“Limp,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth.
“What?” Jon asked. He sounded dazed.
“I said, how’s your leg?” I spoke louder.
“Fine,” Jon said, concentrating on the halting stride he’d forgotten until I reminded him. “My leg is fine.”
He limped beautifully, artistically, all the way across the yard to where Caleb had parked the coach.
Chapter 19
The vice-admiral, uniform buttons straining to contain his paunch, took my elbow and gallantly guided me across the prison yard to where Caleb had parked the carriage. With what I trusted were proper manners, I thanked him for his help on getting us past the gate guard.
“La, sir,” I said, twinkling up at him with pretend flirtatiousness.
“I’m sure I don’t know what I would have done without you.” And that was no lie. “What do you suppose ailed that man?”
“Overcome by your beauty, my dear, and your lovely smile,” he replied, his courtliness startling when one considered I’d almost talked the poor man to death when we first entered Dartmoor.
And no doubt my smile did compare favorably with almost anyone’s here, I suppose, since I at least had all of my teeth. There was just one minor problem with that logic. I had not been smiling at the guard.
As soon as courtesy allowed, I bade Vice-Admiral Stanton an amiable farewell. If he wondered why I had gotten so much quieter than I’d been earlier, at least he didn’t ask. Perhaps he thought my delicate sensibilities had been overcome by the squalor surrounding us, and could be he was correct. What he thought didn’t worry me anyway because I knew our highest, most dangerous hurdle had already been jumped. He had not noticed the coachman who walked away from the prison was different from the coachman who had walked in.
A trembling little laugh escaped me as Vice-Admiral Stanton waddled over to his gig and drove off. “That was almost too easy,” I said, exulting in a release of tension. “I don’t know why we all worried so much.”
Jonathan dumped his armload of stuff inside the carriage onto seat.
“We’ve only passed the first gate. I’m not going to celebrate until we’ve passed all of the gates.”
Well, there’s nothing like a good chastening to set you right up. But I’d take any amount of correction like a sport if Caleb would walk out of that prison yard this very instant. Then, once we got Jonathan away, everyone would be happy.
We spent the next several minutes going through and arranging, then rearranging all of the junk I’d bought, until I feared this make-work occupation had started to look like make-work. Such was my preoccupation with inventing what appeared a plausible excuse for delay that several minutes passed before I realized Sergeant O'Malley, following the plan, was gone.
This would make his third successful trip out of here today, while apparently arriving only twice. Our plan depended on the anonymity of one scarlet coat being much the same as any other. Three people had entered the prison riding in this carriage, and three must be seen to go out.
“What is keeping Ethan?” I was fretting aloud. At least I remembered to call him by the correct name.
Jon frowned. “He’ll be along soon,” he said, although I noticed he kept glancing back toward the gate when he thought I wouldn’t notice.
“He intends to leave as one in a group of people, same as we did, when the guard is less likely to single him out.”
“Oh, right. Just like that blockhead did with us.”
“It’ll be all right,” Jon soothed. Then, only seconds later… “By Christ, I wish he’d hurry. The groom over there—the one with the team of chestnuts—is watching us already. So is the guard on the wall. He’s wondering what we’re waiting for, why we don’t get started.” He cracked his knuckles, four on one hand, four on the other, as if hammering out a drum roll.
I jumped. Seconds began to feel like minutes.
“Maybe we should try to act like we have a reason to dilly-dally instead of standing around like a pair of dimwits. Why don’t you fiddle with the horses or something? You don’t have do anything for real, just look real.” I made the suggestion thinking he’d leap at the chance,
“Fiddle around? Doing what, pray tell? I don’t know what to do.”
“Do what Ethan does.” Cousin Jonathan was a little slow, I decided.
Couldn’t he figure anything out?
“What does Ethan do?” Jonathan asked, with a wary glance at me.
Waiting for Caleb had stressed him close to the breaking point. The indications were in the way he rolled his eyes from side to side and in the jerky movements of his hands.
