The Earl's London Bride

by Lauren Royal

  There they were, their familiar forms near a commanding presence riding tall on a huge black stallion: King Charles with his own brother, James, Duke of York. Colin watched as the king reached into a bag flung over his shoulder and threw a handful of guineas to the workmen, encouraging them in their efforts to create a firebreak. The gold coins shimmered in the light of the flickering blaze, as though hung suspended in the thick, smoky air.

  “Criminy,” Colin breathed, catching up to his brothers. “Where to start?”

  “Here’s as good a spot as any.” Jason twisted in the saddle, looking for a safe place to leave their horses. His gasp made his brothers turn.

  Hands white-knuckled on the reins, Colin could only stare at the terrible splendor of St. Paul’s Cathedral all ablaze.

  He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “I was there last week.” Ford jockeyed his horse closer to Colin, shaking his head in disbelief. “Lady Tabitha and I—we carved our names into the lead on the roof.”

  “They’re erased now,” Jason said grimly. “Along with six centuries of other signatures.” The molten metal of St. Paul’s roof ran down in fiery streams, the blaze rising like a torch from the sea of flames made by thousands of structures burning all at once.

  Jason shook himself, then reached to touch Colin on the shoulder. “Come, there’s work to do.”

  They wheeled to see King Charles dismount and toss his reins to a liveried groom, who led the enormous horse to a makeshift penned area crammed with aristocratic mounts.

  “There’s a likely spot.” Jason’s eyes lit with relief. They left their own horses—along with a fair amount of coin to guarantee they’d see them again—and headed down Warwick Lane on foot, jostling through the swarm of firefighters.

  A bucket brigade broke apart and reformed to include them, and before he knew what was happening, Colin was accepting pails from Ford and thrusting them at King Charles. From all evidence, the king and his brother had spent the night wading ankle-deep in trenches and splashing through mud and water: their silks and laces were drenched, sooty, and scorched.

  “You’ve been here since when, sire?” Colin yelled as the king turned to take a bucket.

  “We came downriver yesterday noon.” Charles twisted to pass the bucket, then turned back to Colin. “Would have ventured out Sunday, but the Lord Mayor assured me it was nothing.”

  “Nothing? We saw it from Greystone!”

  His Majesty gave a derisive snort, then stepped from the line when James thrust a shovel into his hands.

  The royal brothers trotted off into the smoke. The fire was giving Charles his first opportunity as king to play the hero in person—and he performed the part superbly, Colin mused in some vague recess of his mind, passing along another bucket.

  “Help!” The cry, thin and distressed, came through the shouts of the workers. “Help! My little brother!”

  A hand tugged at Colin’s breeches, and he looked down at a grimy young face. “Where’s your brother?” he asked.

  “In a burning house!” The boy grasped his hand and, with desperate strength, yanked him out of the queue.

  The next bucket landed in the dirt, soaking Colin’s boots and spewing mud into the frightened boy’s face. “Where?” Colin repeated.

  “P-Paternoster Row!” The boy was off like a rocket, brown hair flying as he threaded his thin form through the confusion. Colin followed at his heels. Rounding the corner and skidding to a halt, the boy pointed up at a high window.

  Behind the mottled glass, a pale face hovered. The child’s little fingers clawed helplessly at the pane.

  Accursed bad luck, the lad was trapped in one of the few houses in this old neighborhood that actually boasted glass windows. The ground floor was engulfed in flame. Black smoke billowed out, cloaking the street, a narrow, dirty alley lined with tall houses leaning forward until they nearly met their opposite neighbors.

  Colin peered through the haze. Flames leapt from roof to roof, eating their way toward them.

  Without thought, he bolted past another burning house to a third that seemed deserted but yet unscathed. He booted open the door and sped up two flights of stairs, coming out on the balcony.

  The houses were crammed together. It was an easy leap to the balcony next door, and then once again to the one beneath the lad’s window.

