The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) (20 page)

 

 

The Bishop nodded.
“It’s up to
Dalton, but I can’t see any other way of righting all the
wrongs Frederick has
done. Perhaps he
will be sensible,
and tell us where Emer and the baby are so he won’t be
publicly disgraced. But
I have a feeling he won’t budge an
inch."

 

 

Joe said grimly,
"He hates
Emer, and would rather see her dead than married to Dalton.
This is his doing,
all right, but it will be nearly impossible to get him to own
up."

 

 

"Which is why I
think we should
get the best barristers we can find, and have them start
drawing up all of our
depositions, just in case.”

 

 

Adrian shook his
head. “I just don’t
know what Dalton is going to say.”

 

 

Joe looked from one
man to the
other. “Well, with any luck, Emer and William will be found. And if
they aren’t,
well, then, Dalton
will be home soon, and then we shall find out.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

 

 

Dalton arrived home
on a bright
sunny June day about a fortnight after Emer had vanished. Adrian and
the
Bishop had tried to send
him several messages warning him of trouble at home, but in
the confusion of
the huge outbreak of cholera in Toronto, with Dalton moving
from place to place
tending the sick, the communications had failed to reach him.

 

 

Dalton arrived home
in Quebec
exhausted, dirty, and in a foul mood at all the suffering he
had been forced to
witness which he felt he had done so little to alleviate. Dalton
couldn’t
wait to get home to
hold Emer in his arms again, and play with his adorable baby
son.

 

 

But when he arrived
at Adrian’s
house, the servants were nowhere to be found, and the front
door was locked.

 

 

Dalton felt a cold
pang of dread
grip his heart as he unlocked the door and then raced up the
stairs to Emer’s
room.

 

 

Finding no one
there, Dalton began
to panic, and ran to the nursery. There was no sign of baby William
either.

 

 

Dalton sat down on
the top step
dazedly with his head in his hands. Surely they couldn’t both have
died? There had to be some other explanation….

 

 

Trembling like a
leaf in the wind,
Dalton shakily got to his feet and ran down the stairs and out
of the front
door without even bothering to lock it.

 

 

He rushed into the
street and frantically
hailed a cab. Perhaps
Emer had
decided on a change of scenery and gone to the orphanage,
Dalton prayed, as the
horse galloped at a breakneck speed toward the ferry landing.

 

 

After a long delay
in crossing
because of the heavy traffic on the river, Dalton finally
reached the opposite
shore, and demanded that the driver not spare the horses. They drove
up in
front of the orphanage
within a few minutes, and Dalton was relieved to see Adrian’s
carriage there.

 

 

He paid the driver
quickly, and then
went to look for the remaining residents of the home, still
living in the
houses and workshops at the back until the new orphanage could
be rebuilt.

 

 

Dalton found all of
Emer’s friends
gathered in one of the old outdoor classrooms. With them were
several severe-looking
strangers, whom Dalton guessed to be lawyers from the small
snatch of
conversation he had detected as he approached the open
doorway.

 

 

Entering the
classroom, his eyes lit
on the Jenkinses, Marion and Charlie, before turning on Joe,
Patrick, and
Sissy, as well as the Bishop, Myrtle and Adrian.

 

 

“What is going on? Where are Emer and
William? Adrian,
I’ve just come back from your
house, and they're gone.
Captain Jenkins,
what are you and your wife doing here? You're supposed to be in
Ireland, looking after the
Randall Shipping
company interests for me.

 

 

"And you, madam. You’re Marion,
aren’t you? You
and these other women were on the
first steamer for Quebec from the
Pegasus
. What are you all
doing here at Emer’s home?”

 

 

“Dalton, please,
sit down,” the
Bishop urged. “We
have some bad
news for you, and it's going to be hard to take in.”

 

 

“Emer isn’t dead,
is she?” Dalton
asked in a near whisper.

 

 

“No, but she and
William have been
taken, and we have no idea where.”

