The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (61 page)

Just as he was about to descend the wide stone stairway to the lower gardens, Kevin saw Anne Chevington rushing out of the maze, her full skirts hiked above her ankles to ease her flight. His cane at the ready, Kevin bounded down the steps to catch Anne, whose head was turned as if to look for possible pursuers. He placed her behind him, and out of harm's way.

"Oh, Kevin! Thank God it's you," Anne cried distractedly. "Come quickly! Kidnappers! We must stop them! Told me to run—to save myself. I didn't want to leave, really I didn't. But I had to think of the baby. I ran for the shortest exit from the maze. Someone followed for a bit, I could hear him crashing through the shrubbery. But he must have given up. Oh, do hurry, Kevin. We must summon more help!"

Instead of racing straightaway into the maze, knowing he'd surely become lost within seconds of his entry, Kevin propelled Anne to a nearby bench and sought to make some sense out of what she was saying.

Once Anne had taken a few deep breaths and wiped her eyes, she told Kevin that some masked men—anywhere from three to six of them, she'd been too overset to mount an inventory—had come upon them as they sat talking on a bench in the middle of the maze, taking the air. "They demanded to see you, Kevin. One of them even said they'd
sent
for you. But, when they were sure you weren't coming, they said they'd just have to take us instead. They said...they said we'd be the
bait
, whatever that means. Oh, why were you late Kevin? You're
always
late!"

Anne grabbed Kevin by the shoulders and implored him to understand. "I didn't want to desert her, really I didn't. But she insisted. And then she launched herself on two of the men, kicking at their shins and everything, and I was able to get away."

"She!"
Kevin exploded, leaping up from the bench. "God's teeth, Anne, I thought you were talking about Bo! Who is it—Gilly or Amanda? Speak up, Anne, for the love of Heaven. Tell me who it was!"

"It was your wife, Kevin. It was Gilly!" Anne said, sobbing as she buried her head in her hands.

"I'll kill them!"
Heedless of his fine clothing and uncaring that he was unfamiliar with the twisting paths and dead-end avenues of the maze, Kevin plunged into the shrubbery, his cane at the ready.

He was back within a few minutes, time enough for Anne to have flagged down a passing servant, who had summoned the rest of the house party from the morning room where they were awaiting luncheon.

"There's no sign of Gilly," he told his friends, "but from the look of things she wasn't taken without first putting up one hell of a struggle."

"Anne told us the whole, Kevin," Jared said, patting the distraught-looking husband on the shoulder. "Don't worry, we'll get her back."

"Certainly will," Bo agreed. "Get her back."

Kevin angrily shook off his friend's hand. "That's not enough," he said angrily, as he raced towards the stables with Bo, Jared, and all the available male servants running after him. "It's my wife who has been taken! Dear God—it's
Gilly!"

Then this most unflappable of English peers astonished all his listeners by giving vent to an impressive string of curses for the entire length of time it took to reach the stables, and without ever once repeating himself.

"Well, a whacking great thing this is, if I do say somyself. First I'm dumped head down in a smelly old bag. Then I'm carried off willy-nilly over someone's shoulder like a sack of meal, only to end up here, sitting in a puddle in the bottom of this leaky old scow, being stared at by a bunch of dead fish and all you idiots I once thought to be my friends. Good God Harry—are you and your fellows in your cups, or have you simply all just lost your senses?"

"Now, now, Gilly-girl, don't yer go gettin' all bent outta curl o'er a little mistake," admonished the middle-aged swarthy fisherman named Harry as he took in the sight of Gilly Fortune and repressed a shudder when he recognized how close she was to losing her temper entirely.

There'll be the devil to pay for this day's work sooner or later, Harry was sure. If Gilly didn't skewer him first, it was a sure thing the Earl wouldn't settle for less than drawing and quartering the lot of them.

"A little mistake?" Gilly's screech interrupted Harry's thoughts. "A little mistake!
Ha!
Don't say you didn't recognize me, Harry, seeing as how it was straight on noon and the sun right above us, so that you couldn't help but know it was me standing there."

