Dedicated Villain (47 page)

Came a sudden thunder of hooves. A mocking voice shouted, “Catch me if you can,
espèce d'imbéciles!
”

“Mathieson's away!” howled Gregor.

“After him!”

“He's turned the horses loose!”

“There he goes! Shoot him down!”

“No! We'll have the dragoons upon us!
No shooting!
”

The little encampment became a confusion of running, cursing men, who raced for saddles and their milling horses.

Swinging astride a piebald mare, Torrey did not wait for a saddle, but sent his mount galloping in hot pursuit of Rumpelstiltskin, already a rapidly diminishing blur across the meadows. A minute later, Heywood was also mounted and tearing after the other two. Gregor threw his saddle onto a rangy black horse and began to wrestle with leathers and buckles.

MacTavish shouted, “No more! Gregor—help get the horses into the paddock! Let Torrey and Heywood catch the swine!”

“Small chance of that,” said my lady, her worried gaze on Fiona's drawn, white face.

“Rob,” said Bradford, his own face reflecting shocked dismay, “you are absolutely sure? He seemed such a—well, such a likeable young fellow.”

“His charm has fooled many,” said MacTavish, also slanting a compassionate glance at the silent Fiona. “But he sometimes uses another name, sir; one you may have heard. It is—Otton.”

“
What
?” Still clutching his saddle, Gregor jerked around. “
Otton
you say? Isnae that the murrrrdering scoundrel tried tae torment information oot o' poor Quentin Chandler? And Chandler already sore wounded? He's
Mathieson
? Och! It fair boggles ma mind ye coulda stomached him, Robbie!”

“I'd little choice. He had the list. Without it …” MacTavish shrugged helplessly.

“
Without
it!” exclaimed Bradford. “The question is what'll
the conscienceless scoundrel do
with
it? All our heads will roll if he sells it to the military.”

Dazedly, Fiona whispered, “No! He'd not do so base a thing! However—however b-bad he may be … he'd not do
that.
”

Elizabeth left her grandmother and crossed to Fiona. “Dearest,
please
do not look so heartsick. He's—he's nae worth a single tear! He only courted me because he'd somehow learned of my inheritance.”

Racked by grief, Fiona closed her eyes.
She
had told Roland of that windfall. He'd wasted no time, acting on it. Elizabeth was so very beautiful … Perhaps he'd decided she was the—the better bargain … She turned to MacTavish, a bewildered pleading in her pale face that made him wince. In a cracked, thin little voice she asked, “Do you say that—that Captain Mathieson tortured one of—of the couriers, Robbie?”

MacTavish could not bear to look at her. His accent becoming pure Scots, as it tended to do when he was upset, he said gruffly, “I'm waeful sorry tae tell ye, lassie. But—aye, he did that. And sent murrrdering assassins after Ligun Doone hissel'. His crimes 'gainst our people are many, and he's fair withoot honour or merrrcy.”

Fiona swayed a little, and a faint whimper escaped her.

Bradford hurried to her side and Elizabeth moved back allowing him to slip a consoling arm about his daughter. “Come, child,” he said very gently. “You have had a bad shock, but 'twill pass. You mistook your heart, is all. I know it hurts now, but—as well you found out in time, m'dear. Come …”

He led her away and she went with him like one in a trance, scarcely aware of what she was doing.

My lady looked after them, her own bright eyes dimmed by tears. “Poor little soul,” she murmured. “So much for his vows and declarations, the ingrate!” She blew her nose daintily and dried her eyes. “Well, Rob? Do you really think Mathieson will use that list 'gainst us? He holds many lives in his bloodstained hands.”

MacTavish stared at the campfire. “I think Miss Fiona was
right, ma'am. There is a limit even to his baseness. And—I believe he once gave his word never to betray us.”

Gregor sneered low-voiced, “Ye canna think such as
that
verrrmin would hesitate fer one instant tae betray us was there money in it for his ainself? Hah!”

“He'll not betray us,” said MacTavish, still frowning fixedly at the flames. “He'll more likely try to blackmail those on the list, but we'll get it back, never fear. Meanwhile, that shall have to wait, for I think we must now abandon our hopes to get through to the chosen place. 'Tis too far—the odds 'gainst us too great.”

“Yes, I agree, alas.” Disheartened, my lady sighed wearily. “Would to God we'd a closer hiding place. We've come so far … tried so hard. To be defeated now is cruelly hard!”

MacTavish lifted his eyes and smiled at her. “I know of a closer place, ma'am. A place where the treasure can lie hid for as long as need be. And—I've a plan. 'Twill be chancy but—with luck, it just may work!”

The next day was a greyness through which Fiona moved and spoke and even managed to eat a little, although she was so hurt and sick with grief that she could scarcely have felt more pain had Mathieson struck her. In some strange fashion she seemed quite cut off from her family and friends. She knew that they were all around her, that they spoke gently and lovingly, that in their way they strove to comfort her. But it was as if she existed in a glass cage with the windows faintly blurred so that nothing looked clear and voices came only dimly to her ears.

She had waited all her life for the one, the true love. And love had come. But it had been a false love offered by a charming, handsome, deceitful gentleman whose eyes had held adoration, and whose heart was full of guile and greed. A savage who could stoop so low as to visit more suffering upon a helpless
wounded fugitive, only for the sake of gold. A man who had been willing to hire murderers to track down the peerless and heroic Ligun Doone—thank God he had been circumvented in that wickedness!

She sat in the caravan, staring blindly at the windows, seeing not the splashes of rain, for the weather had turned again, but a pair of dark, long-lashed eyes that could hold such a brilliant dance of laughter, or be soft as velvet with tenderness. She pressed shaking hands to her lips to hold back the sobs. It could not be true! It
could
not be! Yet every time she recalled some instance of valour or even heroism, his own words came back to haunt her.

