Six
“Laudem virtutis necessitati damus. Laudem virtutis necessitati damus.”
The Duke of Atwater’s third and most troublesome son coughed. He tried not to think of the bump that must brewing upon his handsome—yes, he had always regarded it as handsome—head. Instead, he concentrated on remembering some smidgen of the classical education his parents had paid so dearly for.
“Laudem virtutis.” He closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he opened them again rather whimsically.
“My, my, you are a bluestocking. Now, let me think. . . Quintilian, unless I am more rusty than I thought. Ah, yes. I take your point. We give to necessity the praise of virtue. Your excuse for treating me thus?”
“Indeed.” Tessie smiled perfunctorily, for her thoughts were now racing ahead of mere niceties.
“Untie him, Joseph, for we may well have need of him tonight. My apologies, sir, and tell me, if you please, about ‘silks.’ That was the password for tonight, was it not?”
Tessie’s brain was agile enough to single out the most crucial point in this debacle. If the password was sound, Nicholas’s impersonation might not be discovered. He might be as safe as houses, quite unneedful of any feminine rescue. On the other hand . . .
“I was given it by Lord Castlereigh himself. The password, of course, refers to the looms. I believe the source was unimpeachable.”
Miss Hampstead sighed a little in relief. Her fingers relaxed infinitesimally around their dangerous resting place. She probed just a little further, however, for she was a tenacious creature, as Finchie was always expostulating.
“But it could be a trap?”
“I begin to think so. Something feels not right. The road, sadly, is fraught with these possibilities. . . .”
But Tessie, tearing down the cobbles in her cotton nightshift, heard no more of Sir Christopher’s explanations. It was left to Joseph to follow her command and unbind his prisoner, muttering dire curses about “females in flamin’ petticoats” and “masters who were as obstinate as striplings in leading strings.” Still, it did not take all of Sir Christopher’s genius to see that the man was apparently attached to both these erring creatures, and that his curses, though colorful, were uncommonly fond.
“Set the barn on fire and ’im in it!”
“Nay, stanch the blood and wait for Mr. Philip.”
“Let us go, I say! No one said ought to me of prisoners! They are more trouble than they are worth.”
“Mmm . . . cut ‘is throat, then. We don’t want no talkers.”
“ ’E won’t if ’e’s charred in the fire.”
“What if some bleedin’ groom sets the alarm? It will look mighty smoky, ’im tied up an all.”
Nicholas, listening to this discussion with an interest that was not entirely surprising, could not decide which of these fates he was more partial to. On balance, he decided neither, but unless Joseph was clairvoyant and therefore poised outside for a rescue, he could see no immediate manner in which escape could be accomplished.
His wound was not significant—he rather thought the rogues had overestimated it—but this slight advantage paled to naught when set against the odds. That Mr. Philip Grange was expected on the hour did not help.
As a matter of fact, this factor alone made immediate escape imperative. While the man called Tallows hastened, vengefully, to procure a coil of rope, Nicholas ignored his aching arm and the thirty eyes focused upon his person. His keen ears gave him cause to hope that his trusty valet was, indeed, outside, for he could swear he could hear stealthy steps on the flagstones. Still, it could just as easily be Mr. Grange arriving early, so he flexed his muscles as his arms were taken roughly and bound behind his back. It was a soldier’s trick that he trusted would serve. By flexing, the rope, though taut, would loosen as he relaxed.
Tallows nodded significantly and the procession from the room began with low utterances, the gloom growing greater with each lantern dipping on the outside. Soon, it was just Fagan, still grinning, and Tallows, who vowed he would like to throw a satisfactory right.
“Don’t be so callow, ‘e’s already bleedin’ like a freakin’ stuck pig. Save ’im for Grange.” This from a thin, reedy man with a tweed coat and two faintly familiar capes. Nicholas struggled to think where he might have seen them before. When the man’s knuckles cracked, the arguing subsided into silence. Not a nice man, Nicholas thought with irony.
Some moments passed. They could have been hours, they could have been seconds. Perceptions are strange when one is desperately trying to release one’s bonds. The reedy man smirked.
“Indeed, please do.”
The voice from the door was chill indeed. Nicholas, never one to despair, now did so.
A gentleman, marvelously dressed in impeccable buckskins, with a coat so nipped in at the waist one wondered at his ability to breathe, took several mincing steps into the room. To the untrained eye he appeared a dandy, for he sported a fan, and his shirt points were so well starched, they actually tickled his chin. There the resemblance ended, however, for the menace in his demeanor was perfectly unmistakable, even to the untrained eye.
