Promise Me Tomorrow (5 page)

“Even if he did not tell the authorities,” Betsy pointed out, “all he has to do is spread it around that Marianne is a thief, and the Game will be ruined. She won’t be received in polite society after that.”

“That’s true.” Harrison rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But we were on the verge of such opportunity—I hate to throw it away on a mere chance. I think we should wait and see. If we lie low for a few weeks, we might be all right.”

“Do you think so?” Marianne brightened a little. She hated to think that she had ruined their plans for everyone.

Harrison nodded. “Some other pretty young thing’ll come along to tickle his fancy.”

That much was true, Marianne was sure. No nobleman was going to waste his time looking for or thinking about some socially inferior girl. If one was not of their class, there was only one use for a woman, and no doubt he could find other willing participants. Marianne realized that that idea gave her no joy, but she shoved the thought aside. She was, after all, a realist; she had to be.

“He doesn’t know where you live, right?”

“No. I left the party, and I am sure that he did not follow.”

“If we take nothing from Batterslee House, it will lull his suspicions—or at least give him no proof to back them up.”

Marianne sighed. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how I could have been so careless.”

“It happens to all of us,” Harrison assured her kindly. “The main thing is that nothing happened to you.”

“Thank you. But it would have been a nice bit of change. They had some beautiful things.”

“I am sure it wasn’t all a loss. You met some people, didn’t you?”

Marianne nodded. “A few. Lady Ursula Castlereigh and her daughter. I talked to the daughter at some length.”

“There? That will get you entré into other places. You see if it doesn’t. And if not…” Harrison shrugged. “Well, we’ll try the Continent, as you said, or go back to Bath.”

Piers groaned. “Not Bath! There’s nothing but old ladies there.”

Harrison cocked an eyebrow at him. “We aren’t there for your entertainment.”

“I know. I know.” Piers sighed and subsided.

“Well.” Della glanced around. “There is nothing else to do tonight. We will just have to wait and see. I am sure Marianne would like a bite to eat and a good night’s sleep.”

Marianne smiled gratefully at the older woman. “Thank you. I don’t think I could eat anything, truthfully. But the thought of sleep is appealing. Hopefully everything will seem better tomorrow morning.”

The group broke up, starting up the stairs toward their rooms. Marianne, too, started out of the room, but Winny caught her arm. “Stay for a bit, Mary.”

Marianne looked around at her questioningly.

“I—there’s something I need to tell you.”

“What?” Fear clutched at Marianne’s heart. “Is it Rosalind? She’s not sick, is she?”

“No. No. Nothing like that. It’s just…well, I got a letter today. From Ruth Applegate. You remember her, don’t you? She were—
was
—a scullery maid at the Hall.”

Marianne frowned. In referring to the Hall, Marianne knew that Winny meant the Quartermaines’ house, where they had both worked. The look on her friend’s face disturbed her. “Yes, I remember. You were good friends with her. What’s the matter? Did something happen to her?”

“No. She knows that I went to live with you. She wrote to warn you. There’s been a man at the Hall asking about you. She thinks a Bow Street Runner is after you.”

“A B
OW
S
TREET
R
UNNER
!” M
ARIANNE GASPED
.
“Sweet Lord, I thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

Winny reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which she unfolded to reveal a pencilled scrawl. “It’s very difficult to read. Ruth never learned to read and write very well. What she said, I think, was, ‘There was a man—two men at—’I think she means different ‘—times. They was asking about Mary C. But nobody knows about her, and I didn’t tell. I thought I should warn you. Bow Street Runners’.”

“Could we have been found out? Has someone—but no. No one I’ve met the past few years would know I was Mary Chilton or that I worked for the Quartermaines.”

Winny nodded. “I know. It’s got to be someone from the past.”

“But who? Why?”

“Do you—do you think it could be your family?” Winny asked tentatively, voicing every orphan’s dream. “If they went to St. Anselm’s, they’d have told them you’d gone on to the Hall.”

“After all this time?” Marianne suppressed the little spurt of hope that had leapt up in her at Winny’s words. It was foolish to think that there was family who wanted her after so many years. “I haven’t any family, or they would have looked for me years ago. It’s been over twenty years.”

“Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe you were stolen from them.”

Marianne smiled. “That’s a child’s dream. I used to tell myself that that was what had happened, that my parents were still alive, still wanted me, that a wicked person had taken me from them. But that’s nonsense. It’s the stuff of dramas. Why would someone steal a child and then drop it at an orphanage? Besides, she said ‘warn.’ There must have been something sinister about the man.”

“Well, if Ruth thinks he’s a Bow Street Runner, then she would think he’s wantin’ to arrest you.” Winny gnawed at her lip. “It worries me.”

