Georgie’s heart was hammering in alarm, but she did as she was told. She dropped through the narrow opening and landed in the shallow puddle of water that had already seeped into the boat. Unable to bear not knowing what was happening, she peered out through the tiny circular porthole at the front of the funnel.
Alex took up position by the front window. Benedict and Jem hid behind a workbench, and Seb ducked behind a pile of lumber near the stack of barrels. Footsteps crunched outside and Seb tilted his head in silent warning. To Georgie’s shock, all three of the men withdrew pistols from their clothing and exchanged nods of anticipation. Her heart lodged in her throat.
After an agonizing wait, a key scraped in the lock and the door to the warehouse swung open. Four men stepped through the narrow doorway, one holding a lantern aloft to light the way. There was a moment of ominous silence as they registered that the submarine had been launched, then murmurs of outraged disbelief.
The foremost man, a hulking figure with bushy ginger sideburns—presumably the elusive Tom Johnstone—bellowed. “O’Meara? You in ’ere?”
All four of the men peered around suspiciously. As one, they reached into their clothing and produced weapons: two pistols, two knives.
“I’m afraid not,” Alex drawled. He stood, his pistol aimed at the nearest man. “You’ll just have to make do with us.”
All four swiveled toward him, and Georgie let out an involuntary cry as a cacophony of shots rang out, seemingly from every direction. Shouts and howls echoed around the walls as the flash of muzzle fire and puffs of smoke added to the general confusion.
She could barely see anything in the shadowy darkness, but caught a glimpse of Benedict throwing down his spent pistol and launching himself at Johnstone, just as Alex pounced on another man. The four of them started punching and wrestling viciously, like the sailors she’d seen once outside a tavern in Blackwall, brawling over a tart.
She gasped as a knife blade glinted in the moonlight. The awful scuffle of grunts and thuds, the sickening sound of fists hitting flesh, made her stomach churn.
One of the men had fallen to the floor and lay ominously still, sprawled in a pile of sawdust and wood shavings. Another had dived for cover behind a stacked pile of wood, but he’d hardly crawled there when Seb loomed out of the darkness and dealt him a vicious kick to the ribs then hauled him up by the collar and punched him across the jaw. The man slumped down just as Benedict threw Johnstone against one of the workbenches with an almighty crash of metal and wood. Johnstone shouted in pain and renewed his attack, and it was then that Georgie noticed the flames.
The lamp had shattered as the first man hit the ground, and now the acrid scent of burning filled her nose. A wicked streak of flame snaked along the trickle of paraffin on the floor and set alight a bucket and paint brushes covered in tar. The whole thing caught with a wicked whoosh!
Seb rushed forward, scooped up the pail, and tossed it into the water next to the sub, but the burning paraffin had splashed liberally in several other places. Flames leapt, eagerly finding fuel in the wood shavings, oil cloth, and hemp ropes scattered around. Soon smoke, thick and black, began to fill the space, and Georgie poked her head out from the submarine in panic. “Get out of there!” she shrieked. “The gunpowder!”
Jem broke cover from behind one of the benches and darted toward the gangway, his fear of the flames apparently overcoming his dislike of the water. Georgie hauled herself out onto the deck and tried to maneuver the vessel closer to the side so the boy could climb aboard. She reached out her hand to help him just as the boat shifted away on the skittish tide.
Jem teetered on the edge of the sloping boards. He took a desperate leap toward the front of the boat but missed her outstretched hand. His fingers clawed the front of the deck, but there was nothing for him to hold on to, and with a strangled shriek, he fell into the water. Georgie threw herself flat on her stomach and reached out over the water as far as she could, trying to grab him as he splashed about. For a moment she thought she could get him, but then his head disappeared beneath the muddy water.
“Jem!” she screamed.
He surfaced a few feet from the side of the boat, and she caught sight of his face, white with terror. His arms clawed upward as if he were climbing an invisible ladder, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. Georgie stood, about to leap into the water, when Seb appeared from the smoky warehouse.
“Help him! He can’t swim!”
Seb saw Jem flailing and leapt into the water, but as soon as he got near Jem, the boy threw his arms around his neck and they both went under. Seb pushed the grasping hands away and dealt him a sharp blow across the face, and before Jem could react, he grabbed him by the collar and started towing him toward the dockside.
“Kick your legs,” he ordered harshly.
