Chapter 4
He started after me. Panic surged through my veins—hot and instantaneous. I scrambled to my feet, searching frantically for anything to use as a weapon. I had nothing but my reticule. Nothing but grass and earth and trees.
The man was nearly to me, just steps away. His mouth twisted cruelly below the edge of the mask. The knife was still clutched in his hand, the edge glinting with blood.
I was going to die.
I threw up my hands, clenched tightly into fists—a pitiful defense. My heartbeat was a drum in my ears.
Then he flew forward, tumbling to the ground, limbs flying wildly. I barely dodged out of the way in time. Mr. Rawlings had tackled him from behind, and the two rolled across the pathway, fists flying.
I could only watch in horror as the stranger landed a solid blow across Mr. Rawlings’s jaw. He fell back on the ground, moaning and cursing, his jacket a patchwork of blood and mud. The assailant picked up his knife and stalked after Mr. Rawlings.
No. No!
Heat coursed through me. Anger. It sharpened and focused my mind. I searched my surroundings again, looking for something—anything—to stop the man.
My foot kicked something. A stout wooden stave topped with a brass crown. Mr. Rawlings’s Bow Street baton, dropped in the scuffle.
I snatched it up, grasping the heavy wooden handle. Then I darted after the attacker. He was nearly to Mr. Rawlings, who was trying to sit up, dazed by the blow. He did not see the stranger coming.
The man raised his knife.
Using both hands, I whipped the baton at the back of the assailant’s head with all my strength. It struck with a sickening thud. The man loosed a howl, dropping to the ground and clutching his head. He attempted to stand but fell again to his hands and knees, shaking his bloody head with a growl.
Then he looked up at me. His mask had come undone in the melee.
I stared at him, and he at me. He had a face I might have passed a hundred times on the street and never noticed.
Brown hair, dark eyes, thick brows, wide nose, and a stubbly chin.
Unremarkable and ordinary. But there was nothing ordinary in the way he looked at me with such dark hatred that I took a step back, my hands clutching tighter around the wooden baton.
“You,” he growled, his voice a broken, grasping thing. “You’re mine.”
He lurched to his feet, heading toward me. I fell back, gasping.
Then Mr. Rawlings was there, his uninjured arm stretched out in front of me. His balance was unsteady, movements erratic.
But it was enough. The stranger glowered at him, realizing the fight was lost, then snatched up his mask from the ground. With one last look of pure venom at both of us, he stumbled away into the dark.
Mr. Rawlings started after him. I dropped the baton to the ground and grasped his arm—the one not dripping with blood. “You mustn’t.”
He tried to shake me off, but it was a testament to how truly hurt he was that he was unsuccessful. “Let me go,” he insisted, though his words were formless, brogue lilting. Not sharp and precise like he normally spoke.
“Stop,” I ordered him. “You’re injured. You’ll only bleed to death, and what good will that do?”
He blinked at me, his eyes hazy. “I—” He shook his head once, and his gaze cleared a bit. “Miss Lacey. Are you hurt?”
The urgency in his voice tugged deep within me. This man hardly knew me, but what he had done tonight . . .
“No,” I said, throat aching. “I’m not hurt.”
He moved his arms to grasp me and hold me out for inspection. But then he winced and clutched his injured arm as if just realizing he himself was hurt.
“I’ll run to find help.” My voice was unfamiliar in my ears, wild and wobbly. I couldn’t seem to focus my thoughts. Bright spots of light danced in my vision.
“No, you certainly will not,” he snapped. “You will stay right here where I can see you.”
I heard footsteps and jerked my head, terror rising again inside me. But it was Jack running back to us from up the path. Ginny followed not far behind, one hand clasped to her belly, mouth agape.
“What happened?” Jack demanded as he skidded to a halt beside us, barely winded. “We heard shouts.”
“We were attacked.” Mr. Rawlings was all business, even covered in blood and unsteady on his feet. “A man with a knife. Came at me first, then went after Miss Lacey. We fought him off.”
We. I blinked. Yes, I’d fought as well.
Jack’s face was as serious as I’d ever seen it. “Where did he go?”
“That way.” I pointed in the direction the man had disappeared. Jack was gone again in an instant, jacket flapping behind him.
“Jack!” Ginny shouted after him, but he did not hear, or chose not to. She reached us in the next moment, grasping my arms. “Where are you hurt, Bea? Tell me!”
“I’m not,” I managed.
“The blood!” she cried as she inspected me.
“It’s not mine,” I said. “Mr. Rawlings’s arm is badly cut.”
