by Gaelen Foley
Mere seconds had passed. The fourth guard was still twitching in the dust as Lucien drew his second pistol, stalked up to the door of the warehouse, and kicked it open, nearly throwing it off its rusty hinges. As it flung open, he came face-to-face with Bardou, a mere six or seven feet between them. Apparently, the Frenchman had been rushing toward the door to investigate the sound of gunfire outside. Bardou froze as Lucien brought up his pistol and leveled it at him.
“Give my regards to the devil.”
“Don’t shoot, Argus! Look!” Bardou raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, but nodded toward the barrels stacked just behind him.
Lucien’s gaze flicked to the white letter A painted on each barrel. Top quality gunpowder. The explosives Sophia had warned him about, he realized.
His glance swept the warehouse, freezing in shock on the cannon with its nose pointed out the window. It was aimed straight across the river at Parliament. No wonder he hadn’t found any explosives planted in Westminster Hall. Bardou had planned on launching his attack from here. He saw the portable stove thrust into the large industrial hearth, throwing off heat that made the whole warehouse uncomfortably warm. Good God, he realized in horror, Bardou had been preparing hot shot.
“If you pull that trigger, we both die,” Bardou warned. “All it takes is one spark.”
“Move away from the barrels.”
He laughed softly, shaking his head. “I think not.”
“Come away from those barrels and fight me, you coward!” Lucien roared.
“Coward?”
“You hid behind Caro the same way you’re trying to shield yourself with those barrels. Maybe you don’t dare, now that I’m no longer in chains.”
“Well, maybe you had better pull that trigger and kill us both, Argus, because I know now about your little mistress, Alice Montague.” Bardou smiled as Lucien’s face drained of color. “Such a tender young beauty. I hope she fights me when I take her. I hope she cries. In fact, I’ll make sure that she does.”
Blind rage overwhelmed Lucien. With hellfire burning in his eyes, he tossed his pistol aside, well out of Bardou’s reach. He did not need it to kill the son of a bitch. He wanted to do it with his bare hands. Lucien charged him, slamming Bardou back bodily into the stacked barrels of gunpowder, which crashed down all around them, some splitting and puffing up clouds of black powder that hung in the air like soot and covered both men in a fine, metallic dust. Lucien hauled back and smashed his fist into Bardou’s jaw.
They fought savagely, pummeling each other with blood in their eyes. Lucien was impervious to the punches he took until Bardou’s fist slammed into his stitches. He let out a harsh cry of pain and doubled over, failing to block Bardou’s next blow to his head. It knocked him to the ground. He coughed, inhaling a bit of the gunpowder that puffed up around him as he fell.
With a brutish grunt, Bardou heaved one of the barrels of gunpowder up and held it aloft over Lucien, who shook his head clear just in time to react. Recalling Bardou’s limp, he kicked him in the right knee with shattering force. Bardou let out a roar of pain and dropped the barrel. Lucien rolled out of the way as the barrel crashed to the floor and broke open.
Cursing over his injured leg, Bardou ran off at a crippled hobble out of the warehouse, pausing only long enough to grab a sleek leather rifle case. He was escaping! Lucien searched frantically through the deep layer of black powder, trying to find his cast-off pistol. Once the Frenchman left the vicinity of the gunpowder, Lucien could safely fire at him. Failing to find his pistol quickly enough, he dragged himself up and ran doggedly after Bardou. When he flung out of the warehouse, he looked around, then saw Bardou climbing into a rowboat at the water’s edge. Beyond, the fiery sunset faded into the western horizon.
“Bardou!” he bellowed.
As Lucien ran after him, Bardou untied the boat from the post and pushed away from the small wooden dock with an oar. Lucien took a running leap off the dock and landed with a crash on top of Bardou in the boat as the current of the Thames began moving them along at an ever-quickening pace.
Lucien whipped out his dagger and slashed at Bardou, but the Frenchman blocked the arc of his knife with the oar, then grasped Lucien’s wrist. They struggled and Lucien let out a furious curse, dropping his dagger over the side into the rushing river when Bardou bashed his wrist on the metal oarlock, then knocked him back with a blow from the oar.
