Ghost of the Thames Page 17

  In his mind he played back the events of the night that Sophy had stepped in front of his carriage. He remembered her words.

  She saved me from the river. She didn’t have to but she was there. She knew my name. She asked me to follow her.

  His head sank into his hands. He recalled the other nights when she had put herself in danger in the city. The night on the Isle of Dogs. For someone who never had been in London in her entire life, she had somehow known exactly where to go to find those enslaved children in the warehouse. She had somehow found her way to Hammersmith Village and to that tavern.

  Sophy had risked her life to save strangers. And tonight. There was no way she could have known where to find Amelia's hidden jewels. She was speaking the truth.

  Spirit. Amelia was dead. The realization brought with it a crushing grief. He'd failed his sister. The promise to protect her only child.

  “Pardon me, Captain.”

  The pleading voice of one of the servants jerked his attention toward the door. “What is it?”

  “Mr. Reeves needs you downstairs, sir.”

  He pushed up to his feet. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Miss Sophy, sir. She is demanding to be let out of the house.”

  CHAPTER 27

  From the very first night when she had crawled out of the river and into Edward's path, Sophy had been directed by the spirit of Amelia. Driven by the apparition of his niece into all kinds of dangers. Edward knew that. He'd witnessed her struggle. Her helplessness. He knew how, against all odds, she had been taken to the exact place where help was needed. If there was anyone who could testify to the guided purpose in her actions, it was Edward.

  Sophy had bared her soul. Spoken the truth. Only to be told by him that she was a liar.

  She could endure almost any wound but that. She would not stay a moment longer. She needed to get away from Edward. Away from him and the searing pain his words and actions inflicted.

  Her voice shook. “Are you telling me that I am a prisoner in this house, Mr. Reeves?” Sophy was angry enough to try to remove the old man physically from her path. Changing into her battered riding clothes in a rush, she just wanted to get as far away from this place as she could.

  “No, miss. I have ordered a carriage. The servants will open the door for you as soon as it arrives.”

  He was lying. She knew it. From the time she came downstairs, the doormen had refused to let her out until the butler was summoned. And no one had called for a carriage, either. The same two men now stood behind Reeves, blocking her way.

  “I will wait at the curb. Stand aside.”

  “It’s raining, miss. If you would be kind enough to wait just a few moments more.”

  An expression of relief washed over the aged face of the man as Sophy heard footsteps coming down the steps. She didn’t turn around. Her attention was focused solely on the door and how quickly she could get out of this house.

  “Leave us.” Edward’s sharp order scattered everyone in her path.

  She didn’t hesitate, but hurried toward the door. As she reached for the handle, her arm was caught in his viselike grip.

  “Let me go this instant,” she said thinly under her breath.

  He turned her around. “Don’t be ridiculous. You are injured, and you are not leaving this house in the middle of the night.”

  “I will do as I wish.” She tried to shake him loose. His grip only tightened. She avoided looking onto his face. She did not want to see the hurt she’d seen in his eyes upstairs. “Let me go.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I am finished talking. Release me, Captain.”

  He started pulling her toward the library, and she lost her temper completely. She kicked him hard on the shin, and as he let go of her arm, she dashed across the foyer toward the door.

  Once again, she was only a step away when he caught her, this time lifting her by the waist off the ground and hauling her toward the library.

  “Put me down.” Suspended in the midair, she tried to hit him, but he was holding her with her back to him.

  “You're making a scene, Sophy.”

  “I am making a scene? You have no right to be manhandling me.”

  He went through the door, shutting it behind him. She heard the turn of a key. Crossing the room, he dropped her on a sofa and walked away. She sat up and watched him use a taper above the dying fire to light a lamp. She bolted for the door.

  “The key is in my pocket.”

  She tested the doors. They were locked. She banged against them, knowing that no one would answer it in this house. Defeated, Sophy leaned her forehead against the cool wood and tried to control her emotions. Sorrow, hurt, anger, confusion.

  “Please. I beg you to let me go.”

  She winced when she felt his hands on her shoulders. Sophy hadn’t heard him approach. She didn’t fight him when he turned her around to face him.

  “But I want you to stay,” he said quietly.

  Sophy looked up into his grief-stricken face and fell apart. Sobs overwhelmed her as he gathered her tightly against his chest. She held on to him, her emotions wracking her body. It wasn’t her own loss that Sophy cried for, but for what she had seen tonight of Amelia in that open pit of a grave. She wept for Edward’s young niece. She could not tell him that his Amelia would never be found. She was lost somewhere among the bodies of scores of nameless women. Women who had to have kin, as well, who have worried and mourned for them, never knowing what had become of their own beloved children and mothers and sisters.

  And her tears had an added bitterness, for Sophy knew that she too would have been one of those bodies. Pulled out of the water or gathered up from the muck of the riverbank, she would have been thrown without ceremony into a mass grave, if it had not been for Amelia’s spirit.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there, wrapped in his arms, before Edward led her to the sofa. Sinking into the cushions, he gathered her again to him. His shirt was wet from her tears. She accepted his handkerchief and tried to wipe her face clean, but there seemed to be no end to them.

