Chapter 22
Marsh was a man of few words and considerable precision, and when he told them the address, he told them everything else too: the number of men he had counted entering and leaving, the layout of the lane as best he could judge from the outside, the single upper window with the curtain that had moved twice in the past hour.
Oliver was already moving before the man had finished.
He had ridden from Berkeley Square to Grosvenor Street in under four minutes, which was not the kind of riding one did in London unless one had stopped caring what anyone thought of it.
Harry had met him at the door of Newbury House with his hat already in his hand and the look of a man who had been waiting for something to do since the moment, he’d heard his sister was gone.
They did not speak much on the way. There was nothing to say that was not better done with action.
Webb had collected six men, all former soldiers, all discreet.
He’d had them ready since the previous evening, because Webb had not survived twenty years of military life by waiting until a crisis was certain before preparing for it.
He met them three streets from the address, and Oliver gave him the briefest possible account of what Marsh had told him, and Webb absorbed it with the contained steadiness of a man filing information into the correct order.
“Front and back,” Webb said. “Two at the rear before we go through the front. They’ll try to move her if they hear us coming.”
“Agreed.”
“And my lord.” Webb held his gaze for a moment. “You and the Duke of Newbury stay behind me until I know the layout of the inside.”
Oliver would have argued on any other night. Tonight he simply nodded.
The house was ordinary in the way that deliberate concealment always produced. A respectable lane, a painted door, curtains drawn against the cold morning. No sign of anything wrong. The kind of house London was full of, the kind that kept its secrets behind its silence.
They went in fast and without ceremony.
The two men Webb had sent around the back had accounted for the guard at the rear entrance before Oliver had cleared the front hall.
Inside the house smelled of damp and tallow and something faintly sweet that Oliver could not identify and did not want to think about.
A servant bolted for the stairs and was intercepted by Webb’s man before he’d taken three steps.
Another door, another room, two of Penharrow’s men with weapons half-drawn who understood very quickly that they were outnumbered and elected not to test the arithmetic.
Oliver was already moving toward the upper floor when he heard Harry say, quietly and with no inflection at all, “That’s her.”
He followed Harry’s gaze to the closed door at the end of the upstairs corridor.
And then the door opened, and Penharrow stepped into the doorway.
He was perfectly composed. He had, Oliver realized, been waiting for them.
“My lord Astor,” Penharrow said pleasantly. “And the young duke. How gratifying. I had begun to wonder if my message had reached you.”
He stepped back into the room, leaving the door open behind him, and Oliver understood in the same instant that this was an invitation and a trap and that they had walked into it because Megan was somewhere inside that room and there had never been any real choice but to walk through the door.
He went in. Harry came with him. Webb made to follow and a pistol appeared from behind the door and pressed itself to the base of Webb’s skull.
“Just the two gentlemen,” Penharrow said, still in that pleasant, conversational tone. “Your man is welcome to wait in the corridor, provided he remains cooperative.”
Webb’s eyes met Oliver’s over the barrel of the weapon.
“Stay,” Oliver said quietly.
The door closed.
* * *
Megan was in the corner of the room.
She had positioned herself there deliberately, Oliver understood, because it was the only place in the room she could stand with a wall at her back and a clear view of everything in front of her.
She was pale and still and entirely upright, and when she saw Oliver, her eyes moved over him with a swift, precise assessment that told him she was already calculating rather than simply afraid.
She was alive. She was unhurt.
He allowed himself exactly one moment to register that fact before he made himself look away from her, because looking at her was what Penharrow wanted.
The room contained four of them and two of Penharrow’s men, one near the door and one stationed by the window where the light came in grey and flat through the closed curtain.
Penharrow himself stood in the center of the room with his hands loose at his sides and the air of a man who had arranged everything very carefully and was now prepared to enjoy the result.
He was, Oliver had always known, a man who liked an audience.
“Well,” Penharrow said, looking between Oliver and Harry with that mild, observational pleasure that Oliver had long since understood was far more dangerous than rage.
“The Marquess of Astor and the Duke of Newbury in the same room. I feel quite honored. Though I confess, gentlemen, that your arrival was somewhat quicker than I had anticipated. I expected more caution from men of your intelligence.”
“Where’s the performance in caution?” Harry said.
Penharrow smiled. It was a smile Oliver recognized, the kind that involved only the lower half of the face. “Your sister has some of the same directness. An admirable quality. I have always found it rather refreshing in her, though not especially convenient.”
He turned to Megan then, and Oliver watched Megan hold very still under that gaze with the practiced composure of a woman who had spent many years learning not to flinch.
“My dear,” Penharrow said. “As I mentioned to you earlier, it seems we find ourselves at something of an impasse. The gentlemen have arrived as expected, and I have my men, and they have presumably men of their own in the corridor and very likely several more positions around this building.” He spread his hands in a gesture of reasonable consideration.
“I am not a fool. I am aware that this is not a sustainable position.”
“Then stand aside,” Oliver said.
“I’m afraid that option has some difficulties attached to it.
” Penharrow reached inside his coat and produced two pistols, one of which he turned over in his hands with the careful attention of a man who handled weapons regularly.
“You see, my position requires a certain clarity of resolution. If I simply stand aside, I face a court, a trial, and the particular enthusiasm with which the Duke of Newbury will prosecute my case. His Grace looks, if you will forgive me, like a man with considerable enthusiasm.” He glanced at Harry. “Am I wrong?”
Harry said nothing.
“Quite.” Penharrow turned back to Megan.
“So it seems we require a different solution.” He held the pistol out to her, grip first, with an almost courteous gesture.
