The Wild Princess

by Perry, Mary Hart

  She pulled herself erect, determined not to stew through the entire day. Stephen Byrne had pledged himself to her. She trusted his word. She’d focus on future stolen moments they’d share. They would create a marriage of the spirit—although they could never appear in public as a couple. To the world she would be the Marchioness of Lorne, and after Lorne’s father passed on, the Duchess of Argyll. But in her heart, she was the Raven’s bride.

  She tested her smile for her mother’s subjects. They lined the street, four and five deep, waving flags and bowers of flowers, shouting, “Long live the queen!” It occurred to her that many of them still thought Victoria was in the coronation coach with her. She covered her mouth with one gloved hand to hide a wicked smile. If her mother realized she was being overlooked, she would be furious.

  “We’re going too fast,” Beatrice complained. “We always parade at walking pace. The people want to see us.”

  “It’s all right, Bea,” Louise comforted her. “We must be behind schedule. The guardsmen need to get us to the church in time for the ceremony. I’m sure we’ll travel at a more leisurely speed on our way home.”

  Beatrice pouted, playing with the lace ruffles of her gown. It was an exquisite dress, in three colors, which had recently become all the rage in Paris. An underskirt of blue faille with gathered flounces, an apricot overdress trimmed with pale green silk ruches, and a discreet bodice designed to hide any suggestion of a bust—which no doubt pleased the queen, who still was intent on keeping Baby an innocent.

  “By then everyone will have gone back to their homes, I’m sure,” Beatrice fretted.

  “You’ll have plenty of chances to show off your pretty new dress when we arrive at the church, my sweet. Journalists from all of the newspapers will be waiting outside Westminster Abbey, writing down everything about your gown and how lovely and grown-up you look.”

  Alice rolled her eyes but said nothing to Louise’s obvious flattery of their youngest sister. Beatrice seemed mollified and took to leaning out the side window to better extend her arm and wave. By the time they’d passed half a mile down Vauxhall Bridge Road toward the river, Bea had collected a lapful of posies, nosegays, and woven crowns of wildflowers thrust into her hands by well-wishers.

  Flowers, Louise thought.

  They reminded her of that day when Byrne had first kissed her in her shop, where she always kept a bouquet. Or rather, she had kissed him, little knowing where that would lead. She knew he must have taken himself out of London by now. She wondered where he was. Already on a dock waiting for a ship to America? Or maybe it would take him a while to arrange for transport.

  Strangely, she felt his presence even now. As if in his absence he still watched over her, letting her know that he loved her, that he cared for her safety.

  It was silly, of course. She knew that. He wasn’t here. She hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him. He would have been easy to spot in the courtyard while they were boarding the carriages and waiting for her mother to appear. She sighed but did her best to turn a cheerful face toward the window and greet the people of London. The people she’d come to feel so much closer to than any of her brothers or sisters possibly could.

  She felt a moment of pride. She alone had ventured beyond royal walls, sat with commoners in parks and pubs, invited them into her shop, worked alongside them, painted them into her art. She loved these people, from the grimiest street urchin to the eldest gin-guzzling granny, from the corner flower sellers to Fleet Street’s paperboys and the penny-desperate little crossing sweepers. From the costermongers wheeling their barrows of produce up and down cobbled lanes to the bootblacks and market stall hawkers, draymen, performing mountebanks, and even the disgusting but necessary rat catchers. They were her people. Being among them, and helping as she could, had brought her immense satisfaction and friends far richer than she might have cultivated within the closed circle of her mother’s court.

  She had earned for herself a truly rich life, and she was more hopeful than ever for the future of women, and not just those in London. She would do what good she could in Canada and, God willing, elsewhere in the world to bring women into their own.

  Louise tossed a kiss to a little girl in the crowd as the carriage climbed toward the middle of Vauxhall Bridge. It was then that the explosion shattered her world.

  Beatrice cried out at the deafening noise.

  “Oh Lord, what’s happening?” Alice shrieked, reaching for her husband’s arm. The duke frowned out the window.

