by Gaelen Foley
The coaches rushed at each other, reminding her in an aghast, slow-moving second of two knights charging at each other in a joust, the traces of each vehicle ready to collide like lances. With all her strength, she hauled her team to the left. The leader screamed but took her cue. The mail coach thundered by so close she could feel the wind from its passing, but in the terrified blink of an eye, the sudden shift in the horses’ direction yanked the coach off balance; it teetered on two wheels.
“Hold on!” she screamed again, but she was unable to do so herself. As the coach tipped over, she saw the crash coming and made a jump for it, even as she was thrown from her high perch atop the driver’s seat.
She went sailing, arms out, through the air while the coach skidded on its side for several more yards down the road.
“Ufff!” She landed flat on her belly in an alfalfa field at the same moment that the splinter bar shattered, the twisted traces cracking off the chassis with a great wooden crunch. It slid to a halt while the horses kept going.
A terrible silence followed.
Lizzie’s heart felt like it would pound right out of her chest. The wind had been knocked out of her, but she took a dazed swallow of air, forcing herself to rise up onto her hands and knees. She looked down at herself and was astonished to see she was not dead. She did not seem to be too badly hurt, except for a jammed right wrist with which she had braced her fall. She could have kissed the ground.
The soft, deep, fresh-tilled soil and its green alfalfa blanket had probably saved her life. But what of the others?
Sorscha. She lurched unsteadily to her feet. Carstairs and his mates would be upon them in minutes.
When she turned and trotted on shaky legs back toward the coach, she saw just how lucky she had been. The alfalfa field was bordered by a squat stone wall; there was also a thick-trunked oak a few feet away, either of which might have easily stopped her midair flight with an outcome she did not want to think about. Rubbing her wrist, she climbed over the stone wall and ran to the coach.
“Sorscha! Mary! Sorscha!” Terrified of what she might find, she approached the overturned vehicle more slowly, when suddenly the carriage door—which now faced the night sky—swung upward and opened.
A curly head emerged. “M-Miss Carlisle?”
“Oh, Sorscha, darling!” she breathed, moving closer to help pull her out. “Are you all right? Can you walk?”
“I—I think so. Mama? I think she’s hurt!”
“Mary? Mary, wake up!” Quickly helping Sorscha out of the wreckage, Lizzie climbed in, where fortunately, she found the widow Harris stirring back to consciousness with a groan.
“Ugh, I hit my head. Wrenched my shoulder on the hand loop, too. It’s a good thing you called out to warn us. What happened?”
“A mail coach ran us off the road. I’m so sorry! Come, we must go. They shall be upon us in a moment.”
Mary took a deep breath and nodded. Then she glanced around the inside of the coach. “My satchel! Where is it?”
“Forget it! We must hide!”
“It had the tickets!”
“You can buy more. Come on.”
Lizzie and Sorscha together helped the shaken woman climb out of the overturned carriage. Lizzie scanned the landscape. She could already feel the earth beginning to tremble beneath her feet with Carstairs’s carriage approaching in the distance.
“What shall we do?” Sorscha cried.
“There!” Lizzie pointed. “Amid the trees—an inn! Perhaps we can find help or at least blend into the crowd. Hurry!”
The women kept Sorscha between them as they ran. Lizzie’s wrist throbbed with every stride as they fled toward a small wayside inn set back from the road and obscured by some overgrown trees.
The night wind rustled through the twisting boughs above them as the women turned in the gate and rushed up the dusty drive. A single lantern hung above the door, its dim glow offering an uncertain welcome. She glimpsed a dilapidated roof, large patches of peeling paint, a few sagging galleries. Without thinking, she reached for the doorknob and started to twist it, then cried out at the pain in her wrist.
Mary opened the door and stepped through it. Sorscha followed while Lizzie wrapped her hand around her injured wrist, despairing to wonder how she would defend herself without the use of her right hand. She twirled swiftly in a swirl of skirts and bumped the door shut with her hip.
“We need help!” Sorscha cried, her girlish voice gone shrill with fear as she strode into the dark, smoky taproom, but Lizzie’s heart sank as her gaze swept the pub.
