She aimed it at her former flash man, but as she stepped closer to the lantern on the wall, Trevor saw that her face was covered in bruises. Still, the tenacious ex-harlot showed no sign of backing down. “He’s got nothing to do with this. Leave him alone.”
“You know him?” Lynch barked at her.
She nodded. “Trust me, he’s got connections. You don’t need that kind of trouble. Just let him go.”
“The hell I will! He killed three of my mates.”
“You’ll get a lot worse if you don’t leave him alone. I’m trying to protect you, you idiot! He’s the constable!”
“Oh, really?” Lynch let out a harsh laugh. “I see. Are you goin’ to try to arrest me?” he taunted.
“It’s just an honorary post,” Trevor said modestly, but his eyes glinted as he waited for an opening to launch his counterattack.
“You have the look of a soldier to me. You seen some action in the war?”
“I’m just a farmer,” he replied.
“Let him go!” a voice called from some distance behind him. “It’s me you want!”
Lynch looked past him. “Well, well, if it isn’t our young lordling. You come to give yourself up, Lord Brentford?”
Trevor glanced over his shoulder, appalled to see that George had just arrived in his phaeton. Worse, Grace and her father were with him, and all three of them looked as horrified to find him in this situation as he was to see them arriving. George stepped down from his carriage.
“Bring him,” Lynch ordered his men.
Just then, Callie poked her head out of the carriage. “George? George! What do they want with him? Leave him alone!”
She began screaming when George was also shoved down onto his knees beside Trevor.
Trevor scowled at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he growled under his breath.
“This wasn’t your fight, Montgomery,” he answered. “You saved my life. I’m not going to let them murder you.”
“George!” Callie kept screaming his name in a panic, until Jimmy’s nearest henchman gave her a rough shove.
“Shut up, you barmy hen!”
Her parents erupted in fury inside the coach.
Trevor felt the situation spinning out of control as the Reverend Kenwood next attempted to insert himself into this debacle. “Please, people! Listen to me, I beg of you! Everyone needs to calm down!”
The old man walked cautiously toward the ruffians surrounding the front of the tavern. “There is no need for all of this. Please!”
“Who are you?” Lynch demanded.
“I’m the pastor here. Surely whatever has happened here, we can sit down and talk about this like civilized men—”
“Don’t make me laugh! Stay out of this, priest. You get in my way, don’t think I won’t shoot you. Now, back off!”
The Reverend Kenwood faltered, but Trevor’s stomach clenched when he saw Grace come forward cautiously.
Get out of here,
he begged her mentally, to no avail.
“Marianne? Please, Mr. Lynch, may I speak to Marianne for a moment?” she asked in a tone of unquestioning respect. It was wise of her to let Lynch feel that he was in charge, Trevor thought, though he suspected she must be seething, knowing who and what this brute was. Nevertheless, he’d wring her neck for putting herself in danger.
“Grace, get back!” her father started, but she ignored him, too.
“What do you want with the wench?” Lynch demanded.
“I’m her friend. I only want to know if she’s all right.” As Grace pushed her way to the front of the crowd, Trevor watched in mingled horror and admiration.
How calm she looked! He was ridiculously proud of her in that moment. Apparently, she had enough experience in dealing with the downtrodden and sorry souls like Tom Moody not to be intimidated by the likes of Jimmy Lynch and his gang.
Trevor also noted she did not even glance over at
him.
He realized that she couldn’t, not when he had a gun to his head, or she’d lose control of her emotions. It sank in that she was trying to help him, perhaps buy him time by redirecting the flash man’s attention to his former mistress.
“I’m over here, Miss Grace,” Marianne called in a shaken voice from the stoop outside the tavern, still clutching her shotgun.
The iron lantern above the pub’s door made Marianne’s shadow loom large over them all. Grace stepped closer, turning away from Trevor. “Marianne, what’s happened?” she asked wonderingly. Then she went very still when she saw the bruises on her face. “My God,” she breathed, “what’s he done to you?”
“Grace,” Trevor warned, but she ignored him or maybe did not hear.
“Hoy! Missy! Get the hell away from her,” Lynch ordered, clapping his hand down on Grace’s shoulder to spin her to face him. “I bet I know who you are. You’re the preacher’s daughter that caused all this trouble in the first place!”
