Patrica Rice (26 page)

As if sensing the activity, Rollings swung around and pointed the gun at the interior again. Daphne swiftly lifted her arm to balance against the seat, blotting out the view of the window with her pelisse. With any luck, at this angle, Melanie would hide the other window.

Rollings glared down at the two women quietly crouching against the carriage side, their silk pelisses glowing in the dusky light, their prim bonnets still perched fashionably upon their curls despite the upheaval. He had no grudge against women. This had not been his choice of revenge, but they were leaving him with little enough to live for.

“Quit rocking the carriage or you’ll be in the river before I am,” he warned them firmly.

“We cannot sit or stand like this,” Daphne protested. “Can no one right the carriage? Or at least help us out? I do not know your argument, but it cannot be gentlemanly to allow us to languish like this. Miss Griffin has been recently ill, and the damp may irreparably harm her. Can you find no other means to have this discussion?”

Daphne cried her lament for as long as she was able, hoping to give the men beneath the time they needed. Rollings’s frown warned she had pushed far enough.

“This isn’t a picnic, Miss Templeton, and I am not the local Robin Hood. Perhaps you should speak to your lovers out here and persuade them of your desperate plight. They do not yet seem convinced.”

The insult flew right by her head. Daphne heard something else in his voice, and she tested it carefully. “If you found that Robin Hood, would they allow you to keep your commission?”

That tactic startled Rollings, and he stared into her upturned face. “I had some hopes of that, but it is too late now. Unless you wish to climb up here and speak with my cousins, you would do best to sit there quietly.”

“I would like to climb up, but I cannot move without disturbing the carriage. Evan can help you find the thief. He has been on his trail all along. That would be a much more honorable solution to the problem, would it not? And then Miss Dalrymple would have reason to be proud of you. She is inordinately fond of you, you must know.”

Rollings desperately wished to believe her for he knew he was in a more than precarious situation, but the hard experience of his youth warned that the honorable way never won him riches. His reply was bitter. “Once the squire learns I am no more than an unnamed son of a common actress, he’ll no longer welcome my suit. It makes no matter that by law I have my father’s name when he does not admit it to anyone.”

“Don’t be daft, Gregory,” a new voice intruded with bored languor. “Your mother thought her stage name more suitable than mine. If your argument is with me, come down from there and leave the ladies out of it.”

Rollings swung around to confront his father, who was stepping out of the hackney they had passed earlier. An older version of his father stepped out after him. The earl’s dark gaze studied the situation.

Before Rollings could answer, Evan’s anger boiled over. “This villain will face me for his deeds this day and in the past. I have lost a father due to his vile actions. I would have lost my own life and that of my brother had he had his way. And now he threatens my sister and my fiancée. I will see him hang.”

Being labeled Evan’s fiancée did not give Daphne the thrill it ought for her attention was solely on the man clinging to the pistol pointed at her head. She could not see who had arrived, but she had heard the carriage and could hear something of the newcomer’s words. Could this be the infamous Uncle Robert they had feared?

The captain’s furious outburst at Evan’s words halted further inquiry. “Your father! What in hell had I to do with your father? Are you that desperate to see me hang? Thanks to my own loving father, I was stationed at White Hall when yours died, instead of on the Continent where I belonged. He can use his influence when he chooses.”

The bored London gentleman raised a golden eyebrow as he regarded Evan. “What bee have you in your bonnet? Your father broke his neck in a drunken riding accident. Have you come all the way home from the wars to accuse us of murder?”

The hint of amusement in his voice brought furious color to both men in the saddles, and they turned their attention fully to Lord Robert, the man they had originally labeled villain.

“It was no accident, sir,” Gordon replied. “The straps of my saddle were cut in a similar incident. I was fortunate enough to survive.
My father was not.”

Lord Robert looked startled, then grim. He turned to the earl beside him. “You told me nothing of this.”

