Jo Beverley - [Malloren] (20 page)

She heard a distant cowbell, and the warning bark of a dog. Noisy crows swooped about their nests in the coppice, and somewhere nearby a skylark sang with startling purity.

She thought of the invisible village that must cluster around that church spire. People there were doubtless going about their ordinary lives, unaware of drama close at hand. A movement caught her alert eye, but it was only a rabbit hopping up onto the road ahead and scampering over.

Everything was tranquil, even the dying horses. The horses, however, could not have eaten yew by accident.

She slid around so she stood back to back with him, she looking ahead, he behind. The groom and coachman were still attending to the poor horses, but the remaining outrider sat still and watchful, pistols in hand.

Pressing against his back—Bey’s back—she regretted
days of doubt and restraint. What if they died here? What a waste it would be.

Then she heard it. Hooves.

Wheels.

From the way they’d come.

She was facing the wrong way and shifted to look, flexing her fingers around the pistol.

It could just be the servants.

“It is, isn’t it?” she whispered, relaxing a little as the coach appeared around the bend, coming at a normal brisk trot.

“It would appear so. Delayed, but not suffering our problem.” He kept his pistol in hand, however, but down, against his body. Tensing again, she put hers in the concealment of her wide skirts.

“Miller,” the marquess said to the outrider, “who comes?”

Heart pounding, dry mouthed, Diana watched the slowing vehicle. She couldn’t see who sat inside, and had no way of recognizing the two men on the coach. The outrider would.

“The second coach, milord.” Then he raised his pistol. “But—”

Two flames, then explosions of sound.

The outrider cried out, fell back, tumbled off—

Diana tumbled to the earth beneath the marquess’s hand as she heard something smash into the coach behind them. Another
crack
and a third pistol ball ricocheted off the ground in front of them spraying dirt so they both flinched.

She had her pistol pointing forward by then and cocked. She sighted without elegance, firing at the open window of the coach. Almost simultaneously, the marquess did the same.

Someone cried out.

A moment to take breath, to haul out the other pistol, to glance around. Their coachman and groom hiding behind horses. Outrider on the ground. Dead?

The marquess fired into the coach and another cry said someone had been hit. How many were there? And how many guns? He’d fired his two. She had one shot left.

She stared at the coach window, ready to kill.

Then a movement to the side swung her attention away.

The coach’s horses were panicked, and the coachman there was having to work full out to hold them in, to try to keep the coach in place. The groom, however, half hidden by his bulk, was carefully aiming a long musket at the marquess.

At Bey.

The coachman pretty well blocked all sight of the man with the musket. Elbows on the ground, Diana sighted anyway, making herself take a precious second to steady, to find that place that Carr always directed her to. She had only one shot between now and a terrible loss.

It was a moment of eerie silence except for the thrashing harness of the frantic horses. The assailants in the coach were either dead or wary and she couldn’t afford to think of them. She aimed for the mouth of that musket because it was the center of her target. Surely she’d have to hit some part of the gunman.

No more time. She squeezed the trigger, felt the kick—

The explosion deafened her. Her pistol had never made that much noise before. Then she heard screams.

She stared up at the writhing, bloody men on the coachman’s box, the coachman swaying sideways, head a mass of blood …

Then the driverless horses took off, coach racketing down the road, leaving a trail of gore in its wake.

Her ears still rang.

In the sudden, resettling silence, the marquess rolled onto his side, head propped on hand. “You are a most delightfully bloodthirsty wench,” he said. But then his expression changed, and he gathered her into his arms, there in the dirt of the road. “Ah, Diana, weep. It hurts to kill.”

She shuddered, but tears would not come. “I didn’t expect … I just wanted to stop him. I didn’t mean—”

He rocked her. “You must have put your ball down the muzzle. Then he pulled the trigger only a fraction after you.”

“It exploded.”

“Indeed.”

Though her ears had stopped ringing, Diana thought she’d hear that explosion for the rest of her life.

Were they dead by now, those two shattered men? Darkness gathered …

Oh no. She’d fainted last time she’d killed. Not again.

