by Julia Kelly
With a sigh of relief, he sagged against a wall. The prince hadn’t left yet. There was still time.
The shrill squeaking of a door echoed through the lane and several sets of boots scraped against the cobbles.
“Bloody cold out tonight,” muttered a footman in a long cutaway coat and britches.
“Stop complaining,” shot another one.
“Just a few minutes now,” a third, pulling out a pocket watch to check the time.
A glint of metal flashed in the lantern light as the man lifted a pistol out of his pocket and settled it into a better position. What footman carried a pistol?
A man who wasn’t a footman at all.
Bloody hell. This was the plot. Not attacking the prince at the ball but here, in a narrow street, where it would be easy to overwhelm members of the royal household and the prince himself.
Andrew had to stop them, even if he knew the odds weren’t in his favor. He couldn’t tell from where he was standing, but the men would’ve been foolish not to come armed to the teeth. He took inventory of the weapons on his person. He had a small pistol holstered under his arm, and knives in his jacket pocket and strapped to his left calf. It wasn’t enough, given how outmanned he was.
He sucked in a deep breath and drew the pistol, but before he could step into the lane, he was slammed against a wall.
“Don’t move,” a voice hissed in his ear, shoving the barrel of a gun into his back.
Andrew grunted when his face scraped against the stone.
“Drop the gun,” the man ordered.
Andrew twisted, throwing the man off as he whipped his hand around, catching his attacker across the brow. The man grunted and fell, but before he could fire off a shot Andrew was grabbed from behind by two sets of hands, and his legs were kicked out from underneath him. One of the false footmen punched him in the side of the head, sending stars cascading across his field of vision.
“We don’t need this,” said the man who’d punched him as he shook out his hand.
“The prince is due out any moment.”
“Shove him in the house with the others,” said another.
“He can identify us,” said the man holding the gun. “The others can’t.”
“Bring him with,” grunted the largest of the bunch.
“How?” asked the puncher.
“Strap him to the undercarriage,” said an older man with silver hair that caught the light from the big houses spilling out into the street. “If he manages to survive it, we’ll give him to Mrs. Wark.”
Lavinia didn’t wait for the cab to stop before unlatching the door and jumping down to the street. The cabdriver shouted something at her, but she didn’t care. Every bit of her was focused on one thing: getting to Andrew.
She raced up to the Duke of Livingston’s door and began slamming the brass knocker down over and over. Inside, she could hear scrambling feet, and a moment later the door was wrenched open by a tall, elegant man who wore a horrified expression.
“Madam, what are you thinking?” the butler asked.
“Is Andrew Colter still here?” she asked.
“Who?”
Her stomach twisted.
“Do you mean the horribly rude man who insisted on seeing His Royal Highness and his grace?” the butler asked.
“Yes!” she nearly shouted. Oh, she could kiss the man. Andrew was here!
“I sent him away.”
“What?”
“He absurdly thought he could demand entry and see the prince,” said the butler with a sniff.
“Where did he go?” Gillie asked over her shoulder.
The butler looked from Gillie to her, no doubt trying to figure out whom he hated most. “I neither know nor care.”
She grasped the man’s arm. “Tell me. If there’s anything you know, anything at all, you must tell me.”
“Unhand me, madam.” The butler ripped his arm away even as she let go. “This is altogether untoward. Good night to you both.”
“Is the prince still here?” Gillie asked in a rush as the man began to shut the door.
The butler stopped and fixed her with a glare. “The prince and his grace left for the ball twenty minutes ago. If you are so concerned with seeing His Royal Highness, you can attend the ball.” He raked his gaze over them and scoffed. “If you have invitations, which I very much doubt.”
Then the man shut the door in their faces.
“Andre—”
“No,” Gillie cut her off sharply. “We will not entertain such thoughts until we know what’s happened.”
Lavinia nodded weakly, and Gillie gripped her by the shoulders.
“I need you right now, Lavinia. We wouldn’t have figured out Douglas and Mrs. Wark’s plan if it hadn’t been for you. Hell, we wouldn’t have anything if it wasn’t for you. I need you to stay sharp. For Andrew.”
For Andrew. Determination surged up in her, and she rolled her shoulders back like a gentleman pugilist entering the ring. She wasn’t giving up yet, because she and Andrew had unsettled business. She was going to rake him over the coals for being so foolish as to take her off this operation when it was clear that he needed her. She was going to eviscerate him for doubting her. And then she was going to cut him to shreds for being too frightened to be loved by her.
She needed him alive to do all of those things.
“Think,” Gillie was saying. “Where would they be taking the prince? It’ll likely be somewhere quiet.”
“The warehouse,” she said automatically. “Mrs. Wark is familiar with it, and it has access to the water so they’d have an alternative means of escape if anyone approached from the road.”
“The waterfront is all warehouses and will be quiet at night,” said Gillie. “It might make sense. You don’t think Mrs. Wark would take the prince to their house?”
“I’m certain of it. She’s far too canny to do something so risky. Not when a single shot might be heard by neighbors or servants. She’ll only have done this if she thinks she can maintain her social standing as well.”
