It had taken nearly two days to get Cuddy to tell the full truth of what Angus had said, but she’d done it. Calmly, the young man had said, “Would you like me to kill him for you?” Edilean had been tempted to say yes, but she didn’t. But as a result of Cuddy’s loyalty he was one of only three men she’d kept in her employ when she started Bound Girl. The other two men were too old to discharge.
After Angus had so coldly left her, Edilean had borne her heart ache without a tear, and she’d never told Harriet what had happened. To compensate, Edilean had started Bound Girl and buried herself in as much work as she could humanly manage.
It had all gone well until she walked into her own parlor and there he was. He sat there looking at her as though he’d just seen her last week and now he wanted to put his arms around her. And then what? Take her to bed, have a night of ecstasy, then leave her for another four years? Is that what he thought of her?
Just as had happened before, Edilean’s mind left her. She ran from the room and told the girls who were in the back loading boxes of fruit that she needed them. She knew that they were so grateful to her for saving them that they’d do anything she wanted. If she’d told them to take the guns and shoot Angus, they would have done it and damn the consequences!
But Edilean had wanted the pleasure of seeing him suffer. She wanted to see him lying dead at her feet—or that’s what she told herself.
After it was over, after the weapons had been taken from her, she couldn’t bear to stay in that house. She didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see the three Scotsmen, who reminded her of Angus, didn’t want to see Harriet simpering over Malcolm. She didn’t even want to see the girls, who reminded her of the company she’d started because of what Angus had done to her.
When she got into the carriage she wasn’t sure where she was going. It wasn’t until she was an hour away that she remembered the handbill Harriet had shown her about the farm for sale in Connecticut. It took days to get there, but when she’d arrived, the widow, Abigail Prentiss, had welcomed her, and by the next evening they’d formed a friendship. Abigail was her age, and she’d been born in England into the same class. They even knew some of the same people.
When she was just seventeen, Abby had fallen in love with an older man who owned a farm in America. Her family protested that she couldn’t go that far away, but Abby had made up her mind. They married three months after they met, and Abby was expecting a baby a week later. Now, with two daughters, aged four and three, to support, she didn’t know how she was going to do it alone.
“I can help you with that,” Edilean said, and gave a great sigh.
From there it went to Abigail listening to Edilean’s problems; she told her about Angus. While it was true that Abby had been in love with John Prentiss when she married him, she admitted to Edilean that it had not been a match made in Heaven.
“I think I wanted to get away from my mother as much as I wanted anything else, and there was John, such a very nice man, who owned a big farm in America, and I saw a way to leave my mother. He was a lovely man.”
“But not one you’d want to kill if he betrayed you.”
Abby laughed. “I don’t think I could feel that way about any man.”
“Good,” Edilean said. “It’s awful. I can’t decide if I love him or hate him.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
They were in her orchard, many of the trees were in bloom, and the bees were buzzing all around them. Her little girls, blonde and beautiful, were chasing butterflies. Edilean knew that she envied Abby. She’d had a “correct” life, marrying a man, then having children. Edilean felt that her own life had been topsy-turvy, everything always backward to what it should be. She’d had no parents to speak of and no marriage—but she’d had a wedding night.
“What will you do now?” Abby asked.
“Go back to Boston and...” She gave another sigh. “I guess I’ll run Bound Girl, although I think Tabitha and Harriet could manage quite well without me. I was needed to make them believe they could start such a company, but now they do all the work. I...” She trailed off. While it was true that she worked all day long and ran everything, it seemed that lately her heart wasn’t in it. She was to turn twenty-two this year, and she wasn’t married or even being courted by a man. There were still many men trying for her hand, but they seemed to get older every year. A woman who was extremely successful in a business was not something a younger man wanted to take on. Whereas they loved the idea of marrying a rich heiress, a woman who was taking over the produce market through intelligence and shrewd decisions was not their idea of a good wife.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Edilean said, and she had a vision of herself looking like Harriet, of being forty-plus, with no husband, no family. If she owned all the orchards in all thirteen colonies she’d still be alone. “What about you?” Edilean asked. “After I buy your farm, where will you go?”
“Williamsburg,” Abby said firmly. “I went there once with John and I loved the place. It’s a city, but it has the atmosphere of an English village. And Virginia is beautiful.”
“With a lot of eligible bachelors?” Edilean asked, and they looked at each other and laughed.
Edilean meant to stay in Connecticut for only a few days, but she ended up staying at Abby’s farm for three weeks. She left because she feared that Bound Girl might need her. If Harriet was still enamored of Malcolm she wouldn’t be paying attention to the business, and if Tabitha wasn’t constantly supervised, who knew what she’d do? Reluctantly, Edilean left the farm and her new friend, and went back to Boston.
