The years had passed, his father finally in his grave, and Ash had begun to hope that maybe, just maybe, he might put that nightmarish time behind him and claw his way free of the pit of despair that had constantly tried to suck him down. But the specter of that man was never far, the memory of his cruelties painting Ash with broad, vicious strokes. And then the girls had come under his care, and he realized he would never be able to break free of the past.
He had done what he could, giving them the best of everything: nurses and maids and nannies, tutors and governesses, an opulent home to live in and plenty of food to fill their bellies. And each year that passed saw them testing boundaries and rebelling until he was hard-pressed to know what to do to keep his vow to protect them.
As if to mock him, the door to his office was suddenly thrown wide, and there stood Regina. Once more in Brimstone, the place he had forbidden her from entering.
“Your Grace. Mr. Beecher,” she said in her cold way, looking from him to his partner before striding into the room. Today she wore breeches and a loose white shirt with a jacket, her rich sable hair tucked up under a hat. No doubt an outfit she had wheedled from one of the stable lads if the roughness of the material was any indication.
“Regina,” he growled, lurching to his feet. “I told you to never come here. And what the devil are you wearing?”
“Whatever I please,” she shot back. “And I would not have to come here if you visited the town house on occasion.”
Again that guilt, so bitter he thought he’d choke on it. As Beecher, mumbling something incoherent, fled the room as if the hounds of hell were on his heels—the traitor—Ash faced the girl. “If you had sent a note, I would have come to you immediately,” he replied, even as his heart fractured for her. Behind the constant chill that she wore like armor was a pain so deep he feared he would never be able to heal it.
“Well, I am here, and so we may as well discuss what I came for.” With that she held a slim leather-bound journal out to him.
Shock tore through his body at the sight of the book, at once so familiar and so painful. He stared at it, unable to tear his eyes away. “Where did you get that?” he rasped.
“In Eliza’s room.”
His eyes snapped to meet hers. “But we searched every damn inch of her room.”
Regina’s lips twisted, at once faintly mocking and agonized. “Eliza is much cleverer than most people give her credit for. I located this hidden behind a loose baseboard beneath her bed.”
Which was much more telling than Regina probably meant for it to be. It revealed that she had been searching, possibly nonstop, since her sisters’ disappearance a week ago. He saw then the fear in her eyes, desperately concealed. She was worried for the two girls.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. They were sisters, after all, and had suffered through the same heartaches and upheavals. Yet Regina had never been as close to the younger girls as they were with each other. It was a distance that had only grown more pronounced over the past years, most notably as Regina matured into a young woman. If one were to look in from the outside, they might assume there was no love between Regina and her siblings, which he saw now was not the least bit true.
But that did not explain why she had come all this way, disobeying his explicit instructions, to bring him this when a note would have sufficed.
She must have seen the confusion and frustration in his eyes, for she moved closer to him, thrusting the journal at his chest, forcing him to grab hold of it. “I think this book is the clue to where Eliza and Nelly have run off to.”
He frowned, looking down at the worn green cover and the gilt letters embossed in the corner, tarnished now with age.M. Caulnedy. Mary Caulnedy, his mother’s maiden name. How many times had she read to him from her journal, stories of her childhood, a time in her life when she had been happy. Before she had married the duke and become a duchess, and suffered more heartache and degradation than any one person should.
Later, after his father’s last cruel beating—God knew how many there had been before that fateful day—he had spirited his mother away and taken her back to the home of her youth, a property that had been left to her and that had, a short time later upon her own death mere days after their arrival, been passed on to Ash. He could still hear the faint sounds of the ocean and seabirds, the smell of brine and life on the breeze, the sun warm on his face as he’d carried his mother, thin and frail and a shadow of the woman she had been, out onto the terrace to see that last sunset before her eyes closed forever.
“Caulnedy Manor,” he whispered.
“They must have gone there,” Regina said. “Why else would she have stolen your mother’s journal and hidden it in her room?”
“But how did she even know about it? I told none of you.”
“Like I said,” she replied quietly, “Eliza is clever, as well as very curious.”
Which was an understatement if there ever was one. He could very well picture his ward digging through his things, locating the journal, reading from it as if it were a book of fairy tales and not one of his most private, precious possessions. For a moment he berated himself for leaving it where she could have access to it. It had been years since he had lived at the Mayfair town house with the girls, preferring to stay in his apartments at Brimstone, a place where constant work allowed him to forget for a short time the sins staining his soul, as well as to protect his wards from being polluted by them. But he had left most of his things at the town house as a way somehow to stay connected to those girls, even if he couldn’t reach them emotionally.
Spinning about, he quickly deposited the journal in a drawer in his desk, locking it tight before turning back to Regina. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” he said, his mind already whirling with what he had to do to prepare for the journey ahead. “I’ll leave for the Isle of Synne at first light and bring the girls back home.”
He thought that would be the end of it; Regina had done what she’d come to do; surely she would leave now.
But she didn’t. Instead, she planted her feet wide, as if preparing for a blow, and said, her chin set mutinously, “If you think you’re going without me, you’re deluded.”
Ash, in the process of seating himself behind the desk to write the necessary notes before his departure, scowled at her. “You are not going with me. Your place is here, with your new governess.” Who had been difficult enough to secure, considering his wards’ propensity for terrorizing everyone he hired on.
“The governess is gone,” Regina pronounced bluntly.
Ash stood slowly, raising himself to his full, formidable height. “What do you mean,she is gone?”
She didn’t answer. But Ash could very well guess what had happened. The girls had made it a kind of game to see how quickly they could run off each person hired on to watch over them. He’d had to search far and wide for this last one; there were not many willing to take on the monumental task of teaching the Duke of Buckley’s wild wards. Damnation, where the hell was he going to find another governess?