Authors: Danelle Harmon
Beside him was Fox, mounted on what looked
to be ...
Crusader?
Bang
, the Butcher's fist caught him
square on the chin, and Gareth reeled backward, seeing stars.
Bugger this. He was furious now. Furious with Lucien for taking his
time in getting here, furious his brother was giving him that cold,
I-told-you-you're-an-idiot stare from his lofty throne atop
Armageddon, furious with Campbell, with Juliet, with the crowds,
with everyone. Sod this for a lark, he wasn't going to stand here
and take this sort of abuse, not with Snelling leaping up and down
in excitement as Campbell hammered him like a woodpecker might a
tree, not with his brother watching in disgust and disdain, and
damn it all, not with Swanthorpe hanging in the balance. There was
only one way to defeat this oatmeal-eating bully, and it had
nothing to do with brawn, only brains.
I may be down, but I'm sure as hell not
out!
His useless right arm cradled to his chest,
Gareth lunged in with his left, aiming for Campbell's eye and
instead connecting with the shelf of bone just above it.
If I
can only blind him, with blood or a blow, I may yet win this
fight!
The flesh opened like meat beneath a cleaver, sending
blood trickling down through Campbell's bushy eyebrow and into his
lashes. The crowd went wild. Campbell, roaring, pawed at his eye
and shook his head, and Gareth took advantage of his opponent's
disorientation by charging back in with renewed confidence, his
knuckles slamming into Campbell's nose, his eye, and again, that
fearsome brow. Blood was running down the Scot's face now, the eye
already beginning to close, and Gareth knew that if he could only
close them both, the fight would be his. Buoyed by success, he
struck with lethal speed, pounding the Scot's face and further
opening the cut above his eye with each blow that connected, again
and again and again until the big Celt had both arms up to shield
his face — an action that brought on a thunderous roar of
disapproval from a crowd that found such a cowardly defense worse
than contemptuous.
Maneuvering his opponent, his one fist
flying and his body sheened in sweat, Gareth looked out over the
crowd and saw Lucien.
No longer furious, but smiling.
And now he was driving the Butcher straight
back into the ropes while around him he heard Snelling cursing, the
Den members yelling encouragement, the crowd cheering him on. He
was going to win. He was going to defeat the Butcher fair and
square and Swanthorpe was going to be his —
But Campbell rallied. With a mighty roar, he
lowered his head and came straight for Gareth, seizing him round
the waist, crushing his broken arm against his ribs as he lifted
him high into the air, and hurling him with colossal force straight
down at the stone floor. There was a loud crack as the back of
Gareth's head hit the stage. Then Campbell landed heavily atop him,
and Gareth knew no more.
~~~~
"Damnation!"
The shouts of the crowd ringing in his ears,
the referee's toll of a count already beginning, Perry charged
forward, both he and Woodford frantically trying to lift Campbell
off of Gareth's still body.
"Four ... five ... six ..."
"He's not getting up. Call off the fight,"
growled Woodford.
"Sod off!"
"Seven ... eight ... nine ..."
Perry desperately tried to rouse his friend.
He slapped his cheek and shook him and leaned down and shouted in
his ear. Nothing.
"Eleven ... twelve ... thirteen ..."
He couldn't hear with the rising roar around
him, couldn't think with the panic that was making his heart race,
didn't know whether to call off the fight or what. Again, he
slapped Gareth's cheeks, but there was no response, not even a
groan of pain, and beneath still, half-closed lashes, Perry could
see the milky crescent of his friend's eyes, rolled back in his
head and seeing nothing.
He looked up, saw the Den members gesturing
and waving, and there, off above a sea of heads, the Duke of
Blackheath coming forward, the crowd parting before Armageddon like
waves before a ship.
"Seventeen ... eighteen ... nineteen
..."
"Damn you, Gareth, wake up!
The Butcher, bleeding heavily, was strutting
around his fallen rival in amusement and high contempt, holding his
arms over his head in a victory salute, shouting. The Den members
were all yelling at the top of their lungs, the duke was still
coming, and Perry, desperate, bent down, bodily picked up Gareth
and threw him over his shoulder, and, staggering beneath his
weight, rushed him back to their corner, rudely dumping him on the
cold stone and ripping the bottle of ale from Chilcot's stunned
hand. He poured it straight over Gareth's face —
"Twenty-two ... twenty-three ... twenty-four
..."
