The Lady of Bolton Hill (22 page)

And then he turned to her, his face filled with concern. “Look, Clara. Don’t ever tell anyone what you’ve done tonight. The dragon who owns this stuff is going to be out for blood, and he’s not someone you want on your tail. I will go to my grave swearing that I acted alone on this. I need you to promise me you won’t put yourself in danger by trying to tell this story to the world. It’s not worth it.”

Looking into that beautifully sculpted face, it was hard to believe that Bane was still little more than a boy. His eyes were old, filled with anxiety on her behalf. “I promise, Alex.”

He laughed a bit at the use of his given name. “You just don’t give up, do you?”

She curled her hand over his. “I will never give up on you, because you truly are a hero, Alex.”

W
ith Eddie Maguire’s lead about the Locust Point harbor, Daniel armed himself with a contingent of hired guards to search through the warehouses that rimmed the waterfront. There were over a hundred buildings, each standing between two and four stories in height, each containing dozens of rooms where a small, frightened hostage might be stashed away.

Clyde and Daniel spent the day going from building to building, searching through hundreds of storage rooms. Each time they forced their way into a building, a terrible squeezing pressure clenched Daniel’s chest. He didn’t know what he was looking for—Clara and Manzetti bound and gagged in a corner? A bloody spot on the floor? It had been almost four days since Clara had been kidnapped, and the likelihood of finding her alive was dwindling with each hour, but he forced his mind to remain rational. Methodical.

It was past midnight when they discovered the warehouse where Clara had been held captive. The oversized room looked like dozens of others they had searched, but the canary yellow dress, crumpled in a wad in the corner, had belonged to Clara. On shaking legs, Daniel knelt on the dusty floor and held the dress to his face. He was too late. He closed his eyes and tried to draw another breath into his tortured lungs.

“That was the dress she was wearing when Manzetti picked her up,” Clyde confirmed, his face white as parchment. Everything was here—her corset, her petticoats. Even her dainty suede pumps were tucked beneath the dress.

Clyde snatched the dress from Daniel and held it up before a flickering lantern. “There are no bloodstains here. And the buttons are not torn or missing.”

On some level that ought to be comforting. Clara had not been bleeding or thrashing about when those animals had stripped the dress from her. She would have to be unconscious or dead to have permitted those dozens of tiny buttons to be unfastened without a struggle.

Before the white haze of rage could cloud his mind, Daniel pushed himself to his feet and began pacing the grim warehouse, scanning the empty crates and makeshift kitchen area, anything that might give a clue as to where the occupants had come from or where they went.

“Check everything here,” Daniel ordered. “Open every crate, look through every pile of garbage. Look for papers, receipts, maps . . . anything that might show where they came from or where they are going next.” Daniel strained to see in the flickering light of the lantern, sickened that this filthy hole was where Clara had been forced to spend her last hours on this earth. His gaze was snagged by something odd on the table. A knife pinned a single sheet of paper to the scarred wooden surface.

He pried the knife free and held the document before a lantern. It was a bill of lading for the HMS
Albatross
. Clyde moved to stand beside Daniel.

“
The Albatross
must be a ship, correct?”

Clyde nodded. “Most likely. Those numbers are for the positioning of crates in the cargo hold. I’ve shipped enough medical supplies to know that.”

Then the people who had been in this warehouse had either come or were going to
The Albatross
. It was all Daniel needed to set the next stage in motion. “Get some men stationed here to guard this space until the police can get here. We are going to the docks.”

The Albatross
was a two-masted brigantine and was still tied up to the dock. A network of piers stretched several acres out onto the harbor, a clockwork of right angles to which boats and skiffs and cargo ships were tied. Clara’s and Bane’s boots made hollow thudding sounds as they walked down the pier toward
The Albatross
. Over her shoulder Clara lugged a huge bundle, and Bane carried an even larger one. She clutched the burlap sack so tightly her hands threatened to cramp up.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

There was that verse again, giving her comfort in surely the most frightening moment of her life. As she and Bane approached the ship, two faces appeared over the edge. The men had thick necks and suspicious eyes. Bane took off his cap, his white-blond hair glowing in the thin moonlight. “Zeidermann, get down here,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir, Bane.”

A rope ladder was flung over the side and the sailor made his way down the twisting ladder and hopped down onto the pier. Clara’s heart sank. She had no idea she would need to climb a flimsy ladder like that while lugging this huge sack of wadded-up cloth. It wasn’t heavy, but Bane had instructed her to hunch over as though she was burdened by great weight. Dead weight, as it were. As instructed, she turned her face toward the sack and tried not to wince at the sight of the blood soaking through the burlap. It was Bane’s blood. He’d sliced the inside of his ankle and let the blood seep onto the fabric—
“for a little added authenticity,”
he had told her.

Mercifully, Bane had a solution to the problem of the flimsy ladder. “We need the gangway lowered,” he told Zeidermann. “We’ve got too much weight here to climb a rope ladder. And listen, you and whoever else is on that ship need to get off for a few minutes. We don’t need any witnesses.”

Zeidermann hesitated. “I don’t know, Bane. The cargo that’s on board ought to have a couple of rifles guarding it at all times.”

Bane’s voice was silky in its calmness. “I don’t want any witnesses while I take care of a private matter, Zeidermann. In the next fifteen minutes I need to dismember the contents of these two sacks into small, unidentifiable pieces. Then I am going to dump the pieces to the bottom of the ocean floor. Do you
really
want to witness this?”

The man’s eyes grew round and color drained from his face. Bane tended to have that effect on people. Zeidermann cleared his throat. “No, sir. I suppose we can guard the ship from the entrance to the pier. Just a moment while I get the gangway lowered.” He cleared his throat again. “Sir.”

