A little while later her efforts bore fruit.
The door swung open.
Kate blinked. It looked like her captor had taken a bath and shrunk. But another look showed her the small aggrieved boy standing there, hands on spindly hips, was as dirty as the larger version of himself.
“Now, whatcha wanna go and do that for?” he asked angrily. He opened his hand to show her all the bits of paper she’d torn from the little notebook she carried in her reticule, scribbled “HELP” on, and had been squeezing out the window for the past half hour.
“Ain’t like no one can read ’em, even if they found ’em, silly bitch,” he said. “They come down like snow in August though, so how could I miss ’em?”
Bitter disappointment combined with anger, it made Kate forget how vulnerable she’d felt moments before. Her only hope had been that her kidnappers would have been too busy to notice. But to have been discovered—and then cursed at. By a child?
“I beg your pardon!” Kate asked furiously.
“Well, yeah, right,” he said approvingly, “you should. Anyways, I come to tell you to quit it or my da will get mad, and you don’t want that, you don’t.”
The boy’s face was almost as filthy as his father’s, but his features weren’t broken, only small and snubbed, like the rest of him. It was hard to tell if he was seven or twelve. Diminutive as he was, he was as assured as a man and had a rough gravelly little voice. He turned to go.
“Wait!” Kate cried. “I don’t know how much you’re being paid to keep me here, but I promise you I can get you more.”
He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Aye, more trouble, for certain. Get us scragged, is what you can. Won’t do you no good. We already got paid, so we gotta deliver or we gets it in the neck one way or t’other.”
“My family—my friends—can pay more.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said in a bored voice. “That’s what my da said you’d say. Listen. It’s ’zactly like I said. It’s our necks. Broken in a noose or wrung by a hand, don’t make no difference, it’d be all the same to us. We don’t deliver, we loses our reputation and starves—or worse. And if you does get free, then we gets to take the morning drop at Newgate. Nah. My da said, ‘Don’t listen to her,’ and he’s a leery cove. Now stop throwing things out the window, hear?” He began to close the door.
“Wait!” Kate cried again, such panic in her voice that the boy turned round.
“Don’t worry. Your gettin’ food, ain’t about to starve you. Comin’ right up, so stubble it, willya?” he said, not unsympathetically.
“But, I need something more,” she said, thinking furiously. “I need…I must…go, you know.”
He scowled. “No. What do you need? Ain’t likely to get it, but you can ask anyways.”
“I have to use the convenience,” she announced.
He looked puzzled.
“Ahm…I…” She sought suitable words, since it was obvious the boy didn’t understand the proper ones. Her upbringing presented a problem though, so she tried to explain the need and not exactly what was necessary to meet it. “I had a long ride here, I had a lot to drink this morning, I need to use the convenience, the outbuilding, the…”
“Oh,” he said, looking nonplused for the first time. “Yeah, right. Shoulda thought. Hang on, gotta member mug downstairs, get it for you.”
She looked blank.
“A thunder mug,” he said in exasperation.
“Oh. A chamber pot? No!” she said with loathing. “I don’t want one. I can’t use it, you see,” she said, inventing rapidly. “Wouldn’t suit at all, not in my…present state.” She fell silent, hoping the mysteries of female plumbing would embarrass or confuse him.
“Oh!” he said, light obviously dawning. “Flashin’ the red flag, are you? Well, yeah. That could be a problem, gotta talk to Da.” He turned on his heel, went out, locking the door behind him.
Kate, face aflame, stood waiting.
The door flew open. Father and son appeared in the doorway. Kate cringed at the look on the father’s face.
“Use this!” he demanded, thrusting a chipped chamber pot and a filthy rag at her.
Her chin went up. Her nostrils flared. “No, I can’t. And I won’t. I have needs, but I have standards. You may kidnap me, but you cannot degrade me, or at least I suppose you can, but I won’t be party to it. So if I become ill, I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?”
That caused some consternation. His face turned ruddy, even under all the dirt. After a moment’s thought he growled at his son. “Take her down to the Jericho, and wait for her. Get her whatever she asks for too. As long as she can’t use it to hurt you none.”
