so miserable.
Betty stepped onto the terrace and shaded her eyes against the westering sun. Sylvan wanted to hide, but that would be foolish, and when Betty waved in great sweeps of her arm, Sylvan waved back and started toward the stairs.
Betty met her halfway and ignored the pleasant smile Sylvan had practiced so ardently. “Your Grace, have you seen Gail in your ramblings?”
Feeling the fool, Sylvan realized she wasn’t the center of at least one woman’s world. “No. Is she gone?”
“Again.” Betty sounded exasperated, but she looked worried. “She’s going more and more, for longer and longer. I’ve tried to tell her she needs to let me know where she’s going, but she says she’ll be fine. I wouldn’t worry, you know, if she were playing with other children, but it’s solitude she seeks, and if she slipped or…” Digging in her capacious apron pockets, she drew out a handful of smooth rocks. “Do you think I’m being silly, Your Grace?”
“Not at all.” Sylvan laid her arm over Betty’s shoulders. “How long has she been gone?”
“She took a bit of supper in a rag and left in the late morning.” Betty scattered the rocks around the base of the tree. “I hoped maybe she’d run into you and Lord Rand, but His Grace came back an hour ago and said no, he hadn’t seen her, and now…”
Feeling as if she’d failed Betty in some way, Sylvan tried to comfort her. “Gail’s fine, I’m sure, but I’ll go back and look for her.”
“Oh, you don’t have to. His Grace has gone out.” More rocks appeared out of Betty’s pockets, and she threw these, one by one, as hard as she could. “I didn’t ask him to, mind, for he’s walking rather stiffly, but when he found you hadn’t returned, either, he insisted.”
“Did he?”
“That wasn’t all, I don’t suppose.” Betty shook her head in disgust. “Him and Mr. James had another go-round, just like this morning when Mr. James arrived.”
“A go-round?” Sylvan’s old suspicions re-formed with Betty’s lugubrious tone. “They fought?”
“Mr. James doesn’t want His Grace to…” She trailed off. “Maybe I shouldn’t be babbling, seeing as how nothing’s actually decided yet.”
“Mr. James doesn’t want Rand to open the mill again.”
“Oh, you know.” Betty nodded, pleased. “I had hoped he would discuss it with you, but one never knows with a man.”
“Where’s Mr. James now?”
“Went to his room to sulk, I suppose. Childish as ever, that one is.” Betty touched the painfully red tip of Sylvan’s nose. “You’d best come inside and let me put vinegar on that sunburn. Where’s your hat?”
“I lost it. I don’t know where.” With Rand gone, the house seemed a likely refuge where Sylvan could eat, rest, and gather her forces for the coming confrontation. But she, too, worried about Gail, for she’d spent time with the child and knew how desperately she missed her father. “I think I ought to go after Gail.”
“I’ll hug her to death when she gets back, then thrash her within an inch of her life.” Betty tried to laugh at her own inconsistency. “But she really hasn’t been out this long before, even when she wanders with you.” With an exclamation of disgust, Betty turned her pockets inside out and shook them.
More pebbles rained at their feet, and Sylvan stared at them in sudden conjecture. “Where did you get those?”
“I went looking in Gail’s chamber, just to see if she was hiding there, or if there was some clue to her whereabouts, and I found them and some other bigger ones, all piled in a corner. What the child wants with a bunch of rocks, I’ll never know, but—Miss Sylvan, what’s the matter?”
Sylvan had stiffened, staring at the stones, polished smooth from the action of sea or stream. “I know where she is.”
“Where?”
“At the mill.” A vision of the little pyramid of stones filled Sylvan’s mind, followed by darker visions of crooked beams and hanging boards, of protruding nails and sharp machinery. “I’ll go after her.”
Apparently, the same visions filled Betty’s mind, for she answered, “I’m going, too.”
They started off at a run, following the path, but Betty knew the byways better than Sylvan, and she said, “This way. It’s shorter.”
They cut through the trees and down a steep bank into a ravine. Sylvan skidded in the soft dirt and landed on a rock, skinning the palms of her hands, and when she stood up again, Betty said, “This is stupid. We should have got the carriage.”