She pulled free, scrambled to her feet, and despite swimming head, started brushing at her ruined dress. “Clara. And your manservant. We must find them.”

“We can’t do that just yet.” He leaned in the coach and produced a flask of brandy and a small glass. He filled it and passed it to her. “Drink.”

The quick fire of the spirit made her shudder again, but seemed to clear her head. “I don’t regret,” she said fiercely.

“Nor do I.” He passed the brandy to his coachman with permission for him and the groom to drink, then he knelt by the fallen outrider.

She followed. The poor man was badly wounded in the chest, but not dead. “Do you have bandages in the coach?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. An oversight.” He was letting the grimacing man clutch his hand, and now he stroked the sweaty, livid brow. “I’ll take care of everything, Miller. Don’t worry. You did well. Everyone is safe and the villains have gone. Quite likely they are all dead …”

Diana went to her knees on the man’s other side, praying, but it would need a miracle. Miller must be in terrible pain, and blood was pooling under him. His eyes were glazing, but he seemed to take comfort from his master’s calm voice. Then, with a strangled, rattling cry, he went limp.

Diana covered her mouth with her hand. She’d never thought he’d live with a chest wound like that, but for a moment, under Bey’s calm, she’d hoped.

He rested his hand on the man’s face for a moment, almost like a caress, but then he rose and seemingly unmoved, wiped blood from his hands with his handkerchief.

She rose too, not knowing what to do or say.

In the end she decided to be practical, and gathered the outrider’s two fallen pistols. He’d fired one, but the other by
a miracle, hadn’t gone off when dropped. “I do hope they’re all dead,” she said bitterly.

“So do I. And painfully.” He took the spent pistol and the man’s powder and shot and set about reloading all three guns.

Diana stood there, absorbing the fact that the attack had taken only seconds, and that the whole incident, including the outrider’s death, had lasted only a minute or two. The plan had surely been expected to take even less time.

One shot for the outrider, one for the marquess, and then speed off. Miller’s quick action had changed things, or perhaps it had been her insistence on standing close that had caused a momentary hesitation. She hoped so.

But she was beginning to shake.

His arm came around her and pressed her against his chest.

“I’m not going to faint,” she insisted.

“Of course not.”

“Don’t humor me!”

“Of course not.”

“I fainted after I shot Edward Overton. I hated that.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“He screamed, too.”

“People generally do. The distressing thought about someone trying to shoot me is that I might end up writhing and screaming.”

She looked up. “Don’t joke about it!”

“I was not particularly joking.” His eyes were gentle however, and she suddenly realized what had happened. Things had changed again.

They were Bey and Diana now. Comrades in arms.

Much more dangerous.

But wildly wonderful.

He stepped away, breaking the connection. “Do you wish me to reload your pistols?”

“Of course not.”

Without protest, he continued to do the larger ones, and she took the balls, wadding, and powder flask from her pistol case. When she tried to pour the right amount of powder
down the barrel, however, her hands started to shake. Strive as she might, she could not make them behave.

“Damn it all to Hades,” she muttered and he turned.

He took pistols and powder from her. “Practice being the conventional lady, just for a little while. Sit in the carriage and swoon. I will endeavor to survive unguarded. In fact …”

He did something in the carriage. When he helped Diana up the steps, she found he’d created a bed, even producing a soft blanket from somewhere. A shelf stretched from the seats to the far wall, padded with the opposite seat cushions and back. She climbed onto it and stretched out. He placed the blanket over her, then leaned forward to kiss her temple.

“Peace be with you.”

Diana wanted to ask him to lie with her.

She wanted something more. Wanted it more intensely than ever.

“I know,” he said, brushing a finger over her lips. “It happens after violence.”

But then he left, and she heard him speaking to the two remaining servants. She absorbed the fact that she really would have tumbled with him here with the servants nearby, and thought modesty, dignity, and reputation of no concern at all.

She tried to keep her ears alert for more trouble, but she feared she’d done as much as she could in one day. Carr had told her she needed to learn how to use her skills under stress, and he was right. If another attack came, she might not be able to cope, and that was intolerable.

