Chapter Twenty
The first thing that came back to Jonathan was a sensation of being jolted about most uncomfortably. The second thing that came back was sound: the rumbling of heavy carriage wheels and the noise of trotting hooves. And then the pain arrived. With a vengeance.
He groaned.
“Lie still,” cautioned a voice he thought he ought to recognize.
But of course, lying still wasn’t what he wanted to do at all. He tried turning his head towards the voice, but that only set off a ferocious hammering inside his skull and provoked another groan. What the hell had happened to him?
“Told you to lie still,” said the voice, somewhat reproving in tone.
Walter. The voice belonged to his friend. No wonder he recognized it.
But whatever was Walter doing in what, from all the noise, had to be a carriage? A carriage of some size, at that. Come to that, what was he doing in the carriage himself? And in what appeared to be a lying down position. What carriage could cater for someone to lie down in it? None he knew of.
“Best do as my brother says,” came another voice. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
Robert. Walter had his younger brother with him.
Why?
Jonathan lay still for a long minute, just breathing and trying to work out why every bit of him hurt.
Badly. Maybe he’d better try opening his eyes.
With a near superhuman effort, he managed to get his right eye open, but nothing would get his left to do the same.
It seemed to be unresponsive. And it hurt. A little alarming.
His surroundings came slowly into focus.
Even though he was undoubtedly inside a traveling carriage, he appeared to be lying on a bed of some kind.
Since when did carriages of any sort have beds?
And what had led to him being so incapacitated as to need one?
He couldn’t for the life of him remember.
In fact, if he strained, which hurt his head abominably, the last thing he could recall was walking into White’s and meeting Walter and Robert.
Which might be why Robert was here with them, of course.
He licked his lips. “Where are we?” It came out as a croak and he realized his mouth was dry and his tongue didn’t wish to obey his commands. There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Going to Luxborough,” Walter said, in the no nonsense, inarguable tones of Jonathan’s old nanny. Since when had his friend taken on the persona of Nanny Jarvis and become so bossy?
“What?” His voice now sounded a little stronger, as well as somewhat surprised.
“What he said,” Robert put in. “Don’t worry. We got the doctor. Or rather, the doctor got us. He said you could travel.” A distinct air of someone not quite telling the whole truth clung to Robert’s words. And what doctor? Nothing of that held any familiarity for Jonathan.
He digested the information he’d just been given.
Luxborough? Wasn’t there a reason he didn’t want to go there?
He groped in his thick and fuzzy head but couldn’t find anything useful so gave up and shut his right eye, thereby reducing the throbbing in his head.
What he really wanted to do was sleep, but this jolting was never going to let him do that.
“Just let me give you some more laudanum,” Walter said. “For the pain. The doctor gave me a bottle.”
The bitter taste again as liquid was trickled into his mouth. He wanted to spit it out, but didn’t have the energy.
It must have worked, however, because the next time he opened his eyes the internal carriage light had been dimmed.
Either that or he was dying. In which case it would be Walter’s fault for taking him on a journey when plainly he should be home in bed being looked after by a nurse and probably a doctor too.
Yes, he would rather die in his own bed.
Someone was talking in a low voice. Robert. “Are you sure we should have done this, brother?”
Walter’s reply came, his voice even lower.
The fact that they either didn’t want to disturb him or, more likely, didn’t want him to hear, seemed evident.
“Absolutely. It’s the only way to get the two of them together.
They’re clearly made for one another but are too pig-headed to realize it.
I had no chance of it whilst Jonnie was standing on his own two feet.
So I took the opportunity when it presented itself.
Got to take a risk that sometimes, to get what one wants. ”
“Risk is the right word. He looks an awful shade of gray.”
“So would you do, if you’d been shot and had your arm broken and your head kicked in.”
So that was why every part of him was hurting like hell.
Robert sniffed. “That sounds like an awful lot of wounds. Are you sure that doctor said it was safe to take him all this way? Are you sure he was a proper doctor, even?”
