Elisabeth Fairchild (25 page)

“Trouble with your dairymaid?” Thistlewood’s lip curled suggestively. “The one you say no longer offers you the milk of human kindness?”

The others laughed.

Adams winked his good eye. “Left with the cow’s itch is my guess. Needs to squeeze a new teat.” He grinned as he suggestively shoved a wick into a finished tube.

Tidd, another out-of-work cobbler, pulled glowing iron from the fire, soldering a final flap of tin over the wick-tailed top. He passed the tin to Cooper, out-of-work sailor, who wrapped it in shredded hemp before painting it with warm pitch.

Brunt laughed as he poked nails into pitch and hemp on another of the bombs. “Still wants to nail her, I'll warrant,”

“I wouldn’t mind nailing something myself,” Tidd said, very serious. “It’s been too long since I could afford a ride in Moll Pratley’s gig.”

Cooper pat the final wrap of string onto another of the tarry balls and handed a finished bomb to Thistlewood with a flourish. “Bang pudding, your lordship?”

 Thistlewood laughed, but he was not one to be strayed from his course. “The milkmaid, Edwards, will she bring us what we need? And I do not mean dairy products.”

Roger had no intention whatsoever of allowing Dulcie anywhere near this dangerous, randy lot. “I do not think she is to be depended upon, sir,” he said. “We did not part on the best of terms.”

“Make up with the lass,” Thistlewood ordered, voice flat.

January 31, 1820

As a favor to Quinn, and because she knew her father meant to spend the morning observing the Proclamation of George IV at Carlton House, Dulcie agreed to make a delivery to the address in Cato Street.

A cold day. Like the emptiness within her. Icy, windy, hollow. Frigid as the King. He had died the 29th. Blustery as the wind, the day’s business. The Prince, who had long waited to be crowned, was to be proclaimed king, guardsmen marching, the Garter King of Arms publicly announcing the transfer of power.

All over London, one could hear the crack and pop of celebratory firecrackers. The loud reports, the mobs of black-ribboned, gloved and cockaded mourners all moving in the direction of the palace, made Dulcie and her pony nervous. On more than one occasion he shied and cavorted.

Too raw the wind for pelisse or shawl to remain adequate protection against the elements, Quinn had procured for her a thick, wool cloak, cherry red. She wore it gladly, not at all the color of mourning--lined in tattered rabbit fur, the hood and hem badly stained, but warm enough in the cutting cold, and pretty. Quinn knew she had developed a taste for bright color. He indulged it whenever practical. Her wool muffler was suitably black, the mittens gray, the hat on her head black, as were her boots.

“It does not do to wear too much color, you know,” Quinn winked when he tied black armbands to the vivid sleeves. He meant to keep her from brazenness. A fatherly gesture, which made her feel doubly guilty that she did this day’s work behind her father’s back. Was it not unconscionably brazen in her to go to Ramsay after his rejection of her? Against her father’s wishes?

“You must not fall in love with me,” Roger had warned. The words whipped through her memory like the wind, and like the lonely clop of the pony’s hooves on fog-bound cobblestone--her answer. “I am already fallen.” Fallen indeed.

The pony slid occasionally on patches of ice. Her resolve slipped as well. Why--after so much silence, absence, rejection, abandonment--why did she go to him? Why could she not extinguish the flame of her feeling for him?

Church bells rang, focusing all thoughts on the royals, all but hers, for she knew the purpose of the white crystalline powder she carried. They were making bombs. Quinn had told her, and Roger Ramsay helped them.

“Why?” she had asked, her every sense offended.

“I cannot claim to understand the workings of my master’s mind,” Quinn had equivocated.

Nor could she, she thought.

Twice she turned the pony in its tracks, meant to ride away; twice she reined the pony around and gigged him on. The package grew heavier with every jouncing step. In the distance she could still hear bells, announcing resonantly the throning of a new king in mourning over the death of the old.

What an unenviable position royal heirs occupied, longing for a crown, yet loathing the very thought of such longing, for it meant wishing the death of family. She understood the depths of such longing, the pinch, too, of self-loathing.

Longing carried her through the forbidding neighborhood, to the stable, a cold emotion, empty--no anger to warm her, to chase away her fears. She shivered, nose tucked into the muffler as much to warm it as to avoid the mean smell of Cato Street as she approached a ruined cow bier.

