Days of Gold (Edilean 2)

“I drugged you.”

“You—?” She sat up abruptly, but then it was as though all the blood rushed to her head and it felt like it might explode. She fell back against the pillows with a groan. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

Edilean turned and looked at her with eyes as hard as steel. “I don’t know what I remember. I want to be told the truth. What happened?”

Harriet sat down on the chair by the bed. “Do you remember Angus coming to your room?”

It took Edilean a moment, but then she remembered every second of that night, every word, every touch. Most of all, she remembered the way she’d begged him to marry her and take her with him. But he’d turned her down. Spurned her. Tossed her away, as though she were worthless.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I remember all of that. But why am I... ?” She looked at Harriet. “I tore up my room.”

“Yes,” Harriet said. “You cut the bed to ri

bbons with your penknife and you broke all the furniture except for the big chest. You even cut up your pretty dresses.”

“Good,” Edilean said. “They were never mine anyway. Who brought me in here?”

“Cuddy.”

Edilean looked at her in question.

“Cuthbert, the second footman. I’m afraid I’m going to have to let him go. He enjoyed holding you to the bed much too much.”

“Don’t discharge him, give him a pay increase,” Edilean said. “It’s nice that some man on earth wants to touch me. I guess you gave me laudanum. Your brother was a master at passing it out.”

For a moment Harriet didn’t say anything as she looked at Edilean. “Please don’t let this make you bitter.”

“And what should it make me? Happy that I got away from a man who doesn’t want me? I could have married him and spent the rest of my life trying to prove to him that I was more than just a useless piece of fluff. You know what he told me? That he should marry someone like Tabitha.”

“And who is Tabitha?”

“A thief on the ship, one of the women prisoners. She told Angus a long story about how she’d been unjustly punished because she fell in love with her employer. She even said she’d given birth to his stillborn child. Oh! And having the baby was why she stole in the first place. According to Tabitha, the Holy Mother wasn’t as good as she is.” Edilean looked at Harriet. “You know what the truth was?”

“What?” Harriet asked, frowning, her worry about Edilean’s anger showing.

“Margaret told me Tabitha was one of the best pickpockets in London.”

“Margaret?”

Edilean waved her hand. “Another one of the prisoners. She did some sewing for me. Margaret told me that Tabitha had grown up on a farm, but she ran off because she wanted the excitement of the city, and that’s where she learned how to pick pockets.”

Edilean raised her fists in the air. “But Angus believed every word that lying woman said! She told him a sob story about her life and he swallowed it. He was like a fish taking the bait and waiting to be reeled in. Yet he never believed anything I said. I told him I’d had a difficult life and he said I’d always had the cushion of my father’s money to fall back on.”

Harriet put her hands on her lap and didn’t look at Edilean for fear she’d see the agreement on her face. Maybe Angus was wrong to believe a thief—if he actually did—but he wasn’t wrong in his assessment of Edilean. She took the way Harriet ran the household and looked after her in stride, never once questioning that these things should be done for her.

Edilean again tried to sit up on the bed but collapsed against it, as she was still dizzy.

“You still have the laudanum in your system,” Harriet said as she went to her. “I think you should sleep some more. Tomorrow will be soon enough to—”

“Start a new life?” Edilean asked, one eyebrow raised. “Another one? A new life when my father died, a new life with my uncle, a new life with James, and now I’m in a new life in a new country. What am I to do this time? Choose one of those namby-pamby men you introduce me to and marry him?”

Suddenly, Harriet had had all she could take. “If you don’t want a namby-pamby man, then you should stop being such a delicate lady.” With that, she left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

“What does that mean?” Edilean called out after her. “I’m not delicate, I’m—” She started to get up, but her head hurt so much that she lay back down. She stayed in bed but she didn’t sleep. Later, she heard Harriet closing up the house before she climbed the stairs and went across the hall into Edilean’s bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t say good night.

“Why does everyone think I’m worthless?” she whispered in the dark. Angus said she was a woman who waited for a man to rescue her and that they always showed up. While it was true that James had rescued her from her uncle, and Angus had saved her from James, there had been times in her life when she’d done things on her own. She’d...