Page 163 of Once an Angel
"Have you ever thought the child might want a home? A family?"
Justin's pen hung poised over the paper. As he lifted his naked gaze, Penfeld wished he could bite back the words.
His master's sweeping gesture encompassed the dusty hut, the crude dirt floor, the books heaped in
every inch of available space. "Does this look like a home?" He touched his stubbled chin, his shirtless chest, the jagged hole worn in the knee of his calico dungarees. "Do I look like a family?"
Penfeld stared at the floor. Justin folded the letter in a neat square, scrawled a new address on the envelope, and held it out. Penfeld took it.
He paused at the door, glancing back to find Justin still slumped on the barrel, his hand cupped around
the gold watch he wore on a chain around his neck. In their years together, Penfeld had rarely seen him without it. As Justin snapped open the cover, a distant mist haunted his amber eyes.
Sighing with regret, Penfeld turned away and plodded toward the native village.
He caressed the worn envelope between his fingers, fearing it was not the poor little girl who needed
his master, but his poor master who needed the girl.
* * *
Emily shifted her bustle with both hands, watching with amused interest the battle taking place at the
stern of the steamer. Three hours had passed with no sign of Barney's boat. Doreen alternated between searching the horizon with a rusty spyglass and threatening the half-deaf, and, Emily suspected, half-daft steamer captain into drifting for one more hour. The captain's little mail packet ran only once a month from Melbourne to Auckland, and he was determined to sail.
While Doreen squawked and the captain bellowed, Emily turned back to the water, preferring the soothing lap of the waves against the hull. The balmy wind tore at her curls. The sun drifted like a
golden feather into the sea. How ironic that after all those years of waiting, she had spent her last ounce of energy trying to abort this trip. They would never have gotten her aboard the ship from England if
they hadn't laced her coffee with a dose of belladonna that had almost killed her.
They were determined to deliver her to the one man in the world she loathed more than them—Justin Connor.
The roar of the steamer's engines shook the deck. Emily clutched the rail, feeling the pistons throb to
life like her hatred for her guardian.
Rumors had flown through London society when the only son of the wealthy duke had failed to return from his New Zealand expedition. Girls Emily had once called friends brought her the murmured tales from their parents' drawing rooms, their malice masked by well-meaning sighs of pity and pointed
glances at her shabby frocks and scuffed boots.
In the best London circles Justin Connor's very name came to embody danger and romance. At the school it was whispered in tones of naughty reverence. Emily wasn't the only girl who drifted into sleep with his image swashbuckling through her dreams.
Most believed him a dashing adventurer, a speculator who had made his fortune gambling in land and
gold and human lives. They swore he had cast aside his own family and had scoffed at their written
pleas to come home and take his rightful place as heir to the Winthrop shipping fortune.
Emily narrowed her eyes. She could well imagine him ensconced on the fertile New Zealand coast,
living in the handsome Victorian mansion he had built with her father's gold . . . and her father's blood. Perhaps he had his own daughter by now—a golden-haired little doll-child swathed in love and lace. In seven years he had sent her not one personal note, not one word of kindness. Miss Winters had taken great pains to show her the stilted messages, the pathetic handfuls of pound notes and shillings.
After a few weeks of such obvious neglect, they had given her spacious sitting room to Cecille du Pardieu, a china-faced brat who was rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of an Austrian prince. It
was only Miss Winters's fear of Emily's mysterious guardian that stopped her from casting her into the streets. It was decided she would earn her bread by teaching the younger girls who had once been her adoring equals.
In her tiny attic box-room, Emily had crawled beneath the gables and rubbed a clean spot on the sooty glass with her sleeve. She had gazed for hours across the grimy ocean of roofs and chimneys and waited for Mr. Connor to come and take her away.
