A Lady by Midnight (Spindle Cove #3)

But even if it lasted days, it would be too much. No one could understand just what it meant for Samuel to be confined. Here was a man who’d etched the date of his release on his own arm, working carefully despite the teeth-gritting pain, because he knew he was in danger of losing all hope and forfeiting his last shred of humanity. Accepting chains must be torture for him.

“We’ll find another way,” Susanna said. She looked around the parlor at Lark, Harry, Aunt Marmoset, Minerva . . . finally coming back to Kate. “This is Spindle Cove. Here we have six intelligent, resourceful, strong-willed women in one room. We will not be thwarted by a few unreasonable men and their silly toy-soldier games.”

“That’s right,” Minerva said. “Let’s go through all the alternatives.”

“I can’t run away,” Kate said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Marrying Evan is out of the question, as is marrying anyone else.”

“I know!” Lark said. “Kate, you could take religious vows, so you’re forbidden to marry anyone.”

Aunt Marmoset coughed on her spice drop. “A Gramercy woman, sent to a nunnery? That would be unspeakably cruel—to the abbess, most of all.”

Harry wagged a finger, eyes keen. “Wait a moment. Perhaps she could marry Evan just for a few minutes, and then apply for a dissolution or annulment.”

“I can’t do that,” Kate said. “I did think of it, but the vicar told me annulments aren’t easy to obtain. Plus, it would be dishonest. Evan’s been so good to me—I couldn’t lie to his face that way, reciting vows I’ve no intention to keep.”

“Susanna had the right idea,” Minerva declared. She adjusted her spectacles. “In this village, we beat the men at their own games. If they want to play soldiers, we’ll assemble our own army of ladies. We’ll have at them with bows, pistols, rifles—even a trebuchet, if Sir Lewis will lend it—and stage a jailbreak by force.”

Aunt Marmoset perked up. “My dear, I like the way you think.”

“No, no,” Kate said. “That’s certainly an . . . exciting . . . idea, Min. But we can’t. There’d be too much chance of someone getting hurt, and the last thing Samuel needs is another siege.”

His unpredictable reaction to blasts was at the very heart of the problem.

“Besides, even if we were to break him out of the gaol, that wouldn’t change his mind. We’d just be back where we were last night.”

Kate believed, with all her heart, that she and Samuel could build a happy life together. But when he’d made that bargain with Evan last night, he revealed his own doubts. He’d passed her into someone else’s keeping, the same way he’d left her at Margate two decades ago. He doubted his own worth. And he didn’t believe her when she said she’d give up everything for him. She had run out of ways to convince him with words.

And there was still the problem of public scandal. She couldn’t adopt the family name, then turn around and drag it straight through the seediest lanes of Southwark. Even after Aunt Marmoset’s confessions, she wouldn’t wish that on any of the Gramercys—and she didn’t want that cloud hanging over a marriage to Samuel.

In a nervous gesture, she twisted the ring on her finger, turning the pale pink stone this way and that to catch golden flashes of sun. So beautiful. She couldn’t imagine ever removing it. Samuel had chosen it especially for her.

The stone had inner fire. So did she.

“Well, we must do something,” Minerva said. “Print pamphlets. Stage a hunger strike in the green. Go without our corsets until someone relents. This is Spindle Cove. Heaven forbid we let etiquette and convention carry the day. Just look at your dog. Even he agrees with me.”

Kate looked down at Badger, who was happily gnawing his way through yet another copy of Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom for Young Ladies.

She bent and scratched him behind one funny, half-cocked ear and whispered, “This is all your fault, you know.”

If not for Badger, she might never have pulled the truth from Samuel after the adder bite. She might never have come to know his softer side, and grown to love him for it. Melons would have far less meaning in her life.

In her mind, the wisp of an idea began to coalesce. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . Badger could be the key to this problem, too.

“I think I may know just what to do,” she said, growing excited as she looked around the room at her family and friends. “But I’ll need help getting dressed.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

So this was Spindle Cove’s excuse for a gaol.

Thorne had always wondered about this tiny building settled on the village green, not far from St. Ursula’s. At first he’d assumed it to be a well house for a spring that had long dried up. Then someone told him it used to be a baptistery for the original church.

At any rate, now it was the gaol.