“How can you be sure?” Gillie asked.
She laughed once. “Because when you’re a dressmaker, you learn how to read your clients. Their attitudes and behaviors become clues as to how to handle them. Mrs. Wark is as selfish and self-centered as her son. She might believe in her cause, but she’s not the type to die for it.”
“Then we’ll go to the warehouse,” said Gillie.
Gillie must’ve paid the driver to wait, because the cab was still there when Lavinia turned. They clambered back in, and the driver looked down through the trap at his feet.
“Where to, miss?”
“Elbe Street in Leith,” said Lavinia, fighting to keep her voice level.
“Right you are then,” the driver said. Then he paused. “Is the Prince of Wales in danger?”
“You could hear that from the street?” Lavinia asked.
“I’m surprised all of Scotland couldn’t hear you hollering on.”
She gave him a tight smile.
“Driver, what’s your name?” asked Gillie.
“Noble, miss.”
“Mr. Noble, there’s a guinea extra for you if you drive as fast as you can without wrecking this cab or us, and another if you can do so without asking any questions.”
He laughed. “Can’t argue with that.” And then he slammed the trap shut and the cab lurched forward.
Gillie’s hand gripped Lavinia’s. “Andrew’s smart and resourceful and, from what I’ve read of his field reports, damned difficult to kill. He’s going to be fine.”
Lavinia nodded. He was going to be fine. He had to be.
Andrew groaned as a rough set of hands untied him from under the prince’s carriage, letting his body fall to the ground. He tried to wedge himself up on his elbow, but he was pulled out from under the axles and roundly punched in the gut just for good measure.
His attackers had beaten him badly and gagged him before tying him up and driving off w
ith him. Even with the cobblestones a few inches from his face, rattling his teeth, he could hear the moment the prince and the duke realized there was something horribly wrong. They’d batted against the carriage walls, but when they tried the door handles, they’d found what Andrew already knew. The men had braced them, effectively locking the future monarch and his friend in.
When the carriage stopped in front of an industrial-looking building, however, Andrew had heard another man greet the heir to the throne in a decidedly pleasant manner. Not at all like a man who was about to commit an assassination.
Who was this man and how was he connected to Wark’s plot? Andrew tried to drag the simple question through his brain, but it was proving difficult to cut through the pain. If he could just get to the knife at his calf. He knew they’d missed that when they’d searched him because he could still feel the firm press of the blade against his leg.
“Bind his hands behind his back and take him to the loading dock,” he heard the man order, and he lifted his head.
Douglas. Andrew hadn’t recognized him dressed as a servant, but now he remembered Lavinia telling him about the man’s shock of silver hair. Still, the appearance of the ironmonger wasn’t as surprising as seeing a handsome older woman stride through the door in a green silk gown shot through with silver. Now he understand what Douglas had meant by giving him to Mrs. Wark. It appeared they’d been hunting the son when it was the mother they should’ve been concerned with the entire time.
Mrs. Wark stopped just a few feet from Andrew, staring down at him. “You’re conscious then.”
“Never better,” he managed.
Mrs. Wark raised a brow, then lifted her chin. Andrew was hauled up off the ground by anonymous hands and shoved forward into a stumbling shuffle.
The inside of the warehouse was vast and empty. Andrew could see the prince and the duke sitting on a pair of chairs, both bound around the arms at the waist, but otherwise they appeared to be unharmed.
Andrew was hustled along into a smaller room with high ceilings rigged up with all manner of chains and winches that smelled faintly of horses. The loading dock.
One of the men dressed in the prince’s livery trained a pistol on him while another unbound his hands and then rebound them, looping the ropes at his wrists onto a massive iron hook. Then the man turned the winch so Andrew’s arms were jerked up, high enough to be uncomfortable but not so high that his shoulders were pulled out of their sockets. For that, he supposed, he should be grateful.
A smile crossed Douglas’s face as he surveyed Andrew’s restraints. “Are you quite comfortable?”
“Quite.”
Douglas laughed. “I take it that you work for a government office, or perhaps the military.”
Andrew kept his mouth firmly shut.
Douglas sighed. “It would be helpful to know which it is, but it’s no real matter in the end. We’ll get what we want, and you’ll be eliminated.”
“What is it that you want?” asked Andrew.
“Revenge. The end of the monarchy. You may choose whatever best satisfies your purposes,” said Mrs. Wark with an elegant shrug.
“And what of your own purposes? Or does it matter so little to you the reason behind your plan?” he asked.
“It matters very much to me,” said Mrs. Wark sharply.
“My darling Anne, you see, is not a great believer in the aristocracy,” said Douglas, raising Mrs. Wark’s hand to his lips to kiss the back of it. “It starts with her childhood in Ireland.”
“You’re Irish?” Andrew asked. “So this is about home rule?”
She laughed. “My interests are hardly political.”
“What then?”
“My father was a weak man, never ambitious enough to imagine he could be anything other than the steward on Lord Marybourne’s estate in County Wexford,” she said. “He oversaw land that his family had worked on for years but that he would never in his lifetime be able to claim as his own. The lord ordered him out one day during a storm to check the condition of a bridge that had washed out. A tree fell in the winds, crushing my father. He died three days later. I was just five.
