But what if they looked for Mrs. Cotterwood and couldnt 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 werent bad enough! Winny, what should I do? If Ive brought the Bow Street Runners down upon us Tears sprang into her eyes. Im ruining everything!
No, youre not, Winny assured her friend stoutly. Theyve 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 couldnt help it if someone recognized you. She smiled and added, Cheer up. Maybe itll 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, theres nothing I can do about it now. And apparently they found a dead end at the Hall, so they wont know where to come looking for me. She reached out and hugged Winny. Thank you. I dont know what I would do without you.
Dont be daft. Its me whod 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. Rosalinds 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 daughters 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 parentseven 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. Anselms 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. Anselms, 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. Childrens 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.
LORD LAMBETH 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 birthor close enough to it to make the match a good oneand 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 Cecilias 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 wayand usually without the spark of beauty to ignite his interest.
The truth was, he had never met a woman who didnt bore him within a short amount of timeand above all things, Lord Lambeth despised boredom. In fact, tonight he had been just about to leave Lady Batterslees 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 Batterslees study, had lessened his interest.