Fall from Trace Read online

  She had four nieces and five nephews now, and she’d only met the first. She’d never seen the rest, never held them, never played with them until their giggles filled the air. She’d never met two of her sisters-in-law and had no idea what they thought of her.

  Or what they’d been told.

  Most days Poppy was too busy to consider any of this, and she was grateful for those days. They kept her from worrying, from thinking, and most especially, from remembering. She never thought about that day her parents had told her to give up Alex or be cut off, or the day the family had left her to close up Whitesdown and then find a place for herself.

  She couldn’t think about any of it.

  She couldn’t bear to think about the last day she had seen Alex, how handsome he had been and how reluctant to leave her he’d been. His kisses had had a hard, passionate edge to them that day, something that almost frightened her for its meaning. He’d promised to ask her a most particular question upon his return, and he hoped she would answer favorably.

  And then the day that word had been delivered to her of Alex’s death…

  Poppy pushed up out of her chair quickly, moving to gather the dishes from supper and beginning to clean them. She needed her hands to be occupied, a task to fulfill, or it would all come rushing back to her. She scrubbed the plates with more determination than they needed, wishing she could scrub out the sight in her mind’s eye.

  She could replay every moment of that terrible day as though she were watching a play on a stage, a witness to her own grief and horror. She could see the tears slowly roll down her cheeks, the distant look that had stayed with her for days, the slow and painful way she’d moved. There’d been no funeral, no body, and no grave she could visit. Lost at sea, they’d said, and buried there.

  How convenient.

  His uncle, Lord Parkerton, had died just the year before, and he had no other family that she knew of. There was no one to mourn him but her. And oh, how she mourned him! She could still feel the burn of shame in her cheeks when she’d donned black and her friends had whispered about it.

  Her friends were all married now, and none of them had spoken with Poppy since her family had left. In fact, just the other day, two of them had come out of the milliner’s shop when Poppy had been passing by, and they had both turned their backs and pretended not to see. It was not the first time one or more of her former friends had done something like that.

  None of Poppy’s neighbors shunned her or minded her addresses. They tended to welcome her with open arms, and often with a friendly basket. Some knew her story and situation, and some had heard the gossip, but not a one of them cared.

  For all the airs of the upper class, they had none of the warmth of their inferiors in station.

  Poppy was glad to have traded one for the other in that regard.

  Yet neighbors did not equate to friendship, and they each worked as hard and struggled as much as she, so there was no real time for outings or teatime conversations. They did not meet often, nor regularly, but they could be called upon in cases of emergency and had done for each other.

  Poppy had yet to experience such generosity and selflessness herself, but she had been part of it on behalf of others.

  It was a fine way of living, to be sure, and quite rewarding.

  But loneliness is a creeping creature, and its pangs were deep and ravaging. In the evenings, when work was completed and she had so much to tell, there was no one to listen. When she missed her sister or her brothers, her parents, or her life, there was no one to commiserate with. When she cried in the night because Alex was gone and no one cared but her, there was no relief. When she felt more alone than anyone ought to feel, there was no one to take away the darkness.

  No one to share her burdens with.

  The only person she had in her life with any sort of regularity was Stanton, and he would not take kindly at all to her sharing such personal and emotional thoughts with him. It would have made him uncomfortable and gruff, and he probably would have told her to focus on her work and the farm and forget everything else. He had once told her emotions were a nuisance, after all, and that the past was only good for lessons.

  Not for visiting and staying for a time.

  Poppy was only too prone to spend an extended period of time in her past these days, though she knew it wouldn’t do her any good.

  The trouble was that it was too easy.

  She scrubbed at the pot harder, her brow furrowing with the effort, and when she stopped, she looked at her hands. Once these hands had been delicate and soft, protected by gloves more often than not, fair and without blemish but for the occasional pricking of an embroidery needle. Her nails had been clean and manicured, the perfect embodiment of a fine lady. Every now and again, there might be a scratch on the skin from getting into mischief with Alex by climbing a tree or racing across their properties, but her hands had been fairly perfect.

  Now, they were rough and worn, weathered by hard work and aggressive labor. She had callouses on her palm, on every fingertip, and along the edges of each finger. Her knuckles were often inflamed, and her skin cracked and peeled regularly. Lines and scars and dry patches dotted every surface of her hands, and her nails were almost brutally short, uneven, and usually had something under them, be it dirt or food or feed for the animals.

  These hands were not those of a young lady.

  Then again, Poppy could hardly be considered young anymore. Twenty-seven was not particularly old, but in those twenty-seven years, she had lived a lifetime, and she was decades older than anyone of her age. Her life did not even remotely resemble what she had thought out for herself, what she had planned, or anything like it once had.

  She closed her eyes and set the pot aside, knowing it was far cleaner now than it had ever been with her excessive scrubbing.

  This was what her life amounted to now. Scrubbing the pots and plates from her own meals, feeding the chickens and pigs, currying the horses, farming with whatever help she could afford to pay, even grinding her own flour to make her own bread, at times.

  Oh, how far she had fallen.

  Lonely and cast out, working for every morsel of bread, sweating her days away in the sun, and mourning a man who had never promised her anything.

