Saving Persephone (The Haberdashers Book 4)

by Sue London

  George listened at the door for a moment, then turned on Sabre. “All right, why did she get to go?”

  “Think it through, George. She is a bit of a risk. Why would I want her here, listening to all of our plans?”

  The scowl was back, but George nodded. “Fair enough. Do we have plans?”

  “Not as yet. Have you had any luck divining how many are here?”

  “We're two stories down, so I'm not having much luck. That window,” George pointed to the small, barred window near the ceiling, “looks out over the road where we came around before walked up the steps, and there are few people who have traveled that way so far. Usually only one or two at a time.”

  “Your hearing astounds me,” Jack said. “I think it's somehow grown more acute.”

  “I've learned how to listen more carefully.”

  “And Jack,” Sabre said, “you agree with my and George's assessment that we're in Normandy?”

  Jack nodded. “The climate and landscape seem fitting, although I've yet to recall the name of this keep.”

  “Perhaps we'll get a good look at it as we leave,” the duchess said drily. ”I assume George gave you her count of the men upstairs when we arrived?”

  Jack nodded again, having had George sketch the number twelve in her palm shortly after they arrived in this room. “It seems an unreasonable number to fight.”

  “All at once, yes,” Sabre said. “Which means we would need to figure out how to divide them.” The duchess mused their options, her gaze flitting around the chamber, coming to rest on her pregnant friend again. Her brow creased. “Jack, are you feeling all right?”

  Jack couldn't hold Sabre's gaze and looked down at her hands. “I'm just overly tired, that's all. It's been ages since I've had so much excitement.”

  “Liar,” George pronounced immediately, squatting down to check on Jack herself. “You're sweating, you have circles under your eyes. Are you sick?”

  Jack chuckled. “No doubt you will have a disgustingly healthy pregnancy, and I'll have no chance to ask you such impertinent questions.”

  “Are you having pain?” Sabre asked, settling down on her knees to the other side.

  Jack hadn't meant to derail their escape planning, because quite honestly all she wanted to do right now was go home. She wanted to sleep in her bed for a week, only waking long enough to sip tea and eat scones. “A little,” she finally murmured.

  George took to rubbing the small of her back, which was quite lovely. As George was the oldest of five, and daughter of a very temperamental mother, she had a better knowledge than most of what mothers-to-be had to complain about.

  “Don't be brave,” Sabre warned. “Tell me what's hurting.”

  Jack bit her lip before admitting her fear. “I think they might be birth pains.”

  George's fingers faltered in their rubbing for a moment, but then she merely asked. “How badly does it hurt?”

  “It's a sharp pain. At first I thought perhaps I had over-exerted myself or it was just, you know, a reaction to what happened at the doc. But then they came twice more, a bit more intense each time.”

  She saw George and Sabre exchange a look.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have sent Imogen,” the duchess said, “as she was the only one of us who has seen to a birth before.”

  “My mother would sometimes have a false round of pains weeks before a birth,” George said. More darkly she added, “Or at least she said she did. She wasn't, as you might imagine, so stoic as you're behaving.”

  Jack smiled. “I just want to go home. Go back to your planning.”

  George stood up. “Help me with my buttons, Sabre.” She was busily plucking apart ribbon ties as the duchess assisted her with the back of the dress. Stepping out of it, she added it to the pile of fabric under Jack. “Lay down and get some rest. Sabre and I will work on taking you home.”

  Jack laughed at the outfit that her friend had revealed. A long blouse overlaid with a fitted bustier of brown silk, and brown trousers that tucked into her boots. She looked like something half-way between a pirate and a whore, and utterly like the hoyden that she was. George simply rested her hands on her hips. “Do you like it? I love the colder months. You can hide so much under your clothes.” Jack knew that among the things George hid were a number of knives. George picked up one of the shawls that Imogen had contributed to the pile, made of bright green silk, and tied it at her waist like a sash. “My wardrobe is complete!”