“It
is
unsettling,” Marianne agreed. “If someone who knew me as Mary Chilton, who knew I was only an orphan and a housemaid, saw me masquerading as a lady, they could have guessed, I suppose, that I was doing something havey-cavey.”

“And gone to the trouble of hiring a Bow Street Runner?” Winny asked skeptically. The Bow Street Runners, though they pursued criminals, had to be hired.

“That seems rather absurd, too, doesn’t it? The thing is, if it was someone we nabbed a few things from, someone with the blunt to hire a Bow Street Runner, they would know me as Mrs. Cotterwood. They wouldn’t send the man to Quartermaine Hall looking for Mary Chilton.”

“Maybe it was someone like you said, who saw you and had known you as Mary Chilton.” Winny’s eyes widened as a thought struck. “Maybe it was someone who had visited the Hall, and when they saw you again, they knew you were a housemaid.”

“You think they would remember a maid that well?”

“One that looks like you, they would,” Winny replied bluntly. “And then they saw you at a party, say, in Bath.”

“And when some things went missing, they suspected me?” Marianne nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense. But they had been introduced to me as Cotterwood. They would have looked for me under that name. Surely they would not have remembered my name from ten years ago.”

“But what if they looked for Mrs. Cotterwood and couldn’t find you? What if it was after we came back to London?”

“So they decided to trace me through the Quartermaines.” Marianne sighed. “Oh, Lord! As if things weren’t bad enough! Winny, what should I do? If I’ve brought the Bow Street Runners down upon us—” Tears sprang into her eyes. “I’m ruining everything!”

“No, you’re not,” Winny assured her friend stoutly. “They’ve all made ever so much more money because of you, and you know it. This is just a patch of bad luck. It happens sometimes. You couldn’t help it if someone recognized you.” She smiled and added, “Cheer up. Maybe it’ll turn out to be your long-lost relations after all. The gypsies took you, and they just now found out where you went.”

Marianne smiled. “Perhaps. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. And apparently they found a dead end at the Hall, so they won’t know where to come looking for me.” She reached out and hugged Winny. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Don’t be daft. It’s me who’d a been lost without you. Go on with you, now. You need to be getting to bed.”

Marianne nodded and went upstairs, but before she went to her bedroom, she stopped at the small room next door to hers and tiptoed inside. The curtains were open, as Rosalind liked them, and moonlight cast a pale wash across the room. Marianne moved to the side of the bed and stood for a moment gazing down at her daughter. Rosalind’s dark curly hair had escaped from her braid, as was usually the case, and spilled across her pillow. Long, dark eyelashes shadowed her porcelain cheeks, and the little rosebud mouth was open slightly. She was a handful during the day, smart and lively, full of questions about everything, but now she looked like an angel. Marianne reached down and moved the covers up over her shoulders and brushed a kiss across her forehead. She might despise the man who had done this to her, but she had never felt anything but an intense love for this child. Rosalind was her life, and the desire to protect her and nurture her was always uppermost in her mind. Whoever this man was looking for her, and whatever he wanted, she must make sure that nothing he did harmed Rosalind.

Finally she turned and left her daughter’s room, slipping down the hall to her bedroom. She undressed quickly and efficiently, hanging her dress in the wardrobe and placing her thin slippers in the neat row on the floor of the wardrobe. She pulled on a plain cotton nightgown, at odds with the expensive dress she had worn this evening, then set about the task of taking down her hair and brushing it out. Before she got into bed, she opened the small japanned box on her dresser. Inside lay her small assortment of jewelry. She lifted out a compartment and reached underneath it to pull out a locket. It was a gold locket on a simple chain, not the chain that had come with it, for that had long since been too short and she had replaced it. But the locket itself had been with her since she could remember; she had kept it through thick and thin, refusing to sell it even when she was starving. It was all she had of her past life.

The front of the locket was engraved with an ornate
M,
and when she slid her thumbnail between the edges, it came open to reveal two miniature portraits. Marianne sank down on the stool in front of the dresser and gazed at the man and woman pictured inside the locket. She was certain that the couple were her parents, though she could not be sure that she actually remembered them or only thought she did from having gazed at the pictures so many times. Sometimes she fancied she saw a resemblance in her own chin and mouth to the woman in the portrait, but she could not be sure whether it was real or only wishful thinking. Certainly neither one of them had her flaming red hair. Still, she knew they must be her parents—even though a cynic would have pointed out that parents wealthy enough to have miniature portraits drawn for a locket would have been unlikely to have left no provision for their child.

This locket had been her talisman all through the dark, dreary days at the orphanage. She had worn it under her dress every day and even slept with it on. As the years had passed, she had gradually forgotten whatever her life had been before the orphanage. She thought she remembered the woman in the portrait laughing, and she remembered a permeating sense of fear, of running and being so scared she thought her heart would burst. That, she thought, must have been when she was brought to the orphanage. But she could no longer remember arriving at St. Anselm’s or who had brought her there, and, of course, the matron had steadfastly refused to answer her questions about the event. She was not even sure if Mary Chilton had been her real name or merely one the orphanage had given her.