 

 

“
Taken
? Taken by whom?” Dalton barked.

 

 

He stared at the
sea of worried
faces wildly, and caught Joe’s eye.

 

 

Joe looked away,
down at the floor.

 

 

Suddenly Dalton
knew everything,
almost as though it had come to him in a flash of lightning.

 

 

“My father's kidnapped them, hasn’t
he?” Dalton
asked flatly.

 

 

Joe looked up
again, and nodded.

 

 

Dalton sat silently
for a few moments,
and then asked, “Why
has he taken them? But more
importantly, what can I do to get them back?”

 

 

“I think you’re
going to have to
threaten your father with court action if he doesn’t tell you
of their
whereabouts soon,” the Bishop advised quietly

 

 

“What, you mean
prosecute
him?” Dalton asked, stunned.

 

 

“Yes, and also for
fraud, criminal
negligence, unfair dismissal, theft, and murder, and that's
only for starters,”
Adrian listed, consulting a piece of paper the lawyers had
drawn up.

 

 

Dalton’s golden
eyes widened, and he
practically choked out the words, “I don’t understand any of
this. Please,
can someone explain just what
the hell has been going on around here?”

 

 

“Dalton, my dear, it’s a bit
complicated,"
Myrtle said gently, drawing him by the hand to sit down between
her and Joe,
who put his arm around Dalton’s shoulder comfortingly.

 

 

"Yes, I'd say so!
Murder
? What is going on? Where's Emer?"

 

 

"Try to be patient,
and just listen. And
before you judge us harshly, keep
in mind that Emer gave us strict instructions to keep what
we're about to say
from you. We’ve
all kept our
promise to her so long as she remained with us and unharmed.

 

 

"But now that she
and William
are gone, we feel we're at liberty to tell you the whole
truth, even if she
never speaks to us again once she does come back, as I am sure
she will
soon,” Myrtle
explained.

 

 

"You're sure she's
alive?"
he asked raggedly.

 

 

"As sure as we can
be,"
she confirmed.

 

 

Dalton felt as
though he would be
ill, but he dragged in a breath and declared, "All right, I'm
listening.
Don't waste your time trying to spare my feelings any more.
Not when there's so
much at stake. Tell
me everything,
no matter how bad it might be."

 

 

So Joe began Emer's tale of woe which
had started the
previous August by reminding Dalton of all the orders for food
for the others
ships, which had in fact never arrived, and then moved on to
the Randall
steamer full of women and children that had ostensibly been
going straight to
Quebec.

 

 

Marion took up her
own personal part
of the tale then. “Only we never got there. We circled right around
the island, and
got dumped on the
shore. If not
for the money you
gave us, and Emer’s help when she got there, and found us,
every single one of
us would have died, of that I'm certain.”

 

 

Joe continued, “Not
only did none of
the food to help those poor souls ever get sent, and healthy
people sent to an
island full of fever, but your father bribed the doctor to
lift the quarantine.
I wondered at the time he came on board, how he knew Emer’s
name.

 

 

"We’ve found the
doctor, and he
admits that you father bribed him to make sure that all of
Emer’s family, no
matter how ill or well, were to be taken off the
Pegasus
and sent to Grosse
Ile. If Emer had
had one ounce of family
feeling, of course she would have gone with them, and thus
your father would
have been able to separate the two of you.”

 

 

Dalton groaned,
“And when I found
out, Father gave me a glass of wine, supposedly to steady my
nerves, and the
next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the Atlantic, far
away from Emer when
she needed me most."

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

"I slept the first
week or so
of the journey back to Ireland.
Gibson told me I had brain fever. He must have been
dosing me with some
sort of sleeping draught.
He must
have been helping my father all along!

 

 

"He also piloted
the steamer
Marion and the women and children were on. So all the time he was
apparently
nursing me on the
Agamemnon
, he was really
drugging me to make sure I couldn’t go back to find Emer.” He shook
his head in
wonder.