There was no crowd to blend into, no one to ask for help but a few doddering old drunks nursing tankards of ale, smoking pipes stuffed with cheap tobacco, and bickering over their chess game. A moldering stag head stared out from the wall; a tainted mirror caught the feeble illumination of a rusty lantern here and there.
The place smelled of greasy pork loin and old tallow.
Behind the bar, an unkempt, potbellied man—the landlord, she presumed—stood drying beer mugs with a rag, sleeves rolled up over his beefy forearms.
“We’re closed,” he grumbled.
“The door was open!” Sorscha protested.
“Lock’s broken.” He sent them a suspicious look. “What do ye want?”
Lizzie took an urgent step forward, her heart pounding. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of an emergency. There are men chasing us—”
“They’re here,” Mary breathed as the clamor of hoofbeats and heavy wheels grinded into the drive.
“Is there a back exit?” Lizzie demanded of the landlord in a shaky voice, while the old drunks studied them in dim curiosity.
“Why do ye want to know?” he challenged, tossing his rag down on the bar.
Outside, the sound of crisp footfalls marched across the graveled yard. “Go around the back,” she heard Carstairs order coldly. “Johnny, you’re with me.”
“What the ’ell is going on?” the landlord demanded, but Lizzie ignored him.
“Come.” She grasped Sorscha’s wrist with her good hand and pulled her toward the rickety wooden stairs, Mary a step behind them. “We’ve got to hide. Now.”
Johnny kicked open the door and burst in with his specially made blunderbuss trained on the taproom. “Nobody move!”
Behind him, Carstairs slipped in, both pistols aimed at the ragtag band of startled pensioners gathered around the chessboard.
“God, what a hellhole,” the earl muttered under his breath. His glance darted to the meaty barkeep, who probably kept a musket behind the bar. “Hands up, unless you want to die!” He strode toward him and confiscated the surprisingly good fowling piece the man had indeed tried to reach for.
Probably used for poaching on the heath, he thought. “Don’t try anything,” he warned the man in an icy tone. He carried the musket over toward Johnny and leaned it by the door behind him. “This might come in handy.”
“Thanks,” the lad murmured, his fierce stare fixed on his hostages.
“I ain’t seen one of those old pieces since the Battle o’ Copenhagen,” one of the tipsy old veterans snorted, squinting at the blunderbuss.
“Never fear, old timer, this one’s a new model. I had it specially designed,” Johnny warned through gritted teeth, keeping his back to the door. “The scatter-shot’s radius can put you all in your coffins. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Where are the women who came in here just a moment ago?” Carstairs demanded.
No one answered.
“Damn you, we saw them come in here. If you want to hide them, it will cost you your miserable lives. You!” Striding over to the bar, he aimed his pistol between the landlord’s eyes. “Where are they?”
Hands above his head as ordered, the landlord pointed a stubby finger toward the stairs. Satisfied that his companion had everything under control in the taproom, Carstairs glided stealthily up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
He came up to a dingy corridor with wavy plaster
and a threadbare carpet runner. A row of lanterns hanging at intervals from the beamed ceiling threw off a murky twilight. His gun at the ready, Carstairs crept down the hallway between the closed doors of some twenty guest rooms. By the sound of it, most of them were empty, though from one room he passed, he heard some woman nagging a man named Mortimer to fold his clothes.
Damn it, those two bitches could be anywhere.
Detecting footsteps just ahead where the hall ended, he whipped around the corner, his pistol outstretched in his hand.
“It’s me,” Quint grunted.
Carstairs lowered his gun. “I see you found the back door.”
“Just down the steps.”
“Ah, what a relief I don’t have to do everything myself this time,” he drawled in biting humor. “Did you see them?”
“No. I checked the cloakroom at the bottom of the stairs. Kitchen, too, but saw not hide nor hair of them.”
“Good,” Carstairs purred. “That means they’re here somewhere. Right…under our noses.”
