The Case of the Missing Marquess (13 page)

Squeaky twitched as if pestered by a flea. I had just time to flatten myself, hands hidden from his view behind my back, before he opened his eyes.

“See ’ere,” he complained, glaring at me, “what yer rockin’ the bloody boat fer?”

I FROZE, COWERING, LIKE A RABBIT IN a thicket.

But from the other side of the hull an imperious voice spoke. “What for? I
desire
this boat to rock. I demand, nay, I
command
this boat to rock.” And rock it did, for there sat young Viscount Tewksbury, Marquess of Basilwether, leaning back to front to back again, disturbing our prison’s repose.

“Ye there!” Squeaky’s flinty stare turned to him.

“Stop ’at.”

“Make me.” Haughtily Lord Tewksbury met his glare and kept rocking.

“Ye want me to
make
you?” Squeaky lurched to his feet. “Think yer a toff, do you? By jingo, I’ll show ye.” Fists balled, he walked over to Tewksbury, and in so doing he turned his back to me.

I sat up and twisted around, leaning to one side, fumbling again to find the corset rib with my bound hands.

With vicious force our captor kicked young Lord Tewksbury in the leg.

The boy made no sound, but I could have cried out. I wanted to strike, seize, stop that nasty man. Indeed, I lost my head entirely, struggling against the cords that bound my wrists so wildly that it seemed I would wrench my arms out of their sockets.

Then something snapped. It hurt terribly.

Squeaky kicked Tewksbury again. “Keep going,” the boy said. “I like it.” But his strained voice showed that he lied.

My arms hurt so badly that I thought I had broken a bone, rather than the cord, until I found myself looking at my own hands, which had presented themselves in front of my face like disreputable strangers. Battered, bloodied. Rags of hemp dripping from their wrists.

“Ye like it? I’ll see ye like it,” squeaked our scurvy wretch of a guard, kicking Lord Tewksbury for the third time, quite hard.

This time Tewky whimpered.

And simultaneously I rose to my feet, my ankles still bound—but walking was not necessary, as I stood directly behind our captor. My hands, which seemed to know what to do better than I did, selected a large rock from the ballast even as Squeaky cocked his leg to kick again. Before he could do so, I hoisted my primitive weapon and brought it down with great decision upon his head.

He fell without a sound, splashed into the bilge water, and lay still.

I stood gawking at him.

“Idiot, untie my hands!” cried Lord Tewksbury.

The downed man continued as he was. Inert, but breathing.

“
Untie
me, fool!”

The boy’s peremptory tone prodded me into motion. I turned my back on him.

“Ninny, what are you
doing
?”

I was preserving my scant remaining modesty, although I did not tell him so. Unbuttoning part of my bodice, I reached deep into my frontal baggage and found the penknife I had removed from my drawing kit and stowed in my “bust enhancer” along with a pencil and some folded sheets of paper. After buttoning up again, I opened the penknife, stooped, and cut the cords away from my ankles.

Unable to see these proceedings through my expanse of black skirt, Lord Tewksbury stopped giving orders and actually began to beg. “Please. Please! I saw what you were doing and I helped you, didn’t I? Please, you—”

“Shhh. In a moment.” Once I had freed my feet, I turned, stepped past the motionless form of our guard, then leaned over the captive boy. With one quick snick I severed the cord binding his hands behind his back. Then I handed him the knife so he could free his feet himself. On the skirt of my ruined dress I wiped the blood from my wrists. I looked at the cuts—not so deep as to be dangerous—then felt at my hair, which had fallen out of any semblance of a bun to straggle around my shoulders. Finding a few hairpins in its tangles, I tried to close the rip in my dress with them.

“
Do
come on!” urged young Viscount Tewksbury, now on his feet with my penknife, still open, gripped like a weapon in his hand.

He was right, of course; there was no time for me to make myself presentable. Nodding, I approached the ladder that led to freedom, with Lord Tewksbury at my side. As we reached it, however, we hesitated, eyeing each other.

“Ladies first?” said His Lordship uncertainly.

“I yield in favor of the gentleman,” I responded, thinking only that a girl must never place herself in such a position that a male might look up her skirt. Not at all thinking of what might await us above.

Nodding, still clutching the penknife, Tewksbury climbed the ladder.