Georgie let out a sob of relief as Seb managed to drag the flailing boy to the set of wooden steps and haul him out of the water, coughing and spluttering.
Jem’s mishap had distracted her from the commotion in the warehouse. She turned, searching frantically for Benedict through the choking smoke that was now billowing out of the double doors.
“Get going!” Seb shouted. He raced down the side of the wharf to the wooden gates that opened out onto the main body of the river and started turning the handle. The iron cogs groaned against the press of the incoming tide, but the gates gradually opened and a swirl of brown water swept in, making the little vessel pitch and toss.
Georgie grabbed the knife in her boot and hacked through the rope that restrained the sub. She saw Alex drop through the side window of the warehouse and stagger down the alley, and then Benedict lumbered onto the gangway.
The sub had already floated to the middle of the dock, out of reach, drawn by the irresistible pull of the tide. Benedict shook his head and sent her a teasing smile across the eddying water that separated them. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Before she could tell him that she had no way of steering the vessel any closer, he stripped off his jacket, tossed it aside, and waded down the jetty into the water. “Bloody hell, that’s cold!”
“What are you doing, you imbecile?” she screeched.
He ignored her, and when the water was up to his thighs, he launched himself forward and began to swim toward her with strong, athletic strokes. When he reached the side of the vessel, he caught the dangling end of rope and hauled himself up. Georgie grabbed the back of his breeches and tugged until he landed, panting and sodden, on the deck. His formidable build seemed to take up most of the available space.
He rolled over onto his back and let out a breathless groan that was half laugh, half pain. “No adventures without me, Mrs. Wylde. Is that understood?”
She sent him a chiding frown for doing something so risky.
“Now, how do we sail this thing?”
Georgie sprang into action. She raised the sail and swung the boom around so the cloth caught the breeze, then took the tiller and turned the bow so they faced the open water gate. She glanced up at Benedict, who had risen to his feet and was looking back at the burning warehouse with a satisfied expression.
“Where’s Johnstone?” she asked uneasily. “Is he still in there?”
Benedict’s jaw hardened. “I don’t know. Shadwell and Daws are both dead, but Johnstone managed to slip away. I don’t know what happened to Finnegan.”
As if in answer to that, a hulking figure emerged from the rear doors of the smoking warehouse. In the blink of an eye, Georgie saw him raise a rifle to his shoulder and aim it directly at her chest. She choked out a cry of alarm at the same moment Benedict threw himself in front of her. The gun discharged with a crack. Benedict’s staggering weight almost pitched them both over the side, and he gave a grunted curse as they fell to their knees on the deck. When he pulled back, a red bloom was seeping through the white of his shirt, near his shoulder.
“Benedict, you’ve been shot!”
He clapped his hand to his arm and glanced furiously back at the warehouse. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” He pushed down hard on the back of her head. “Keep down.”
The gunman, Finnegan, had managed to reload. Georgie saw Seb sprinting back along the dock to intercept him, but Finnegan lowered his head and aimed again. The crack of another shot echoed over the water and she ducked instinctively, but it pinged against the side of the ship with a spray of wooden splinters. Seb leapt toward Finnegan and took him to the ground just as series of mighty explosions tore through the warehouse.
Windows shattered, and an enormous fireball billowed into the sky as the gunpowder barrels exploded in a chain reaction of sound. Georgie felt a flash of heat against her face and then debris rained down, splashing into the water all around them. For some bizarre reason, all she could think of was the story of Guy Fawkes and his plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
“Seb!” Benedict bellowed, shielding his eyes with his hands. He scanned the ground around the burning building, and his shoulders dropped in relief when his friend crawled out from beneath a fallen advertising placard and sent them a shaky wave.
Seb stood, tried to brush the dust and debris from his coat, then gave up with an expression of acute irritation. “That’s another coat ruined!” he yelled across to them. “It was a Weston too. You can damn well buy me a new one, Wylde!”
Benedict gave an amused chuckle. “Fair enough,” he shouted back.
Georgie scanned the rest of the dock and saw Alex and Jem huddled together a safe distance away, on the street near the coffee tavern. With a breathy prayer of thanks, she turned away from the confusion and grabbed the tiller. They still had work to do.
She steered them through the water gate—the wooden boards were slimy and green with algae as they slid past—and the river caught them in its flow.