The Solitary Envoy (15 page)

When the ship was lashed to the quayside, all the other passengers began pushing and shoving their way down the twin ramps. Erica felt a similar hunger to have solid earth beneath her feet once again. Yet at the same time, she could not stop the occasional quake from wracking her. There was so much unknown ahead of her, so much new, so much to be afraid of.

“Orright, missy?” One of the sailors gave her a gaptoothed grin and pressed a knuckle to his forelock. “Where’s your carriage, then?”

“What, no, that’s quite …” Erica stopped her protest because the sailor had already lashed her three valises and one trunk together and hefted them upon his broad back. He shouted a warning and began bulling his way forward. The wooden ramp bowed under his weight. Erica had but two choices: to follow him or to watch her luggage disappear in the maelstrom.

Even with her eyes held steadfastly upon the sailor, she had difficulty keeping track of him. Twice the hordes seemed to make the most casual of shifts, and suddenly she was being swept off in one way while her luggage headed in another. She struggled to keep to her feet. One hand remained fastened to her hat and the other gripped the hem of her dress. She cried for people to let her pass, but her voice was lost in the bedlam.

Erica Langston was not used to such brutal indifference. She shoved back at the crowd and forced her way through. By the time she caught up with her luggage, the sailor had almost arrived at the long rank of carriages flanking the warehouses.

“Which is your’n, missy?”

Erica almost had to shriek to be heard. “I seek a carriage that will take me to West London.”

“None to be found, miss.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s the trouble, see.”

“The what?”

The sailor’s explanation was shattered by a heightened pitch to the din. Two male voices shouted like guns being fired. Her entire body tensed in response. Erica could scarcely hear herself think. For an instant she could not say exactly what had caused such a surge of panic. Then she saw the glint of sunlight upon burnished metal and understood.

Soldiers. British redcoats.

Two ranks of mounted cavalry came first, ramming their way through the masses. People shouted and shrieked and struggled to find safety. Erica found herself so compressed by this wave that her feet actually left the ground. Even the sailor was shoved about. The cavalry horses were trained to stand fast in the face of artillery and shells and gunfire. They whinnied as high as a woman’s scream and pressed forward. Behind them stomped rank after rank of redcoats, their long-bore rifles tipped with bayonets. The forest of steel marched stolidly past, the muscled threat so vast it choked off the air from Erica’s lungs. She knew the noise about her went on unabated, but for the time it took for the soldiers to pass she heard nothing at all. She could not take her eyes off the brutal force on display. All the terror and agony she had known back on that horrible day in Washington returned.

Then they were past, and the crowd relinquished its crushing grip. Still Erica could not draw the world back into focus. What, oh what, was she doing here? The sailor was shouting at her, but she could not derive any sense from his words. Then a face came into view.

He wore the dark suit of a working gentleman. His topcoat was of fine material. He wore a frilled shirt, sparkling waistcoat, pressed dark trousers, and polished boots. He was merely one of many such men milling about the docks. Perhaps he was more handsome than most. He possessed the sharply defined features of one accustomed to harsher realms than mere parlor life. But that was not what caught her attention.

She had seen him before. Erica recognized him instantly.

Perhaps if his appearance had not been preceded by the military’s passage, she would have required more time.

He glanced her way. His clear green eyes clouded over. Clearly he felt he should know her.

Erica felt such revulsion the word was clawed from her throat. “You!”

Recognition dawned in his eyes. “The lady in Washington. Can it be?”

Erica wanted to turn and fling herself away. Where did not matter. What worse collection of portents could she have imagined for her arrival in England?

But the sailor interrupted her anguish. “I’m glad to see you, sir,” he shouted above the din. “Didn’t have a hope of finding a carriage for the lady.”

“A carriage? Here?” The man was still having difficulty adjusting to Erica’s appearance. “Today?”

“What I said exactly, sir.” The sailor was puffing from still holding the luggage aloft. “But I dursn’t leave the lady’s things just sitting here.”

“No, of course not.” The unspoken request was what the man seemed to have required. He turned and pointed behind them. “Third coach in line. There’s a good man.”

“Right you are, sir.”

Erica’s mouth was so filled with bile she could scarcely shape the words. “I would rather die.”

