The Hungry Heart Fulfilled (The Hunger of the Heart Series Book 3) Page 14

  "It's bad news, but we have to feel pleased at our success this morning. These are the first real clues we’ve had in days. Now we have several people who can all identify Frederick as the man responsible for the disappearance of the child, and possibly even the death of poor Mrs. Everett," the doctor said, shaking his head in wonder at all that Dalton's father had done to harm everyone his son had ever cared about."

  “But it doesn’t really help us, for we are no closer to finding Emer than we were before, and the good Lord only knows who that woman was that now has the poor innocent child. For all we know, she might have thrown William overboard and kept the five pounds all for herself," Joe worried aloud.

  "We just have to pray that that is not the case. She would be a most desperate woman to have harmed a tiny babe like that. But there are a great number of illnesses a child can succumb to in infancy, as well you know."

  "Aye, indeed. So please pray all the harder for him, Bishop, and let's just keep on looking," Joe urged.

  "What worries me more than anything is what on earth are we going to tell Dalton?" Adrian admitted, chewing his lower lip. "He’s been through so much already."

  "Indeed. Can you imagine how he is going to take it when he finds out that not only is Emer gone again, but that his own father kidnapped her. Even worse, that he tool his son and gave him away to an utter stranger who has now vanished into thin air?” the Bishop sighed.

  Adrian sighed. “I don’t know, exactly, but I have a pretty good idea. He will be completely distraught, and we will have to break it to him as gently as we can."

  "But in the meantime, let’s not give up hope," Joe urged. "We can post a reward in all the towns along the river, right the way down to Toronto, and even beyond. We have to find baby William before it’s too late. Emer and Dalton will never forgive us if something happens to their child.”

  “If it hasn’t already,” the Bishop observed gloomily.

  “Now, let’s not think like that. William is alive," Joe insisted. "Not even Frederick Randall would be so cruel as to drown it like an unwanted pup."

  "I agree. At least he gave it to a woman, along with some money. He could have disposed of it the way he did poor Mrs. Everett,” Adrian pointed out.

  “Perhaps I should go to Toronto myself, look for the child, and try to break the news to Dalton in person,” the Bishop suggested.

  Adrian thought over the suggestion for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m not sure there’s any need. It's a long journey, and Dalton should be back in a day or two. At any rate, perhaps we will find them both soon. Besides, what will you say to Dalton even if you do find him?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, but I think he’s just going to have to be told the whole truth. You’ve all kept silent about everything you knew about Frederick’s interference in order to protect Dalton, but God only knows where Emer is, or the baby. They could both be in the gravest danger. Frederick has already harmed so many people, as has Madeliene Lyndon, that it is about time they were exposed.”

  Adrian gaped. “You don’t really think that this has anything to do with her, do you?”

  The Bishop rubbed his hands together, folded them, and sighed. “I can’t be sure. But she was the one who burnt down the orphanage to get rid of Emer and her child as possible rivals for Dalton’s love. Generous though her restitution was, the authorities have been suspicious about the fire. Perhaps they arrested Emer for that at Frederick’s instigation."

  "If they arrested her, then where is she, sir?" Joe asked. "The police seem to know nothing, and they can't all be lying."

  "I'm not sure what's going on, but I promise, I am going to start asking around in the Attorney General’s office as soon as I drop you both off in town. If Emer was arrested and imprisoned, there must be a record of it somewhere that we haven’t been shown. Maybe if I am sufficiently persuasive, the Attorney General, an old friend of mine from school, and completely incorruptible, will give me some help.”

  Adrian smiled. “If he’s incorruptible, then why should he help?”

  “I think he will be sympathetic to Emer’s plight when I explain all the circumstances, and will do all he can to help find Emer and William. But I think we're going to have to hold nothing back, private though Emer’s affairs would normally be. We need a logical reason for why Madeliene would have started the fire, and why Frederick would be so hostile to her that he would run the risk of kidnapping her and his own grandchild in broad daylight."

  Both of his companions nodded.

  “And I don’t see how we can get Emer or the child back, without exposing Frederick. So I'm afraid everyone is going to have to be willing to testify in court as to what they know about the Pegasus , Emer, Dalton, Grosse Ile, everything,” the Bishop maintained.

  “Are you suggesting we take Frederick to court?” Adrian asked, aghast at the very idea.

  The Bishop nodded. “It’s up to Dalton, but I can’t see any other way of righting all the wrongs Frederick has done. Perhaps he will be sensible, and tell us where Emer and the baby are so he won’t be publicly disgraced. But I have a feeling he won’t budge an inch."

  Joe said grimly, "He hates Emer, and would rather see her dead than married to Dalton. This is his doing, all right, but it will be nearly impossible to get him to own up."

  "Which is why I think we should get the best barristers we can find, and have them start drawing up all of our depositions, just in case.”

  Adrian shook his head. “I just don’t know what Dalton is going to say.”

