A Noble Masquerade (11 page)

“His Grace wished me to inform you that his plans have changed for tomorrow. He will be riding before breakfast instead of after it.”

A loud snort sounded from a nearby stall and a man with shaggy red hair poked his head out long enough to throw Ryland a menacing glance. “Been changing his mind an awful lot lately. You must not be keeping his schedule as well as old Herbert did.”

Subdued laughs circled the stable. Ryland allowed his lip to curl as he encompassed them all in a calculated look of disgust. Perfect. He could now account for all the stablehands. “See that his horse is ready.”

He stalked off down the aisle. Not the most direct exit from the stables, but he'd made it a point to walk obscure paths wherever he went. It made people less curious when they saw him where he shouldn't be.

In this case, he was heading for one last look around the Russian's living quarters. The man had received a letter, and Ryland needed to know what was in it. If the letter could exonerate the stablehand, this whole ordeal would be almost over.

He found the missive crumpled in a corner of the small bedroom. After a quick look at the contents, Ryland felt comfortable crossing Jack, as he was calling himself, off the suspect list. The letter was from a friend of Jack's father and the tone was such that the friend expected Jack to be appalled by his father's treasonous activities. The man expected Jack to remain in hiding.

Replacing the wadded-up letter, Ryland made to leave the stable. He knew who his men were and how they were getting
information to and from the estate. The innkeeper wouldn't be happy to learn the gardener who was courting his daughter was only doing so in order to pick up and drop off packages at the inn—but the man would not be as angry as Griffith would be when he learned his butler was posting letters in his name, trying to gain access to state secrets.

The shift from the dim stables to the bright courtyard made him stumble blindly a bit as he exited the back side of the stable. He paused and blinked to adjust his eyes.

A sharp pain shot through his skull and his vision went black.

Miranda sat on a rock, thinking of all the ways her situation could be worse. She could be injured. It could be approaching evening. It could be raining. It could be a rainy evening.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“I didn't mean it!” Miranda glared at the patches of sky she could see through the bare branches overhead. Sunlight filtered through the sparse canopy, dappling the ground in yellow and orange, but weather could turn quickly in the English countryside.

The prospect of another soaking rain wouldn't be so bad if she weren't stuck on a rock in the woods without a horse. It was embarrassing. Whatever had spooked her normally steadfast mount had done a stellar job of it.

She had not done a stellar job of keeping her seat.

There wasn't even a low-hanging branch to blame for her inelegant flop in the dirt. All she had was her inattention and wandering mind. Her thoughts had been filled with the pointless venture of comparing the Duke of Marshington to the valet of the Duke of Riverton.

The turmoil of emotions had driven her to deliberately lose
her groom so she could be alone with her thoughts. Obviously that had been a foolish decision.

“Now what?” She scooped up a stick and poked at the dirt.

She could walk. But the trail meandered, making it wonderful for riding, but incredibly long for walking. Navigating through the woods could get her lost. Parts of it were rather dense and her sense of direction had never been the best. The stick caught on her hem. The cumbersome riding skirt was not intended for walking miles comfortably either.

Another rumble reached her ears, this one closer and longer than the thunder earlier. A smile split Miranda's face.

It was a wagon traveling the old wagon road! She had no idea she was so close. It wasn't much of a road, more like two ruts through a long, rocky clearing, but it cut a fairly direct path back to the house. Miranda began picking her way across the forest floor. It wouldn't do to be found out in the woods without an escort, and she didn't know what kind of person she might encounter, so she couldn't flag the wagon down and ask for a ride, but she could hide in the trees until the wagon passed and then make her way home.

She crouched behind a dense, overgrown holly bush and peered through the leaves to see who was approaching. It looked like one of the undergardeners. Yes it was! A man named Smith. What was the undergardener doing driving a wagon through the woods?

Getting mad at a donkey, if his angry face and hissed words were anything to go by. Clearly the beast of burden was not pulling the wagon as fast as Smith preferred.

Another man who looked vaguely familiar crouched behind him in the bed of the wagon. He was watching the road in both directions and mumbling “Let's go! Let's go!”

