Chapter Twenty-Seven
T he horses were at full gallop before they were a dozen paces away. Jackie glared after them. Drew had point-blank refused to allow Jackie to ride with them and had ordered Lord Thomas to stay to see to her welfare. “He is my betrothed,” she grumbled.
“They will save him,” Thomas assured her. “You shall see, Miss de Haricot.” He glanced over her shoulder and his eyes widened and then narrowed. “Forgive my impertinence,” he said, as he laid an arm over her shoulders. “Please walk out of the lamplight. Not as if you were hurrying, but as if we have nowhere in particular to be. That’s it.”
She had fallen into step beside him before she had time to question, but now she heard a carriage drawing up behind them.
“Don’t look back,” he warned, as he used his free hand to try the gate of the area they were just passing. It opened, and he nudged her ahead, following her partway down the area steps to where they could peer from pavement level to see the carriage without being seen.
Oscar stood in the lamplight, arguing with the jarvey of the unprepossessing hackney that stood outside the door of Beddington House. Bill Whitely was with him. As Jackie and the men watched, Bill tugged at Oscar’s sleeve and murmured something that made Oscar dig in his pocket for a coin that he threw carelessly at the jarvey. The man snatched the coin from the air and went grumbling back to his seat on the carriage.
Oscar, heading toward Jackie, Bill at his heels, turned off into the lane that led down the side of Beddington House. Jackie hurried back up the stairs as soon as he was out of sight.
Thomas came after her. “I will follow him,” he offered. “You stay here, Miss de Haricot.”
That suggestions did not warrant an answer. Jackie reached the lane’s corner and peered around it. Oscar and Bill were entering the grounds of Beddington House by the gate Jackie had used earlier. Good. They wouldn’t see her creeping down the lane, making use of every shadow to keep herself hidden.
Thomas kept up with her, as stealthy as she, and together, they reached the gate and let themselves inside.
“Let me take the lead,” Thomas said, his voice little more than a breath.
A shake of the head was answer enough. That and her stride forward. She was tired of being treated like a helpless female. Pol didn’t treat her like one, and she was determined that his faith in her—in spite of how every other man, it seemed, regarded her gender—wouldn’t be for naught.
She led the way to the back corner of the house and paused. Across a patch of flagstones, a tower rose from the garden, slender but tall, round, windowless, and topped with a conical roof. It was for doves or pigeons. In the twilight, and with the light of a full moon, she could see small arched doorways in the top of the wall, just below the roof.
Bill was dumping a load of wood at the base of the tower. Oscar was not in sight, but someone was breaking something up inside the little building. After Bill had brought two more loads of wood from somewhere out of sight behind the structure, the displaced viscount appeared from the doorway, holding an armload of smaller sticks. No, not sticks. That was dressed wood. He had been breaking up chairs or something similar.
“Here,” he told Bill, his voice high-pitched with excitement. “Kindling. Did you see any straw? Or paper?”
He was going to set fire to the dovecote? But why ?
Someone else wanted to know, too. “Here! Stop that! What do you mean by it?” Jackie could not see the speaker, but from the direction of his voice, she guessed him to be at the back door. One of the abandoned servants, perhaps?
Oscar peered at him. “Are you still here, Mitchell? I thought Mama had dismissed everyone.”
“Nowhere to go, Lord Riese,” the servant told him. “Not on such short notice.”
Oscar ignored the resentment in his tone. “Make yourself useful, then. Go get a scoop of coal from the kitchen and bring it here. I mean to burn this to the ground.”
“Do you have a gun?” Jackie whispered the question to Thomas.
He frowned at her. “I do, but I will not put you at risk for the sake of a pigeon house, Miss de Haricot,” he whispered back. “Let him burn it.”
“But why does he want to?” Jackie couldn’t understand. Oscar should be trying to escape, not remaining here in London to burn a little garden folly—for that was all it was, the narrow wooden tower with its pigeon loft.
Perhaps he had hidden papers or some other incriminating evidence inside.
“Let us go and fetch help to arrest these men,” Thomas insisted. “Just ten minutes, my lady, and we shall be back.”
Jackie hesitated. It was the sensible thing to do.
“Here you are, my lord,” said the footman, hurrying toward Oscar from the house, carrying a shovel full of glowing coals.
Oscar took the shovel then stepped back to look up at the pigeon loft. He shouted, “Polly! Oi! Polly!”
Pol? Pol was still here? Jackie started forward and Thomas caught her by the shoulder to keep her in the shadows.
“You’ve lost the viscountcy, Oscar.” Pol’s voice came from the pigeon loft. “It was never yours in the first place. But if you kill me, you’ll hang.”
“Nobody will ever know,” Oscar shouted back. “Even if they find the body, they’ll not know it was you. The Whitelys took you away in their carriage. People saw you being taken out.”
“I will know,” Jackie said, shrugging off Thomas’s grip and stepping forward. “And so will Mitchell and Bill. Do you intend to kill us all?”
“You might find Miss de Haricot harder to kill than you might think,” Thomas added, stepping up to Jackie’s side. He had produced a pistol from somewhere and held it as if he knew how to use it.
Oscar looked wildly around him and then dashed the shovel full of coals onto the fuel that he and Bill had piled around the foot of the tower. Straw caught and flared up even as Oscar ran into the house, followed by Bill.
The doorway was still clear of fire. Jackie raced for it, thankful for her boy’s trousers, which allowed her to leap a low hedge and jump over the low steps into the building. Inside, she came to a stop. The inside was wreathed in shadows, but she could see no way up to the pigeon loft. No stair or ladder. No opening far above her head.