  Joe looked from one man to the other. “Well, with any luck, Emer and William will be found. And if they aren’t, well, then, Dalton will be home soon, and then we shall find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dalton arrived home on a bright sunny June day about a fortnight after Emer had vanished. Adrian and the Bishop had tried to send him several messages warning him of trouble at home, but in the confusion of the huge outbreak of cholera in Toronto, with Dalton moving from place to place tending the sick, the communications had failed to reach him.

  Dalton arrived home in Quebec exhausted, dirty, and in a foul mood at all the suffering he had been forced to witness which he felt he had done so little to alleviate. Dalton couldn’t wait to get home to hold Emer in his arms again, and play with his adorable baby son.

  But when he arrived at Adrian’s house, the servants were nowhere to be found, and the front door was locked.

  Dalton felt a cold pang of dread grip his heart as he unlocked the door and then raced up the stairs to Emer’s room.

  Finding no one there, Dalton began to panic, and ran to the nursery. There was no sign of baby William either.

  Dalton sat down on the top step dazedly with his head in his hands. Surely they couldn’t both have died? There had to be some other explanation….

  Trembling like a leaf in the wind, Dalton shakily got to his feet and ran down the stairs and out of the front door without even bothering to lock it.

  He rushed into the street and frantically hailed a cab. Perhaps Emer had decided on a change of scenery and gone to the orphanage, Dalton prayed, as the horse galloped at a breakneck speed toward the ferry landing.

  After a long delay in crossing because of the heavy traffic on the river, Dalton finally reached the opposite shore, and demanded that the driver not spare the horses. They drove up in front of the orphanage within a few minutes, and Dalton was relieved to see Adrian’s carriage there.

  He paid the driver quickly, and then went to look for the remaining residents of the home, still living in the houses and workshops at the back until the new orphanage could be rebuilt.

  Dalton found all of Emer’s friends gathered in one of the old outdoor classrooms. With them were several severe-looking strangers, whom Dalton guessed to be lawyers from the small snatch of conversation he had detected as he approached the open doorway.

  Entering the classroom, his eyes lit on the Jenkinses, Marion and Charlie, before turning on Joe, Pa
trick, and Sissy, as well as the Bishop, Myrtle and Adrian.

  “What is going on? Where are Emer and William? Adrian, I’ve just come back from your house, and they're gone. Captain Jenkins, what are you and your wife doing here? You're supposed to be in Ireland, looking after the Randall Shipping company interests for me.

  "And you, madam. You’re Marion, aren’t you? You and these other women were on the first steamer for Quebec from the Pegasus. What are you all doing here at Emer’s home?”

  “Dalton, please, sit down,” the Bishop urged. “We have some bad news for you, and it's going to be hard to take in.”

  “Emer isn’t dead, is she?” Dalton asked in a near whisper.

  “No, but she and William have been taken, and we have no idea where.”

  “Taken? Taken by whom?” Dalton barked.

  He stared at the sea of worried faces wildly, and caught Joe’s eye.

  Joe looked away, down at the floor.

  Suddenly Dalton knew everything, almost as though it had come to him in a flash of lightning.

  “My father's kidnapped them, hasn’t he?” Dalton asked flatly.

  Joe looked up again, and nodded.

  Dalton sat silently for a few moments, and then asked, “Why has he taken them? But more importantly, what can I do to get them back?”

  “I think you’re going to have to threaten your father with court action if he doesn’t tell you of their whereabouts soon,” the Bishop advised quietly

  “What, you mean prosecute him?” Dalton asked, stunned.

  “Yes, and also for fraud, criminal negligence, unfair dismissal, theft, and murder, and that's only for starters,” Adrian listed, consulting a piece of paper the lawyers had drawn up.

  Dalton’s golden eyes widened, and he practically choked out the words, “I don’t understand any of this. Please, can someone explain just what the hell has been going on around here?”

  “Dalton, my dear, it’s a bit complicated," Myrtle said gently, drawing him by the hand to sit down between her and Joe, who put his arm around Dalton’s shoulder comfortingly.

  "Yes, I'd say so! Murder? What is going on? Where's Emer?"

  "Try to be patient, and just listen. And before you judge us harshly, keep in mind that Emer gave us strict instructions to keep what we're about to say from you. We’ve all kept our promise to her so long as she remained with us and unharmed.

  "But now that she and William are gone, we feel we're at liberty to tell you the whole truth, even if she never speaks to us again once she does come back, as I am sure she will soon,” Myrtle explained.

  "You're sure she's alive?" he asked raggedly.

  "As sure as we can be," she confirmed.

  Dalton felt as though he would be ill, but he dragged in a breath and declared, "All right, I'm listening. Don't waste your time trying to spare my feelings any more. Not when there's so much at stake. Tell me everything, no matter how bad it might be."

  So Joe began Emer's tale of woe which had started the previous August by reminding Dalton of all the orders for food for the others ships, which had in fact never arrived, and then moved on to the Randall steamer full of women and children that had ostensibly been going straight to Quebec.