  Their coach lurched drunkenly. Louise gripped the inside armrest on the door. She looked out her window, now slanted toward the pavers, and peered forward along the parade route, trying to locate the source of the explosion. Her mother’s little brougham and the Prince of Wales’s larger carriage had both stopped on the bridge ahead of them.

  It took her several seconds longer to comprehend the impossible—that the bridge simply ended twenty feet beyond the coronation coach. A gaping maw of missing stonework separated the two lead carriages from the one in which Louise and her sisters rode. The entire center span of the bridge had been blown away in front of them.

  Everything that happened after that moment seemed to occur in slow motion, enabling Louise to fix each detail of the disaster indelibly in her mind. As she watched, transfixed by the horrific scene, the space between the two halves of bridge widened, more and more stones tumbling down and splashing into the river below. Then the entire slope of the roadway beneath their coach shifted, making her gasp at their precariousness. The road slanted downward, then settled momentarily, as if trying to decide whether it too would give up and drop away beneath the royal cavalcade.

  All was mayhem in the coach—Bea and Alice sobbing, the duke trying to calm them, Lorne looking confused.

  “We’re safer here than out there on the road,” the duke said when he saw Louise try to leverage herself out of her tilted seat and reach for the door.

  She thought he might be right. Onlookers who had lined the bridge to watch the parade pass were running toward the shore, knocking one another down in their panic.

  But then she felt the immense carriage, weighed down by its ornamental carvings and gilded embellishments, continue to grind forward despite the driver’s and footmen’s attempts to brake. It pushed the terrified, screeching horses ahead of it, ever closer to the brink.

  A man wearing a white shirt rode up to their coach on horseback, shouting, “Jump. Jump now!”

  Startled, Louise looked up at his face. Stephen!

  He was here, with her, watching over them.

  It took her less than a heartbeat to understand what Stephen meant, and why. As he slashed the traces with a knife, freeing the team of horses from the coach, letting them run back as they’d come, it became clear to her. He was afraid if the horses went over the edge and into the water, they would drag the coach over with them. Everyone still inside would drown. If they survived the plunge.

  “Get out. We have to get out now!” she shouted.

  Alice looked horrified. “How? The coach is tipping over. What if it falls on us?”

  Lorne flashed Louise a look that told her he understood. He tried to open the lower of the two doors, but it was jammed.

  The duke said, “It has to be up and out the other way. Ladies, follow me.” Standing on one of the seats he shoved against the door, now almost directly overhead. He’d barely broken the door open when something in the coach’s structure gave way with a loud snap.

  “Go!” Lorne shouted.

  The duke clambered through the door then reached down for his wife and pulled Alice, squealing in fright, petticoats and skirts billowing like a pink cloud, up and out. Louise felt the carriage still skidding forward, wood and metal screeching against stone. How far to the broken end of the bridge’s roadway? Did even ten feet remain?

  Lorne grabbed Louise’s hand.

  She fought his grip. “No! Beatrice. Take her next.” She shoved her little sister into his arms. Realizi
ng from his hesitation he was about to argue with her, she screamed, “Go, Lorne! For god’s sake, go.” She shoved them both up and out the door even as the front wheel of the coach grated over the last crumbling stones.

  The last one out, Louise poked her head up and through the door just in time to see Lorne and Bea tumble to safety. The fat body of the coach teetered, creaking on the stone lip. Beside the carriage, the white-shirted rider hastily dismounted. “Stephen!” she cried.

  He ran to the edge of the broken bridge, reached for her, but she was too far away. She climbed halfway out on the broken carriage frame. He appeared ready to fling himself aboard even as she scrambled for a grip to pull herself the rest of the way out. But two guardsmen seized him by the arms and held him back.

  And then she felt the coach beneath her go suddenly weightless as the blast-weakened stones supporting it finally gave way. Louise and coach plummeted down, down, down into the river.

  Fifty-two

  “No!” Byrne screamed, as if by the sheer force of his voice he could stop the inevitable. From atop the ruins of the bridge he heard a sharp crack, the sickening sound of splintering of wood as the coach slammed into the bridge’s stone abutment, breaking apart the monstrous thing before it hit the water.

