The coach hit a bump, became airborne for a split second, and landed hard, snapping her neck, throwing her violently against the man on her left, and causing the passengers clinging to the roof above to cry out in terror. Someone’s trunk went flying off the coach, but the driver never slowed the galloping team.
“God help us!” murmured the young mother across from Juliet as her children cringed fearfully against her.
Juliet grasped the strap and hung her head, fighting nausea as she hugged her own child. Her lips touched the baby’s downy gold curls. “Almost there,” she whispered, for Charlotte’s ears alone. “Almost there—to your papa’s home.”
Suddenly without warning, there were shouts, a horse’s frightened whinny, and violent curses from the driver. Someone on the roof screamed. The coach careened madly, the inhabitants both inside and out shrieking in terror as the vehicle hurtled along on two wheels for another forty or fifty feet before finally crashing heavily down on its axles with another neck-snapping jolt, shattering a window with the impact and spilling the elderly gent to the floor. Outside, someone was sobbing in fear and pain.
And inside, the atmosphere of the coach went as still as death.
“We’re being robbed!” cried the old man, getting to his knees to peer out the rain-spattered window.
Shots rang out. There was a heavy thud from above, then movement just beyond the ominous black pane. And then suddenly, without warning it imploded, showering the inside passengers in a hail of glass.
Gasping, they looked up to see a heavy pistol—and a masked face just beyond it.
“Yer money or yer life. Now!”
* * *
It was the very devil of a night. No moon, no stars, and a light rain stinging his face as Lord Gareth Francis de Montforte sent his horse, Crusader, flying down the Wantage road at a speed approaching suicide. Stands of beech and oak shot past, there then gone. Pounding hooves splashed through puddles and echoed against the hedgerows that bracketed the road. Gareth glanced over his shoulder, saw nothing but a long empty stretch of road behind him, and shouted with glee. Another race won—Perry, Chilcot, and the rest of the Den of Debauchery would never catch him now!
Laughing, he patted Crusader’s neck as the hunter pounded through the night. “Well done, good fellow! Well done—”
And pulled him up sharply at he passed Wether Down.
It took him only a moment to assess the situation.
Highwaymen. And by the looks of it, they were helping themselves to the pickings—and passengers—of the Flying White from Southampton.
The Flying White? The young gentleman reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out his watch, squinting to see its face in the darkness. Damned late for the Flying White…
He dropped the timepiece back into his pocket, steadied Crusader, and considered what to do. No gentlemen of the road, this lot, but a trio of desperate, hardened killers. The driver and guard lay on the ground beside the coach, both presumably dead. Somewhere a child was crying, and now one of the bandits, with a face that made a hatchet look kind, smashed in the windows of the coach with the butt end of his gun. Gareth reached for his pistol. The thought of quietly turning around and going back the way he’d come never occurred to him. The thought of waiting for his friends, probably a mile behind thanks to Crusader’s blistering speed, didn’t occur to him, either. Especially when he saw one of the bandits yank open the door of the coach and haul out a struggling young woman.
He had just the briefest glimpse of her face—scared, pale, beautiful—before one of the highwaymen shot out the lanterns of the coach and darkness fell over the entire scene. Someone screamed. Another shot rang out, silencing the frightened cry abruptly.
His face grim, the young gentleman knotted his horse’s reins and removed his gloves, pulling each one carefully off by the fingertips. With a watchful eye on the highwaymen, he slipped his feet from the irons and vaulted lightly down from the thoroughbred’s tall back, his glossy top boots of Spanish leather landing in chalk mud up to his ankles. The horse never moved. He doffed his fine new surtout and laid it over the saddle along with his tricorn and gloves. He tucked the lace at his wrist safely inside his sleeve to protect it from any soot or sparks his pistol might emit. Then he crept through the knee-high weeds and nettles that grew thick at the side of the road, priming and loading the pistol as he moved stealthily toward the stricken coach. He would have time to squeeze off only one shot before they were upon him, and that one shot had to count.
* * *
“Everybo’y out. Now!”
Holding Charlotte tightly against her, Juliet managed to remain calm as the robber snared her wrist and jerked her violently from the vehicle. She landed awkwardly in the sticky white mud and would have gone down if not for the huge, bearlike hand that yanked her to her feet. Perhaps, she thought numbly, it was the very fact that it was bearlike that she was able to keep her head—and her wits—about her, for Juliet had been born and raised in the woods of Maine, and she was no stranger to bears, Indians, and a host of other threats that made these English highwaymen look benign by comparison.
But they were certainly not benign. The slain driver lay face-down in the mud. The bodies of one of the guards and a passenger were sprawled in the weeds nearby. A shudder went through her. She was glad of the darkness. Glad that the poor little children still inside the coach were spared the horrors that daylight would have revealed.
