The Lady of Bolton Hill (18 page)

“You d-don’t have to hurt either one of us,” Alex said through white lips. “Just let us out of here.”

“Why don’t the two of you shut your face and enjoy the ride. We’ve got a ways to go.”

Now Clara was certain that Mr. Manzetti was no longer driving the carriage. They were flying through a back alley completely devoid of protesters. When the gravel-voiced man noticed her looking out the window, he nodded to one of the other men, who pulled the muslin shades closed. Somehow being inside the darkened carriage with nothing to see but the three terrifying men was even worse. Clara’s eyes drifted closed, and she sent up a prayer.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
She drew a blank on the next line. For years, she had recited Psalm twenty-three when troubled, and now when she was most in need, the lines escaped her.
Just please keep the boy safe.
She was old enough to fend for herself, but this poor child was out of his element and completely petrified. She was, too, but somehow it was easier to endure terror as an adult than as a boy barely old enough to shave.

She shifted and swayed in the seat as the carriage swerved through the narrow city streets. She kept her arm around Alex’s slender shoulders, occasionally sending a reassuring squeeze his way.

At last the carriage slowed to a halt, and Clara felt her mouth go dry. She was about to find out if all they wanted was the carriage, or if they intended to murder her and poor Alex on the spot.

The door was pulled open from outside and the men began filing out. No rays of sunshine leaked though the open door, and when she stepped outside, she was amazed to see the horse and carriage were inside a huge, mostly vacant warehouse. Alex got out behind her, but she was too busy looking for Mr. Manzetti to focus on anything else. Another giant ox of a man was in the driver’s seat of the carriage, and there was no sign of Mr. Manzetti anywhere.

“Move out” came an order from behind her. Immediately the men assembled into a formation, and like a phalanx of Venetian soldiers, they boxed her in and forced her along with them as they strode deep into the warehouse. The echo of footsteps clattered throughout the cavernous space, and only a little weak light filtered through the dirty windows several stories above them.

At the far end of the warehouse a table and few chairs littered the corner. Crates were stacked up to enclose the space almost like a private room. Clara was shoved against a chair, which she took to be a request for her to sit. She did, not that she had any choice in the matter. Directly across from her the men were lined up as though in formation, arms folded across their beefy chests as they seemed to have no purpose other than to stare at her. There was no sign of Alex.

“Where is Mr. Manzetti?” she asked. “And Alex? What have you done with them?”

The gravel-voiced man stepped forward and grabbed a handful of her blouse, hauling her forward until she was nose to nose with his sweaty face. “I told you before to shut up, and if I have to remind you again, I’m slicing that tongue out of your head and sending it to Tremain and see if he’ll pay ransom for that much, at least. Have you got that through your thick skull?” With one arm he shook her like a rag doll, and Clara felt the coils of her hair coming loose and tumbling down the back of her head.

“Richards, knock it off.”

The cool voice came from the far side of the warehouse and her tormenter immediately dropped Clara back into her chair as a glimmer of fear shone in his eyes. “Sorry, Bane,” he mumbled. “It won’t happen again.”

Clara looked toward the voice, and her eyes widened in shock as Alex strolled forward, his beautiful face a portrait of serenity as he casually pulled out a chair opposite her. “Bring us something to drink; our guest looks thirsty. McGahee, get rid of the carriage and set the horse free.”

The men turned to do his bidding, but Clara could not tear her eyes off the boy. He seemed so young, and yet he calmly ordered men who were twice his size and age with the ease of a prince born into power. She couldn’t lose her nerve now.

“I’m not interested in something to drink. I’m interested in what you’ve done with my driver, Alex.”

“My name is Alex Banebridge, but call me Bane; everyone else does,” he said calmly. “And you really shouldn’t open your door to strangers, Clara.”

“You forced yourself into my carriage!”

“Let’s not split hairs. Do you care for coffee or tea? I’ve got both.”

She ignored the question. “So what is the plan? Are you hoping to ransom me back to someone? I’ll make it easy on you. My father will pay; Tremain will not.”

A smile lit Bane’s face, revealing an array of perfectly straight, gleaming white teeth. “Thank you for that piece of information, but we are planning on killing you, so there will be no need for any messy ransom notes. Paper trails are so bothersome.”