— and was rewarded with a sudden flutter of
his friend's lashes, a sharp, spastic jerk of his head, and a groan
of pain. Dizzily, Gareth tried to raise himself, only to sway and
fall back against Perry's arm with a sigh.
"Twenty-five ... twenty-six ... twenty-seven
..."
Three seconds left. Cursing, Perry grabbed
Gareth's injured arm and twisted it right back, and his friend
lunged to his feet with an inhuman howl of pain, lashing out with a
fist that nearly took off the top of Perry's blond head. But he was
up, if dazedly awake, and Perry wasted no time rushing him back to
the line and shoving him at the Butcher once more.
Gareth, reeling and all at sea, saw only a
blurry vortex of faces spinning around him. He saw Campbell's
bloody visage moving in and out of his vision, heard the crowd
shouting at him to pull himself together, felt only pain ...
throbbing viciously in his arm, his bruised ribs, pulsing in the
back of a skull that felt as if it had been mashed like a potato.
And now Campbell was hitting him again, hard, but the pain seemed
to come from far away, and Gareth had little interest in defending
himself, only standing there, swaying on his feet, blinking dumbly
with each blow. From some distant part of his brain that was still
functioning, he found himself hoping that Juliet wasn't here to see
this ... that she would never hear about it ... that the Butcher
would just hurry up and put him to sleep because he could feel
stone beneath his knees now, and Campbell was still hitting him,
and Perry was yelling "Foul!" and Lucien — 'Sdeath, was that
Lucien? — was bellowing in a voice that could've shaken the very
heavens:
"Perry! Stop the goddamned fight! Stop it
this instant or by God, I'll haul you straight to the gallows for
manslaughter!"
"No!" Gareth cried, shaking his head, and
then pandemonium broke loose as Lucien spurred Armageddon right up
the shallow stairs onto the stage, the crowd shouting and roaring
behind him. The referees were yelling. Snelling was hollering. The
crowd swelled in a mighty human tide toward the ropes, Campbell
came charging down on Gareth like a lion on a kill, and Gareth knew
then that if he didn't do something, he was going to die.
Lunging to his feet, he braced himself, took
a deep breath, and stopped the Butcher with a single blow between
the eyes. Campbell dropped like a stone. The crowd went insane. And
Gareth staggered away, reeling off the ropes and mustering all his
strength in a desperate bid to stay on his feet as the referee
began the slow count for his opponent ...
"Twenty-eight ... twenty-nine ... thirty."
He grabbed Gareth's bleeding fist and thrust it high. "
The
winner!
"
And then the screaming throngs were rushing
the stage, the Den members were vaulting in over the ropes, and
Lucien, his face thunderous, was heading straight to where Gareth,
sporting a silly little grin, stood swaying dizzily.
"Guess what, Luce ... I'm a landowner
now!"
He blinked as a slight form brushed past his
brother and came running across the stage, skirts flying, tears
streaming down her face.
"Juliet?" he managed, in stunned
disbelief.
And as Gareth's tenuous hold on
consciousness finally broke, it was she who caught him and, holding
him until Lucien could pick him up and lift him over his shoulder,
silently followed the brothers back across the stage to where
Armageddon waited — leaving Sir Roger Foxcote, and the constable,
to approach a suddenly quaking Snelling.
"You, my man, are under arrest."
Chapter 34
If Campbell hadn't nearly murdered his
brother, Lucien swore he would've done so himself.
It had taken Gareth almost two hours to
regain consciousness after he'd gone down that final time, and as a
grim-faced Lucien had put his senseless sibling aboard Armageddon
and brought him back to Swanthorpe with hundreds of cheering,
reveling people following in their wake, he had thought for sure
he'd soon be mourning a second brother.
Victory, exhaustion, and a concussion had
made for a powerful sedative. But later that night — after the
doctor had set his broken arm, and while Juliet was sitting on the
bed holding wet compresses to his swollen face — Gareth finally
opened his eyes, his dizzy return to consciousness greeted by
blurred vision and bouts of severe nausea.