Harry gratefully grasped at the out Gilly had handed him. "Well, now that yer say that, Gilly-girl. With yer fine duds and...and with yer hair chopped off all short-like—"

"Bull feathers, Harry, bull feathers," Gilly cut the man off mid-excuse. She looked around her at the half-dozen men she had sailed with time and again on the tubs. To a man, they were dressed alike in the dark, nondescript clothes of the fisherman, their faces blacked as if they were about to set off on a smuggling run.

"We let the other one go," Harry pointed out, sounding very much as if he was desperately explaining away a late night at the pub to his wife and hoping she wouldn't brain him with a cooking pot before he could find a way back into her good graces.

"What were you doing skulking around the maze like a bunch of thieves in the first place?" Gilly asked the group at large, a tingle of apprehension running down her spine as the seriousness of the situation was brought home to her. These men were her friends, or so she'd thought. But they were also poor men. Desperate men.

She was not in fear of her own safety, nobody here would hurt her, she was sure, but these dour-faced men were obviously upset about something. "Come on, Harry, 'fess up. You weren't in the maze to pick daisies. What's going on?"

Knowing from past experiences with the chit that she would persevere until she had the truth (hadn't her bulldog tenacity gotten her a seat in the tubs?), Harry sighed deeply, pulled off his black knit cap, and hunkered down in front of Gilly to look her in the eye.

"It be like this, missy," he began earnestly, and Gilly, her legs curled up under her damp and stained spriggled muslin morning gown, listened with growing alarm.

Her friend told her about the disappearance of two of their last three smuggling hauls, the one she had herself helped sow the night the revenue officers nearly caught them, and another one since she'd left the group. Once they'd harvested that first crop of sunken kegs, the men had stashed their booty in the usual shoreline caves to await the overland gang, which would transport everything inland the following night. But when night and the overland gang arrived, the kegs were gone—vanished without a trace.

The second haul had disappeared just as mysteriously. One lost load could be attributed to the King's men discovering the stash, but as the second haul had been hidden in different caves, the chances of the revenue officers possessing either the brains or the luck to discover two hidey-holes so quickly were so remote as to be impossible to believe.

Besides, Harry went on reluctantly, word had come to the gang that the new Earl needed money, and needed it badly.

Hadn't his man Willstone been nosing around the Cock and Crown asking all sorts of queer questions?

And hadn't the Earl suddenly found the blunt to start making some repairs on the estate?

And wasn't Gilly Fortune wearing brand-new gowns—the same Gilly Fortune who knew just where every cave was situated and the probable nights when her old friends were most likely to set out on their tubs?

Oh, yes, the evidence was damning. Except to explain the source of Kevin's funds from the sale of Sylvester's collection of clocks, Gilly was at an impasse as to how to refute the gang's accusations. Harry's claim that she might have been a party to the betrayal she refused to dignify with an answer.

"Who told you that my husband the Earl was strapped for funds?" Gilly asked Harry, who was looking very embarrassed, for he knew his speech had not contained a single deferential "milady" or other outward sign of the rank she just then so neatly reminded him she now bore.

"I-I'd druther not ta say," he hedged before adding, "M–Milady."

"Milady my sainted mother, Harry!" the Countess of Lockport snorted. "A minute ago it was just plain Gilly. What's the matter, Harry? Have you belatedly remembered that you're talking to the enemy? Now, keeping in mind that you have accused my husband and, unbelievably, myself, of a truly infamous deed, and keeping in mind that I'll have your liver on a spit if you cross me—and you know I don't threaten idly—I'll repeat my question. Who told you?"

It all came out then. The way Harry had taken on a silent partner, so to speak, some months back, a man who said he could get a better price for any goods Harry and his gang could set ashore. In return for a small percentage of the profits, this man had set Harry up with an overland gang that had indeed paid prime money for their kegs of brandy and bolts of fabric and lace, nearly twice the amount Harry had gotten from his other contacts.

"Lord love a bloomin' duck, Harry!" Gilly yelled in exasperation, all her fine speech deserting her as she turned on her friend in a fury. "And did it never occur to a single one of you greedy dullards to wonder
why
this overlander was willing to pay so much?"

