The Counterfeit Gentleman (9 page)

Then she heard footsteps outside, and she would have
screamed if she had been able to take a breath.

The door was slowly pushed open while time stretched
out into an eternity of heartbeats. Then Mr. Rendel stepped into the room, his arms filled with wood for the fire, and at once everything returned to normal. The shadows retreated,
and the room became a cozy place again, filled with
warmth and the mouth-watering smells of food cooking,
which made her realize how ravenously hungry she was—
as if she had not eaten in three days, which indeed she had
not.

The only remnant of her terror was her heart, which still
raced wildly in her chest. But perhaps it beat so quickly not
from the residue of fear, but because the man closing and bolting the door behind him was altogether too attractive?

“I am surprised you are awake already,” he said, dump
ing his armload of wood into a bin by the fireplace and then
crossing to the table and pulling out a chair for her.

Feeling as if her legs might give way at any moment, Bethia walked the few steps to where he was waiting and
sat down. Unexpectedly, bitter memories intruded. She was
not supposed to be here. Someone had intended that she
should never see the light of another day, never eat another
meal, never...

“I was going to let you sleep another half hour.” Taking a bowl out of the cupboard, Mr. Rendel filled it from the
iron kettle hanging above the fire, then set it down in front
of her, the very casualness of his manner dispelling the
dark thoughts from her mind.

The kedgeree he offered her was not what she was accus
tomed to eating first thing in the morning. She was used to
hot chocolate and a shirred egg and two slices of toast
lightly spread with marmalade, not rice cooked with lentils and smoked fish.

But although the food was peasant fare, the bowl Mr. Rendel handed her was fine bone china and the spoon he
gave her was sterling, as were the candlesticks on the table.
And the candles were wax, not tallow.

While they ate in silence, she wondered again at the in
congruities and inconsistencies of this man, whose polished
manners were also more suited to a London drawing room
than to a peasant’s cottage.

When she finally pushed her bowl away, feeling remark
ably restored in body and in spirit by the simple repast,
there came a knock at the door—a sharp rat-tat, which immediately destroyed all her hard-won equanimity.

“Stay here,” Mr. Rendel ordered her, as if he thought she
could actually have forced her legs to move. She waited,
trembling in her chair, while he opened the door a crack
and spoke to someone outside.

A few moments later, he returned to the table and tossed
some articles of clothing down on it. Boy’s clothing, she
saw, and somehow the sight of it made her realize just ex
actly what she had gotten herself into.

“I think you are being remarkably foolish to insist upon coming with us,” Mr. Rendel said, and it was no more than she herself was thinking.

With the hour for action at hand, Bethia could not find
the same reckless courage she’d had in the middle of the
night. But weighed against the fear she now felt at the thought of confronting her two abductors was the even
more paralyzing fear of being left alone.

Doing her best to show more determination than she was
actually feeling, she said, “Since it is obvious that I have
become an intolerable burden to you, I will not trouble you
any longer. If you will but loan me some money, I shall
take a stagecoach back to London and pick one of my eager
suitors at random and marry him.”

Digory cursed under his breath. Apparently, Miss Pep
perell had had a better night’s sleep than he’d had. Her spir
its were greatly restored even if her common sense
appeared to be still woefully deficient.

With an effort Digory kept his own voice calm. “I have
no wish for you to leap blindly into marriage with a
stranger, especially one who may turn out to be a villain,
and I have never even hinted or implied that you should do
such a foolish thing.”

Grudgingly, she nodded her head.

“The only thing I am objecting to this morning is taking
you along on this expedition. You will have to be patient
with me if I do not appear overjoyed at the prospect of
putting you back into danger. Having saved your life once,
I confess I am not looking forward to doing it a second
time.”

Miss Pepperell bit her lip and looked as if she were about
to burst into tears, which only made Digory feel like a miserable cur, deserving only of a kick.

“I do not mean to be a burden,” she said. “It is just that I feel safer when I am with you.”

A single tear escaped to run down her cheek and past her
quivering lips, and Digory would have liked to take her in
his arms and comfort her. But there was even more danger in that direction, so instead he left her alone to finish her
breakfast while he changed out of the ridiculous clothes of
a gentleman.

Once again wearing the smock and breeches of a smug
gler, he emerged from his bedroom, and the sight of his
guest sitting there looking quite bereft and dejected made
him feel like some sort of monster. Wholly against his better judgment, he said, “I must own, I will undoubtedly be
easier in my mind if I have you where I can see you. So
you might as well see if those clothes fit.”

* * * *

They fit, but did little to disguise Miss Pepperell’s
charms. She looked, in fact, like a very pretty young
woman dressed in boy’s clothing. But after she tucked her
hair up under one of his caps, Digory had to admit that
from a distance her disguise would probably be adequate.

Even so, he could not entirely shake off the feeling that
he was making a mistake.

* * * *

Although she would never have admitted it to her companion, Bethia needed all the courage she possessed to follow Mr. Rendel out of his cozy cottage and into the chill air
of a Cornish morning. Not even the roosters were awake
yet, and the only things moving on the horizon were the
thin columns of smoke rising lazily from the chimneys of
the cottages they hurried past.