Grace’s eyes widened and filled with righteous fury.
Oh, no, thought Trevor. He knew that look firsthand.
“Bloody do-gooder!” Lynch spat, looking her over. “You’re the one that brought her here to try to hide her from me, eh? Thought you’d steal my property?”
Lynch was surprised, but Trevor was not when Grace suddenly went on the attack. “You monster! Get out of our village! Leave her alone! Who do you think you are? Some kind of a tough man, beating up a woman? You’re lower than a dog!” she flung in his face.
“Well, every dog gets his day, don’t he?” he taunted. “Maybe you should come along with us. Try a little whorin’ yourself. You might like it. I can arrange that, you know.”
As he grabbed Grace by the arm, her father yelled, but Trevor leaped to his feet and lunged at the gang leader. He tackled Lynch, slamming him down onto the cobblestones.
In the next instant, although he had his hand around Lynch’s throat, he was surrounded by a bristling phalanx of weapons. “You keep her out of this,” he snarled at Lynch in rage.
“Oh, she means somethin’ to you, does she?” he mocked him, panting. “Well, that settles it, then. She’s comin’ with us.”
Trevor squeezed harder and would have killed Lynch on the spot if not for the fact that one of the gang members suddenly put a gun to Reverend Kenwood’s head. “Do it, and I kill the old man, eh?”
“Papa!” Grace yelled in terror.
Trevor considered his options and knew he could not take the chance.
He let go of Lynch and raised his hands and ignored Grace’s cries of distress as they spent the next several minutes punishing him for his attack on their leader.
Fortunately, the Order taught their agents how to endure this sort of brutal gauntlet. Not that he had ever really expected to have to
use
his training in quaint, sleepy Thistleton. But at last, when Lynch was satisfied that the gang had beaten out of him any thought of trying that again, Trevor was thrown into the Windleshams’ carriage, the baron’s family having been tossed out into the street.
Trevor was a little woozy from having his head slammed on the ground. And with six or eight men thrashing him, he realized he must have lost consciousness briefly, for he could not quite remember the moment they had manacled his wrists. He tested the handcuffs in groggy confusion, but winced as Callie’s piercing shrieks filled the square.
“George! George! No!”
Her voice made his head throb worse.
“It’s all right!” the young lord called back bravely, though he looked terrified as the ruffians shoved him into the coach beside Trevor. He, too, was handcuffed. “I’ll be fine!”
“No, you won’t, you piece of shit. I’m goin’ put a bullet in your head,” Lynch informed him. “Just like I promised.” Then he laughed.
Grace whispered something to her father just as Lynch grabbed her by the arm. “Come along, poppet! We wouldn’t dream of leavin’ without you!”
“Grace!” her father shouted.
“Jimmy!” Marianne protested.
“Shut up, bitch. Get up on the driver’s box,” he ordered Marianne as he made his followers handcuff Grace. She was not fighting them nearly hard enough for Trevor’s liking, almost as if she wanted to be taken captive with him. Then Lynch pushed her into the coach and slammed the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where are they taking us?” George whispered as the Windleshams’ carriage lurched into motion seconds later.
“Trevor?” Grace asked softly. “Are you all right?”
“Never better. I’m going to wring your neck,” he grumbled at her. “You had no business butting in. Why didn’t you run when you had the chance?”
“They didn’t give me much of a choice,” she retorted. “Besides, when you quit fighting back, I knew I couldn’t leave you. Even an Order agent can’t defend himself when he’s unconscious.”
Trevor scowled that she had seen him that way. “How long was I out?”
“Maybe thirty seconds. I couldn’t tell how badly you were hurt. Is anything broken, sweeting?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Poor thing.” She leaned closer, lifting her bound hands to touch his swollen face tenderly with her fingertips. He flinched a bit at the contact, but even now, her touch felt heavenly.
What a baffling creature she was. One minute he thought he’d lost her love; the next, her actions proved she’d rather risk dying with him than be left behind to live without him.
Then she leaned closer and kissed him on the cheek, pausing to whisper in his ear: “I told Papa to fetch Sergeant Parker and his men.”
Trevor received this news with a wave of relief. He gave her a canny half smile and nodded. “Clever girl.”
“I’m so sorry,” George uttered, sounding near tears. “Now all three of us are going to die, and it’s all my fault.”
