to! I can’t have a baby!”
“Molly, I will not help you get rid of your baby.”
“He was going to marry me, he was! The liar! Says he never promised me anything.” A sob hiccupped out of her, and tears as fat as chandelier prisms rolled on her cheeks. “I bought a tonic from the apothecary. He said it would work. All it did was make me sick and twopence poorer. Men, they’re all liars.”
“Do not try to harm the child. It is wrong.” Dreadfully, horribly sinful. “Besides, most of those tonics will not work, other than to make you severely ill, perhaps fatally ill.”
“Ha! Telling me not to make myself ill.” Molly threw down Rachel’s arm. “As if you care about me. If you cared, you’d help! Well, I know what to do about that. You’re going to help me or I’m going to show Dr. Edmunds the letter. I’ll tell him what I think you’re all about.”
Molly spun away, black skirts belling, and hurried toward the house.
Rachel rushed after her. “Molly, wait! Do not do this! You will ruin both our lives. Stop, please. We can think of something else to do to help you.”
Molly pulled open the rear door, Rachel on her heels. “What, are you afraid now, Miss hoity Dunne? Well, wait until Dr. Edmunds hears everything I know about you! Then you’ll be sorry.”
“What is it you know, Molly?” asked a man’s voice from down the hallway.
Rachel’s heart stopped. Dr. Edmunds was waiting for an answer.
CHAPTER 20
What is it you know, Molly?” James repeated.
Silence permeated the hallway like a mist rising off damp cobblestones.
Molly’s eyes jerked to where Miss Dunne stood rooted to the ground, her face turned an unearthly shade of white. “She’s been lying to you, sir. All this time she’s been working for you, she’s fooled you into believing that she’s of good character. Well, she isn’t, Dr. Edmunds. There was a trial in Ireland, and she was the accused.”
“You must be mistaken, Molly,” he said dismissively. “You have misunderstood the situation, I’m sure.”
Molly’s face flushed an ugly shade of red. “I have not. I’ve a letter that proves what I’m saying.”
“What do you have to say for yourself, Miss Dunne?” He waited for her to deny Molly’s ridiculous assertion, waited for her to throw back the accusation. Waited for denial that did not come.
“Molly is telling the truth,” she answered, her soft lilting voice steady. Unbelievably calm.
“You were accused of a crime?” It wasn’t possible. “What could you have done? Something desperate, like taking a loaf of bread to feed hungry family members, perhaps,” he said, grasping for a palatable explanation, one he might comprehend. “Tell me it was something like that.”
“I cannot, Dr. Edmunds.” Her gaze was unwavering. “I was accused of murder.”
His blood ran cold through his veins. Funny, when he was young he had always believed that expression to be just a saying, but indeed it was truth. “Impossible.”
“I assure you, it is not.”
Molly started laughing, a feral sound emanating from low in her throat. “Murder! What a rotten hypocrite you are, saying you won’t help me.”
What an odd comment, James thought, his eyes never leaving Rachel’s beautiful face. He stared at her as though she were a stranger, an unfamiliar woman he might pass in the street and wonder about. Who is she? What is her past? He thought he had known, at least enough. He’d just learned he had not known her at all.
“I did not murder Mary,” Rachel said to Molly, so smoothly it sounded as though she were saying nothing more startling than she did not wish to have jam with her toast. His physician’s mind analyzed; he’d had patients so shaken by their injuries they acted with utter calm, as if the wound were happening to another person. He witnessed the same response here. “I was accused, but not convicted. The jury acquitted me.”
“But you obviously did something that made the officials think you might have been a murderer! Constables don’t go accusing folk for no good reason!” Molly shrieked.
“Quiet down, Molly,” he ordered. Mrs. Mainprice would hear; the men from the moving agency scraping furniture across the floor even now would hear; his neighbors would hear. Miss Dunne had barely flinched.
“She died while in my care,” she answered Molly’s hysterics. “While I was asleep. I do not even know what happened, why . . . But I did not murder Mary Ferguson. That I swear.”
“Mr. Ferguson doesn’t think you’re innocent, does he?” Molly