His Wicked Charm

by Candace Camp

  “Are you serious?” Thisbe stared. “You think they’re going to put us on a boat?”

  Olivia shook her head. “I can’t see why. But then, I don’t know why they left the city at all.”

  “Perhaps they thought we’d make too much of a fuss and be noticed if there were people around.”

  “I suppose. No doubt they’ll ask for a ransom.”

  “Why else take us?” Thisbe turned to her sister. “Do you think they’ll set us free when Papa pays them?” She had no doubt her father would pay any amount of money for the return of his wife and daughters.

  “I don’t know. It’s a risky proposition for them either way. But I think we mustn’t count on them letting us go. We must try to escape.”

  “When they open the doors to take us out will be our best opportunity,” Thisbe offered.

  Olivia nodded. “I wish I had a weapon of some sort.”

  “I wish I hadn’t dropped Kyria’s parasol. It broke, but still, it was better than my bare hands.”

  “I have a penknife on my chatelaine.” Olivia reached down to the engraved silver brooch attached to the waist of her dress. Several silver chains hung from it, with various items dangling from the ends. Chatelaines were popular pieces of jewelry, but they were also practical, as they carried small useful items such as little scissors, penknives, miniature note cards and pencils. Olivia opened her penknife, showing the sharp, albeit short, blade.

  Thisbe never wore a chatelaine, preferring to stick items in her pockets, but she pulled out the long, lethal hatpin she had held back when she tossed out her bonnet. “I have this.”

  Olivia’s eyes widened a little. “I have one of those, as well. We can do some damage. When they open the doors, we can rush at them.”

  “We might be able to cause them enough pain they let go of us and we can run,” Thisbe agreed. “But what about Mother and Kyria? We can’t just leave them here.”

  “We probably wouldn’t be able to outrun them for long either.” Olivia’s eyes began to sparkle. “But if we could manage to make it up to the driver’s seat and take the reins, we could get away. And take Mother and Kyria with us.”

  The wagon made a turn to the right, and they were on a rougher road. Olivia jumped up and threw a petticoat out the window, hoping to make the turn obvious to whoever followed them. They rattled along for a while, jarred by every rut. Thisbe, watching Olivia, saw her face grow paler, and knew that the jouncing must be hurting her head, already bound to be aching from the blow that had knocked her out.

  Then they made another turn, and the road was less rutted, making for a smoother ride at least. The wagon pulled to a stop. Thisbe and Olivia took their makeshift weapons in hand and crouched down on either side of the doors, prepared to spring.

  Nothing happened.

  They waited, then waited some more. “What’s going on?” Thisbe hissed.

  Olivia shook her head. Rising, she slipped back to the window and looked out. “I don’t see anything except some trees.”

  She crossed to the other window as Thisbe joined her. “Let me. I can look out more easily.” Thisbe peered through the bars. “I see the top of a house. And over there is a big tree. We’re definitely in the country, but beyond that...” She shrugged.

  “Listen.” Olivia held up a finger.

  There was the sound of men’s voices, though the words were indistinguishable, then the unmistakable jingle of the team’s harness. Olivia and Thisbe looked at each other in alarm. “They’re unhitching the horses.”

  “We won’t be able to steal the wagon.” Olivia followed her statement with one of her husband’s favorite curses. “Now what are we to do?”

  At that moment, the duchess moaned and turned over. “Mother!”

  They dropped down beside the other two women. “They’re still unconscious.”

  “But they’ll wake before long. If they do so soon enough, we can all escape.” Thisbe patted her mother’s cheek, saying her name. “Use your smelling salts.”

  “Yes, of course.” Olivia unscrewed a metal vial from the chatelaine at her waist and held it under her mother’s nose.

  The duchess turned her face away, mumbling something. Olivia waved it under Kyria’s nose as well, before screwing it back onto the chain. “I think Kyria got a deeper dose of their gas.”

  At that moment, the bar on the door came off with a thump. Thisbe and Olivia whirled around, Thisbe silently cursing the fact that they had been caught farther inside the wagon. But they took up their hatpins and knife and started forward as the doors swung open.