  Jack laughed even harder. “Now you truly do look like a pirate.”

  “No, I think I'd need to wrap it around my head for that.”

  “Haberdashers!” Sabre said a bit sharply, even though she was laughing herself. “It is time for us to move on with our plans. I agree with George that you need to sleep, Jack.” Sabre patted her friend's foot. “Then when you wake up, I'll have it all figured out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Once he and Casimir returned to the loft, Robert encouraged the men to all take turns sleeping for a bit. He even took a short nap himself. Then in the pre-dawn hours they waylaid the grocer. Their combination of threats and bribery seemed to prove effective again. However, it was clear that only two men could be concealed in the wagon, at best, and that it should be the smallest of them. Casimir was a ready choice, but Robert and the duke were of a size. That was when Robert discovered, to his chagrin, that the normally affable duke had become intractable. A few moments of fiercely whispered conversation had ended with “yes, your grace,” and the plan that Robert and Gideon would lead an assault on the front door while Casimir and the duke slipped in from the kitchens. As plans went, it was perhaps as effective as four men could be. Bernard had told them that the chateau was more of a castle, really, and that it housed more than fifty men. Robert loathed believing him, since it made their attempt to attack it madness. But if it proved to be true, then he and Gideon were to draw as many out of the chateau as they could, while Casimir and the duke operated inside to find and free the women.

  As he felt that he could not trust Bernard, Robert left him bound in the woods nearby.

  Dawn was creeping up as the wagon rattled up the road around to the kitchens, and Robert made for the front doors with the earl.

  * * *

  As Imogen had spent time with rich, powerful men her whole life, she knew how they thought. What they valued. This Baron Granby was no particular exception. He was perhaps a bit more self-centered than most, which was saying something. And quite a bit crueler. But overall he reeked of entitlement, wrapped around a very small, very guarded ball of fear. A primal fear, probably not something of which he was even aware, but Imogen could sense it. While she smiled at him, while she made promises about what she would tell him about Robert, what she could tell him after spending a sennight alone with the Hero of the Home Office, she observed. The baron enjoyed the obvious appeal of breasts, but more so had an obsession with feet. He loved to inflict pain, but also craved a woman who was strong enough to return it. Imogen watched his every reaction to how she held herself, how she breathed, how she was. Slowly, she altered her behavior to entice him. Entrap him. A shift of a foot here to have her slipper peek out below her hemline. A tilt of her shoulders there to make her seem more direct and less coy. She conveyed herself to be both strong and submissive, and he ate it up as though she had served him the finest of desserts.

  She hoped to be able to call on the spirit of Scheherazade, and tell him a thousand and one tales. To taunt him with her body without actually allowing him to touch it. To keep him poised on the edge of desire, keep him more vulnerable than he realized he was, so that she could do her best to collect the information Sabre had asked for. She was doing to the baron, she realized, precisely what Robert Bittlesworth feared she had done to him. At the time, she had laughed at his accusation, not thinking herself capable of such a thing. Now, she had to admit that under the right conditions, she was capable. That further, it was something at which she could excel. But was it
something that she would want to do in anything other than these very extreme conditions in which they found themselves? No. Categorically no. But to save the three women downstairs along with herself? Yes, that she could do.

  She slid a slippered foot out further and settled in for a long evening of talk and flirtation. She could only hope that the outrageous lies she came up with to tell the baron came nowhere close to the truth of Robert's activities, nor that they revealed her own ignorance of what Robert truly did. As such, she hinted at the unspoken hopes and fears that the baron had regarding Robert. It proved to be a fitting way to keep the man's attention.

  * * *

  Sabre awoke when she heard a clang outside that sounded suspiciously like steel. “George?”

  Her friend's voice was low but clear in the early morning darkness. “I'm awake.”

  “Do you want me to boost you to the window?” They were getting some little light of dawn through the window, but most of their room was in shadows.

