Page 65 of To Seduce a Stranger

“Witch? Ah, no suh,” Mari insisted with a shake of her turbaned head, her normally flawless English turned suddenly into the singsong patois of the islands. “No speak de curse. Me no obeah woman.”

Jack appeared to take little comfort in her reassurance. Beads of sweat sprang up on his forehead.

Edward glanced back at Mari. “What have you done?”

She looked at him for a long moment, as if weighing whether or not to reveal her secret. “Sure now, you remember hearin’ ’bout bad massahs what got struck sudden by de megrims or de cramp or de flux?”

“Well . . . yes, of course.” Disease of every sort was rampant in the islands.

“Slave women talk in de market, you know,” she said with a pointed look. “Give advice. Swap recipes. I knows how to make a cruel man suffer.”

“What did you give him?”

“Jus’ plain p’ison,” she said, nodding toward the half-empty cup. “Dat’s all.”

Until that moment, Edward had never actually seen a man turn green; he had always imagined it nothing more than a fanciful expression. “P-poison? In the c-coffee?” Jack managed to stammer before he clutched at his stomach and collapsed forward onto the table.

Edward grasped one of Jack’s shoulders and shook him, hard, but he could not be roused. Slowly, he raised horrified eyes to Mari.

“Settle yourself, Mr. Edward,” she said, her voice her own again. “If I set out to poison a man, he’d never know until it was too late.” With calm, deliberate motions, she poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a sip. “For some men, there’s nothing scarier than the sight of a woman who knows her own power—the more so, I suppose, if her skin is black. I saw that fear in his eyes. So I decided to play with him a bit, pretended to be what he imagined I am. I didn’t suspect he was weak enough to frighten himself into a faint.”

Still surprised by Mari’s performance, Edward could not deny that her game seemed a fitting punishment for the way Jack had frightened Charlotte.

Mari snatched up the paper with one hand. Her dark eyes took in the hasty sketch and the circled words. “Well, we all knew she was hiding something. Any fool could see she was scared.”

“Or shrewd. God, Mari . . . I begin to wish I had never come home.”

“Home? To England, you mean.” When he did not answer, she pressed further. “It wasn’t the promise of a job that brought you here, was it? You’re from this part of the country. Gloucestershire, Little Norbury . . .”

“Ravenswood.” He could see no point in denying it to Mari. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken her this long to piece it together. “I was born here. My father was Lord Beckley.”

Mari looked from him to Jack and back again, her face a perfect blank. If she was surprised, she seemed determined not to show it. “And now . . . ?”

“I am.”

Her gaze dropped to the picture, and she studied it for another moment before crumpling it and tossing it onto the floor for Noir, who pretended to ignore it, though the tip of his tail flicked. She jerked her chin toward Jack. “Don’t you listen to him.”

“Even if he’s right?”

“He can’t know the whole truth,” she insisted. “He doesn’t know what’s in her heart.”

A scoffing laugh pushed past his lips. “Her heart? She lied to us, Mari. She made me think she cared. Cared for the fate of Ravenswood. Cared for me. But in the end, it was all just another one of her stories.”

“It seems to me she wasn’t the only one telling stories. M’lord.”

Edward opened his mouth to retort, but stopped when he realized Mari’s attention had been caught by something on the other side of the room. He turned and looked toward the still-open kitchen door. An old woman stood there, stoop-shouldered, her knobby fingers clutching a walking stick. When she lifted her head, he could see the scars on her face and one blind, milky eye.

“May I help you, ma’am?” he asked, rising.

She twisted her head awkwardly to fix him with her other eye, then drew in a sharp breath.

Her exhalation brought with it one whispered word: “Neddy?”

Chapter 17

When the woman tried to step up into the kitchen, she tottered unsteadily on her feet. Garrick appeared in the doorway behind her, ready to help, but Edward was at her side first. Gently, he drew her arm through his, led her to the bench, and knelt to bring his face level with hers. Afraid even to blink, for fear that if his eyes dropped closed he would awake to find it had been a dream, he studied her face, looking past the mask of scars to see familiar features untouched by time.

Surely his memory was playing tricks on him. His heart hammered in his chest.