But that was neither here nor there. He tamped down on his frustration, leveling a furious glare on Regina. “Regardless, you will remain here, in London.”
But Regina wasn’t the least bit fazed. She raised her head higher and narrowed her eyes. “You will take me with you, or when you return to London you shall not find me.”
He was still trying to figure how to respond to that blatant attempt at emotional blackmail when she did the one thing that would sway him.
Her voice dropped to the smallest whisper, showing a vulnerability he had never witnessed in her before. “They are my sisters.”
His heart wrenched in his chest, his every argument decimated in the face of her pain. There was no doubt in his mind that Regina would do exactly as she threatened if he did not comply with her demand. And even if he took the chance that she would not, he could not possibly leave her here alone, anxious over her sisters’ fates. He had to take her with him.
“Very well,” he replied softly. “Be ready at first light.”
The pathetic relief that flashed through her dark eyes was so brief he very nearly didn’t see it. But it was powerful enough to bring tears to his eyes as, with a firm nod, she spun about and raced from the room.
The Isle of Synne. He had not thought of that place in longer than he could remember. He’d been a different person then, not even a man, afraid and uncertain but with a raw determination that had driven him to flee home, to try to save the one person he could. And even in that he had failed.
So many years trying to make up for his failings, atoning for his father’s sins. Sins that stained Ash’s soul as surely as those horrible crimson stains on his mother’s snowy white handkerchiefs. He clenched his back teeth together, the force of it making his jaw ache, shooting pain into his temples. A question clung to him then, a ghoul grasping onto his back, digging in its claws: Once he found Eliza and Nelly, how could he hope to protect them if they were determined to run again? How could he keep them safe and see to his business at the same time? And how could he protect them from the same shame that polluted him?
As he wrote a quick letter to his solicitor, hurriedly sprinkling it with sand to dry the ink before grabbing up a blank sheet to start on the next, he determined to focus on one problem at a time. Mayhap, by the time he located them, he might find the answers he needed.
Chapter 2
Isle of Synne
She was late.
Miss Bronwyn Pickering pushed open the door to the Quayside Circulating Library and hurried to the rich blue curtain that graced the back wall, her sturdy boot heels clicking sharply on the gleaming wood floor. It had taken every bit of her talents for persuasion—which were regrettably lacking as it was—to convince her parents to allow her to come to today’s meeting. She pressed her lips tight, waving distractedly to the two younger Athwart girls as they saw to several of their patrons. She did not know what she would do without her weekly visits to the Quayside to meet with her friends, the one thing she looked forward to most in this world beside her studies of the local arthropods. Something which her parents had already forbid her from doing in their attempts for force her to find a husband.
A husband. She shuddered involuntarily as she pushed the curtain aside and hurried down the narrow hall beyond. The one time she had actually wanted a man to propose, he had merely been playing with her affections in order to teach her social-climbing parents a lesson. A lesson Bronwyn had been paying for ever since.
She paused for a moment just outside the small back office, absently rubbing her fist over the dull ache in her chest at the thought of that man and that time and the heartache it had caused before. Taking a deep breath and rearranging her features to a calm she did not feel, she put her hand on the latch. “I’m so sorry,” she said as she opened the door, ducking inside. She cast an apologetic look about the circle of women as she hastily removed her bonnet and deposited it on a side table. “I came as quickly as I was able.”
“Oh, Bronwyn,” Miss Honoria Gadfeld, the vicar’s eldest daughter, murmured, her brows drawn together in worry. “Are they threatening to forbid you coming to our meetings as well?”
“They are.” She tried for a brave smile as she hung her bag on a hook, being careful not to disturb the glass jar within. But her lip, the traitorous thing, decided in that moment to wobble tellingly.
As one, the women jumped to their feet and rushed her. In an instant Bronwyn was enveloped in hugs, exclamations of shock and frustration ringing in her ears.Thiswas why she needed the Oddments, she thought as she allowed herself, for just a moment, to lean on these people she had come to love so very much.