  “You're not tall enough.” George then proceeded to crabwalk her way up the corner of the room closest to the window. Reaching the ceiling, she flung herself out, just barely managing to grab hold of the bars in the window before falling. The force of her jump and sudden stop thumped her body against the wall in what sounded to be a painful way. Barely stopping, she hoisted herself up to peer out the window.

  “I'm sure you're very impressed with yourself,” Sabre said.

  “Immensely,” George murmured, clearly more absorbed with what was happening outside the window.

  “What can you see?”

  “Nothing yet. But I'm hearing...” her friend's voice tapered off.

  “Tell me what you're hearing or I'll find a way up there myself.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was more enthused. “I'm definitely hearing swordplay, but I also just heard the earl swear.” She lowered herself to dangle from the window. “Look out below, please.” Then she dropped to the floor, rolling to absorb some of the impact.

  “So it's time to go,” Sabre said. “Jack, are you awake?”

  “Yes,” said the third Haberdasher, but her voice sounded odd.

  “Jack, what's wrong?” Sabre dropped down near her friend and felt around in the gray dimness for her hand.

  “I woke up with the pains twice more. I think the baby is coming.”

  Sabre wasn't sure that there was anything else that her friend could have said that would strike quite that level of fear. Perhaps 'the French are invading'. She hadn't even thought what to respond before Jack spoke again.

  “George, did you say Giddy is here?”

  George also knelt down and took Jack's other hand. “That's right,” she said. “He's here and everything will be all right now.”

  “If it all, well,” they heard Jack swallow audibly, “if it should all go badly, you will tell him that I love him.”

  Sabre didn't even want to consider such things and stood up. “You will tell him yourself.” She set to pounding on the door with a panicked ferocity she didn't have to feign. “Guards! Guards! We need a midwife! The countess's baby is coming.” She realized what she was doing and said it all again in French. The guards took to talking amongst themselves. “Blessed Virgin Mary,” she complained, “are they a committee of cardinals out there? They can't seem to make a single decision without debating it.”

  George pressed her ear up against the door. “I hear Miss Grant. She and another woman are to the other side of the guards, arguing to come in.”

  Sabre stepped back and bellowed. “I'll pay a thousand francs to the man who opens this door!”

  “You don't have a thousand francs,” Jack complained from her pallet.

  “I'll borrow it from your husband,” Sabre said, quickly mollified by the sound of a key in the lock. “I'm sure he's good for it.”

  * * *

  Once the door opened, Imogen heard the duchess call out that any man who wanted to live needed to let them pass.

  “Please,” Imogen said to the man closest to her. “Lay aside your swords. Let these women pass in peace.”

  Instead of complying, they laughed and roughly grabbed both herself and the girl from the kitchens who had shown her the way down the steps. Not sure what else to do, Imogen shouted out to the duchess. “They're here! Your husbands have come for you! There were twenty men upstairs that I saw.”

  The man holding her slapped her for her trouble. She was growing terribly tired of these men. But not so tired of them that she wanted what came next.

  Sabre and George flowed into the hall like a deadly tide. Knives flashed in the lantern light, and shortly the two men in front of the door screamed and fell to their knees. The duchess claimed one of their swords and ran at the man holding Imogen. She wasn't sure if he failed to believe the tiny duchess could be a threat, or if he simply couldn't react in time, but he still had a hand around Imogen's arm when Sabre cut his throat. She felt his death, felt it down to her core, and it made her shake.

  “Go see to Jack,” Sabre shouted at her. Imogen felt like she was far away again, sent away by the death and destruction, and shook her head in confusion. “The countess,” Sabre tried again. “The baby is coming.”

  Oh sweet mercy, Imogen thought. A baby? In the midst of all this? She stumbled toward the room to see if Sabre had the right of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Robert and Gideon had drawn over a dozen men outside, and Robert was beginning to wonder if there might not be fifty before the day was done. Provided that he and Gideon survived it.

  “They're loading shot at the back,” Gideon called over the clash of steel.

