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Over the mountains, and under the seas,
Over the fountains and under the graves,
Over floods which are deepest that Neptune obey
Over rocks which are steepest, love will find out the way.
–“Love Will Find Out the Way,” Trad.
Jamie Deverill rode to Ryder House early enough in the evening to find the master still at home—and still sober. Ryder’s hope that Jamie might have brought a message from Annis died the instant he saw the look on the younger man’s face.
“The ladies are missing. Lured away from a dress shop by trickery,” Jamie told him. “The way it happened makes me fear—”
“Belle Barlow,” Ryder surmised grimly.
“I think so, yet I can’t make myself believe she would ever dare.”
“I admit to thinking that myself,” Ryder conceded. “She must know we’d hound her to hell and back for it. And yet...” His eyes narrowed at the memory of how Annis and the Red Queen had faced each other like duelists inside the magistrate’s chambers. “There is something between her and Annis that makes me think Mrs. Barlow might risk a good deal to even the score between them.”
“So you’ll go with me to the Red Queen’s place?”
“Need you ask?” He rang for Curran and then, seemingly lost in thought, went to stare out the window at the falling night.
Jamie, badly in need of some reassurance, would have given a good deal to know what the older man was thinking. He would not have liked those thoughts.
Ryder was thinking: If Annis was by herself, maybe, just maybe, she could witch her way out of this. But not with Clare in her keeping. Clare will cry and cling and drag her down, and Annis will never, never leave her...
The London night had never looked so dark as this night looked to Ryder. Struck by a sudden realization, he turned from the window. “The lightskirts have their rout tonight. Surely the famous Mrs. Barlow will make an appearance.”
Jamie frowned. “I suppose. But what’s the connection?”
“I don’t know,” Ryder admitted with a frustrated shrug. “But the traffic will be in an infernal tangle, and if Belle Barlow is at the Argyle, it will be next to impossible to put the screws to her in such a public place. I believe,” he said after another moment of thought, “we’d best take along a few trifles that we might be in need of.”
“Trifles?”
“Swords, pistols, reinforcements, mounts,” said the lord of war, Nick Ryder.
****
It was festival night in Covent Garden.
What happened tonight was better than a hanging, better than a riot. What happened tonight was that the cream of the neighborhood Cyprians would dress up in flash costumes and parade out of their brothels. They would step aboard fine carriages and ride in a colorful, bawdy procession to the Argyle Rooms, where they would entertain the fancy gents with all manner of rompish vice.
Hordes of slum dwellers poured out of their tenements, eager for a glimpse of the expensive pleasures of their betters. The parade to the Cyprians Ball was an event of intense civic interest, for whoremongering was the mainstay of the neighborhood economy.
Drink-sodden carousers were already congregating along the block of brothels and bawdy houses adjacent to Covent Garden. But most of the crowd chose to gather in front of Mrs. Barlow’s place. The Red Queen, purveyor of dark pleasures, would not disappoint them.
****
Ryder came on horse to Covent Garden with four good men riding at his back: his coachman, Sloane, his two young grooms, Wade and Duckett, both stout Kentish men, and Jamie Deverill, the man he still hoped and prayed would one day become his brother-in-law. They held their horses on tight rein among the drunken, reeling revelers who filled the streets.
Once Belle Barlow’s place was in sight, Ryder gave the order to dismount. He and Jamie had shed their tight gentlemen’s coats and waistcoats and wore black cloaks to hide their pistols and swords. They had also prudently divested themselves of watches, fobs, purses, and signet rings. Ryder’s servants were out of livery and dressed like the retired troopers they all were.
“Jamie and I will go on foot from here,” Ryder decided. He tossed his reins to Sloane. “Take the horses in as close as you dare and wait for us.”
The crowd in front of the Red Queen’s place was crammed close, hungry for spectacle. Calls for the doxies to show themselves rose and fell as jugs of gin were passed around. Torches cast a lurid sheen over the mass of surging faces.
