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The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn’d.
–Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies
Annis drooped exhaustedly at her post. She had not fainted, though she certainly wished to. All she could do was close her eyes and try to will herself away as she willed Clare away. But now she dimly perceived that something was happening. The wagon had been stopped and boarded. By Jamie! she realized with an ecstatic feeling of relief.
He cut the ropes that held her to the crossbar, and she sank to her knees massaging her chafed wrists.
“Clare!” she gasped out, quite unnecessarily, for Jamie was now cutting her free and lowering her limp figure to the wagon bed.
Annis was appalled to see that her sister’s hands had swollen to an ugly bloated blue, while her face was blanched deathly white beneath her mask. The pulse in her throat was reassuringly strong, however.
“Is she all right?” Jamie asked in a tense voice.
Annis nodded. “She only swooned from the shock. Have you any water?”
“A canteen on my saddle.”
“Here, wrap her up in this.” Annis had found Holland sheets folded in the wagon bed. “I’ll get the water.”
She scrambled over the side of the wagon but then forgot her errand entirely when she saw Nick swinging off his horse in front of her. Blind with happiness, she flew to his breast and gave herself over to refuge, her arms clinging round his neck, her feet swung from the ground as if she were a child. She had no clever words but was simply thankful for the fortress of his arms around her, thankful to hide in the black folds of his cloak until her trembling spirit should quiet.
“Annis.” He whispered her name against her hair and then stepped away to look searchingly into her face, his hand splaying across her belly. “There’s no child, is there?”
She shook her head. “No, there’s no child.”
He grinned. “Trust me to amend that in due time.”
Which, she supposed, was his way of renewing his marriage proposal.
Her reply would never be known, for down the street, Wade was in trouble, his horse out of control, rearing up, pawing the air while the young groom clung desperately to the pommel.
Ryder knew instantly what had happened. “They cut his reins and spooked his horse. Duckett,” he bellowed over his shoulder, “we’re needed.” His hand went briefly to her cheek, and then he and Duckett were off, clattering to where Belle Barlow’s men were circling like wolves about the now unhorsed Wade.
In the wagon, Annis commanded Clare to wake up in a manner that struck Jamie as being rather dictatorial considering the circumstances. But he supposed that big sisters would always be big sisters no matter how old they got.
“Clare,” Annis was saying in her firmest voice, “you will wake up in the space of three breaths. You will wake up as I have commanded you, and as I command you, you will do. So mote it be.”
Clare stirred and moaned and opened her eyes.
To nightmare.
Jamie crashing to his knees in the wagon bed beside her, his eyes glazing...the truncheon coming down on his head again, his body falling across hers, the back of his head sodden with blood, so much blood...Annis, leaping to her feet...seized by shadowy men, snatched away as if her body had no substance at all in the white draperies.
Clare slumped in the wagon bed, mute with horror, her eyes vacant and unfocused as Jamie Deverill bled against her breast.
****
Sloane had been trying to protect the fallen Wade, but a pair of Belle’s men had come at his mount with lit torches—though they dropped them and fled when Ryder and Duckett galloped up, cavalry swords raised high.
“Get his mount,” shouted Ryder, swinging down beside Wade. “Are you hurt, lad?”
“My rib’s stove.” He grimaced with pain.
“Can you walk to the wagon?”
“Aye, I think so—” He broke off, alerted by something behind Ryder. “They’re after Ducks!”
Ryder swiveled around in time to see a ragged man leap up from the shadows and slash Duckett’s thigh, trying to sever the femoral artery. Sloane brought his horse next to the wounded groom’s mount, supporting him in the saddle until Ryder could ease him to the ground.
Sloane dismounted and yanked the leather tourniquet from his saddle bag. Watching Sloane apply it, Ryder saw with relief that though there was blood aplenty, it was not the fatal torrent that could drain a man dead in minutes.
“He’ll do for now,” Sloane opined, “no thanks to her.”
As if drawn to a red lodestone, their eyes traveled down the street to where Belle Barlow stood in her carriage. No ruffian men-at-arms separated them from the Red Queen now. She knew it too.
Without ceremony, she began to evict her ladies-in-waiting from her carriage. She was going to run for it, and she wanted her load lightened. The nun, the Bacchante, and the Dutch girl went willy-nilly at her command. The bird girl was not so eager to be thrown to the wolves. Belle dealt with her summarily, knocking her over the side of the carriage to land in a crumpled heap of feathered tawdry.
Belle’s coachman had recovered the reins, and he lashed the team forward, leaving behind not only her girls but also her groom, who hobbled imploringly after the coach. But he, too, was abandoned.
The Red Queen was borne away, still standing in her carriage. She glared back, the red mouth writhing words in the bone-white face, her arms raised as if to summon the night dark and hurl it toward her enemies. Ryder knew instinctively that he had just been cursed, and by one who knew what she was about in the making of curses. Then she disappeared among the buildings, leaving a chill of malediction lingering in the night air.
“Took to her heels, by God!” Sloane crowed. “Like a bloody red bat back into hell. Do we pursue, captain?”
Ryder was tempted, mightily tempted, but with two wounded men and only Jamie to guard the wagon, he knew it would be unwise. “No, but I’ll send her a warning.”
