Time After Time (51 page)

“Again, it is not a good time. Perhaps I will stop round the shipping offices this afternoon to speak with him, and he can deliver his message himself.” She began to close the door on them, and even though she felt justified in heeding her instincts, she couldn’t completely squelch the sense of guilt she felt over her horrific manners.

The man who spoke, the apparent leader, stuck his foot in the doorway, preventing its closure. “’fraid not,” the leader said, and Del gulped, unease bursting suddenly into full-fledged fear. He pushed the door open in a violent burst, sending her reeling backwards. “Mr. Camden wants it dealt with now.” The two men were in her foyer now, and the silent one shut the door behind them.

Del’s heart pounded and she felt dizzy. She expected the men to fly at her in a full-blown assault, but they stood where they were, just inside the door.

“What is it you want?” Del took several slow steps back, her mind racing. Were they really sent her by Camden’s father, or were they here to rob her? Or did they have more nefarious plots in mind? She tried to tamp down the abject panic; she would be no good to herself if she completely lost her head. “I-I have money, if that’s what you’re after.” She continued to back up until she was pressed up against the mahogany side table at the far end of her foyer.

“Ain’t why we’re ’ere,” Leader said.

“But the Mister didn’t say we
couldn’t
take an extra nicker or two,” the other said. Leader looked annoyed he had spoken.

“I’ll go get money,” Del said, trying to keep the men calm and appeased.

“Not going nowhere,” Leader said as he took a few steps toward her.

Del fumbled her hands along the table behind her, trying to keep her movements discreet, until she felt the smooth, cool hardness of a candlestick. It was large and heavy, and would do considerable damage to any skull it cracked against — at least enough to let Del make her escape, she hoped.

“Not going to ’urt you,” Leader said as he continued to move toward her, his actions doing little to assuage her fear. “Mr. Camden just wants to make a few things clear. ’e wants you to stay away from ’is son.”

Del’s blood was pounding in her ears, and she heard little of what the man was saying. Behind her, she curled her fingers around the candlestick, her sweating palms making the grip difficult.

“Says you got your whore claws into ’im, bewitched ’im, and it’s time for you to let ’im go.”

He was close to her now, so close she could smell the smoke and liquor and other remnants of a night of who-knows-what kind of debauchery. She knew she couldn’t hesitate. She would have to swing the candlestick hard and fast, and if she managed to hit the man squarely on the temple, she might have enough time to run up the stairs and lock herself in her room. She could only hope his brother wouldn’t be able to react in time to stop her.

Before she could think anymore about it, she tightened her grip on the candlestick and swung it as hard as she could at the man’s head. It connected soundly, hitting his skull with a dull thud while he cried out in surprise and pain. He staggered back, his hand at his temple, and Del could see blood seeping through his fingers. Del stood rooted for the briefest moment before she dropped the candlestick, picked up her skirts, and bolted for the stairs.

“You fuckin’ bloody bitch,” the man roared as he lunged for her. He caught one of her arms and swung her around. “Fuckin’ bitch,” he yelled again as he cocked his fist and punched her, snapping her head back. Pain rocked her skull and she saw bursts of light in her cloudy vision. She dropped to her knees, and then collapsed into a disoriented heap on the floor. She couldn’t hear or see properly, and she knew she was in danger of losing consciousness. She only dimly sensed the brothers standing over her, arguing.

“Bloody ’ell!”

“Did you kill ’er?”

“No! I don’t know!”

“What do we do now? Leave ’er? Jesus, blood’s everywhere.”

“Most of it’s mine.”

“An’ you always said I was the cock-up.”

“Will you shut up? I can’t think. Grab ’er.”

“What?”

“Grab ’er, we’ll take ’er to Mr. Camden. ’e’ll know what to do.”

Then there were hands on each of her limbs and Del was hoisted up, the movement causing her head to pound even more fiercely and her stomach to roil. She was vaguely aware of the men carrying her out of her townhouse and placing her in a carriage, and then the world went dark and she was aware of nothing more.