Vicious elbowing got Ryder and Jamie close enough to see that a high-toned barouche had been drawn up before the building. The calash top was thrown back to reveal a red brocade interior. The horses that drew it were red-plumed, the coachman decked out in red livery. A similarly uniformed groom stood on the rear roost. The Red Queen was going to the ball in full regalia.
“Soon now,” Ryder predicted. “We’ll follow and wait for our chance.”
The Red Queen was preceded by her lightskirted ladies-in-waiting, the cream of the neighborhood Cyprians.
First came a girl dressed as a Bacchante. She carried a wineskin, and her black hair flowed loose under a garland of grapes. Never mind that most of the crowd hadn’t the remotest idea what a Bacchante was. All were in a mood to huzzah for a young lady wearing diaphanous draperies anchored to her person by strategically placed grapevines.
After her came a buxom young woman in a black gauze travesty of a nun’s habit, and after her, a Dutch maid in a peaked cap, wooden shoes, and an aproned skirt so short it would certainly have gotten her taken up for indecency in staid Amsterdam. Last of all came a bird girl decked out in dyed plumes and Turkish sequins, as fabulous a soiled dove as ever fluttered on the Covent Garden pavement.
The crowd stomped, whistled, and called out invitations to become more intimately acquainted. The costumed girls preened their way to the carriage, with Mrs. Barlow’s bullies shoving away any man who got too forward in his admiration.
Then the Red Queen came, sanguinarily resplendent in a red dress of Jacquard, the cost of which half the ladies of the court could not have afforded. The taloned hands were sheathed in a matching red muff, another expensive indulgence. Rubies glittered like drops of blood about her neck and quivered in larger drops from her earlobes. Her face shone white as polished bone in the torchlight.
She turned with a theatrical flourish, for now came something else—a wagon carrying a piece of scenery with two actresses. The Quality would have called it a rolling tableau vivant, but the Covent Garden crowd called it two fancy whores getting a beating from the Red Queen.
****
Don’t be a cowardly ninny, Annis. It’s not as if you’re going to be swum for a witch. It’s not as if you’ve been sentenced to the flame. It’s not as if your foot will be crushed in the boot until the white marrow of your bones runs out with the red of your blood. It’s only public ordeal, the very least of all the awful fates a witch could face. It’s not so bad...
Oh, but it was bad enough.
Annis felt battered by the noise and the eyes of the many-eyed crowd monster that surrounded her. The tumult rose up in a gobbling howl at the sight of her and Clare. The crowd was primed to enjoy the charade of cruelty masquerading as correction, especially when spiced by the lickerish, lip-smacking tang of sexual subjugation.
And now her red tormenter was beside her, whispering about pretty, wicked little girls, and we all know what must be done to pretty, wicked little girls, don’t we? And the whip snapped and whistled against Clare, but Clare was beyond it for the moment.
Oh, Clare, be very far away...
And then she felt the hot stinging slither upon her own shoulders, not so much in pain—not yet—but rather in utter loathsomeness, like the writhing of a nest of scorpions upon her skin. She looked up, hoping for sight of the moon, her mistress. But there was no moon. The sky was blotted out by the smoke of the stone city, and she was a prisoner in the hands of the Mistress of the Revels in Hell...
****
Comprehension struck like cold steel into Ryder’s gut as he recognized the two masked figures in the Red Queen’s cruelly celebratory spectacle. So, too, did Jamie recognize them. The younger man tensed to push his way forward, but Ryder grasped his arm.
“Not here,” he said close to Jamie’s ear. “The crowd would turn on us.”
Jamie took a steadying breath, but when the lash fell on Clare’s inert form, Ryder had to haul him back again. “The thing’s a fake. I’ve seen them before.”
“I’ll kill the bloody bitch for this,” Jamie muttered.
“Later for that. First, we look to our own.”
And now it was Annis’s turn to feel the caressive attention of the Red Queen’s whip.
Ryder felt as if his heart’s blood had drained right out of him. Fear for her made him helpless, and helplessness was new to him. And Dear God, what if she was with child? The possibility tortured him as he watched her undergo her ordeal before the mob.