Marianne rubbed her thumb over the delicate tracery in an old habit, remembering the stories she had made up about her parents to help sustain her. She had imagined them wealthy and noble and very loving. A wicked man had stolen her from them and taken her to St. Anselm’s, but she knew that her parents were still out there looking for her. They would never give up.

She smiled a little sadly and set the locket back into its case.
Children’s stories, that was all they were. No one was searching for her to bring her back to her family. Her only family was here: her daughter, Rosalind, and Winny and the others.
Yet, as she climbed into bed and settled down to sleep, she could not quite still the ache in her heart for the family she had never known.

L
ORD
L
AMBETH GAZED DOWN INTO THE
brandy snifter, circling it idly in his hand, and watched the liquid swirl around the balloon glass.
Marianne Cotterwood. Who the devil was she?

He found it decidedly irritating that she had managed to slip away from him. Justin was not accustomed to being thwarted, least of all by a woman. Women usually hung upon his every word, smiling and fluttering their lashes, eager to be the one on whom he decided to settle his sizable fortune. He was cynical enough to realize that while his good looks might make the effort more palatable, it was his money that was the real lure. Marriageable girls had been after him since he reached his majority ten years ago. The truth was that he found all of them dead bores, and the thought of shackling himself to one of them for the rest of his life was enough to make him shiver. He supposed that someday, when he could delay it no longer, he would marry Cecilia Winborne, as she and his parents expected. Her family was equal to his in birth—or close enough to it to make the match a good one—and a future Duke had to produce a few heirs, after all. Then, of course, they would go their separate ways, and he would have mistresses to counteract Cecilia’s coldness.

Women of lighter virtue, of course, were rather more fun, not bound by the rigid rules of propriety that afflicted their more genteel sisters, but he found them just as vapid, primarily interested in their looks and his pocketbook, with few thoughts in their head. His friend Buckminster sometimes teased him that he should try his luck with a bluestocking female if he was so interested in intelligence, but the truth was that they were as serious and dull in their own way—and usually without the spark of beauty to ignite his interest.

The truth was, he had never met a woman who didn’t bore him within a short amount of time—and above all things, Lord Lambeth despised boredom. In fact, tonight he had been just about to leave Lady Batterslee’s rout, having judged it deadly dull, when he caught sight of the redhead.

He had had no idea who she was. He had never seen her before; he knew he would have remembered her if he had. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Just looking at her across the room had sent a thrill of pure sexual desire through him, and his first thought had been that he wanted to see that flaming mass of hair spread across his pillow. Then she had looked at him in that haughty way, lifting her chin, and had turned away, snubbing him. It was a reaction he was not used to receiving from a woman, and his interest in her had heightened. Nothing that had happened afterward, from discovering that she was an apparent thief to kissing her in Lord Batterslee’s study, had lessened his interest.

He smiled faintly to himself, his lips softening sensually as he remembered their kiss. He rubbed his thumb over the smooth glass of the snifter, wishing it were her skin. This was a woman, he thought, who could hold his interest longer than most. She was somewhat infuriating, of course…Unconsciously, he raised a hand and rubbed it along the cheek that she had slapped. The sting had been well worth it, given the kiss that had preceded it. Her mouth had been soft and sweet, and there had been a certain awkward naïveté to her kiss that had been curiously arousing. It had left him wanting a good deal more—and he intended to have it.

The only problem, of course, was that he hadn’t the slightest idea where to find her. He knew only her name—if she had not been lying to him about that, which was a distinct possibility. Thieves, in his experience, rarely balked at lying. However, she was scarcely the usual thief. She spoke and acted like a gentlewoman.
Was she a lady who had fallen on hard times and chosen this way to keep herself afloat?
It seemed absurd. More likely she had been blessed with good looks and learned to imitate the upper classes—
a lady’s maid, perhaps?
Then she had somehow managed to worm her way into Society. But whatever her background, it seemed to Justin a particularly daring and unusual thing for a woman to do. He certainly could not fault her for her courage.

Damn that fool Batterslee for barging in when he did!
If only he had had a few more moments with her, Justin was sure that he could have wormed more information out of her, could even have convinced her that he did not intend to use his knowledge of her illegal activities to bludgeon her into coming to his bed. As it was, she thought him the basest of men and had fled without a trace.

He was not without resources, however. He had seen her with Penelope Castlereigh and Lord Buckminster. Perhaps they knew who she was and where she lived. He would make it a point to drop in on Bucky tomorrow and pump him for information. However long it might take, he was determined that he was going to find that girl.