Chapter Nine

Del came to consciousness slowly and painfully. Her head was pounding and her mouth felt dry and raspy. She opened her eyes, trying to remember where she was and what had happened. Her vision adjusted to the dim light of the room and she scanned it for any clues to her location. Shelves lined the wall from floor to ceiling and they were crammed with books and ledgers. There were crates in the corner, though she couldn’t see what they contained. There were no windows and only one door. Del was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room and her wrists were bound to it by thick rope. She strained against the bindings, but the knots were tight and the rope dug into her skin. Wincing, she relaxed her arms.

She was afraid, very afraid, but she willfully slowed her breathing and tried to calm down. She needed to remember what happened, to figure out where she was and how she could escape. Panicking would do nothing but cloud her mind and worsen her circumstances. She must be calm and logical.

She tried to reconstruct the events leading up to her present predicament. She remembered Camden coming to her in the evening. She remembered him leaving at dawn. She was having difficulty remembering what happened after that. And then her hazy thoughts cleared and she remembered the two men standing at her doorstep, brutish and sinister and full of cryptic warnings. What had they said to her? What had they wanted? Del strained to remember, but it was hard to cut through all the panic — from then and now.

And then it came to her, what they had said. They had a message from Camden’s father; he wanted Del away from his son. The elder Camden had actually sent men to her to warn her away from his son, to threaten her, and they had knocked her unconscious and dragged her — here. But where was “here,” she wondered.

She looked around the dusty room again.

They were Camden’s men. She was in a room full of legers and crates.

She must be at the Camden shipping offices.

She felt slightly calmer now that she could remember what happened and could guess at her location. Still, though, she was trapped with no ready means of escape. She pulled at the ropes again but the heavy bindings only tore at her wrists, breaking skin and causing small droplets of blood to well at the injuries. She would not be able to break free.

Her mind raced with conflicting desires. She wanted to call out to someone, cry for help, but she knew in doing so she ran the risk of alerting the men who had brought her here — men who clearly meant her harm. She wanted to scream and cry in panic, but knew there was absolutely nothing to be gained by such histrionics.

Think, Del
, she commanded herself. She scanned the room again, this time slowly and methodically, looking for something — anything — that would help her. She spotted a small table in the corner to her right. It was littered with various things common to an office: papers, writing implements, books and ledgers. The table was too cluttered to clearly make out everything upon it, but it didn’t seem entirely improbable that there could be something there to help her, scissors or a letter opener or something. The room was small and the table was only a few feet from her — so tantalizingly close and yet so frustratingly difficult to get to when one was bound to a chair. Her feet were free, at least, and that would have to do.

She tried to move her weight onto her feet, thinking she could shuffle over to the table while still strapped to the chair. The seat of the chair was too deep, however, and she couldn’t quite manage it. She gripped the arms of the chair and tried to “hop” it over a few inches. At first she merely bounced impotently in place, but then it finally budged. The chair legs scraped against the wood floor as it moved. The sound seemed deafening to Del in her frightened state. She froze in place, breath held, and strained to pick up the sounds of anyone coming near. After several beats of her pounding heart, she decided no one had heard her and she carried on.

It was a difficult, torturously slow process. Each time she moved the chair, the ropes gouged at her wrists and soon they were bruised and bloody. She was desperately trying to keep quiet, but the chair creaked and scraped against the floor no matter how careful she was. All in all, it was a great effort for minimal gains, and she despaired at ever reaching her goal.

Del had managed to move the chair perhaps a foot closer to the table when she heard footsteps and voices outside the room, drawing nearer. She held still, not moving, not breathing, and prayed a silent entreaty that the men she heard would walk past her door without stopping.

Her heart sank when the footsteps stopped and the voices grew clearer and louder. There were at least two men standing just outside the room.

“What in the bloody hell could you have been thinking, bringing her here?” one of the men barked. Del heard in his voice the barely contained rage. “My instructions to you were clear: get her to leave town as quickly as possible and promise to never contact my son again. At no point did I tell you to lay hands upon her or bring her anywhere near me or my properties.”