  “You see her.”

  Sophy understood that he would have dozens of questions. She looked up into his face. The grief showed in his eyes. “You believe me?”

  “You have nothing to gain by telling an untruth. And I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  She pressed her cheek to his chest and listened to his heart beating.

  “Talk to me, Sophy.” His hand caressed her back.

  “Yes, I see her. But not all the time. She only appears to me when she has a task to accomplish. Her directions are always the same. She tells me to follow her.”

  “Until tonight, I never made the connection that the spirit appearing to me might be your niece, Amelia.”

  “So she is dead, then.”

  Again she saw the image of the grave. She couldn’t tell him, though. Not when she had no way to help him find the place or the body.

  “Yes, she is. Tonight was the first time I heard your niece’s name from Mrs. Perkins. You have never said anything to me of her disappearance or your search. And even after I was told, I didn’t make the connection that she was the same person who had saved me from the river.”

  “And she was here tonight.”

  Sophy nodded. “She appeared to me in the bedroom. She wanted me to help her clear her name. I had no way of knowing that the room across the hall was Amelia’s. She led me there and showed me everything. And then she told me what I should say as I gave you the box.”

  “Is she here now?”

  Sophy lifted her head off his chest. Through bleary eyes, she looked about the large library. The light from the dying fire and the single lamp he’d lit did not reach the far corners of the room. “No. She disappeared after I gave you the box.”

  “And no one else sees her.”

  “You have been with me several times when Amelia has led me places. She is invisible to others.”

  His tone told he
r that he was puzzled, but there was not a hint of condemnation.

  “And she came to you the first time when you were in the river.”

  “I was underwater and suddenly became conscious. I knew I was drowning. I might have already been dead. But she told me it was not time. She helped me out of the river. She knew my name. She led me to you.”

  “You have never mentioned her since that night. Why?”

  Sophy sat up on the sofa and wiped at her face again. “I myself doubted what happened in the river until she appeared to me again. If I told you, you would never have believed me. Even now, you are struggling to believe me.” She looked into his eyes. “I am not mad, Edward, and I am telling the truth.”

  “I know.” He gently touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “But I am still tormented by thoughts of where Amelia went and, if she is gone, what happened to her. And I cannot understand how a sixteen-year-old girl who led a protected life of wealth and privilege could know so much about this sordid side of London. Or why she would want to expose you to it.”

  “I have asked myself the same question. Why did she choose to save me? And why did she call me Sophy?”

  “Because your name is Sophy,” Edward told her. He took her hand. “Your name is Catherine Sophia Warren. She knew who you were when she reached in that river.”

  She looked at him, confused. “You know who I am?”

  He nodded. “Now it is your turn to be angry with me. I learned of your true identity the day after we visited Professor Acton at the Geographical Society. Actually, Dickens was the one who pieced the puzzle together. You are the Warren shipping heiress who supposedly fell off the deck of a ship during a storm. You were just arriving from India.”

  She stared at him. Of course. That was why she knew the language, the history, the culture of India. Most of what she could recall consisted of memories of her childhood in India.

  “Your uncle, John Warren, is the man who stands to gain the most from this situation. He is your guardian, and he oversees your inheritance, until you turn twenty-one. The papers have been reporting his efforts to have you declared dead, and that your death was accidental.”

  Sophy’s spine stiffened. She felt cold. She pushed herself to her feet and walked toward the fireplace. Standing in front of it, she could feel no heat from the dying embers.

  “You have every right to be furious with me for not telling you all of this before. But I was afraid that you’d return to John Warren too soon, and—if he is the villain I think he is—I didn’t want him to have the chance of finishing what he started.”

  Catherine Sophia Warren. Snatches of memories began coming back--singly, at first, and then more and more. In her mind the name danced to a familiar tune. Sophia. She was always Sophia when she lived in Bengal. She had been transformed to Catherine when the man with the limp and the ivory-headed cane stepped onto the deck of the ship. He’d called her Catherine. The taste of bile climbed into her mouth. She had no recollection of his face, but she remembered disliking him.

  And she remembered her ships. Her ships. Her father had always spoken of her ships, of the ports. There was so much that he taught her of the business that was to be hers. But she could not remember him.

  She turned to Edward. “Is this John Warren my only relative?”

  “Your father died suddenly last spring. In Bengal. You have other relatives on your mother’s side of the family. Some distant cousins that you’ve apparently never seen, Dickens says. John Warren is your closest kin. He had been running the London side of the shipping company for your father, and he will continue to run it until you come of age.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Mid-January. Two and half months from now. That is when, by law, you can take over the management of your inheritance. But if there is any suggestion of, well . . . insanity or mental incompetence, he could potentially strip you of that control.”

  Sophy felt something inside her tighten. A taut cord of independence, of self-confidence, had been strung within her from an early age. It was what made her so different from the young women at the Cottage. And she now understood the source of it. She had been raised to be strong. This was her life and she would fight John Warren for it.