“I find myself in a generous mood, my dear. A choice. Choose which of these gentlemen you would like to live, and then you will kill the other. If you decline to choose, I will simply shoot them both and leave you to consider the consequences of your obstinacy.”
The room was very quiet.
Oliver looked at Megan.
She was looking at the pistol.
Megan had known, from the moment Penharrow had told her what he intended, that this was not a real choice.
That had been the first thing her mind had produced, clear and cold as spring water.
He will kill them both. He will kill you.
There is no version of this in which he allows any of you to walk out of this room.
He would take her and her happiness with him because he knew the game was over.
She had spent the intervening time thinking about what was actually possible.
She reached out and took the pistol.
It was heavier than she remembered. Oliver had given her a gun as they fled Wales, although she’d had little time to learn to shoot it. The weight of it was familiar in the way that unpleasant things were familiar, known, but not wanted.
She held it in both hands and looked at Oliver.
He was watching her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. Not fear for himself. Fear for her. The particular quality of a man watching someone he loves preparing to do something he cannot stop and cannot reach.
She looked away from him before it could undo her.
She turned toward Harry instead.
Her brother, who had never stopped looking for her. Who had spent his own money and his own time and his own hope on the possibility that she was still alive. Who had looked at her across a drawing room and said you have my father’s eyes in a voice stripped of everything except the raw fact of it.
She raised the pistol.
Harry held very still. His face had gone pale, but his jaw was set and his eyes were steady on hers, and even in this moment she could read him, the same quality she had recognized the first time she had seen him. He was a man who would not beg.
I’m sorry, she thought at him. I need you to trust me.
She held the gun on him for one heartbeat. Two.
Penharrow made a small, satisfied sound beside her.
Megan turned and shot Penharrow.
She had aimed for his chest. She caught his stomach instead, the report of the pistol shockingly loud in the closed room, and Penharrow staggered back against the wall with a sound that was less a scream than a furious, disbelieving exhalation.
The man by the door lurched forward and the door burst open in the same instant as Webb came through it low and fast, and the room became something she could not track individually, noise and movement and the crack of another shot from somewhere she could not identify.
She watched as if in a dream as Penharrow sunk to the floor but raised his arm. He was going to fire.
She saw it in the way his face changed, shock collapsing into the particular cold fury she knew better than almost any expression in the world. He had one pistol and it was leveled at Oliver, who had moved forward and was not yet clear of it, and Megan had no weapon left and no time and no choice.
She stepped in front of him.
The sound of it was not what she had expected.
The impact was a shove that spun her sideways, a burning that spread outward from her left shoulder before the pain had properly arrived.
She hit the wall. Slid down it. Heard Oliver’s voice yell her name, not in the careful way he usually said it but broken, raw, uncontrolled.
The room continued without her for a little while.
When it resolved back into something she could follow, she was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and Oliver was beside her, his hands on her face, her name in his voice in a register she had not heard from him before.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“You are not all right.” His voice was entirely unlike itself. “You have been shot.”
“It is not serious.” She could feel the truth of this even through the pain, which was considerable but not the spreading, drowning kind she suspected would accompany something serious. “Shoulder. I can feel that it is not deep.” She paused. “I may have some experience with wounds.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite the opposite.
Webb appeared in her field of vision, assessed the situation in approximately two seconds, and began giving instructions to someone over his shoulder with the brisk efficiency of a man who had triaged on battlefields and found a London drawing room considerably less chaotic by comparison.
“Penharrow,” Oliver said. His voice had steadied but his hands had not left her face.
“Still alive,” Webb said. “But I don’t think he’ll survive a wound like that.”
“I hope he suffers.” Oliver’s jaw was very tight. “But we should get him a doctor. I’m not the same man as him.”
Harry appeared on her other side, crouching down, and looked at her with an expression she did not have a name for. She suspected she was wearing something similar.
“I aimed at you, but I’d never shoot you,” she said.
“Yes.” He reached out and took her hand, not the injured side, and held it with the careful, deliberate grip of a man deciding. “I know. I understood what you were doing.”
“Did you?”
“Not immediately,” he admitted. “For approximately three seconds I thought my sister was going to shoot me.”
“I am sorry about the three seconds.”
“Do not be sorry about the three seconds.” Something moved in his face that he did not trouble to conceal. “Be sorry for nothing. Not a single moment of any of it. You were very brave and clever.” His hand tightened on hers. “I have you now. Whatever comes next, I have you.”
Oliver had turned back to her and the look on his face was such that she reached up with her good hand and pressed her palm flat against his jaw before she had decided to do it. He turned his face into it, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again.
“You stepped in front of a bullet meant for me,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “I need you to promise me you’ll never do anything like that again.”
“I couldn’t let anyone else die for me,” she said. “Not after everything.”
“I know.” He covered her hand with his and held it there.
“I know that. But Megan.” He met her eyes, and whatever composure he had reassembled in the past few minutes came apart at the edges in a way she suspected he was not aware of.
“I would not have survived it. Do you understand me? I would not.”
“I do now,” she said softly.
“Good.” His thumb moved across her knuckles. “Good. Never again.”
His pulse beat hard under her fingers and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.
Outside, London went on in its indifferent way, the sounds of the street drifting up through the window, the ordinary world unaware that anything of significance had happened in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable lane.
Webb was directing men with the competent calm of a man restoring order.
Harry was speaking in a low voice to someone in the doorway, already thinking about what came next.
Megan leaned her head back against the wall and let Oliver hold her hand and decided that for the next five minutes she was simply going to breathe.
There was time enough for everything else.