A Gentleman of Means (22 page)

Jake appeared much more startled by her concern than he did by the evidence of his close escape. “Thank you, miss,” he mumbled, and shrugged his clothes back into place, clearly embarrassed at her seeing even an inch of bare skin.

“What’s this now? Acid?” The leader of the walkers was clearly a little slow on the uptake. “Never mind. Miss Meriwether-Astor, I presume?”

“No,” she snapped. “My name is Madeleine Aster, and I am a guest of Captain Hayes at Haybourne House.”

“Really,” he drawled. “And I suppose you and your friends are merely out for a walk?”

“We were taking a midnight flight in our touring balloon,” Andrew said with such dignity that Tigg might even have believed him if his heart hadn’t been pounding so hard. “I and my fiancée and Miss Aster.”

The leader’s gaze narrowed on the Lady. “And who might you be besides this gentleman’s fiancée?”

“I should think that when you are sent to collect someone, you might at least be able to identify her correctly,” she said in what was quite possibly the worst attempt at a Colonial accent Tigg had ever heard. There was no mistaking its tone of frigid offense, however. “I am Gloria Meriwether-Astor.”

Andrew’s hand convulsed on her sleeve, but there was no help for it now. It was a mad idea, but it was done now and the Lady must play it out, for good or ill.

“This is Captain Hayes. And since what brings you all here
en masse
is undoubtedly Papa’s hearing of our engagement, then I suppose I must assume our elopement is off?”

“Cl—Gloria, no,” Andrew managed.

She patted his arm. “I knew he would never permit it. For you are penniless, and he believes you to be a scurrilous fortune hunter.”

“All right, all right. Enough,” snapped the ringleader. “Our instructions are to bring the young lady to her father, so I suppose you’ll have to come, too, Captain Hayes, and explain yourself to him. Don’t envy you that one bit.”

“And what of my friends?” Claire asked, tilting her nose in the air. “Miss Aster’s driver has been injured. Their vehicle is at the farmhouse, there.” She nodded toward the river. “I suggest you allow them to take him to the nearest doctor, or at the very least, to ask for assistance of the farmer’s wife.”

The ringleader looked a little put-upon at this wrinkle in his plans. But before he could reply yea or nay, there was a commotion in the woods—swearing—and in the next moment a barrel-shaped figure burst from between two fir trees and stomped into the circle of light cast by the moonglobes.

“Great balls of fire, Gloria!” Gerald Meriwether-Astor shouted. “What in the name of Zeus are you thinking?”

Claire gasped and clutched Andrew’s arm. Gently, he lifted it and laid it across her shoulders, where subsequently she felt a tiny tug as he released one of the fastenings that held the lightning rifle in place. A moment later there was another tug as he slid the switch forward and the rifle began to hum. She did her best to play the helpless damsel while inside, she rejoiced in having a man by her side who not only recognized her capabilities, but meant her to use them.

Gloria had frozen in place, but as one man, Jake and Tigg stepped protectively in front of her to block the fuming progress of her father, who, it seemed, would like nothing better than to haul off and backhand her.

“Gloria?” one of the men murmured. “Oo’s ’e talking to, then?”

“Well, girl? Out of my way, blackamoor. I want an answer from my daughter.”

Tigg stared him down—literally, for the man was at least six inches shorter. “I am Lieutenant Thomas Terwilliger of Her Majesty’s Air Corps, and I’ll thank you to address me that way. I am not moving until I am certain this young lady will come to no harm.”

Gerald swore with such imagination that Claire apprehended exactly where Gloria’s repertoire had come from. But none of it moved Tigg an inch. He merely folded his arms, alongside Jake, whose left hand had moved to rest casually on the haft of the Texican blade at his hip. His right hand, considering the injury to his shoulder, lay casually in the pocket of his flight jacket.

“This is your daughter?” The ringleader of the vultures gave Claire a look that could have seared a side of bacon, to which she returned a sunny smile.

