Chapter 35 #2
“Well… the more correct proposition would be: I gave a dimwitted chit a purse and a task, and she proceeded to make an utter dog’s dinner of it.
” Rising with an oily grace, he wandered to the cupboard and helped himself to the lemonade pitcher, pouring a glass as though he were calling on a summer afternoon.
“Too much milk, Lilian, you ninny. A child could have done it cleaner.”
Beside Emma, James thrashed against his bindings, throwing his weight against the wood to no avail.
Digging her fingernails to try loosen her bindings, Emma stammered, “W-what do you want? Money? I can give you whatever sum you—”
“I don’t want a damn handout, Emma!” The glass cracked down on the table, lemonade sloshing over the rim, and for one heartbeat the oily charm peeled clean off him, and she went dead still.
Then it slid back into place, smooth as a closing drawer.
“Forgive my… manners. Manners maketh man, after all,” he smiled sinisterly, smoothing the creases of his Windsor blue coat that always sat a shade too big on him.
He came to crouch before her again.
“There is a viscountcy rotting in a strongbox while that half-witted boy”—he shot a cold glance at James—”can scarcely even puzzle through a storybook.
Lands, Emma. A seat in the House of Lords.
A name men lean in to hear! I have always been the only one with the wit to build something towering, yet I must watch the pair of you scratch for pennies in this hovel like it’s some noble Christian virtue. ”
“James is the viscount,” Emma hissed back, her voice shaking with fury. “And what you lack in virtue, he makes for double in heart. You will never get the title!”
“James is a soft-headed lamb who will sign whatever paper I slide beneath his hand, while he’s tucked away in a quiet house in Ireland.
” Cillian’s mouth split with a muddy grin.
“And you, dear cousin, you were meant to be a duchess far away in the country, sick or dead, but none the wiser.
I even had Agnes spend the night away, but you just had to come trotting back to London and muddy a tidy plan.
“No matter. You will both make the crossing now, reunited—”
Before he could finish, a floorboard groaned on the upstairs landing, and Cillian’s head snapped.
“Sit tight, cousin,” he muttered, straightening. “Shan’t be a moment.”
The instant his back vanished round the doorframe, Emma flung herself sideways, crashing against James’s chair, her fingers tearing desperately at the knots binding his small wrists, “James—James, listen to me—when you are free you run, you hear me, you run, and you fetch Vincent and you don’t stop for anything—”
The rope gave. James spat the gag loose. “I—I can’t leave you, Emmy, I won’t—”
“Go!”
Footsteps thudded hard back into the room. Cillian filled the doorway, his gaze dropping to James’s free hands.
One breathless heartbeat.
Then he lunged.
But James shot faster out the back door, skidding out into the rain.
“I’ll come back for you, Emmy!” he cried—and was gone into the dark.
Vincent spurred Colossus into a gallop, hoping to make Bloomsbury before the last of the daylight gave out, but by the time Edgware Road stretched black beneath them, the mist had thickened and the lamps were little more than yellow smears in the wet.
His chest had gone too tight to manage properly. Twice, he found himself with no air in him at all, and twice he dragged in a breath through his teeth. Still riding. Still thinking. He’d had his eyes peeled, and nothing of note had passed him.
That had to mean she was not lost yet.
I’m not too late. I’m not too late—
A figure burst out of a pitch-black side-lane and threw itself straight into his path.
“Carefu—” Hauling the leather reins back with bone-snapping force, Vincent yanked the beast right.
Colossus shrieked, rearing wildly into the evening air, steel-shod hooves slicing down so near to the boy’s hand that it scraped mud off them and threw the figure face-first into the mud. “Are you mad!”
With his pulse slamming in his ears, he twisted round in the saddle to flay the reckless idiot raw—and every word of it withered.
The runner shoved up onto his knees in the mire, soaked to the skin, his nightshirt clinging grey to a chest that pumped like a bellows. Sandy hair was flattened over a tear-streaked face Vincent had last seen weeping into Emma’s gown across a kitchen table.
God-above—”James? Is that you?”
“Y-Your Grace!”
“What are you doing out here—”
Scrambling frantically through the mire, James grabbed blindly at Vincent’s stirrup, “It’s Cousin Cillian, he’s got Emmy tied up and he poisoned her, and he’s-he’s going to take us away—”
Swinging off the horse before James could finish, Vincent caught him by both shoulders, “Breathe, lad. Where is she? Did he hurt her?”
