An Unsuitable Bride (47 page)
Marcus mopped his bowl with a thick slice of wheaten bread and heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “So, are we going to bribe the jailers to let her go? I doubt they’ll be averse to a healthy sum.”
“No.” Peregrine drained his ale tankard, setting it down on the deal table with a thump as he pushed back his stool. “ ’Tis too risky, Marcus. Sir Stephen’s her accuser, and he’s the Justice of the Peace. It won’t be worth their while to take a bribe and face his wrath. They’ll lose their livelihoods. It won’t do.”
“No, I see your point. So?”
A grim smile hovered around Peregrine’s mouth. It was time to play the game his way now. Alexandra had insisted on playing it her way, and it had landed her in a prison cell. It was past time he asserted himself. “She’ll be out of there within the hour, if I have to kill someone first.”
“But we’ll do our best to avoid that, I trust,” Marcus murmured wryly as he followed Peregrine back outside.
Peregrine’s fatigue had vanished. He was infused with purpose now, his plan forming and reforming in his mind. First a visit to the prison to see how many jailers they would have to contend with, and then they had to gain access to the prisoner. Money would do that much, he was certain. He refused to allow his imagination to wander, to start thinking about how she was, what conditions she was living under. He must concentrate only on getting her out of there.
But what if she is in the common cell, among the rogues and ruffians of the highways and byways?
Not even Alex, fighter though she was, would be able to hold her own among a mob of rough, thieving women. For an instant,
the ghastly thought intruded, and it took all of his willpower to dismiss it. He could do nothing to alter the past but everything to change the present. He would adapt his plan to whatever conditions he found her in.
“Do you have a pistol with you?” he asked Marcus as they went into the stable yard.
“Yes, and my sword.” Marcus touched the hilt of the sword at his hip. “So, we
are
going to be fighting our way out of there?”
“Not if I can help it,” Perry said. “But sometimes a show of force is necessary. I have a pair of pistols and my sword.”
“We’ll play it by ear,” his friend stated. “Dorchester is a sleepy market town. I doubt that the jail will be bristling with armed guards.”
“Let us hope not.” Suddenly, Perry veered off towards the stable block. Marcus waited, and his friend eventually appeared with a rope halter that he pushed into the deep pocket of his coat. “Let’s go, then.” Perry set off at a brisk walk in the direction of Shire Hall, Marcus falling in beside him. “Here’s what I need you to do.”
Alexandra paced the small cell back and forth, forcing her cold, cramped limbs to move, swinging her arms as vigorously as she could. She had the stub of another candle, begrudgingly provided by the old jailer when he’d brought her bread and water a few hours earlier. As always, she wished she had some sense of the passing of time. The old man had also produced a bowl of watery porridge on production of a silver shilling, but the price for these creature comforts, if they could be called such, increased day by day, and Alex was beginning to worry now that her supply of coin might not last until she was brought before the judge. As time inched by, she became increasingly impatient for the moment that hitherto she had been dreading. Anything was better than these interminable dark hours of inaction, not knowing what the future might hold for her.
She had begun to exercise her body as much as she could and had started cataloguing the library in her head, going through the shelves one by one, methodically seeing herself pack and crate each individual book.
When she missed one, she made herself go back to the beginning. It kept her mind off the sounds, which were as unbearable as ever, and gave her at least the illusion of a purpose.
Above Alexandra, in the afternoon sunlight filtering through dusty windowpanes, Marcus Crofton idly twirled a gold sovereign on the table so that it caught the pale sun, winking seductively at the old man who hadn’t taken his eyes off it. He didn’t know his visitor, but everything about the young man bespoke authority.
“As I said, I am Sir Stephen’s agent,” the visitor repeated when it seemed the man was so mesmerized by the dance of the coin that he wasn’t listening to him. “Sir Stephen wishes me to see your prisoner at once.” He caught up the coin and folded it into his palm, fixing the old man with a cold stare. “I would like you to take me to her now, if you please.” He tossed the coin into the air and caught it again.
“Aye, sir. But I ought to ask the beadle, sir. Master Gilby’s mighty fussy about ’is prisoners, sir. He don’t like folks goin’ down to visit less’n he’s ’ere ’imself. I don’t ’ave no orders, sir.’
Marcus smiled and flicked the coin with his thumb so that it fell onto the table beneath the jailer’s watchful eyes. “You do now. And I should remind you that Sir Stephen Douglas does not take kindly to having his orders countermanded.”
