by Rebecca King
“We walked straight into their trap because the highwaymen’s network goes far further than just a handful of thieves and killers.”
“We have to plan what we are going to do very carefully before we go after these blackguards,” Elias muttered. “We can’t risk being ambushed like that again. The problem is that it looks like half the bloody village is helping them.” He stopped talking when Morgan’s hand appeared on his knee.
Morgan pointed to the window. “This village?” He cursed at Elias’s grim nod. Morgan slid a worried look at the door. “Who are they?”
“Locals too, but not involved with the highwaymen. Ruth overheard Mark and another highwayman discussing how they were going to murder one of the Star Elite. I think the lad didn’t want to get embroiled in the murder and so helped her save us.”
“It was a brave but foolish thing to do,” Morgan murmured but smiled suddenly. “But I owe them my life.”
“We both do,” Elias muttered softly. “We both do.”
They sat in contemplative silence for a few moments and thought about the evening’s events. It was a stark reminder that life was very fragile and could be snatched away at any given moment.
When Elias eventually realised that Morgan had gone quiet, he glanced at his colleague and best friend and smiled when he saw that Morgan was sound asleep.
“You need to get some sleep too,” Ruth murmured from the doorway.
Elias jerked and mentally cursed because he hadn’t heard her creep up on him. Slowly, Elias forced himself to his feet.
“Follow me.” Ruth moved into the hallway because being anywhere near this powerful stranger from the Star Elite made her feel small and helpless. She nodded to the room she used. “You can stay in here.”
Elias stood in the doorway of the room and watched the young woman light a candle. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”
Ruth offered him a smile, but it fell quickly. “We aren’t safe yet.”
Elias nodded. Ruth was pleased that he didn’t offer her any false promises. She didn’t want them. All she wanted was the truth. She was all brisk efficiency when she nodded toward the bed even though she was still quaking inside with a growing discomfort that was confusing because she wasn’t sure what caused it. It might have been the growing attraction she felt for the man before her, or it might have been from the deepening sense that trouble was drawing steadily closer outside but she couldn’t see it. Whatever brought it to life, Ruth knew it was going to stop her from getting any sleep tonight. “Try to get some rest. Maud is just heating some broth. You should both feel better in the morning.”
“What about you? Where will you sleep?” Elias suspected that the room they were in was hers. “Ruth.”
“Yes?” Ruth looked askance at him and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other while she waited.
Elias grinned. “Just checking.”
Ruth looked at him in astonishment. “Do you think I would lie to you about my name after everything I have done to help you? Why?”
“If there is one thing that I have learnt tonight it is that I would be a fool to trust anybody in this village. Except you three kind people, of course.”
“Why are you trusting us? You don’t know us,” Ruth retorted.
“I know that you went to a lot of trouble for someone you didn’t know. You put your life in danger, your home at risk, and your relatives in the middle of one of the Star Elite’s most difficult investigations. That takes courage. You have not only saved two lives, but you have put everything you own at risk to keep us safe while we recover. There are no words we can use to thank you.”
“So don’t,” Ruth replied with an awkward shrug. “We didn’t do it for praise. Just eat and then get some sleep so Maud and I can rest tomorrow. I have no idea if the tracks we made will be enough to stop the highwaymen from following us. If they aren’t then danger is still out there somewhere, and likely to attack us in the morning. That is where you will be needed to keep everyone safe.”
Elias knew she was right but still contemplated the wisdom of climbing into the alluring bed. It looked luxuriously soft and inviting, especially to a tired investigator. While he wanted to stay awake for a while, Elias also knew that he wouldn’t be able to aim properly and be able to shoot anyone if someone did turn up on the doorstep tomorrow. Neither he nor Morgan were any protection whatsoever right now and wouldn’t be until they had a few hours’ rest.
“I will keep an eye out for them,” Mark offered suddenly from behind Elias. “I know what all the highwaymen look like. I doubt they will come this way just yet, though, because the snow is getting worse. Get some sleep.”
“Let’s hope that we have a heavy blizzard, eh? Then maybe we can all get some rest,” Maud called from the depths of the kitchen.
When Mark had left the room again, Ruth turned to leave too only to find her hand captured by Elias’s. She gasped and looked at him. Their eyes met. She waited to hear what he had to say, but he slowly, gently, released her without speaking.
With that brief touch, the air between them changed. It was difficult to know why. It might have been that an instinctive understanding between them was created, a deeper connection. Whatever it was it entwined them both in a unity that was unbreakable. They had shared a connection tonight that went far further than the need to work together to escape the highwaymen. They had fought for life, but whose and what that life would involve from now on was unknown to either of them yet. What neither of them could deny was that tonight had been lifechanging for them both but to stay alive they now needed each other.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ruth was woken up by someone persistently shaking her shoulder. She was so tired that she moaned and tried to roll over only to be forced awake by the fact that she couldn’t move because of the tight confines of the chair she was in. Ruth jerked upright and realised then that every bone in her body ached. It took a few moments more before the events of the previous night slowly filtered through her sleep-fogged thoughts and dragged her into the present with a merciless jolt.