  Four men stood on the ground outside. One of them was pointing a gun straight at Thisbe and Olivia.

  “Blast.” Thisbe kept her hand in the fold of her skirt, slipping the pin through the material to secure it. She stepped in front of Olivia to shield her from view as Olivia slipped her weapons into her pockets.

  Thisbe could think of nothing to do now but put on a disdainful face and climb down. She would have liked to take her sister’s hand but didn’t, unwilling to show even a small sign of weakness to their kidnappers. Instead, she kept a stony gaze on the men, memorizing every detail of their faces. Beside her, Olivia was equally stoic, though Thisbe suspected that she, too, surged with anger when the men pulled the duchess and Kyria from the wagon and slung them over their shoulders.

  As they walked across a strip of land too filled with dirt and weeds to be termed a yard, Thisbe and Olivia kept up a steady stream of questions. “Who are you? Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

  But the men remained silent, until finally the gunman roared, “Stop! Shut your mouths, or I’m going to knock you out, too.”

  Their captor led them up a narrow set of stairs and into a room in the hall above. The men carried in their mother, dumping her unceremoniously on the lone bed. Olivia let out a cry and ran to her mother’s side, and Thisbe whirled on the man, eyes blazing.

  But the men were already going out the door, the gunman backing out last. Thisbe ran toward them. “Wait! What—”

  He slammed the door shut in her face and the key turned with a loud clank. Thisbe pounded on the door, then kicked it in frustration. She turned back to go to Kyria and stopped, her eyes wide.

  “Kyria!” Thisbe whirled, looking frantically all around the room. “Where’s Kyria?”

  “What?” Olivia turned toward Thisbe, then jumped to her feet. “They took Kyria!”

  Thisbe rushed to the door and pounded on it with both her fists. There was a small rectangular window at eye level, barred as the ones in the wagon had been. Thisbe yelled through it, “Where’s Kyria? Come back here! Where is my sister?”

  Olivia joined her, and they yelled and pounded until they were hoarse and their hands sore.

  “Girls! What is this racket?”

  They whirled to see the duchess sitting up on the bed, rubbing at her face groggily. “Mother!”

  “Are you all right?” They hurried to the bed and sat down on either side of her.

  “I don’t think so,” Emmeline said, bringing her hand to her head. Her eyes were vague, her voice unaccustomedly weak. She looked, Thisbe realized with a pang of sorrow, almost fragile. Olivia reached for her vial of smelling salts, and the duchess said, “Don’t you dare.”

  Olivia and Thisbe exchanged smiles. “That sounds more like you.”

  “Well, of course...” Emmeline pushed back the strands of hair straggling around her face. “Where—what—those men!” Her eyes sharpened. “That man attacked Kyria.”

  “We’ve been abducted, Mother.”

  “What?” The duchess blinked. “Why?”

  “We’ve no idea.” Olivia succinctly relayed to her mother everything that had happened while Emmeline was unconscious.

  The duchess said nothing until Olivia ended with the information that Kyria was not with them. “Not
here!” She looked around. “Where is she?”

  “We don’t know. But they didn’t leave her here with us.”

  Their mother’s eyes narrowed, and she surged to her feet. The dazed, even weak, woman of a moment earlier had disappeared. She pulled herself to her full height, back ramrod straight, and her face stern as death. Emmeline Moreland might have come from mere country gentry, as she liked to point out, and she might disdain titles and noble bloodlines, but no one could look any more the duchess than she did right now.

  She marched to the door and in a voice accustomed to being heard above a crowd—and obeyed—she called, “Young man!”

  The duchess had cowed policemen, jeering men, prime ministers and even the twins with that tone. It was no surprise to Thisbe that it worked with kidnappers, as well. A few moments later, a man appeared at the rectangular window.

  Before he could speak, the duchess demanded, “What have you done with my daughter?”

  “Nothing!” He glared at Emmeline but could not hold her gaze.

  “Then where is she? What have you done with her?”