His son. So it
was
Camden’s father who was behind her abduction, and she
was
being held in his shipping office. That simple knowledge had a strange calming effect on Del. The earlier uncertainty had been terrifying.

“I’m sorry, sir, I — ”

“I have no use for your inept apologies! It does nothing for me now! Thanks to you and your even more addle-pated savage of a brother, I have a beaten and kidnapped women on my premises.” Del could hear the fury building in the elder Mr. Camden’s voice and any relief she had felt just moments ago turned into shaking fear. “And because you told her I sent you, I’m implicated in all this. What am I to do with her?” The words were ominous, and Del knew that whatever answer he found for that question spelled doom for her.

“It was an accident, I didn’t know what to do — ”

The man — Del recognized the voice as the man who had struck her — was cut off in his explanation by a grunt and a thud, and Del guessed he was being slammed into a wall.

“Enough, Murphy,” Mr. Camden said, the words coming out in a furious growl. “I’ve had enough of your excuses, enough of your incompetence. Not another word from you.”

There was a moment of silence, a maddening time when Del couldn’t tell what the men were doing and what was coming next. Then the doorknob turned and Del knew she was about to come face to face with her tormentor.

She wasn’t sure exactly what she expected to walk through the door but it certainly wasn’t the slender, impeccably dressed man who entered the room. From what she knew of Mr. Camden, from what she’d heard from his son and from what he’d done to her, she had thought his sinister character would be more readily apparent. As though one could look in his face and see an unfeeling brutality stare back. She wondered if this was worse, if the man’s unimposing build and bland features lulled one into a false sense of security that made the inevitable attack that much harsher.

Her attacker — Murphy — trailed behind Mr. Camden. Murphy was the larger man, squarer, more brutish in body and countenance, more immediately intimidating, yet the way he walked behind Mr. Camden, looked at him, responded to him, was deferential to the point of being almost fearful. It unnerved Del yet more.

Neither man said anything to Del. Mr. Camden walked to her, stopping just inches from the chair where she was bound. She could see now the resemblance the man in front of her held to her beloved Camden. It disconcerted her to see the features of someone she loved beyond reason reflected in the face of someone who so clearly meant her harm.

Now that he stood directly in front of her, his true nature was more apparent. She was struck by how much two men who looked alike, who shared the same blood, could be so entirely different. The father was all irritated stiffness and carefully controlled ire where the son was kindness and light affability. Her Camden was also restrained, yes, but unnaturally and imperfectly, and his joyfulness was obvious enough when you knew where to look. She saw none of the son’s goodness in his father’s eyes, none of his tenderness or understanding or compassion. The elder Camden’s mien was cold and uncaring, and he seemed to possess all the human feeling of a wax figure. His were the uncomplicated emotions of a savage animal: anger, frustration, ruthlessness. It saddened Del to know that her Camden had once been a small and helpless child in the care of such a man.

Del tried to be defiant, to catch Mr. Camden’s penetrating gaze and make him look at her, but the longer she was in his presence, the more certain she was at how much vileness was hidden underneath his unassuming exterior. There was a quiet malevolence to him, his anger and short-leashed temper were almost palpable, and it made him seem so much larger and physically threatening than he appeared at first glance.

He studied Del, radiating frustration, and when he reached out to touch her face his grip was hard. Wordlessly, he tilted her head back, angling it beneath the light, and frowned at what he saw. From the pain throbbing in her temple and the stickiness of her hair, Del knew she was bruised and bloodied, and it obviously made Mr. Camden displeased. He checked her wrists, pulling at the ropes to see the wounds beneath, showing no reaction when Del gasped in pain.

“Bloody hell, Murphy,” Mr. Camden muttered, and Murphy shrank back against the wall. “What do you propose I do now?”

Behind him, Murphy shrugged helplessly.

Mr. Camden hadn’t spoken to Del directly or even met her eye since entering the room. It made her feel invisible.