Any pride she might have felt in her own fortitude de
serted her when they arrived at the top of the path leading
down to the beach. If there had been no fog obscuring the
sea, she might have managed alone. But staring down into
the soft white obscurity, she knew she could not reenter
that world of terror. Before she could prevent it, a soft cry
of despair escaped her lips.

Mistaking the cause of her fear, Mr. Rendel turned back
and held out his hand. “The path looks steep from above,
but it is not really dangerous. If heights bother you, you can
hold onto me.”

She wanted very much to run back to the cottage like a
craven coward, but instead she took the hand he was offer
ing her and discovered she had enough courage—barely enough—to follow him down the path into the formless
world waiting below.

Even when the other smugglers appeared noiselessly out
of the fog, she did not shriek with terror... but then
she did not let go of Mr. Rendel’s hand either.

“There’s a boat down at the other end of the beach,” a
man she identified as Little Davey said in a low voice. He was, in her opinion, not the size of man anyone could call little, except that he was slightly smaller than Big Davey.

“It’s mine,” Mr. Rendel said. “You’d better take care of
it, or it will make the murderers wary.”

Harry appeared next, carrying the hastily constructed
dummy over his shoulder. To Bethia’s way of thinking it
would never fool anyone. But once the fog lifted, an hour
or so after they had finished all the arrangements and hid
den themselves behind assorted boulders, the dummy
looked entirely too real. Harry had weighed it down with concealed rocks, so that although the waves tugged at it, the
“body” did not float away.

Even knowing it was nothing but straw and old sheeting
with seaweed for hair, Bethia could not help shuddering
every time she caught sight of the gruesome object. So eas
ily might she have been the one lying there; just so would
her body have looked after the tide carried it in.

Unable to look at the dummy without trembling, she shut
her eyes. But she could not close her ears to the waves
breaking with monotonous regularity on the beach. They
sounded like the ticking of an eternal clock that never
winds down, counting ... counting ... counting the ever
decreasing minutes of her life. And with each passing hour, the sun beat down with increased intensity.

She was just beginning to think that they were waiting in
vain—that the two villains had forgotten all about retrieving the body—when above the sound of the surf she heard voices. As they grew louder, she recognized them, and in
stinctively she moved closer to her rescuer, only with diffi
culty managing not to clutch Mr. Rendel’s arm in panic.

His muscles taut, his body coiled like a spring for the at
tack, he did not look at her, but only murmured out of the
corner of his mouth, “Remember, you gave me your word that you will stay here behind the rocks until it is all over.”

Too frightened of the approaching men to speak, she
could not force even a single word of acknowledgment out
of her constricted throat.

Mr. Rendel turned to look at her, and the devil was in his
eyes. For a moment she was more terrified of him and his
wrath than she was of the kidnappers.

Then he smiled and touched her cheek lightly with his
hand, and her fears—all of her fears—subsided, and she
felt safe again.

As if from an immense distance rather than just a few
yards away, she heard Jacky-boy cry out enthusiastically,
“There’s the body, right where I told you it’d be. Now’ll
you admit I know my job?”

The two men speeded up their steps until they were al
most running, and as soon as they were past the waiting
smugglers, Mr. Rendel gave a low whistle. With a sudden
ness that astounded her, the small cove erupted with vio
lence.

Bethia could not bear to watch the pain that the men
were inflicting on one another, and yet she could not tear
her glance away. To her astonishment, some of the smugglers were grinning, as if they were enjoying the fray.

Her ears were filled with the sound of men shouting, and the thud of fists striking flesh and bone, and Bethia winced
with each blow, as if she herself were being battered.

Then with the same abruptness with which it had begun, the fight was all over. From her hiding place behind a boulder, she saw that Big Davey was holding one of the villains
with his arms twisted behind his back, and the large man named Jacky-boy was lying motionless on the sand.

Using his foot, Harry turned the man over, then said,
“He’s dead. ‘Twould appear he fell on his own knife.”

Mr. Rendel nodded his head once, and then, as if it were
commonplace for him to have dead bodies at his feet, he
turned his attention to the other kidnapper.

“We want a name,” Mr. Rendel said, and Bethia heard a
world of power and arrogance in his voice. The captured
man should have been intimidated, for surrounded as he
was by five strong men, he had to realize how effortlessly
he could be dispatched to join his companion, who was
surely feeling the unremitting fires of hell by now.

“‘Tis you who need to explain yourself,” the man said
quite brazenly. “My companion and I were merely taking a
walk and enjoying a bit of brisk sea air when you fell upon
us like savages.”

“We want the name of the man who hired you,” Mr.
Rendel repeated, and Big Davey gave a jerk on the man’s
arms for added emphasis.

But even with his face contorted in pain, the man persisted in his denials. “I do not know ... what you are talking about,” he managed to say with visible effort. “I am
innocent of whatever it is
...
you think I have done, and I
demand the right to put my case before a magistrate.”