The earl snorted. “I knew nothing of it myself, and I certainly wouldn’t have told you if I had. You haven’t concerned yourself with your family in years. Now look at the results of it standing there on the carriage like some blasted tobyman. Get down from there, boy, and let us discuss this like gentlemen.”

Inside the carriage, Daphne gave a sigh of exasperation at this irascible command. Did the earl truly think a desperate man would bow to being treated like a child? What did they mean by standing there arguing while she and Melanie were in imminent danger of sliding down the hillside? It was time someone put an end to this impasse, and if no one else did, she would.

Kneeling, feeling the carriage rocking lightly with the movement, Daphne ran her fingers over the window frame, searching for the mechanism that removed the window when the top was down.

From below, Rhys reached up to guide her search, and between them, they unlatched the leather hood and gently urged the window from its frame. A rush of cool air swept Daphne’s face, and she took a deep breath. She had not known how stifled she had been in there until now.

Melanie grasped her arm and glanced nervously upward to where the head and shoulders of Captain Rollings stood framed in the doorway, but his attention was fully on the irate argument outside. Daphne shook her head and sat down on the edge of the open window frame. She hoped the men below had the decency to avert their eyes from her ankles as they dangled out the opening.

To her surprise, two strong hands reached in to lift her out, and she was suddenly crouching beside her brother as the carriage teetered overhead. She gave a gasp at the rocking motion caused by her departure, but Rhys and several of his men were already grasping the vehicle to hold it steady while Melanie edged toward the opening.

Daphne crouched low and moved out of the way as Michael reached to lift Melanie down. The loss of this last weight sent the precariously balanced vehicle into another groan and shudder, and a shout from above warned all was not well. Rhys grabbed Daphne’s arm and Michael took Melanie’s, and everyone scampered for the relative safety of the muddy hillside.

Evan noted the first lurch of the carriage and prayed Rhys and his men knew what they were about. When the second lurch jarred Rollings’s hold on the undercarriage, Evan was ready.

Kicking his heels into his mount, he raced forward, raised his riding crop, and swung it viciously at his cousin’s upraised gun hand. The move called for a careful maneuver and perfect timing to hit the target and bring the horse out of the carriage’s wheels without harm.

Evan enjoyed a jolt of satisfaction as the crop connected and Rollings screamed. The gun exploded, but Evan ignored the mass confusion he left behind. With a cry, he raced toward the hillside and the muddy figures emerging from beneath the carriage.

Chapter Twenty

Daphne dashed into Evan’s arms as he dismounted and held them out. Her cheek scraped against the smooth weave of his coat, and she breathed deeply of the scents of starched linen and horse sweat and bay rum, reveling in these sensations she had feared never to experience again. Hard arms clenched her fiercely, briefly, and she had time to feel the swift beat of his heart before they were torn asunder.

“Unhand my sister,” Michael intoned tersely, his pale but muddy face a picture of fury at the sight of the reckless adventurer crushing Daphne against him.

Evan obediently released her, knowing he had no right to stake his claim. He had just needed the reassurance that she was unharmed, he told himself, and his gaze strayed guiltily to his sister.

Melanie was staring adoringly into Rhys’s grim but awestruck visage. Were he not in such pain, Evan would have to chuckle at the Welshman’s expression. Instead, he turned his attention back to the chaos he had left on the road, ignoring the emptiness at his side when Daphne reluctantly took her brother’s arm to find safety on level land.

Gordon had successfully relieved Captain Rollings of any other weapons and brought him down from the carriage to face a jury of his peers—his family. The boredom had been wiped from Robert Griffin’s face as he came to stand before his eldest son, but the arrival of an erratically driven ancient barouche ended any opening for hostility or peace.

Daphne gripped her brother’s arm and sighed in exasperation as her father’s coachman nearly ran over the earl, side-swiped the hackney, and came to a halt in the ditch. The various scars on the vehicle’s wooden sides told tales of more than one such landing, and Daphne waited impatiently for the tirade of mutual curses as her father leapt out and berated the impudent Willie. To her surprise, a second figure jumped from the overturned barouche and stood surveying the scene of chaos.