  Poppy’s hands curled into fists and hot tears filled her eyes. It was wrong to resent a dead man, she knew, but resent him she did. If he hadn’t have died, if that was what had truly happened, she would not be in this situation. He could have just broken off their impending engagement, and she would have been with her family now. She should have been wiser, not giving her heart so freely without the official connection between them.

  Never mind that they had been in love since she was fourteen and he sixteen. Never mind that they had been planning to marry for years. Never mind that she was so utterly and completely his that she hadn’t been whole in almost five years.

  She should have been wiser.

  And it was his fault she was so destitute, despairing, and dismal.

  It was his fault she had grown so attached.

  It was his fault she still felt the ache within her at the thought of him.

  It was his fault that when she looked out of her kitchen window and could see the shadows of Parkerton Lodge in the distance, she still looked for a light in any window.

  As she did now.

  But there were no lights within, and no lights without, and the crumbling estate looked as foreboding and desolate as it had the day the servants had departed it.

  Poppy exhaled slowly, wiping her hands on dry toweling. She couldn’t do this anymore. Couldn’t watch for him, wait for him, ache for him. He wasn’t coming back, and this was the life she had chosen for herself. This was her future, and looking back would not make it any brighter.

  She was done.

  She had to be.

  A knock on her door brought her head around, and she waited for Stanton to enter. When he didn’t, and the knock came again, more firmly, she
rolled her eyes as she moved to the door.

  “Honestly, Stanton,” she moaned loudly. “It’s not so cold that you had to fill your arms to the brim with wood.”

  She reached for the door handle and pulled the door open, fixing her expression into one of mocking amusement.

  The man who stood there stared at her with his dark, sunken eyes, leaning both forearms against the doorframe, his chest heaving wildly, and her amusement faded at once.

  She knew that face. She knew the line of that jaw, the dark eyes that were endless in their depths, the nose with a slight crook in the bridge from where her brother had walloped him with a tree branch ten years ago. He was thinner, terrifyingly so, and his face was hollow and gaunt, sickly in color despite being tanned, and covered with a sheen of perspiration. His dark hair was cut brutally short, but it, and the scruff on the lower half of his face, were as dark as his eyes, if not darker still.

  All changes aside, she knew that man better than any person on this earth.

  “Alex…” she breathed, her voice catching on his name.

  His corded throat worked on a swallow. “Poppy.”

  Her hand lashed out and struck him hard across the face, a weak yet harsh cry ripping from her throat. He stumbled sideways, surprising her with his unsteadiness, and a tremor ran across his once broad shoulders and down to his legs. Slowly, he looked back at her, pressing his left arm against the doorframe again and almost sagging against the wood.

  “Please,” he whispered, his voice fading with shocking rapidity as his eyes widened.

  Then they rolled back, and he collapsed to the ground at her feet.

  Chapter Three

  “What did you do?”

  Poppy barely glanced at the large man who spoke as he ambled up from the barn, her eyes fixed on the back of the man lying face down. Her lungs seemed to be shaking in her chest, but she was nowhere near tears. Her fingers had full sensation, her knees were stable, and she was thinking clearly.

  Slowly, but clearly.

  “I hit him,” she informed Stanton, who came to stand on the other side of Alex. “Across the face.”

  “And that took him down?” Stanton asked, eyeing Alex’s frame. “He’s got at least two stone on you, if not three, and he’s tall. How’d you take him down?”

  “I hit him hard,” she retorted without any sort of sting.

  Stanton snorted softly. “You could hit a man like this with a brick wall, and he’d still smile and thank you for it.”

  Poppy didn’t even smile at the joke, staring down at Alex as her heart began to race and slow at alternating intervals.

  How could it be him? How could it be him?

  Nearly five years after being told he was dead, and now he was here at her door. He wore a dark coat that did not fit, shredded and stained trousers, worn boots, and a strange, pale tunic that was more stained than anything else, though she hadn’t looked at it long enough to consider the stains. She could only remember seeing him there, staring at her as though she were a specter of some sort.

  He was so changed, she’d have passed him on the street without a second look, but when his eyes were on hers, she knew. Her stomach had shifted sharply, and her knees had nearly buckled, and her fingers tingled with a familiar anticipation.

  Even now, they rubbed together anxiously at her side.

  “What should we do with him?” Stanton asked, sounding as though he did not care one way or the other.

  Unfortunately, Poppy did.

  And she resented herself for it.

  Exhaling a sort of growl, she gestured at Alex. “I can’t abandon someone in his condition and live with myself. Lift him up and carry him into the spare room. I’ll make up the bed for him until he comes to, and we’ll figure the rest out later.”

  “Madam?” Stanton raised a suspicious brow of warning. “A strange man in your house with you alone?”

  Poppy smiled very faintly. “He’s no stranger. Well, I know who he is, at any rate. Rather, who he was.” She stared at Alex’s back for another long moment, then shook her head slowly. “Perhaps you could stay in the house as well, Stanton. Just to be safe.”