The breath froze in her throat and she stared in disbelief at the slip of a boy sitting before her. “Are you serious?” she finally managed to stammer.

“Afraid so. But don’t worry. I’m good at this and it won’t hurt. I can be very quick.” One of Bane’s thugs set down a pot of tea and two teacups. She watched in fascination as Bane leaned forward and poured out a carefully measured dose of tea and slid it across the table to her. He poured one for himself and took a sip. Surely he would not be drinking from the same pot if the tea were poisoned.

“It would be rude not to join me,” he said. He withdrew a watch from his pocket and noted the time while drawing another sip of tea.

“And you are such a stickler for manners, I see. Do you always take tea before bedtime? Am I to read you a story, as well?” She was surprised to see nervous glances being exchanged between the thugs who surrounded the table. Did they really fear this boy so much? She didn’t believe he was capable of killing her . . . if he wanted her dead, she would already be dead.

She took a sip of tea. It tasted fine, so she downed the entire cup. This kidnapping business had made her extraordinarily thirsty. “So who paid you to kidnap me? I’ve never seen you before, so someone must have put you up to this.”

“Obviously.”

“Who?”

He leaned back in his chair with feline grace, that creepy little smile back on his pretty face. “I don’t give information away for free; it is not good business.”

She was still thirsty and reached to pour another cup of tea, but Bane’s hand locked around her wrist like an iron band and slammed her arm to the table before she could touch the pot.

“No more tea,” he said.

“Stingy, are we? And you are about to come into such riches from your criminal enterprise today.”

One of Bane’s goons leaned forward. “I’ve seen Bane break a man’s leg for that kind of wise crack. You’d better watch it, lady.” Bane neither confirmed nor denied the comment; he just remained watching her so calmly it was impossible to read what was going on behind that oddly beautiful face.

But strangely, she didn’t really care. A rather delightful pressure settled on her shoulders and chest, making her feel expansive and brave. She glanced at the teapot and Bane’s hand still keeping her wrist locked to the table.

She had been drugged.

“So what was in the tea?” she asked calmly. It was easy to be calm, since nothing really mattered anyway. “Am I going to die from it?”

Instead of answering her, Bane opened his watch again. “Two minutes,” he reported, and one of his goons made a notation on a small notepad. “This batch is stronger than the last, so we ought to fetch at least ten percent more.”

“You drank it, too,” she said inanely.

Bane looked amused. “Of course I didn’t. The powder was in the bottom of your teacup before I filled it. Opium is a nasty habit. I don’t indulge.”

Bane kept talking, but she had quit listening. She was grateful the chair had a back because holding her head up was getting to be too much work. She slumped against the back of the chair and her head lolled to her shoulder. She kept her eyes open, though. The thugs were putting little gray cakes on the table, and Bane was grinding them into a powder. Was he some kind of drug runner? The way he took a tiny little instrument and held the powder to the light made him look like some kind of scientist. A dazzling, wicked scientist.

Her left side felt very heavy, and the floor was beginning to look more comfortable than this straight-backed chair.

“Better catch her,” she thought she heard someone say. But it was the last thing she heard before everything went dark.

D
aniel pounded on the front door of Clara’s house. He could have been polite and knocked like a civilized person, but there was very little civility left in him. Clara should have been at his office hours ago, but she hadn’t shown up. He might have understood if Clara had refused to meet with him as agreed, but Manzetti’s simultaneous disappearance was ominous. There had been some minor rioting downtown this afternoon, but that had dispersed almost as quickly as it had arisen. And still no sign of either Clara or Manzetti.

Daniel pounded on the door harder. If Clara was safely holed up in her house, Daniel didn’t know if he would embrace her or shake her until her teeth rattled. Finally the door was opened by Clyde. Or someone who mildly resembled the Clyde Endicott he had once known.

“Is Clara here?” Daniel asked bluntly.

Clyde took his time peeling an apple with a small hunting knife. “Who wants to know?”

It had been twelve years since they’d laid eyes on each other, but Daniel was certain that Clyde knew precisely whom he was speaking to. “It’s Daniel Tremain, Clyde. Clara was supposed to be at my office at two o’clock, and there was never any sign of her.”