 

 

“We shall skip over
all the deaths
that we therefore can hold your father responsible for, and go
on to the Jenkinses’ testimony,” the Bishop instructed, seeing the
terrible state Dalton was in.

 

 

Captain Jenkins
began, “Well, as you
know, sir, I was promised two weeks’ shore leave. No sooner did I
get off the steamer in
Quebec, than I was
paid off and told I would never work here again. I went around every
shipping company
office, but as soon as
I mentioned that I had worked for Mr. Randall on the
Pegasus
,
they told me to
get out. With no money, and no references, we were soon destitute.”

 

 

“It was just as bad
when I got off
the ship, but me and Jim Beckett and the rest of the lads
aboard decided to go
out to the logging camps, and got wise enough to use fake
names,” Charlie
explained. “Told
‘em we had worked
for Mr. Lyndon, so we did.
But
when the winter weather came, we were trapped, and ended up at
Brona’s, you
know, Emer’s sister. The weather was horrible, and it got so
bad we nearly ate
each other.

 

 

“But when spring
came, we helped
them plant the fields, and then came back here, all except
Jim, who liked it
out there and stayed with them to help, being Michael was
still so frail. Most
of the men died along the way, and the last of them fell to
the cholera back
here in Quebec, as I would have done if I hadn’t seen you in
the slums with Dr.
Lovell here, and said I knew you and Emer.

 

 

"There’s really no
one left
from the
Pegasus
crew except myself and Jim and David the
ship’s carpenter, you
remember, the one who was always so kind to Emer’s brothers Cormac
and Martin?”

 

 

Dalton nodded. “I remember him. Where is he now?”

 

 

“He stayed on at
the logging camp to
set up his own carpentry shop, and I’ve sent word for him to
come if he can, to
try to help find Emer.”

 

 

“There is Pertwee,
the second mate,
too, but he went about ingratiating himself with your father
and the Lyndons,
telling them all sorts of lies about Emer setting fire to the
ship,” Patrick
revealed suddenly.

 

 

“I had got better
thanks to Emer and
Joe’s excellent nursing, and had tried to go into town to get
a job so I could
help support those still left on the island. It was only when I got
to Quebec in
November that I found
out that all the crew of the
Pegasus
had been blacklisted. I
couldn’t even get a job as a bootblack." He shook his head in
disgust.

 

 

"I saw Pertwee,
driving
Madeleine Lyndon’s carriage so he was, and he bragged about
what he had
done. He had
always hated Emer because
he fancied her, and she wouldn’t give in to his pestering. So he
told your
father all these lies
about the fire, and Pertwee claimed that she was going to be
arrested for
arson."

 

 

"But she saved the
ship!"
Dalton protested.

 

 

“I know. I was very worried, so I went back to
Grosse Ile to warn
Emer that Frederick Randall was after her. We all agreed to pack up
and leave then,
didn’t we, Marion.
But Joe fell ill, and Cormac was still lingering on.
  He had got rid of the fever all
right, but by then he was
dying slowly of tuberculosis.”

 

 

"TB? She never
said."

 

 

“It's true,” Marion
confirmed. “But
even though Emer knew she was in
danger, she refused to leave without them. Joe was unconscious, but
Cormac had
heard everything Patrick
said, God rest his soul."

 

 

Dalton felt a cold
finger of fear
trickle down his back. He could guess what was coming now, but
it was still
almost too horrible to hear the truth at last.

 

 

"When Emer’s back
was turned to
help Joe, Cormac committed suicide by drinking all the
laudanum rather than
allow Emer to remain behind for his sake, and be caught by
your father and
thrown in prison.”

 

 

“My God, so that’s
why she couldn’t
talk about it,” Dalton sighed bitterly. “Cormac killed himself to
save her.”

 

 

“And to save the
children too.  What
would have happened to them
if Emer had been thrown in jail?” Patrick reminded Dalton.