The man gave a roar and aimed the knife at me. His powerful forearm, adorned with a tattooed anchor, looked as if it could do serious damage, with or without sharp, pointy kitchen implements. I tried to divert the blade from the vicinity of my throat with a finger against the blunt side of the blade, but that made him angrier.
“Your duchess thinks this is funny, Rasta-boy.”
He felt the sleeve of my coat with the back of his finger, then gave me a one-eyed stare that froze my blood.
“Not a bad Burberry knock-off,” he said. “And those McCartney boots look almost genuine. You get them off Peter?” He turned back to Liam. “Rasta-boy, you couldn’t pull a posh bird like this. She’s Peter’s tart, ain’t she?” He felt my coat again. “I hope that twatface didn’t tell you this is the real thing?”
I couldn’t have spoken, even if I’d had a response to give this madman. My knees had turned to custard. I held onto Liam, whose face was a mask of stony calm, although every muscle of the arm that circled my shoulders had gone tense.
“How much time left?” Liam said to the television watchers, whose faces showed similar indifference to the armed and dangerous fashion policeman.
“They’re going to chuck it any minute,” said one, lighting a cigarette. The others said nothing, only glancing for a moment from the television that transfixed them. Apparently nothing could pry them from their game, even a homicidal maniac.
The man moved his knife back toward Liam.
“They’ve all been getting mysterious calls on their mobiles. You lads are up to something.”
The TV watchers yelled. A man in a paint-spattered hoodie threw a beer can at the television.
“Bollocks!” he shouted. “Bleeding, bollocksy wankers!”
Eye-patch man gulped whiskey.
“You’d better be a Leeds supporter, Duchess, or these barbarians will tear you limb from limb.”
I tried to smile, feeling as if I’d been dropped into a wild animal cage at an alien zoo. Those Merry Men of Sherwood stories were terribly romantic, but the reality of unwashed, uncivilized men was not.
“Sorry, I don’t know anything about Leeds—or Manchester United either. I don’t follow soccer, I’m afraid.”
“What did you say?” said a small, dark man with a jutting jaw and eyebrows like wayward caterpillars. His voice held as much menace as the eye patch man’s.
They all turned to glare at me. Soccer. I’d called it soccer. Not good.
“I mean football. I don’t know much about Leeds or Manchester United, um, Man U, I guess it’s called…”
No, I must have said that wrong, too. The glares got darker.
“You’ve got the pronunciation wrong there,” said the dark little man, who was rolling his own cigarette from what appeared to be a communal tobacco pouch. “Around here, you don’t say ‘Man U.’ It’s pronounced ‘scum’.”
All the men laughed, including Eye-Patch.
“We’re still fighting the Wars of the Roses over here,” said a young man who looked to be of Indian descent. “It’s still York vs. Lancashire, six hundred years later.” As he turned back to watch the screen, I noticed he sat in a wheelchair.
“You’re from America?” said Eye-Patch, scrutinizing me again. “You people don’t know shit about making whiskey.” He stumbled toward the TV, where something noisy was happening. After emptying the bottle with one last swallow, he threw it at an overflowing trash can in the corner. It missed and shattered on the floor.
The TV watchers gave an angry roar.
“Lost again, fuckers!” somebody shouted.
Chaos descended. Liam, who had been backing toward the doors, disappeared into the factory. A second later, the lights went out. A crash came from above as a rusty trap door opened and a ladder swung down, knocking the drunken Eye-Patch to the floor.
The men swarmed Eye-Patch. In the light from the streetlamp outside, I could see the dark little man grab the knife while two others held Eye-patch down. He roared in fury. They roared back, using a remarkable assortment of obscenities.
An authoritative voice came from above. “Excellent work, lads.” A flashlight flared, and a man’s legs descended the ladder. “Take him outside,” the man said, shining the flashlight on Eye-Patch’s limp body. “The Swynsby constabulary can find him accommodation for the night.”
Peter Sherwood’s grinning face appeared as he hung from the swinging ladder.
“And lads…Watch your sodding language. There’s a lady present.”