Clyde merely shrugged. “Maybe she decided she had better things to do than listen to her supposed ‘best friend’ accuse her of inciting arson. Can’t say that I blame her.” Clyde propped a shoulder against the frame of the door and flicked the long curl of apple peel into the garden. He was about to slice a wedge from the apple when Daniel’s fist closed around his hand and wrenched the knife away.

“I sent my man to pick up Clara just after lunch, but they never showed. An hour ago my carriage was discovered abandoned near the canneries, with a broken window and shattered glass inside. Clara’s reticule was on the floor of the carriage.”

Clyde straightened to his full height, the nonchalance replaced by fierce concentration in those pale blue eyes. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need a fresh horse. I’m heading to Manzetti’s home next. I have already traced the route they would have taken to my office, and there was no sign of them. Manzetti’s is the next logical place to look.”

Clyde strode to the hallway closet and nearly wrenched the door from its hinges as he flung it wide. A moment later he had a leather satchel that he threw over his shoulder. “I’m coming with you.”

It took twenty minutes for the men to reach the three-story townhouses where Manzetti lived in one of the city’s middle-class neighborhoods. After receiving no answer to their pounding on the front door, Daniel made short work of the lock and pushed his way inside.

The interior of the townhouse was eerily silent as Daniel strode through the ground floor. Clyde vaulted up the stairs, calling for Clara. An open-faced newspaper was spread on the kitchen table and a canvas bag of laundry hung on the coatrack, awaiting the regular Tuesday pickup. Aside from that, everything was in perfect order. Manzetti took great pride in his home, keeping the hardwood floors polished with a regular fresh coat of wax and the interior immaculately tidy.

Clyde was coming down the stairs when Daniel pulled open a drawer from the front hall table. “His riding gloves are gone,” he said. Now he knew for certain that Manzetti had taken the carriage to pick up Clara, as the only time the man wore riding gloves was when he was handling a team of horses. Nothing short of an onslaught of violence would have knocked Manzetti from his mission. Manzetti wasn’t simply a bodyguard; he was a three-hundred-pound force of nature who could intimidate lesser mortals who dared to interfere with his duty. The thought that Clara could have been the victim of random violence when Manzetti was with her was unthinkable. Daniel shoved the thought away and tried to think of the only logical explanation for their disappearance.

“I think we need someone posted at both of our houses to await a ransom demand,” Daniel finally said.

Clyde’s eyes widened. “Our family is not the sort who would attract that kind of attention.”

“But I am,” Daniel said flatly. “There are enough people in my inner circle who could have guessed that Clara meant more to me than a casual friendship. They knew I would pay.” Although anyone close to Daniel would also know of his affection for his sisters, and Kate’s penchant for sporting events would have made her a much easier target. He scanned the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary, or something that could shed the tiniest light of insight into what had happened to Manzetti. But everything looked in its place. The stack of newspapers he rarely threw out, the tidy arrangement of furniture, the little lace doilies he had covering all his tabletops because he thought it looked like the way well-to-do people decorated their homes.

The roll of money on Manzetti’s desk was out of place. Manzetti had grown up in the same hollow-bellied poverty as Daniel, and would never have left money lying so casually about his home. In two strides Daniel had reached the desk and weighed the hefty roll in his palm.

“That’s a fat wad of bills,” Clyde said. “How much is there?” Daniel unrolled the stack of dollar bills and fanned them out to count them.

“Two hundred dollars.” This didn’t make sense. Daniel did not pay Manzetti in cash but arranged for a regular deposit to be paid into his bank account every two weeks. What would Manzetti need this much cash for? He knew the man had been hankering after a new horse, but that would cost less than a hundred dollars.

“What kind of purchase would require that much money in cash?” Clyde asked.

“Precisely what I was thinking.”

Clyde dragged a hand through his hair. “Could he have been blackmailed into something? Or bribed?”

The thought was repugnant. Daniel trusted Manzetti as he trusted that the sun would rise in the east tomorrow morning. He paid the man a small fortune for the unswerving loyalty he had shown to Daniel throughout the last decade. But Clara was missing, and Manzetti was the last person she had been with. Had her involvement in the war between him and Forsythe reached out to drag her down? His anger at her evaporated and it hurt to even draw a breath, knowing that Clara was in danger and even now might be struggling for her very life.