“If you stay here today, that is precisely what will happen,” her would-be rescuer shouted back. He took a step toward her but halted when she drew back. “The riots threaten to cut us off from the city proper.”

“What?”

“Riots!” the man repeated. “Bread and blood, they’re called, for that’s the crowd’s rallying cry.” When Erica continued to shy away from him, he cried impatiently, “Look about you! The place is a half step away from full alarm!”

It was true. She saw a man wave a sheaf of bank notes in the face of a carriage driver. Three women clutched one another and wailed pathetically. Drivers cracked long leather whips and shouted at horses and people alike. Panic was a palpable force in the air.

This time, when the man stepped forward, she did not retreat farther. He stood very close and spoke loudly to be heard. “You can spend the rest of your life hating me, miss, but only if you first survive this day!” He gripped her upper arm. “We must fly!”

Erica flinched. “Unhand me, sir!”

He did no such thing but instead pulled her roughly through the crowd to a carriage, where a driver took her valises and lashed them to the upper transom. “Pay your man!”

When she clearly did not understand, he shouted, “Your sailor. Give him a coin!”

Erica fumbled for her drawstring purse, handed the sailor a coin she did not see, and allowed herself to be bodily lifted and inserted through the open carriage door.

The man leaped up behind her, slapped the carriage’s side, and shouted, “Make haste, Daniel!”

“Right you are, Major!” The driver settled into his seat, raised the whip from its stand, and released the carriage brakes. “Heyah!”

The streets of London closed in about them. After weeks of frothy waves as the only interruption to endless sea and sky, the tightly compressed walls with their coverings of soot were grimly claustrophobic.

Erica and the officer sat facing forward. She looked at the other passengers. Across from them was a young woman, perhaps a year or so older than herself, and an older woman. Both looked gray from fear.

The officer was never still. He scouted the streets fore and aft, slipping over to glance out the windows on her side. Twice he trod on Erica’s toes, but she stifled her protests. The carriage rocked and jounced upon rough-hewn cobblestones, and the horses’ metal-shod feet clattered and echoed back from the walls to either side, as loud as military drums.

The older woman winced when the man’s boot came down upon her instep. “I do wish you would seat yourself, Gareth.”

“Forgive me, Aunt. But I must remain vigilant a while longer.” Even so, he lowered himself to perch upon the seat’s edge.

“The least you can do is introduce our traveling companion.”

“I beg your pardon. My aunt, Mrs. Clarissa Bellows, and my cousin Karity. This is a young woman from America, Miss Langston—”

Erica’s face registered her surprise. She had not expected that the man would know her name. But he was still speaking.

“—although I fear we have never been properly introduced.”

Now it was his aunt’s turn to look startled. “Then what—”

A faint rush of noise rose ahead of them. Gareth cried, “Down on the floor, all of you!”

The two women opposite Erica flung themselves down in a swirl of petticoats. Erica was not so speedy, however. As a result, she found herself staring out the window at pandemonium.

A crowd larger than the one portside filled a gigantic square. Two of the buildings at the square’s opposite end had been set ablaze. The throng was so noisy it was impossible to make out more than a single word, one shouted over and over:
Blood
.

As soon as the carriage raced into view, the crowd bayed. Fists and staves and farming implements and a few rusty swords were lifted into the air. The multitude swarmed toward them. The driver whipped the horses and shouted so loudly he could be heard over the baying throng. The horses, as frightened by the raging surge as Erica, sprang forward. They managed to outrun all but the fastest. One man scrambled onto the carriage’s nearside door. He wrapped his arm about the stanchion, then poked his head and thrust his other hand through the open window. The hand held a knife as long as Erica’s forearm. It was stained with something dark and glinted like a taste of death itself. The assailant opened his mouth to reveal a great maw of rotting teeth and roared at them. Erica might have screamed back. Someone in the carriage certainly did. She could not be certain it was she who had made the sound.

Gareth responded with cool precision. He ducked beneath the slicing blade and hammered one solid fist directly between the attacker’s eyes. The assailant blinked very slowly, and his knife clattered to the carriage floor. Then Gareth did something that amazed Erica as much as anything that had happened that strange and terrifying day. Just as the assailant’s arm began to unravel from the stanchion, Gareth reached out and gripped the man’s collar. “Steady on, chap.”

