DARE THE WILD WIND (24 page)

Fearing the captain's interference as much as they did, he gathered up their bags and shepherded them at a brisk pace to the end of the wharf.  Hailing a hackney, he handed them quickly inside, telling the driver to stop for no other passengers on the way.

Eleanore Wittworth's was only address in
London they knew, and Brenna gave their destination as Grosvenor Square.  Then, letting out a breath, she sank with Fenella onto the coach's ripped and wine  stained seat. 

As soon as the hackney had rounded the first twist in the street, Brenna rapped on the roof.  She leaned out the window.

"Driver, pull up.  Take us to the Tower."

Chapte
r
15

Joining a stream of merchants and late afternoon petitioners, they entered through the Tower's Lion Gate and crossed a long bridge to William the Conquerer's ancient stone pile striding the moat.  Caged lions roared, and the odor of fresh dung floated over the moat from the menagerie, a reminder that the King's pets could be loosed on invaders or escaping prisoners.

At the grated iron gate in the Outer Ward, guards with crossed pikes halted them.  The yeoman warder frowned at the papers in front of him wit
hout looking up. 

"Your business?"

Brenna asked to see the captain of the guard.  His eyes shot up at the soft burr of
Scotland in her voice.

"On what errand?" he asked sharply.

"I'll reveal that to the officer in charge."

"No one enters without my leave."

"It's plain my mistress is a lady of rank," Fenella said, feigning the indignant sputter of a servant.  "She doesn't answer to gatekeepers and baseborn louts."

The warder's gaze measured them, and Brenna was doubly grate
ful Eleanore Wittworth had insisted on sending them off properly gowned.  Eleanore's village dressmaker had hastily ripped a rose brocade at the seams and restitched it for Brenna, and Fenella wore a bombazine gown left behind by a governess. 

Then his glance fell to the bags at their feet.  Skepticism replaced
the caution in his face.

"Perhaps you'd like to see the letter I have from the Viscountess Wittworth," Brenna said in as imperious a tone as she could muster.  "I'll be staying in her house in
London."

There was no need to break the seal on Eleanore's letter.  At the sight of the Wittworth crest, he allowed them to pass. 

The clerk escorting them knocked at a nail
studded oak door.  Brenna and Fenella set their portmanteaus down, and Brenna smoothed the travel creased silk of her skirt.

The young officer of the day rose from his mahogany writing table.  Despite a game leg, he stumped forward to offer them a gallant bow.  Then, when they spoke, his welcoming air vanished.      

"So you're Scots," he said shortly.   Limping stiffly, he r
etreated back behind his desk.

Brenna ignored his tone.  "We've come to see Cameron MacCavan and his men."

"And you expect to find them here?"  His voice had a mocking edge.  "The Tower houses prisoners of the highest rank."

"Lord MacCavan is chief of his clan," Brenna said, keeping a rein on her temper.  "He was one of the Prince's closest aides."

"
Highland chieftains count for very little here."  He took up a quill and dipped it in the inkwell atop his desk.  "And aides of the Pretender even less."

Brenna swallowed a blistering rush of words.  "If you don't hold Lord MacCavan and his men in the Tower, surely you can tell us where they've been taken."     

He looked up.  "It hardly signifies where your Rebels are held.  You won't be granted leave to visit them."    

Beside her, Fenella sucked in a small shocked breath.

"You must be mistaken.  We've come a very long way."

"Then you have my sympathies," he said coldly.  "You've made a trip to no purpose."

"Please, Captain," Fenella persisted in a softer voice, "you can't be entirely heartless.  Only think how you'd feel if you were in their place."

"Spare me your sermons," he snapped.  "I was an officer of the line.  A ball from a Scotti
sh musket shattered my leg and my career.  Now I'm fit for nothing but scribbling at a desk."

For a second, Brenna found it impossible to speak. 

"How easy for you to feel sorry for yourself," she lashed out with a scathing look.  "Other men have lost their legs or their lives.  What a pity you'll be inconvenienced by a limp."

His face went livid.  "Who are you to judge me, you camp
following slut?"  He started up from behind his desk.  "I'll have you thrown from the Tower gate."

Brenna stiffened, her anger matching his.  "Do so at your peril, Captain.  My brother Lord Dalmoral is loyal to the Crown."

She saw a wary flicker in his eyes.  "How is it, then, that you come to the Tower inquiring after traitors to the King?" 

"The men we ask after are neighbors and our childhood friends.  I've requested no more from you than where Lord MacCavan and his men are being held, and in the most civil manner.  Your behavior is past all belief."

The hauteur and disdain in her voice had effect.  The captain sank back into his chair, but he had gone too far to yield easily.  "Do you think I have a list of every prisoner taken at
Culloden Moor?"

"There must be a list," Brenna snapped.  "His Majesty's government can scarcely be so slack."

"It's hardly politic for a Scot to take the King's government to task," he
reminded her in an acid voice.

"If you want the whereabouts of your Rebels, you'll have to speak to Colonel Teague.  Tomorrow."  He gestured to the glazed, mullioned window and a sky streaked orange and red by the sinking sun.

"Unhappily, the hour is late.  I'd advise you to get back across the bridge before the guard draws it for the night."

               
*****

The rapidly gathering dusk meant they would have to find lodging for the night.  She hadn't scrupled at using Lady Wittworth's letter with the warder, or at flinging Malcolm's name at the captain.  But there was little likelihood her claims would reach the ears of the Crown.  Imposing on the Wittworths' hospitality in Grosvenor Square would be a different matter.  Brenna wouldn't have Eleanore or Geoffrey Wittworth accused of sheltering two Scotswomen who plotted to rescue captured Rebel prisoners.