“Mark?” she whispered in dismay. She glanced blankly around the kitchen and willed her thundering heart to resume its normal pace.
“We have a problem,” Mark muttered, glancing warily at the door as if he expected the highwaymen to come bursting through it at any moment.
“What’s wrong? Where is Maud?”
“She went to bed hours ago. She checked on Morgan and Elias first but then told me that she had to rest,” Mark replied.
“What’s the problem, Mark?”
Mark beckoned her over to the window and eased a shutter open. Outside, all was perfectly still and quiet. The peaceful, somewhat idyllic wintry scene was magical, especially now that it was bathed in the silvery glow of moonlight from the full moon shining down on them.
“I don’t see anything,” she breathed.
“Look at the ground.”
Ruth dutifully looked at the ground, at the footprints cutting through what should have been the untouched lawn at the back of the house. “Do they come all the way up to the window?”
“I think so. I haven’t gone out there to check just in case someone is still out there.”
Ruth struggled to decide what to do. She wanted to tell someone but at four o’clock in the morning there was nobody awake to tell.
“Have you looked out of the other windows?” she whispered.
“I can’t see anything and don’t want to open the shutters too much in case whoever is out there realises that I am here,” Mark replied.
Ruth nodded. She wasn’t going to open the shutters much either. “The doors are locked and barred. The windows are shuttered. We are safe for now,” Ruth assured him.
Although she dreaded being the only one still awake, Ruth knew that she wouldn’t get any more sleep tonight so clapped Mark on the shoulder. The young lad looked even paler than he had last night, and now had dark circles beneath his eyes that she knew weren’t
habitually there.
“Why don’t you get some sleep? Don’t worry about the footprints. It could be one of the Star Elite looking for their men.” Ruth hoped so in any case. She looked sharply at Mark whose lean face appeared wan in the sparsely lit room. “Did you see someone?”
Mark shook his head.
“What is it?” Ruth pressed when she sensed Mark’s hesitation. He looked less than reassured.
“I have a bad feeling about all of this,” Mark breathed. “I don’t know why.”
“We have had plenty of snowfall. I doubt the highwaymen would have returned from Mivverford fast enough to be able to find our tracks before they were covered over by last night’s storm,” Ruth reasoned. “I wouldn’t worry too much. Those tracks across the garden do look odd, but there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for them. Don’t worry, eh?”
“Rointon hates to be thwarted. He is a bully and will stop at nothing to get what he wants.” Mark sounded almost sad as he said: “Rointon will be livid about what we did last night. He will want revenge on those who crossed him.”
“You mean us,” Ruth replied flatly. “But we saved two men’s lives, Mark. Whichever way you want to look at what we did, we may spend a few weeks facing the likes of Rointon, at least until the magistrate and the Star Elite catch him and his gang, but it is only temporary. The deaths of those two men would have haunted me – us – for far longer if I hadn’t done everything possible to keep them alive.” She still saw Mark’s misery. “Do you want to go back to them – the highwaymen, I mean?” Ruth had to ask.
Mark looked truly frightened. “God, no!”
“What is wrong then?”
“I am just worried about what the highwaymen are going to do when the snow clears enough for them to search the village,” Mark whispered miserably.
“Rointon can’t search the village. He isn’t the magistrate and would cause a ruckus if he knocked on everyone’s doors whether they are working for him or not. God, the magistrate would arrest him within the hour.” Ruth knew the magistrate wouldn’t because he was miles away, but Mark didn’t need to know that.
Mark continued to look unconvinced, so Ruth tried again. “What you must remember is that the Star Elite have lost not one but two men last night. They will be out looking for their colleagues and will see Rointon if he is out there somewhere. All we have to do for now is sit here and wait for morning. As soon as the snow clears, we can go and find the Star Elite’s safe house. In the meantime, we will let the Star Elite deal with Rointon. He must face gaol for what he tried to do to those investigators. Just remember that if the French couldn’t beat the men from the War Office during the war, a village idiot like Lucius Rointon won’t either.” She smiled reassuringly but mentally cursed at Mark’s next words.
“He nearly succeeded last night, though. It took us to save them.”
“But the Star Elite weren’t expecting so many in the tavern to turn against them. To be fair, I didn’t expect everyone in the tavern to be involved with the highwaymen either and I live around these parts,” Ruth sighed. “Do you think you could recognise them all if you had to?”
“I know a lot of them but not all,” Mark admitted.
“Are many men from the village helping Rointon?”
“Not all are from Riddlewood. Most of the men who help Rointon live in Mivverford, or the outlying villages, but they don’t live all that far away from here,” Mark muttered as if doubting the wisdom of betraying them.
“Then that makes you our new main witness,” Elias announced from the doorway. “Like I have already told you, because of what you two did last night you have to stay under the protection of the Star Elite.”
“You can’t catch him,” Mark informed him sadly. “Rointon is elusive. He has friends, a whole network of them, who will hide him and lie to protect him.”