  He stood in shock, unable to breathe, his gut a ball of fire. Never had he felt more helpless. More lost. The two men holding him back dropped his arms, called off by their sergeant. Faced with more pressing problems than protecting the queen’s agent they raced off to fight their attackers.

  All about Byrne was madness. Gunfire echoed from the direction of the shore behind; the guardsmen who had been bringing up the rear were fighting off a heavily armed force. He should join them to protect the two princesses and other civilians trapped in the melee. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t stop staring down into the putrid, gray flow beneath him. At the bobbing wreckage of the royal coach.

  Where was she? He stepped to the edge, prepared to jump in at the slightest sign of life. At least from here, above, he had a better chance of spotting her. There might still be a chance of getting her out, of her surviving. Oh, God, there has to be!

  At first he could make out nothing but debris in the wretched, reeking confluence. Then a billow of white blossomed at the water’s surface, reminding him of a graceful, pulsing jellyfish in the dark water. As he squinted, trying to make out what the thing was, a long white-gloved arm appeared.

  “Louise!”

  “Bloody fool.” A hand clamped down on his shoulder before he could step over the edge. “You’ll do her no good dead. Come, there’s a better way.”

  Byrne hung back, trying to extricate himself from Lorne’s grasp. He looked across the open space where the middle span of the bridge used to be. The queen’s carriage had made it across to the other side before the blast ripped a hole through stone and mortar. Hussars now surrounded the boxy little brougham. Brown had taken one of their horses and was standing in the stirrups, trying to see what was happening on the other side.

  “Take her on!” Byrne shouted above the sounds of battle, waving him off. His throat closed, blocking further words. If the Scot left now, the queen and heir to the throne would be safe with the bulk of her guard as escort. The Fenians seemed not to have yet realized that Victoria wasn’t in the coronation coach.

  Lorne hadn’t given up tugging on his sleeve. “Move your bloody ass!” the marquess ordered, and this time Byrne snapped to action, drawing the Colt out from the hip holster where it had stayed to leave his hands free to reach for Louise.

  They broke into a run, past the princesses and Alice’s duke, now surrounded and sheltered by the queen’s guard. Perhaps because of his love of the hunt, Lorne instinctively found the one hole in the fighting and made for it. Byrne followed on his heels.

  An instant before they reached the foot of the bridge, Byrne caught a glimpse of a thin man in a dark cape, aiming a pistol at the running Lorne. He recognized Gladstone’s secretary, the Fenian officer.

  Philip Rhodes’s first shot missed. Byrne’s shot didn’t. Rhodes staggered two steps, firing a second volley too wide and high to hit anyone, as a crimson stain spread across his chest. He fell to the ground; Byrne didn’t stop but felt satisfied the wound was fatal.

  As soon as they were clear of the bridge, Lorne turned down the steep incline and raced, mud flying from beneath his boot heels, down the embankment toward a nearby boatyard. A covey of fishing skiffs, a barge, and a tugboat were docked there.

  Believing he knew what the marquess had in mind, Byrne shouted, “We’ll never reach her in time, rowing.” Even putting up a sail would take precious minutes. And there was barely a breeze, this rare hot day, to fill the canvas.

  Lorne pointed. “If that steamer tug is stoked up—”

  Byrne’s hopes soared at the sight of gray smoke starting to billow from the tugboat’s stack.

  But Louise still might have been killed in the fall. Crushed beneath all that heavy wood and cursed metal hardware. Drowned as her gown sucked up water and dragged her down by its weight. Knocked unconscious by falling rubble as more and more stone blocks tumbled into the river. He agonized over the myriad ways she might have met her end. After all, he’d seen a dress and an arm, nothing more. He hadn’t seen her face or been able to tell from the height of the ruined bridge if she was even breathing.

  His heart felt as if it would detonate like an Irish bomb. He stared out over the water, scanning the filthy froth surrounding the rubble and shattered, half-submerged coach. Now, as he ran, he could see nothing at all that looked human in the water.