“Of course it is, you dolt,” he snapped. “I don’t know what game you’re playing now, missy, but the jig is up. You’re coming with me and we’re going home, pronto.”

Instead of meekly admitting that the jig was indeed up and going with her father, Gloria’s chin took on an obstinate firmness that eerily reflected that of her parent. “No, I’m not, Dad.”

“What?”

“You have to get out of England immediately. We don’t have time to argue. They’ll be here any moment.”

“Who will?”

“Barnaby Hayes, Dad, and the government men staying at his house.”

“I’m not afraid of that bounder! I don’t care how many men he’s got with him—he deserves to be shot on sight for aspiring to my daughter.”

“He doesn’t aspire to me, you fool,” she snapped, losing her patience in a rush. “He suggested I write that letter to get you to come here. It’s a trap, Dad, and you’ve sprung it. They’re agents of the Walsingham Office and I was their bait!”

Claire imagined this was likely the first time Gerald Meriwether-Astor had ever been struck dumb by anything his daughter said. He stared at her, his mouth working as though he were chewing tobacco. “I don’t believe it.”

She threw up her hands and slipped through Tigg’s and Jake’s protective shield. “Believe it or don’t, but it’s true. Didn’t you see them firing on our touring balloon? Claire and Andrew were trying to
rescue
me, and all your stupid henchmen have done is slowed us down—and injured Jake!” She gripped that young man’s wrist, and he winced. “I know what you’ve done. I know about the convicts in Venice. How you supplied the weapons and ships for the French invasion. About the attempt to shoot down the Prince of Wales. I know it all, and I’ll tell you right now, if this is the man you’ve become, then I wash my hands of you.”

The ringleader stiffened in shock, and around them, men began to mutter among themselves.

“Shut up!” Gerald snapped over his shoulder. To Gloria, he said, “None of that is your business, except to spend the money those deals made.”

“I’m not spending that money. It’s blood money. Not that it will make any difference to you, but I’m leaving this place with my friends and making my own way from here. I doubt I will ever see you again.”

“Nonsense, missy. Hatch, Corling, take her and bring her along.”

“My name is
Gloria
, not
missy
, and I tell you, I won’t go.”

“Hatch!” Gerald whirled to find that his team of burly men tasked with rounding up one slender young woman had backed away into the trees, leaving them under the eave of the forest, where it opened on the slope. “Corling, what is the matter with you! Obey my order at once!”

“That were you,” said a voice behind one of the moonglobes, “what engineered the French invasion? You?”

“What of it, you dolt?”

“I didn’t know I was signing up with a bloody Bourbon lover when I took this job,” someone else said.

“Me either. Shot down the Prince o’ Wales? That’s treason, that is. What’s next, ’er Majesty?”

“The Californias, actually,” Gloria said.

“I don’t care about no Californias,” Hatch said, branches cracking under his boots as he took another step back. “But I ain’t havin’ it noised about that I’m a Bourbon lover. I’d never get a drink in these parts ever again.”

“My cousin died on the beach during the invasion,” came another voice, injured, with a foreign accent. “I’ve a mind to knock you down and take what’s in your pockets for his widow!”

Beside Gloria, Tigg stiffened, and his head swiveled sharply as he sought the source of the voice in the dark.

“Hold,” Hatch told whoever it was. “No time. We’ll leave ’im for Her Majesty’s men and a fine justice that will be. Come on, lads, we still got time to scarper—they’ve half a mile to cover.”

And just like that, the moonglobes winked out and the vultures faded into the trees until nothing could be heard but the sound of cracking branches. Then silence. A few snowflakes drifted down, as if the commotion had shaken them out of the clouds.

“How dare you? I paid you!” Gerald shouted after them.

In the distance, Claire heard the sound of an answering shout, but it meant nothing. For a dark shape stepped clear of the trees holding a heavy, double-bored pressure rifle.

Tigg sucked in a breath. “No,” he said, the word sounding almost like a moan. “Oh, no.”

“Nice to see you again, boy,” the man said pleasantly. “And your friend, too.”