“The hell we are,” Trevor answered, willing himself back fully into the land of the living.
“We’re not?” George asked, wide-eyed with fear as he sat across from Trevor and Grace in the darkened coach.
“Of course not,” Trevor promised in a hard tone. “Don’t worry. I’ve been in much worse situations than this. Just do as I tell you and give me a moment to figure out our next move.”
“You see?” Grace whispered to George. “I told you he can handle whatever comes. We just have to work together, and Trevor will get us out of this.”
Her blind faith in him made him ache. Blazes, hadn’t she learned by now that he was trained to lie?
Think,
he told himself, as the coach clattered on at top speed through the night.
A
bout an
hour later, they pulled off the road and turned in at a wooded drive. Through
the trees, Grace saw a dim, orange light shining like a baleful eye.
“Where are they taking us?” George asked
anxiously.
“I don’t know, but we’ll soon find out,” she
murmured, staring out the carriage window as she sat beside Trevor.
When the woods cleared about a hundred yards up the
drive, she saw that the light was actually a window in a small, gloomy, stone
house surrounded by several acres of fields.
A ramshackle barn sat languishing amid one
overgrown pasture, and although the light in the window of the house seemed
evidence that somebody must live here, the small farmstead had an eerie,
abandoned atmosphere, hidden from the world by its remote location and the woods
that screened it from the road.
“What is this place?” Grace whispered to Trevor.
“Some sort of hideaway for Lynch’s gang?”
He nodded, scanning out the carriage window. “If I
were to venture a guess, I’d say they probably use it for a safe house when they
have trouble in Town. Maybe a way station for moving stolen goods out of the
city, as well. That barn could serve as a warehouse for storing their contraband
until they can carry it out to be sold in other parts of England.”
“And a place to hide the bodies,” George said
dryly.
“Lovely.”
“Lord Brentford, don’t be a coward,” Trevor said in
a cool monotone.
George scowled at him in return.
As the carriage rolled to a halt, Grace’s heart
pounded with dread and an ominous uncertainty. She had a bad feeling about this
place. George was probably right.
The three of them were probably going to end up in
shallow graves in one of these pastures.
Then Lynch’s hard-eyed henchmen opened the carriage
door. The three prisoners were ordered out and taken into the ill-kept cottage,
and herded into a back room. Here they were thrust down into wooden chairs set
back-to-back.
Trevor and George had their ankles tied to the
chair legs, but at least the ruffians spared Grace this indignity. She scowled
at the man with the rope as he reached to grab her ankle. “Don’t you dare,” she
warned.
“Leave her alone,” Marianne pleaded, following them
into the back room. “Jimmy, please! Don’t be cruel to ’er! She’s a lady!”
“Eh, never mind the wench,” he told his henchmen,
ordering them out with a nod toward the door. “Leave us. Shut the door behind
you, Stella.”
Marianne withdrew with a worried frown.
Then Lynch studied them, pacing slowly around all
three of them tied up in a ring back-to-back. Grace refused to cower with Trevor
by her side. She could feel his fury as he watched Lynch pass with an icy
stare.
The criminal stopped in front of George.
“Ow!” George muttered.
Grace looked over her shoulder and saw Lynch
reaching down to wrench the signet ring off George’s finger. “What do you want
that for?” her friend demanded in a shaky tone.
“Well, Your Lordship, y’see, I had some time to
think on the drive here. Funny how things come into perspective. I wanted to
kill you before for slicin’ up my arm, but it’s not as if you killed three o’ my
men.” He slanted an evil glance toward Trevor. “You’re a pain in the arse, to be
sure, but I’m thinkin’ you’re worth more to me alive. Lord Lievedon’s son,
aren’t you? This ring should inspire your father to cooperate. As for you,
Constable . . .”
Lynch sauntered around to
sneer at Trevor. “You’re another story. You’re not leavin’ here alive. I’ll let
you ponder that a while, and you can think about what I’m going to do your lady
here before I put you out of your misery. But don’t worry, you’ll get to watch
the whole thing.”
Grace felt her blood run cold, but she refused to
let her terror show on her face. Instead, she reminded herself that there was a
big difference between making a threat and carrying it out. Still, the man was a
monster.
Just then, one of his henchmen poked his head in
the door. “Hey, Jimmy, you better get out here. Trouble outside. I think we
might’ve been followed.”