“I'm goin' as fast as I can! This old nag won't go any faster.” Smith—which might not be his real name given the suspicious
circumstances—flicked the reins and bounced in his seat, as if trying to transfer his agitation to the donkey.

The danger emanating from the slow-moving wagon seeped into Miranda's veins, making her heart pound. She held her breath, afraid that even the smallest sound would draw their attention. They looked like dangerous, unhappy men. Were they stealing from the estate? There was some very valuable artwork in the gallery.

“This'll get him moving!” The unknown man snarled out the words as he jerked a long whip from the bed of the wagon. A sharp crack and the donkey squealed and shuffled up into a trot. A second whiz of the whip sent the donkey scurrying toward her, the wagon bouncing along behind.

A foot or two beyond Miranda's hiding place, a small washout crossed the rutted road. Worn away from years of rain, it would have been nothing but an annoyance to a cart moving along at a steady sedate pace. For a frightened donkey trying to outrun its burden it was a bit more of an issue. The donkey did an awkward leap over the four-inch-deep ravine, and the wagon shuddered as its wheels took turns dipping into the washed-out valley.

The wild clatter of the wagon echoed through the lane, disguising the slight rustle of leaves as Miranda pushed her way into the bush, the sharp edges of the leaves biting through her sleeve. She ignored the sting and the sweat riding down her spine.

As the third wheel bounced out of the hole, something large shifted in the bed of the wagon, sliding toward the back edge. She focused all her energy on keeping herself as still as possible as the mystery man scrambled after the load to keep it from falling out the back. A man's head lolled over the end of the cart.

Miranda's stomach churned. Had they killed someone? Kidnapped Griffith? If the men were desperate enough to attack a duke, they were dangerous indeed.

She caught only a glimpse between the bush's branches before
the man was hauled back into the wagon bed, but that face had drifted through her mind so often in the past few weeks that she would recognize it anywhere.

Marlow.

She bit her lip to keep from crying out. A sharp, bitter taste—blood—cut through the haze and brought her focus back.

Soil caked between her fisted fingers as she held to the ground, afraid to move from her hiding spot too early.

The wagon was soon out of sight, but she remained motionless until the rumble began to fade.

Fistfuls of dirt flew everywhere as she scrambled from beneath the bush. Holly leaves pulled at her skirt. The fabric snagged as she shoved her way through to the rutted lane.

What should she do? What could she do? Help. She needed help. Griffith would know what to do. Two steps down the road in the direction of the house, she glanced into the deep ruts, spun around, and looked down in the direction the wagon had traveled. Nothing. Despite the softness of the ground from the previous night's rain, the wagon left no distinct marks. Too many rocks lined the bottom of the ruts.

Even the sound of the wagon was almost gone now.

If she went back to the house they'd never find the wagon. The road split on the other side of the curve. Beyond that, there were countless places they could go and hide.

With a low groan she ripped her jaunty blue riding hat off her head and lodged it in the holly bush. When her groom couldn't find her, he would assume she'd returned home. The chance of them looking for her along the road and finding her hat was slim, but she'd seen God work with slim chances before.

Her hands trembled. A shaky breath rasped her throat.

Was she really going to do this? Chase down a couple of assailants without so much as a riding crop? The picture of Marlow's head lolling over the side swam through her memory.

She wrapped her hands in her riding skirt, dirt smudging the light-blue wool, and set off, muttering a prayer with every step. It looked as if God had a very busy day ahead of Him.

Her feet hurt. She'd given up trying to figure out how far she'd walked in pursuit of the wagon and its beleaguered but blessedly loud donkey.

She was cold. Evening had fallen, bringing a deeper chill to the air.

Being soaked to the skin didn't help either. The rain she'd predicted earlier had arrived with gusto, making her miserable and obscuring her vision. It had tapered off to a mere drizzle now, the scattered clouds letting through the occasional sprinkling of moonlight.

“Positive things, Miranda. Focus on the positive things.”

One, her skirt was less cumbersome, as she had ripped several strips of extra fabric off to mark her path. Two, she wasn't walking anymore since the wagon had pulled off the road into a clearing nearly an hour ago.

