Page 9 of The Maid of Fairbourne Hall
“Exactly so.” Preston’s eyes gleamed. “I hear your father bragged about this season’s yield—the highest in several years, I understand.
” The man lowered his sword tip to the chain around Nathaniel’s neck.
“The key?” With a flick of his wrist, he severed the chain, speared the key through its hole and tossed it into the air, catching it handily.
“I’ve got it, sir!” the man called Turtle shouted, lifting the two-foot-square padlocked chest in the air. His scar, from mouth to ear, looked like a gruesome leer.
“Take it down to the others. I shall join you directly.”
Here it comes, Nathaniel thought, his whole body tensing.
He has everything he wants from me. This is the end.
He found himself thinking of Helen. More alone than ever now.
And his father. Would he think him a failure?
And then he thought of Margaret Macy. Perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t married him.
He wouldn’t want to leave her such a young widow.
Preston lifted his sword once more—to bring down the death blow, Nathaniel knew. Instead the man rose with a jerk. “Away with us, me lads! Take our bounty and be gay. Let these good men live, to see another day!” He leapt from the burning deck and swung from a mooring line with impressive agility.
Nathaniel jumped up and dashed to the rail in time to see the man land in the dinghy with practiced ease. Preston smiled up at him and tipped his tricorn.
Nathaniel called down, “Running away? For all your skill and supposed renown, you are a coward, sir.”
Preston’s smile faded. “You risk my sword, saying that.”
“Name the time and place.”
An eerie gleam shone in the man’s eyes. “Your place. When you least expect it.”
The crew began rowing, and the dinghy pulled away, no doubt on course for a waiting ship.
Nate considered jumping in after him, but that would be suicide.
He debated rousing the tardy river police, but there was no time.
The stern of the ship was burning rapidly now.
His ship. The one he had convinced his father to add to their small fleet.
The one he had invested in with his own share of the profits.
He ran to where Hudson lay, insensible but alive, and bodily dragged the man away from the burning master’s cabin.
A flaming yard clubbed his arm, nearly felling him.
Ignoring the bone-deep pain, he lugged Hudson across the main deck and down the gangplank, hearing the alarm being raised at last. Too late.
The dinghy was already fading into a dim shape and disappearing behind a row of moored frigates.
Nathaniel ran up the gangplank once more, vaguely hearing Hudson’s groggy voice calling after him to stop but not heeding him.
He ran into what was left of the master’s cabin, grabbing what he could of value—monetary or sentimental.
A roar surrounded him. The deck below him buckled.
He grabbed one last thing. The only thing he had of hers.
He ran from the cabin as it caved in, a section of the wall crashing into his left side, searing his temple.
But he did not let it go.
That evening, Margaret sat thinking at Peg Kittelson’s open window, elbows on the sill, her back to the depressing room crammed with toppling piles of piecework, childish babbling and wailing, and meager food.
Margaret inhaled the outside air, fresher than the stale apartment, though carrying the smell of the nearby river.
She tried in vain to reach an itch through the wig and wished she’d thought to bring a wig scratcher.
The narrow lane below, littered with tumbling wads of newspaper and horse droppings, was relatively quiet compared to the clamor of the room behind her.
She wondered if she should try again to contact Emily. Perhaps wait a day or two and knock at the servants’ entrance in disguise. Or would the runner still be on guard, questioning everyone who came to call?
On the distant street corner, three young men sat on the stoop of an ale house.
A hulking black-haired man tossed pebbles into the gutter, while his thin comrade whittled and spit seed hulls into the street.
The third sat, limbs sprawled, head lolling against the wall behind him in an ale-induced doze.
“Come away from the window, girl,” Peg whispered. “You don’t want that lot to notice you. Blackguards they are.”
Margaret was about to comply when clattering hooves and wheels sounded below. From around the corner came a black coach pulled by two horses. As it passed the ale house, the enclosed carriage all but filled the narrow lane, its brass lamps blazing like beacons in the night.
Joan said from her shoulder, “Might as well light a sign asking to be robbed.”