“What’s this? A rescue attempt from the hayseeds?”
He scoffed. “You better hope your little farmer friends don’t try anything
stupid.” As soon as he stalked out of the room, George nearly started
hyperventilating.
“Oh, my God, how can this be happening—”
“Be quiet!” Trevor clipped out in a low tone.
“That’ll be Parker and his men. We don’t have much time. Grace, did they tie
your feet?”
“No.”
“Good. Listen carefully. I want you to stand up,
then step through your hands. Just bend down, bring your arms as low as you can,
and step one leg through, then the other. Once you get your hands in front of
you, come around to me and untie the ropes round my ankles. I’ll get us out of
here, I promise.”
Shaking with fear, she did as he said, though it
was an extremely awkward motion, especially in long skirts. “I better stop
baking all those lemon biscuits,” she muttered, trying to make light of the fact
that she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to squeeze her rear end through the circle
of her bound arms.
“You can do it,” he encouraged her.
At last, she succeeded in stepping one foot, then
the other, through the circle of her bound wrists. When her manacled hands were
in front of her, she hurried around to the front of Trevor and knelt, plucking
at the knots tied around his ankles.
Trevor gazed lovingly at her while she finished
untying his feet.
“There you are.” All of a sudden, she heard him
gasp. She glanced up at him in alarm.
“What is it?”
“You have a hairpin!” He was staring at her
topknot.
“Well, yes—” she started.
“Give it to me! Hurry!” he whispered.
He stood up, freed from his chair, as she quickly
slid it out of her hair—the same pearl-tipped hairpin she had poked him with on
the night of the Lievedon Ball.
He stepped through the circle of his bound hands,
just like he had ordered her to do, then Grace gave him the hairpin. “Untie
George’s feet,” he ordered, hastily using her hairpin to pick the lock on the
manacles around his wrists.
“How did you do that?” she exclaimed in a
whisper.
“Just a trick I learned at school. Come here, I’ll
get yours, too.”
“Where did you go to school?” she asked dubiously
as she hurried over to Trevor so he could free her hands, as well.
“Long story. There’s a lot I still have to tell you
about myself, Grace, someday, if you want to hear it.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she whispered.
He nodded, holding her gaze deeply for a moment,
then he glanced at George. “Brentford, go lock the door, then get over here, and
I’ll get those off you.”
A
ll
three of them were quickly freed, but Trevor hushed them, reminding them to be
silent despite their jubilation at their progress.
Silently whisking a chair over to the wall, he
stepped up to have a quick look out of the room’s only window. It was small and
narrow and set unusually high in the wall, probably as a security measure.
Fortunately, they were on the ground floor. It
would be an easy drop. They would come out at the back of the house, but then
they’d have to make a sprint across the back field to the woods.
He knew Lynch’s men were outside checking the
property. He spotted a couple roaming here and there off by the drive where the
carriages were parked, but they seemed distracted.
As Trevor stood on the chair scanning the tree
line, he saw motion in the dark woods. Sergeant Parker stepped out stealthily
into the moonlight, rifle in hand; Trevor waved from the window; Parker
beckoned, hurriedly signaling that it was safe to come.
“We need to go. Now.” Trevor jerked the window
open, tilting it as wide as it would go. “Parker’s out there with his men.
George, you first. Then help her down.” He moved aside so George could climb
out.
“As soon as you hit the ground, stand flat against
the wall and wait for Grace and me. It’s important that you not draw attention
to yourself,” he whispered. “Parker will send a few of his lads to distract
Lynch’s men, and when their attention is drawn elsewhere, we’ll head for the
tree line. Stay low. Hopefully those blackguards won’t see us, but if they do,
just keep moving forward. Parker and his men will give us cover. Got that?”
George nodded and practically dove through the
window.
Grace was next, as soon as George whispered,
“Ready!” from outside. She turned and gazed at Trevor with big blue eyes full of
distress.
“Go on, it’s all right,” he urged her, cupping her
cheek gently.
“Trevor, if we don’t make it—”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” His heart clenched with
protectiveness; at the same time, he wanted to tear Lynch apart for scaring her.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Now get the hell out of here.”
She forced a brave smile and nodded with nervous
resolve, then reached up for the windowsill. Trevor gave her a boost, steadying
her by her hips as she climbed up. Brentford was waiting for her on the other
side.
