A Love by Any Measure, page 31
She cried, tears stinging her eyes. “Ask any price of me, but my hand and my heart I cannot pay. Both are purchased in full.”
Barely able to realize his own actions, his hand drew back, prepared to strike sense in to her. Maeve winced as, instead of his palm across her cheek, he grabbed her wrist, forcing her right hand up to the level of her eyes.
“I don’t see Grayson’s ring on this finger.” He threw the appendage back at her. “And now I know it will never wear mine.”
As Owen crashed through the door of the flat and rounded the bottom of the stairs, he swore he heard her call for him. For a moment, he paused, thinking he had been rash and that he should go back before his pride got the better of him.
He considered the same the next morning as he awoke curled in a ball on the steps of the Old Courthouse. And he considered it thrice as he signed with Captain Jeremiah Burgess’ crew bound for Cork.
But after that, he would think no more that she might someday be his. Maeve was Grayson’s, clear as the day was long.
Rory had understood that, too. He had never gone after Maeve, knowing her heart had been claimed for good. Finally, Owen had learned the same. No wonder Rory had been so quick to sacrifice his life in the uprising; the English had already stole him of the one thing that made his life worth living.
Common Ground
November 9, 1872
Maeve awoke with a start. She didn’t know if she shivered because the night was cold, or if the warmth of human kindness had abandoned her. She tried to pull the thin throw tighter around her trembling shoulders. The brick walls of the jail did little to keep away the chill, though crossing her arms and rubbing vigorously helped some. As she began to pace, trying to warm, the approach of loud voices, brash and bawdy, and the jingling of keys met her ears.
Another prisoner. The first in some time who would share the wing of the jail, in fact.
No sooner had Maeve made the conclusion than her eyes squinted from the light that accompanied the entrance of the three men to the holding area, her home since the day Owen had led justice to her door.
“All right, you,” one of the officers barked at the poor sot being manhandled in the direction of the empty cell next to hers, “keep your head down and your mouth shut and you might make it ‘til morning.”
Maeve could hear him struggle against their efforts. “For the love of Jesus, I didn’t do a thing,” he contested.
Maeve recognized the accent at once — perfectly County Kerry. A vague momentary thrill flashed through her that she might actually know this man. After the weeks, she was thrilled with the notion of having anyone to talk to outside of court. It was fortunate that he should be put here in the same wing of the jail. Still, arrests heated up when the temperatures went down and all manner of cheap spirits were employed in lieu of expensive clothing to keep away the chill. Perhaps the other areas of the jail were occupied.
The second officer must have thrown him pretty hard into his cell before locking the door with a metallic clank. Maeve heard his body fall to the floor with a grunt, and felt an instant sense of unease for his welfare.
The begrudging voice of the authority ground out, “Now, I’m going to go have a little chat with your victim. Keep your yap shut, and remember your manners.” A reddened face curved around the wall as the officer sneered at Maeve. “There’s a … lady present.”
With that, the officers commended each other on a good “roughin’ up of another damned pick-pocketin’ Patrick” and left, locking the door behind them, leaving Maeve and the new arrival to uncomfortable silence.
She heard his body sliding against the floor as, she assumed, he scooted his back up the wall.
“Well, go on with it,” he invoked at last, speaking Irish.
“With what?” Maeve asked innocently, surprised he had correctly assumed she was a fellow countryman.
“Telling me what you’re in for,” he returned, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Isn’t that how this works? We compare stories and then complain about our sorry lot in life?”
“I guess.” His bluntness would have surprised her in any other venue. “Kidnapping. And you’re a thief.”
He scoffed. “So they say. Are you guilty?”
“In a manner of speaking. You’re not?”
“Sure, but they’d be hard pressed for proof.”
“What did you steal?”
He laughed lowly, “Time.” And even though it was in mock of her, the giddiness gave her restless spirit a temporary reprieve. “What do you mean by, ‘in a manner of speaking?’”
Why hold back? Her trial was all but over, and Maeve was sure to be convicted. What fate held for her beyond that, who knew?
“I stole a child from her father’s home,” she admitted in as matter-of-factly a tone as possible, before clarifying, “but I like to think it was at her mother’s request.”
He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Now that’s a convenient defense. How did you manage to pry a child out of its mother’s arms, let alone with permission?”
Maeve had never told her story to anyone, never once revealed the promises made in the shadow of Amelia’s deathbed. It had seemed almost sacred at the time, like a nun taking vestments and a vow of silence. Amelia died to give Augusta life, to ensure August’s place, and Maeve lived on to ensure that sacrifice was not in vain.
With a deep sigh, she proceeded with the confessional. “Her mother was my lover’s wife and died during the birth. I just became her mother after that. It was an odd set of circumstance, but we all just made the best of what was what.”
“The father, you loved him?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.
She didn’t have to qualify that answer in the slightest. “To a fault. But I was so naive in those days. I thought if I loved him enough, and if we both loved his daughter, that we could just go on living in our perfect little secret. He was a noble, see, and me? Well, I’m nothing so special as to not end up here. I told myself just having him was enough.”