Light blinded me as he lifted the hatch. Night had passed into day, whether morning or afternoon I knew not. I retain only a vague, blinking, silhouetted impression of the cautious way the young viscount put his head forth and looked around. Quite silently he laid the hatch cover aside, climbed out, and beckoned urgently to me.

Climbing as quickly as I could, I realised he was waiting for me, his hand extended to help me out of the hold. Despite having called me in close succession an idiot, a fool, and a ninny, the boy showed traces of gallantry. He would have been wiser to flee without me. But it seemed right that, as we had been prisoners together, we would escape together. Certainly it had not occurred to me to leave him behind, and evidently he had not thought to leave me behind, either.

Reaching the top of the ladder, I grasped his hand—

An awful voice roared a curse such as I had never previously heard or imagined. As my head rose above the level of the hatch, I saw a tall, massive, scarlet form hurtle out of a cabin and across a too-brief expanse of deck towards us.

In that awful moment I learned that gentlemen, or at least a certain ungentle man, wore unmentionables made of blood-red flannel from wrist to ankle.

I screamed.

“Come
on
!” Springing to his feet, Tewksbury all but lifted me off the ladder, flinging me away from the charging red menace. “Run!”

He looked as if he intended to hold the brute off with his little penknife.

“
You
run.” Hoisting a wad of skirt and petticoat above my knees with one hand, I grabbed him by the collar with the other as I fled to the far end of the boat. Together—although necessarily I let go of him—we leapt across a yard of water to the wobbly planking of what I suppose might be called a pier. Then, hauling at my skirt with both hands, I ran as fast as I could along that narrow, unsteady path.

“You won’t get far!” bellowed a ferocious voice from the boat. “Just wait till I get some clothes on me and my hands on you!”

Being long of limb, I like to run, but not tripping over my own confounded clothing, and definitely not on a labyrinth of rotting green-slimed planks. A bewilderment of piers and brackish water, wharves and cat-walks, and yet more stinking water lay between us and the taverns and warehouses that rose at the edge of the Thames.

“Which—
way
?” gasped Tewky—for I could no longer think of him as lord, viscount, duke’s son; he was my comrade now, panting along right behind me.

“I can’t tell!”

Surrounded by tar-dark water, at a dead end, we slipped and skittered, turning to dart back. Once again an arm of water blocked our way. I began to shake, for if I fell into that black river, it would be the end for me; I would drown. I doubted whether Tewksbury could swim, either. But there was no time for dithering. At too scant a distance our massive enemy sprang out of his cabin again, with some decent covering thrown onto his person this time, roaring, “I’ll kill you both!” Like a charging bear he lunged from his craft onto the labyrinthine wharf.

Even worse, a small, crooked form followed him the way a starved dog follows a beggar. Evidently I had not hit Squeaky hard enough.

“Jump!” I wailed, and with my skirts billowing I leapt for another pier.

It rocked beneath me, but I managed to keep my footing, and just as I gasped for air, it rocked again, even worse, as Tewksbury landed with a thump beside me. Lacking breath to scream outright, I squeaked like a clothesline reel. Tewky grabbed my arm, crying, “Run!” and this time he led as we fled. At some point, he had lost my penknife; his right hand trembled weaponless. My shaking redoubled, for I felt the heavy tread of the cutthroat quaking the dock beneath us.

“Oh,
no!
” I cried as we slid to a halt at the end of another pier that led nowhere.

Tewky said something unrepeatable.

“Shame on you. This way.” Turning, I took the lead again, and in a few moments, at last we scrambled to firmer footing of cobbles, brick, and mortar. But our enemies, who knew their way, reached shore just as we did, only a stone’s throw behind us. I could see the blood on Squeaky’s head and the rage in his squinty eyes. I could see the hair in the big cutthroat’s ears and the wrath reddening his platter face. Blood on the moon, an ill omen.

I confess I screamed again—indeed, I shrieked like a shot rabbit. Blindly, with Tewky’s hand in mine, I fled up a narrow street and around a corner. “Hurry!” Zigzagging between heavily loaded wagons drawn by straining draft horses, we ran at an angle across the street to the next turning.

By now out of breath, moist of face and dress, all too aware of the heat of the day, I could still hear running footsteps following us.

