“Over there.” His guards—he rated three, whereas the others had only one apiece, which surely meant that he was considered the most dangerous, or perhaps notorious, of the prisoners—shoved him into place before the closest noose. Its twisted brown length seemed to mock and beckon at the same time. Matt wished sickly that it was all over. It was not death he feared so much as the act of dying, he realized. Dying scared him horribly. He could feel cold sweat breaking out under his armpits and along his spine. Desperately he hoped that his sudden weakness was not apparent to the men around him. Clenching his teeth, he unobtrusively straightened his shoulders and forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. Philosophizing about death paid no tolls; in any case, he would soon be solving its mysteries for himself.
From his position at the end of the platform, Matt realized that he would die last—or first. At this point he didn’t know which he preferred. But when the priest stepped up to the prisoner at the opposite end and began administering the last rites, Matt felt a dizzying surge of relief. It seemed that his stubborn body was determined to hang onto life as long as it possibly could.
Down below, the crowd quieted as they realized that the first execution was imminent. Matt looked out over the sea of upturned faces, his lips curling with hatred and contempt as he felt the blood lust of those for whom his and his companions’ doom was merely an excuse for a holiday. A hanging was an event, more respectable than a cockfight or a bearbaiting but just as exciting. Fine gentlemen and ladies in their curricles jockeyed for position to one side of the gallows under a clump of tall young oaks whose just-greening buds provided some protection from the bright spring sun. Shop clerks and merchants’ apprentices, given the morning off by masters who were just as likely to be present, stood shoulder to shoulder with pink-checked scullery maids and prim seamstresses. Jammed almost underneath the platform itself were London’s street people—the whores and thieves and drunks who haunted the city’s byways at night. They were so close that they had to crane their necks uncomfortably to see the condemned men above them. But they were content: they were in the best possible position to hear the snap of a broken neck. Vendors made their way through the crowd, hawking meat pasties and hot chestnuts and lemon drinks. Overall hung an air of festivity, as if the citizenry had turned out to gawk at a carnival come to town.
Matt scarcely felt it as one guard ponderously began to remove his irons while another kept him firmly fixed in his rifle sights. He was too caught up in the horror of watching another man suffer the fate that soon would be his. The priest made the final sign of the cross over the condemned man—a small, stooped fellow with a bald head and fear-dulled eyes—and stepped back. The executioner, a black hood obscuring all but his eyes, stepped forward to jerk a hood similar to his own over the victim’s face. Then, his movements quick and efficient, he grabbed the noose and pulled it over the man’s head until it rested against his scrawny neck. The man jerked as he felt the rough hemp against his flesh; through the obscuring hood Matt saw his lips moving, in what he guessed was a prayer, as the hangman tightened the rope and positioned the knot judiciously. Then the executioner stepped back and the drumroll began. The condemned man gasped audibly. To Matt’s horror and pity, he saw a wet stain spreading down the front of the fellow’s ragged breeches; the man’s fear had rendered him incontinent.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” the priest intoned, and the doomed man gave a hoarse cry. Then the executioner lowered his hand in a sharp, slicing motion while his assistant obediently pulled the lever that opened the trapdoor. The little man screamed just once as he felt the floor dropping out from beneath his feet and himself falling through it. Matt had no time to breathe the prayer hovering on his lips, so quickly was the man gone. The rope snapped taut. The scream choked off in mid-cry. There was a sharp crack, followed by a moment of silence. Then the crowd roared its approval. It had been a clean death.
“
No.
Oh, please God,
no.
” The next man to die, a huge, redheaded fellow bigger than Matt, lost all pretense of composure as the priest approached him. Matt could almost smell the man’s fear. The good father paid no attention to the man’s attempts to cringe away from him, but quickly muttered the service while two guards rushed over to assist the original guard, who had abandoned his rifle to lock the weeping man in a bear hug and wrestle him back into place. Matt felt goose bumps break out along his arms as the priest, hastily making the sign of the cross before backing away from the prisoner’s flailing legs, was replaced by the executioner. At the sight of that black-hooded figure, the man screamed horribly while tears rolled down his square yeoman’s face. Matt, watching as the hood was forced into place over the head of this second man, clenched and unclenched his fists in impotent sympathy. Would he, too, be so overcome by fear when his turn came that he would lose every vestige of pride and human dignity? he wondered desperately as bile rose in his throat.