“Aw, Da. Do I gotta?” the boy whined. “’Tis a man’s work for certain, aint it?”
“That it ain’t,” his father said brutally. “Listen,” he told Kate, shaking a filthy finger at her, “he’s little, but he’s quick, and he knows his knife like you knows your needle. I give him orders. He’ll cut you if he got to—and he’ll sing out for me, which’ll be worse, I promise you. Try any kinda rig, and you’ll find out. Now go and take care o’ it. Your only gettin’ your way ’cause you’re a lady, and I don’t know much about ’em. But mind your manners, or I’ll forget mine.”
Kate nodded and, with stiff neck and flaming face, gathered up the hem of her skirt and stepped out the door, with the pair of them at her heels. She took a quick look around the cottage as she marched down the stair and down the short hall to the back. The room on the right was no neater than the one on the left, and had a rusted stove and a table. Blankets on the floor of the room opposite showed it was for sleeping.
“Hold,” her original captor said, when they reached the back door. He rummaged in a knapsack until he produced what might once have been a doublet, a dress, or a shirt. He then made a great show of ripping it into long pieces, and handed them to Kate. Her face was so hot it felt swollen, but she accepted the rags, nodded, and allowed herself to be showed out the back door.
The tiny back garden was all weeds, and even they didn’t flourish. A path through them led to a swaybacked hut at the foot. Behind it, a high overgrown hedge blocked all view of what lay beyond as well as obscuring the house on the left. The cottage on the other side looked abandoned.
“Well, go in,” the boy said when Kate stood still in front of the dilapidated outbuilding. “And ’member, I’m out here.”
Kate opened the door to the squalid outhouse, and took an involuntary step back again. It was dark, dank, and incredibly fetid inside. But she held her breath, marched in, and pointedly closed the door behind her.
“Boy!” she called imperiously, a few minutes later. “I need some more clean cloths. I must have them!”
“Aw, damnation!” the boy said angrily.
“Four,” she called again.
“Four?” he asked in disbelief.
“Do you want to see why?” she asked, her voice frigid. Her next words seemed tinged with tears. “I don’t want to show you,” she said miserably. “But I don’t have any choice, do I?”
She couldn’t believe the next words he used. When he was done, he grumbled, “Yeah. Anything else, Your Highness?”
“That will do,” she replied.
Muttering, he marched back to the house.
She was gone when he got back.
But it took him several minutes to discover that, since she’d managed to wedge the door tight after she’d left.
They caught up with her a half mile down the road. They didn’t make a fuss, they didn’t raise their voices. Kate felt a prodding at her back, and then the father was at her left side, breathing heavily and glowering at her, and the boy was at her right.
“Silly blowen,” the father panted. “Where’d you think you was going? Only got two directions. You wasn’t going to scarper cross’t no fields, you ain’t such a clunch, after all. Still, we run upstairs and looked out a winder, and seen you right off. Now, shoutin’ won’t do you no goo
d, ’cause the folk hereabout wouldn’t care. And if they did, they knows it wouldn’t do ’em no good neither. Not many folk live here no more, which is why it’s such a good ken fer us. Now, face about and c’mon back.”
Kate had only seen two people in her brief race for freedom, both looking old enough to likely expire at merely being shown a knife. She nodded. “You can’t blame me, can you?” she asked in a defeated voice.
“Nah,” the man said. “Can’t. It were the best you could do, though, remember that. You din’t need no more towels when you went to the jakes, did ye? I misdoubt you even had your courses.”
She ducked her head. It had been a bold ruse, but a terrifically embarrassing one, and now she wondered that she’d even tried it.
He laughed. “Your a canny one, all right, nothin’ like a woman’s secrets to make a feller look t’other way,” he said with admiration. “Sharky here’s a regular jemmy fellow, and ought to have twigged to your lay, but he’s still a lad. Still, he come for me fast enough when he seen you flown the coop, and he learned from it, so it weren’t a waste.”