  Marion took up her own personal part of the tale then. “Only we never got there. We circled right around the island, and got dumped on the shore. If not for the money you gave us, and Emer’s help when she got there, and found us, every single one of us would have died, of that I'm certain.”

  Joe continued, “Not only did none of the food to help those poor souls ever get sent, and healthy people sent to an island full of fever, but your father bribed the doctor to lift the quarantine. I wondered at the time he came on board, how he knew Emer’s name.

  "We’ve found the doctor, and he admits that you father bribed him to make sure that all of Emer’s family, no matter how ill or well, were to be taken off the Pegasus and sent to Grosse Ile. If Emer had had one ounce of family feeling, of course she would have gone with them, and thus your father would have been able to separate the two of you.”

  Dalton groaned, “And when I found out, Father gave me a glass of wine, supposedly to steady my nerves, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the Atlantic, far away from Emer when she needed me most."

  "Yes."

  "I slept the first week or so of the journey back to Ireland. Gibson told me I had brain fever. He must have been dosing me with some sort of sleeping draught. He must have been helping my father all along!

  "He also piloted the steamer Marion and the women and children were on. So all the time he was apparently nursing me on the Agamemnon, he was really drugging me to make sure I couldn’t go back to find Emer.” He shook his head in wonder.

  “We shall skip over all the deaths that we therefore can hold your father responsible for, and go on to the Jenkinses’ testimony,” the Bishop instructed, seeing the terrible state Dalton was in.

  Captain Jenkins began, “Well, as you know, sir, I was promised two weeks’ shore leave. No sooner did I get off the steamer in Quebec, than I was paid off and told I would never work here again. I went around every shipping company office, but as soon as I mentioned that I had worked for Mr. Randall on the Pegasus, they told me to get out. With no money, and no references, we were soon destitute.”

  “It was just as bad when I got off the ship, but me and Jim Beckett and the rest of the lads aboard decided to go out to the logging camps, and got wise enough to use fake names,” Charlie explained. “Told ‘em we had worked for Mr. Lyndon, so we did. But when the winter weather came, we were trapped, and ended up at Brona’s, you know, Emer’s sister. The weather was horrible, and it got so bad we nearly ate each other.

  “But when spring came, we helped them plant the fields, and then came back here, all except Jim, who liked it out there and stayed with them to help, being Michael was still so frail. Most of the men died along the way, and the last of them fell to the cholera back here in Quebec, as I would have done if I hadn’t seen you in the slums with Dr. Lovell here, and said I knew you and Emer.

  "There’s really no one left from the Pegasus crew except myself and Jim and David the ship’s carpenter, you remember, the one who was always so kind to Emer’s brothers Cormac and Martin?”

  Dalton nodded. “I remember him. Where is he now?”

  “He stayed on at the logging camp to set up his own carpentry shop, and I’ve sent word for him to come if he can, to try to help find Emer.”

  “There is Pertwee, the second mate, too, but he went about ingratiating himself with your father and the Lyndons, telling them all sorts of lies about Emer setting fire to the ship,” Patrick revealed suddenly.

  “I had got better thanks to Emer and Joe’s excellent nursing, and had tried to go into town to get a job so I could help support those still left on the island. It was only when I got to Quebec in November that I found out that all the crew of the Pegasus had been blacklisted. I couldn’t even get a job as a bootblack." He shook his head in disgust.

  "I saw Pertwee, driving Madeleine Lyndon’s carriage so he was, and he bragged about what he had done. He had always hated Emer because he fancied her, and she wouldn’t give in to his pestering. So he told your father all these lies about the fire, and Pertwee claimed that she was going to be arrested for arson."

  "But she saved the ship!" Dalton protested.

  “I know. I was very worried, so I went back to Grosse Ile to warn Emer that Frederick Randall was after her. We all agreed to pack up and leave then, didn’t we, Marion. But Joe fell ill, and Cormac was still lingering on. He had got rid of the fever all right, but by then he was dying slowly of tuberculosis.”

  "TB? She never said."

  “It's true,” Marion confirmed. “But even though Emer knew she was in danger, she refused to leave without them. Joe was unconscious, but Cormac had heard everything Patrick said, God rest his soul."

  Dalton felt a cold finger of fear trickle down his back. He could gu
ess what was coming now, but it was still almost too horrible to hear the truth at last.

  "When Emer’s back was turned to help Joe, Cormac committed suicide by drinking all the laudanum rather than allow Emer to remain behind for his sake, and be caught by your father and thrown in prison.”

  “My God, so that’s why she couldn’t talk about it,” Dalton sighed bitterly. “Cormac killed himself to save her.”

  “And to save the children too. What would have happened to them if Emer had been thrown in jail?” Patrick reminded Dalton.

  “And that’s why she married Oran Dillon? To protect them?”

  They all nodded.

  “Aye, she would have had more status as a widow than a spinster, and would have been able to protect the children better," Joe explained.