Candace Camp - Promise Me Tomorrow

The group broke up, starting up the stairs toward their rooms. Marianne, too, started out of the room, but Winny caught her arm. “Stay for a bit, Mary.”

Marianne looked around at her questioningly.

“I—there’s something I need to tell you.”

“What?” Fear clutched at Marianne’s heart. “Is it Rosalind? She’s not sick, is she?”

“No. No. Nothing like that. It’s just…well, I got a letter today. From Ruth Applegate. You remember her, don’t you? She were—was—a scullery maid at the Hall.”

Marianne frowned. In referring to the Hall, Marianne knew that Winny meant the Quartermaines’ house, where they had both worked. The look on her friend’s face disturbed her. “Yes, I remember. You were good friends with her. What’s the matter? Did something happen to her?”

“No. She knows that I went to live with you. She wrote to warn you. There’s been a man at the Hall asking about you. She thinks a Bow Street Runner is after you.”

“A BOW STREET RUNNER!” MARIANNE GASPED. “Sweet Lord, I thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

Winny reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which she unfolded to reveal a pencilled scrawl. “It’s very difficult to read. Ruth never learned to read and write very well. What she said, I think, was, ‘There was a man—two men at—’I think she means different ‘—times. They was asking about Mary C. But nobody knows about her, and I didn’t tell. I thought I should warn you. Bow Street Runners’.”

“Could we have been found out? Has someone—but no. No one I’ve met the past few years would know I was Mary Chilton or that I worked for the Quartermaines.”

Winny nodded. “I know. It’s got to be someone from the past.”

“But who? Why?”

“Do you—do you think it could be your family?” Winny asked tentatively, voicing every orphan’s dream. “If they went to St. Anselm’s, they’d have told them you’d gone on to the Hall.”

“After all this time?” Marianne suppressed the little spurt of hope that had leapt up in her at Winny’s words. It was foolish to think that there was family who wanted her after so many years. “I haven’t any family, or they would have looked for me years ago. It’s been over twenty years.”

“Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe you were stolen from them.”

Marianne smiled. “That’s a child’s dream. I used to tell myself that that was what had happened, that my parents were still alive, still wanted me, that a wicked person had taken me from them. But that’s nonsense. It’s the stuff of dramas. Why would someone steal a child and then drop it at an orphanage? Besides, she said ‘warn.’ There must have been something sinister about the man.”

“Well, if Ruth thinks he’s a Bow Street Runner, then she would think he’s wantin’ to arrest you.” Winny gnawed at her lip. “It worries me.”

“It is unsettling,” Marianne agreed. “If someone who knew me as Mary Chilton, who knew I was only an orphan and a housemaid, saw me masquerading as a lady, they could have guessed, I suppose, that I was doing something havey-cavey.”

“And gone to the trouble of hiring a Bow Street Runner?” Winny asked skeptically. The Bow Street Runners, though they pursued criminals, had to be hired.

“That seems rather absurd, too, doesn’t it? The thing is, if it was someone we nabbed a few things from, someone with the blunt to hire a Bow Street Runner, they would know me as Mrs. Cotterwood. They wouldn’t send the man to Quartermaine Hall looking for Mary Chilton.”

“Maybe it was someone like you said, who saw you and had known you as Mary Chilton.” Winny’s eyes widened as a thought struck. “Maybe it was someone who had visited the Hall, and when they saw you again, they knew you were a housemaid.”

“You think they would remember a maid that well?”

“One that looks like you, they would,” Winny replied bluntly. “And then they saw you at a party, say, in Bath.”

“And when some things went missing, they suspected me?” Marianne nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense. But they had been introduced to me as Cotterwood. They would have looked for me under that name. Surely they would not have remembered my name from ten years ago.”

“But what if they looked for Mrs. Cotterwood and couldn’t find you? What if it was after we came back to London?”

“So they decided to trace me through the Quartermaines.” Marianne sighed. “Oh, Lord! As if things weren’t bad enough! Winny, what should I do? If I’ve brought the Bow Street Runners down upon us—” Tears sprang into her eyes. “I’m ruining everything!”

“No, you’re not,” Winny assured her friend stoutly. “They’ve all made ever so much more money because of you, and you know it. This is just a patch of bad luck. It happens sometimes. You couldn’t help it if someone recognized you.” She smiled and added, “Cheer up. Maybe it’ll turn out to be your long-lost relations after all. The gypsies took you, and they just now found out where you went.”

Marianne smiled. “Perhaps. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. And apparently they found a dead end at the Hall, so they won’t know where to come looking for me.” She reached out and hugged Winny. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Don’t be daft. It’s me who’d a been lost without you. Go on with you, now. You need to be getting to bed.”

Marianne nodded and went upstairs, but before she went to her bedroom, she stopped at the small room next door to hers and tiptoed inside. The curtains were open, as Rosalind liked them, and moonlight cast a pale wash across the room. Marianne moved to the side of the bed and stood for a moment gazing down at her daughter. Rosalind’s dark curly hair had escaped from her braid, as was usually the case, and spilled across her pillow. Long, dark eyelashes shadowed her porcelain cheeks, and the little rosebud mouth was open slightly. She was a handful during the day, smart and lively, full of questions about everything, but now she looked like an angel. Marianne reached down and moved the covers up over her shoulders and brushed a kiss across her forehead. She might despise the man who had done this to her, but she had never felt anything but an intense love for this child. Rosalind was her life, and the desire to protect her and nurture her was always uppermost in her mind. Whoever this man was looking for her, and whatever he wanted, she must make sure that nothing he did harmed Rosalind.

Finally she turned and left her daughter’s room, slipping down the hall to her bedroom. She undressed quickly and efficiently, hanging her dress in the wardrobe and placing her thin slippers in the neat row on the floor of the wardrobe. She pulled on a plain cotton nightgown, at odds with the expensive dress she had worn this evening, then set about the task of taking down her hair and brushing it out. Before she got into bed, she opened the small japanned box on her dresser. Inside lay her small assortment of jewelry. She lifted out a compartment and reached underneath it to pull out a locket. It was a gold locket on a simple chain, not the chain that had come with it, for that had long since been too short and she had replaced it. But the locket itself had been with her since she could remember; she had kept it through thick and thin, refusing to sell it even when she was starving. It was all she had of her past life.

The front of the locket was engraved with an ornate M, and when she slid her thumbnail between the edges, it came open to reveal two miniature portraits. Marianne sank down on the stool in front of the dresser and gazed at the man and woman pictured inside the locket. She was certain that the couple were her parents, though she could not be sure that she actually remembered them or only thought she did from having gazed at the pictures so many times. Sometimes she fancied she saw a resemblance in her own chin and mouth to the woman in the portrait, but she could not be sure whether it was real or only wishful thinking. Certainly neither one of them had her flaming red hair. Still, she knew they must be her parents—even though a cynic would have pointed out that parents wealthy enough to have miniature portraits drawn for a locket would have been unlikely to have left no provision for their child.