The Widow's Secret. Sara Mitchell
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insisted I marry you,” he said. “Well, it’s too bad for both of us your youthful innocence can’t last forever.”
He leaned over, planting his palms on the counterpane, inches from Jocelyn’s quivering limbs. “The truth is, Mrs. Chadwick Bingham, that from this moment forth, you’ll never be free again.”
Chapter One
Richmond, Virginia
September 1894
Over a dozen clocks chimed, bonged, pinged or warbled the hour of four o’clock in Mr. Alfred Hepplewhite’s store, without fuss simply named Clocks & Watches. Jocelyn smiled at the cacophony of timepieces heralding the time, while Mr. Hepplewhite placidly continued to fiddle with the clasp of her brooch watch. His gnarled hands were as deft as an artist’s, his eyes intent upon the task.
The store was busy today. Restless, Jocelyn wandered toward a deserted corner near the front of the shop to avoid mingling with the other customers. For this moment, she wanted to savor the freedom of being alone, a widow of independent means beholden to nobody, whose sole activity of the day consisted of enjoying the chaotic voices of a hundred clocks.
“Mrs. Tremayne? Your timepiece is ready.”
Jocelyn hurried across to the cash register, ignoring a disheveled little man wearing a bowler hat several sizes too large, as well as an officious customer who insisted that Mr. Hepplewhite hurry up, he had an appointment in an hour and didn’t want to be late.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Hepplewhite,” she said as she opened her drawstring shopping bag to pay.
“And you, madam.” He handed her the watch, bushy white eyebrows lifting behind his bifocals when the seedy-looking customer wormed his way past the rude gentleman to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jocelyn.
“Sorry.” He produced an unrepentant gap-toothed grin. “Just wanted to see them watch chains.”
“Here now, I was next. Move out of the way, you oaf.”
“Right enough, gov’ner.” With a broad wink to Jocelyn the other man stepped back. “Fine-looking brooch watch, ma’am. Don’t see many like it these days.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.” Jocelyn pinned her watch in place, steeling herself to fend off another impertinent remark.
Instead the man abruptly scuttled back down the aisle. After jerking the door open, he darted across East Broad, barely missing being run down by a streetcar. People, Jocelyn decided as her gaze followed the strange scruffy man, were uniformly unpredictable, which was why she didn’t trust many of them.
The door flew open again before she reached it. A tall, broad-shouldered man loomed in the threshold. Blinking, Jocelyn took an automatic backward step when, eyes narrowing, he focused on her. For some reason time lurched to a standstill, all the clocks ceased ticking, all the pendulums stopped swinging because this man with windblown hair and gray eyes looked not only dangerous, but familiar. For a shimmering second he stared down at her with the same shock of recognition she herself had experienced.
“Excuse me,” he finally said.
His deep voice triggered a cascade of sensations she’d buried a decade earlier, of longing and hope, and Jocelyn squelched the emotions. “Yes?”
One eyebrow lifted, but unlike most other gentlemen, this one remained uncowed by the hauteur she had perfected over the years. “A man came in here, scrawny fellow with a hooked nose, pointy chin. Clothes too big for him. Did you happen to see him?”
Cautious, Jocelyn kept her answer short. “Yes. I did see him. He left a moment ago.”
Frustration tightened his jaw. Beneath a straight, thick mustache, his mouth pressed into a thin line. Despite herself, Jocelyn’s heart skipped a beat, but even as she determined to push her way out the door, to fresh air and freedom, the man swept past her down the aisle, where he proceeded to make the same inquiry of the other customers.
Impatient, Jocelyn quickened her step and walked out of the store. She was behaving like a two-headed goose. Men had gawked at her all her life, even after she was married, certainly after she was widowed. Little could be gained by turning weak-kneed over one of them. His pointed questions marked him as a policeman of some kind, though he hadn’t been wearing a uniform. But even if he weren’t a policeman and was only trying to find a friend, his affairs had nothing to do with her. The reserved widow Tremayne did not associate with policemen or ruffians.
At what point during her marriage, she wondered, had she allowed herself to become the self-righteous snob the Binghams so relentlessly demanded her to be?
“Mrs. Tremayne.”
Her head jerked back. “How did you learn my name?” she demanded, concealing her perturbation with words. The sidewalk was filled with pedestrians she could cry out to for help, and her shopping bag, though not heavy, would serve as a weapon if words weren’t sufficient. “Surely Mr. Hepplewhite wouldn’t—”
“No, but one of his customers, a Mr. Fishburn, proved to be most helpful.” The man smiled down at her, a smile loaded with charm and not to be trusted. His gaze lifted in a sweeping search around them. “I take it you are unaccompanied, without a maid or…your husband?”
Sometimes, usually when caught off guard, the uprush of painful memories would still crash over Jocelyn, stealing her breath as the waves sucked her backward into the past. “My life is none of your business. Please let me pass. I have an appointment. You’re making me late.”
“Ah.” His head tipped sideways while he searched her face with an intensity that triggered a self-consciousness Jocelyn thought she’d eradicated long ago.
Then he touched the brim of his gray bowler hat, one end of his mustache curling upward as he offered a crooked smile. “Take care, Mrs. Tremayne. God doesn’t always choose to intervene in our circumstances, and life on Earth isn’t always kind to innocence.”
Before Jocelyn could fry him with a scalding retort, he was half a block down the street.
“God doesn’t always choose to intervene…” Bah! Jocelyn could have informed the man that God might exist, but He never intervened. For ten years she’d carried the awful burden of her past, and God never supplied one moment of peace. All that religious doggerel was nothing but a lie to soothe simple minds.
As for the rest of the stranger’s insulting remarks, she’d been deprived of innocence long ago, and she couldn’t figure out why he had made the observation.
If she ever saw him again, which she knew was unlikely, but if she did, she planned to inform him that he was an incompetent bounder, a slavering wolf disguised as a gentleman in his three-piece woolen suit and natty red tie.
On the way home, when she realized she was pondering her encounter with the mysterious gray-eyed stranger as a curative for her growing sense of isolation, she ground her teeth together, and initiated a conversation with the person sitting across from her in the streetcar.
Micah MacKenzie lost his quarry.
Frustration pulsed through him like an abscessed tooth, but he vented the worst of it by kicking over a stack of empty crates at the back of the alley where Benny Foggarty had disappeared. Benny, the glib-tongued engraver-turned-informant for the Secret Service, was now officially a fugitive, courtesy of Operative MacKenzie.
Thoroughly disgusted with himself, he retraced his steps back to Broad Street, then settled in the shadow of a bank awning. Shoulders propped against the brick wall, he tilted his bowler to hide his face, so he could survey passersby without drawing attention, and mull over his next move. Benny’s dash into that store could have been deliberate, instead of a scramble to find a hiding place because something had made him bolt. After nine months, Micah thought he knew the way Benny’s mind worked, but he acknowledged now that he may have been mistaken about the expression he’d glimpsed on his informant’s face.
Because