Kate turned and walked down the broken walkways with them. “I can offer you more to let me go,” she said.
“Aye, mebbe you can,” the older man agreed. “But we got to keep our word or we don’t never work no more. And our customer ain’t going to cry rope on us, but your fine friends would, and you know it. Leastways, even if you don’t, we do.”
“‘I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you that though I am not wealthy, I have influential family and friends?”
“No, none,” the man agreed amiably enough. “Like I said, it aint the gold, it’s the job of work.”
“So, you’re going to…” she swallowed hard and her voice broke, “kill—uhm, scrag me?”
The man stopped short and looked at her in astonishment. “Nay, what are you going on about? We ain’t in that line. We grabs, we don’t put out no lights.”
“But why?” Kate asked.
“Not for us to know, or me to say even if I did,” the man said primly, as he started walking again, and pulled her along.
“But we ain’t got nothin’ against you,” Sharky put in quickly, looking a bit upset, because Kate’s eyes had begun to fill with tears.
She was astonished at her own tears and the boy’s reaction to them. She almost never wept, and refused to use them to win an argument, because she had three brothers and felt, as they did, that it was poor sportsmanship. But tears had done what her logic and guile had not. Both father and son were obviously disturbed by them. They were looking grim when they weren’t trying to look away. She’d invented one set of female difficulties for a chance at escape, she could certainly invent feminine frailties for the possibility of another.
“It’s hard to be stolen away from my friends and family,” she said brokenly, swiping at her eyes with one hand, because now that she’d allowed herself to use them the tears were easier to summon. “It’s not just because I’m frightened—though I am. But my cousins, the Swansons, are so good to me, Lady Swanson will be devastated by this, and my uncle, unmanned. And my…friend, Sir Alasdair, will be distraught.”
That was the wrong note. She didn’t know why, but father and son exchanged a look, and it was smug and knowing.
“I wonder if I’ll ever see my mother and father and my three little brothers again,” she went on, letting the tears roll freely down her cheeks. “They sent me to London so I could see the great city, but they’re simple country folk. They won’t understand. Who could so dislike me as to cause them—and me—such pain?”
“Can’t say,” the man said abruptly. “C’mon. Tell you what,” he added as she bravely gulped back a sob, then let out another, “cuppa tea be just the thing. We’ll fix one for you. Aye. You gotta eat, but no one said you gotta do it by your lonesome.”
He was as good as his word.
They let her sit at the tilted table while the father brewed tea. The son took a pack they’d stowed under the table and dug out a slightly green haunch of mutton, a hacked-up loaf of bread, and a slab of cheese. Kate wiped her tears and offered to help, but they just looked at her strangely before going on with their chores.
“You could fix your hair,” the boy remarked, looking up from where he was placing the cheese on a cracked plate. “You look a regular Blowsabella.”
Her hands flew to her hair. “Blowsabella?” she asked as she tried to comb her unruly curls into some order with her fingers.
“Aye, it’s a word we use for a lass what got hair what looks like a rag doll,” the father said, with an actual smile in his voice.
Kate took heart. “Oh. That’s why, when you stopped me from running just now, you called me a ‘blowen’?”
Both father and son froze and exchanged a guilty look.
“Nay,” the father said curtly, turning his attention back to the pan where he was heating water. “Different word. That was because you’re the…partikilar friend of a swell, a fine gent. See?”
“Oh,” Kate said, “but I’m friends with a great many gentlemen.”
“Nah,” Sharky commented as he sliced a hunk of cheese, “he means ’cause your Sir Alasdair’s doxie.”
Kate shot to her feet. “I should say not!” she said angrily. “No such thing! Why, I’m no man’s…mistress. There, I’ve said it plainly,” she added, her face flaming. “There’s nothing I can do about you abducting me, but I don’t have to listen to such claptrap. Why,” she added, tilting her head to the side, “did those who paid you to do this tell you that? Well, if they did, it’s a lie.