Finding the man in scarlet, his eyes lit and he strode forward shouting, “Gregory!” The resemblance between the two was such that they could almost be mistaken for twins.

Before Daphne could reconcile all these events in her spinning head, Gordon was at her side, appropriating her other arm and returning Michael’s glare with equanimity. “I think the ladies should be escorted home immediately. The hackney is still upright and Llewellyn can maneuver it around while the others are righting my carriage, if that is all right with you?”

Before Michael could murmur an assent, Daphne jerked her hands from the arms of both men. “You might ask if it is all right with me. It isn’t. Nothing has been settled yet, and it appears very much as if Evan is about to come to fisticuffs with both your cousins at once. I know upon occasion I misunderstand people’s intentions, but I don’t think I am so bad as to mistake that particular stance. Perhaps all three of them ought to be bound and gagged for safety’s sake.”

That startling announcement brought Gordon’s gaze back to the road, and with a curse, he hastily leapt to his brother’s side.

As the cousins dived into the fracas and the muddy lane became a sprawling free-for-all of flailing arms and legs, the older men watched with resignation and a touch of sorrow.

“Gregory didn’t do it, you know,” Robert spoke idly, poking his cane into the mud of the road. “He was at White Hall, just as he said, raising hell and demanding his transfer to Brussels. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have tried it if he had thought of it, but I rather believe George’s death coupled with the end of the war is what started him resenting his cousins.”

The earl wearily attempted to maintain his noble carriage as he watched his heir plant a facer squarely in the center of the captain’s nose. He winced at the crunch, and sighed.

“I have had time to think on what Gordon said. It is very possible that George’s death was an accident. There was never any evidence that his saddle was damaged. George had been blue-deviled for a long time, and that jump was a bad one when he had all his faculties about him, and he was three sheets to the wind that night.

“I’ll accept that George’s death was an accident, but there is no such explanation of the incidents toward the twins afterward. Evan could have been killed when his horse went off the bridge. You can see the river from here. If Gregory shot at a man on that bridge, he intended murder.”

Robert’s aristocratically narrow face deepened into gray lines of anxiety as his eyes sought his sons in the melee. They were younger than the twins, but not by enough to make a physical difference. He flinched perceptibly as the younger went sprawling backward under Evan’s forceful blow.

“The shooting incident must have happened shortly after word that Gregory was to resign his commission. With the war over, they had no need of the excess of officers. He was devastated and petitioned for relief, but he received no promises. I think it festered inside him. We have never been close, so I can’t speak in certainties, but today’s episode reveals much of his state of mind. If I had only known ...”

Both men grew silent over this sad commentary on the lost years between them. The argument over his younger son’s marriage to an actress had been violent and irrevocable, but at this distance, it could also be seen as the folly of youth and not worth a score of years from their lives. The brawl before them now was as much a result of their separation as it was of the marriage. It could easily have been averted.

“Never mind that. What should we do now?”

Robert looked startled as his father consulted his advice for what surely must have been the first time in his life. His lips quirked as the earl refused to meet his eye but continued staring at the brawl in the road. It was as much of a truce as he would ever be offered, and he accepted it. Age had a way of mellowing even the most virulent of emotions.

Robert’s glance went to the scruffy scoundrels on the hillside and the two horrified women being held back by two husky young men. He had been the villain for so long, he wasn’t certain anyone would consider his change of heart now, but he had to begin somewhere.

“I’d suggest recruiting those young brutes to pull apart the melee. They’re already filthy. There is no sense in our emulating them.”

The earl smiled wryly at his son’s bored drawl. He had forgotten Robert’s tendency to distance himself from any form of disagreement. How he had ended up with that fractious harridan of a wife was beyond the earl’s ability to comprehend, but Robert’s coolness in the midst of fury was always welcome.

He nodded his head in agreement and signaled the wooden-legged groom currently preventing Melanie from running to join her brothers. If Rhys Llewellyn were a groom, he’d eat his whole damned carriage. But that was another story.