Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
The River
The rope had been put on by somebody who did not intend it to be comfortable. By the time we cleared the Pool, my hands had gone the color of a plum from the knuckles down.
He had put the cloth back in my mouth on the way to the river, but had taken it out when we boarded the black launch.
There was no longer anything to be gained by it.
I could scream the whole way to the Nore, and the Thames would take the sound the way it takes everything else.
Nor could I expect any help from the men aboard. Every man was his.
So I did not scream, but simply stood at the after rail where they put me, with a man on either side and a hand on my elbow.
The engine went on beating under the deck. It never varied. After the first mile, I stopped hearing it and began to feel it instead, up through the boards and into my teeth.
Wapping went by, and then the shipyards, and the whole eastern sky filled up with masts.
Colliers three deep at the tiers. A barge going down under a red sail with a boy asleep on the hatch.
Somewhere behind Greenwich a hammer was going on iron, one blow and then another, all the way down the reach.
If I had been anybody else I should have found it beautiful.
Harcourt stood forward of the wheelhouse with his back half toward me.
He’d gone up two steps to the wheelhouse without touching a rail.
He stood the roll of that deck and never once put out a hand.
He was a man of fifty in good condition who had spent three years telling London he was a man of seventy-odd years who could not manage a staircase.
But now in front of me, he was not troubling with his disguise. He had no further use for it.
Not because he had been caught out. Because he was leaving, and one does not pack an old coat.
I looked east and made myself think it through in order. Thinking in order is the only thing I have ever been able to do when I am frightened, and I have never been more frightened in my life.
Chrissie had run. I had watched her run, and she had gone to the right door.
And Steele had known, and he had come. Whether he would reach me before the water got wide was another matter altogether.
I set that question aside, because there was nothing I could do with it and a great deal I could do with the next ten minutes.
Harcourt came aft and dismissed the men guarding me. “You will have worked out where we are going.”
“I have no intention of going there.”
“I was not asking.”
“I did notice.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “You will find France a good deal more accommodating than England.”
“I doubt that very much. I have been to France.”
He laughed. “You have spirit.”
“I have had excellent teachers. My grandmother once made a bishop cry.”
“I have observed as much.” He put his hands behind him and looked back at our wake, at the brown water folding away toward London. “I confess I underestimated your duke.”
“You have underestimated everyone in this, as you will find out.”
“No, I haven’t.” All the pleasantness went out of his voice, and what was underneath it was flat and level and old.
“A man I trusted, one I have known for twenty years, turned on me today. I knew he would. I’ve been expecting it for some time.
He has cost me a great deal, more than you will ever know.
But you are worth it.” He stroked the back of his hand down my cheek.
I turned my head to bite him. But he was quicker. “I love that about you. Although I expect I’ll have to muzzle you when I take you.”
“Bastard.”
“I’m many things, my dear, but strangely enough, not that. I come from legitimate stock. A second son. The oldest took everything—the name, the money. So, I had to make do with what was left—the silver. It was enough to start my little enterprise. Well, not so little any more.”
“Kidnapping young women to be abused by men?”
He shrugged. “I simply provided a service.”
I spat at him.
He retrieved a handkerchief from his coat and calmly wiped the spit away.
“Steele won’t save you. Right now he’s headed toward Gravesend.
The man who betrayed me shared that with him,” he said evenly.
“That was his arrangement, you see. Berthed in a woman’s name, victualed a week ago, a very sound piece of work.
He will have sold it by now to whoever is buying.
” He looked out at the water. “One keeps a second door. I learned that a long time ago.”
“You’re vile.”
“My brother didn’t think so. He enjoyed the women I found for him.
Sadly, he died from a horrible disease. They weren’t clean, you see, and he did not take care.
” His gaze returned to me. “But you are pure. Steele has not touched you, nor will he ever.” He stuck his handkerchief in my mouth, the one with my spit on it, and held it there while he whispered in my ear.
“I will be the only one to have you, Rosalynd.”
His hand moved over me with deliberate possession. I fought against him while the rope cut deeper into my wrists. He could do whatever he wished with me and nobody would stop him.