Slam! The whole wall shook as their pursuers threw open the door of another empty guest room somewhere down the hallway. The three women huddled together in a pool of moonlight inside one of the musty guest chambers.
“Oh, Miss Carlisle!” the earl’s voice sang out. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“I’m scared,” Sorscha breathed.
Mary wrapped her arms around the girl and kissed her head. “We’ll keep you safe, sweeting.”
“Did you hear what he said? The back door is just down the stairs,” Lizzie whispered. “We can make it with any luck.”
“No. We’ll never reach it without them seeing us.”
“Ginny!” Quint called again in that queer, mournful howl that sounded like an animal calling for its dead mate.
“Why does he keep calling for Ginny?” Sorscha whispered angrily. “It’s all a mistake! We’ve got to tell them they have the wrong person!”
Lizzie and Mary exchanged a grim look. “Sorscha, go look out the window over there and see if the coast is clear. Make no noise.”
“Yes, Mama.”
When the girl tiptoed off across the dark guestroom, feeling her way around the furniture, Mary turned to Lizzie.
“I’ll hold them off,” she said in a low voice. “You and Sorscha still have a chance of escaping if I distract them.”
“How?”
“I’ll surrender.”
“You mustn’t,” Lizzie whispered, paling. “They’ll kill you.”
“Quint won’t let Carstairs harm me. The same cannot be said for the two of you. Besides, I’ve got this.” Mary furtively showed her the small lady’s pistol she had brought in addition to the rifle that she had been forced to abandon near Carstairs’s town house. Moonlight glimmered along its sleek muzzle, but Mary quickly slipped the weapon into the pocket of her voluminous black cape before Sorscha returned.
Lizzie stared hard at the woman as it dawned on her that Mary meant to kill Quint.
“Don’t look so surprised, my dear.” A trace of a cold, cynical smile curved her red lips behind the black lace of her veil. “It’s not as though I happened by Carstairs’s house by accident.”
“Whatever your reasons, I’m glad you did,” she murmured. “Thank you, Mary. I owe you my life. It seems Sorscha does, too. You were there that night. You managed to save her from the fire.”
“She was just a little girl,” she whispered, nodding. “Her mother begged me to take her.”
“Lady Strathmore was still alive?”
Mary nodded. “She would not leave her husband, and he was hurt too badly to escape the building as it burned.”
Lizzie stared at her, trying to absorb it all. Then she glanced at the curly-headed innocent silhouetted in the window, and looked at Mary once more. “Devlin is a good man, Mary. He will help me to protect her.”
“Not if Torquil got to him first. I’m sorry, but I know how these men work. Even if Devlin survived, the others will hunt him down. They won’t stop until they’ve caught him—or you—or Sorscha. You all know too much about their crime. That is why you must go on to Ireland.”
Absorbing Mary’s dire words, Lizzie wrestled with herself. How could she possibly leave Devlin behind, knowing that he was in mortal danger? But as Sorscha rejoined them and whispered the all clear, Lizzie gazed at the girl and realized Mary was right. She had to trust that her wild adventurer could take care of himself.
The sheltered schoolgirl could not.
As Mary quickly explained their plan, alarm filled Sorscha’s big blue eyes. “But what about you, Mama?”
Mary pulled her close and kissed her forehead. “I will see you back in Ireland when I can.”
As they hugged, Lizzie couldn’t help but wonder if it was a lie. She rather doubted Quint would ever let his beloved Ginny elude him again.
Reluctantly, Mary released the girl and cupped her cherubic cheeks between her hands. “Be brave, darlin’. You must trust me now and go with Miss Carlisle. ’Tis the only way.”
“Yes, Mama,” she said woefully.
“Are you sure about this?” Lizzie asked Mary evenly.
She nodded, then Lizzie squared her shoulders, and reached for her pupil’s hand.
“Come on, Sorscha, we haven’t much time.”
Sorscha held her adopted mother in an imploring stare, but went along trustingly with Lizzie. All three of them walked to the door.
Mary put her ear to it and listened. “I’ll go out first.”
Lizzie’s nod was grim but resolute. “We’ll slip down the back stairs.”
