To Seduce an Angel (30 page)

“Dav! Dav!”

He turned at the shouts. The boys swarmed into the ring. They jumped and pointed, out of breath and frantic. Dav collared Swallow and made the others hush.

“A man with a pistol put Miss Portland in a coach. Another fellow, a swell toff, hit her with a riding crop and rode off on his horse.”

Dav spun back to Wallop. “Who took Emma just now?”

Wallop tried to straighten up. “Now, boy, this is no way to treat a friend of the fancy. Josiah Wallop doesn't know such things.”

“You're no friend to anyone. You tried to kill us. You frightened her.”

“She gave you up, boy. Anything we wanted she told us.”

Dav smashed Wallop's nose. Blood gushed over his fleshy chin and his soiled linen and spattered the purple silk.

“Who's got her? Aubrey?” Dav knew his grandfather would not be mounted on a horse.

“Don't . . . know.”

Dav hit him again.

“Aye, Aubrey was here.”

Dav looked at his brothers. “I'm going to get her.”

“It's another trap, like this match. Aubrey's likely got hired fists or guns waiting.” Xan spoke quietly. “Let us go.”

“She's their lure. They're using her to draw you in.” Will protested.

It made sense, but the bits and pieces of Emma's story collided in Dav's brain and fell into a kind of rough order. “They've got some hold over her.” Dav shoved Wallop, who was slumped over his neckcloth, bleeding freely. “What's the duke's hold on her?”

“She needs a paper, a pardon. Wenlocke has it.”

“A pardon? For what?”

Wallop still breathed in short, pained gasps, but he smiled a sly, malicious smile, ensanguined by the blood on his teeth. “She murdered some poor bloke. She'll swing for it.”

His brothers' faces wore shock. The boys were sober and uncomprehending.

Lark stepped up to his side. “She came to warn you.”

Dav detached himself from the urgent pleading voices in his ears. Everyone wanted him to believe that Emma was a murderer. Emma, who hugged ponies and rejoiced in grubby boys reading and admired toads. Emma, who yielded her sweet self to him when she had nothing left to give. He knew better. He'd got it backward when she'd disappeared. He'd thought her love was a lie, but her love was the truth. Everything about Emma Portland was a lie except her love.
I love you.
That was the truth. She wasn't a vicar's daughter or Wenlocke's spy or a murderer. He didn't know who she was yet, but he knew her, the woman under the layers of disguises. He loved her, and he had to get her back from Aubrey.

His immediate surroundings came back into focus. The vinegars and the umpire formed a loose circle around Dav and his brothers in the middle of the ring, but beyond them the crowd voiced its displeasure at the breakup of the match. They'd missed seeing the bloody spectacle they'd come for. Hotheads in the crowd started a chant of “Cheat, cheat, cheat!”

“In case you haven't noticed, Dav, a bleeding riot is brewing. These fellows came to see a match.” Will cocked his head in the direction of the crowd.

Dav turned to him. “Then give them a match. You and Xan. School them. And empty Wallop's pockets for starters. Get the boys to spread some of his blunt around. See that every workingman gets a day's wage.”

“And what are
you
going to do?” One of Will's black brows quirked upward.

“I'm going to Wenlocke to get Emma's pardon.”

“You can't go to Wenlocke without us.”

Dav nodded to Adam Digweed, who began to clear a path through the onlookers with brute size. “Catch up when you can.”

“Wenlocke will kill you.”

“Or die trying. It's much the likelier outcome.”

“Wenlocke won't give you her pardon.”

“I think he will when he hears what I'm offering. I think he'll give me everything I want.”

STANDING in the corner of the ring, Lark tasted gall, a bitterness that made his mouth go dry. He could not move for a full minute as he watched Dav go. Dav did not look back. His mind was on the girl. He had left them behind to enter a world where they could not be his mates. They would not scramble together to the top of some roof to share the spoils of the day. Dav thought he had stayed one of them, but he hadn't.

Around Lark Dav's brothers began to turn the crowd from disappointment to interest in the new match. Xander Jones had stripped for the ring, and already the legs were offering odds. Will Jones held a purse high over his head, encouraging wagers that he could land a hit over his brother's guard. No one was watching Lark and Rook, which was a good thing. Their bulging pockets would not bear scrutiny at the moment. Rook looked decidedly uneasy. Any minute now some persons in the crowd were bound to discover their pockets had been lightened and to begin to complain.

It was time for Lark and Rook to slip away. Lark nudged his companion. As he held the rope up for Rook to duck under, Lark spotted Dav's old velvet coat on the ground. He snatched it up and dragged it with him through the ropes. They moved quickly then while the crowd laughed and shouted at Xander and Will Jones in the ring.

A steady pace took them up the hillside bordering the green into the wood. In the concealing shelter of beech trunks Lark stopped and donned the worn coat. It smelled like London, like smoke and stone. A little loose in the shoulders, it hung down to his ankles and he had to turn up the cuffs.

“Wot're ye doing with 'is old coat?” Rook wanted to know.

“Starting a new career. Let's head for London.”

Rook grinned.

ANCIENT oaks that cast long shadows before a bend in the road allowed Dav a full view of Wenlocke Castle from the carriage window. He had never cared to possess it, and he knew he could count on his grandfather's reluctance to surrender its splendor into unworthy hands.

