Page 15 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)
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The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error.
—Michael Faraday
Four years ago, Phoebe let rage control her. Not until she’d gone so far—too far for her friends to forgive her—did she realize that by fighting back at her father with the same weapons he used, she had become him.
All she’d wanted was to live loud enough that no one could erase her.
Phoebe couldn’t find the energy to say this to Grantham. The earl was so large, his body took up the entire aisle of the train car and then some. Inside the car, the shock of Grantham’s announcement—a bomb had gone off amid a crowd of police called in to break up a pro-Chartist rally and she was suspected of setting it—was still reverberating in Phoebe’s ears.
“You can accompany us to Athena’s Retreat while we sort this out. Everything will be over quickly,” said Grantham. The last sentence was for Karolina, who was trying to calm Moti, whose voice rose until the icy edge of hysteria coated her words.
“ Kur mes einame? ” Moti asked. “Where are we going?”
Grantham thought Phoebe might have done it. She could tell by the way he looked everywhere but directly at her.
Sam climbed back onto the train.
“Right, I’ve talked to Grey. This is how things are going to go.” Sam pushed past Grantham and came to stand in front of Phoebe, blocking her view of the exit. “Lord Grantham will take Lady Karolina and your mother back to Hunt House.”
Sam, on the other hand, did not look at her with suspicion. Instead, he regarded her with ambivalence.
Phoebe’s stomach churned while Sam loaded Grantham with boxes and extra coats and hampers. Before her mother finished tying her bonnet ribbon, Sam had thrown Phoebe’s coat over her shoulders.
“Lady Phoebe, you and I will exit the back of the train and meet Greycliff at the other end of the station for safety’s sake.” Not even a hint of surprise in his voice. No outward sign of shock that Grantham had accused her of setting a bomb, no censure—it was as if Sam had already known what Grantham would say.
Had Sam known? This entire time at Prentiss Manor, the kisses, the card games, the tumbling over furniture, had it been an act the entire time?
The floor of the train car beneath her feet disappeared, and Phoebe stumbled like a drunkard—like a stupid child—toward the back door, away from her mother and sister. Grantham’s voice was low and soothing even though Moti had not stopped asking questions in Lithuanian and not waiting for an answer before asking another one.
“Kas vyksta?”
“K? tu darai?”
“Faster, now, before they figure out what we’ve done.” Sam’s words hit her like tiny pellets, but Phoebe couldn’t absorb them.
There were too many people at the station, and the train heaved and growled like a living thing, smoke from the engine combined with soot from the rails and the dirt from the fog outside.
Not until he pulled her from the platform and onto a set of wooden steps that led away from the station exit and toward the blackened steel tracks did Phoebe understand.
They were running away.
“What…where are we going?” she whispered, although no one would hear her over the din surrounding them.
“I don’t know.” Craning his neck toward the sky, Sam moved his arm from her elbow to grasp her hand in his. “But we have two minutes before Grey realizes we’re not coming around front. You’ll have to get rid of your bonnet so we can hide in the crowd.”
Sam hadn’t known.
It hadn’t been a trap.
A surge of relief washed through Phoebe, followed by satisfaction. For the first time since she left America, her lungs expanded all the way.
No one had been more surprised than Phoebe at how quickly she’d taken to the role of private agent for Tierney & Co. Folks paid a tidy sum for a Tierney agent’s services. Unlike their colleagues in London who were called upon for discreet services for the Crown, the American agents were most often called upon by the wealthy.
Railroad barons, financiers, men with both “new” money and “old”—they knew a Tierney agent could be counted on for intelligence and discretion. Receiving letters threatening to expose a mistress unless a payment was made? Tierney’s agents would find out who sent it. Suspect arson in a train fire? Sabotage in a shoe factory?
Assignments deemed too refined for whatever sheriffs might have jurisdiction or require intricate plotting beyond the scope of private police forces, such as the railway police—this work came to Tierney’s agents.
“We should not take a direct route,” Phoebe said quietly, steering Sam to a narrow alley. “No matter where we are going, it makes sense to double back and see what manner of search Greycliff and Grantham mean to employ.”
“I see…” Sam trotted along at Phoebe’s side. His bemused gaze tickled her cheek, but she kept walking, not too fast and not too slow.
“If they have help, it will be good to know if they’re on horseback or a single conveyance. We’ll want to take the smaller streets but be sure not to go down alleys that come out into a courtyard, in case we are cut off.” Within moments, she had copied the gait and mannerisms of the people around them.
“Ahh, well…”
Phoebe tensed when Sam took her elbow but allowed him the liberty when she looked at the people passing them by on the street. In this section of town, they passed as a barrister and his wife hurrying home for an afternoon meal.
“Give me your topper,” she said.
Without questioning, Sam handed her his felted top hat and Phoebe slapped it against a dirty brick wall two or three times.
“Oi,” he protested. “That’s a new hat.”
Phoebe brushed off the worst of the brick dust and gave it back to him. Now Sam looked more like a harried barrister and less like a man of wealth. She let her shawl slip from her shoulders, leaving it on the railing of a stoop. Surreptitiously she pulled the silken flowers off her bonnet crown. When they rounded a corner, she ducked into a doorway and turned her pelisse inside out.
The benefit of having the best seamstresses in her younger days. The inside of the coat was as well made as the outside, and no one would notice the seams unless they were looking closely, but the color of the inside lining was less noticeable.
“What were you doing in America these past few years?” Sam queried, leaning in so the brim of his hat poked her now-ribbonless bonnet askew.
“Impressed, are we?” she asked.
“We are.” Sam took her arm as a barrister might do for his wife, and they left the station and its occupants far behind.
“Believe me when I say it truly was a punishment at first,” Phoebe confided, then pulled Sam into a niche between buildings, searching the crowd for familiar faces. “Americans do not stray far from their reputations as loud and unmannered.”
From oil barons to farmhands, the people Phoebe met in America had been loud. They’d also seemed more colorful, happier, freer than folks back here in England.
“Why do you think that is?” Sam asked.
She pulled her gaze away from the crowds and stared at him. The niche was small and he stood partly behind her, half his body pressed up against hers. He appeared to be searching the crowd as well, but a pulse in his neck had sped, and the way he grasped her elbow spoke to her of an equal awareness on his part that if they turned a few inches toward each other, they would be in a full embrace.
Dropping her eyes, Phoebe tried to freeze from the inside out, blocking the heat that threatened to fog her head or cause her to make stupid choices.
“I think that on a small island where the goal of exploration is conquest, people grow complacent.”
The way mountains sliced open the blue skies, the sheer expanse of forests where few humans had ever tread, the simple size of the place—all that gave people room to breathe, to fill their lungs, to demand better.
“You admire them, the Americans,” Sam said.
“Hmmm.” Phoebe nodded in affirmation. “If only they could make a bloody cup of tea.”