Tell Me Lies by Claudia Dain

Author:Claudia Dain
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Leisure Books NY
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Seventeen

A tall man with black hair, dressed in burgundy silk faille, strode with angry purpose past their shop window in the direction of Duke of Gloucester Street, He did not carry his cane elegantly; he carried it like a club. Anna, arranging pots of herbs in the display window, watched him pass with avid interest. She knew who he was. He was the man who had been engaged in conversation with Lydia while she worked in the garden.

Ruth was not the only one of the McIntyre household who bad seen the stranger and his effect on Lydia.

They had stood not close, not chillingly distant, but a few polite feet apart, yet even at that distance, the emotion that swelled between them had buffeted Anna at her accidental observation post near the well. Like Ruth, she had heard nothing. Like Ruth, she had been disturbed by what she had seen.

Theirs was not the meeting of strangers, nor was it the meeting of friends.

Anna, after a quick conversation with Ruth, had learned what she had already strongly suspected—that this dark man was the stranger in church and also Dandridge Prentis. Eavesdropping was wrong, she had made that point repeatedly to Ruth even as she asked for a repetition of what she had heard outside of Bruton Parish. Eavesdropping was wrong, but Lydia needed help, and Anna would stoop to eavesdropping if it would help her daughter.

Of course, knowing now who he was, she could see that Robert had been right: this man who had so upset Lydia could not be the pirate who had robbed her of her virtue. That was flatly impossible. Yet he did have an unusual effect on her, one that Anna could not interpret intelligently. He was handsome, sorely, but he was not alone in that state, and Lydia was not the sort of woman to be moved by simple and transient comeliness. And Lydia was most definitely moved by him.

There was no explaining the surge of emotion that had swept over them as they stood in the garden. Robert needed to be apprised of this.

"Robert," she began, turning away from the window and facing him at his counter, "I happened to see Lydia talking with a man in our garden, the man from church yesterday."

Robert looked up from his grinding to show his wife that he was listening and then promptly went back to what he had been doing. Lydia being sociable was hardly worth comment.

Anna waited for his response, found that he had none, and continued on, "I have learned that the man's name is Dandridge Prentis, nephew to Widow Whaley."

Robert stopped his grinding and looked at his wife with greater attention. Whereas his wife had found, upon the knowledge of the stranger's name, a decreased inclination to think him the robber of their daughter's virginity, Robert found that he was being moved toward belief. A simple pirate would not walk the streets of Williamsburg; Dandridge Prentis would. Dandridge Prentis owned a ship. Dandridge Prentis had been away, without word, for many years.

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