“Do you think that matters?’ she asked hopefully. “I mean, will it change things? Because if it’s some woman who has plans for Sir Alasdair, and believe me, many do,” she added, as a sudden vision of the spiteful Lady Eleanora flashed into her mind, as well as a horrifying image of the three spiteful females she was now living with. “Since it’s not so, maybe you could tell them that and they’d agree to have you let me go? Because I’m not Sir Alasdair’s particular friend in that sense at all. I never would or could be,” she added with regret, in spite of her efforts to be neutral.
Her two captors didn’t miss it.
“Ain’t ours to ask,” the boy said, but he looked at his father as he did.
“No, it ain’t,” his father said roughly. “Now, have a cuppa, and some to eat, and you’ll feel more the thing.”
“But how can I?” she asked, real tears back in her eyes.
“Eatin’s got nothing to do with feeling,” he said. “Just makes you feel better. Eat,” he added, not un-gently. “It’ll help your mind work so’s you can try to outfox us and lope off again.”
He flashed a crooked yellowed smile at her, but it was a curiously winning one, and she had to smile back, through her tears.
“All right,” she said. “But I must wash my hands.”
He laughed. “A good try! But that won’t help you do nothin’ but get them clean, miss, for we ain’t lettin’ you get outside again.”
“Getting them clean will help,” she answered ruefully, holding up both hands to show them how dirty they were from her attempts to break out of the window. She lowered them, looking slightly abashed, when she realized that even so they were cleaner than either of her captors’ hands.
The older man saw it, and read her mind. “Aye, but your a real gentry mort, ain’t you? We could grow flowers on our mitts and mushrooms on our dimbers and we wouldn’t mind. Sharky, get the lass some water.”
The boy brought her a bowl of water, a wafer of tan soap, and a square of towel. Kate dipped her hands in the bowl and washed her hands, obviously thinking deeply as she did.
“This just doesn’t make sense, you know,” she murmured as one hand slowly rubbed the other under the water. “My disappearance won’t matter to Sir Alasdair. Well, it will because he is a friend. But it won’t affect him, or anyone, really, except my parents and brothers. I do have relatives other than the Swansons,” she added
. “But if anyone’s thinking of them, that’s folly. Abducting me won’t matter much to any of them. They’ll feel bad, of course, but I doubt they’ll turn the world upside down to ransom me, I don’t think. Because though I’d feel sorry for them if anything happened to them, I wouldn’t be crushed, and neither would they be for me.”
She dipped her face into her cupped hands. “So since none of my rich kinfolk would be too devastated,” she said when she lifted her face, “who’d profit from this? The Scalbys are my most important relatives in town now, I suppose, at least the most influential. But since I haven’t seen them for a long time either, why should they care either?”
She asked, but didn’t look at them for an answer because she’d picked up the toweling and was drying her face. So she missed the matching startled looks of regret and fear father and son shot to each other then.
18
“’E’s gone to earth, Sir Alasdair,” the little man protested. “Lolly’s sloped off Gawd knows where. Mind,” he added, “don’t mean ’e done it or knows ’oo did. Just means ’e knows, like we all do, that you’d blame ’im for leaves falling in autumn. Fact, did ’e know who spirited the gentry mort away, ’e’d be the first to make profit from it from you, wouldn’t ’e?”
“So he would,” Alasdair said in a flat grim voice that made the little man back farther into the shadows of the alley they were meeting in. “But so he’d want me to think, too. And how did you know what I wanted him for?” he added a shade too gently.
“It’s all over,” the little man said plaintively. “’Oo don’t know? You ain’t got no ransom note neither, or we’d know that, too.”
Alasdair bit back a curse. So much for preserving Kate’s reputation.
The little man anticipated the next question. “’Oo knows who blew the gab?” he asked. “Mebbe a maid at the Swanson ken spilled it to ’nother, mebbe it were a footboy telling a friend, but it’s out, and every rogue, bawd, prigger, and peddler in Lunnon’s looking sharp, ’cause they thinks there’ll be gold in it for ’em if they ’ears ought. So, ’o course, Lolly scarpered—’e knows how you feel about ’im, don’t ’e?”
Edith Layton Page 21