Cuddling Charlotte, she stood beside the other passengers as the robbers yanked people down from the roof and lined them up in front of the coach. A woman was sobbing. A girl clung pitifully to the old man, perhaps her grandfather. One fellow, finely dressed and obviously a gentleman, angrily protested the treatment of the women and without a word, one of the highwayman stuck his pistol into his belly and shot him dead. As he fell, the wretched group gasped in dismay and horror. Then the last passengers were dragged from the coach, the two children clinging to their mother’s skirts and crying piteously.
They all huddled together in the rainy darkness, too terrified to speak as, one by one, they were relieved of their money, their jewels, their watches, and their pride.
And then the bandits came to Juliet.
“Gimme yer money, girl, all of it. Now!”
Juliet complied. Without a sound, she handed over her reticule.
“The necklace, too.”
Her hand went to her throat. Hesitated. The robber cuffed it away in impatience, ripping the thin gold chain from her neck and dropping the miniature of Charlotte’s dead father into his leather bag.
“Any jewels?”
She was still staring at the bag. “No.”
“Any rings?”
“No.”
But he grabbed her hand, held it up, and saw it: a promise made but broken by death. It was Charles’s signet ring—her engagement ring—the last thing her beloved fiancé had given her before he had died in the fighting at Concord.
“Filthy lyin’ bitch, give it to me!”
Juliet stood her ground. She looked him straight in the eye and firmly, quietly, repeated the single word.
“No.”
Without warning he backhanded her across the cheek, and she fell to her knees in the mud, cutting her palm on a stone as she tried to prevent injury to the baby. Her hair tumbled down around her face. Charlotte began screaming. And Juliet looked up, only to see the black hole of a pistol’s mouth two inches away, the robber behind it snarling with rage.
Her life passed before her eyes.
And at that moment a shot rang out from somewhere off to her right, a dark rose exploded on the highwayman’s chest, and with a look of surprise, he pitched forward, dead.
* * *
Only one shot, but by God, I made it count.
The other two highwaymen jerked around at the bark of Gareth’s pistol. Their faces mirrored disbelief as they took in his fine shirt and lace at throat and sleeve, his silk waistcoat, expensive boots, expensive breeches, expen
sive everything. They saw him as a plum ripe for the picking, and Gareth knew it. He went for his sword.
“Get on your horses and go, and neither of you shall be hurt.”
For a moment, neither the highwaymen nor the passengers moved. Then, slowly, one of the highwayman began to smile. The other, to sneer.
“Now!” Gareth commanded, still moving forward and trying to bluff them with his display of cool authority.
And then all hell broke loose.
Tongues of flame cracked from the highwaymen’s pistols and Gareth heard the low whine of a ball passing at close range. Passengers screamed and dived for cover. The coach horses reared, whinnying in fear. Gareth, his sword raised, charged through the tangle of nettle that grew dense at the side of the road, trying to get to the robbers before they could reload and fire. His foot hit a patch of mud and he went down, his cheek slamming into the stinging nettles. One of the highwayman came racing toward him, spewing a torrent of foul language and intent only on finishing him off. Gareth lay gasping, then flung himself hard to the left as the bandit’s pistol coughed another spear of flame. Where his shoulder had been, a plume of mud shot several inches into the air.
The brigand was still coming, roaring at the top of his lungs, already bringing up a second pistol.
Gamely, Gareth tried to get to his feet and reach his sword. He slipped in the wet weeds, his cheek on fire as though he’d been stung by a hundred bees. He was outnumbered, his pistol spent, his sword just out of reach. But he wasn’t done for. Not yet. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He lunged for his sword, rolled onto his back, and sitting up, flung the weapon at the oncoming highwayman with all his strength.
The blade caught the robber just beneath the jaw and nearly took his head off. He went over backward, clawing at his throat, his dying breath a terrible, rasping gurgle.
And then Gareth saw one of the two children running toward him, obviously thinking he was the only safety left in this world gone mad.
“Billy!” the mother was screaming. “Billy, no, get back!”
The last highwayman spun around. Wild-eyed and desperate, he saw the fleeing child, saw that his two friends were dead, and, as though to avenge a night gone wrong, brought his pistol up, training it on the little boy’s back.
“Billeeeeeeee!”
Gareth lunged to his feet, threw himself at the child, and tumbled him to the ground, shielding him with his body. The pistol exploded at close range, deafening him, a white-hot lance of fire ripping through his ribs as he rolled over and over through grass and weeds and nettles, the child still in his arms.
He came to rest upon his back, the wet weeds beneath him, blood gushing hotly from his side. He lay still, blinking up at the trees, the rain falling gently upon his throbbing cheek.
His fading mind echoed his earlier words. Well done, good fellow! Well done…
The child sprang up and ran, sobbing, back to his mother.
And for Lord Gareth de Montforte, all went dark…
* * *
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Heir To The Sea (Heroes Of The Sea Book 7) Page 31