“Good evening, my lord.”
“Mr. Higgins,” Nicholas Cathgar, peer of the realm, corrected Grange. His efforts, sadly, were not rewarded. He perceived this at once, for Grange’s lips thinned into an ironic twist and his eyes narrowed into slits of disbelief.
“Ah, come, come, let us not persist with this foolish nonsense. Mr. Higgins—very sadly, I am sure—is rotting in Newgate. Let us not concern ourselves with such paltry matters, but cut at once to the quick.”
There was a troubled interruption from some of the fellows, but Grange’s eyes never left Nicholas’s.
“Watcha mean, paltry matters?”
But Grange, apparently, did not hear the Luddite interjection. His gray eyes were still focused entirely on Sir Nick.
At last Cathgar spoke. “Which is?”
“Which is, my dear fellow, who your sources are.”
Grange clicked his fingers and instantly, the last lingerers, the puzzled audience, straggled from the room. Even Tallows took up his lantern, casting a final vituperous glance at the impostor. His eye was already swelling into slits.
Mr. Grange turned cold, fishlike eyes upon him, so that he yelped a little, stuttering several small explanations that trailed off into his spittle. The man said nothing, but it was perhaps a matter of seconds before the barn was effectively empty. Mr. Grange—or Monsieur le Duc—looked about for the reedy figure in tweeds, but even he, it seemed, was gone.
“I haven’t the faintest idea of what you are referring to.”
“But naturally. You are not yet acquainted with my methods.”
The man stepped forward and gazed directly into Nicholas’s calm sea-blue eyes.
Nicholas ignored the prickling sensation up his spine. Instead, he concentrated on loosening his hands. He was weak, for the loss of blood was taking its toll, but not too weak to kick. If the man came any closer, he would. It was a matter, he supposed, of baiting him.
“I don’t commonly consort with traitors.”
But the ruse did not work, Mr. Grange finding this sally amusing rather than infuriating.
“Then you shall find it an instructive experience.”
“Why are you doing this? Not for the Luddite cause, surely?”
“Good Lord, no. Stupid fools. But we tarry.”
There was a scuffle outside. Something unlike the heavy booted feet of Tallow and his peers, fading into the night. Nicholas’s ears quivered, alert to every nuance. Someone coughed, and he could have sworn it was a female. Then, a moment later, he was certain, for a vision appeared to his tired, bewildered, hallucinating view.
It was a vision that ordinarily would have appealed to his sense of the ridiculous. It might, had the circumstances been different, brought a light dancing to his eyes and a curve to play upon his rather masculine lips. Not tonight. His shock, frankly, was dire.
For Miss Tessie, far from being tucked up safely with her forty-two gold sovereigns, was standing at the barn door. Yes, a veritable nemesis with her hair flowing down in a tangle of curls almost to her waist, a modestly frilled nightgown tucked in swathes around inviting curves, and the look of the hellion upon her animated face. Nicholas did not know whether to be alarmed or pleased that she was brandishing a very businesslike pistol. On the whole, he thought, for the fleeting half-second that he had, that he was pleased. Her stance was admirable and her aim apparently immaculate, for by the time Mr. Grange was alerted to the danger, he was crumpled on the floor, alternately moaning and cursing.
To anyone paying close attention, Mr. Grange’s dialect slipped just for a fraction. He was French but spoke English like a nobleman. When it suited him, however, he spoke cockney like a Londoner. Nobody—least of all Nicholas Cathgar—noticed. His eyes were transfixed on the vision. She looked, he thought with incredulity, rather smug.
“Is he dead?”
“I suspect not, by those oaths.”
“Good. Grandfather was always very specific about that. I almost never shoot to kill. Unless it is an animal, of course.”
“How encouraging.” Nicholas’s tone was dry, though the curves had indeed now appeared upon his startlingly masculine lips.
Tessie did not remove her eyes from his face, a fact he noted with fatalistic calm. But she did address her victim. “If you move, I am very much afraid I shall have to shoot you again.” This to Mr. Grange, who was now stifling his oaths and approaching Miss Tessie cautiously from the floor. She reloaded—Nicholas noted her skill with fleeting admiration—then calmly approached him, a serious look upon her piquant features.
“I shot his leg, for I think it very unsporting to shoot from the back. But you will agree it was necessary.”