Gilly's quick mind had taken two and two, added them together, and she was sure she had come up with a very dangerous four. Jared had spoken of a spy, and although Kevin had pooh-poohed the idea, Gilly had thought at the time that her husband had tried too hard to divert everyone's mind from the possibility there was a foreign agent in the area.

"Did this man, your recent benefactor, ever ask any favors in return besides his cut of the money?" she asked now, her eyes narrowed into slits of intense blue fire.

"Er-uh, well, mebbe he did and mebbe he didn't," Harry said, delaying his answer, then adding a show of bluster. "Wot's it ta yer?"

"He
did!
I can tell by the way you're shifting your greathulking feet and looking everywhere but at me. Come on, Harry, give over. I mean to hear the whole of it."

"Onc't in a while we carried a man for him, only one way each time. But he wuz only some Frenchie takin' money and food to his kin left behind when the Froggie bolted on account of the Revolution. He's a harmless enough sort." Harry almost whined as Gilly moaned theatrically and threw up her hands in disgust.

"A spy, Harry. You've been lugging a great, ugly spy across the Straits.
That's
what you've been doing!" she accused, sending the half-dozen brawny men into a babble of fear.

"We none of us knowed," one cried.

"Never say that, milady," another begged.

"Are we goin' ta be hanged? I've got me six kiddies. I cain't be hanged."

They were all obviously convinced their young friend was right, and they all also were obviously frightened half out of their heads. But Harry was not their leader without a good reason, and his mightier brain soon snapped back into working order. With a few well chosen words he silenced his men and turned to Gilly.

"There'll be no more Froggies on our tubs, milady, I promise yer that!" he announced firmly. "We're all good Englishmen here, and we doesn't wants English blood on our hands."

"That's all well and good," Gilly replied. "But that leaves us still with problems to solve. It's not enough to stop carrying the spy, Harry. The maggot must be captured and turned over to the authorities. Since your mysterious benefactor introduced you to the spy, it follows he has to be a traitor himself. So I ask you again, Harry. A name, man. Give me a name!"

Harry mumbled something under his breath.

"What?"

"I says I doesn't know his name," Harry repeated, shamefaced. "We only met the onc't, when he waylaid me one night and put his plan to me. After that I only talked with the Frenchie."

"Well surely you saw him that first night," Gilly prompted, wondering why she had never noticed before that Harry, for all that he was the leader of the smugglers, was really not very bright.

Harry shook his head. "He stood in the shadows like, and I ne'er see'd his face. I heared him, tho," Harry said more forcefully, "and he were one of the gentry, sure as check."

"And on that damning evidence you have convicted my husband?" Gilly sneered the question.

Harry reluctantly told her that gossip in the village, he steadfastly refused to say from whom, had provided them with the idea that the Earl was their man. They believed he had decided he wanted more than his share of the profits—that he wanted it all. The note sent to The Hall and the plan to abduct the Earl for a "chat" concerning the whereabouts of the missing booty naturally followed.

"One more thing, milady," another of the smugglers piped up. "Two nights past we caught up a fella on the estate, a fella a-carryin' one of our kegs. He talked like a City bloke, not at all like one of us. But he loped off afore we could find out who he wuz workin' fer."

"Damning evidence indeed," Gilly said with a worried frown. "But you forget. Kev—er, the Earl didn't arrive at The Hall until late June. Harry, you said you were first approached some months ago."

"He coulda come down here afore then, surrep-er–surrep—"

"Surreptitiously," Gilly ended, realizing the truth of that statement. Kevin had been the Earl for some six months before showing his face—six months he was reluctant to speak about. "All right, Harry, now I've got questions of my own to answer. And I want to help. What do you want me to do?"

#

Gilly had been gone a little above three hours, hours Kevin (and therefore his friends) spent mentally traveling through several different levels of Hell. Kevin's first impulse—to mount his horse and speed off after his wife's abductors—was aborted by the time he reached the stables, when he realized he had not the slightest idea as to which direction his search should take.

It was left to Jared to calm his distraught friend and suggest the three men begin their search at the point of the abduction, the large, open center of the maze. It was apparent at once, by the evidence of an overturned bench and a scattering of leaves freshly ripped from the shrubbery, that Kevin had been correct in his assumption that Gilly had not gone quietly with the men Anne described.