But no one paid much attention to her arrival. There were no crises that only she could handle. In just a few weeks, her household had changed so much that she felt she didn’t know it. Harriet’s every sentence seemed to start with, “Malcolm says—”
As for Tabitha, she’d taken the opportunity to buy some new wagons and have the company’s Bound Girl symbol painted on them. Edilean thought they were hideously garish and said so. “But they sell more,” was Tabitha’s reply.
Now, Edilean was watching Harriet dither about as she set the table as though the king were coming when it was just Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus. As far as Edilean knew, Shamus still ate all his food with a spoon.
She left the table, unable to sit there and—She hated to think that she was such a shallow person, but it was difficult not to feel jealous and envious of the happiness that everyone in her household seemed to have found.
She went to the big warehouse where the produce from the farms came in. Usually, she was so busy that she could think of nothing else, but today she was distracted. She kept remembering Abigail and her beautiful young daughters.
When Tabitha said something to Edilean, she just stared at her.
“You comin’ down with somethin’?” Tabitha asked her.
“Yes. No,” Edilean said as she looked at two young women who were bent over boxes of cherries and saw that they were watching her and laughing. No doubt all of Boston knew about her shooting at some man. And they could easily guess why.
Edilean grabbed her skirts and fled the warehouse. All in all, she thought, it would have been better to have killed Angus and now be sitting in a jail cell.
She wandered about Boston for a while, looking at what the stores had to offer, and listening to men complain about England. Edilean didn’t understand what the problem was. If the men thought King George was bad, they should read the history books and look at past kings. What did the Americans think they were going to do? Start a new country without a king? Really! Sometimes she didn’t understand Americans at all.
It was dusk by the time she got back to the house, and she hadn’t eaten all day. She asked to have a tray taken to her room. She ate little of the food, then undressed down to her chemise and went to bed. She fell asleep instantly.
She was awakened by a shot and angry shouts coming from downstairs. “Now what?” Edilean mut
tered as she slipped her arms into a dressing gown and went out her door. She had to wait her turn to go down the stairs as the three men and Harriet were ahead of her.
When Edilean got to the parlor, the others were blocking her view. They were standing there and staring, transfixed into immobility by whatever they were seeing. “Would you mind!” she said angrily as she pushed through them. When she got to the front, she also stood still and stared. Two candles were lit in the room, and her good silver candlesticks were sticking out of a bag on the floor. Beside the bag was the body of James Harcourt, and he had a bullet hole smack in the middle of his forehead. He was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Over him stood a large woman with her back to them, but they could see the pistol in her hand. “That’s what you get for stealing my life from me,” the woman said. “You bastard. I hope you’re already in hell. I wish you were alive so I could kill you again.”
The woman drew back her foot and proceeded to kick James’s inert body. Suddenly, in a fury, she began to kick him over and over, her feet moving so fast they were a whirl of motion. “I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you. Hate you!”
Shamus pushed past the others, went to the woman, and grabbed her arm, but she fought him off. She turned her anger onto Shamus and began to hit him with her fists and kick at his shins with her hard-soled shoes.
“There now,” Shamus said, pulling her close so her arms were pinned between his body and hers. She was a large, strong woman, and Shamus was the only one who could have held her still. When he got her arms to stop pounding him, he pushed her head down to his shoulder and turned her face to the others, who were still standing in the doorway.
It took all Edilean’s self-discipline to keep from gasping, for the woman was extraordinarily ugly. Her nose was huge and curved down so it overshadowed her sharp chin.
Harriet said, “Prudence.”
Edilean didn’t know the name, but she knew who had the most reason to kill James Harcourt, and she’d heard about his wife’s unfortunate looks. “James’s wife,” she said.
Edilean came out of her lackluster mood. “Harriet!” she said sharply, then had to repeat herself. “Harriet! Listen to me! I want you to get her upstairs and give her some of that laudanum your brother loves... loved so much. Are you listening to me?” When Harriet didn’t respond, just kept staring at her brother’s body on the floor, Edilean looked at Malcolm for help.
“It’s over,” he said softly, and took Harriet into his arms. “It’s all over now. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”
“When has James bothered her?” Edilean asked.
“He’s been blackmailing Harriet for years.”
“You knew?” Harriet asked as she raised her head from his shoulder to look at him.
“Yes, we knew, and we’ve been waiting for him to return. Come now, and we’ll get you back to bed. Shamus! Take Miss Prudence upstairs. We’ll put the women in the same bed and give them that...” He looked at Edilean.
“Laudanum,” she said, blinking at him. Blackmail. She couldn’t help wondering how Harriet had paid the blackmail. James wouldn’t be cheap.
“What you’re thinking is right,” Malcolm said, glaring at her, anger in his voice. “It was your company’s money that paid the blackmail, but Harriet was protecting you. If you plan to try to put her in prison, I tell you now that you’ll have to go through me first.” With that, he helped Harriet up the stairs; Shamus with Prudence was right behind him.
