Linda Needham (26 page)

“Christ, woman, what are you doing here?”

Kate had wanted to sob in relief when she’d heard Jared’s voice from the office door. The man who had become the breadth of her world in such a short time.

He’d come all the way to Liverpool to find her, to protect her. But, no, that couldn’t be true. He couldn’t have known she was here in the warehouse with the grain unless Elden had confessed it. And that was impossible.

He must have come after one of his criminals.

And he’d found her instead.

Now he was framed against the lamplight, towering above her in his fury, silent, his eyes flinty as winter.

Unforgiving.

“Jared, I’m sorry—”

“Who are you, madam? You look so much like my beloved wife.”

He might as well have slapped her. The stinging re
buke of a stranger’s distaste. “Jared, please listen to—”

“To more of your lies?” His voice was so intimately condemning, so resonant. He began a slow circle around her, his eyes fixed on hers. “But please, go ahead, tell me anything you wish. I love your stories: falsehood clad in all sorts of disguises. Do start with the reason that you’re here in Liverpool, in this warehouse.”

The truth would only separate them further. “What I do here has nothing to do with you and me.”

“It bloody well does!” His circling made her turn and turn, in order to face him, to follow his eyes. “My God, Kate, I’m here from the Home Office to investigate a massive conspiracy. To find and interrogate a thief. Have I succeeded? Have I found my thief?”

A huge sob caught in her throat, making it difficult to answer, and the truth taste so bitter. But she raised her chin as he stopped his blasted stalking and matched the fury of her gaze to his.

“If you mean have you found the person responsible for the transfer of grain from Lord Grey’s warehouse, and Russell’s and Trevelyan’s to the Ladies’ Charitable League’s warehouse, then…yes, you have.”

He reared back as though she’d struck him, took a sharp breath as if just hearing her admit the truth had injured him to the quick, though he must have already known. Then he clamped his hands around her upper arms and pulled her close, a dark fire blazing in his eyes.

“Christ, Kate, do you know what you’ve set in motion, what you’ve done? To yourself? To me? To our children?”

“I know exactly what I’ve done and who I’m doing it
for. I am apportioning justice as best I know how.”

His breath bellowed against her cheeks. “By recklessly stealing tons of grain from the three most powerful men in Britain?”

She nodded. “And then giving it to a soup kitchen that keeps thousands of children from starving to death every month.” The bright light of righteousness filled her chest. The rightness of her cause.

“Kate, are you listening to yourself? Boasting to me of your crimes. Have you any idea who I am?”

“My husband.” Her hardheaded champion.

“Dammit all, I’m Lord Grey’s deputy! Do you know what that means?” He growled and held her even closer, the lamplight shadowing his eyes, darkly planing his jaw. “If you were anyone else in the world I would clamp you in handcuffs, parade you across the docks, and toss you into a jail cell. You’d have a short trial and be transported for the next fourteen years of your life. Fourteen years. Hell, Mera would be married, with her own children by the time you were sent home. That’s who I am, Kate!”

“And for all that, Jared, all your blustering, I’m not just anyone else in the world. I’m your wife. And you’re still my husband.” Aching for him and this breach between them, Kate touched her hand to his chest, feeling his heart clattering around beneath her palm. “I love you because I know that you’ll do what’s right and honorable.”

“And what about you, Kate?” He took hold of her hand. “You’re supposed to be home with our children.”

“I left them safely in your care. How could I have
known you were going to leave too?” And yet a wave of guilt washed over her, with neither of them home to protect them. “Father Sebastian had gotten himself into trouble and—”

“Then the old priest in the prison cell was Father Sebastian?”

“He’d heard Drew and Ross talking about the Indian corn from the
Pickering.
It’s stored right outside that door in a warehouse in the Albert Docks.”

“Yes, I know. The
Pickering
is my investigation. So is Lord Grey’s missing grain. Not to mention the case of my wife the jailbreaker.” He turned away from her, flattened his palms against the tabletop and the scattered papers she’d been sorting through. “Hell, the inquest into this whole illegal operation of yours belongs to me.”