Silence for a moment. “Of course I am. He heard the rumpus outside in the street and came out with his butler and a pair of loaded pistols to help us. Without his pluck, you’d be looking at becoming viscount after father dies, because those footpads would have killed both of us.
Luckily the fools attacked us right outside the house of such a brave, public-spirited fellow, who just happened to be a doctor.
He took us in off the street and helped us even further.
” He huffed a little. “And when I asked him, he said it would be all right to take Jonnie home. So I sent for you and for Mama’s carriage. She won’t even have missed it yet.”
Robert was clearly not to be deflected from his worries. “But that doctor thought home was Cavendish Square, not Oxfordshire.”
“A mere detail.”
A long pause ensued, the rumbling of the wheels and the steady sound of trotting hooves pushing their way to the fore. Almost lulled by their rhythm. Jonathan would have begun to nod off once more had not Robert spoken again.
“I can see blood coming through the bandage on his shoulder. It must have started bleeding again.”
“Leave it alone. The doctor said to leave it in place. It needs to coagulate or something like that. I’m sure that’s what he said. Just like your foot had to when you nearly cut your big toe off with that axe.”
“But I hadn’t been beaten nearly to death.”
“Neither has Jonnie. Only beaten a little bit.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Footpads.” Walter sounded definitely cagey at this point.
“You said there were seven of them.”
“They all went limping away, I can assure you. No one crosses Jonnie Dunster and Walter Farrington.”
“Jonnie doesn’t seem to have done too well out of it. He looks pretty ‘crossed’ to me.”
“Nonsense, as I already explained when you first arrived, he killed one and near blinded another. I can tell you they departed in a worse state than they left us in, dragging their tails behind them. The sight of the doctor’s pistols finished off any thoughts they had of further battery.
” Again, Jonathan, even in his half-conscious state, divined that Walter was not quite telling the truth.
“I still don’t much like it. Supposing…” His voice was so low now as to be almost impossible to hear. “Supposing he dies. It’ll be our fault. Your fault, really.”
A huff, none too confidently done, emerged from Walter. “He won’t do that, or I’ll have something to say about it.” Only Walter sounded nowhere near as confident as Jonathan would have liked.
“Let it be noted that I’m not in agreement with this kidnapping.”
Another huff from Walter. “Go to sleep. I’ll give him some more of this stuff if he wakes up again. Best if he don’t feel all the jolting about.”
The brothers fell silent for a few minutes.
Time ticked on.
Jonathan was nearly asleep when Robert spoke again, his voice a low hiss. “I’d damned well like to know what it was you were up to while that doctor was treating Jonnie. When you sloped off and left me alone with them. You were gone quite a while.”
“I said go to sleep,” Walter hissed back.
And silence finally fell.
Jonathan listened for a bit longer but neither spoke again, and pretty soon his attention waned and sleep took over. He dozed some more, drifting in and out of sleep, or possibly consciousness. He had no idea which but everything was very jumbled.
In one of his short waking periods, he tried moving his head.
Just a little, this time. Something had improved, because he only managed to set off about three quarters as much pounding as earlier.
From the bitter taste in his mouth he had a feeling someone had given him laudanum for the pain while he was dozing.
Which might explain the strange feeling he now had of floating on a cloud.
Perhaps he should try sleeping while he was feeling like this.
Yes, that might be an excellent idea. His eyelids drooped and sleep took him again.
The next time Jonathan awoke, the pain was back with a vengeance.
Pale morning light was filtering in around the dropped blinds on the carriage windows showing him Robert asleep in the opposite corner, head back and mouth inelegantly open.
Walter’s legs poked out from the corner he couldn’t move his head to see.
From the snoring, it seemed apparent that he too was asleep.
Jonathan lay still for a while trying to work out which bits of him were hurting the most. A difficult task as his body felt as though every square inch was in pain.
What was this makeshift bed he lying on?
His fingers found several layers of blankets under his body but they didn’t do enough to disguise the hardness of the bed.
Might it be an old door? It certainly felt as though it could be.