With raucous laughter they dragged the old man to the outer door. The man in the wheelchair led the charge to the cobbled street outside.
“Hello, Camilla Randall!” Peter said, “Catch the torch!”
He tossed me the flashlight. I directed the beam at the ceiling and saw Peter hanging from the ladder, wearing a tuxedo, complete with bow tie—a large, purple one. From the hole above him, he extricated a battered bouquet of daffodils and leaped to the cafeteria floor, landing with an athlete’s grace.
He offered me the flowers along with an irresistible grin and a bow worth of Errol Flynn himself.
“Welcome to Sherwood, M’lady.”
I stood in the dark cafeteria—daffodils in one hand, flashlight in the other, alone with this tuxedo-clad man who had just knocked out an apparently homicidal creditor with a kick to the head.
My new publisher.
I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. But since my face seemed to be frozen in a stiff smile, I did neither.
Peter, with a cheery grin, resumed custody of his “torch.” He let the beam linger on my boots.
“Those boots are brilliant, Miss Randall.” He extended his other hand. “Splendid to see you again.” He shook my hand with tea-party politeness.
“That man. With the eye patch. He had a knife.”
Peter laughed. “And I had no weapon of any kind. Which I believe gave me the moral advantage.” He looked absurdly sexy in the tuxedo: Keith Richards doing a Cary Grant impression. He peeked out a window and took a mobile phone from his pocket. “There’s a bloke lying on the pavement on Threadneedle Street,” he said. “Near the Merry Miller. Probably just pissed, but you might want to send an ambulance. Cheers.”
After this surprising show of compassion. He disappeared through the double doors, and a moment later, the fluorescent lights above hummed to life and the television blared. He laughed as I blinked in befuddlement. “I phoned Liam earlier and told him to throw the switch as soon as the match was over,” he said. “I didn’t want to electrocute myself when I kicked through a ceiling with who knows how many live wires running through.” He glanced up at the rusty trap door and precariously hanging ladder. “Luckily, the electrical system seems to be intact. I’ve been wanting to replace that filthy ceiling anyway. Somebody tiled right over that nice trap door. Victorian, from the look of it.” He kicked away a piece of disintegrating ceiling tile that had fallen to the floor.
On the television, a commercial showed a cartoon of cheery, bouncing bunnies. I felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in some demented cartoon-bunny land myself. I’d come for Robin Hood and found the White Rabbit.
“I do apologize for the dramatics,” Peter said. “They weren’t entirely for your benefit, although I think it was rather a good entrance, don’t you?” He picked up a piece of broken glass bottle and tossed it in the vicinity of the trash bins. “I would have got rid of Barnacle Bill earlier, but he’s easier to handle with a whole bottle of whiskey in him than half. Usually passes out by then. Besides, I didn’t want to ask Liam to throw the switch until the game was over. The lads would have clobbered me instead of old Bill.” He gave me a sudden hug—quick and brotherly, but I couldn’t help reacting to his touch. He smelled of peppermints. “Are you all right, lass? How was your flight?”
“The flight was fine.” I wanted to tell him nothing had been close to fine since I’d landed on terra firma, but that seemed too obvious to state without being rude.
Peter brushed dust off his tuxedo. “It’s right nasty, up there in the attic. We haven’t had time to clean it. Although I did some brainstorming up there. It would make a brilliant flat. It has skylights and gobs of floor space.” He straightened his purple tie. “I wore this for your arrival. Ordered in some pizza and American whiskey, too, to make you feel at home, but I’m afraid Barnacle Bill availed himself of the treats.” He examined the mess around the trash container. “Sorry. Are you ravenous? Let’s get you some food. “I could do with a meat pie meself. Nothing like climbing about on rooftops and lying in rat turds to work up an appetite.”
I’d been a little hungry, but that evaporated with talk of rat turds. Mostly I longed for bed.
“I’d prefer to settle in now, if you don’t mind. It’s tomorrow morning for me.”