Sorscha gripped her hand harder.
Mary opened the door and inched it wider soundlessly.
Around the corner, they could hear Quint and Carstairs opening and closing doors all down the corridor, searching every room for them.
Lizzie led Sorscha out; they stole along the side of the wall. The back stairs were only a few yards away.
Sorscha cast a frantic look back over her shoulder as Mary walked slowly toward the corner of the adjoining hallway to give herself up to her former lover and, Lizzie knew, to kill him with her pistol if she could. Her black lace veil drifted phantomlike behind her, her slender shoulders squared.
Turning away, Lizzie tugged Sorscha forward. As soundlessly as possible, they hurried down the narrow, turning steps.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Mary stepped around the corner and faced the creatures of her nightmare squarely. “Quentin!” Her voice rang out down the hallway, halting both men in their tracks.
Her former lover stopped, turned to her with a look of reverence settling over his square, cruel face.
“Ginny,” he whispered. “Is it really you?”
“Yes, Quentin. It’s me.”
“Then it’s true. You’re alive. After all this time…”
“Alive, yes. But changed.”
“Still a whore, I wager.” Carstairs ignored Quint’s warning glance. “Where is Miss Carlisle?”
Mary said nothing.
Carstairs aimed his gun at her. “Speak, whore. Where is Strathmore’s bit o’ muslin?”
Quint reached over and pressed Carstairs’s arm down, forcing him with a dark look to lower his weapon. Carstairs gave him a defiant stare, then left them alone with an arrogant huff and continued searching the guest rooms.
“It’s all right, Ginny. I won’t let him hurt you. I can’t believe it. This is a miracle.” Quint took a step closer.
She fingered the gun in her pocket, but she did not intend to kill him until he understood the enormity of his crime. Then he would die.
Staring at her with a glazed look of loss and nostalgia in his eyes, he shook his head. “Oh, Ginny, why did you leave me?” he whispered. “We’ve wasted so much time—but now all that’s in the past. Now we can be together. Come back to me. Say you will.”
“But Quentin, you would not want me now.”
“Why not?” he asked
with a chiding smile, as if the mere suggestion was absurd.
“Because.” Releasing the pistol, she slid her hand out of her pocket. It was not merely that she wanted to buy time so Miss Carlisle could get Sorscha out. No, she wanted him, both of them, to see what they had done to her. “As I’ve told you, I’ve changed.” She grasped the ends of her black lace veil between her gloved fingertips and slowly, ever so slowly, lifted it away.
His eyes widened as his stare took in the burn scars that had disfigured the left side of her once-flawless face.
“Yes, my love.” Her whisper dripped with venomous reproach as he stared, ashen-faced. “Behold what you did to me.”
“Oh, God,” he choked out.
Even Carstairs looked unsettled as he stared at her in shock. She sneered faintly at the revulsion she read in their eyes.
“Oh, Ginny,” Quint groaned. “You never should have run. This need never have happened. Your beautiful face.”
“An improvement, if you ask me.” Quickly regaining his ruthless smirk, Carstairs turned away, but his voice was taut. “Come on, Quint. We don’t have time for this sentimental journey. If we don’t find Miss Carlisle and get the hell out of here, we hang. Understand?” Resuming his search, he threw open another door, whereupon a woman let out a piercing scream.
Mary looked over in surprise as Carstairs jumped back.
“What is the meaning of this?” bellowed a male voice from inside the room.
“Mortimer, do something!” the woman shrieked.
“Shut that door, you jackanapes!” A large mustachioed man in footed long drawers appeared in the doorway. Then he saw Carstairs’s gun and sobered. “Put that thing down before you hurt yourself, sirrah.”
Quickly lowering her veil again before the strangers chanced to view her scars, Mary’s eyes widened at the fellow’s air of self-assurance. Oh, no, she thought. Not another well-meaning Good Samaritan.
“I’d do as he says if I were you!” The man’s wife, appeared behind him in the doorway in a dressing gown and nightcap. “My Morty was at Waterloo!”