“Well, you have to get out and walk a slow circuit around the horses. Act like you’re checking their harness, then go around and pick up their feet and examine their hooves. Ethan always does that before starting a journey. Not that I have a clue about what he’s looking for, mind you. How should I?” I thought the knowledge of horses and wagons was something the men of this time would automatically know, just as every man of my acquaintance in my own time knows cars.
This, as Jon soon informed me with a horrified expression dawning in his eyes, is not necessarily so.
“You don’t know?” he asked. “I don’t know either. The less I’m around horses, the better I like it. I don’t have anything to do with them—ever. I’m a seaman, for God’s sake, not a bloody horse wrangler.”
“You mean…” For the first time, Jonathan Harriman and I agreed upon something.
“I mean when I’m in port I hire a driver to take me where I want to go. Unless, of course, I walk.”
I cast a rather desperate glance towards the gate, hoping I’d see Caleb on his way out of the market square. Nothing. Yet we, Jon and I, couldn’t tarry any longer without drawing someone in authority down on us, even if they were only offering help. It was up to me to act. At least I knew Caleb’s routine.
“First thing,” I said, beckoning Jon to fall in at my side and walk alongside the horses with me, “is to make everyone think you know what you’re doing.”
Jon nodded soberly.
“See? The two lead horses are tied to this rail with a hitching rein, not the driving reins. You don’t want to forget to untie them before you try to start off.” Jonathan didn’t even crack a tiny smile at my feeble little joke. We passed in front of the horses and started down the offside. The animals watched us with placid eyes. “You’re going to want to look at their feet. I think this is an important step, Jonathan. If one of them has picked up a stone or cast a shoe or something like that, you’ll be dead in the water, and going nowhere.”
He recognized the truth of that.
“Argh.” He made a disgusted sound. “I hate this. I can’t imagine why Ethan thinks horses are so fine. If you can show me, though, I’ll do my best to appear a believable coachman.”
You just never know what you know until you’re tested. I’d watched Caleb perform this ritual time after time and, while I was reluctant to mess around with horses that had feet a big around as hula-hoops, I forced myself.
“Whoa, boy.” I didn’t notice if the horse was a boy or not. I got a tail hair twitched into the corner of my eye, so maybe not. I went for a rear foot thinking he couldn’t bite me on the bum from there, although I may have been mistaken on that premise. I picked up his foot just like I’d watched Caleb do. The horse didn’t resist. He lifted his foot when I tapped his ankle and let me lift it onto my bent knee. I expected the hoof to be heavy, only to find it wasn’t especially. Just solid.
“All part of a coachman’s job,” I said to Jon as I let the hoof down.
“Ethan has a special tool he uses to clean the gunk out with while he’s doing his inspection, but I think we can skip that part. It wasn’t so hard,” I added by way of encouragement. “Only fifteen more to go.”
“By Christ,” Jon sent another pleading glance toward the gate. “I wish he’d get here.”
It seemed he had begun to appreciate his cousin.
The waiting grew long. Five minutes—ten minutes, while Jonathan took his time, working his way among the horses. He picked their feet up, studied them as though he expected them to split into two, and then dropped them again. The horses didn’t seem to mind. Then finally, finally, I saw Caleb. Still on the other side, the wrong side in the prison proper, walking alone.
“Oh, no,” I moaned, and I heard Jon suck in a hard breath also.
“He was supposed to wait for—oh, hell!” Jon started forward, as if he’d physically stop Caleb. Not, of course, that he could do any good.
He didn’t need me clutching at his coat to stay him. His own good sense did that.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered, agony building in my heart.
There wasn’t a hope in hell the guard wouldn’t remember the two men who passed through his guard post who looked enough alike to be twins. Not even a wild, weird, unlikely chance. I had gone out of my way to annoy him. He had stared into Jonathan’s face as he replaced the dropped deck of cards on top of the stuff piled high in my coachman’s arms. Although one man wore the coat of an English officer, and the other the capes of a coachman, I knew that would never save them.
My fault. All my fault.