And then suddenly, he stopped himself. “Not here. Not now.” He grabbed my jaw and brought my face close to his. “When we’re in the channel. Then and only then.” He stepped back to yell at a crewman. “How long?”
“Making good time, sir. Not long.”
“Good.” He glanced back at me. “Your duke will come and come hard. But he will be too late to save you.” He removed the handkerchief, stuffed it into his coat, and walked away, signaling my guards to return to their posts.
I did not speak. There was nothing in it worth the breath. I counted instead.
Two men on me, one on either side, both armed, the younger one carrying his revolver in his coat pocket where he would foul it getting it out.
One at the wheel. One below with the engine, because the beat changed when somebody spoke down the skylight to him.
One forward, coiling. The man who had come up to report. And Harcourt.
Seven, two of them past fifty, and one of them—the young one on my left—had been sick over the side twice since Limehouse and was gray about the mouth.
The cabin door opened inward, which meant a body could hold it.
A brass poker stood in the fender by the stove.
The skylight was propped. The falls holding the little boat on the port davits were rotten at the turn, frayed back to the core where the sun had been at them.
If the boat were ever swung out in a hurry, the after fall would go and she would drop by the stern.
None of it would get me off that launch. I had no illusion about any of it. But I had spent months learning that you never know which small thing will be the thing. So I would observe. Remember. Wait.
We came round into a long reach with the marshes opening out gray on the far side. And there she lay, anchored off the fairway with her cable up and down and her boat already in the water.
A steam yacht. White, with a black funnel, two raked masts, and a gold line along her, the sort of thing a gentleman keeps to take his friends to Cowes.
Big enough for the Channel and a good deal more than the Channel.
Her counter was fresh-painted, a hard flat white laid on in a hurry and not long dry.
A hand came round my arm above the elbow. “Move.”
I did not move.
He pulled, and I let my weight go against him. My feet stayed where they were, which is not a thing a man expects. He had to stop and get a better hold or drag me down the deck on my heels.
He swore. He was not a large man and I am not a small woman.
Harcourt turned from the rail. “What is it?”
“She won’t come, sir.”
“No,” he said. “I did not suppose she would.”
He came down the deck himself. “You gain nothing by this.”
“I have gained eleven seconds,” I said. “Would you care to make it twenty?”
Something crossed his face then, and it was not amusement. It was not the cold thing I had seen in the carriage. It was the plain irritation of a man behind his own timetable. I would not have traded it for a diamond.
He put out his hand for my arm. But I turned my shoulder into him with everything I had.
I did not shift him more than a foot. But he was standing on a moving deck with his weight on the wrong leg. He fell back a step and put his hand down on the rail to keep himself upright.
His hat went over the side. It sat on the brown water for a moment, brim up, entirely dry, and then the launch went past it and it was thirty feet astern and going up the river without him.
Both sailors lunged, one for me and one, ridiculously, for the hat. The younger man on my left let go of my elbow altogether.
Four seconds. Five.
Then there were hands on both my arms and my shoulder was wrenched round and it was over.
Harcourt straightened his coat. He did it without hurry, and he was breathing hard. “You continue to disappoint me.”
“Good.”
The two hulls came together. Lines went across and were made fast. Fenders went over.
Somebody on the yacht called down a question and somebody on our deck called an answer.
A short gangway came down onto our rail and was lashed.
The white side of that ship stood up over us and put the whole after deck into shadow.
A sailor came down it and reached for me. I tried to step out of reach, but I was being held fast by two sets of hands.
From somewhere astern, a whistle blew. It came down flat and hard over the water and did not stop.
It went on, and on, three times as long as any signal has ever been given on the river Thames, until the man on the gangway turned round with his hand still out, and every head on both vessels came up at once.
Half a mile back, coming down through the anchored shipping at a pace that had two lightermen standing up in their boats to shout at her, was a small gray launch with a bone in her teeth and black smoke lying flat off her funnel.
A man stood right forward, outside the rail, holding the stay. Nobody with the least sense would stand there. But then not every man was Steele.