Her heart sank at the sight of his misery, his head hanging, his wondrously dark hair falling over his forehead. She wanted to touch him but knew he would flinch from her and that would hurt too much.

“I wouldn’t have kept the secret from you forever, Jared.” After the famine was over and the children grown, when they were both old and sitting comfortably by the hearth. She would have told him then about the justice she had meted out to the wicked death dealers back in ’48.

But he didn’t seem to be listening, had picked a piece of paper off the table. “What’s this?”

“It’s nothing. Just a bill of lading.” And other evidence against so many people if anyone ever looked closely enough. She started collecting the paper into
stacks. “Endless paperwork. Invoices and letters, manifests.”

“Corroboration of your crimes.” He grabbed her wrist and stopped her, his mouth set in a resolute line. Then he went back to sifting through the piles, tossing pages here and there, until he yanked one back.

“Martin Hopwood,” was all he said. Then he raised his frown to her. “My estate manager’s signature on a manifest for the
Katie Claire
, dated only last week? What the hell’s going on here?”

Kate swallowed, her tongue dry as dust as he watched her mouth and then her eyes. “Martin Hopwood is one of the bravest men I’ve ever met, with a heart the size of the sun.”

“You recruited him to do your dirty work? An old man who should be living out his retirement in peace? Is no one safe from your calculations?”

“Martin helped me start up our grain-running scheme and now eagerly manages the traffic. Who better to keep account of our work than a man who ran an estate for thirty years?”

“Not only that damn fool Hopwood, but the
Katie Claire
? Now you’ve involved one of my ships?”

“The
Katie Claire
belongs to me, named for me. And far better being used to carry food to innocent children than to lay at anchor and abandoned in Liverpool.”

He shook his head at her, raked his fingers through his hair. “Christ, I’m just glad I caught you in time.”

“In time for what?” But a cold panic had already settled across her shoulders.

“To pack up all this, for starters.” He grabbed an
empty crate from a shelf and started shoving the papers inside.

“Why? What are you doing? I need those.”

“No you don’t. I’m going to incinerate the lot and anything else incriminating that I find,” he said, with a narrow-eyed growl. “And then I’m taking you home.”

Kate backed away from him, out of reach around the end of the table, fearing the worst, that he would never understand. “And then what?”

He kept up his paper stuffing. “Then you’re going to live out your life safely beside me at Hawkesly Hall.”

“No, Jared. I can’t.”

“Can’t?” He stared at her, as though unable to comprehend her words. “What the devil does that mean?”

“I still have work to do.” Months of it, years perhaps. So many children to feed.

“Your work is done, Kate. I’m taking you away from this unholy mess while I still can. Consider the Ladies’ Charitable League disbanded for good.”

“I will not.” Tears began to swim in her eyes. “We’ve just gotten everything running smoothly. The warehouses and the grain transfers and the
Katie Claire
. I won’t stop it now.”

“Are you mad?” He’d dropped the papers and now rounded the table toward her, a helpless fury gathering in his voice. “You’re an inch from being caught.”

“But nobody knows what I’m doing here.”

“I do.” He took his steady steps toward her and still she backed away, fearing his determination. “Ross and Drew know. They don’t know that you’re the culprit, but, Kate, they soon will.”

“How would they, unless you told them?” Surely he wouldn’t reveal her secret! He wasn’t that kind of man.

“Christ, I don’t need to tell them. The prime minister has put the chancellor of the Exchequer on the case. You’ll be found out and arrested and it’ll be out of my hands. I can’t have that”—he slipped his hands behind her head—“because, Kate, I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t. But I can’t stop running grain. The children are hungry
now
. They’re starving
now
. You held our Elizabeth.” She couldn’t help the tears streaming down her cheeks, couldn’t hide them. “You said yourself that there was nothing to her. Twigs for bones. If she hadn’t been left to Father Sebastian she wouldn’t have lived another day. Think of how horrible that would have been! Never to know her—”

“Kate, please stop this!” His eyes were glittering and hot, rimmed red in his fury and frustration.