  “She’s fine!” The man protested, taking a step back from the door. “’Long as she tells us, nothing’s going to happen to her.”

  “Tells you what?” Emmeline snapped. “Stop this nonsense and bring her here at once.”

  “You don’t give me orders,” he blustered. “You best remember, I’m the one with a gun here.” His hand dropped to the butt of the pistol stuck in his waistband.

  “Well, I am the one who’s a duchess here.”

  “A what?” The man goggled.

  “I am the Duchess of Moreland.” Emmeline said the words as one might say “the Angel of Death.” The man seemed to take it the same way, for he blanched, his hand slipping from his gun. Emmeline continued, “Do you realize what you have done? What sort of idiocy you have committed? There’s not a ransom in the world that can make up for you hanging from a rope.”

  “You’re lying,” he said weakly.

  The duchess made a derisive noise. “You’re a fool if you think so. I assure you, I can bring the full force of the law down upon you. I have the money to make any associate of yours happy to betray you, and if it takes an army to find you, I will do so. If you hurt Kyria in any way, if you so much as harm a hair on her head, know this—I will hunt you down and you will rue every moment of your short, pathetic life. Now...” She leaned closer to the window and said, each word a shot, “Give me my daughter.”

  “Mother is a force of nature,” Olivia murmured.

  Thisbe looked at her sister and grinned. “I’ve always thought Papa fell in love with her because she was the personification of a Greek goddess.”

  The man turned and scuttled off down the hall. The duchess turned back to her daughters. “Well, he isn’t brave, but neither is he very intelligent.” She sighed and joined them.

  “Our family will find us,” Thisbe told her encouragingly.

  “Yes, of course, but we haven’t the time to sit around in this wretched room, waiting for them. We have to rescue Kyria. And think of your poor father...” She shook her head. “Henry must be so distraught. I cannot bear for him to suffer. We must get out of here.”

  “Yes, of course.” Olivia stood up and began to inspect the room.

  There was little enough there—a simple narrow bed, a washstand with a pitcher and bowl, one chair, and a small table with an oil lamp on it. The single window was shuttered on the outside, making the place dim, and the door was sturdy.

  Olivia crouched down beside the door and studied the lock. “I wish I had my lock picks with me—though I’ve never been as good with them as Con and Alex.”

  “That’s because you aren’t the little thief they’ve always been,” Thisbe joked.

  “Now, now, dear, Con and Alex aren’t thieves,” the duchess said. “They’re just...”

  “Intellectually curious, yes, I know.”

  “I was going to say slippery.” Emmeline’s eyes glimmered with amusement. She stiffened at the sound of raised voices down the hall and sent an anxious look toward the door. “Come. We need to act.” She turned to Olivia, and Thisbe followed suit.

  “Well...” Olivia glanced around again. “I’ll try to pick the lock with our hatpins.”

  Thisbe handed her the hatpin she had thrust through the folds of her skirt. “Give me your chatelaine. We need to figure out what we can use to escape. The best way to start any experiment is to lay out the supplies.”

  “Excellent idea,” the duchess agreed. “Perhaps you could concoct a bomb of some sort to toss at them.”

  “A bomb?” Thisbe raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes. You’ve blown up any number of things. That time you started a fire in your workroom, for instance.”

  “I’d just as soon not start a fire in here, thank you,” Thisbe said drily and spread out her sister’s chatelaine on the bed. Though made of silver, it was plainly styled; seven chains dangled, holding various ornaments—a rectangular locket that opened up to reveal a small writing pad, a pencil stub in a silver sheath, the penknife Olivia had pulled out earlier, as well as small scissors, a watch, a round case containing a few matches and a vial of smelling salts. “I’m not sure how we could use any of these but the penknife.”

  Thisbe went through her pockets, setting the items down on the bed beside Olivia’s chatelaine. Two pencil stubs, one with the lead broken off, a bag of lemon drops, a handkerchief, a magnifying glass, three of Athena’s jacks which Thisbe had discovered in a painful manner on the floor this morning, a list of chemicals she needed to order from the apothecary, a small tin of matches and, finally, a test tube.