This was the place.

Straw whipped about the unpainted doorway, smears of old dung darkened the cobbles. A dog, coat matted with filth, eyed her approach, hackles raised. With a low growl, he went back to rooting about in the gutter. She lifted her gaze to rag-stuffed, flyblown windows. What madness this, involving herself in insanity.

She pulled the pony to a halt outside the stable door, peered in at the cobbled floor, the smutted walls, the wooden ladder, leading not to a throne, but to the lair of those who would topple it.

The man startled her, drifting like a shadow from the hay-scented shadows, a bucket of oats clasped in one hand. He stood in the doorway, a man strangely lightless but for his eyes.

“’Ooo are you noo, me beauty?”

She recognized him from the gunsmith’s where the clerk had been killed. He had carried in his hands, that night, a keg of gunpowder, a cask of destruction.

“I’ve coom with a parcel for Edwards,” she said sharply, bonnet brim and muffler a shield for her face.

“Have ya’ noo?” A spark of humor lit him briefly. “Is there nothing more you mean to give da boy?” He caught hold of the pony’s cheek strap. Her mount would have jerked away had he any choice in the matter, but he was a trapped as she. The man offered his hand for dismounting.

“Don’ ya’ mean ta give the boy a tumble, milky maid?”

He smelled of pitch. From his palm, as he helped her down sprang ugly visions. A fine house in a row of fine houses. The opening of the door, a mob-capped maid, roughly pushed aside. A bright flash of light and sound. And last, leaving her weak-kneed and light-headed, her fingers slack in his, she saw this man’s head, dangling lifeless, by it’s glossy dark curls, from a white man’s hand.

Flinching from his touch, she fastened the pony’s reins to a hitching ring, gripping the metal to steady herself, saying boldly, for she must not sound as dizzy as she felt,  “I’ll thank you to keep such personal questions to yourself.”

“Don’ ya’ sound the grand lady, then?” He laughed, plucked the packet from her grasp and started up the stairs. “Off with ya’, strumpet, if ya’ve no more business here. I shall see your ginger-haired lad gets this.”

She frowned as his ill-clad feet pounded out of sight up sturdy ladder. Was that it? The delivery done, and she on her way again, without so much as a glimpse of Roger?

How anticlimactic, a disappointment of far grander proportion than the situation merited. And not a word to carry back to Quinn as to Roger’s health and welfare.

She might have shouted after him to send Edwards down, might have insisted he take her to see him. She hadn’t the courage. She turned her back on the ladder. The adventure might have ended there, had it not been for the gentleman in the blue vest.

She had no idea where he had come from, nor how long he stood leaning against one of the stalls. Unnaturally still, his stance, unnerving the intent focus of his attention. On her. A straw dangled disarmingly from his mouth.

She was not disarmed. About his head hovered an unholy yellow glow.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Cato Street

He wore heavy black boots, copper tipped--a high-collared, black wool overcoat, beneath it blue--colors to accentuate the dark, lightless eyes that studied her, dark and empty. His hair was a thinning thatch of darkness. A cloud of sulfurous yellow tinged head and shoulders--a cloud so disturbing her first reaction was to back away. Fear struck her in meeting his gaze. She knew this man had incited riot at Spa Field. Thistlewood.

Briskly, she untethered her pony. The hard-mouthed pie went walleyed and contrary.

“May I be of assistance?”

His presence, his tone, an oiled gentility, too close behind her, further agitated. The pony jerked the reins from her hand. Head high, it shied deep into the stable run.

“Bethany, is it not?” Thistlewood asked. His careful enunciation raised the hair at the nape of her neck. “How do your wounds, my dear? Are you all better?”

His hand settled on her shoulder as he spoke, as if he meant to examine her back himself. In his touch she saw again a severed head dangling.

“I am fine.” She forced the words to sound calm as she turned, slipping his touch, escaping the nightmare vision.

“You do not perhaps recall, we carried you to hospital in my wagon the night of Spa Field’s?” His voice carried the faintest of French accents, cultured and urbane. He did not seem the sort of man to overthrow governments.

An image of Puysegur loomed in her mind. He had put her in a somnambulistic trance by way of his voice and the light of a candle. Mesmerizing, he had called the tone he used, the word, the technique, borrowed from his teacher, Franz Anton Mesmer.