Tewky was dropping behind. Dragging him along, I could feel a wince of pain in his every stride. His feet. Bare, sore, hitting on hard stone. And it was all uphill, fleeing from the river.

“Come
on!
”

“Can’t,” the boy panted, trying to yank his hand out of mine. I tightened my grip.

“Indeed you can. You must.”

“You—go. Save yourself.”

“No.” Blinking away my blind panic, I looked around me as we ran. We seemed to be reaching the end of wagons and docks and warehouses. Now we ran along a poor street of shabby lodgings and even shabbier businesses: a fishmonger’s, a pawn shop, an umbrella mender. And street vendors: “Live mussels, live oysters!” “Sweet ices here! Cold sweet strawberry ices!” There were people about, a dust-man with a donkey-cart, men with barrows of scrap metal, women and girls afoot in caps and aprons that should have been white but had grimed to the colour of mushrooms. People, but not the sort likely to help us, and not enough of them so that a barefoot, fleeing boy could escape notice, let alone a breathless, dishevelled, bareheaded girl in the torn, blood-smeared dress of a widow.

“Stop, thieves!” bellowed a voice behind us, hoarse but still roaring. “Stop those two scoundrels! Villains! Pickpockets!”

Faces turned to stare at Tewky and me as we fled through a street of junk stores: secondhand furniture, used clothing, hats refurbished, shoes and boots resoled, used clothing again. Faces seemed to rise out of a haze of heat and terror, loom for a moment, then flash by.

One of the faces I knew in passing, although I could not think where I had seen it before.

Then, as we ran on, I remembered.

“Tewky! Quick!” Dodging off the street, I darted up a narrow passageway between two ramshackle boardinghouses, turned past the corner of a cow shed, and fled through the stinking mews behind the buildings, redolent of donkey, goat, goose, and hen. I turned again—

“You can’t get away!” a fearsome voice roared from behind the cow shed, far too close for comfort.

“Give it up!” yelled another voice, squeaky.

“Idiot,” Tewksbury cried, evidently addressing me. “Why are we going in a circle? They’ll catch us!”

“You’ll see. Follow me.” Letting go of his hand and also of my remaining shreds of modesty, I ripped open the buttons of my upper bodice. Running down quite a filthy alley, I thrust my forearm into my frontal baggage and, my fingers encountering a packet of crisp papers, withdrew one. Hiding it in my palm as I rounded the final corner back into the street, I dashed towards a used clothing store.

The proprietor stood outside the door, enjoying the street scene and the cooling breeze. But when she saw me making towards her, her cheery expression chilled and turned to alarm. Rather than resembling a robin or a toad, she looked like a mouse under the paw of the cat. “No!” she gasped as I ran up to her. “No, Cutter would kill me. It’s more than my life is worth—”

There was no time for discussion. Tewky and I had only a moment before the two villains would round the corner and sight us again. In that moment, I thrust a bank note for a hundred pounds into the hands of, presumably, Mrs. Culhane, grabbed Tewky by the sleeve, and dragged him with me into Culhane’s Used Clothing Emporium.

GASPING FOR BREATH, WE DARTED INTO A gloomy, dirty, cluttered room that felt as close as an oven. From one side wall hung a number of long cloaks and mantles; for quick concealment we pressed ourselves into their shadowy folds. Trembling, hands clenched, I watched the front door, waiting to see whether my bribe would succeed.

“Hide under a table!” Tewky whispered.

I shook my head. Poised to flee, staring out the front door and window, I saw how folk scattered, giving way, as the hulking cutthroat and his squeaky mongrel of a companion barrelled down the middle of the street, glaring in all directions. I saw the big ruffian grab a loiterer by the collar, almost lifting the man off his feet, shouting into his face. The poor fellow gestured in our direction.

And where Mrs. Culhane had gone, I did not know.

But there she was again, standing with her back to me; she looked like a plaid tortoise with a limp bow of apron strings across its middle.

Our moon-faced enemy and his follower strode up to her. Towered over her. Even rickety Squeaky stood taller than she did. And I’m not sure I could have braved the ferocity in their glares.

But the squat old woman occupied that doorway like a plug. I saw her shake her head. I saw her gesture towards the far end of the street.