Jake swore under his breath, and his hand jerked on his knife.

“Try it, and I promise you I will no longer be playing cat and mouse.”

“Where did you get that gun?” Gloria said sharply.

“It’s one of ours,” Gerald said at once. “The Astor fifty-five caliber with the—”

“I know what it is, Dad,” Gloria said impatiently. “What I want to know is whether this man is, as I suspect, the one who fired at me through the drawing-room window the other night.”

“Know your ordnance, do you?” the man inquired. “That’s refreshing in a lady. Pity you don’t play the piano as well. All of you, step back.”

“Who are you?” Gerald demanded. “If you’re the only loyal one of that miscreant crew who just deserted me, I’ll pay double your price and we’ll be off.”

“I don’t work for you. Step back, away from the young lady. Now. I have as many cartridges as I need to deal with all of you, but I prefer to keep things clean.” The double bores of the Astor .55-calibre did not move from between Gloria’s eyes.

“I say again, who are you and what have you got to do with my daughter?” Gerald shouted.

“His name is Thomas Terwilliger,” Tigg said, “and he’s an assassin for the Famiglia Rosa in Venice.”

The man’s eyes glinted above the bores of the rifle. “Quick on the uptake, aren’t you, boy? Wish I could take credit for that, but I suppose I can’t.”

“You both have the same name?” Gloria asked. Then her eyes widened as well. “Tigg, you can’t mean this is—”

“Looks like we’ll both be disowning our fathers tonight,” Tigg said, his steady gaze never leaving that of his parent. “Unless they intend to make better choices than the ones we’ve seen up to now.”

“If you know what I am, you also know why I’m here,” Terwilliger said. “Stand out of the way and you won’t get hurt.”

“But why?” Tigg demanded, doing no such thing. Instead, he stepped in front of Gloria. “What has Gloria ever done to you—or the Family, for that matter?”

“Gloria? Don’t know a Gloria. My medallion is for Alice Chalmers. Now step back. I won’t ask you again. You’ll get the first barrel, and I’m not in a temper to miss.”

“I’m not Alice Chalmers!” Gloria shouted. “I only wish I were, being courted by Ian Hollys and having a dadburned future to look forward to! I’m Gloria Meriwether-Astor.”

The business end of the double barrel dipped an inch, the only indication of the assassin’s surprise.

“You’ve got the wrong girl, mate, and the right one is on the other side of the world, running cargo out of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias,” Tigg said.

How clever and brave he was! Claire could hardly breathe, the tension was so thick in the air. No one dared move, for the first to aim a lightning pistol would be the first to ensure Gloria’s instant death.

“I don’t believe you. How many girls of her description and acquaintance can be in this part of England?” Terwilliger lifted the barrel once more. “The Ministry of Justice was very specific. My … client … is a blond Colonial named Alice Chalmers, seen in the company of Captain Ian Hollys, whom she set free illegally from his lawful imprisonment. I am here to administer justice on their behalf. But if you force me to it, and obstruct the Doge’s justice, I cannot answer for the consequences.”

He did have them mixed up, Claire thought in despair. Herself, Alice, and poor Gloria, who of them all was the least guilty of any crime.

Gloria made a sound as her eyes rolled up in her head, and her knees buckled. As she fell forward between Jake and Tigg, a sizzle of lightning arced past the assassin, who had already begun to move in reaction to his target’s fall.

The blast of the pressure rifle sounded like Gabriel’s last trump, and a tree behind them cracked, split, and toppled. The reverberation rattled Claire from heels to skull, but it did not stop her from whipping the lightning rifle over her shoulder and taking aim at Terwilliger.

But she could not pin him down. Moving like a dancer, he aimed at Gloria’s recumbent form. His finger slid into the second trigger guard, and pulled.

“Gloria!” screamed Gerald Meriwether-Astor, and flung himself across his daughter’s unconscious body.

The bullet caught him full amidships, and he screamed again as the force of it flipped him over her, straight into the legs of Jake and Tigg, who went over backward under the weight of his body.