"Serves you right," Lucien growled. He took
the cloth from Juliet and hurled it at his brother's bare chest.
"Put this against your head, and it won't hurt so bad."
But Gareth, looking dazedly up at Juliet,
wasn't paying him any attention. Instead, he was staring at his
wife as though she was the dearest thing he had ever beheld, as
though he had never expected to see her again. Which, Lucien
reflected dryly, was not so unlikely a supposition. He had arrived
at the dower house just after six to find his brother already gone
to the fight — and his new sister-in-law packing her trunk and
sobbing her eyes out.
Crying females did not amuse him. Soppy
tales of prideful husbands did not faze him. And her angry protests
did not deter him when, his patience exhausted, he plucked
Charlotte from her arms and thrust her into the stunned Sir Hugh's,
bodily threw Juliet over his shoulder and, striding back outside to
where Armageddon waited, personally brought her to the fight
himself — where her bristling defiance had turned to heartbroken
misery as she'd seen Gareth taking a beating from the Butcher and
realized just what her husband was doing for her.
Not for himself — but for her and
Charlotte.
Now, as Lucien stood there watching their
nauseating display of love and forgiveness, he felt compelled to
vent his spleen.
"All right, that's enough of this damned
sickly-sweet foolishness," he growled, stalking to the bed and
glaring down at his brother. "You listen to me, and you listen
well, Gareth. Your fighting days are over. And if I
ever
hear of you taking on a champion pugilist again —"
Gareth waved him off. "Give me some credit,
would you? After all, I
did
beat the fellow."
Lucien tightened his jaw. So he had. He'd
also won himself a lucrative estate, exposed Snelling for the
murdering swindler he was, and won the hearts of the people of
Abingdon with his courage against the Butcher.
Earlier, while waiting for Gareth to come to
his senses, Juliet had told Lucien everything she knew. Her story
had been confirmed by Fox, who had stopped by after having applied
a certain amount of ... duress to Snelling to get a confession not
only from him, but also from Woodford, Creedon, and even Angus "the
Butcher" Campbell — who admitted that Snelling had promised him an
additional two hundred pounds if he killed his opponent during the
fight.
Enhanced by testimonies from the widowed
Mrs. Fleming, the chemist in Oxford, and even a sober Bull
O'Rourke, it was not hard to put together a frightening
picture.
Snelling, it appeared, had assembled a
stable of tough, seasoned fighters who were among the best in
England and pitted them against each other every Friday night. When
he'd seen Gareth fight Joe Lumford that evening at Mrs.
Bottomley's, Snelling had come up with a scheme that would make him
a staggering amount of money. As Gareth was an unknown newcomer,
there was little reason for the vast crowds who came to watch the
fights to think he could hold his own against the likes of Nails
Fleming, Bull O'Rourke, or Angus "the Butcher" Campbell — much less
beat them. And they had bet their money accordingly. With each
fight, Snelling had matched Gareth against a man who was heavily
favored to trounce him. Then, all Snelling had to do was put
his
money on Gareth, slip just enough laudanum to the
favorite to subtly dull his reflexes, and take home a fortune.
Unfortunately, an innocent man had died
because of it. But Nails's death would not go unavenged. The next
trip Snelling made would be his last, for at this very moment, the
brilliant Fox was pulling out all the stops to ensure that Snelling
and his henchman would hang for Nails's murder.
And for plotting to kill my brother
,
Lucien thought, savagely.
Thank God for his trusty informer, who was
not quite as brainless as he appeared. If Chilcot had not sent word
to him, he would never have reached Abingdon in time.
Not that it would've mattered. As things
turned out, his brother had done just fine without him.
Lucien was still scowling as he helped
Juliet prop Gareth's shoulders up on the pillows to ease his
throbbing head. Amazingly, she was not angry with him for dragging
her to the fight in such a rough and undignified way — not that he
cared one way or another whether she was or not. She had seen him
cursing Snelling to eternal hell while the doctor had set Gareth's
arm. She had seen him fretting, swearing, and pacing as he'd waited
impatiently for his brother to come to. Oh, she saw right through
him, had done so from the start, and knew him exactly for what he
was: an overprotective older brother whose fear for the sibling he
loved had switched to angry relief the moment Gareth had opened
those guileless blue eyes of his.