The man’s hand in fingerless mittens shot out and scooped up the coin. “If ’tis Sir Stephen’s orders, then I s’pose it’ll be all right, sir.” He shuffled to a hook on the wall, where hung a ring of keys. “If’n ye’ll follow me, sir. Mind yer step, ’tis dark an’ a bit damp like.” He took up a horn lantern and held it aloft as he opened a narrow door in the far wall of the chamber.
Marcus grimaced and followed close. A flight of stone steps led down into darkness. The lantern offered a swaying path of light, revealing a long corridor lined with wooden doors, all with gratings at the top. Whispers filled the air and grew louder as the lantern’s light swayed from side to side, offering momentary illumination in the barred windows of the cell doors. Marcus felt the hairs on the back of his neck lift. The jailer stopped at a door in the middle of the corridor and hung his lantern on a hook above the door before inserting a key.
“’Ere’s a visitor fer ye.” He pushed the door open a crack. “I’ll ’ave to lock it after ye, sir. ’Tis the beadle’s orders, sir.”
Marcus gave a quick thought for Perry, who should by now be in the chamber above, waiting for the old man. If their luck held, Perry would only have to immobilize the one jailer. He nodded his agreement and stepped swiftly into the dimly lit cell, grimacing at the reek of damp straw and ordure. The woman standing in the middle of the cell was immobile, staring at him, blinking as if she had never seen his like before.
“Mistress Hathaway?” He had never called her anything else, and since, as far as he could see in the dim light, she still looked like the middle-aged spinster librarian he knew, he couldn’t think how else to address her. He looked more closely and saw that her appearance was, in fact, altered. Normally trim and neat to a fault, she was disheveled, her hair hanging lank and bedraggled to her shoulders. Her eyes were deeply shadowed, her skin waxen in the dim light of the tallow candle. Her gown was the same shabby one he remembered, but the humpback was gone, and the material hung in loose, limp folds around a body that seemed thin and frail.
“Dear God, what have they done to you?” he heard himself exclaim as the jailer closed the door and the key turned in the lock.
For a moment, Alexandra didn’t recognize her visitor. She hadn’t known her stepbrother well, indeed had only seen him as an occasional visitor at the dinner table at Combe Abbey. Now she shook her head as if dismissing confusion. “Master Crofton . . . I . . . what are you doing here?”
“Never mind that. Can you walk?”
“Yes . . . yes, of course.” She could feel the blood beginning to flow again. Somehow, someone, someone with no reason to hurt her, knew she was there. He could get a message to Perry. “It’s only been a few days, I think, but in truth, ’tis hard to tell day from night down here.”
“I don’t wonder,” he said with a shudder. “Peregrine will be dealing with the old man. As soon as he gets down here, we have to walk out. We have to walk out as if we have simply been about our legitimate business in the council chambers above.” He cocked his head, listening for a sound from above, but the walls and ceiling were so thick that no sound penetrated the dungeons from the upstairs chambers.
Alex wrestled with her confusion. How did Peregrine get there? How was her stepbrother involved? But the question lost all significance as she registered what he had said. “Just tell me what to do,” she said simply.
Peregrine had insisted on immobilizing the jailer himself. If the man was hurt, he didn’t want Marcus involved. So far, as far as they could tell, there was only the one jailer on duty, and if the gods smiled, their luck would hold. He could certainly handle one old man single-handed. It was also immensely reassuring to know that there was no reason for the elderly jailer, or indeed the beadle, to recognize either of them. He himself was completely unknown in Dorchester, and Marcus would have had no previous dealings with men such as the jailer and the beadle. If they could make their escape cleanly, without pursuit, they could be free and clear before anyone knew what had happened. The prisoner would have vanished off the face of the earth, the librarian a mere memory. And no one would look
for the timid, mousy spinster in the radiant and assured wife of the Honorable Peregrine Sullivan.
At least, that was what he was counting upon. As he sauntered carelessly into the council chamber a few minutes after Marcus had entered, he remembered wryly the old aphorism: if you touch pitch, expect to be tarred in your turn. Marry a criminal, and find yourself on the wrong side of the law. He, Peregrine Sullivan, a thoroughly upright member of Society, with a strict code of honor, whose primary goal in life was to uphold the honor of the ancient Blackwater name, was about to commit a crime, quite possibly violent, that could bring him to the gallows.
The council chamber was empty at first when he entered. A door in the far wall stood ajar onto a dark space, and he walked over to it. The smell of damp and rotting straw rose up in noxious waves from the darkness at the base of the flight of steps. He cursed Stephen Douglas with silent vehemence that was nonetheless powerful for being unspoken and stepped back quickly at the sound of shuffling steps below.