Until they crossed the Tower bridge with the last of the day's visitors, Brenna thought of nothing but
Cam and Iain.  Now the buildings and tall narrow houses jammed cheek by jowl along the cobbled street cast a premature darkness across it, and she came alert to a change in the crowd around them.  It had thinned, and eyes darted away, no longer meeting theirs.

Night would fall quickly, and
London was alive with cutpurses and worse.  Past All Hallows Church, they walked faster, stomachs cramping with hunger.  Parting with a few pennies for a cold pigeon pie from a street vendor packing her wares, Brenna asked her if she could direct them to a modest lodging.

The grandmotherly woman eyed the silk of Brenna's dress and the bags at their feet.  Her expression changed to sympathy.

"Did your fine gentleman toss you out?" she asked in a tone that suggested nothing better could be expected from any man.

Brenna shook her head.  "We've only just arrived in
London, and we have very little we can pay."

"And no family to go to?" the older woman guessed with a shrewd look.  When Brenna nodded, she wiped her hands briskly on her apron.  "Then I know an inn that should suit you right enough."

"It has to be the cheapest we can find," Fenella insisted.

"Bless me, child," the p
ie vendor said with a cackling laugh, "there's none cheaper than Annie Swain's."

With the directions she gave them, Brenna and Fenella
made their way to a herringbone timbered house on Paradise Street.  Night had closed in, and to their relief, the proprietor agreed to take them in when Brenna told her the name of the woman who had sent them.  Her only demand was that they pay in advance. 

They quickly saw most of the other boarders were sailors, ashore from ships anchored in the
Thames.  Though the innkeeper didn't appear overly fastidious, she seemed respectable, and she swore to Brenna and Fenella an aging spinster had lived alone and unmolested in her establishment for more than seven years.

As she lit the candle on the rough
hewn table in their room, a pock faced sailor bumped unsteadily by her in the hall, then stared at them through their open door.

"The seafaring men who stay in my rooms are here and gone again in a fortnight."  She flicked with a fingernail at a crusted spot of food on the fichu at her bosom.  "They're off for the drabs and grog shops as q
uick as they can navigate from my table.  My swamper will see they're no trouble to you.  The only bother you'll have will be with me, if you don't pay your board on time."

Brenna had no intention of paying for more than a day or two in advance.  "Our stay in
London may be short," she said, "but be sure you'll have your money promptly."

"See I do," the landlady said, her hand on the door.

When she closed it behind her, Fenella made haste to bar it.  Together they shook out the change of gowns Eleanore Wittworth had ordered her maid to slip into their portmanteaus
.  For Brenna, an emerald taffeta, and a flowing violet
robe a la francaise
with a ruffle  trimmed underskirt in a rich mulberry satin.  For Fenella, there was a second bombazine dress, in a russet that contrasted to flattering effect against her shining blonde hair.

They would take their meals in their chamber.  The door was stout and heavy, and they would stay well out of the way of the sailors who came and went in the upstairs hall and the crudely
furnished common room off the kitchen.  The room was passably clean, and the straw  ticked mattresses were innocent of lice.  Though Brenna longed for a feather bed, the inn's cots would be more comfortable than their hard berths aboard the TRIDENT.  They ate the meal of soup and bread the serving girl brought and reveled in turn in the simple luxury of a hot bath.  Afterward, Brenna lay down on her straw pallet to plan for the next day, to drop into spent slumber as soon as her head found the flat and lumpy pillow.

When they set out the next day, the streets were blocked by crowds.  Despite the early hour, the ghostly morning fog had parted its cool wet curtain and fled before a warm May sun.  Bystanders clogged every curbstone and doorway, and a great throng surged ahead of an approaching procession. 

They tried to thread and then wedge their way forward, buffet
ed against shopfronts and the rough stone walls of buildings by merchants in silks and candlemakers and butchers in stained leather aprons.  Women jostled and shoved them as carelessly as the men.  In the press of bodies, the acrid smell of sweat and the ever present odor of offal in the gutters all but made Brenna gag.

A sharp elbow jabbed into Brenna's chest.  She was thrown back against a splintery door, the wind knocked from her lungs.  Fenella squeezed quickly to her side, but Brenna shook her head to indicate she wasn't hurt.  Next to them a stout, pasty
faced woman in a mobcap craned to see over the heads in front of them.  She let out a squawk of triumph, in chorus with cheers and catcalls from the other spectators.  Whatever the mob waited for had come into view.

"What do you see?" Brenna asked as soon she could find her breath.  She had to shout the question before the blowsy woman turned.  "What's drawn such a crowd?"

"A right lot o' them," she said with a wheezing laugh.  "On the way to Kennington Common."  She gave Brenna a sly, gap
toothed grin.  Then she took in the satin of Brenna's mulberry colored gown.  "Does the toff that keeps ye clean the wax from your ears?  'Tis the Scots, jigging their way to gallows row."

Brenna's heart went still.  "They can't already be tried?"

Her expression avid, the woman had turned back toward the approaching tattoo of drums.  But the words wrenched from Brenna drew her around again, and with her some of the crowd around them.  And sudden hostility dawned in her face. 

"
Can't already be tried
?"  She mimicked the soft Scottish lilt of Brenna's voice for the curious circle around them.

"Surely they can't have found juries so quickly for the Rebels?"  Brenna said, uneasy at the suspicion kindling in the faces surrounding them. 

"Found them and tried the bloody traitors," a wizened wiry man said and spat.  "And sent the first of them to swing."

Fenella let out a choked sound.  "No."

Brenna clamped her fingers around Fenella's arm to silence her.  More of the crowd that penned them had turned.  In another moment, everyo
ne in earshot would set on them.

"My maid is a softhearted wench," she said, forcing contempt into her voice.  "She can't drown a rat from our cupboard."