I met Mr. Rawlings’s eyes, too dark against the pale of his face. He was not well, his breaths shallow and his shoulders bowed as he cradled his injured arm.
“We need to bandage it,” I said immediately. “Stop the bleeding.”
Ginny was not one to blanch at the sight of blood, thankfully, though my stomach was more riotous.
We helped Mr. Rawlings ease off his jacket, then Ginny fished a handkerchief from her reticule.
I folded it into a messy square, my movements hasty and imprecise, and pressed it to the wound with shaking hands.
The crimson blood against the white of his shirt made everything seem garish and unreal in the hazy lantern light.
“Here,” Mr. Rawlings ground out, reaching into his pocket with his other hand to retrieve his own handkerchief. “Tie the bandage on.”
Ginny took it and wrapped it around his arm while I held the other handkerchief in place.
We all turned as Jack appeared again down the path, anger and frustration written across his face.
He hadn’t caught the man. Without a word, I took the ends of the handkerchief from Ginny, and she hurried to meet him.
I tied off the ends, but I was far from a competent nurse. Mr. Rawlings needed a doctor, and soon. My breaths came too quickly. What had just happened? Had we truly almost died at the hands of an armed assailant?
“You saved my life.” Mr. Rawlings was watching me, his eyes burnished by the flame of the nearby lantern. He’d spoken with a sort of detached bewilderment, as if trying to come to terms with that fact.
“And you saved mine.” My voice cracked. “Now, let us say nothing more of it. We need to find a doctor, or my efforts will have been in vain.”
Suddenly, voices and footsteps surrounded us—other guests at the gardens, I assumed, who had heard the shouts and come to help or to gawk.
I noticed them with an odd vagueness. My vision dipped and swam, and I swayed to one side.
Mr. Rawlings grabbed my elbow. What a sight we must be, him holding me up, the both of us bloody and dirty.
“You’ve had a shock,” he said brusquely. “You ought to sit.”
“No, I’m—”
“Mrs. Travers,” he ordered, not listening to me. “See to Miss Lacey.”
Ginny nodded and returned to my side as Mr. Rawlings strode off to where Jack stood speaking to another man, something about closing all the entrances to the gardens.
I stood there, legs like jelly, my hands and skirts filthy. Everything felt so far away, so muted and dreamlike. Ginny was speaking beside me, holding my arm tightly, and I struggled to make out her words.
“—see you both back,” she said. “We’ll send for a doctor on the way.” She noticed I wasn’t listening. “Bea?”
“I need to wash my hands,” I said distantly, holding them up before me, splotched with blood and mud. “I . . . I don’t . . .”
She took my hands in hers, not caring how grimy mine were. “You’re safe now, Beatrice,” she said softly. “You’re safe. It’s over.”
But it wasn’t. The masked man had escaped, and the grasping, choking fear that had consumed me had yet to relinquish its hold. What if he came back?
I blinked away the strange fog that clouded my mind, the details of the night screaming back into focus. I could feel the biting chill in the autumn air. The dirt beneath my nails. My damp skirts clinging to my legs. Faint strains of the orchestra drifted on the breeze.
Then I spotted that golden gleam in the dirt again—the baton that had saved both our lives. I pulled my hands from Ginny’s and bent to pick it up. There was blood on the gilded crown. Our attacker’s blood.
“This is Mr. Rawlings’s,” I said. “I’ll keep it for him.” I held it gingerly as I slipped it into my reticule, shuddering at the thought of the blood staining the fabric inside. I would throw it out entirely, I already knew.
Ginny mistook my shudder for a chill. She took her shawl and wrapped it around my shoulders, then slipped one arm around me. She held me close, and I let her, her presence comforting.
But the black pit in my chest refused to dissipate. Never before had I felt truly unsafe. That I was in danger. That I might die. It was a feeling that tore one up and left one changed on the other side.
And I knew I was not the same person I had been.
Mr. Rawlings hissed as the doctor stabbed the needle yet again into his skin, stitching up the impressive gash on his upper arm.
The doctor had cut away Mr. Rawlings’s sleeve to reveal the wound, and though I’d known it was awful when I’d helped him at Vauxhall, seeing it now in the bright lamplight of the Traverses’ parlor made me feel ill.
I looked away, stomach churning, and focused on taking deep, full breaths as I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders.
Ginny had tried to convince me to go upstairs and change out of my soiled dress, but I’d refused.
I needed people around me, needed the heat of the fire and the hum of conversation in my ears.
Not to mention that I wasn’t entirely sure my unstable legs could conquer the staircase.