Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) (36 page)

Sabrina wanted to rant, to scream, to blame someone, but she knew she must calm herself or be useless to them. She also knew that the fault was hers.

She read the note again. It said she must go to Seven Dials, else Damon and Rafferty would be harmed. Worse, he promised, if she did not go alone, they would die. Sabrina sobbed at the very words. She did not need the undisclosed address or signature to know who had taken them or where in the Dials she must go to save them. She did not need his signature to know that the fiend meant every word.

He, Homer Lowick, had stolen her boys. Dear God; they must be so frightened.

Sabrina began to search her bedchamber for anything she could fit in her reticule that might serve as a weapon. Then she came to a dead stop, realization dawning. “You knew? Why did no one tell me? Who else knows?”

Alice
hesitated. “Everyone is out looking for them, your grace, even the runners, now.”

“Does his grace know, too? And kept it from me? Is he searching for them as well?”

Alice
bit her lip. “He is out looking for them, yes.”

Sabrina moved from panic to fury, then to relief, all in a flash. Perhaps it was best that Gideon was away, else he would try to prevent her from going, or try to go with her, or in her stead, and place the boys in mortal danger. “Will you care for Juliana, Alice, while I go out?”

“But where—”

“Do not ask.”

“Of course, your grace.”

“Thank you, Alice.” Sabrina picked up Juliana to kiss and snuggle her one last time, then she all but ran down the stairs. She dared not give voice to how long she might be gone, or that she might never return.

Sick over leaving, afraid she would never see her daughter or her husband again, Sabrina made her surreptitious way toward Oxford Street, avoiding the main roads whenever she could. On Oxford, she gave in to her anxiety and hailed a hack. People were too busy there going about their own business to notice her.

Inside the hack, head back, eyes closed, she could think of nothing but the danger to her boys. The man in whose hands their fate rested had already committed murder, of that she was certain. She had placed her children in danger by not doing something about Lowick sooner.

She would never forgive herself.

At St. Giles High Street, she had to argue with the hack driver, before he would set her down. But despite his dire warnings, Sabrina planned to lose herself among the motley mix of close-set buildings. She did not intend to be followed.

As the hack drove off, she stood unmoving, alone, and afraid, for perhaps the first time since she came to know Gideon. She had never consciously placed her trust in him. Yet, she did trust him, she came to realize, as she made her way through a nefarious aggregate of humanity, most in need of a wash.

On Monmouth, near Seven Dials, a grimy urchin, twelve at the most, in stovepipe hat, but no shoes, accosted her, demanding her purse or her virtue.

Sabrina laughed somewhat hysterically at the ultimatum. “I have neither,” she said, throwing him off his guard. “And Lowick will not want me to be late.”

As she expected, her assailant stepped back and looked about, as if the demon might jump from the shadows, and Sabrina continued on her way.

Perhaps she should have told Gideon about Lowick. Except that her husband might now be dead, if she had, for he would surely have tried to rid the world of such a one. At least this way, if something happened to her, Gideon could raise Juliana, the boys, too, if she could manage it, please God.

In Seven Dials, a dingy neighborhood of costermongers, bird-fanciers, and sellers of old clothes and shoes, a body could go missing just walking down the street. There, heart hammering against her ribs, bold on the outside, shaking on the inside, Sabrina approached a battered front door and stepped gingerly into the house.

Having fled this place some seven months before, Sabrina knew something of the extravagant layout. Her only hope for Damon and Rafferty was that they, too, remembered, so that when she distracted Lowick, in whatever way she could manage, the boys could get away.

She hoped she would have a chance to tell them how to get to Gideon from the crypt in the St. Giles in the Fields churchyard, where the old priest-tunnel exited.

She had only ever told one person about the underground passage, and that man was dead. She should have told Gideon about Lowick, if only so he would know about the tunnel. Except that she did not want Gideon following, Sabrina reminded herself.

If he came, her husband would die, just as her time here would no longer matter by the time he arrived, for it was entirely possible, that when she and Lowick were finished with each other, either Lowick would be dead, or she would.

* * *

Upstairs, Lowick rubbed his hands together, smiled, and studied his bait. Huddled together on a single attic cot, identical-twin boys, in nightshirts and bare feet, sniveled like two peas adrift in a leaky pod.

Taking them had been too easy to be fun, his men had complained. Lowick was sorry for their lack of sport, though they had had sport enough later, what with that bloody runner breaking down the front door. Served the idiots right, walking down the street with stolen rugs, bold as you please, for all the world to see.

Lowick was only sorry that he would now have to replace them, and he was furious over the cost of disposing of the bodies. He hoped no one came looking for the missing runner anytime soon.

Nevertheless, he had Whitcomb’s brats, no matter the nuisance. Besides, he would only keep them around long enough to get him the prize, then he would dispose of them.

Brian Whitcomb’s woman was all he cared about. That she was now St. Goddard’s would only make his mounting of her that much the sweeter.