Lightning arced into the trees as Jake attempted a shot as he fell. A tree branch the size of a human being crashed down, and Andrew grabbed Claire, swinging her out of the way.

When she regained her feet, the rifle cradled in both arms, she sighted down the barrel and swung it in the direction of her last sight of the assassin.

The slope lay empty.

Snowflakes landed silently on the ground—as silent as the man who had vanished into the night.

In the distance, she heard the shouts of Her Majesty’s men.

Being grounded had never sat well with Alice. Being grounded while waiting for other people to pull off a rescue was making her plumb crazy. “There must be something we can do, Ian, besides sitting here biting our nails.”

“I am not biting my nails.” Indeed—they were in the crew’s quarters on
Swan
, and he was knotting a rope ladder for the fuselage. It wasn’t difficult work, merely time-consuming, and she ought to be helping him.

If she could bring herself to sit still for two minutes together.

“We should take her up,” she suggested. “Just a fast sail over to Haybourne House. They might need us.”

“We all agreed that the safest place for you is here.” He laid the long grid of the ladder along the deck and considered its length, then, satisfied, turned to her. “In fact, I suggest we remove to the house, which is more defensible.”

“More defensible than a military-grade airship?” Her eyebrows rose in disbelief.

“The gondola may deflect a bullet, but the fuselage will not—and
Swan
’s crew are quartered in the fuselage.”

“You don’t have to tell me the layout of my own ship.”

“I am simply pointing out that while
Swan
is nearly unbeatable in the air, on the ground I would rather rely on the greater safety that granite and brick provide. In fact, why don’t we go up into the tower? At least there we might be able to see their return.”

As suggestions went, it wasn’t much, but maybe all the steps up into the tower would take the edge off the nervous energy burning her up inside.

They crossed the park on the gravel walks, Alice’s shoulder bumping his from time to time, and she wondered if he had forgotten all about the things he had said in the landau a few days before. Yes, he’d said they’d discuss this—this
thing
between them once everything was over and Gloria was safe, but still …

Alice sighed. Everything seemed to be conspiring to teach her patience.

“There are eighty-four steps,” Ian informed her cheerfully as he unlocked a door off the dining room, which she had for some reason assumed merely opened into the library. “After you.”

By the time they reached the top and he had ushered her out onto the open roof of the tower, she was winded enough to admit that this had accomplished one thing, anyway. She walked to the parapet and leaned on the roughly hewn pale stone to catch her breath.

Alice lifted her face to the woolen sky. “Look—it’s snowing.”

“I hope it will not lessen their chances of returning safely.” Ian joined her, his hands clasped over the edge of the parapet, one shoulder leaning comfortably against hers. “Are you warm enough?”

In her flight jacket, she could cling to a fuselage in a gale, and he knew it, but it was kind of him to ask. “Yes. So how far do the Hollys holdings extend?”

“You will have to come up here with me in daylight so that I may show you. But in practical terms, the estate is nearly a thousand acres, with six tenant farms and half a mile of fishing rights on the river, which is on the other side of the first farm.”

“A thousand acres,” Alice breathed. “I’ve heard of ranches owned by the Californios in the Royal Kingdom of Spain ten times that size … but things are more spread out there. How does a person get used to owning so much property?”

The sum total of her ownership was half of
Swan
and what she could carry in her valise. Which, she supposed, was a lot more than she’d left Resolution with. At least this airship wasn’t stolen. It had been … recovered.

“It is a responsibility,” Ian replied, “and I suppose one grows into it. As a child and a young man, I helped on the farms during harvest, planted roses with my mother, and flew over all of it in the touring balloon—cows and sheep tend to be hard on fencing, and until I left to join the Corps, my job during holidays from school was to repair it.”

“So you didn’t grow up taking dancing lessons and gambling?”

He laughed. “Hardly. Though I do aspire to Claire’s skill at cowboy poker.”

“Don’t we all—though I give her a run for her money. Or toothpicks, as the case may be.”

