ALL OF LONDON pushed into the parks for the first night of the Grand Jubilee, members of the ton rubbing shoulders with chimney sweeps, the smells of food, costly perfumes, horse dung and sweat mingling together to have Mariah reaching for her handkerchief, pressing its scented linen against her nose and mouth as she held on to Spencer’s arm and did her best to not step in anything more vile than the mud churned up by ten thousand pairs of feet that had already destroyed every blade of grass in St. James’s Park.
Nicolette hadn’t returned to the millinery shop to take delivery of her bonnet that afternoon, which proved that either the shopkeeper had lied about the day she was to return or that she hadn’t been able to return. That last worried Mariah more than a little bit.
It all would have been so easy—see Nicolette, follow her as she left the shop, capture Renard and convince him to lead them to Edmund Beales. Mariah didn’t know precisely how the Beckets would convince the man, and didn’t want to know. She just wanted this over and her life with Spencer and William to begin in earnest, with no shadows of the past able to reach out and hurt them.
“Would it be terrible of me to beg you to buy me a pint of stout?” she asked. Spencer avoided a mug that a burly man in a leather apron was swinging about as he spoke to a companion. “It’s so warm in this crush and Papa let me drink a bit of stout from his glass on very hot summer days.”
“A sip is not a pint, Mariah,” Spencer pointed out, already elbowing his way toward a stall selling stout and ale, both of which would probably cause less damage than a glass of water. “You can drink a little from mine, all right?”
“Are you afraid I’ll go all tipsy and begin singing bawdy songs?” she asked him, feeling petulant. She was just hot after spending several hours in this mad crush of people, so very hot, and wishing everyone else would simply go home. Mostly, she was angry that she and Spencer were trapped here in Green Park, when anyone with any sense knew that whatever was going to happen would happen in Hyde Park.
Spencer dropped a few coins on the wooden counter and grabbed a pint, easing them back into a less crowded area. “Are you telling me you know bawdy songs?”
Mariah took two quick sips of stout and then sang out in a clear, strong voice, “As I walked out one May morning, one May morning so early, I overtook a handsome maid just as the sun was rising.”
“Oh, God,” Spencer said, rolling his eyes, but then joined her in the chorus. “With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle dol, Fol the dol the diddle dum the day!”
Behind them, Clovis took up the second verse. “Her shoes were bright, her stockings white, her buckles shone like silver. She had a black and roving eye, and her hair hung down her shoulder.”
By the time they’d reached the chorus once more, Aloysius, née Anguish, had begun to dance a jig and several others nearby had lifted their mugs—undoubtedly not their first of the evening—to sing along.
“With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle dol, Fol the dol the diddle— where are we going?” Mariah asked as Spencer took her arm and began dragging her through the crowd. “I love the next verse. How old are you? My fair pretty maid. How old are you, my honey? She answered me right cheerfully, I’m seventeen come Sunday. With my rue dum day, Fol the diddle—would you stop dragging at me! You’re spilling the stout.”
“Damn the stout,” Spencer gritted out from between clenched teeth, not stopping until they were at the fringes of the crowd, a worried Clovis and Aloysius joining them a few moments later. “Is this how we watch for Renard?”
Mariah dipped her head, mumbled her apologies. “We both know Renard won’t be showing up here, Spence. Besides, you did ask if I knew any drinking songs.”
“I didn’t expect you to break into verse, madam, with the rest of the world and his drunken wife joining in,” he told her, stabbing his fingers through his hair. “Oh, hell, and yes, you’re right. We should leave here, go to Hyde Park and the viewing stand, no matter what Chance said, and just follow everyone back here when they come to see the pagoda. At least, there, we can watch the royal viewing stand. The only way to see anyone here would be to be up in that damn balloon.”
“About that, Lieutenant, sir,” Clovis said, holding his hat in his hands, fairly wringing the cloth. “I saw over there where someone is selling rides on one of those pachyderm beasts. High above the crowd that would put you, sir, you and your lady wife. You could see a good fair lot, atop a pachyderm.”