Thistlewood’s mesmerizing voice interrupted the memory. “Do not tell me our Georgie boy has reshaped the truth in claiming the role of hero entirely his own?”

She smiled faintly, emboldened by thought of Roger, and moved deeper into the stable, after the piebald, who had calmed enough to lower his head to mouth straw from the far end of the run. “He mentioned someone with a wagon. Was it you, sir?”

“Indeed. Can it be so long ago?” He insinuated a shabby bow and stood away from the prop of the stall to follow her. “I wonder . . . ”

He let the words hang, so that she must wonder too.

“Would you return the favor?”

He set traps with sparse words. She frowned, shrugged, deftly caught up the uncooperative pony’s reins, and turned to find their exit blocked. Thistlewood stood in the middle of the way out, the uneven glow of him unsettling.

“That would depend upon the favor, sir.”

“A simple favor really, of someone with . . .” he paused again, the swim of silence adding additional importance to his words, “so many favors to bestow.”

She said nothing, took firmer hold of the pony’s reins and walked toward him, expecting him to step back.

“It involves the loan of a your milk wagon. We have certain deliveries to make, you see, door to door.”

“Deliveries?” The word caused his light to shift rust red.

 “Gifts.” He chuckled. “For a few friends. Bag pudding. Blood sausage, a bottle or two of spirit.”

It seemed he laughed at her. She did not like look or sound of him. “Your own wagon will not do?”

“Ah,” he tisk-tisked, his lightless gaze direct, his stance four square, the red about him fading to a simmer. “There’s the pity, you see. I lost the wagon since last we met--horses too. Creditors absconded with my every possession. I was detained, you see, unfairly blamed for inciting riot at Spa Field. As if it were not every man for himself that night.”

She used the pony to move him, leading the animal past. He stepped out of the way as she had hoped. The pony, nostrils flared, the whites of his eyes showing, adopted the stiff-legged stance of an animal ready to flee, personifying her hidden feelings.

In the doorway to the street, the biting wind offering good excuse for her shiver, she positioned the pony against the stall slats. Slowly, crooning endearments, she lifted the reins either side of his jumpy, sweated neck, willing the beast to be still long enough for her to step up into the sidesaddle.

“My dear, shall I mount you?” Thistlewood asked.

The pony sidled.

She did not look his way. “I am quite capable of mounting unassisted.”

 “He looks an unruly beast. But perhaps you like a vigorous ride?” Innuendo, fogged the air between them as much as his breath. He smelled, she thought, dangerous.

She attempted to gain the saddle. The pony snorted and backed.

“He is too much for you, my dear.”

Thistlewood crowded her into the pony’s uneasy flank, the weight of their bodies in turn crowding the pony.

“A firm hand is required when a creature would run.” His rough yank on the bridle stilled the pony, stilled her, too. His arm blocked her way. His breath smelled of rum. “You do not run from my request for favors, do you, puss?”

She saw flashes of what he had in mind for her in his body’s every unwanted brush against hers, in the dark, fathomless eyes. His coat, caught in the wind, whipped against her skirt. She knew he meant to use her in any way he could. She ducked chin into the muffler at her neck to avoid his lips, a mouse seeking cover from the hawk.

“The milk wagon is my uncle’s,” she muttered into wool. “He is unlikely to agree to my taking it out unattended.” She hoped to buy time with her lies.

“And yet, he lets you ride here, today? Does he value the wagon more than his own blood? Or can it be, he does not know?”

She hated his well-oiled suggestiveness, hated the assurance with which he touched her.

Images again, knee weakening images, a sword flashing, lashing bloody havoc. A house, the same she had seen before, windows exploding into the street. A cacophony of screams. Bloody cabbages.

Her head swam. Her knees buckled. She slumped into his chest. His voice, the heat of his breath at her ear, seemed distant.

“My dear.” His manner quieted, soothed, as if they were friends--intimate friends. One-handed, he loosened the woolen muffler from her throat, caught up her bonnet strings, which whipped free in the wind, and with a flick of his wrist, untied the bow beneath her chin. “Do you wear stays?” he asked gently. “Perhaps they are too tight?”

She gasped, tried to stand, to push him away. Wind chilled her throat.