He pushed the man’s head and arm back through the window, then leaned so far out the window he seemed almost to topple from the racing carriage. He lowered himself, supporting his own and the unconscious attacker’s weight by propping his knees against both carriage seats. Then he dropped the man into the street.

He glanced fore and aft, then called, “All right topside?”

“Aye, sir,” the driver sang out. “One tried to climb aloft, but we saw him off right smart.”

“Excellent. All right, Auntie. You can rise up now.”

“Are you quite sure?”

He helped the two women rise from the floorboards. “We are almost to Parliament. The crowds don’t dare come this far.”

Erica looked at Gareth. Why had he gone to such lengths to keep their assailant from slipping beneath the carriage wheels? She couldn’t keep her astonishment to herself. “That man wanted to kill us!”

“Yes. He was also starving.” Gareth leaned forward for another scouting ahead and behind. “‘Blood and bread’ is their rallying cry for good reason, I’m afraid. The enclosure laws have forced thousands of stout British farmers off their land. The fortunate ones are doomed to working sunup to sundown in the new mills, spinning flax and cotton and wool. The others …” He waved out the window. “You see how desperate the others have become.”

Erica took a moment to slow her breathing and observed how the two women watched Gareth. More than family ties bound these people, of that she was certain. The aftertaste of terror and danger left her able to see the carriage’s interior with a crystal clarity. “Desperate,” she repeated.

It was the older woman who answered. “Were you to see your children starve before your very eyes, a rage such as what we have just witnessed might be forgiven.”

“Forgiven but never condoned,” Gareth said, rising for another check out the window. “Not violence. Never violence.”

Erica turned in amazement to the young man. “That is quite a remarkable comment to hear coming from a soldier,” she snapped.

Gareth said nothing but wore a look of very deep sorrow. The older woman was clearly affronted. “That seems a rather strange tone to take with a man who has just saved your life.”

“Is it indeed?”

Gareth continued to stare into her face, his look so poignant she felt it in her very marrow. It would be so easy to like this man. The sudden thought left her dizzy with a conflicting surge of repulsion and appeal.

He said very softly, “It’s all right, Aunt Clarissa.”

“Really, Gareth. You just saved the young lady’s life.”

“Twice,” her daughter added.

“Quite so. There at the harbor, had you not come to her aid, she might still be stranded.”

The lane they followed had opened into one of the grandest panoramas Erica had ever seen. The tall spires of Parliament rose into the cloud-flecked sky. She observed the fine parade of carriages and well-dressed people, the carefully tended green at the square’s center, the utter calm. The scene was a world away from the chaos they had just left behind but which remained so close that her heart still stuttered and her breath caught in her throat. She felt herself ensnared by the carriage and these watching eyes. “Let me out here, please.”

“I am quite happy to take you wherever—”

“I demand that you let me out!”

“Very well.” Gareth leaned out the window. “Pull up to the line of coaches, Daniel!”

“Right you are, sir.”

The two women watched as Erica opened the door and alighted before the carriage had come to a full halt. “I must say your behavior astonishes me, young lady,” said Mrs. Bellows.

“Aunt, please.” Gareth got down and said to the driver, “Give me a hand carrying the lady’s valises.”

But Mrs. Bellows would not be dissuaded. “I think the young lady owes you some expression of gratitude.”

“Do you?” asked Erica. “Tell me, madam. If a gentleman stood by and watched as one of his soldiers felled
your
father with a blow from his rifle, what do you feel would be the proper response?”

The woman’s mouth worked but no sound came out. It was the daughter, Karity, who responded, “No doubt he had good reason.”

“Oh, most certainly. My father was rushing across the street to fetch a pail of water. You see, these same soldiers had just set our family’s business on fire. So my father rushed for the water trough carrying buckets for weapons. One of this gentleman’s soldiers struck my father so hard he fell and never rose again.” Her eyes burned from the telling, such that she might as well have been fighting the flames anew. “I am unfamiliar with the British concept of proper etiquette. No doubt the gentleman’s response was most fitting under those circumstances.”