  “Stand back!” he implored the terrified face.

  Climbing onto the balcony’s rail, Colin stretched toward the upper story to hack at the window with his sword. The boy disappeared into the smoke-filled room. Seeing flames lick up the far wall, Colin whacked at the window harder. But his elegant rapier blade was no match for the thick, uneven glass.

  He dropped to the deck of the balcony and whirled in desperation, relieved to see Jason and Ford among a crowd that had gathered in the street.

  “Rock!” he yelled, and the next second a chunk came sailing up; he caught and hurled it through the window in one smooth motion. A swipe of his blade cleared most of the glass from the sill. He dropped the sword and struggled out of his surcoat, tossing it up to drape over the frame before he jumped to catch the window ledge with his hands and hoist himself inside.

  The small, towheaded child cowered against a side wall, wide-eyed with terror. Fed by the fresh air from the broken window, the blaze thundered. The fire seemed alive, a hideous monster come to devour all in its path.

  Colin’s lungs burned as he swept up the boy under one arm and leapt out the window. They landed hard on the balcony, tumbling into a tangled heap, Colin’s surcoat twisted around one foot. Flames followed, orange and white and blue tendrils snaking through the window, threatening the wooden structure on which they huddled.

  Colin unsnarled the garment and threw it over the rail to his brothers. He stood, pulling the boy up with him, and jammed his sword back into his belt. Below the balcony, several men waited, a quilt stretched tight between their hands.

  “We’re going to jump!” he shouted to the child over the roar of the flames.

  “No!” The boy squirmed out of his grasp. “No! No!”

  He snatched him back. They hadn’t time to be scared of heights, but then again…

  Colin’s gaze focused on the quilt. Three stories, and his considerable weight plus the lad’s—they’d likely not survive anyway.

  Hot flames licked at his back; black, billowing smoke choked his air supply. Through tear-blurred eyes, he searched out Jason’s face, far below.

  “Rope!” he bellowed, the word tearing at his raw throat.

  Scarce seconds ticked away while he watched his brothers argue with a man intent on securing his worldly goods. At last they gave up and simply filched the rope from the laden cart, Ford tugging while Jason brandished his sword in the obstinate fellow’s face.

  A moment later, the lifeline snaked up, thrown in a wide arc by Jason.

  With shaking fingers, Colin knotted it to a balcony post and pulled tight. He hauled the child onto his back, yelled “Hang on!” and they were speeding toward the ground. After sliding to the dirt, Colin seized the boy and rolled out of harm’s way as the balcony fell to the street, landing with a mighty crash and a deadly shower of sparks.

  Safe for the moment, Colin and the boy lay tangled together, coughing their lungs out.

  “John!” The child’s brother rushed forward and scooped him up. “I thought for sure you were dead!”

  John dissolved in tears. The older boy hushed him as, one on either side, Jason and Ford helped Colin stand and shrug back into his surcoat.

  They urged him down the street, farther from the threatening flames, while Colin in turn tugged the boys after him.

  “Wh-where are your folks?” he croaked between coughs.

  The older boy shook his head. “We don’t know,” he yelled over the deafening racket. “They told us to wait, but that was”—he tilted his blackened face to the sky—“yesterday, maybe.” The smoke was so thick it looked like dusk, but the sun had risen, bathing t
he city in an unearthly glow.

  The boy stopped walking. Clutching his sniffling brother to his side, he shoved the tangled hair from his face and fixed Colin with pleading eyes. “Can you help us, my lord?”

  “I…” Nonplussed, Colin looked to Jason and Ford.

  They shrugged.

  “Can you help us? Please?” Without waiting for an answer, the boy grabbed his brother’s hand, pulling him along as he shouldered his way purposefully through the throng.

  Colin’s gaze was glued to the children’s skinny, vulnerable backs. “I’ll see you at Cainewood!” he called to his own brothers before taking off after them.