“Now you die,” Bardou snarled. Falling atop him, he wrapped his big hands around Lucien’s throat and began strangling him, choking the life out of him.
With each vain attempt to pull air into his lungs, Lucien felt his awareness sliding back into an ancient panic. Can’t . . . breathe. The terror of his childhood asthma attacks came flooding back to him, a deeply ingrained fear against which he had no defense. He pummeled Bardou’s stomach and clawed at his face until the little boat pitched wildly with their struggles. He started to throw Bardou off and in the next heartbeat, fell over the side. Before he knew what had happened to him, he was underwater, sucked down under a current so frigid it shocked him. He nearly drowned himself with the impulse to gasp for air now that the viselike grip had been removed from his throat. For that instant, he didn’t care that Bardou was escaping. All that mattered was getting air into his lungs. The cold, murky Thames tumbled him in a somersault, but he righted himself and pulled upward against the weight of his waterlogged boots and clothes.
He shot to the surface, gasping and choking for breath. As he wiped the water out of his eyes, drinking in great lungfuls of air, he saw Bardou rowing swiftly with the current.
“You haven’t begun to suffer, Knight!” Bardou shouted over the water at him. “Just wait till I kill Alice Montague!”
“No!” he choked out. “God damn it!” Though his strength was spent, pure rage fueled Lucien’s strokes as he swam back to the docks against the sweeping pull of the current. Bruised and bleeding, shivering with the wintry cold, his clothes and hair dripping with greasy Thames water, he felt nothing but volcanic fury as he grasped the ladder on the dock and pulled himself out of the river. He scrambled up onto the dock and ran through the warehouse yard, past the strewn bodies of the guards and the industrial refuse, making his way back out to Narrow Wall Street.
With the sky darkening in autumn’s early twilight, people were already milling about in the streets, waving their Guy Fawkes torches, singing their songs, and drinking their ale. In the distance, the revelers had already begun to set off crackers and Roman candles, but some children darted in front of Lucien, chanting, “Guy, guy, guy! Stick him up on high! Hang him on a lamppost and leave him there to die!”
He dodged around them, his pulse thundering in his ears as he raced toward Westminster Bridge. He heard the first celebratory cannons being fired from the direction of the royal parks. Their booming report reverberated in his chest, taking him back in a flash to his army days and the wild rage of battle. His mind was crisply clear, and he realized that he would never get to Alice first on foot.
Pounding up to the well-trafficked bridge, his waterlogged boots slogging with every stride, he stepped into the road in front of a dandy on a tall gray horse. The spooked gray reared up, but Lucien seized the reins and laid hold of the bridle.
“Get down,” he ordered the rider in a deadly tone.
“What is the meaning of this? Remove your hands from my—whoa!” the man cried as Lucien pulled him down out of the saddle, leaving him in a heap on the bridge. “Thief! Stop thief!”
Lucien swung up into the saddle and rode, urging the nervous gray into a gallop. He flew past the other traffic on the bridge as the first burst of the holiday fireworks climbed into the sky over the river and exploded in a hail of blue, red, and green, followed by another in resplendent orange and yellow. He glanced at the water. By their colorful illumination, he searched the river’s glittering surface for Bardou’s rowboat and let out a sharp curse as he spied the big Frenchman already climbing out of the boat onto the wharf
by Craven Street. Bardou knew that Lucien trusted his twin brother above all men, thus, could easily deduce that he had sent Alice to be protected by Damien at Knight House. It was reasonable for Bardou at least to check there, since Knight House was so close. Bardou need only take Cockspur Street to Pall Mall; from there it was practically a straight shot to the mansion. Lucien urged the gray on at breakneck speed, flying past the elegant wrought-iron lamps on the bridge. Too many streets lay between him and Alice, he thought, his face set in grim frustration. His only hope of arriving before Bardou was to cut through St. James’s Park, where the fire festival was under way.
Chapter 17
While Peg kept Harry entertained on the floor with a quiet game of spillikins, and the formidable Lord Damien paced back to the window, keeping guard in stony silence, Alice sat with Weymouth on the couch in the elegant drawing room of Knight House, trying to console him.