Joan and Peg receded into the room, but Margaret remained at the window.
The equipage and horses were too fine for the neighborhood.
The man at the reins, a sturdy man in his midthirties, did not look the part of traditional coachman.
No top hat graced his head. No many-caped greatcoat fluttered in the wind.
The carriage stopped on the street below for no apparent reason, and the driver tied off the reins and clambered down none too nimbly. He opened the carriage door and leaned in. “Are you all right, sir?”
She heard no reply.
Margaret looked past the coach to the ale house on the corner.
As she’d feared, the ne’er-do-wells on the stoop had taken notice of the carriage as well.
The thin man stopped whittling. The black-haired hulk stilled, his gaze focused on the coach, nose high like a hound on the scent.
He slowly rose, gesturing to the second fellow to follow and kicking the foot of the dozing youth.
Dread prickled through Margaret’s stomach and along her limbs.
She glanced back down at the driver standing with his head and shoulders in the coach, completely unaware of the danger he had steered into.
“Hello?” she called in a terse whisper, trying to make herself heard.
Vaguely she heard Peg shush her in the background.
“Excuse me, you there!” she hissed, not daring to shout.
She did not want to draw the ruffians’ attention to poor Peg’s window.
Only belatedly did she realize she had not bothered to disguise her voice.
No matter, for the man had not heard her.
Margaret closed the window and stepped back, retreating into the relative safety of the room. Well, she told herself, she had tried.
Then in her mind’s eye she saw her beloved father calling “Whoa” to his old driving horse, pulling the gig to the side of the road to help a farmer with a broken wagon wheel, mucking his breeches and gloves without complaint.
Just diving in to help a fellow traveler in need. How often he had done so.
She turned to the door and yanked it open. “I shall return directly.” Without awaiting a reply, Margaret drummed down the stairs. She was halfway to street level before the second thought followed.... It had been in the midst of just such a good deed that her father had been killed.
Reaching the front door, she cracked it open. The driver still had his head and shoulders inside the carriage, and she could see that he was repositioning a pillow under a man’s bandaged head. A pillow was not going to help either of them if they did not get out of there in the next few seconds!
She peered around the edge of the door. The large man had paused down the street, bending to remove something from his boot.
A knife? His thin crony cinched up his baggy breeches as the third man yawned and sized up the unguarded coach.
Margaret wondered why the travelers had neither guard nor groom.
She inched open the tenement door a bit farther, glad that it acted as a shield between her and the approaching cutthroats.
Dredging up her best imitation of Nanny Booker, she called sharply, “You there. Best drive off... and sharp-like.”
The driver swiveled around to frown at her. “What do you want?”
Only then did she see that one of his hands was bandaged. She pointed beyond the open door. “Are ya blind? Get out of ’ere. Go.”
The man looked in the direction she’d pointed and the skin around his eyes tightened. His mouth followed suit.
“Hold on,” he urged the man inside. He slammed the coach door and leapt back up into the coachman’s seat far more adroitly than he’d climbed down.
He slapped the reins, yelled a command, and snapped the whip in the air.
The horses tossed their heads, whinnied and pulled, and the coach began to move away. Too slowly.
She braved one more glance around the door. The black-haired man was running up the lane. He shouted, “Let’s get ’em, lads!”
His cronies followed more cautiously.
In a flash she gauged the hulk’s gait against the coach’s slowly increasing speed. Not accelerating quickly enough. Looking up, she saw the driver glance back, his face grim.
She heard the pounding of the boots just beyond the door she held slightly ajar. At the last moment, she shoved the door wide open with all her strength.
Slam. Umph. The heavy wooden door reverberated violently and came slamming toward her. She leapt back. The door smacked her shoulder, barely missing her face. She heard a shout, a thud-slap , as knees and limbs hit the cobbles, followed by a sharp curse.
The door hit the jamb and bounced outward. Through the opening, a pair of black eyes locked on hers. She snagged the latch and pulled the door closed. Hands shaking, she slid the bar home.