Edilean was left standing in the parlor door, with James’s dead body on the floor not ten feet from her. But she was in much more shock from what Malcolm had just said than she was at James’s death. What had she done to make him or anyone else think that she’d prosecute Harriet? Harriet had taken care of her for years. Harriet had—
Edilean refused to think any more about what had been said to her. Right now, the most important question was what to do about the dead man lying in her parlor. She slowly walked into the room and looked down at him. The light was dim, but she could see that James wasn’t nearly as handsome as he used to be. Or was it that she had become used to American men, who spent their lives out of doors and worked hard in their lives? By comparison, James looked pale and weak.
Whatever it was, she wondered what she’d ever seen in him.
“Miss Edilean?”
She turned to see Malcolm standing in the doorway, and she couldn’t help her cold expression when she looked at him. “Is Harriet all right?”
“Much better, thank you,” Malcolm said, his voice contrite. “I said some things to you that were uncalled for. It was in the heat of the moment, and I want to apologize. I know that Harriet has been nearly driven insane by that... that man.” He sneered at James’s body sprawled on the floor.
“I understand,” Edilean said, but she was lying. She was hurt that he could even think she would prosecute Harriet. “I would never do anything bad to her.”
“I know that, but she worries so.”
“But now she has you to take care of her.” Edilean raised her hand when he started to speak. “I think that all this can be hashed out later. Right now we need to do something about this man’s body.”
“You mean to call the sheriff?”
“So he can give Prudence a medal?”
Malcolm blinked a couple of times, then smiled. “That’s the way we all feel, but I wondered, since you once...” He shrugged.
“Loved him? Maybe I did. But I was a schoolgirl and he was beautiful. I can be forgiven that idiocy, can’t I?”
“I think you should be forgiven everything.”
“Now that that’s settled, what do we do with him? My floor is going to be ruined.”
Malcolm laughed. “Between shots fired into it and now blood on it, I think you might have to have this floor replaced. Unless there are more men in your life and we should expect cannon fire at any moment.”
Edilean laughed too, and plopped down onto a chair. “What are we going to do with this body?”
“You have to ask Angus.”
Edilean thought he was making a joke. “So he can dress it up as an Indian and blame them for this? I tell you that these Americans blame the poor Indians for everything. Only last week—” She broke off when she looked at Malcolm’s face. He wasn’t joking.
“All right,” she said at last. “Go get him. And while you’re gone, I’ll pack and get out of here. I may move to that farm in Connecticut permanently.”
“No,” Malcolm said, moving to stand on the other side of James’s body. “You have to go get him.”
“Me? Did you forget that I’m the one who tried to kill him in this very room just three weeks ago? If you can’t go, send Tam. Angus adores his young cousin.”
“Angus is, well... He’s a bit angry at us right now and won’t speak to us.”
“What did you do to him? No, on second thought, don’t tell me.”
“We didn’t tell him all of the truth about why we came to America.”
“There’s more than about my uncle dying?”
“It was Miss Prudence who paid our way here, and she hired us to find her husband.”
Edilean stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know the law that well, but I think you three could be considered an accessory to murder.”
Malcolm shrugged.
“So Angus is angry at your participation in this? Since when did he become a champion of James Harcourt?”
Malcolm glanced at the window. “You know, lass, I don’t mean to rush you on this, but I think you should go right away. It’s hours before daylight, but we may need all that time of darkness. I don’t think that in the morning the maid will keep quiet at the sight of a dead body on the floor of the parlor.”
“Would that be the maid who was transported for grave robbing, or the one who was sentenced because she used a whip on her stepfather?”
Malcolm shook his head at her. “Oh, lass, if only I were younger. But you must go get Angus. He knows this co
untry but we don’t. He’ll know what to do and how to hide a dead man. We’d go, but he said he’d have nothing to do with us until we tell him the whole truth, but we swore to Miss Prudence that we wouldn’t.”
“And Angus has a soft spot for her.”
“Please tell me that’s a jest,” Malcolm said seriously. “Shamus is quite taken with the woman and she with him. If Angus also wants her it will cause great problems. They’ll—”
“How do I know what he wants?” Edilean half shouted, then glanced at the ceiling when she heard what sounded like a muffled cry.
“I must go!” Malcolm said. “And so must you. Angus is at the tavern where he used to work.” He rushed from the room.
“Of course he is,” Edilean said. “Where else would he be? In that same room, asleep in that same bed.” She wanted to run upstairs and tell the men that she could not do this. She would do anything but go see Angus, but then she looked down at the body on her floor and thought about poor Prudence being hanged for shooting someone who so very much deserved killing, and Edilean headed for the doorway. But she turned back and gave James’s rib cage a good swift kick. “That’s from me,” she said, and left the room.
24
ANGUS!” EDILEAN SAID as she stared down at him in bed. He was lying on that bed, the one that held so many memories for her, and he was smiling. She had no doubt that he was dreaming something good. And why not? He got everything he ever wanted, didn’t he? In the four years that she’d heard nothing from him he must had bedded a hundred women. Maybe a thousand.