When they first had met and he'd saved Picayune, he had denied his bravery almost with indignation and said that his “‘cue was villainous melancholy.'” She smiled sadly and the tears slipped silently down her cheeks as she remembered him sitting there wrapped in the blanket, looking so far from heroic—yet so very dear, with his wet black hair curling about those superb features … How put out he had been when she'd told him it was funny to be wooed by “a real rake”; little had she known the depth of his depravity then. When he had saved the poor lady from the ducking stool he'd said that had he'd been alone, he'd have ridden away and left her to her fate … True, no doubt. Fiona sighed heavily. Always, he had spoken truth. And always, nobody had believed him …

Someone was talking to her. A hand was taking her own, leading her from the caravan. Beth's hand. How anguished dear Beth looked. How kind, to be so understanding. She managed a smile somehow and could not know how that pathetic travesty of her former bright beam wrung her cousin's tender heart.

She was mildly astonished to find it was dusk, and they had not yet left the little meadow. Her mind pondered it vaguely while she ate a few bites of something—heaven knows what. Gregor played his flute, and Heywood began to sing softly in his fine baritone. Fiona started and stared at him. “Oh,” she gasped, interrupting the song. “You are come back!”

The others looked at each other, their troubled glances telling her she had been told of this and had not comprehended.

Lady Clorinda took her hand. “They did not come up with Mathieson, my dear. He is likely miles away by now. I fancy we'll not hear from him again until he lets us know what we must do to get the list back.”

Soon, Fiona was sitting alone in the caravan again, thinking in that oddly detached way that he was safe. Beyond doubting, she should have wished he'd been caught. But she could not. Roland Mathieson had come into her life and brought an ecstatic happiness; a depth of love she had never dreamed would be hers. He was gone now. Out of her life forever, for he had never loved her as she loved him, and to leave her must have meant no more to him than to change from riding clothes to evening dress. But whatever he was, however evil, in going, he had taken her heart with him, leaving her alone in a cold empty world, and she knew she would never love again.

Despair engulfed her, and she wept until she fell asleep. Her next clear memory was of waking during the night and hearing the rain pounding down. They were moving once more. They must be crossing a bridge, for the wheels rumbled in an odd echoing way. They were slowing to a stop. She could no longer hear the rain, but the hollow rumbling continued. She heard her father's voice call softly, “Shall we clear?” and Torrey's answer, “By an inch, sir!” And after a minute, again, her father, “Godspeed! And go in His keeping!”

Curious, she clambered from her bunk and hurried to peer from the back window. At first she thought they were in a tunnel. Then she saw a faint beam of light from a hooded lantern and was astonished to realize they had halted on a covered bridge, and barely scraping past them was a line of five caravans—five familiar caravans. She blinked, scarcely believing her eyes. They were the same caravans they had brought up from Gloucester! She gasped an astounded, “What on earth?”

Lady Clorinda's voice spoke in her ear. “We are trapped,
dear. There are dragoons all around, and no possible way for us to escape.”

Fiona gave a stricken little gasp as she turned to look into the small face that could seem proud and pretty, even framed by the beribboned nightcap. “Then—then Roland
did
betray us?”

For an instant my lady hesitated. Then she said, “We cannot know that is certain. But—but this is our one hope.”

Fiona blinked out of the window again and saw the last caravan rumble past. “I don't understand. I cannot see the gentleman who is driving. Where did they come from? Where are they going?”

“Cuthbert went to find them and bring them down here. The ‘gentleman' you saw was a dummy, tied to the seat. They will travel only at night, and there will be just one driver, in the first caravan. The following horses are all tied on to the vehicle ahead. Hopefully, in the dark it will look as if we are very quietly trying to slip away.”

“But—but if the soldiers are all around us, they will be stopped before they have gone a mile.”

“No, child. It seems the military discovered that some of our treasure has been sent on aboard ship. They very cleverly decided to let us get through—to follow and watch and wait until we reached our destination, and there to seize not only us, but the Jacobite gentlemen who await our arrival in Dorsetshire.”

“And—the entire treasure,” whispered Fiona, horrified. “Oh! How frightful! Then those caravans are decoys, to lead the soldiers away?”

“Yes, my love. They were brought onto the bridge at dusk this evening, long before we came near, and they have hid here, waiting. The dragoons were all watching
us.
”

“Did you see them?”

“No, but we know they are there. They have kept well out of sight. I suppose they think that if we saw them and suspected their trap we might turn aside from our proper destination so as to protect our friends.”

“And you think they are watching now? In the middle of the night?”

“Rob says they are. They saw us drive in, and they'll see the five empty caravans drive out of the other end of the bridge. They will follow, thinking they still follow us.”

“But—if they follow, they will come in here, and find us, no?”

“No, child. There is a new bridge a half-mile north of here. We believe they will choose that one. The instant they're well away, we will turn about and drive into Wales, where, God willing, we will reach MacTavish's farm and safe haven before—” She paused and shrugged wordlessly.

“Before—what? Oh, my Lord! Before the other caravans are found to be decoys, you mean! Then—then the gentleman who drives, goes to certain death!”

My lady's face was inestimably sad. “Yes, child. Is a very gallant gentleman indeed. For all our sakes he was willing to take the risk. I'll own,” her voice cracked a little, “I did not expect it of the boy.”

Her heart commencing to pound hammer blows at her ribs, Fiona whispered, “Who is he, Grandmama? Tell me, I beg you! Who is sacrificing his life for our sakes?”

For a moment Lady Clorinda was too moved to reply. Then she said in a voice that quavered, “It is the man who has loved you so faithfully and so well, Fiona, that he has given up his life to protect yours. It is … Freemon Torrey.”