Her mind fed her the image of Oscar emerging with his arm full of pieces of kindling. A ladder? He must have broken it into pieces, for Pol had reached the pigeon loft somehow. She had to find some way up! She shouted, “Pol, I am going to look for a ladder!”
His voice came back, muffled by the floor. “Get out of here, Jackie. Don’t risk yourself.”
Hah! As if I am going to stand back and let him burn! She didn’t stop to argue, but leapt out of the door, rushing through the flames at the tower’s base.
In the brief time she had been inside, Thomas had found himself a workforce. Servants from the house, perhaps, or men from the stables in the mews. Some had formed a chain to bring buckets of water from farther down the garden. Those at the tower receiving the buckets were throwing them on the walls to damp them down.
Other men were using rakes to pull the wood and straw away from the flames. A third group had large sacks they were throwing over the scattered embers before stamping on them.
Jackie let out a breath she had not known she was holding. Perhaps the tower was not going to burn, after all.
“Is Pol behind you?” Thomas asked.
She shook her head. “Riese destroyed the ladder to the loft. Pol cannot get out. I am looking for another ladder.”
Thomas looked around and then grabbed the arm of one of the rakers and spoke briefly to him before bringing him back to Jackie. “This is the gardener, Miss de Haricot. He shall find you a ladder.”
“This way, Miss,” the gardener said. “There’s several ladders in the shed across the road.”
They returned with the tallest, but Jackie knew, even before they tried it, that it wasn’t going to be tall enough. Sure enough, it was more than six feet too short, and worse, once Thomas had climbed the ladder—he had insisted on taking her place—he could see that the trapdoor leading into the loft was bolted shut, and he couldn’t reach it to open the bolt.
“I will go up the wisteria,” said Jackie. “I can take Pol something to break open the trapdoor, and a rope for him to get down.”
Oscar had failed in his attempt to burn the place down and Pol with it, though the people who had been mustered to help were still moving the piles of wood, looking for spots that needed to be damped down. The wisteria that grew up one side had suffered scorched leaves within a few feet of the ground but was otherwise intact.
Thomas protested but had to admit he was too heavy for the stems in the upper reaches of the wall. He sent one of the stable men off to find a mallet and a rope. “Preferably a rope ladder,” he said.
The man came back with a knotted rope, a hefty wooden mallet, and a feed sack into which he put the other two items, “For the young Miss to loop over her shoulder, my lord, during the climb.”
Jackie called up to Pol to let him know she was bringing him what he needed to escape and began the climb. She was halfway to the pigeon entrances when she heard the bark of a gun from the direction of the house, and something buzzed past her ear and hit the wall. Someone is shooting at me! Jackie froze.
Another gun barked, this time from the foot of the tower.
“Good shot. You got him,” said Lord Thomas.
“ Cochon ,” commented a voice that sounded somehow familiar. Jackie did not have time to think about it. Her hands were clenched hard on the trunks of the wisteria and refused to relax. The crisis was over. She had to focus all her energy on moving again. No one was shooting at her. She was safe, and Pol would be, too, if she just kept climbing.
“Jackie,” Pol called to her. “Jackie, are you hurt?”
Hearing her beloved’s voice was enough to make her fear-caused paralysis disappear. She moved one hand and then the other. “I am perfectly well,” she called back. “I am almost there.”
She pushed off on one foot and moved the other to a higher foothold, moved a hand, then the other foot, and the other hand, and repeated the movements until suddenly, she was there, and Pol was reaching a hand through the pigeon door for her to clasp.
“What happened?” he asked. “I heard gun shots.”
Jackie looked over her shoulder at the house. Oscar lay draped over a window ledge on the second floor. Even as she watched, Thomas and another man pulled him back inside. “Your cousin took a shot at me and missed. The man who fired back did not miss.”
“Oscar’s dead?”
“I think so,” Jackie said, surprised that Oscar’s death seemed almost inconsequential to her Oscar had been such a malevolent force in her life and Pol’s that his death should be a relief, but dead or arrested and soon to hang, this had been his last wicked act. Oscar was in the past. She and Pol, and their future together—they were what mattered.
“Here.” She had managed to maneuver the bag so she could reach inside it. “This is a mallet to break open the trapdoor. And this is a rope for you to climb down.”
Fortunately, it was twice as long as needed, for there was nothing in the pigeon loft to tie it to, so Pol fed one end down from the pigeon door and the other through the trap door. With the stable hands to weigh the rope down on the outside, Pol came down, dropping the last four feet to fold Jackie into his arms.
She lifted her mouth to his and for a long moment, they forgot the world. Until someone cleared their throat, and Pol’s arms loosened, and his lips lifted from hers. He did not let her go, but he did look over his shoulder when the man in the doorway spoke.
“It is to be hoped, Monsieur , you have spoken to the demoiselle’s Maman .” It was the man who had shot Oscar, and he sounded even more familiar than before. Jackie leaned to look around Pol, but all the available light was outside, and his face was in darkness. However, somehow, she knew it was the man who had been watching her.
“The lady is my betrothed, sir,” Pol told him, somewhat coldly.
The man stepped back from the doorway as he said. “Betrothed! It does not seem possible, ma petite .”
As if the words had turned a switch, she knew him. But no, it could not be! Jackie squeezed her eyes shut and then looked again. He was smiling at her. With more light on his face, she knew him, though he was older, thinner, grayer. She stepped around Pol, but continued clutching his hand, his touch anchoring her against the shock. “ Mon Papa ?”
*