“Start looking through his desk,” he ordered quietly. Clyde began with the papers on the desk, while Daniel sat down and tugged open the drawers. He cursed under his breath when he saw so many of the documents were written in Italian, but he scanned them, looking for any words that might relate to Clara. He had moved on to the next drawer where there were primarily financial records, and thankfully, most of them were in English. If Manzetti was moving money in order to make a large purchase, perhaps there would be some indication of it here. Daniel was plowing through the second stack of documents when he realized that Clyde had not moved a muscle but was staring at a document lying on the top of the desk. His face had gone white.

Daniel stood to examine the note, written in an exact imitation of his handwriting, which was brief and damning.

She’s coming to my office this afternoon. I want her finished by nightfall. Half now, half after the job. Tremain.

When Clyde turned to face him, his eyes were murderous. “Her little articles bothered you that much?” he spat.

Daniel could not respond. He could not even
breathe
, seeing his deepest fears confirmed in writing before his eyes. Someone had kidnapped Clara, and he was being framed for the deed. His sweet, precious Clara had been assaulted and dragged to some godforsaken place. If she was still alive, she would be terrified and desperate for help while Daniel had been wasting time rifling through Manzetti’s house.

He closed his eyes and drew a steadying breath. Clara needed him, and Daniel would somehow find the rationality necessary to unravel this mystery and have Clara safely back in his arms. The first thing to do was calm her brother and get him working toward a common goal.

“Do you think I’d be so stupid as to sign my name to a note like that?” He closed the desk drawers and arranged the items on the desk exactly as they had been. “Leave everything here, untouched. Whoever planted these things probably didn’t expect them to be uncovered so quickly. Let’s get back to my office and start laying out a strategy for getting Clara back.”

She was thirsty.

Clara tried to move, but there must have been some sort of weight on her head, because even her eyelids seemed too heavy to lift. But nothing was worse than the thirst. It felt like her mouth and throat were filled with cotton, making her tongue thick. She wondered how long she’d been sleeping to provoke this aching thirst and why she couldn’t rouse herself to go to the kitchen for some water.

The floor was grainy beneath her cheek, and the sound of muffled voices came in the distance. Memories crashed down on Clara like the worst sort of nightmare. This nightmare was
real,
and she recognized the sawdust scent of the hideous warehouse she’d been brought to. She wondered if she had been restrained, as the horrific weight on her head felt unnaturally heavy, but then she remembered the drug. It had been in her tea that evil boy made her drink.

She cracked her eyelids and light streamed into them. The men were close and she could hear their voices as some sort of argument seemed to be taking place. It was probably best to keep feigning sleep, and she let her lids drift shut, leaving only a sliver open to see. If she could learn what their intentions were, perhaps she could bargain for her release.

“Please, Bane,” she heard a voice beg. It was the gravelly voice of the man called Richards, his voice vibrating with fear. “I know I messed up, but it was dark. I looked as long as I dared before people started coming out of the house and I had to get out of there. Besides, the gun can’t be traced back to us. No harm can come from it.”

“No harm? I run a clean operation, Richards, and I don’t like my associates leaving a gun at the scene of a crime.” The voice had the tranquil clarity of a crystal bell. Such a soothing tone and lovely to hear. It made the contrast with his words all the more terrible. “It could not have been all that dark if the house was on fire, now, could it? I can’t have that sort of carelessness among my crew; it sets a bad example. Back you go to the Professor,” Bane said.

Now the man looked terrified. “Please, Bane. Don’t send me back to the Professor,” Richards pleaded. “He’ll kill me; you know he will.”

Bane shrugged. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked at the other two men. “Get him out of here,” he ordered. Clara wondered who the Professor was, and what could be more terrible than being under the mercy of this pitiless boy.

A tear leaked from the corner of her eye, but she dared not lift a hand to wipe it away. She needed to survive this ordeal so she could return to Daniel and make amends. It was unthinkable that the last time she should lay eyes on Daniel this side of heaven would be as he raged at her in front of his burning house. That was
not
the way their friendship would end.

She forced the tension to fall from her face and tried to assume the slack look of a drugged sleep. The longer she could avoid interacting with this hideous boy, the better off she would be.