  When they were just feet from the tug, Byrne heard the grinding throb of its engine. It was a relatively new model, he guessed—no paddle wheels, so there would be a propeller beneath the water to move her forward. Lorne exchanged a hopeful look with him, the pallor of his face less deathly. A bearded man in a waterman’s smock and cloth cap was coiling heavy lengths of hemp rope while a younger fellow, stripped to his waist, shoveled coal into the boiler, stopping only to consult the steam gauges.

  The captain saw them coming. “You from the queen’s party up yonder?” he bellowed over the noises of the engine and the fighting above them.

  “Yes,” Byrne shouted. “Can you get us out there, to where the coach fell in?”

  “Just what we’d in mind, sir. How many in her when she went over?”

  “One. Princess Louise.”

  “Lordamighty,” the captain said.

  “Shit,” added the boy, “she’s good as dead, she is.”

  The captain silenced him with a look. “Engine’s near ready. Lucky we were already heading out for a job when it happened. Hop aboard. It’ll take a few minutes to get us out there.”

  “Can’t you shove off now?” Lorne wailed, his blue eyes electric with panic. He grabbed binoculars laying nearby on a crate and scanned the water.

  “Pressure’s gotta build. Almost there,” the captain assured him. “We started her up soon’s we saw that boat blow.”

  “Boat?” Byrne scowled at the captain.

  “Dory or some such, covered over with tarp. Tied to that middle strut there. I thought they were bridge repair boys. Musta been filled to the gills with powder.” The boy slammed the iron boiler door closed and nodded at his captain. “We’re off, boys.”

  The tug swung away from the dock and picked up speed.

  “Let me see those.” Byrne took the binoculars from Lorne and rushed to the bow to better see the water directly ahead of them. If there was any chance of Louise swimming to shore he didn’t want them running her down.

  Lorne came up behind him. “She loves you, you know,” he said.

  Byrne’s heart stopped. He said nothing.

  “If she’s alive . . . if you save her”—the marquess choked on his words—“I won’t stand in your way.”

  Byrne shot him a quick look. Their eyes met in a moment of understanding. Then Lorne looked away, his tear-filled eyes narrowing on the water. “There!�
� he shouted.

  “Where?” Byrne’s heart leapt with hope.

  “Two o’clock. Another rescue boat.” Lorne pointed.

  Not her. Not her, damn it.

  “With another boat helping we’ll have a better chance of finding her,” Lorne yelled in his ear over the engine’s growl.

  Immediately following the explosion, the river had cleared. Merchant ships, ferries, fishing trawlers—all made quickly away from the area, no doubt fearing their boats would be damaged by more blasts. But this lone boat had now reversed direction and was moving toward the catastrophic scene.

  Byrne had always wondered whether he’d know his old enemy Rupert Clark, if they ever met face-to-face. He’d only ever seen a photograph of him during the war. And then there were the statements of a few witnesses, filling in physical details.

  Now, as he peered through the binoculars at the two men aboard the rusty old ferry steaming across the water, Byrne felt his sixth sense kick in. One man stoked the boiler. But it was the other who drew his eye. He was tying a large open loop in the end of a length of rope, using his teeth to hold the rope secure while manipulating the strands into a knot. Even from this distance, Byrne could tell that something was wrong with the man’s right hand.

  Fingers missing. The badge of a black powder man.

  The rope man’s face was back to him. But he knew Rupert Clark by his shock of red hair and war injury. His work with the rope done, the former rebel soldier’s attention fixed on something in the water beneath the bridge. Something he intended to haul aboard with his lasso?

  Byrne shifted the binoculars by sixty degrees to follow the general direction of Rupert’s gaze. At first he saw nothing but floating rubble. He swung the binoculars to the right, and stopped. There.

  He’d have recognized those smooth white shoulders anywhere.

  Fifty-three

  Louise felt cold, dreadfully cold, head to foot. From her waist down, she was submerged in the Thames River’s slime—dark as tea, the consistency of congealed gravy. The upper part of her body stretched across a shattered door of the coach but was no less wet. She’d swallowed mouthfuls of the filthy water before kicking off her shoes and hauling herself up onto the only part of the broken coach within her reach that seemed not to be sinking.