The guard must have been angry with me. Why hadn’t he simply stomped the damned cards into the mud? Why had he thought he must call to Jonathan Harriman, then replace the fallen object on the stack? I fought back the scream of warning I felt building in my throat.
Caleb trod with an unhurried, even pace, unaware of his imminent denouncement. He held his head high, his shoulders square. Impossible to guess he had a bum leg. His red jacket and white trousers shone with a targeted brilliance in the afternoon light. The sun was behind him now, his face in shadow. Within seconds, he’d be face to face with the guard. And he would be revealed. I knew it.
Sweat broke out under my arms, hot and sticky. A nervous rush swelled my chest tight. Damn Caleb anyway! Hadn’t he been watching Jon and me? He had to know this was the same guard. Did he think to sacrifice himself on the altar of Jonathan Harriman’s freedom?
As if in answer to the prayer I hadn’t been able to verbalize, the rambunctious sound of fighting carried to where Jon and I waited. I hadn’t been praying for a fight exactly, although when it came, I realized I should have been. The fight was a good touch. A perfect touch.
The hoop-de-doo in development was taking place within the market square, not far beyond Caleb. Once he turned, watching as the melee began to spread throughout the market. A woman—not a lady—
yelled a rather vile curse.
“Bates,” Jon breathed, and indeed, thirty or forty yards beyond Caleb, I saw Mr. Bates’ long arms windmilling, pummeling away at anyone who chanced within his reach.
“’Ere,” the guard roared, taking one step away from his post. A whole troop of red-coated guards rushed to gather around the group of struggling men. He clearly wanted to join them. “’Ere,” he said again, and took another step.
“Go!” I whispered, although I wanted to shout. I stared at the guard’s back, the pupils of my eyes narrowing until I saw no more than a dark tunnel, wishing I could will him away from the gate. “Go now!”
Caleb plucked at the guard’s sleeve. The man’s eyes were fixed on the fight, an exhibit of far greater interest than one lone officer in the act of departure. He shrugged Caleb’s hand aside and glanced toward the gate, took two more steps, and forgot Caleb as he made the decision to investigate.
As the guard took his fourth step, Caleb drew even with the gate. At five steps, he was under the domed arch. Six steps—a small falter before his iron control straightened his weak leg—and on the seventh step, he came out the other side. Our side.
I wanted to smile and cheer. Instead I felt drained, as if I’d been carrying him on my back.
Caleb spoke with everyone he met on his way to meet Jonathan and me—or so it seemed. There were several who stopped him, all wanting to ask about what was happening “inside.” As if he had all the time in the world, he had a word with a groom busy walking a fine pair of matched blood-bays in a large circle, keeping them warm and limber against the wind while they waited for their master.
“Pretty slick,” I murmured, when at last he joined us. I still trembled.
He smiled at me until the corners of my mouth turned up in response. “I thought so,” he said. “A hell of a lot slicker than what you pulled.” He turned to Jon. “Your Mr. Bates is one helluva a piece of work. He’s the one who thought up having a fight as a distraction. He said the guards hate fights.”
Jon agreed. “They do. They’re always afraid a fight’ll balloon into a full-blown riot. So that was Bates’ idea, eh?”
“It was indeed. He’s a good man, Jon. He almost started sooner, back when I was beginning to think you’d never get out. What did you do to the guard anyway?”
“I think your Miss Winthrop talked so much she almost scared him to death,” Jon said. Now, at last, there was a trace of amusement in his voice.
“There’s no way in the world I can have scared him any more than he scared me,” I said. “No way. I must say I’ve never seen a bigger meathead in my life. I thought for a while he was trying to put down roots.”
Caleb sighed. “Speaking of roots, what do you say we get out of here before we grow some ourselves?”
Any fool could see he was about done in, his face a pale background for the flush over his cheekbones. He had a sheen of sweat across his forehead and over his upper lip. His bad leg was trembling in tiny, erratic jerks. I can’t imagine how he had managed to walk so far without falling, let alone without a limp. If I’d put a hand to his face, I knew I’d have felt the fever-heat burning through his veins.