Three . . . There really wasn't a three.

“I'm wet, I'm cold, and I am incredibly stupid. What was I thinking?”

She had to save Marlow. That was what she'd been thinking. But how to do it? After an hour of considering the situation, she still knew nothing.

Well, she knew that Marlow was alive, or was fairly certain he was. There wasn't much reason to tie up dead people, and the large man was currently slumped against a wagon wheel, arms pinned awkwardly behind him in a way that made her assume he'd been tied to the vehicle.

Miranda was sitting on the ground, shielding herself behind
a cluster of prickly shrubs. She had plopped down in the middle of a mud puddle, but by this point a little more rain and dirt wasn't going to hurt. Her vantage point was limited, seeing as how she was looking through a break in the branches that measured approximately three inches square, but she could see the two captors stumbling around the area.

The clearing had once held a stone cottage, but at least half the walls had been carted away and more than half the roof was gone. It wasn't much to look at, but the one corner of remaining roof seemed to be enough of a shelter to satisfy the two men as they settled in for the night.

When one of them tried to build a fire, Miranda gave in to the desire to roll her eyes. Surely captors this clueless could be outwitted, couldn't they?

There was no way to talk around a gun, though. And there was a clear glint of metal in Smith's hand as he gestured around the ruins.

After a brief shoving match, the two men settled in, with Smith sitting up to watch the wagon and the other man stretching out on the ground, presumably to get some sleep. Within moments, Smith's head was falling forward to rest on his chest. Guard duty wasn't enough to keep him awake.

Miranda counted slowly to two hundred, starting over every time she saw one of them move or heard a noise not naturally occurring in the woods. Not that she knew much about forest noises.

When she finally reached two hundred, she decided to keep going until she hit three hundred, just for good measure.

Then she rose from her hiding place, wincing at the cramps in her legs as they took her weight for the first time in hours. She took a step, freezing in place at the snap of a twig underfoot.

“Lord, I don't know what's going on here, but I know Marlow doesn't deserve it. Please, God, help us both get out of here alive.”

The prayer didn't ease her fears the way she'd hoped. Simply admitting the worst possible outcome made her throat thicken with her pounding heart. She didn't want to die.

She didn't want to be a coward either.

Marlow must have stumbled into something he shouldn't have, an innocent bystander caught in whatever nefarious activity the other two men had been up to. Then she had stumbled onto their abduction. If Marlow had been courageous enough to try to stop whatever they were doing, she could be daring enough to save him.

A fortifying breath filled her lungs, and she continued on, placing her feet with a bit more care and precision. It was slow going, as she had to keep untangling her ragged skirt hem from the sticks and branches covering the ground, but she made it to the dilapidated stone half-wall before her courage failed her again.

She couldn't see Marlow anymore, but he'd been eerily still the entire time she'd watched him. How bad were his injuries? Would they be able to walk away? Rescuing him was going to be hard enough. Liberating the donkey and wagon would be nearly impossible.

Endless possibilities swirled through her head, clouding her thoughts with fear. Deep breaths and deeper prayers cleared the way for rational thought. If she didn't come up with a plan, she could end up tied right alongside the valet. Until she knew what she was dealing with, she couldn't come up with a plan.

Miranda sank to her knees and started to crawl. Marlow and the wagon were parked beside the lowest part of the wall, the donkey tied to a nearby tree. The poor beast hadn't even been released from his harness.

As the wall got shorter, Miranda's heart beat faster. She was crawling on her belly by the time she reached the end of the wall, where only a single layer of rock remained. A few more
feet and she'd be able to slide under the back of the wagon. The shadows beneath should be dark enough to hide everything, including her blue riding habit. If she could untie Marlow from a position underneath the wagon, they would have the element of surprise and be able to slip away.

Hopefully.

The short stretch of ground between the end of the wall and the wagon seemed to grow the longer she looked at it. The wagon might provide decent protection but she would be fully exposed until she got there.

She peeked around the corner at Marlow's slumped body once more.

Sealing the motivating picture in her mind, she closed her eyes and rolled.