Mounted on a hill above the surrounding countryside, Wenlocke was meant to daunt rather than welcome visitors. Whatever defenses it had possessed through the dark centuries of wars and plagues, over time it had undergone an architectural transformation that made it less a battlement than a rich man's palace of stone modeled after the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome.

Dav had realized something about his grandfather on the way to Wenlocke. The old man had never cared for a direct fight. For seven years Wenlocke had sent his lackeys and hirelings against Dav, paid tools of malice. Dav felt he had the advantage in a direct fight.

The carriage halted in front of a massive central block like a tricked-out temple from an ancient acropolis. Six fluted columns supported a pediment and frieze of warring figures clashing in battle. Stone urns and torches bristled along the roofline against the blackening sky. From the center block imposing wings branched out to the north and south. Wide steps compelled the visitor's gaze up to the entrance. Dav guessed the place had five hundred rooms or more, but he only cared about one of them, whichever one held Emma prisoner.

As he opened the carriage door, a flock of crows took off in raucous flight at the edge of the woods. He hoped Emma could not hear their harsh cries.

He stepped down. A raw evening wind tugged at him and blew his loose hair back from his face. The stinging touch of the breeze set his wounds throbbing. His right eye did not open fully, and he could imagine its plum hue. He tasted blood every time he moved his lips. Yet he felt oddly exhilarated at the prospect of confronting his grandfather at last.

Adam lumbered down to stand beside him and untucked two pistols from his belt. They crossed the drive, Dav confident that some vigilant soul inside would soon note their arrival. The crunch of their footfalls, the rustle of the breeze, and the driver tending to the spent horses sounded loud in his ears. The crows flew off as they advanced.

As they reached the foot of the steps, the castle's grand door opened, and a pair of shaggy orange and white setters exploded from within. All lean muscle and energy, the dogs barreled toward Dav, hair flying, teeth bared.

He stood his ground and stared them down, and the beasts dropped panting at his feet. A long moment passed filled with the flapping of his open coat and the dogs' ragged pants. With a wave of his right hand, he freed the dogs to dance and cavort around him.

A solemn butler watched the display from above, flanked by three liveried footmen on either side. Dav let the servant phalanx take his measure while the dogs barked and danced. Then he gave Adam a nod, and they strode forward.

The footmen shifted uneasily on either side of the butler, looking to him for a signal and casting wary glances at Adam with his pistols. Dav took the steps and halted on a level with the waiting men.

“I've come to see the old man.” The stiff butler's high collar kept his chin angled upward and forced him to look down a long nose at Dav, but the man's eyes were alive with recognition.

“Regrettably, sir, His Grace is not at home to uninvited guests.”

Sir
was calculated for politeness and a refusal to recognize Dav's claim to his title. Dav let his gaze sweep the assembled footmen and return to the butler. “Ordinarily, Mr. . . . ?”

The dogs chased each other back up the stairs and halted panting at Dav's side.

The butler flicked them a disgusted glance. “Vickers.”

Dav nodded. “Ordinarily, Mr. Vickers, I would not interrupt His Grace's enjoyment of his vast possessions, but as he's taken one of mine, I must. He'll see me when he reads this.” Dav produced the folded paper with the terms he'd conceived for Emma's release.

Vickers took it as if he handled live ammunition. With a slight bow he stepped aside. “You'll be pleased to wait in the hall, sir.”

At a signal from Vickers two footmen went running in opposite directions, one up a stone staircase, and one through a door to their left. Dav exchanged a glance with Adam, alerting him to be ready for whatever was thrown at them next. Adam nodded. The dogs trotted in with perfect unconcern for the human drama around them, their nails clicking on the marble tiles.

 

 

HIS supper interrupted, Lord Roderick Philoughby stood in the narrow stone cell in the women's wing of the jail looking at a disheveled young woman in black with mud on her hem. Philoughby thought it no wonder that she kept her head bowed. The place reeked of confinement and helplessness, submission and abandonment. What appetite he'd had for his supper deserted him.

Foley, the constable, rattled his keys. The girl lifted her face, and Philoughby looked into eyes of the purest, sweetest blue he had ever seen. Eyes of truth, he thought.

The day had little light left, slanting down through a grating in the wall, catching a strand of the pale culprit's untidy hair and lighting up the cell with it. It was unlike Foley to speak up on behalf of the wretches who ended in Horsham Jail, particularly when the accused had been taken up on a charge of murder, but looking at the young woman before him, Philoughby understood Foley's unease.

Philoughby could not imagine a more unlikely murderess in spite of the dirt and bewildering contrast between her thin face and well-padded person. She appeared to exist in some other realm than the sordid cell with its iron bed and reeking chamber pot.

“You did well to summon me, Foley. This whole affair smacks of unseemly haste.”

“Thought ye'd want to know, Yer Worship, Colonel Crutchfield is over at the Swan. Says 'e's got a jury ready to act in the morning. 'E's spoken for the executioner's cart.”

Philoughby frowned. Juries were meant to deliberate before deciding. Crutchfield was acting above himself to rush this case. Earlier Philoughby had received a brief on the case with a message from the Earl of Aubrey to move the proceedings to tomorrow's court session and put all other cases back. The disorder in this abrupt change and the demand for haste aroused suspicion in Philoughby's well-ordered soul. The terse request from Aubrey irked him, try as he might to regulate his temper.