Griffin softened his tone. “Castle Glenmorgan has stood in the same place for centuries. How could anyone, having left a little girl there, claim to have forgotten its location?”
“The mother could have been ill,” Lady Powlis said. “Or perhaps Liam had made an arrangement that… It wouldn’t be the first sin the men of this family have committed.”
She was on the verge of tears.
Sir Daniel glanced at Griffin. “Perhaps the subject of her mother is one we ought to explore.”
“What sort of person would abduct a young girl?” Lady Powlis asked in agitation, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief Harriet gave her.
Harriet put her arms around Primrose’s shoulder. “We’ll find her, I promise. Please don’t cry. I know London like my own be-well, I know places that nobody even dreams exist.”
“And where you are not to go,” Griffin said, staring hard at Sir Daniel. “What do you want us to do? Where do we start? I feel an urgency that mere discussion cannot allay.”
“There is already a search in progress, your grace. For the moment I’m going to ask you all questions that you may not immediately be able to answer. It never hurts to return to the places you took Edlyn, as if you were actors in a play. Perhaps then you will remember something unusual that she did or someone who befriended her.”
Griffin stood. It wasn’t enough for him to answer bloody questions. He needed to be part of the search. He was Edlyn’s uncle, her guardian, and though he had never told her, nor she him, they could not afford to lose each other. She had been his sullen fairy from the first time he had hoisted her on his shoulders to let her swing on the castle’s wrought-iron chandelier.
Now he realized that she had been keeping secrets, and he was startled when he saw Sir Daniel lean forward to address Harriet in a low voice that suggested familiarity. Griffin was afraid to ask what the exact nature of their association had been.
“Miss Boscastle said that Miss Edlyn might have confided her thoughts in you,” Sir Daniel said.
“I shall do my best to remember,” Harriet replied, “but there were only a few times that she seemed to speak her mind.”
Harriet wondered if she could keep her promise to the duke. Once she could have drawn out maps of London’s underworld wards and secret courts where only the hardest of criminals would venture. Few outsiders had the right of entry. Fewer still emerged alive.
There were hundreds of places to hide an abducted girl in London. And countless more for a girl who might not want to be found. Still, Harriet and Sir Daniel agreed that Edlyn had likely been taken against her will.
She frowned, suddenly realizing that Griffin and Lord Heath had not only risen but were making their way to the door. “We’re going for a ride with Drake and Devon,” the duke explained at her questioning look. “Stay with Primrose.” He looked back at the tall man who had not moved from his chair. “I trust you will be safe for now with Sir Daniel.”
Harriet wanted to go with him. The pain in his eyes reminded her of a beast who had taken a hunter’s arrow to the heart. If she tried to pull out the arrow, he might bleed to death. Or lash out at her as he struggled to survive. He would not rest until he found his niece.
It seemed as if all the men she had ever known were half made up of darkness. Her father. Her brothers. One day they would fight to protect her. The next she might well be fighting them to protect herself.
“Let us know if there is news,” she said. “Send word no matter what time it is.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Edlyn stared out the cracked window at the gin shop on the corner. It was dark outside, and she doubted anyone could see her from the street.
“I tell you, Rosalie, that girl is a witch. The picture did not fall off the wall by itself. She made it happen.” The man wiped a dribble of wine from his chin. “It’s the Welsh blood that makes her wicked.”
“And the Boscastle blood that makes her wealthy,” his companion, a woman in her thirties, said in a flat voice. “Remember that, and pray do not spit when you talk.”
Jonathan Harvey watched Edlyn from a safe distance across the room. He wore an ill-fitting jacket, with a soiled cravat and fustian trousers. He and his lover, Rosalie Porter, lived in this unappealing tenement off what Edlyn had deduced was Hanging Sword Alley.
If she was going to be held for ransom, Edlyn vowed to wreak the revenge that only a girl of her age could carry out.
Rosalie Porter gave her a narrow glance. “You aren’t a witch, dear, are you?”
Edlyn smiled.
The gray cat preening on the hearth stretched suddenly and sauntered to Edlyn’s side. She knelt to stroke his ears. His purrs vibrated in the silence of the shabby parlor.
“What did I tell you?” Jonathan sputtered, moving behind the oak settle for good measure.
“Get away from that window.” Mrs. Porter rushed across the room, the hem of her dressing robe disturbing the dust on the floor. “You don’t want anyone to see that pretty face. Might give our neighbors some ideas.”
Edlyn pressed her bitten nails down on the windowsill. Mrs. Porter might not want anyone to see her face, either, smeared as it was with her Parisienne pomatum that promised to remove freckles, warts, and spots. Before she went to bed, Mrs. Porter would discover her costly elixir had removed something else, too. When sent to fetch the pomatum, Edlyn had come upon another jar of salve in the cupboard, which claimed to be Cleopatra’s secret formula for lifting off hair.
She swallowed bitterly. She had been a fool to believe Mrs. Porter’s story about her mother. She’d been a fool to sneak out of the castle one night to watch a troupe of traveling actors perform in the village. How the woman must have laughed at her naïveté, a duke’s daughter asking over and over if any of the players had met a woman who could be Edlyn’s mother during their travels.
She had given Rosalie Porter the idea for her abduction. She had believed the letters Mrs. Porter had sent from London convincing her that she had found Edlyn’s mother but that it must be kept a secret from the Boscastle family.
Edlyn’s entire past seemed to be a secret, which had begun the night her mother rowed her across a choppy lake to land on the shores of Castle Glenmorgan. She barely remembered the older man in the boat, her grandfather, his bearded face solemn. He had kissed her before lifting her out of the water. And Edlyn had stood, her teeth chattering with the horror of being abandoned. She had tried to believe she was only going to stay at the castle for a short while, and that in the sunlight it looked like heaven.
She had stared up, clutching her cloak.
The turrets of the castle touched the evening clouds, but it didn’t look heavenly at all, only dark and imposing. Still, gold light shone in the windows. And as she trudged up the drawbridge, she heard laughing voices, warm and lilting, and smelled the enticing fragrance of griddle cakes and leek soup. But then her mother had turned away.
She panicked. “You’re coming back for me, Mama?”
Her mother’s face looked ghostly pale. “When I can,” she’d whispered, and squeezed Edlyn’s hand so tightly they both started to cry. “Mama?”
“Edlyn, I will find you again.” “Please, don’t make me go.”
“They’ll be good to you. These people are kind, I promise. One day I’ll find you. I promise.”
Six years. And then nine. Edlyn looked from the tower first thing every morning and last thing at night for her mother to keep her promise. She was afraid that Mama and her grandfather had drowned rowing back across to the cove. No one had heard of the man and woman she described, not even when the duke, her alleged father, had ridden with his brothers and guards into every border town to find out who had left a little girl with unearthly-blue eyes at the castle drawbridge.