  “I noticed,” Robert shouted back.

  “Well are you going to do anything about it?”

  “When it's time,” Robert replied.

  The first man to load his shot raised his pistol, but not in time to beat Robert. Having already loaded and primed his pistols before they arrived, he drew the first from his vest and fired, seemingly casually with his left hand. The would-be shooter collapsed to the stone steps. Robert tossed the spent pistol away and drew another.

  Gideon grinned. “I always did say you were the best shot I know.”

  “And here I thought you'd been referring to my talent at billiards.”

  Sword fighting was grueling and sweaty work. Worse yet, Robert had no idea how Casimir and the duke fared inside the house. If he had been inside, he could have had more influence over the unfolding of their plan. Here, he was simply a soldier executing an onerous and quite dangerous task. Both he and Gideon already had enough cuts to require a surgeon, and would be beyond lucky to both make it out of the confrontation alive. They had finally drawn the vanguard of the men down to the stone wall where they planned to make their stand, so at least that had worked out. Now it was simply the near-endless task of wearing out a superior force.

  * * *

  Quince had never had much use for bullies. When he first arrived at school, one of the larger boys, Bruce, had liked to pick on him. Quince had been small for his age, quiet and fastidious in the way of children who had only ever known adults. Worse yet, he already had a title. Marquess. That seemed to irritate Bruce the most. “Little Marquess,” he would call out tauntingly before doing something horrid, like tripping Quince down the steps or dumping his books in the pond. It had always been something he could claim to be an accident, until the day a Prefect had caned Bruce upon seeing what really happened. Later that day, Bruce and his snorting cadre had held Quince down and worked on giving him a real beating. Well, they started to, but just when Quince had been sure he was about to cry, the one sin from which school boys never recovered, it was as though the hand of God had reached down and plucked Bruce away. Off the bully flew, higher and higher, tumbling away into the yard. Standing in his place, dark and foreboding, with a split lip and a scowl at the retreating Bruce, had been another boy from Quince's class. Classmates called him Wolfe. Son of an earl. Wolfe had his own friends, and Quince wa
sn't sure quite why the boy had helped him.

  Turning his attention back to Quince, the boy offered him a hand up.

  “You can't let them pin you down like that,” he said.

  “I can't?” Quince was at a loss on how he was supposed to stop it from happening.

  Wolfe shook his head. “If they're bigger, you need to be faster. If they're stronger, you need to be smarter.”

  “Of course. How stupid of me.”

  Wolfe sighed. “And if they're touchy, you can't be an ass. That's just asking for trouble.”

  “You're obviously bigger and stronger, are you also touchy?”

  The boy grinned at him. “Lucky for you, no.” He cocked his head to the side. “Are you fast and smart?”

  “You only told me that I had to be faster and smarter.”

  The larger boy hooked an arm around Quince's throat and pulled him in to rub a knot on his head. “You answered that one now, didn't you?” the boy asked. The move was teasing in a way that Quince was not at all used to. It spoke to an easy familiarity with other boys that was, in fact, completely outside his experience. When Wolfe pushed him away again, it was to walk companionably down to the dormitory together.

  That day had changed the course of the rest of Quince's life. He had taken Gideon's advice, and worked to be both faster and smarter. Especially as he dearly loved being an ass to people who deserved it. Luckily, he had also grown bigger and stronger. He had taken up the sword with the singular obsession of someone who never wanted to suffer at the hands of others again, and later his prowess with the blade had even won him his wife. The very least he could do, he thought, to repay Gideon for everything from that day long ago to the life he enjoyed now, was ensure that the countess was safe. He had not trusted that Robert would put as much priority on Gideon’s wife as his own, but for Quince there was no question that both women must be saved. As such, he had no hesitation as he and Casimir moved through the house. Threats were eliminated, swiftly and without mercy. Servants who surrendered were instructed to leave through the back door, for if they were seen again they would also be killed.