  Thisbe sighed and studied her treasure trove, saying wistfully, “If only that vial had something in it—potassium chloride, say. I could make a show with that and the lemon drops.”

  She turned to the duchess. “What about you? What do you have?”

  The duchess pulled a chain from around her neck. A beautifully carved narrow wooden cylinder dangled from the chain. Emmeline pulled off the top of the ornamental to reveal a glass tube half-filled with powder.

  “Smelling salts?” Thisbe asked in surprise. “You carry smelling salts?”

  “Yes, of course. Someone’s always fainting at these things. Lydia Hammersmith does so regularly. In fact, I usually bring an extra supply.” The duchess reached into a pocket and pulled out a small plain bottle. She added it to Thisbe’s pile on the bed, followed by a handkerchief and a small flat tin box. “And digestive tablets—my stomach isn’t what it used to be. I mix one of these with water.”

  Thisbe opened the box to reveal several flat round pastilles. “Sodium bicarbonate? Hmm.” She sat back, thinking.

  Behind them something clattered to the ground. “Blast!”

  Thisbe turned to see Olivia, still crouched at the lock, looking disgusted. “I can’t manage it. It’s old and rusty and my picks keep—”

  “Sh.” Thisbe held up a finger. “Someone’s coming.”

  Olivia scrambled away from the door, hiding her tools in her pocket. The duchess and Thisbe, without even exchanging a glance, sat down together on their cache of implements lying on the bed, spreading out their skirts a little to make sure it was all concealed. The key grated in the door, giving proof of its age and recalcitrance, then turned with a clank. The door opened to reveal one of the men, his color high and his jaw set, and Kyria, whose arm he grasped firmly. He shoved her inside and slammed the door shut, once again locking the door.

  “Kyria!” The women rushed to her, the duchess wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “Did he hurt you?” Olivia’s eyes flashed.

  Kyria was very pale, but she shook her head. “No. He was full of bluster, but he didn’t do anything to me. It was whatever they gave me to knock me out. It made me
sick.”

  “They gassed you, I’m certain. Mother, too, but I think you got the brunt of it, since they used it on you first.” Thisbe urged her toward the bed. “Here, sit down.”

  “Thank you. I’m still a bit woozy. Not as bad as it was, though, when I woke up. I was so nauseous that I tossed up my breakfast.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “All over that man’s shoes.”

  Thisbe and Olivia laughed, and the duchess said, “Good for you, dear.”

  Kyria looked up at her mother. “What did you say to that other fellow? He came back a few minutes ago, looking rather agitated.”

  “Mother gave him that look,” Thisbe said. “You know.”

  “Oh, yes.” Kyria nodded.

  “Only about ten times deadlier,” Olivia put in.

  “Then she said, ‘I am the Duchess of Moreland.’ All she needed was a flaming torch in her hand.”

  “Or a sword.”

  “I wish I’d had one,” Emmeline said in a heartfelt tone. “It would have been a good deal more useful. You know how much I dislike trading on your father’s name and title. But one must always stand up to tyrants.” She paused, then gave a little laugh. “I was, perhaps, a trifle bombastic.”

  “That’s another thing that’s odd,” Kyria said. “They didn’t seem to know who we were. The man you frightened came in and said, ‘She says she’s a bleedin’ duchess.’ Pardon my language, Mother.”

  “Perfectly understandable, dear.”

  “The man questioning me looked surprised, too. But I had the impression that he was their leader.”

  “I did, too,” Olivia agreed. “He was the fellow with the gun—and the one who stayed here while the other three did the kidnapping.”

  “I don’t understand. What was he questioning you about?” Thisbe asked.

  “That’s the most peculiar part. He kept asking me about a key.”

  “A key!”

  “Yes. Can you imagine? At first I thought I heard him wrong. I was still rather groggy. But he kept saying it, just getting louder and louder, as if I were deaf. And...” Her eyes flashed. “He told me I was ‘too old.’”