“You gonna cry for Mama, too, Grayson?” the guard tying his wrists behind him taunted in an undertone. Matt glared at the man, feeling a burning rage that the oaf should mock the terror of a man in such dire circumstances. In that single instant before his eyes locked with those of the guard who was squatting behind him, he registered that his irons had been removed and that the guard who was supposed to be keeping him covered was instead watching with wide-eyed interest the frantic struggle going on just a few feet away. Even before his brain had properly recognized the opportunity, his body, made desperate by the situation, acted. Before he was conscious that he meant to do it, he swung around, jerking his wrists from the guard’s hold, freeing them from the as-yet-untied rope in a single, violent movement that ended with his hands bunched into two fists that slammed into the astonished man’s temples like twin anvils. The guard crumpled with a single grunt; the other guard, the one with the rifle, looked back just in time to see Matt going over the side of the platform in a low, fast dive. Automatically he jerked his rifle up and fired. Matt felt the stinging sensation of a bullet plowing through the side of his right hip, but he didn’t slow down.
“Escape! Grayson’s escaped!”
“Look out!”
“Get out of the way, you fools!”
The report of the rifle mingled with the screams of the crowd. They panicked at the sound of gunfire, taking to their heels like stampeding cattle. Matt ran with them, knowing it would be hard to spot him among so many fleeing bodies. Dirty and unkempt as he was, dressed in torn rags, he looked no different from many of London’s army of the poor. A tremendous burst of strength surged through his veins; he felt suddenly vitally alive, reborn. He had escaped—he
would
escape. Spying a fat burgher astride a rearing horse just ahead of him and to his right, near the fringe of the crowd, Matt fought his way through the screaming, streaming mass of people to the man’s side.
“Get down,” he growled, and to make sure there was no possibility of mistake, he grabbed the frightened horse’s bridle with one hand and the man’s belt with the other. Before the perspiring burgher could do more than gape down at him, Matt had hauled him out of the saddle and vaulted up himself.
“My horse,” the man cried. Then, with a note of horror, “It’s
him.
”
But Matt had already set his heels to the horse’s sides. He sent the animal plunging toward the edge of the crowd, knocking down those who were slow to get out of his way. Curses and screams followed his progress. Another shot—from a pistol, by the sound of it—whistled frighteningly close to his head. This added to the crowd’s panic, which aided him. He reached the road at last and crossed it quickly, too canny to travel on it in either direction. They would look for him first along the road …
Leaning low in the saddle, one hand pressed tight against his hip in an effort to stem the blood that ran warm and sticky down his side, he galloped across the field that ran at a right angle to the road. He had no idea whether they were after him yet; in his lightning glances back he had seen no one, no cavalry charge of soldiers brandishing rifles, no rush of guards on fat farm animals. Likely the crowd was hampering pursuit—not that it mattered. If they weren’t hard on his heels now, they soon would be. They would search the four corners of the kingdom for him if need be.
His escape would be a hideous black eye for Queen Victoria’s government, and they would be tireless in their quest for vengeance. The odds were high that he wouldn’t get more than five miles before he was captured. Matt’s teeth gleamed brightly in the morning sun as he considered that. He’d always been one to bet on long shots, and as often as not, they’d paid off. That brief smile flashed again as he sent the horse over a low stone wall and into the valley below it. The odds had been considerably higher this morning that he would be dead by now. Instead, he was alive, free as the air, the sun warm on his face and a horse beneath him. He just might manage to cheat the devil one more time. Thinking that, for the first time in a long while Matt laughed out loud.
“Damn .”
Lady Amanda Rose Culver took intense satisfaction from uttering a word that, had they heard it, would have sent the good nuns with whom she lived into a collective swoon. Savoring the feeling of wickedness it gave her, she said the word again, louder. But it didn’t really make her feel any better. She doubted that anything could.