“How can she be gone? Oh, my sweet, beautiful sister. How could anyone hurt her?”
Alice rubbed his bony arm in wordless sorrow. Her own eyes were red-rimmed from crying, but she wished that the unkempt viscount would get himself under control before he upset Harry. She had received the terrible news of Caro’s murder about an hour ago. She had feared this outcome from the moment she had heard Bardou take her sister-in-law hostage back at the house in Upper Brooke Street. Though she had long had premonitions of disaster for Caro, it still came as a horrible shock. As soon as she had regained her composure, she had sent for Weymouth as Caro’s next of kin.
Unfortunately, the opium clouding the viscount’s wits made it all the more difficult for him to absorb the shocking news. If only for once he were not intoxicated. As Weymouth went on sobbing uncontrollably, Alice was tempted to shake him. He was taking the blow worse than Harry had, but in truth, she admitted, the three-year-old had no comprehension of what death meant. Perhaps this was a blessing.
Fighting tears, Alice had explained to Harry that Mama had gone to live in heaven with Papa and the angels. Harry seemed to think that it was just another occasion of the baroness leaving him again. As long as Harry had his Nanny Peg and his Aunt Alice, he seemed content, at least for now. Though Alice was trying to be strong for Harry and for the pitiful Lord Weymouth, she could barely keep control of her emotions with Lucien still missing.
An hour ago, at about five o’clock, Kyle, Talbert, and the others had returned to Knight House in defeat. They had explained to her how they had quickly caught up with Ethan Stafford’s fleeing carriage and how they had found Caro murdered inside. Bardou had escaped. They had handed Stafford over to the constable. For Alice, somehow, even worse than hearing the news of Caro’s murder was the sight of Kyle leading Lucien’s black horse in through the gates of Knight House, riderless. Kyle had told her that they had become separated from Lucien somewhere in the East End. Now that she had seen the unfeeling cruelty of which Bardou was capable, the fact that the Frenchman and Lucien were both missing made her blood feel like ice in her veins.
The lads had gone back out to look for him in the area where they had found his horse. This time Marc had joined them, abandoning his orders, since a man with Damien’s years of combat experience surely did not need any help protecting Alice. And yet, ever since the Guy Fawkes fireworks had begun exploding through the night sky, she had noticed that Damien had started to seem . . . strange. He seemed to be on edge, pacing restlessly. Alice noticed that he jumped each time the salute cannons boomed in the distance. She could not account for it. If anyone were used to the sound of cannonfire, she thought, surely it would be the battle-hardened colonel.
When she looked at him again, she could see the tension bristling in the broad lines of his shoulders. When another cannon roared in the distance, he flinched.
“Damien?”
He turned to her abruptly, as though she had startled him.
A shudder ran through him. When he glanced at her, the look in his gray eyes was ferocious, yet miles away. His face was quite pale and streaming with sweat.
She stood up and took a step toward him. “Damien, are you all right?”
He cast about as though confused for a second.
She moved toward him. “Maybe you’d better sit down.”
“No—I—I’m—fine. Would you excuse me,” he mumbled, then stalked out of the room.
Harry waved cheerfully. “Bye-bye, Lucien!”
Alice glanced from Damien’s retreating back to her nephew. Unable to quite absorb the concept that the twins were two separate men, Harry could not figure out why this “Lucien” seemed so remote and unwilling to play with him, unlike the friendly man who had given him the prism back at the townhouse. As Alice glanced in the direction Damien had gone, she still was not convinced that he was well.
“Weymouth, would you excuse me?”
“Harry will keep me company,” he said with a sniffle. “Come to Uncle Weymouth, Harry.”
Alice hurried out of the drawing room while Weymouth went on trying to get Harry’s attention. Damien had looked feverish, she thought as she marched down the corridor to the gleaming entrance hall. She hoped he had not fallen ill. When she reached the entrance hall, she saw Damien standing midway up the stairs. He was just standing there staring at the ground, his back to her. He looked so unsteady that she thought he was on the verge of passing out with fever, so she started to run up the steps after him to try to stop him from falling. Hearing her footfalls, he suddenly spun around with lightning speed.