“Oh, undoubtedly.”
Mr. Grange apparently did not, for he eyed Miss Tessie with a cold stare that made her suddenly aware of the inadequacy of her garments, despite the darkness of the barn and the fire now almost at its embers.
“Are any of them likely to return? I watched them leave from behind the hale bales. They are strewn upon the footpath.”
“What, the men?” Nicholas wouldn’t have been surprised.
She considered him gravely. “No, for that would have been a foolish waste of ammunition. I meant the hay bales.”
“Ah.”
Nick, concealing a grin, considered that this was probably the single most diverting conversation of his four and thirty years. He would have prolonged the discussion, but all the while he had been grappling with his bonds, and though his wrists were now raw, he found himself free at last.
“I am not certain. There were a good dozen fellows here tonight, maybe more. Shall we leave, dear delight?”
Tessie ignored the “dear delight,” for it made her heart beat quite unconscionably when she was holding a pistol. Besides, the man was a rogue to speak to her that way without a by-your-leave! So she depressed his presumption by speaking rather severely, though in truth she was horribly worried about his wound.
“No, for you have lost blood.”
“ ’Struth, woman, we are not going to sit here like trussed chickens till dawn!”
“No, for you are no longer trussed, my lord. Possibly, however, like chickens.” In spite of herself, Tessie smiled impishly. Joseph, she knew, could not be far away.
There was a grim silence. “Give me the gun.”
“No, for you are bleeding. Not at all up to a fight.”
“And naturally, you would be?”
“But of course, for I have the advantage of the pistol.”
The twinkle now definitely lit Nick’s deep, sapphire-blue eyes. It was too dark for Tessie to notice.
“Shall we call the authorities?”
“There is a magistrate in Stipend. It is a half hour from here.”
“Then we shall ride there at once.”
“Oh, we will, will we?” Nicholas wondered quite where he had lost the plot. It was his custom to be the one making decisions. But then, time-honored custom seemed to have deserted him completely. He therefore meekly prepared himself for a half-hour ride in the moonlight with an unchaperoned lady of quality clad in naught but her nightshift. Strangely, bizarrely, he was tempted. Even the novelty of being ordered about would have been amusing had he not been about to faint. The wound must have been worse than he thought. He paled just as the broad-set, rather burly villain reentered.
Quick as a flash, Tessie whirled around, but the man called Fagan, his customary smile wiped from his face, advanced toward her menacingly.
Then Nicholas disgraced himself utterly by dropping to the floor in a dead swoon. Tessie, distracted, turned to him. Mr. Grange grabbed at her ankles—neat and excellently well turned despite her boots—so that she tripped over her billowing white nightgown. In seconds, it was Tessie who was on the hay-strewn floor, her precious pistol shaken from her hand.
There was a loud report, then a yelp from Fagan, for the gun had fired clean through his boot and doubtless shattered his ankle, if his colorful curses were anything to judge by.
Tessie should have run then, for Grange looked likely to murder her, injure or not. Fagan was too self-absorbed to be any further obstacle. But Tessie did not run. She picked up her pistol, though she had naught to reload it with—and dropped to Nick’s side.
“Are you dead?”
There was no welcoming answer.
“My lord! You must wake up!”
Again no answer, so Miss Hampstead ripped open the greatcoat and put a hand on the tattered shirt. It was stained with blood. She could feel it warm and sticky, though the barn was too dim to see the red.
She leaned over to look at the dark, angular face. Long lashes fluttered over those disdainful eyes, but in his neck there was a pulse. Tessie uncertainly extended her hand, for she wanted to be sure. Everything was so damnably shadowed, it was hard to tell. Suddenly it really mattered. More, even, than Hampstead Oaks and Grandfather’s bequest, it mattered. Fagan was crawling toward her, and Grange was muttering something about a dagger, but she cared naught for this.
Her hand rested on the neck. It was warm and pulsed quite noticeably. For a strangled moment Miss Tessie felt herself blush.
“Wake up, will you?”
There was a long silence in which Nicholas’s features became etched in Miss Tessie’s consciousness. It seemed as if she had known him forever, a lifetime, not a moment, a mere few hours, indeed only a half hour if one counted their exchanges and not the lifetimes in between. He was undoubtedly exasperating, disturbing, odiously annoying, but Tessie knew if he did not live to insult her horribly, just one last time, all the Granges in the world could do their worst. It simply would not matter. Nothing, she supposed, would.