“In the time it would take Jasper to hitch the horses, we’ll be there.” Sylvan blew on her stinging palms. “I’m fine now. We can go.”
“Jasper’s not at the court,” Betty said. “He’s off moping over Loretta again, poor sot. Uphill, now.”
They started off, climbing as Betty directed.
“Jasper’s in love?” Sylvan asked.
“For all the good it’ll do him.” Betty puffed hard. “Loretta’s married and likely to stay that way. Nothing’s wrong with Loretta’s man that I can see, except he’s mean as a boar and twice as stupid. ’Twould take a mighty blow to kill that one.” They crested the rise, and Betty stood and panted. “See where we are now?”
“Yes.” Betty’s shortcut had eliminated half the distance to the mill. “Hurry!” Sylvan started running again, only half aware of how Betty struggled to keep up.
“Stop, Your Grace!” Betty cried at last.
Turning, Sylvan saw Betty standing, hands on her knees, gasping for breath, and realized her exhaustion. “Betty, I’ll go on without you. I’ve got to hurry.”
“Your Grace!” Betty’s cry stopped her in her tracks. “Why do you have to hurry? What do you fear?”
“The mill is a dangerous place. Gail might be hurt, bleeding…” Betty still stared, and Sylvan pushed aside her images of the inanimate dangers of the mill. Instead, she allowed her true fears to come forth. “The rumors will be all over the village, all over the district, that Rand is going to reopen the mill, and that could make someone very unhappy.”
Betty comprehended at once. “Run, Your Grace. Run! I’ll go to the village, or back to the house.” Caught halfway between both, she tried to decide her best route. “I’ll go to the village.”
“Send help,” Sylvan said, and ran again.
Too late.
When she was a child, Sylvan imagined herself a fearless heroine who responded to need without flinching. Instead, she ran each step aware of the blisters her shoes were rubbing on her heels, aware of her heart’s pounding and the breath that burned her lungs.
Too late.
Gail probably wasn’t even still at the mill. Maybe she’d never even gone there. And most likely, the man who pretended to be the ghost had left the district or didn’t care about the mill anymore or wouldn’t dream of harming a child.
But Gail was Garth’s child, and
Sylvan didn’t dare slow for fear she would be too late.
Too late, too late. She scrambled up the steep hill that stood east of the mill and stood still for one wicked second. It helped her catch her breath, and she inspected the mill building. Its long side faced her, with Garth’s intact office on the right and the vanquished wall on the left. She couldn’t see any unusual activity, but the sun was setting and it blotted her eyesight.
She didn’t want the sun to set. Not now, when she was here alone and a ferocious creature waited for darkness to prowl. But was she alone, or did Gail lie bleeding below?
She ran down the hill, jumping over the heather, skidding on the mossy stones. “Gail?” she called. “Gail!”
A small figure rose from beside the pile of stones and looked up at her, and Sylvan’s heart pumped pure thankfulness. “Gail!” She waved like a madwoman, and as if responding to her rapture, Gail started toward her. They met on the grassy slope in front of the mill, and Sylvan wrapped the girl in her arms and hugged her tight. “Praise God you’re well!” She panted, trying to get her breath. “You are well, aren’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Gail asked belligerently.
“You frightened us.” Sylvan dropped her head onto Gail’s thin shoulder. “Your mother’s worried sick.”
“I was here when someone came.” Gail patted Sylvan’s head in quite an adult manner, but her reasoning was childlike. “I hate to be here when there’s someone else around, so I hid until he left.”
Sylvan’s anxiety returned in a rush. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know.” Gail pushed Sylvan away, needling her with a scornful dismissal. “He was rummaging around. A lot of people rummage in the mill. Why can’t they just leave it alone?”
Straightening, Sylvan wiped the perspiration from her forehead and scanned the mill site. They seemed exposed here, with the wind blowing so it would snatch away a woman’s scream. “Why don’t we go back to Clairmont Court?”
“Not yet.” Gail marched toward the mill. “I’ve got things to do.”