“Does the property—the house—do
I
make you uneasy, Alice? Is that the real source of these questions?”

“Not uneasy, no. It’s just … not what I’m used to, that’s all. And if—” She stopped. What if she was mistaken and her inexperience had led her to read something into his words the other day that wasn’t there? What if she’d dreamed the whole thing? What if it never happened at all?

“And if I meant what I said that day in the landau, could you become used to it? Is that what you were going to say?”

“
Did
you mean it?” There was no sign of the touring balloon as far as she could see, which wasn’t very far in the dark. She turned to him. He was solid, visible. Close. And radiating warmth, the way people got when they were laboring under strong emotion.

“I did,” he said. “This is hardly an appropriate time, when our friends are in danger—when
you
are in danger—but I feel like champagne shaken in a bottle. I must speak, or explode.” He took her shoulders in both hands, so that they faced each other square on. “Alice, is there any hope that you might feel for me what I have come to feel for you? Sometimes I think there is—at the station, for instance, when you kissed me in that
highly
inappropriate manner—”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t like it.”

“I did like it. It shocked me to the core, and gave me hope that I might—that you might—that we—”

Was this really the arrogant, commanding Captain Hollys, this man who had been through hell and survived … and now could hardly get his words out? She felt exactly the same way—as though there was so much to say that it was all backing up in her throat, and all she could manage was a whisper. “That we what?”

“That we … might be more to each other than merely comrades in arms. That you might truly believe me when I say I want to offer you all that I have.”

She could hardly speak over the pounding of her heart. “I don’t want all that you have. I want the man who kissed me at the train station. The man who flies as well as I do—and who trusts me to take the helm when he can’t. The one who puts me first—me, an air pirate’s daughter with nothing to her name but half a ship and the clothes she stands up in. That’s what I want.”

He released a shuddering breath, as though he had been holding it. “I am not the man I was, Alice.”

“We would hardly be having this conversation if you were.”

“I do not think I would have survived these weeks since Venice without you. Even now, I—”

“Shh.” She put a finger to his lips, then slipped her arms around his neck as his hands slid to her waist. “You will get better. We’ll see this through together. And after that …”

“After that, will you marry me?” His voice was a whisper of hope in the silence. “Will you, Alice?”

She opened her lips to answer against his mouth. But the word never came out.

Crack!

The granite crenellation two feet from Ian’s elbow exploded in a thousand pieces, and without a second’s hesitation, he rolled her to the rooftop behind the parapet.

*

Claire thrust the lightning rifle into Andrew’s hands and dashed to Gloria’s side. With some difficulty, Jake and Tigg helped each other out from under Gerald Meriwether-Astor’s not inconsiderable weight, and Tigg laid a gentle hand on the man’s neck.

When Claire’s gaze met his, he shook his head.

Jake gazed down at the man’s body—and at the damage the propelled bullet had done. “Guess he won’t be invading the Californias after all.”

So many emotions and panicked questions were ricocheting inside Claire’s skull that the fate of the Californias was the least of her worries. “Gloria! Gloria, wake up. Oh, bother—why do I never think to carry smelling salts?”

“Because our friends do not tend to faint?” Andrew knelt next to her and snapped the rifle into its holster on her back while she patted Gloria’s cheeks.

A snowflake fell on the young woman’s eyelid and her lashes fluttered open. She groaned and closed them again. “Am I shot? Am I going to die?”

“No, darling,” Claire said. “Not for many years yet.”

Her eyes opened slowly and then she looked about her and sat up. “What happened?” Then her gaze fell on Gerald’s body. With a gasp, she said, “Dad! What’s wrong with Dad?”

Rolling to her knees, she reached for him—and then saw the black stain under his ribs. She reared back, both hands pushing at the air as if to deny the very evidence of her eyes. “What happened?”

Claire took her in her arms and pressed her shivering body close. “He saved your life, darling. You fainted and the assassin fired at you. As he pulled the trigger, your father threw himself across your body and took the bullet himself. And as you know, there is no surviving those bullets.”