“But you saw how quickly she rallied with just a few sips of Rosemary’s gruel. You fed her yourself. Ounce by ounce. I’ve heard you cooing to her, seen you encouraging her to eat.” Kate slipped her fingers through his hair. “Think of the hundreds of babies like Elizabeth, just waiting for a little food from a kind heart. From someone who dares to give a damn.”

He stopped and stared at her for a long time, the muscles in his jaw flickering. “Dammit, Kate, if you’d only…” But then he stopped, relaxed some, his shoulders easing. “Hell, I should have thought of it before.”

“What?”

He sighed as though the world had suddenly righted for him. “Look, if it means so much to you, I’ll buy you
enough grain every month to supply three soup kitchens.”

Three! Two extra kitchens. Think how many thousands would that feed! “Oh, Jared, that’s wonderful.”

“But it means the end of your conspiracy. We close down your League activities. No more plundering the prime minister’s warehouse.”

Her tears welled up again; he didn’t understand. “As much as I’d like to accept your offer, I can’t.”

Jared could only stare at his wife, trying to make sense of her plain-faced statement.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” He’d just supplied her with all the answers. “I’ve money enough and ships. And, by God, if it’ll extricate you from this mess you’ve made for yourself—”

“I don’t want extricating. I want justice for the innocent lives they’ve taken and the ones they’ve yet to take.” She wore her pride high on her cheeks.

“Justice?” She bandied the word like a ball, as though it were a simple thing to conceive or carry out. God knows he’d tried in his life.

“I want Trevelyan to pay for his cruelty, for his injustice and inhumanity.” She started straightening the piles of papers with her long, capable fingers, putting things back in their places. “I want Lord Grey and the cowardly Lord Russell to feel the price of their evil every month, every day, every hour. I want them to watch the grain slip out of their warehouses as though it were their life’s blood. I want them to know it can’t be staunched—”

“Are you mad?” He grabbed her hand, turned her toward him. “You can’t keep this up forever.”

“But I have to try. Until the famine ends. There’s too much at stake. If I let you spend your honestly hard-won money to supply the grain instead of stealing it from the three men who have so selfishly, carelessly mismanaged the famine and caused the starvation, then they win. Their egregious sins cost them nothing. That’s not right.”

“I can’t let you, Kate.” Though her every word rang with such clarity in his heart. Evil men with evil hearts.

Closing relief depots, withholding the funds that would have saved countless lives, imposing laws that made paupers of hardworking farmers, and broke up families.

And used workhouses to punish and degrade, to steal away hope and joy.

“You know it’s the right and good thing to do, Jared.”

Do it for Thomas
. For the boy who’d never had a chance against Craddock. For the boy he had tried so hard to save.

And the woman who had become his life. She looked like a runaway, not a wife, wild-haired and rumpled, standing guard over her cause.

He had his answer, and something deep inside of him knew it was right and unregrettable.

He picked up one of the
Katie Claire
’s bills of lading, his hands shaking, because this was probably the most foolish step he’d ever taken. “How does it work, Kate? Your little conspiracy?”

Her eyes grew wide, frightened. “Why?”

Surely she didn’t really think he would ever turn her
over to the authorities. “Because, Kate, I need to know every nuance of your proceedure. The smallest detail of every warehouse, every person, your schedule, the ports—”

“But why?” She clutched at the front of her cloak, looked terrified, as though he was about to betray her.

“To keep myself out of trouble. Because if I’m caught it means the gallows for me.”

“The gallows!” She clamped her fingers over her mouth. “What do you mean? Caught doing what?”

“Oh, my love, things you’d never imagine I was capable of doing.” Feeling reckless and desperately in love with the beautiful, wide-eyed woman, Jared tossed aside the bill of lading, slipped his hands inside the warm folds of her cloak, then lifted her up to sit on the table.

“Jared, we haven’t settled this problem between us.”

“We have. But you forget, my love, I’m a spy.” Enjoying her moment of confusion, he opened the cloak clasp at the base of her throat. “And soon to be a pirate in truth.”

“You’re also a priggish, stone-headed lunatic.” But she sighed as he ran his hands slowly over her ribcage and gathered her against him, moaned against his cheek and then sat up. “What do you mean, you’re going to be a pirate?”

“It’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?”