She braced her hands on his shoulders, but as the
young earl grasped her by her waist to help her down, somebody tried the
door.
Eyes narrowed, Trevor glanced over his shoulder,
instantly ready to fight. He could hear the gang members puzzling over the
locked door.
“What the ’ell? Did Jimmy lock it?”
“Where’s the key?”
“There is no key! This one only locks from the
inside!”
“Get in there!” one of them yelled, realizing.
They began kicking the door.
It jumped on its hinges.
“Hurry!” Grace cried in a frantic whisper.
But Trevor knew it was too late.
Lynch’s men would be through that door in a moment
and would shoot them in the back before they had reached the woods. There was
only one option. He had to stay and fight. “Get her out of here,” he ordered
Brentford. “I’ll hold them off.”
“Trevor, no, you have come with us!” Grace
insisted. “They’ll kill you!”
He looked at her in searing anguish. “Go.” He
nodded toward the woods, where Parker was waiting impatiently. Two of his
soldiers emerged from the shadows with rifles drawn, ready to give them
cover.
Brentford was already pulling her away by her
wrist.
“You come back to me, or I’ll never forgive you,”
she vowed over her shoulder.
“I’ll always come back to you, Grace. Now, go.”
Brentford had to drag her another few steps, but
she finally started running willingly. As the pair of them sprinted away from
the gang’s hideout toward the woods, Trevor watched them for another heartbeat,
but he dared not linger. He knew he had only seconds to brace for the enemy’s
arrival.
He turned back to face the room and scanned it for
anything useful. Lifting the chair he had been tied to, he smashed it on the
floor, breaking off one of the legs to use as a bat. He got into position beside
the doorway, his back to the wall and waited, every muscle tensed, wild instinct
filling his veins.
When the door crashed inward off its hinges, the
first gang member through the doorway got a shattering whack to the face.
Trevor used his bat to block the fist of the next
one who swung at him, then knocked him out with a left hook to the temple.
Lynch must have heard the commotion, for he also
came running. “Get in here! They’re escaping!” the gang leader bellowed from the
corridor outside the room. “Split up!” he barked at several others behind him.
“Go kill the other two! This one’s mine.”
Trevor knew he needed to buy more time for Grace
and George to get farther away by taking out as many of Lynch’s men as
possible.
The next drew a gun on him; Trevor counterattacked
with a circular block and a step behind him, grabbing the man’s weapon arm and
twisting it backwards to wrench the son of a bitch forward from the hips.
It was as natural as breathing to extend the
twisted arm and break it over his knee. A garbled cry escaped the man as he fell
to the floor.
Trevor stooped down and had the man’s dropped
pistol in his hand in a heartbeat.
The next thing anyone knew, he slammed Jimmy back
against the wall, one hand clamped around windpipe, the other holding the pistol
to the gang leader’s cheek.
“Anyone moves, he dies,” Trevor warned,
panting.
Jimmy cursed, and outside they could hear the sharp
report of shots fired, but in the room, the remaining two men backed off; they
had to step over the one with the broken arm, who had just passed out from
pain.
Trevor was filled with battle frenzy, nearly
tasting blood. Everything in him wanted to rid the world of this slimy
underworld snake. It would be so very easy.
Lynch must have seen the spark of madness in his
eyes. He wilted back against the wall. “No hard feelings, man. It’s just
business.”
“Call them off.” He squeezed his windpipe just a
little.
Lynch gagged, and Trevor relented, allowing him to
nod at his men. “Tell ’em to stand down,” Lynch ordered.
The other two ran off to do his bidding, leaving
Trevor alone in the room with the gang leader.
No witnesses to whatever might happen.
Lynch realized it, too.
“Now, what was that threat you made to my fiancée?”
he asked softly.
Lynch gulped. “You c-can’t kill me, man. Y-you have
to obey the law. I thought you were the constable?”
The criminal’s insistence that
he
obey the law outraged him all over again, but hearing that one
term, “constable,” Trevor was abruptly reminded of his new life.
Grace.
The Grange, the village. All those people counting
on him.
No longer roaming through the shadows, one of the
Order’s dark angels of vengeance. In that existence, he would have taken
pleasure in killing this vicious parasite.