“My mother received no pension from Lord Marybourne, and we were evicted from our cottage on the estate to make way for a new steward. She couldn’t keep me and herself. Her sister, who had moved to Scotland with her husband when she was just seventeen, came to collect me and we moved to Edinburgh. She and my uncle passed me off as their own child because they couldn’t have children of their own.
“I was ambitious and beautiful and intelligent. My aunt and uncle made sure I did all the right things girls are supposed to do and married well, but I’ve never forgotten my father. I want Lord Marybourne punished and all the other men like him. I want them to lose their land and feel what it’s like to lose everything.”
“And doing this will hurt Lord Marybourne? The man probably has half a dozen estates but even more invested,” said Andrew.
The lady’s eyes narrowed. “The monarchy is at the center of the whole social structure. Once people see how weak it is, it will begin to crumble.”
“And who will take their place?” he asked.
She smiled cruelly. “Those of us intelligent enough to make real money. This nation is industrial, and its rulers should be too.”
“And so you’ll kill the prince,” said Andrew. “Why not just shoot him in the middle of the street and have it done with?”
“Because I’m smarter than that. He’ll be taken somewhere no one knows about and be disposed of. He won’t be traceable back to me.”
“To us,” said Douglas.
“Of course, my dear,” said Mrs. Wark with a smile, but there was no warmth under it.
Andrew wondered how Home could’ve gotten it so wrong. This wasn’t some carefully thought out larger plot. It was the workings of a deranged woman and a profiteering man who’d found each other to be convenient assets in the pursuit of their plans. They’d wrapped their own motivations in the flag of a greater cause to justify to themselves the insanity of what they were doing.
“It’s as simple as that then?” he said.
“In a way, yes. Some of those who’ve come before us have failed rather miserably with their attempts on the queen’s life in London,” Mrs. Wark said.
“Six, if memory serves,” said Douglas. “The queen is remarkably resilient for a woman of sixty.”
“And some of those men were committed for lunacy,” said Andrew, twisting his hands a little to try the ropes.
“You won’t be able to get out of those, Mr. Colter. Still . . .” Mrs. Wark looked over at one of the men who’d remained behind. “Did you search him for weapons?”
“We did, ma’am.”
Mrs. Wark strode over and began to pat Andrew down again. He closed his eyes, praying that the woman wouldn’t find the knife . . . which she did in approximately fifteen seconds.
She pulled the blade free and threw it at one of the liveried kidnappers’ feet. “He could’ve freed himself with this and ended everything.”
“I—”
“I will not see this plan fail because of your inattention!” Mrs. Wark shouted.
“You very well may,” said Andrew, even though it was looking less and less likely with every passing moment. Gillie would be at the ball by now and would in all likelihood not give a passing thought to the fact that she hadn’t seen him yet. She would be busy trying to find Wark, a man utterly unconnected to this, and stop a plot that was already under way.
Mrs. Wark looked Andrew over with a skeptical eye. “Tell me one thing, Colter. What is Mrs. Parkem to you?”
Letting her walk away is my biggest regret. Now it was likely he was going to die in the company of these asses, never having told Lavinia how he felt. She’d wanted him—maybe not with the power with which he needed her, but it was more than nothing—and he’d thrown his chance at happiness with her away, choosing his mission and his distrust over the chance to love her again. But t
hat wasn’t the entire truth and he knew it. He’d pushed her away because he loved her and because the thought that she might not return that love terrified him.
He wanted to thrash and scream and rage hearing her name on the lout’s lips, but instead he forced his mouth into a thin line. “She’s my biggest mistake.”
Douglas grinned. “Good. It’ll be a pleasure telling her that before she dies.”
Andrew roared, his composure snapping as Mrs. Wark’s and Douglas’s laughter echoed off the loading dock’s walls.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE CAB SHUDDERED to a halt in front of a warehouse that looked all but abandoned. This time, it was Gillie who jumped down first.
“Wait for us, Mr. Noble, if you will!” Gillie shouted up. Then she pointed to a set of fresh wheel marks in the soft mud. “Look!”
Lavinia scrambled down after her and peered at the marks. A carriage had been here very recently and, when she looked a few feet away, she could see a set of drag marks big enough to be made by a man’s body.
Her heart hitched, and she balled her fists up. “They’re here.”
Gillie nodded and began hiking up her skirts. She reached under and unstrapped a small gun that could’ve fit into a lady’s reticule before handing it to Lavinia. “Draw back the hammer. Point. Shoot.”
Lavinia’s blood roared in her ears as she took the gun from the young lady. “Won’t you need it?”
Gillie grinned, yanking free a larger revolver. “I’ll be fine.”
“What do we do?” asked Lavinia.
“Try to find a back way in. Shoot anyone who tries to run out when the bullets start flying.”
“Where will you be?” asked Lavinia.
“Up,” said Gillie, pointing. “Most of these warehouses have beams. I’ll position myself high so I can get a clear line of sight and see if I can pick them off. If it’s safe for the prince.”