his debts. I visited him in the Fleet.” He shrugged. “I quickly realized that there was nothing I could do for him. He prefers to be in the prison because it is familiar to him. He feels safe. He is fed and housed. If I buy him out he only seeks its shelter again.” His mouth thinned. “He is an unhappy man but his unhappiness at least is not on my conscience.”
“He is in your pocket,” Merryn said, “bought off by you, your creature.” She felt bitter and frustrated and she could see something in Garrick’s eyes, something of regret and pity that only made her all the angrier. “I’ll go back,” she said. “I’ll find a way to get him to talk.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Garrick said. “You saw what happened today. Next time you might get yourself into far greater difficulties.”
“I would have persuaded them to let me go,” Merryn said.
Garrick grabbed her without warning, his hands biting into her upper arms. His touch was fierce. It was so sudden and so shocking that Merryn could not hold back a gasp.
She had never seen this anger in him before. For a moment she thought he was going to shake her. His eyes were black with fury, his mouth a hard line. She could feel tension radiating from him.
“Persuade them?” he said. “With what?” He bit the words out. “You had no money. And you have only one other commodity to sell.” His gaze raked her with insulting thoroughness. “Would it have been worth it—a few fumbled liberties—for your freedom?”
“Is that what you took from me?” Merryn said. She was shaking now. Her voice was shaking, too. “A few fumbled liberties?”
She heard Garrick swear under his breath. He dropped her onto the seat and pinned her there with one hand on each side of her. She pressed back into the plush cushions, trying to put some distance between them. His physical presence was overwhelming.
“You are too courageous and too stubborn, Lady Merryn,” he said. “You never seem to learn that one day your persistence will get you into trouble.”
He was very close to her. Merryn stared into his eyes. They were the deepest brown, flecked with gold and green and they held her gaze with absolute demand. She felt odd, light-headed. She knew she was an inch away from shifting her gaze to Garrick’s mouth, and then he would kiss her again, or she would kiss him. It was inevitable; and there would be the same undertow of anger and longing and helpless desire in their embrace that there had been before. Her stomach felt odd, tingling with nerves, aching for something deeper.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly. “Tell me about Stephen’s death.”
The change in Garrick was extraordinary. She saw darkness fall across his eyes like a veil, thick, impenetrable, shutting her out. The line of his jaw was as hard as granite. He said nothing at all.
Merryn stared at him, baffled and frustrated, while outside the carriage the flow of people swirled around them, passed by in a blur of color, a moving pageant. She was locked into the still core of it, possessed by the ferocious tension she could sense in Garrick, trapped by the harsh misery in his face.
“Why don’t you speak?” she burst out, after what seemed hours, goaded by fury and misery. “Why do you say nothing?”
He caught her wrists and pulled her close to him.
“There is nothing I can say.” For all his harshness, his breath stirred her hair like a tender caress. She could hear pain in his voice as well as anger. “Nothing will put matters right. Nothing will give you your brother back.”
His hands gentled on her, slid from her slowly, reluctantly. He sat back and Merryn felt shocked and alone, missing his touch, hating herself for feeling so bereft.
“You are home,” Garrick said. “I’ll bid you goodbye.”
There did not seem to be anything else to say. Merryn looked at his face, at the unyielding line of his cheek and jaw and the cold distance in his eyes as they rested on her. He opened the door for her with studied courtesy and then Merryn was standing on the pavement watching the carriage disappear into the press of London traffic.
Garrick had said the previous night that he would stop her inquiries and so far he had been true to his word. He was always a step ahead. She felt so impotent. There was no one who could help her. The truth had been suppressed years ago. But her only alternative was to abandon her quest for justice and it had possessed her for so long that to forsake it now seemed unthinkable. It would leave a huge void in her life and she would not know how to fill it. Besides, that was what Garrick wanted. He wanted her to give in, to concede defeat, and if she did so she would never achieve the justice that Stephen deserved.
That justice would see Garrick Farne swing on the end of a silken rope, convicted for murder.
A long shiver racked her. She thought of Garrick, of his hands on her body and his mouth on hers, of the desire in him and the answering need in her. How could it be that an outcome she had so devoutly sought for twelve years now left her shuddering? For she had the strangest feeling that if she found the evidence she sought, if she held Garrick’s life in her hands, proved him a murderer, she would not be glad, but sorry.
She turned and ran up the steps to the house trying to escape her thoughts. A footman opened the door and bowed her inside. As Merryn stripped off her gloves and unpinned her hat, she noticed a large bundle of papers, tied with ribbon, sitting on the hall table. The table, one of Joanna’s decorative pieces of rosewood furniture that was intended for display not use, looked as though its spindly legs might collapse beneath the weight.
“Merryn, dearest!” Joanna was coming out of the drawing room, Max the terrier clasped in her arms, his velvet green topknot a perfect match for her gown. Alex was following, holding Shuna by the hand as the baby toddled across the marble floor.
“Where have you been?” Joanna said. “You missed luncheon!”
“Nowhere in particular,” Merryn said. She knew that Joanna had no real curiosity and she had no intention of telling either of her sisters anything of her business. She nodded toward the pile of papers.
“What are those?”
“Oh …” Joanna waved a vague hand. “Mr. Churchward sent them over. They are the deeds to Fenners or something else monstrously dull. Alex can sort them out.”
“I’d like to look at them,” Merryn said in a rush.
Joanna looked faintly surprised. “Well, of course, darling,” she said. “If you like. I’ll have someone put them in the library for you.”
Merryn put out a hand and touched the top sheet. It was smooth from age and use and it smelled faintly musty. The ink was fading brown but it felt magical, alive, the first link she had had to her childhood home in over ten years. Her breath caught in her throat and she felt the tears sting her eyes.
Fenners is rightfully yours … I am giving it back …
She could hear Garrick’s voice like a whisper, like a promise. She looked at the writing, the word Fenners on the top of the document pile, a fragile link to another time.
She wished that Garrick did not always make it so difficult to hate him.
“OLD HABITS DIE HARD, FARNE.”
Garrick