Gloria gulped air, and pressed her face into Claire’s shoulder. “He died to save me?”

“Without a second’s hesitation,” she said softly into her friend’s hair.

Gloria shivered, and began to sob—great heaving sobs that seemed to come up from the very ground on which they knelt. “I was wrong—oh, I thought such terrible things—said such terrible things of him—and he—oh, Claire!” A shudder of breath, an attempt to gain control, and then she gave up under the onslaught, buried her head, and wept.

Long moments passed and Claire did not move, absorbing her friend’s distress. Sometimes there were simply no words that did justice to a situation. Sometimes only action would do, and sometimes the only action possible was a hug.

When the flood of her tears had at last been reduced to a trickle, Gloria straightened slowly, wiping her nose inelegantly with the hem of her skirt.

Andrew knelt beside them. “Claire,” he said quietly. “I do not like it that the assassin has disappeared with his mission unfinished.”

“I do not like it either,” she admitted, sitting back on her heels. She helped Gloria up and stood with one arm about her waist, lest her knees should give out again. “How could he conclude anything but that he had the wrong girl when her father sacrificed his very life with her name on his lips?”

“Precisely. Which leads me to conclude that he will certainly go after Alice.”

“But does he not believe she is in the Californias?”

Tigg rounded Gerald’s inert walking boots and touched her shoulder. “I don’t think he does, Lady. When Miss Gloria said she’d rather be Alice, being courted by Ian Hollys and having a future—begging your pardon, miss—it gave him another lead. He’s bound to follow it. It means his death if he doesn’t—a man with a medallion must carry out the Doge’s command, or die trying.”

“But—”

“It’s true, Lady,” Jake said. “I heard him tell it just so. And it wouldn’t take but a few enquiries at one of the inns along the post road to get directions straight to Hollys Park.”

“Because nobody expects a Venetian assassin,” Claire moaned in despair.

“So it’s true?” Gloria asked, her tone hollow with horror. “What he said? Because Dad proved that I was me, he now means to kill poor Alice?”

“He does, and Ian and she do not know for certain he is in Somerset.” Andrew took Gloria’s hand and squeezed it. “We must act quickly. Jake will go with you back to the touring balloon to wait for the Walsingham men and inform them of your father’s demise.”

When Gloria began to protest, he shook his head. “If they do not see his body
in medias res
, as it were, and hear the facts, you will never be free of them. It must be you, and you must not be alone. Claire, Tigg, and I will take the landau at once to Hollys Park, for Tigg is right. That is certainly where he has gone.”

“Mr. Andrew, I would rather help Jake and Gloria,” Tigg objected. “I am also in Her Majesty’s service, to say nothing of Lady Dunsmuir’s service. Even in the Walsingham Office, that name will carry weight.”

Claire’s mind cleared, and she saw all at once why Andrew had divided them this way. And also that she must be the one to explain. “No, dearest. You must come with us. You are—he is—”

Understanding lit Tigg’s eyes, and a weight seemed to settle at the same time in his shoulders. “He is my father. Do you think I have any influence with him? That anything I say will stop him, when he fired on Gloria without hesitation?”

“No, I do not. But if the worst comes to pass—” Oh, how could she say this? But she must. “If there is a fight, and tonight is to be his last on the earth, it is right that your face should be the last one he sees.”

Tigg’s whole body stiffened, and she could not read that beloved face in the dark. “You aim to kill him?”

“He aims to kill Alice, and already did for Gloria’s dad,” Jake pointed out.

“My only aim is that Alice should live to see the morning.” Claire forced the words through chilled lips. “Anything else is in God’s hands. Come. We do not have much time.”

For a moment, she thought Tigg would refuse. His presence was not, after all, strictly necessary. But something—some instinct—some knowledge of him that her years as companion and mother figure had given her told her that
necessary
could have more than one meaning.

“All right, Lady,” Tigg said quietly. “I only hope the landau will ignite on that slope.”

“Let us find out, then, as quickly as we can.”