  He chased them through the teeming confusion of the intersection and onto Friday Street, where they ducked into a space between two buildings. Seven more children huddled there, most of them in tears.

  “Davis!” a few cried in unison, running over to embrace the tall boy. They pulled little John into the center of their circle, a small island of camaraderie amongst the misery.

  Colin’s chest squeezed. These children could have been himself ten years ago, and Jason and Ford and Kendra. They might be commoners, not aristocrats, and lost rather than abandoned.

  But the desperate feeling was the same.

  Davis withdrew from the group and returned to Colin. “We all live by Ludgate,” he explained breathlessly. Though tall for his age, the boy couldn’t be more than ten or eleven. “We waited there together, but our folks will never find us now. We had to move, to Warwick, then we found that empty house on Paternoster, then here…but my brother didn’t make it here. Oh, I thank you, my lord.” He sank to his knees in the mud. “You saved my brother’s life.”

  Colin awkwardly patted the boy’s head, leaning to look into the street. “A fat lot of good it will have done if we all burn anyway,” he muttered. “It’s headed this way. Wait here; I’ll be back.”

  He darted before a creeping wagon, its bed laden with a hodgepodge of household goods. With Colin’s palms outstretched to press against the two horses’s muzzles, the wagon ground to a quick halt.

  “Hey!” the driver shouted. “What the dickens do you think you’re about?”

  “I need this vehicle.” Colin came around and leapt up beside the man, who shook his slick, bald head indignantly.

  “Folks paid good silver for me to save their belongings. I’m bound for Moorfields, for the refugee camp.” The man’s accent branded him from the countryside, no doubt come into London to assist the victims’ flight—and turn a handy profit in the process. A simple cart had suddenly become a high-priced asset, and this was a sturdy wagon.

  “Silver, you say? I’ll pay gold.” Colin fished a pouch from his ripped surcoat and pulled out a guinea. He jumped to the street and began unloading the wagon, suffering a pang of guilt at his cavalier disregard for others’ prized possessions. But a line from one of Dryden’s poems came to him unbidden: “And thus the child imposes on the man.”

  Surely children’s lives took precedence over men’s possessions.

  The driver bit on the coin and then pocketed it, climbing down to watch with disbelieving eyes.

  Colin tossed him another guinea. “There’s for your flea-bitten horses. And there’s another in it for you if you’ll help me unload. The fire’s gaining.”

  A quick glance toward the flames had the man throwing goods off the back end, heedless of the clutter it added to the street. He grabbed the third coin, then took off at a run toward Cheapside, disappearing into the wretched mass of newly homeless.

  The children clambered up into the wagon bed, their faces masks of relief beneath the tear-streaked soot. Waves of heat lashed at Colin’s back, spurring him to move on.

  He shrugged off his hot coat and stood up on the bench seat, plucking his damp, grayish shirt away from his body as he peered through the smoke toward the west. Priscilla lived in that direction, and his family’s town house was there too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Thankfully, the area appeared untouched. The fire was heading north now; west was the best way out of London.

  And out was where Colin intended to head—out and to his brother Jason’s home, Cainewood. There was no sense searching for the children’s families until the fire died down, which could be days. And there was no suitable space for them at Greystone.

  He sat and picked up the reins. Traffic was unbearable, and they moved at a crawl. A quarter-hour later, they’d crossed one block of Friday Street and made the turn onto Cheapside. Just three or four blocks, a little further from the leading edge of the fire, and then—

  “No, Papa!” The voice cut through the roar of the crowd; a rather familiar voice, though Colin was sure he’d never heard it raised before. His fingers went oddly, instinctively to his ring. “Papa, you cannot!”

  His head whipped around. There it was, Goldsmith & Sons. And the girl, Amethyst.

  He jerked on the reins as her father shoved her stumbling into the street, flames thundering in the shop behind. A small trunk came out after her, then the man gestured wildly and ducked back inside. Colin saw him start up the stairs—stairs already engulfed in fire—before a blast of heat slammed the door shut.