Spencer looked across the canal, where the Battle of the Nile was now raging, complete with flaming boats and small fireworks meant to resemble cannon fire. He could see an elephant that had been decked out with some sort of large open-topped box tied to its back, the box filled with no fewer than a dozen people, most of whom appeared to be hanging on for dear life while rethinking their bravery. Put Mariah up in a basket like that? “I don’t think so, Clovis…”
“Oh, come on, Spencer, we’ll be like Hannibal, crossing the Alps,” Mariah begged, more than happy to have her feet somewhere other than where they were, surrounded by puddles, with only half of them, she worried, being mud puddles and the rest created in ways she could have only guessed at before she’d seen a red-faced, clearly drunken young man clad in the first stare of fashion bent over, his hands on his knees as he cast up his accounts in a fit of violent retching. “And Clovis is correct. We would be higher than anyone else, according us a much better view.”
After indulging in a short mental vision of commandeering an elephant and riding it through the throng, hard on the heels of a fleeing Renard and Nicolette, Spencer sighed and nodded his agreement. And a few minutes after that, he was handing a dark-skinned old man in a turban and baggy pants a shilling each for he and Mariah, then watching in amazement as Mariah nimbly ascended the wooden ladder propped against the side of the now-kneeling elephant. Was there anything the woman wouldn’t dare?
He joined her in the box that was covered in an assortment of rather moldy carpets and he looked out over the park, toward the Chinese pagoda, now lit on all seven stories with what had to be more than a thousand flickering lights. “I hesitate to point this out, Mariah, but this elephant’s hind leg is shackled to a fairly stout stake hammered into the ground. We’re going nowhere.”
Mariah, heady with the height, the thrill of the thing, turned to grin at him. “And where did you want to go, Spencer? We’d be trampling the villagers, as I’ve heard happens in India, if the elephant broke loose. I hope the stake is very heavy and hammered into the ground at least three feet or more. Oh, look—there’s Aloysius, waving up at us. Yoohoo, Aloysius! Here we are!”
“Oh, for the love of—Mariah, I know I said I doubted anything was going to happen here in St. James’s tonight, but if Chance knew I’d spent precious time perched on a damn elephant, I wouldn’t blame him for knocking me down.”
“You’re just upset because we’ve been banished here, that’s all,” Mariah told him. “So am I, truthfully, and the pistol is banging painfully against my leg when I walk, so I’m not all that delighted to be here, either. Just let’s make the best of it, all right?”
Spencer turned her to face him, ran his hands down over her hips and found the outline of the pistol. The large pistol. “How in bloody hell—?”
“I took a page from Courtland’s book of brilliance and fashioned a sort of harness for it from strips of my petticoat. As you’re already pawing me in public, perhaps you’ll find the seam I opened enough to reach my hand inside my gown and extract it, if necessary.”
“I’m definitely never letting you anywhere near my sister Morgan,” Spencer grumbled, turning his attention to the fireworks that had begun in a small way, with Catherine wheels spinning colored flame in the trees to the sounds of oohs and ahhs from the increasingly drunken crowd.
“You didn’t bring a pistol, Spencer?”
“Clovis has it, tied around his neck together with his own, beneath his coat. I can have it at a moment’s notice.”
Mariah stepped closer to him as the elephant seemed to decide he needed to shift his weight about somewhat, and slipped her hands beneath Spencer’s jacket, her fingers closing around the leather harness holding the mechanism for his knife. “Well, I suppose that’s all right, then. We neither of us expect to be a part of whatever happens tonight, but at least we’re prepared.”
The dark sky above them suddenly lit with the explosion of larger fireworks—Congreve rockets especially made to be all flash and dash, rather than the destructive rockets he’d invented for warfare. Mariah rested her head against Spencer’s shoulder as she looked into the sky above their heads. “Oh, look, aren’t they beautiful!”
The crowd no longer milled below them, but had all stopped where they were, to cheer each new explosion, those emanating from the area behind the bridge holding the Chinese pagoda as well as more bright explosions in the distance—in Green Park, even as far away as Hyde Park itself.
Spencer felt a tug of disappointment that he wouldn’t see the large Temple of Discord be enveloped in fireworks as the entire top of the Temple was craftily revolved to reveal, as the smoke from the explosions cleared, a new name for the structure, the Temple of Concord. He’d have to hear Rian tell him about the thing, probably at least a dozen times.