“Stay back!” he snarled. He was wild-eyed, panting. He had a large knife in his hand and was holding it with a white-knuckled grasp.
Alice froze with a gasp.
They stared at each other. She did not dare move. The creature she saw in his eyes was not the same stoic, controlled colonel who had proposed to her in Hyde Park.
“Damien? What’s wrong?” she asked, her heart in her throat. She began inching back down the steps as though backing away from a wild animal.
Another cannon boomed in the distance, and his glance darted in the direction from which the sound had come. His face was taut with fierce concentration.
“Less than a mile off. Look sharp, boots. Pull up camp. They’ll be here in minutes.”
“Who will?” she asked faintly, paling at the glittering madness in his eyes.
“Boney’s coming. He’s just over that rise.” He pointed up the staircase with his knife, then laid his finger over his lips. “Don’t make a sound. We’ve got to get the artillery in place.”
Before Alice could react, he glided up the stairs, keeping low.
She stood stock-still, her hand clapped over her mouth in shock. Oh, my God.
For a long moment, she just stood there, not knowing what to do; then she jumped with fright as a loud banging reached her from somewhere upstairs. It sounded as though the colonel was barricading himself into one of the upper rooms. Her heart pounding in dread, Alice rushed down the stairs and began frantically searching the mansion for Mr. Walsh, the unflappable butler of Knight House. Surely he would know what was to be done. She glanced into the duke’s elegant library at the end of the hallway, when suddenly, Peg screamed her name.
“Miss Montague! Lord Damien! Stop him! Stop him!”
Alice picked up her skirts and ran back to the entrance hall, where Peg was standing beside the open door, pointing. “He took him! Hurry! I tried to stop him; he’s taken Harry—”
“Bardou?” Alice cried.
“No, Weymouth!”
As she rushed out into the cold night, she could already hear Harry crying.
“Weymouth!” Alice screamed in rage, racing after him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Clutching Harry in his arms, the viscount started to step up into his waiting carriage, but Alice barreled over to him and fought him, trying to take Harry from him.
“Get your hands off him!” she ordered through gritted teeth, trying to be heard above Harry’s wailing screams and the booming fireworks. The bonfires and t
orches lit up the rowdy festival in the adjoining park, throwing a dim glow upon the austere face of Knight House. “Don’t cry, Harry—”
“Auntie!” The child got hold of her hair and would not let go, but Weymouth yanked Harry’s hands down.
“Give him back to me!” Alice shouted.
“I’m taking him, Alice! It is in Caro’s will. I am Harry’s legal guardian.”
She stared at him, aghast. She had not thought that far in advance, but she realized he was right.
For a moment, she was so stunned by the realization, she did not know what to do. Weymouth refused to listen to her, and she had no legal grounds to stand on. “But—you can’t! You can’t take him, Weymouth! He barely knows you, he’s terrified, and you don’t know the first thing about caring for a child!”
“No, I don’t, so would you please tell his nurse to stop dawdling and come with us? She will look after him.”
“Weymouth, you are not taking that child! You are an opium eater and a drunkard! Now, give him back to me or I will call the constable!”
“He is my ward. I’m the one who can call the constable on you,” he muttered, turning to put Harry into the carriage.
“Noooo!” Harry wailed, reaching for her. He began throwing a hysterical tantrum, screaming and thrashing.
With all her might, Alice reached for him again, but Weymouth turned around in sudden fury and shoved her hard. She stumbled backward and tripped on the hem of her gown, falling onto her backside on the graveled drive.
“Have you no feelings?” Weymouth cried, glaring down at her. “I lost my sister today! Harry is the one little piece of her that I have left! Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’m going home and I’m taking Harry with me.”
She started to get up, cursing at him, when a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned and glanced toward Green Park—and then her blood ran cold.
Von Dannecker—or rather, Bardou—was standing just on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, peering through the bars at her, with Green Park at his back. Alice froze, paralyzed. Her stare locked with his. She ceased hearing the sounds of the festival; time stopped. Bardou brought up a rifle and smoothly aimed it at her.