  Stanton gave her a quick half bow. “Of course, madam. Gladly.” He looked down at Alex with some distaste. “Now for this worthless bag of…” He trailed off the moment he rolled Alex to his back, staring at him with a mixture of horror and shock.

  “Stanton?” Poppy prodded, looking from him down to Alex and back again.

  The larger man was silent for so long it was unnerving, then he swallowed once and scooped Alex into his arms as easily as one might have a sleeping child.

  “I think he’s wounded, Miss Edgewood.”

  She frowned at that. “Clearly. He fell unconscious when I slapped him.”

  Stanton shook his head once as he strode for the darkened spare room. “I think he’s badly wounded, Miss Edgewood. Come, light some candles, then help me take this coat off.”

  Frowning still, she did so, wondering what Stanton had seen that she hadn’t, and why he had looked so stunned upon seeing Alex.

  Had Stanton known him before? Had he worked the Parkerton estate? Lived in the village? There was no way to know, and no time to ask.

  Once the candles were lit, she came to Alex, still limp and almost cradled in Stanton’s arms. The thick but worn coat was clearly not his, as he would have to be even thinner for it to do so, and she wasn’t sure he could get thinner. Peeling the fabric off was too easy, his slender arms sliding from the sleeves too smoothly. The tunic underneath was long in the sleeves, though riddled with holes and loose from wear.

  And through each and every hole, she saw cuts and scars, some still red and raw.

  Her lower lip trembled wildly, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. But as she finally removed the coat completely, she stared at Alex’s chest in dismay.

  Long stripes of deep red crossed the fabric covering his chest, some the faded brown of age while others were almost vibrant. They wrapped around the side of the tunic, and Poppy knew instinctively that his back would have more of the same. Through the deep vee of the tunic’s neckline, she could see a hint of his too-lean chest, and some suspiciously taut and pinked skin that spoke of healing scars.

  She covered her mouth with the coat, gripping it tightly in her hands, muffling a startled whimper.

  Oh, Alex…

  “He’s feverish, Miss Edgewood,” Stanton murmured, his eyes steady on her now. “Very much so.”

  Somehow, that broke through her sudden haze, and she dropped the coat to the ground with a firm nod. “Right. Lay him down here, Stanton, then go out to the well and draw up as much water as you can. I have some in my bedchamber still, but we’ll need more.”

  Stanton lay Alex down on the bed, adjusting the pillows behind his head with surprising gentleness. He stared at Alex for another long moment, his expression unreadable, then strode from the room at a fast clip.

  Poppy laid a hand on Alex’s brow, wondering how she’d missed the startling heat from it when she’d hit him moments ago. But she hadn’t exactly been in a mindset of concern at that moment, she only wanted to strike the man before her, whether he was real or imagined, in an effort to rid her mind and heart of him. The stinging across her palm had informed her that, yes, he was real, and she’d felt better for lashing out.

  Then he’d collapsed, and her satisfaction had diminished.

  She had never been able to strike Alex to the ground before. She’d tried in play fighting and never managed to do more than make him laugh at her efforts, as he’d always been a strong and imposing figure of a man.

  Not this.

  He was still taller than she was, but now their frames were more similar than they should ever have been.

  She watched as his chest moved with each breath, hitching and wheezing nearly every time, and rasping in his throat. His skin gleamed with perspiration, even through the dirt and grime that covered him. She ran her gaze all along his long, lanky body, and for
some reason, the sight of his tattered boots brought tears to her eyes. Holes in the toes, filthy and scuffed, and a ring around the ankles where something had chaffed the leather to the point of fraying the layers below.

  A perfect ring around the ankles. She didn’t want to think about what had made that ring.

  “Oh, Alex,” she whispered as she brought her eyes back to his sharp, angular face. “What happened to you?”

  He did not respond, nor did she expect him to.

  Her thumb stroked the skin of his brow gently, and the sensation of his skin against hers triggered a ripple down her spine. She jerked her hand away and sprang back as if shocked. Moving to her own bedroom quickly, her arms stiffly swinging by her side.

  There was no time for sentimentality here. The man was quite feverish, wounded, and in need of her care. It made no difference if it were her former intended or the blacksmith’s son; she had a duty to see to.

  The fact that he was supposed to be dead and was not must not factor into anything now.

  Later, however…

  She pulled her water pitcher and bowl from the windowsill and grabbed some toweling and linen from the closet, thinking quickly. Bringing the fever down would be important, but if he had fresh wounds, as she suspected, they would need to be tended and dressed. There was no way to prepare for the extent of what they might find there, and there wasn’t a doctor in Moulton. They could send for the one in Northwich, if need be.

  That is, if she could spare Stanton for the ride or find a neighbor willing to fetch a doctor at this time of night.

  But for now, she was on her own.

  She set the bowl and pitcher down on the nightstand and moved to the kitchen quickly for her apron, forcing herself to breathe steadily in and out.

  She could tend the man she had loved to an almost frantic degree, so that he would not die in her home tonight. It did not matter that he had apparently died some years ago and broken her heart in the process.

  She could.

  Walking back into the room, however, seeing Alex, of all people, lying there on the bed, Poppy bit her lip in a moment of hesitation.