It hadn’t always been like this, of course. She’d not always had this support, this unfailing enthusiasm bolstering her up on even her darkest days. Having grown up without a single friend, she had been cast like an unsuspecting lure into London society in advance of her debut. But instead of earning her a place in thetonas her parents had hoped, it had only managed to invite devastation and near ruin—as well as a heartbreak that even now sent lurching pain through her chest. That horrible event had forced her parents to flee with her and take up residence in the seaside resort off the northeast coast of England, the Isle of Synne. And through it all, Bronwyn had struggled mightily. Heruniqueness, as her mother was wont to say in an attempt to justify why her unfashionable, strange daughter was such a failure at anything remotely social, had made finding friends a difficulty, if not an utter impossibility.
Until the Oddments. The self-labeled group of women had come to her rescue when she had been at her lowest and desperate for someone who understood her. She would be forever grateful to them.
And now she was in danger of losing even them.
“I cannot believe they could be so cruel,” Miss Katrina Denby exclaimed a bit breathlessly as she wrestled her massive dog, incongruously christened Mouse, out of the center of the throng—a ridiculous sight, indeed. She could have easily ridden the creature, as diminutive and delicate as she was. But the beast would not be denied his greeting. Bronwyn, for the sake of her skirts, and because she adored the creature despite—or mayhap because of—his determination to like anyone and everyone who came into his orbit, scratched Mouse behind his ear. He groaned in ecstasy before allowing himself to be dragged away, what appeared to be a grin spread across his massive black-and-white spotted face.
“Surely there is something we can do to help.” Miss Seraphina Athwart, oldest Athwart sister and the proprietress of the Quayside, pushed a lock of fiery red hair out of her face and guided Bronwyn to the low brocade settee that held place of honor on one side of the small but welcoming office that doubled as a parlor of sorts. She quickly went to work, rearranging cushions, filling a teacup just as Bronwyn liked it, her manners brisk and capable, just like the woman herself. “Your parents cannot be completely unreasonable.”
“You know as well as I that they most certainly can,” Bronwyn replied quietly as she settled into her seat. “And besides, you’ve already done all you can do. My parents will not listen to reason, I’m afraid. Each day that passes and I am not married to a title, they grow more difficult. There is no amount of persuasion that will make them change their minds now.” She reached into the pocket in her skirts, extracting a nut and passing it to Phineas, Seraphina’s parrot, who perched on the back of the settee.
“We’re a’ Jock Taimson’s bairns,” the creature squawked in its thick brogue before it took to breaking through the hard shell with its wickedly sharp beak.
Miss Adelaide Peacham, owner of the Beakhead Tea Room, kind and busy and constantly smelling of all things sweet, passed Bronwyn a plate piled high with biscuits. “What shall you do?” she asked, concern puckering her dark brows.
Bronwyn shrugged as she took a biscuit, an indifferent action that in no way reflected the turmoil within her. “There is nothing much Icando,” she replied, fighting panic and the feeling of being buried alive that had overtaken her since the confrontation with her parents that morning. “I have no money of my own, nothing at my disposal to claim independence.” She did not even have privacy in her own home any longer. But she could not inform her friends of that particular wound, not yet. It was still too raw, too frightening.
She glanced quickly at her bag hanging on the wall, as if to make certain the items ensconced safely within were still secure. She had been forced to pack up the beetles, what she was certain was a new species she had discovered here on Synne, as well as the research she had compiled over the past years, to bring with her for the short trip to the Quayside. There was no doubt in her mind that her parents would search her rooms while she was gone and would dispose of anything they thought improper for a lady to possess, namely the insects that she had made her life’s work. Already all of the mounted specimens she had collected, as well as the great majority of her scientific equipment and supplies, had been consigned to the rubbish heap.
Again that pain in her chest, though this time not muted with age. No, this was fresh, and no doubt would stay sharp for some time. She would not soon forget her panic when she’d returned home not two days ago to find all her carefully curated equipment and specimens gone. And then the despair that had filled her when she’d been informed that all those things, each one precious to her, had been thrown out. And not just thrown out, but methodically destroyed, each piece smashed so it might never see use again. It seemed that the moment she had reached the advanced age of four and twenty and without a single marital prospect, a kind of fever had come over her parents. As if that particular number had a magical effect on all their fears and wishes for her, expanding them tenfold.