“Wake up, dammit! There is a room full of villains!”
“How appealing. Yes, definitely an inducement.” The voice was a murmur, but audible enough.
“You are alive! I knew it!” The triumph in Tessie’s voice was unmistakable. The murmur, now, was stronger.
“I believe it is customary, in such instances, to kiss the victim.” Lazy blue eyes opened below her, amazingly—bizarrely—quizzing.
Tessie caught her breath, spellbound, despite Fagan’s approach. Now it was her pulse she felt. She ignored it.
“You are lost to all propriety, my lord.”
“And you are not, my little hoyden?”
“Not if I can help it.” How curious that her heart should burst with a sudden flutter of extraordinary lightheartedness at a time like this. She supposed it was the triumph, really, of knowing that Nicholas’s bored indifference—so skillfully feigned—was merely skin deep.
She continued. “But we are about to be killed, so I suggest we leave. Can you move?”
“I believe so.”
“Watch out!”
Nicholas sat up and grasped Fagan’s hand. It held a long sliver of a blade. It looked distinctly unwholesome. Fagan lunged, but Nick was swift, pushing both the blade and Fagan’s wrist above him. Then it was a contest to the death, for if Fagan’s wrist dropped any closer, the blade would have pierced Nick most horribly. Tessie did not dwell on the point, for Grange’s hands twisted around her ankles. He sought to trip her again, knowing that this time, her pistol was empty.
Drawing every bit of strength she could, she wriggled herself free and brought her boots down hard—crunching, cracking, crisply hard—down, down on Grange’s elegantly gloved hands. The doeskin was too fine and too thin to withstand such calculated onslaught. Consequently, the Monsieur le Duc screamed such as would have woken bedlam and very likely roused some of the midnight occupants of the taproom.
There was a clatter of steel upon cobbles and Fagan’s blade dropped just inches from Nicholas’s abundantly endowed head. Fagan scrabbled to fetch it, but Tessie was swifter, kicking the glint of metal far out of sight.
Then, miraculously, there was Joseph and the moonlight prisoner entering through the stalls, and she watched with satisfaction as they bound Mr. Grange efficiently while he screamed about fingers and curses and horrible oaths that were patently unsuitable for maidenly ears. When they approached Fagan, she begged them to beware, for his pockets were plentiful and he seemed to favor the blade. Joseph, no longer surprised by the wench’s bloodthirsty knowledge of such unmaidenly facts, merely nodded and frisked Fagan thoroughly. He withdrew an ivory-handled dagger and another of those lethal little blades that was clearly not honorably intended. Then it was a matter of finding sufficient rope for Fagan, for he was bulkier than Grange, and there had been only one coil.
“Here!” There was a loud rip in the darkness. Then another, and another. “Take these.” Miss Tessie’s voluminous nightrail was being torn to shreds. Oh, she was still perfectly respectable if one disregarded the boot-clad ankles and the glimpses of flesh one could just catch below her knees—if one was sitting in the correct position. Nicholas, on the floor, most certainly was—his eyes were not above gleaming, despite some evident pain.
Miss Hampstead hardly noticed, for having provided ropes, she now used the remainder of her linen strips for his lordship’s wounds.
“I believe I can manage, little Miss Nobody.”
“Oh, do stop calling me that ridiculous name!” This, in a hiss, for Tessie was fearful some of the Luddites would return.
“You are right. Under the circumstances, I believe I shall revert, once more, to Charity.”
“Wrong again, for this is not charity, this is payment. I always pay my debts.”
“What a strange female, to be sure. How terribly odd! And what debts are you repaying, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
“Oh, the dinner tab, for I lost not a sovereign over it and I believe it must have been prodigiously expensive despite the cod’s eye. . . .”
“. . .which is a delicacy . . .”
“. . . a revolting one . . . now, where was I?”
“Payment, I believe. Ouch!” Nicholas flinched.
“Did that hurt?”
“Damnably, but since I’ve already disgraced myself by swooning, I shall make no complaint.”
“How heroic. No, this should not take much longer. Try to relax.”
“Perhaps if you were to kiss me . . . medicinal purposes. . .”
“I believe I have paid my shot, my lord. The cost of dinner and access to the posting house. We are quits now.”
“Oh, do you think so?” Nick’s eyes were limpid, and his tone was so low, it was almost a murmur, but it held both a threat and a promise that made Tessie shiver, whether from delight or from sheer apprehension, she could not say.