First, he was going to work the money Whitcomb owed him out of her, every shilling, then he was going to make her pay double for the insult St. Goddard had paid him. It was just too bad he would not be able to keep her around for a bit of fun later, but she would be just too hot a property, if St. Goddard lived.

One of the boys took to sniveling again and Lowick snickered. “Be good and you can make me some brass,” he said. “If St. Goddard won’t pay to have you back—as he can well afford to do—you’ll make a fine pair of chimney sweeps. Might even get me a guinea for a matched set.” Lowick laughed. “Give me trouble and I’ll set you adrift in fact, and there’ll be no boat beneath you, leaky or otherwise.”

They remembered him, he thought. He could tell from the way their eyes had widened when he’d walked into the room and from the way they clutched each other now. He wondered what else they remembered.

“How did your slut of a mother get you out of here the last time?” he asked. “Tell me and I’ll let your baby sister go.”

Rafferty charged him for his groundless taunt, throwing his whole body into the action, but Lowick boxed the cheeky boy’s ears and sent him sprawling to the floor.

“Papa is going to find you,” Damon spat. “He will find you and
beat
you.”

Lowick laughed. “Too late,” he said. “Your Papa hasn’t got it in him, anymore.”

“Uncle Bryce does.”

“There’s a new name,” Lowick said. “And who is this fine Uncle of yours?”

“He is the Duke of Hawksworth,” Damon said. “And very powerful.”

“Hawksworth. Hawksworth? Didn’t he come to a bad end at Waterloo? Blimey, if you two keep depending on people from the netherworld, you’re going to find yourselves joining ‘em real soon.”

Lowick leaned in close. “In this life, best you remember who can help you and who cannot.” He pointed to himself. “Me,” Lowick said, “I am the only man who can help you now.” Then he screamed in rage and twisted around as if to grab something.

“Mama, Mama,” the boys shouted when they saw her.

Lowick choked her with an arm, and while her boys beat against him, he forced her hand, into the air, the hand with the bloody scissors she had stabbed into his shoulder. When he bent back her wrist, Sabrina screamed, in pain and frustration, and dropped them.

With a curse, Lowick kicked the sharp-edged cutters under a chest of drawers, then he picked her up and carried her, kicking, toward the staircase.

Remaining silent, so as not to terrify her boys any more than they already were, Sabrina managed to drop her reticule before Lowick carried her down the stairs.  

* * *

At Stanthorpe Place, Gideon called Sabrina’s name as he ran up the stairs and into her bedchamber, all the while praying that Veronica’s insane tale was false. When he failed to find Sabrina in either bedchamber, he went up to the nursery.

There, he found Alice walking Juliana, the babe red-faced and screaming. “Sabrina?” he asked, but his heartbeat had already trebled, for he knew that Sabrina would not leave her sick baby, unless she had a compelling reason to do so.

Gideon felt as if he had stepped off the edge of the world and dropped into hell. Veronica’s tale could very well be true.

Fighting a knot of emotion stronger than any he had ever encountered, scared enough to break under the weight of his fear, Gideon regarded the maid. “Where is your mistress?”

“I read her note,” Alice wailed, as if she expected him to cuff her for her impertinence.

“What?” Still breathing hard, Gideon searched the nursery with his gaze, for a clue, something, to lead him to the boys, while he also tried to make sense of the maid’s words above the din of his daughter’s fretting.

Alice
bounced Julie. “I sent Doggett to see if he could find her,” she said. “It is so bad a place, after all, and I hoped he could tell you, but he is not back. And the man in the cellar has been making ever so much noise. I am afraid he will break free and murder us all.”

Frustrated and anxious as Gideon was to set off and make everything right again, he needed to hear what Alice knew, so he took Juliana to quiet her. “Tell me now, Alice.”

When the maid’s discourse became disjointed, Gideon set her gently back on the simple path, until she began to make sense. Then he perceived that Veronica had been correct. Panic set in and he gave her the baby back.

When Alice pulled a note from her apron pocket and offered it, Gideon gaped at her for not presenting it sooner, but he said nothing and read it. Then he cursed as he crumpled it, tossed it to the floor, and was on his way out the door again.

Alice
placed the baby in a cradle. Then she bent down to pick up the crushed note, and as she regarded it, she remembered the man Waredraper was guarding. “Wait!” she called. “What about the man in the cellar?” But when she got to the top of the stairs, Gideon was long gone, and the very man she feared was on his way up.

“Where is Sabrina?” he shouted, his cane smacking each step as he climbed. “Where is your mistress?”

Alice
backed up a step.

“It is all right,” Waredraper said, coming up behind him. “I am convinced he is a friend.”

Alice
extended her trembling hand to reveal the crumpled note.

The man who had been locked in the cellar snatched it from her, and Alice screamed and ran back to the nursery to lock herself and the baby inside.

* * *

Gideon found Doggett hurrying down Oxford Street, halfway between Stanthorpe Place and one of the worst sections of London.

Gideon hauled the man up on his horse. “Did you find her?”

“Seven Dials. I know the house. I was just—”

They rode hell for leather toward Seven Dials.