As if to punish her for her naughtiness, the pale ghost that was all that was left of the moon stared at her reprovingly from the still-midnight-black sky while the early-morning wind whipped her hair across her face. Muttering impatiently, Amanda dug the offending tresses out of her eyes with both hands. Her hair—a heavy, wayward mass that fell down past her hips when released from the neat braids in which the nuns insisted it be kept confined—was the bane of her existence. Even the color annoyed her. It was a deep, true red, the shade of fine old port when the sun hits it. Coupled with the porcelain paleness of her skin, the inky blackness of her winged brows and thick lashes, and the strange, smoky violet of her eyes, it could be considered striking, she supposed. Certainly the nuns were much struck by it. They seemed to feel that it symbolized everything they found fault with in Amanda. Her quick temper, her impulsiveness, the many small rebellions with which she plagued them daily, they always attributed directly to the outrageous color of her hair. Which was why, she supposed, they required her to wear it in such a conventionally schoolgirlish style—braided and wound into a coronet on top of her head—a style she loathed. Which in turn was why she unbraided it every chance she got, and why it was free to fly in her face at that moment.
Tucking the offending tresses firmly behind her small ears, she walked farther along the beach, her arms automatically wrapped about her slender body for warmth. She should have worn a shawl; even in the springtime this isolated bit of Lands End was cold at night. But the only shawl she possessed—the good sisters practiced poverty, as well as chastity and obedience, and saw to it that their pupils did the same—was a spotless, gleaming white cashmere. Against the background of dark gray cliffs and black water it would have stood out like a beacon, whereas the unfashionably high-necked, long-sleeved gray merino dress she wore blended almost invisibly into the night. Even in the murky, predawn hours, when she loved to walk the small shale beach at the foot of the cliff on which the convent perched, it was possible that one of the sisters would be up and about. If they saw her, they would not hesitate to report her to Mother Superior, and that would mean punishment, as well as the certain end of her clandestine walks. Even pretty Sister Mary Joseph, the youngest and most sympathetic of the nuns, would betray her, feeling duty bound to do so. After all, it was neither safe nor respectable for a young lady to be out alone at night anywhere, much less on a deserted stretch of beach that had been notorious some years back as a smugglers’ haunt; and just at present there was another, more acute danger: the whole of England was on the alert for Lord James Farringdon’s murderer, who three weeks ago had made a stunning escape from the very gallows itself.
The man was said to be brutal and ruthless in the extreme—the exact details of his crime were too horrendous to have been told to Amanda or even to the nuns themselves—but it was known that he had callously slain a woman and several children, as well as the Tory lord, who had been his prime target. He was desperate, unlikely to stick at anything. Ladies across the land were being careful to stay in their homes at night unless escorted by a gentleman, and men were going about armed until the fellow was caught. As he would be; it was merely a question of when. He could be anywhere in England, although the authorities were most particularly scouring the coastal areas, certain that the man would try to flee the country. And Lands End was one of those areas under constant surveillance.
Not that Amanda was unduly worried about coming face to face with a murderer. Of all the places in England that he could choose to run to, it seemed unlikely that he would pick her own small stretch of beach. No, she had more pressing worries on her mind than a madman who was probably hundreds of miles away. Only last evening she had received word from her half brother, Edward, the sixth Duke of Brookshire, that he had made final the arrangements for her marriage—arrangements that had been undertaken with nary a word to her. In four months’ time, he had written to her, just a week to the day before her eighteenth birthday, she would become the bride of Lord Robert Turnbull, a plumpish, balding forty-year-old, nephew to Edward’s late mother, the first wife of Amanda’s father, and cousin to Edward himself.
She would
not
do it. Oh, she knew she had to marry, and marry well. There was no other course open to a lady of her background and breeding, and she had long since come to accept its inevitability. But
not
to Lord Robert. Why, he was old and fat, and had already buried one wife—who had been a considerable heiress, if she remembered correctly. Amanda knew that she would, upon her marriage—if that marriage met with Edward’s approval—come into a tidy fortune of her own. With that as her dowry and her own not-inconsiderable charms, she had thought to be able to look as high for a husband as she chose. She had always imagined she would be allowed to select a man from among the list of eligibles who would no doubt pay her court after her come-out. For years she had dreamed of a brilliant season—she would, of course, take the
ton
by storm and be the year’s reigning belle—and of a handsome, wealthy young man of impeccable lineage who would fall madly in love with her and beg her to be his bride. There would be other gentlemen ready to die for the sake of her
beaux yeux,
of course, but she would have no one but him. At the end of the season there would be a dazzlingly lovely wedding, and she would waltz into the future with her adoring husband to protect and cherish her. But now Edward was going to spoil it all—as he had always tried to spoil everything for her—by insisting that she wed this cousin of his before any other gentleman had ever seen her, and make her bow to society as Lady Robert Turnbull.