It was full dark by the time they arrived at the White Goose Inn in Bay Green. The first outrider had returned with two ostlers and four horses to pull the coach the mile to the inn. He hadn’t been totally shocked by the mayhem since they’d come across the other coach overturned, driverless horses tangled in the traces, and three corpses—two tumbled off the box and one inside.

“Had to shoot two of the horses, milord,” the man had reported
with a degree of stoicism which made Diana wonder how many such adventures Bey’s men enjoyed.

They’d gathered a small audience in the road by then anyway, since three men had come over from a nearby farmhouse to check out the explosion, and the York Fly had halted to help. They’d certainly provided unusual entertainment for the weary passengers.

“Shocking!”

“What is the world coming to?”

“Is that really the Marquess of Rothgar?”

“So they say. There’s certainly a crest on the carriage door …”

Diana stayed lying down, hoping she was invisible.

The Fly had no spare room and a timetable to keep, so it had rumbled off with promises to alert the authorities. She suspected Bey would rather have avoided that, but it was impossible.

The men from the farm had gone to find ropes to drag off the torpid horses when they finally died. The dead outrider—Thomas Miller—was wrapped in sheets and blankets and put into the coach beside her for the short journey. She didn’t mind. She’d asked and found out that he had a wife and young children, and had grown up on Bey’s estate, son of a tenant farmer there.

One of his own. She knew how that must hurt.

She wasn’t sure how Bey traveled the short distance, but it wasn’t with her.

The White Goose was too small and too close to Ware to be a major inn, but their bedraggled party received the best of care both because of rank and because of the furor of their story. The local magistrate—a Sir Eresby Motte—had already been summoned.

“Time for me to practice being a very conventional lady, I think,” she said to Bey in the low-ceilinged inn parlor.

“And you, of course, would not know how to fire a pistol. To have created such carnage single-handed can only enhance my reputation.”

Tempted to fall into wild laughter at that, she let the innkeeper’s flustered wife lead her to a small but comfortable
bedchamber and ply her with sweet tea. When Clara staggered in, however, disheveled but whole, Diana hugged her and surrendered to tears.

The story there was simple. No yew for the horses, but a frayed piece of harness that required a halt to fix. As the groom had worked on it, they’d been surrounded by four masked men and forced away from the coach behind some bushes. There, they’d been tied up, and the villains had made off with the coach to prosecute their murderous attack.

Four. She’d thought so, and yet there had only been three corpses. The fourth murderer was on the loose?

Diana shivered. It had been planned with such cold-blooded efficiency. No one could guard themselves day after day, everywhere they went. She longed to go to Bey now, to be with him, to guard him, but she knew that giving in to that would be another consuming fire. No matter what happened, soon they must part—he to his life, she to hers.

He would have to live or die without her.

She wasn’t sure she could bear it, but she must.

Once Clara was calm again, Diana sent her to find a fresh gown. The maid soon returned. “I’m sorry, milady, but all your boxes were in the second coach. No one seems to know where they are, or what condition they’re in.”

Diana looked down at her muddy gown, but couldn’t stir emotion over it. “Why wasn’t something put in the boot of the main coach?”

“Well, milady, apparently there’s a machine traveling in there, all bundled up in blankets and quilts.”

Diana laughed at that. Of course the automaton would travel in style. She opened the small valise she carried with her, but a change of garments hadn’t magically appeared inside. Some books, her writing case, creams and lotions with which to refresh herself, and her pistols. This might be the total of her possessions until she met up with the rest of her belongings in London.

Ah well, no need of vanity here, and she was far too weary to care. She and Clara ate the hearty soup sent up, then climbed into bed. Clara only had the one nightgown with her, so Diana made do with her shift.

Despite exhaustion, however, sleep would not come.

Soon Clara was snuffling softly beside her, but Diana lay awake, mind staggering through fear and around danger, and on to danger of another kind. That kiss. Then rushing forward again through fear and danger and bloody death, and all the changes it had brought.