He loped to where the bird-girl was picking herself up off the cobbles. Though she’d been cruelly tumbled out of the nest, Ryder didn’t doubt that Belle’s ladybird would fly back to her mistress sooner or later.
Seeing him coming, she tried to flee, but he caught her in a granite grip and brought her around to face him, his eyes blazing into hers. “Tell your whore-queen if ever I see her face again, I’ll kill her where she stands.”
The girl stumbled away into an alley. Ryder gathered up his battered troops and made for the wagon. But instead of welcome and victory, they found ravagement and loss.
There was so much of Jamie’s blood on Clare that she looked wounded as well. Clare seemed insensible with shock, and Annis was gone, gone, gone.
Ryder cried out her name in grief and rage, and Clare’s haunted gaze fixed on him. “Snatched away,” she whispered.
Sloane gently disengaged Jamie from her embrace. “He’s alive, but he’s got a furrow in his skull you could plant corn in. What now, cap?”
“Take the wounded out of here in the wagon. I’m for Belle Barlow’s place.”
“They’ll never take her there,” Sloane objected. “They must know it’s the first place you’d look.”
Ryder nodded in agreement. “But I mean to make whoever I find there tell me of the Red Queen’s other bolt holes. Someone there must know. And to think,” he lashed at himself in fury, “I had one of her girls under my hand, and I let her go.”
Suddenly Sloane looked wise. “We’ve someone else at hand who may know even more of Madam Belle’s doings. The groom. I lamed him when I knocked him off the coach. He couldn’t have got far.”
“Get him,” Ryder ordered and Sloane galloped off.
Ryder took off Wade’s sword belt and bound up the younger man’s ribs with it, willing himself not to think about what might be happening to Annis.
I will win her free, though I go to my grave for it.
Sloane came trotting back, a red-clad man groaning over his saddlebow. Sloane knocked him off his saddle. Ryder picked him up off the ground and slammed him against the nearest wall.
“Your mistress! Where does she take her prisoners?”
“I don’t know.”
Ryder hit him an openhanded blow across the face. “We know she has another bolt hole. Where is it?”
The man babbled through a bloody mouth. “I don’t know...and even if I did, they’d murder me if I told—”
“And I,” Ryder roared, “will crucify you if you don’t.”
“I swear I don’t know.”
Ryder knocked his head back against the wall. But before he could strike again, Sloane held him back.
“You’ll bash his brains out, and he’ll be no good to us.” Sloane took out his knife, the blade glittering in the torchlight. “Do him the way you done that spy we caught trying to poison the horses at Salamanca.”
And now Ryder’s eyes were as glittering as the knife.
Sloane ripped open the front of the groom’s red coat. The man was whimpering hopelessly. Wade, better now that his ribs were bound up, was back to help Sloane pin their prisoner against the wall.
“Gently now,” cautioned Sloane.
Ryder, cold-eyed and unrelenting, put the point of his knife against the base of the prisoner’s quivering throat and oh-so-delicately pricked the skin between the two carotid arteries. Blood oozed into the hollow between the man’s collarbones and trickled down his chest—a trickle that would become a fatal torrent at the slightest more unseaming of his flesh.
Ryder drew back his bloodied knife and said in a soft, deadly voice, “Tell me where she takes her prisoners, or I’ll bleed you like a stuck pig.”
A stuttering cataract of words burst out of the man’s mouth, his tongue loosened by the fear of a death more immediate than the Red Queen’s vengeance. “It’s a house...in Afton...the House of the Quaker Monster. That’s all I know. I never been there. Them that’s there sends their own rig for Mrs. Barlow and the girls.”
“I think you lie to me.” Ryder’s voice was razored with menace. “I think I’ll take your eye out for it.” He laid the dagger flat against the man’s cheek, the bloody point a fraction of an inch from the man’s eye.
“No, I swear...the House of the Quaker Monster, I swear.”
Sloane spoke up. “Might be he’s telling the truth. When I was a nipper, my da took me to a hanging. It was a Quaker that was called a monster on account of him butchering his family above his shop. It sounds the sort of place for playing the filthy games the Red Queen and her ilk like to play.”
Ryder agreed. The murderous, bloodletting evil that had been done to Belinda would flourish in such a place.
He loomed over his prisoner again. “If you’ve played me false, I’ll flay you alive, starting with these little knick-knacks.” He sliced the man’s trowsers perilously close to his essentials, and the man began to babble quite gratifyingly that as God was his witness, on his mother’s grave, etc., etc.
Ryder shoved the sagging prisoner to Sloane. “Truss him up and toss him in the wagon.”
“What do you mean to do now, cap?”
“Go to that place and get her back,” answered Ryder, methodically checking his weapons and his mount.
“Don’t go alone. Let me go with you.”
Ryder shook his head. “You can’t abandon a wagon full of wounded, and Wade is coughing up blood, which means his lung is punctured.”
“I’m telling you,” Sloane went on doggedly, “you oughtn’t to go alone. They’ll be laying for you, sure.”
“You have your orders. Once you have the wounded safe, you can ride after me.” He mounted up and galloped off in the direction of the Afton Road.
Sloane was too good a soldier to disobey, especially on the field of battle. But like all sergeants from time immemorial, he had strong opinions about the foibles of his commanding officers.
“Your brains are in your backsides,” he bellowed after his captain.