I wondered if Queen Charlotte would have laughed, for all of her concern had been for her grandson Jonathan’s health, believing him ill unto death in cold Dartmoor prison. Yet the one in real danger was his rescuer. Jonathan Harriman seemed in the peak of health.
When the time came for Caleb to climb up onto the driver’s perch, he couldn’t manage. Oh, he tried, pushing off on his good leg and pulling with his arms, a method which had worked for him in the past.
Now his strength failed.
“Sorry,” he said, panting like a winded dog. Sweat poured off him in buckets. “Sorry, Jon. I’m afraid you’re going to have wear the coachman’s coat a while longer. Once we get to the bottom of the hill, we’ll pick up O'Malley and he’ll drive, but you’re going to have to get us through the gate.”
“Me? Are you ill?” Jon gave his cousin a narrow-eyed once over, speaking with more concern in his tone than I ever expected. He came to Caleb’s side and gave him a shoulder to lean on. Better late than never, to quote an old cliché. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Bad leg,” Caleb allowed through clenched teeth.
“He took a musket ball through his leg.” I took up the explanation.
“A month or so ago while he was in Spain. The wound didn’t heal well—and now it’s infected.”
“Infected…”
“That’s okay,” I interrupted, determined to keep the worry out of my voice. I opened the door into the coach and, with Jon on one side and me on the other, we helped Caleb settle inside, seated well back in the corner and with his leg propped on the opposite seat. “We’ll manage.”
“Sorry,” Caleb repeated. He had collapsed, looking limp as the last noodle on a plate.
“The thing is Jon isn’t very experienced with driving so I’m going to sit out here with him and help.”
Caleb closed his eyes, although he grinned a little through his pain.
“You? I don’t believe it. I only wish I could stand aside and watch.”
“Oh, hush,” I said. “You don’t know what I can do, if I have to.”
“I’m beginning to find out.” His eyes opened and he stared at me for a moment. “Be ruthless if that’s what you have to do, Boothenay.
Remember that.”
&nbs
p; I gripped his hand, hot in my cold one. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” he said, his return grip without strength. “Oh, yes, you do.”
Realization hit me hard. Caleb didn’t think he was going to make his way home.
Jonathan Harriman had the hat on his head, and he wore the coat with four capes. An authentic coachman up top the driver’s perch, or so he looked, until he refused to pick up the reins.
I’d already released the horses from their tether before I climbed up beside him. Groom’s work. Did he expect me to do everything?
“How many time do I have to tell you?” he said, his patience growing thin. “I don’t know how to drive a team of horses. One horse I might just manage, but I’ve never driven a team in my life and I’m not going to start now. If we have to sit here and wait for Ethan to get better, then we will.”
“In a pig’s ass, we will.” The mantle of a lady didn’t seem to be an easy guise for me. “This is your rescue he’s risking everything for, including his life. I thought you were crazy to get out of here. If you are, you’d better be prepared to help yourself. I’m damned well not going to let him get stuck here in your place. No way—no how. Don’t you understand that he’s sick? Sick to death.”
Saying the words made my worry all too real and, even as I said them aloud, every sense, every nerve, every iota of intelligence I had, rose up and hollered in protest. Caleb was only resting for a while.
He’d be all right. I’d make him be all right. Soon now, we’d have this ridiculous rescue of Jonathan Harriman wrapped up, then the magic of Caleb’s gun would have to let us go. Only a few hours more. Please God, only a few hours more.
I didn’t feel like letting a one of those precious minutes go by while I sat like a lump of wet doggy-do melting on the lawn. If Jonathan Harriman wasn’t going to help, I’d damn well get us out of here myself.
Taking a deep breath, I picked up the reins and threaded them through my fingers just as I’d watched Caleb do. An immediate response flowed through the lines from the horses’ tender mouths to my hands. Christ on a crutch, I thought, breathing deeply. I must be crazy.
In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 24