He bore it the best he could, clenching and unclenching his fists, struggling to master the all but overwhelming urge to attack, attack, attack. He knew this inspired pageant of revenge was meant to strike at him and Jamie as well, to smirch their honor and rape their manhood and leave them with memories that would gall them to their dying day.
The Red Queen’s instinct for cruelty was unerring—and uncanny. Was it possible that she knew how diabolically she avenged herself on Annis? But of course, she knew. She must. But how? Cold unease ran beneath his hot fury. His hand sought the comfort of his sword hilt and his loaded pistol. And yet, his heart misgave him, for he feared he might be up against an enemy that no weapon could dispatch.
The crowd’s volatile passions were subsiding, especially since the two lead players were doing nothing particularly dramatic. Excellent whores they might well be, but as actresses, they were as dull as ditchwater: no agonized writhings, no screams of pain, no pleas for mercy.
Disappointed, the onlookers began to move on, heading for “The Finish,” Mother Bain’s notorious brothel, to see what kind of show was being put on there. Belle Barlow retired to her red-bedizened barouche, which pulled into line behind the lumbering wagon.
“God in heaven,” Jamie groaned. “She’s parading them through the streets like aristos to the guillotine.”
“But instead of the guillotine, she’ll throw them to the gentlemen at the Argyle. We must stop the wagon before it gets there.” Ryder scanned the torch-lit confusion of the street and saw his men coming toward him.
At first, Sloane and the two grooms could not believe what they heard about the two figures in white, but Ryder’s killing look confirmed it.
Sloane shook his head in disbelief. “The Red Queen has run mad.”
“The Red Queen,” said Ryder, “will be off her throne and trampled in the dust before this is over. But first, the ladies.” He gathered his men around him. “Mrs. Barlow will undoubtedly have men watching the wagon. But I think if her carriage is threatened, her dogs will run to her aid. When they do, Jamie and I can breach the wagon.” He hesitated, suddenly aware of what he asked. “Lads, I know we thought to leave the fighting behind, but it seems I must ask you to back me in one last battle.”
“And did you think we would not, captain?”
With a fight brewing, the three cavalrymen had fallen back into the habit of addressing him by his military rank.
Ryder gave them a swift look of wordless gratitude, then got down to tactics and orders: he and Jamie to take the wagon, Sloane and Wade to harry Belle’s vehicle making it lag behind, Duckett to ride between the two sortie parties to reinforce and collect the mounts.
Sloane and Wade went into action first.
Wade tossed some coins to an orange vendor and soon had a sack of fruit hanging from his pommel. He hurled the oranges at the red-uniformed coachman, causing him to drop his reins under the barrage of fruit. Gleeful urchins risked life and limb to gather up this amazing windfall as it rolled into the gutter.
Sloane went after the fancy groom, swiping him off the rear roost with one well-placed blow that sent him sprawling to the cobbles. The crowd, sensing trouble, melted into the safety of the alleys to watch and see who was foolish enough to assail the Red Queen in such a manner.
Belle Barlow knew she was under attack. She made no audible cry for help, but suddenly, as if they had sprung from the gutters, men grouped around the carriage, knife blades flickering in their hands.
“Our turn now,” Ryder said.
He and Jamie urged their horses toward the wagon, which had pulled to a halt some distance ahead as the driver became aware of the astonishing goings-on behind him. Suddenly, he found himself confronted by a mounted man with a drawn pistol.
“Get down from the wagon,” Ryder ordered, “or I’ll blow your head off.”
The man hesitated for an instant, then slid off the wagon seat.
“Now run,” Ryder invited, “like the dog you are.”
The man ran.
The fact that he didn’t wear the Red Queen’s livery saved him from death. The possibility that he might be an innocent carter hired for the evening niggled at Ryder’s conscience, so he contented himself with harrying the fellow into a nearby cross street.
And now, thought Ryder, turning his horse back toward the wagon, now for my reward.