Free The Janus Affair: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel by Pip Ballantine, Tee Morris Page B

came here with her on this tour, more for moral than physical support. She’s got that bloody honour guard, the Protectors, courtesy of the local chapter after all. This was the first time she actually had something for me to do.” Douglas looked at her, crooking his eyebrow. “She sent me to find you.”
    “Oh.” Eliza hadn’t meant the sound to give such an impression of melancholy, but now that it was out there, she went on. “Forgive me if I seem surprised that she did so.”
    They turned the corner and once again, there was the Thames. The boats of all shapes and sizes disgorging the spoils of the Empire, and ferrying people up and down the river, provided a moment’s diversion where former sweethearts did not have to talk to each other. With the right company, Eliza thought to herself, it is almost scenic here.
    “Eliza, you need to stop this. Now. She’s mended well enough—some have even suggested she is better than before. The only reason I have not heard her speak your name aloud since the incident was on account of your departure.” Douglas adjusted his ascot, a gesture she remembered well. “That brought on more pain than her surgeries, I can attest,” he said, a touch of spite in his words.
    It was hard not to let that revelation hurt—but then she couldn’t blame Kate. The circumstances surrounding the vital petition granting women the right to vote, had been . . . incendiary. No one had felt that more keenly than the redoubtable Mrs. Sheppard.
    “Despite the nature of your departure,” Douglas began after a time, “you did your country—and my mother—a great service.” The statement was said so quietly that she might have missed it.
    Now she shoved him away, her outrage quite overwhelming the propriety she was trying to maintain in front of him. “That was most certainly not what you said when it happened!”
    “Eliza!” he snapped, and then looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had noticed. “Eliza,” he continued in a more moderate tone, “I was nursing my mother back from the brink—by Jove I thought she was dying! I am sorry I did not have enough time or inclination to spend on your feelings. When I had a moment to gather my wits . . .”
    “King Dick passed his sentence on me, making certain that I could never return. I had barely enough time to utter the word ‘goodbye’ to my mother and father, so please, refrain from adding ‘guilt’ to my burden.” She closed her eyes. “And please don’t stand on ceremony and commend me for my love of country, because I am no longer welcome there.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Douglas,” she said, “I am banished, assured imprisonment if I ever set foot back on God’s Own.” She bit her lip and took a long, deep breath. “I miss it, Douglas. I miss home .”
    “Stuff Richard Seddon,” he swore. “We would have fought for you.”
    Eliza looked out over the river, trying to calm herself. The painful emotions of that event were something she thought she’d gotten under control—but apparently it only took Douglas Sheppard’s handsome face to undo all that good work. “Kate had done enough fighting for a lifetime. She needed to enjoy that victory.”
    Douglas laid one of his gloved hands on hers where it rested atop the wall. She wanted to jerk her hand back, but memory and a stirring of old emotion held her in place. His posture was so straight, and he was so quiet that Eliza for a moment didn’t quite know what to say. Both of them remained fixed to the spot in a tangle of strange emotions.
    “My mother never stopped trusting you,” he said, his hand tightening over hers. “The first thing she communicated to us in the hospital was that the whole incident was not your fault. Naturally it was scribbled on a blackboard, since she . . . well, she had inhaled some of the smoke and fire.”
    The agent closed her eyes for a moment, seeing the destruction, and hearing her friend’s call but being unable to