Zeidermann scrambled up the ladder, and within moments a gangway was lowered over the edge. Clara picked her way up the slatted boards, weaving as
The Albatross
rose and sank on the gentle waves. When she arrived on board she kept her eyes fastened on the deck, her face turned away from the crew. She could see three pairs of boots shuffling toward the gangway. One of the men was grumbling about leaving their post, but Zeidermann was adamant. “Just do it . . . don’t ask questions, just do it,” he said in a fierce whisper.

As the men hit the pier, Bane leaned over the edge and called a warning. “You didn’t see anything. You didn’t hear anything.”

“That’s right, Bane,” a fear-roughened voice replied.

Two minutes after boarding
The Albatross
, she and Bane were alone. “Follow me,” he said. The hold was only a few steps away, and immediately upon descending the short flight of steps, Clara was assaulted by the sweet, pungent odor she had come to know too well over the past few days. The hold was entirely dark except for the narrow rectangle of moonlight coming from the door behind her. Bane struck a match and lit a small kerosene lantern, casting an eerie yellow glow over the crates stacked in the hold.

“What now?” she asked.

“Can you lift one of these crates up to the gunwale on your own?”

“What’s a gunwale?”

Bane sprang up the short flight of steps onto the deck, and rapped the uppermost rail on the ship’s side. “The top edge of the ship,” he clarified.

Clara wrapped her hands around the rough oak crate and waddled up the stairs. She lifted it to balance on the gunwale. Heavy, but manageable. She nodded to Bane.

“Good. Put it down, then, and we’ll move the crates up to the portside of the ship where they can’t be seen from the shore. Then we dump them all at once. Move.”

Clara needed no further prodding. Navigating the stairs was easy in her boy’s clothing, and she carried a steady stream of crates almost as quickly as Bane could move them. In less than ten minutes they had thirty-four crates of opium lined up along the portside of the ship, ready for pitching into the swirling waters below. Bane squatted down and lifted a crate, which he balanced on the railing of the ship. Just before tossing it overboard, he looked at Clara.

“I think this is the first purely decent thing I’ve done in my entire life,” he said. His face wore a quizzical expression, as though it had never occurred to him that doing something positive with his life was in any way a worthwhile endeavor.

“Perhaps it will set a trend,” Clara said. She prayed that it would. If Bane turned his skills toward the good, there would be no end to the things he could accomplish.

“Let’s find out,” Bane said as he heaved the first crate over the side of the ship. Clara winced at the splash, a crash of noise punctuating the night air. “Keep moving,” Bane said. “They know to ignore any sounds they hear of cargo being dumped, but let’s make this fast.”

Clara wrapped her hands around another crate, wishing she had worn a pair of gloves as the rough wood cut into her hands. She had to stand on tiptoe to hoist the crate onto the ledge of the ship; then she shoved it forward with all the strength she could muster. A moment later came the satisfying sound of the splash as twenty-five pounds of opium dissolved in the salty water of the ocean.

Bane continued to heave crate after crate over the side of the ship. Clara tried to keep up, but Bane was dumping the crates at twice the rate she could manage. Just as they were nearing the end of the dumping, a terrible sound interrupted their rhythm.

A clattering of footsteps sounded behind her, and a groggy voice called out, “Zeidermann, is that you?”

Bane froze and his gaze fastened on someone behind her. “Keep your face turned to me,” he whispered fiercely. Then he stood up and raised his voice. “And what are you doing here, Hansen? I told Zeidermann to clear everyone off this ship.”

Fear kept Clara immobilized as she hunched over a crate. There were only two other crates remaining on the deck of the ship. Bane moved to stand before one of the crates, partially obscuring the view from whoever had just stumbled up onto the deck, but anyone with a functioning brain would be able to figure out what they were doing.

“I fell asleep in the forecastle and thought I heard something sloshing around,” the blurry voice said. “What you got there, Bane?”

Bane’s voice lashed out like a whip. “None of your business, Hansen. If you want to live another sixty seconds, you’ll dive over the side of this ship. Otherwise, I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

She prayed the sailor would cooperate, but behind her came the dreaded sound of approaching footsteps. “Are you out of your mind?” the man said. “That’s prime opium you are dumping. The Professor will have our heads for this.”

And in an instant, Bane broke the tension. He shoved the revolver into his belt and reached down to hoist another cask. “You think I’m dumping opium? You idiot, it’s the minced up pieces of what is left of that fool Richards. That’s why I didn’t want any witnesses.” Bane tossed the crate overboard, and Clara did likewise with the crate she still clutched. One crate left.

But Hansen was on to them. He darted to the hold and tore open the door, revealing the empty cargo space. “You dumped the opium, you insane maniac!” Hansen ran for the side of the ship, cupping his hands around his mouth as he called out to shore. “Bane is dumping the opium! Get back here, you fools! Bane is dumping—”

Before he could finish the sentence Bane had rushed the sailor and flipped him overboard. Clara hoisted the final crate and tossed it over, then looked to Bane for instructions.

“Run!”
was all he said. He tugged her arm so fiercely she thought it might be pulled from her socket as he yanked her to the gangway. She toppled down the gangway, landing on her knees on the pier, but Bane hauled her upright as they made a dash for the shore. Directly ahead of her were the four men from the shore who had heard Hansen’s warning, running straight at them like a herd of enraged beasts.

Going the way they had come was suicide, and Bane dragged her down a different pier. The height of the ships tied along the docks made it difficult for their pursuers to track them as they darted through the maze of interconnecting piers, trying to find a way to reach the shore.