“He hit Emmy’s head with a candleholder!” James wailed, burying his fists into his drenched wool coat, and rage went through Vincent cold as the Serpentine in winter.
“There was blood here—” he touched the side of his own head, then shook harder, “s-she got my ropes off and told me to find you, but he’s putting us on a boat, he kept saying it, to Ireland, and then after he got the title he’ll—he’ll be rid of us both—”
“He will do no such thing,” Vincent snarled, voice dropping to a sinister, quiet rasp.
Ireland…
Immediately, the cogs in his head started whirring.
If Cillian was indeed taking her to the coast, from Bloomsbury, he would need to take the western arteries.
Oxford turnpike, unless the bastard had enough wit to double back through the city, and Vincent would not flatter him so far.
But even a light carriage would flounder on those roads, and tonight, they were mud to the axle.
He held less than a fifteen-minute advantage at most. Less, if he dawdled.
He could hunt them down. Devil as his witness, he would tear the bastard apart.
“Get on!” Vincent ordered. He swung into the saddle, caught James under the arm, and hauled him up with all his strength. The boy came half over the cantle before locking both arms around Vincent’s middle. “Hold fast, and don’t let go.”
James sobbed against his back, “She told me to find you, and I did, so you have to find her, please…”
Vincent wheeled Colossus toward the western dark. “I will,” he swore, and gave the horse his heel, “if it’s the last breath I take.”
The carriage lurched into another deep rut, and Emma’s shoulder cracked against the window casing hard enough to rattle her teeth, though she scarcely felt it through the dull throb already drumming behind her eyes.
Across the narrow gap, Cillian lounged with one boot propped on the squabs, flicking a small, ivory-scaled folding blade open and shut, open and shut.
Click. Clack.
A maddening little rhythm that frayed at what was left of her nerves.
She said nothing. She didn’t trust herself to speak. The back of her head throbbed where the candlestick had caught her, and her throat felt raw. If she opened her mouth now, she thought the only thing that might come out was a scream.
And what good has that done me so far…
“Seven years,” Cillian muttered conversationally in the rolling darkness. “Seven years I’ve waited on that boy to take a fever, a fall, a bad turn… anything that might do the decent thing for me. And he only got ruddier and happier.”
Emma pressed herself smaller into the corner.
“Nothing to say to that?” His head came round. The swing of the lamp shadowed his gruelling face. “No. You’ll talk soon enough, I suppose.
After a few more seconds of silence, he went on, “I offered you the painless route, Emma. A quiet cottage outside Cork. Funds enough to keep you in bread, thread, and all those silly books you like to bury your nose in. Your simpleton brother under the same roof so you could play nursemaid until you were both grey. Most of the ton would call that a grand mercy.”
“Where is Grandmama,” she whispered.
“Bath. Her sister’s. Perfectly safe.” He scrubbed the back of his wrist over his mouth. “You know I’m no monster, cousin. I had it all arranged so neatly. No one touched who needn’t be. James living merry and well out of my path, and the world none the wiser.”
“If you’re no monster,” Emma said, forcing the words up through the tremor in her jaw, “then stop the carriage. Let me down. We can pretend nothing happened, I’ll tell James it was just a mis—”
“It is rather past that!” he barked, and the knife snapped shut so sharply that Emma startled.
“And whose doing is that, hm? If you had simply stayed in the shires like a compliant little girl, I wouldn’t have been forced to improvise this vulgar mess.
But no. No matter. You can suffer in his stead. ”
Emma strained against the rough twine eating into her flesh until a fresh burn flared. “He will expose you, you know. James will go to the constables, and he will—”
“He will tell them what, exactly?” Leaning into the wash of the silvery lantern, Cillian went suddenly hollow and gaunt—the refined gentleman peeling away to reveal something grotesque beneath.
“A grown, dim-witted child who can’t even spell his own Christian name, blubbering about his wicked cousin?
They’ll pat his head and call for the Bedlam carriage. ”
He settled back against the dark upholstery, wearing the smug grin of a fox fat in the henhouse. “No. You are the last stitch, cousin. One clean snip, and there’s not a soul left in England to brand me a liar.”
Emma opened her mouth to scream—
The carriage braked with such bone-rattling force she was flung near clear off her seat.
“What in the devil...” Cillian slammed his fist against the wooden ceiling, “I gave no order to stop!”
“Tree’s down across the lane, Mr. Haverleigh!” a groggy voice shouted back through the downpour. “Me an’ Sykes’ll shift it.”