He was silent for a few minutes, and Maeve had thought he might have fallen asleep. Or passed out. The smell of alcohol coming off him wasn’t so strong as to be overwhelming, but it did snake around the corner of the cell, nonetheless.
But instead, he almost frightened her to death when his voice came across the darkness, a little more inquisitive and softer than before. “And your secret became known?” With a scoffing chuckle, he added, “What happened, did the mistress become the missed? Take off with another lass, did he? Or did you finally come to your senses and took his kid for revenge? Hell hath no fury and the such.”
He could not have possibly understood the pain so vulgar a suggestion induced.
“The former,” she said bitterly from behind clenched teeth. Taking a deep breath, she attempted to ease the sudden tension racking her body. “Without my knowledge, he arranged to wed another. I suppose he meant well. She could certainly give our … his daughter better opportunities than a poor Irish nanny could.”
“Wait a fine moment!” he exclaimed. “If he was making all these dealings behind your back, how did you come into the know?”
“I heard him agree in front of a reverend to take her hand.”
“Is that so?” He scoffed. “Bloody English. Doesn’t even have the decency to betray you to your face.”
“Seemingly not,” Maeve agreed with a snide grimace. “Not sure he would’ve. He’d kept things from me before. Big things. Besides, I’d made a vow to the mother — on her deathbed, no less — I’d never let Goosie endure that … façade. The way I saw it, me staying while he married that … woman … would have broken that promise. So yes, I took her and left before I would allow him to make a fool of me and a justification of her. Then, of course, he didn’t marry.”
“So surely your conclusion was correct.”
Maeve’s brow furrowed as she marveled at the way his thoughts so perfectly aligned with her own. “I suppose after I took his child away, there wasn’t a purpose for it anymore.”
“But you still love him.”
Were her emotions so inherently ingrained into her tone?
“Yes, but does it matter?”
“Women!”
As the echo of his hmph echoed, Maeve felt a universal insult at his interjection on behalf of her sex. “What does that mean?”
“You always assume you’re the only ones who make sacrifices.” She could hear his body shift toward the front of his cell, his voice becoming clearer. “You say you took the child to protect her from her father’s giving into society. But did you ever consider that he was doing the same to you?”
Maeve sat thoroughly confused. “I don’t follow.”
“You say he was a widower. Well, why didn’t he marry you if you were so happy together?”
Even from a drunken Killarney sot, it was a ridiculous suggestion. “He was a lord.”
“Aye, and wouldn’t a lord think long and hard about asking such a compromise of an Irish peasant?” His voice slipped into English. “Would have put you in a precarious position, subject you to the scrutiny of his demeaning and demonstrative class.”
An impossible and fantastical sense of familiarity filled her, but she couldn’t make herself believe the farcical notion of whom the “thief” might be was true. “I’m not—”
“Isn’t it possible he always intended to marry you, but was afraid the consequences that would bring for you?”
“But he never made any mention of mar—”
He wouldn’t allow her to make a proper retort. “Might he not have been seeing out a vow he himself made to never again put the women he loved through the inquisition and rejection of his kind?”
“I never said there were other … ”
But there were. Amelia, Eliza, Caroline … all victims of the wrath of the English and their expectations. But how did he …
“And then, perhaps, just perhaps,” and his voice softened again, his lilt shifting east, ringing with a pure essence of Britannia, “after voices of reason had finally talked him down from his sacrificial altar where he had put his own happiness and best interest up for slaughter by denying his love’s own freedom to decide that fate—”
“It was hardly a choice; there’d have been consequences no matter my deci—”
“IF!” he interjected, urgency for her understanding creeping into his tone that Maeve just couldn’t fathom. “If, perchance, he had decided to sacrifice his all for you to prove how he treasured you, only for you to misunderstand the nature of the very proposal he was to make … Might not he have suffered from the realization that it was his own shortsightedness that cost your happiness? Despite that he has suffered in his loneliness and concern for his daughter and his intended, is it not possible that he understands how the thing it cost him was the thing he promised to honor and value the most?”
Her head pounded in the contemplation. Was it possible? Could it really be him? Dry words whispered past a parched heart. “What did he value most?”
His voice was eerily close as he gained every inch of distance not forbidden to him.
“Your time.”
“August?”
“Yes.”
Her breath reclaimed its grace, but Maeve’s heart refused to forgive the fault in the air between them.
“But you … The Duchess … ”
Tears slipped from the corner of her eyes and blazed a heated path down her face as he answered. “Perish the thought. It was the Duchess who was intervening on your behalf. I wanted to marry you, but was too frightened.” He paused, sounding on the verge of tears himself. “I still want to marry you, Maeve.”
She wanted so desperately to believe, to know that her beloved sat just on the other side of this cold brick wall, wanted to look into his eyes and remind him of her heart’s unfathomable love for him.
“I don’t … How are you … Why did you get … Are you going to … ”
Too many questions to be answered, but Maeve couldn’t calm her racing mind long enough to focus. She heard him laugh, amused at her perplexed state.