  “I wonder how well he knows me,” Sophy said quietly.

  “He has only met you once in the past ten years. That was the night you disappeared.”

  Sophy rubbed the back of her neck as she started pacing the room. Something happened that night. A conversation had taken place. Something had been said that she couldn’t remember. But whatever it was, suddenly she had known that she needed to get away from that ship. She had no choice.

  Yesterday, a man had stepped in front of her and fired a pistol. That was no random act of violence. There had been no mistaking that she was his target.

  Edward had known her life was in danger. She looked across the room at him. He watched her, concern etched in every feature. He expected her to be angry for holding back what he knew of her identity. On the contrary, she was indebted to him for keeping her safe. He was the only one in the world that she was certain she could trust.

  Another thought occurred to her.

  “Priya. She was with me that last night on the ship. If I see her, if I can speak to her . . .” She paused. “Does anyone know where she is?”

  “Yes. She is being kept at your uncle's house. Dickens tried to see her, but he was turned away.”

  Sophy wrapped her arms around her middle and stared blankly ahead. Knowing who she was, finding she had a name and position and wealth, didn’t ease her burden.

  The room was quiet. Neither said anything for the longest time. Then, she looked over at Edward and felt her throat tighten. Elbows on his knees, he was staring into the ashes of what was left of the fire, lost in a world of his own. Tonight, Sophy had discovered her past, and he had found that an innocent girl who had been left in his care was never coming back.

  She walked over and sat next to him on the sofa. She reached for his hand and brought it to her lap. His hand was large and strong. It was dark and weathered. A thin white scar ran from his knuckles and disappeared beneath the cuff of his shirt. This was a hand that had held fast in tempest and in battle. When she looked up, his dark eyes were looking searchingly into hers.

  “Can you forgive me for what I have held back from you?”

  “Held back? You have continually showered me with generosity. You have treated me with the utmost respect. You have carefully introduced me into society and kept me safe from those who wanted to cause me harm.”

  “So the answer is no, you cannot forgive me.”

  Sophy laughed softly. “Clearly, I have a great deal to be angry about.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “Reproach is the farthest thing from my mind, Edward.”

  His arm wrapped around her, and he pulled her into a tight embrace. He just held her, and she knew this was what both of them needed at this moment. There were so many things to think through, but right now Sophy’s strength came from the knowledge that she hadn’t lost him. He still wanted her in his life.

  *

  It had been too long. Edward had to have her. She was as impatient as he as they raced upstairs. Once in the bedroom, he locked the door and turned to her. Her eyes shone with desire. In an instant, they were tugging at each others clothes, neither slowing until they fell naked in each others arms onto the bed.

  Her dark eyes looked into his. The intensity of her gaze made Edward realize that she was no longer thinking of her newfound identity or of the hurt he had caused her. She was focused only on him.

  “I have been wishing for this since the first time we made love." Her voice was soft, like the rustle of wind in the trees. "From that first night."

  He cupped her cheek with one hand. “So have I.”

  "But you stayed away."

  "I was keeping your identity from you. I felt I was betraying you."

  "No more apologies," she whispere
d, tracing the furrows on his brow. She caressed the line of his jaw and touched his lips. She kissed his chin. “No more reproaches.”

  “I will never stay away again.”

  Her feathery touch was sending waves of heat downward through his body. They lay close enough that it was impossible for her to miss his rising manhood pressing against her.

  "I will hold you to that promise."

  He smiled and lowered his head, tasting her lips, her cheek, the delicious hollow of her neck.

  She stretched her body, sliding one foot along his leg. Her fingers traced the muscles of his back.

  He kissed her lips gently, feeling her body form to his. She tasted sweet, her mouth hot as she let his tongue inside. Edward’s fingers threaded into her silky hair as their mouths moved searchingly against each other. Hunger continued to build in him, and he fought his body's craving to take what she offered…fast, hard. He had to calm the roar in his head and focus on giving this beautiful and trusting woman what she desired. What she deserved. He wanted Sophy forget about all that had happened, about all the sadness and danger she'd experienced.

  His fingers moved from knee to thigh to the junction of flesh above. She was already moist, ready for him. He slipped a finger deep inside and groaned as her body clutched at him, welcoming his intrusion. His thumb slid between her damp folds, finding the sensitive crown. Edward watched as Sophy arched her back and pressed against his touch.

  He kissed her jaw, her neck, before mouthing her breast.

  She tried to pull him on top of her. “Take me, Edward. Come inside of me.”

  Edward was ready. Too ready, he thought. He wrapped his arm around her waist and rolled on the bed until she was on top of him. She looked at him in surprise and sat up, her hands flat on his chest. Her hair draped like a lustrous blanket over her alabaster skin. Her breasts, full and perfect, waited to be tasted. He positioned against her wetness.

  “Take me inside of you.”

  She leaned forward, letting the end of her thick hair sweep over his chest and pushing Edward even closer to the edge.