As much as Spencer believed this entire celebration was nonsense, an expense England could not afford after a long war had depleted the Treasury, an affront, almost a goad to Bonaparte to prove the celebration premature, he could not deny that the evening itself was fairly close to spectacular. A fete so grand, nothing close to its scope and grandeur would probably be seen again for several generations. They were celebrating victory, after twenty long years of war across the continent. This was history in the making, a thrilling and glorious time to be alive.
The dawn of a new peace, please God, a lasting peace.
“Maybe Prinney isn’t as silly as I believed him. Maybe we all do need something like this grand spectacle right now,” Spencer said, drawing Mariah close against his side, smiling as the bright colors of the fireworks seemed to be reflecting in his wife’s shining eyes.
And then he tensed, his arm going more tightly around her.
“What’s wrong, Spence?” Mariah asked him, immediately sensing his sudden alertness.
“Did you hear it? God knows I’ve heard that sound enough.”
“It’s the bang of the fireworks exploding, that’s all,” Mariah told him, but she was already following him as he pushed aside people sharing the basket with them, heading for the ladder. “Isn’t it?”
“Not that last one, no, and it sounded close by,” Spencer said, whistling the attendant over to make the elephant kneel, then holding the ladder still as he helped Mariah over the railing of the basket. She quickly climbed down and he joined her almost immediately, ignoring the short ladder as he jumped to the ground. “Clovis, Anguish—to me!”
“Er…that’s Aloysius, sir.”
“Bloody hell, Anguish, now’s not the time. Did you two hear the difference in one of the explosions? Just a minute ago. There! There’s another one, coming from somewhere behind us,” he said, looking up at the sky in time to see one of Congreve’s rockets shooting overhead, heading for Green Park…or perhaps even Hyde Park itself.
“Those…those are real rockets?” Mariah asked. “My God, Spence!”
He grabbed her hand and began pushing his way through the crowd toward the Chinese Pagoda, Clovis, Aloysius and five strapping sons of former members of the Black Ghost crew running ahead to help clear the way.
Mariah used her free hand to hold the pistol still at her side as she ran, not that her leg wouldn’t be bruised badly by the time she awoke tomorrow…if she awoke tomorrow. “Oh, excuse me!” she said, as Spencer was pulling her along willy-nilly and she’d crashed into a blowsy-looking woman in red satin and green-dyed feathers, knocking her to the ground.
“Here, now, look what you did, knocking my Maisie on her rump! How about I knock you down, you flame-haired bitch!”
Spencer didn’t actually stop so much as he paused, pushing Mariah behind him even as he stepped forward and pushed out his right arm in a short, economical movement that had his fist connecting with the protesting man’s jaw and the man’s rump connecting with a large puddle on the ground, just beside his Maisie.
“Be more careful, Mariah,” Spencer said, dragging her along again.
“Me? You’re the one who rammed me into the poor woman. Oh, I don’t have the breath for this,” she complained as she hiked her skirts nearly to her knees and tried to keep up.
She longed to ask Spencer where they were going, other than in the general direction of the Chinese pagoda, and what he expected to do when they got there.
But there was no time for questions.
They ran along the canal, the decorated rowboats flying French flags still burning down to their water-lines, Catherine wheels spinning colored fire, smoke hugging the ground around them, thin shafts of hot color shooting up into the sky—riots of color, like cabbage roses, blooming over their heads.
And the occasional rocket that sang over their heads, not exploding in a shower of pretty colors but heading somewhere else…somewhere deadly.
The battering ram that was the men from Becket Hall cut a swatch through the revelers who still laughed and cheered each rocket, and at last they were clear of the worst of the congestion and within sight of the yellow bridge.
Spencer skidded to a halt and looked at Mariah even as a nearly breathless Clovis handed over his pistol. “You stay here with Clovis, you hear me?”
“No! I don’t know where you think you’re going, Spencer Becket, but I’m going with you and you can’t stop me. I mean it, Spence, you—”
He took hold of her upper arms, breathing heavily as was she, and crushed her mouth in a short, hard kiss before looking at her, his dark eyes intense. “I love you, Mariah Becket.”
Mariah looked up at him, unable to move, unable to say a word, her head positively spinning. He loved her? He loved her!
“Yes,” he said, grinning at her. “I thought that would do it. Clovis, take her. And if she tries to follow me—tackle her if you have to!”