“Nobody is untouchable, or his man would have escaped last night and not died trying to kill us,” Elias argued. “You have to remember that what you and Ruth did was done by two people who have no investigative skills whatsoever, yet you got into that tavern, rescued me, found Morgan, and brought us here without anybody seeing you. Rointon isn’t as untouchable as you may think, or you would have been noticed. Last night did nothing except prove that Rointon thinks that the men he is with will lie to protect him and are strong and capable killers. Unfortunately, lying is not going to do anything to help them fight us. It is easy to get at him. You two proved that last night. The man was lured into a false sense of security by his own arrogance and number of men he has helping him. Unfortunately, that has also made him weak because his men are not well trained and think there is safety in number, but they are still country yokels, and not very clever ones.”
Mark contemplated that and then pursed his lips. There was a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes as he said: “I never thought about it like that.”
“The big mistake is that you should never count your enemy,” Elias warned. “If you start to think about the number of men who are lying for Rointon and helping him, you will start to feel overwhelmed and will be lured into making mistakes that could get you killed. If you focus on a few important members of the gang first, the rest will be easier to vanquish. It just takes persistence, determination, and patience to catch them all.”
“Do you think you will ever catch them all?” Ruth asked. “Given what you know now about the number of men involved? It seems foolish to expect a few of you to arrest them all, doesn’t it?”
“It would be foolish to expect a handful of men to arrest a group of thirty or so men,” Elias agreed. “Like I have said, we will target a few of the highwaymen at a time, but they will mostly be the leaders of the group – the killers who murder the carriage victims. Because of last night, and the fact that the highwaymen made it clear that they want to kill one of us as a warning, we have to bring in reinforcements.”
“From where?” Mark asked.
“From the War Office,” Elias replied simply.
He ventured deeper into the kitchen and stood before the fireplace but only because it was closer to where Ruth was standing. He didn’t mention it to either Mark or Ruth, but he wanted to be next to her in case someone did try to break in. “They will help us hunt Rointon down for the blackguard he is. I can’t speak for what my boss will decide to do but what I do know is that Sir Hugo won’t risk any of us being murdered by the highwaymen. Because you have both put your lives in danger for us, he is likely to insist that you stay under our protection for the foreseeable future.” Elias wandered over to the window and looked at the footprints. “Those footprints would not have been made by one of my men because they wouldn’t want to leave a trail for Rointon to follow. That is either a local taking a short cut home or one of the highwaymen. However, what I would say is that they are coming out of the woods toward the house, which means that they might not have seen us coming here last night. If they followed the route that we used last night, they would have come to the front of the house and walked around it like we did, so wouldn’t have left tracks across the garden like that.”
Mark looked stunned yet impressed at the same time. “How do you know all that?”
Elias grinned at him. His white teeth flashed in the darkness as did the roguish twinkle in his eyes. “It is what investigators do,” he replied with a nonchalant shrug.
“You can’t go out there,” Mark protested when Elias made his way to the door.
“I am not going to,” Elias replied. “I am going to open the door and look for fresh footprints directly outside. Only someone who intended to try to get into the house, who didn’t knock, would have a reason to come up to the doorstep, especially seeing as there was fresh snowfall last night after we got here.”
Mark nodded. “It isn’t the time of night for a house call, is it?”
Elias pursed his lips. He was impressed with the young lad’s bravery and clapped him companionably on the shoulder. “We could do with you in the Star Elite.”
“What’s it like?” Mark asked, following Elias to the door.
“Busy. Dangerous. You saw what we can face,” Elias sighed. “Sometimes, we can be fooled, like Morgan and I were last night.”
Mark nodded. “They hoped to fool you into thinking it was an ordinary tavern.”
“Well, that is over and done with now,” Elias replied. “What matters is the here and now. We must focus on keeping Rointon away from us until we can get to the safe house. If it is one of his men out there, they have been outside all night in the middle of a blizzard. They must be cold, tired, and eager to get home.”
Before either Ruth or Mark could warn him against it, Elias eased the door open. The icy chill that slid through him snatched the warmth from his skin as he peered at the doorstep, but it was reassuring to see that the snow directly outside of the door remained undisturbed. The footprints had joined the path around the side of the house that led to the road at the front of the property.
“Do many villagers use the garden as a cut-through to get to the road?” Elias asked once the door had been locked and bolted again.
“Well, no,” Ruth replied with a thoughtful frown.
“What’s through those trees over there?” Elias pointed in the direction of the thick woodland at the top of the garden.
“There are paths running all through those woods. People use two or three of them to get from Mivverford to the village, but never cut across our garden. There is another path that comes out at the end of the road that the villagers use.”
“Is it faster to cut across your garden?” Elias pressed.
“Well, I suppose so,” Ruth sighed. “But there is nothing between the woods and Mivverford except miles and miles of empty fields. I can’t see why anybody would be trudging through them in a blizzard in the middle of the night.”
“It has to be the highwaymen.” Mark looked askance at Elias. “Maybe they were looking for our footprints, but the snow had already covered them by the time they got here.”