“All will be well soon. “
Again, a twist of agony writhed within her. “Oh, August, I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too.”
Lord in Heaven, had she really misunderstood? Had she invited this torturous existence because she had jumped to false conclusions? Suddenly, the punishment seemed all too fair a fate. Maeve thought it was just that she sat imprisoned. She should be given no reprieve, for what she had done was unconscionable.
She struggled to speak, let alone make sense. “You were going to ask me … to marry you?”
“I never meant for you to misunderstand. And if that’s what you promised Amelia, knowing what you believed to be true,” he exhaled slowly, as if letting go his own regret, “if you thought that I was marrying Alexandra, then I understand why you took Goosie. I suppose it’s my punishment. I took three years of your life from you, and you’ve denied me three years of mine. But Maeve … ”
She could picture his face pressed against the bars of his cell.
“I don’t want to live without you and Goosie anymore. Time has stolen too much from us already.”
Tears as hot as coals fell down her face like ash. She had never dreamed the day would come again when August wooed her with honeyed words.
“I … thought … ” Maeve sniffled. “I thought … you were … marrying … ”
She mumbled, willing some divine force to intercede and magically erase the last three years. Maeve wanted him to tell her it had never happened, as though she had just fallen asleep on that Easter night and had an awful dream.
“Never,” he declared. “Maeve, I love you far too much to ever do such a thing.”
The reality of their circumstances, however, did not elude her. “Fat bit of good that will do. Yes, you’re here. In jail. What could we do now?”
“Well, quite simply, we’re going to break out.”
Of course the knowledge of the workings of a prison were woefully lacking in the British aristocracy.
“You’re here to get me out?” she repeated back sarcastically. “To get me out, by being thrown in?”
It was precisely at that moment that Maeve heard the approaching of footfalls and the cursing voice coming out the outer corridor.
“ … just want to eye him down, see what kind of man does this.”
The voice was all at once familiar, its Dixie drawl all too indicative of the owner: Jefferson Schand.
“Here we go, Maeve,” August whispered quickly. “Don’t say a thing.”
The door opened at the far end of the room and the steps moved to the front of August’s cell.
“This is him, the ungodly cur,” Jefferson spat vehemently. “This is the man, if we can call him that, who accosted me in the street and attempted to steal my bill fold.”
August’s voice rang back with scorn, invoking the false Irish tones of his cover. “Did not, you stupid thumper. I’ve no need of your money.”
“Officer Hume, give me five minutes. Five minutes with the dog and let me have vengeance. Damned Irish! Let me give a good lesson.”
The accompanying officer cleared his throat and shuffled in place. “Yes, sir, as you wanted. Put him back here especially because no one would witness it.”
Jefferson’s face peeked around the wall. He winked. “What about this one? Will she say a word?”
The policeman sneered as he too eyed Maeve. “Not if she knows what’s good for her. She’ll be sent to the reaper soon enough, as it is.”
Both men pulled back as Maeve heard the rustling of paper.
Money. Jefferson was paying off the officer to get time alone with August under the auspices of delivering a little un-civil justice.
“Leave him alive and just a little … wiser, gentlemen,” the officer cautioned.
Metallic clacking followed as the gate to August’s cell slowly creaked open. Maeve, always a careful examiner of words, wondered at the plurality of “gentlemen.” She tried to crane her neck to see who else had come in, but her view was regulated by the angle of their position.
“Don’t break anything. I don’t want the hassle.”
Jefferson chuckled. “Don’t worry, he’ll heal. In time.”
Lone footsteps paced back up the hall, followed by a cracking of the door and subsequent latching of the lock. In her cell, Maeve began to piece together the basics of their idea, but still couldn’t conceive how it would work. August’s cell might be open, and Jefferson may be here, but how were they planning to get …
“Maeve!”
She jolted as the voice called out to her and a most unexpected face came into view. Maeve took shelter against the back wall as her nerves jumped to full attention.
“Owen!”
He made to hush her, his eyes darting to the door to assure that the outburst wasn’t bringing any attention from the outside.
“Owen, what in the name of Kingdom Come are you doing here?”
His smile almost unnerved her with its vague self-assuredness.
“Doing what I should have done a long time ago,” he declared as he fished out from his pocket some scrap of cloth. His hands worked with alarming speed unrolling it, before he leaned against the bars of the cell. A scratch and tinkle of metal upon metal confused her, until a moment later when, to her shock and amazement, the lock of her cell disengaged, and the gate swung on its hinges.
Owen, wearing a smirk of confidence, took two steps in, backing Maeve into a corner. “Now, take off your clothes.”
As August rounded the corner, he was distressed by the look on Maeve’s face, her expression one of utter confusion and misunderstanding. If there had been time, August could have expounded upon the events leading to this moment at great length: how Murphy and he had agreed to set aside everything and focus on freeing her from jail; how Jefferson’s military experience allowed them to craft the covert mission with the best chance of success; how a hurried stop at their temporary residence had alerted Caroline, who had aided the effort by letting out hems and waistlines of the necessary clothing to better allow the interchange of attire.