“Um…sure thing, Lieutenant,” Clovis said, his hands now clamped on Mariah’s upper arms as he stood in front of her, his smile apologetic and a bit sickly. “Please don’t make me tackle you, Missus,” he begged as Spencer took Aloysius and two others with him, directing the remaining three men to his left so that they would come up on the area behind the bridge on both flanks.
“Clovis?” Mariah asked, regaining her bearings.
“Yes, Missus,” he said, his hands still tight on her arms.
“I’ve got a pistol, Clovis. Feel it? I will use it on you, or I will use it to help my husband. My husband who loves me. Which would you like me to do?”
“Ah, now, Missus, you wouldn’t do that to—”
Her hand inserted through the slit in her gown, Mariah pushed the barrel of the pistol more firmly against the body part Clovis probably cherished more than all others in this world. “I would, Clovis. You were with me in the swamp. You know I don’t threaten. Not more than once. Now, Corporal Meechum, I’ve given you an order. Take your hands off me, Clovis…now.”
“No, Missus, I can’t do that. He loves you. I heard him, too. So I’m guessin’ you’ll just have to kill me, because the lieutenant will, if you don’t.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake! Clovis, you love him, don’t you?”
“Yes, Missus. He’s my lieutenant.”
“And I love him. He’s my husband. So? Are we both just going to keep standing here?” She looked up as that peculiar sound, so different from the rockets meant to carry only fireworks, boomed and whistled yet again. And still nobody else seemed to notice. “Are we, Clovis?”
Clovis dropped his hands away from her. “He went that way, Missus.”
Mariah didn’t run, as she knew enough to be aware that the worst thing that could happen would be to inadvertently put Clovis and herself between Spencer and whoever was sending those deadly rockets into the air. So, instead of a full, frontal assault on the area, she cut far to the right side of the bridge, then circled around through the cover of a small stand of plane trees, hoping to come up behind Spencer as she called his name as quietly as possible.
Stopping behind one of the trees, she raised a hand to signal Clovis to halt and peered out into the cleared area where many of the fireworks had been assembled, lined up in clay pots all across the rear of the bridge and the Chinese Pagoda at its center. Several men holding brightly burning torches stood behind the rows of pots and, as she watched, one of them lowered his torch to the thick wick trailing away from one of the pots and, moments later, a white-hot fireball shot nearly straight into the air.
“Fireworks. They’re simply setting off the fireworks. The real rockets must be somewhere else,” she told Clovis, signaling that he should follow her as she threaded her way through the trees once more, still circling behind the bridge. “Damn! There goes another one. Did you see where it came from, Clovis?”
“I did that, Missus,” Clovis said, pointing to a smaller clearing just now visible as they crept out of the trees, keeping behind some tall bushes that smelled slightly singed from all the gunpowder.
Even as Mariah watched, Spencer, Aloysius and two of the Becket Hall men crashed into the clearing, pistols drawn. There were no loud reports of gunshots, not that the noise would be remarkable with all the cheering and shouting coming from the main area of the park. Mariah shot a triumphant fist into the air as she could see the three men dressed all in black quickly lay down their torches and raise their hands in surrender—what her father would have called a bloodless coup of sorts, she supposed.
“Don’t shoot, Spencer,” she called out as she and Clovis emerged from the bushes, even as the rest of the Becket men joined the small group and began kicking over the metal stands holding three-foot-tall rockets aimed up and over the Chinese pagoda.
Spencer had just turned to look at Mariah, his mouth opening to tell her he knew full well that she’d never stay where he’d put her, when two men, also dressed in black, their lower faces covered by black silk, stepped out of the trees behind her. One of them knocked Clovis to the ground with the barrel of his pistol; the other grabbed Mariah and twisted her pistol out of her hand.
“We meet again, Mr. Joseph Abbott,” the slighter man drawled, tightening his grip on Mariah, who knew she was being employed as a human shield and wasn’t exactly willing to be that cooperative. “Later, mon chérie doux,” he whispered into her ear, “you may wriggle all you wish beneath me as I delight you past all bearing and then strangle you with your own fiery hair. I’ve thought about that a time or two, since last we met. But for now you will remain still or your Mr. Abbott dies.”