“But you’re in Blighty now, my dear.” He looked at his watch. “And here it’s only half nine. You’ll hate yourself if you go to bed now and wake at five AM. Come down the pub, lass. Brenda can fix you breakfast, dinner, supper—whatever you fancy. And you can meet Mr. Trask. Don’t you want to meet your fellow American scrivener?”
“Gordon Trask will be there?” Talking with a fellow American might make this seem less surreal.
“I assume so, since he’s terrified to walk about at night. Amazing about these macho authors. They’re generally big girl’s blouses when you meet them. Same with the whips and chains blokes. They all look like chartered accountants in person.”
A siren wailing down the street. Peter peeked through the filthy curtains—wildly flowered in a print of orange and hot pink that probably dated from the days of the Beatles.
“Here’s the ambulance. It’s all right then. They’ll get poor old Barnacle sorted.” He picked up a large purple umbrella and offered me his arm. “Come, m’lady. The brolly’s big enough for both of us. Let’s get you fed.”
He led me into the rain and put up the umbrella. I took his offered elbow, although the thought of where it had been made this less appealing than it might have been. But I was happy for the stability on the slippery cobblestones.
Peter blithely led me past the paramedics attending to Barnacle Bill, who still lay lifeless on the sidewalk.
“You’ll feel better when you’ve had a pint, lass. And I need to introduce you properly to the lads. I owe them a couple of rounds. Rather clever, I thought, calling them all on their mobiles to coordinate the maneuvers. I haven’t forgotten everything I learned while fighting for Queen and country in the Balkans.”
I digested this information.
“So that was you who called Liam in the car?”
He grinned. “Yes. I called from my perch up there. Awfully sorry I couldn’t welcome you myself. But as you saw, the old Barnacle had other plans for me.”
“So you’re previously acquainted with this…Barnacle person?”
“He used to captain my yacht in the Caribbean.”
Yachts. The Caribbean. Galaxies away from this soggy, nonsensical place. I felt as if I were watching a foreign film without subtitles. All I wanted was a bed. And a shower.
But instead I was walking down a narrow, treacherous street in the direction of beer—warm beer, no doubt; Plant had warned me of that—with a man I did not know, and at the moment, had very little reason to trust.
As we rounded the corner, we came to a pub called the Merry Miller—a storybook half-timbered building with thick, bottle-glass window panes and a tiny arched wooden door that looked as if it had been made for Hobbits. So did the low ceilings. But the place glowed with inviting light from a big fireplace near the bar.
“A seventeenth century coaching inn,” Peter said. “There are still some guest rooms upstairs. Gordon Trask isn’t terribly impressed with them, but then Mr. Trask isn’t impressed with much.”
Before I could ask him to elaborate, Liam shouted from a big booth in the corner. “You owe us a pint, Peter.”
“Brenda, pints all round for me brave lads!” Peter shouted at a large red-haired woman as he ushered me through the crowd. He seated me next to the wheelchair man.
“So what was all that about, Peter?” said Mr. Eyebrows. “That geezer said you owed him money. Do you?”
Peter’s eyes twinkled.
“It’s not impossible. I left Tobago Bay with some haste last year. I don’t know how he found me here.” He took out his pipe and filled it from a leather tobacco pouch. “He’s mostly harmless, except when he’s on the piss.”
“I don’t know why Meggy let him in. He were right bladdered,” said the man in the paint-spattered hoodie. He had a number of piercings in both ears and one in his nose.
“It’s hardly fair to Meggy,” said the man in the wheelchair. He gave a professorial harrumph. “She’s a machine operator, not a bloody guard dog.” He extended his hand to me. “I’m Pradeep Balasubramarium, Miss Randall. Your editor.”
“We just call him Professor,” Peter said. “Got a Ph.D. from Cambridge, he does. No idea why he’s slumming with this lot.”
The Professor gave my hand a shake.
“Sorry I didn’t introduce myself over there. I didn’t want to let on that you were one of our authors, or that lunatic might have taken you hostage. He’d been threatening to abscond with my chair if we didn’t tell him where Peter was, so I was lying low.”