  “Papa!” The girl’s wail was a knife to Colin’s heart.

  “Davis, take it,” he barked, throwing the boy the reins. He jumped to the street, dodging cross-traffic as he made his way toward the girl. She hastened up the street in the direction her father had indicated, not making much progress, weighed down by the trunk she dragged in the mud.

  They both whirled at the sound of an ominous crash. She let out an anguished scream as the roof of her home caved in, sending a column of sparks into the sky that looked extraordinary, even in stark daylight.

  “Papa!” She dropped the trunk and rushed back toward the door. The gilt shop sign crashed to the street, but she lifted her skirts and leapt over it without missing a step. Colin reached her just as she grasped the door latch, but she jerked back, staring at her palm, where angry red welts were already rising. Cradling the hand, she doubled over, oblivious to the soot and ash that rained down on her head.

  “Papa!” The cry was a whimper now.

  Black smoke puffed out from beneath the door, swirling around her grayed skirts. She didn’t move. Flames licked at the shop’s windows. Good heavens, the blaze would consume her in a moment, and she wasn’t moving.

  Colin grabbed her good hand and pulled her toward the wagon.

  “No!” She wrenched from his grasp and rushed back to the door, bunching her skirts in one hand for insulation as she reached again for the searing metal handle.

  Colin couldn’t believe his smoke-blinded eyes. He clutched her by the waist and yanked her back against his body.

  “No!” She slammed into him and immediately lunged forward. “Papa’s in there—I must save him!”

  The door’s paint was now blistering, writhing, bubbling. At any moment the planks would flare up. Yet she tugged against Colin’s restraint, aiming a shoulder at the door, clearly intending to batter it down.

  With both hands on her shoulders, he dragged her back a yard…two…three.

  “No! Let me go!” She twisted and turned in his grip. Heat battered them in scorching waves. “No!”

  “Yes!” He spun her around and, desperate, gave her a shake meant to rattle some sense into her fevered brain. “You must leave!”

  “I have to save him!” Head down, she kicked at his shins. Still he hung on, jostled by the torrent of evacuees, dragging her stumbling toward the wagon as she struggled. “Let go of me!”

  Jaw clenched, he stopped and took her face between his hands, forcing her eyes to his. “He’s dead!” he roared over the deafening noise. “He went up the stairs, and the roof collapsed! Now come, before you’re dead as well!”

  A glassy look of despair began to cloud her amethyst eyes as she went limp beneath his hands. Her knees buckled. He scooped her into his arms and ran to the wagon.

  After flinging her light frame up front, beside Davis
, he made to climb up after her.

  She stiffened, bolting straight up. “My trunk!” she screamed, pointing at the homely object. It sat mere feet from the shop, flames from the front wall reaching deadly fingers in its direction. But one look at her face convinced him he’d have to retrieve it, or she’d attempt to do so herself.

  “Go!” he shouted at Davis, slapping the nearest horse on the rump for emphasis. Davis lifted the reins, and the wagon lurched, inching down the street.

  The heat was incredible. A window burst as Colin raced toward the shop, the blast scattering glass and releasing clouds of smoke that seared his lungs anew. Coughing, his eyes streaming tears, he knelt to lift the trunk.

  How on earth was a small trunk so heavy? He let it drop and, grabbing one handle, dragged it clunking down the rutted street to where the wagon crept along. Waving the children back, he managed to heave the trunk into the wagon bed, then ran around and swung up to the bench, taking the reins from Davis, who scrambled to join the others in the back.

  “Are you hurt?” He forced the words past his raw throat. “Amethyst?” What had her father called her? “Amy?”

  At the sound of her name, she looked up, her glazed eyes registering first confusion, then disbelief.

  “Lord Greystone?”

  Before he could respond, she threw her arms around his neck and burst into tears.

  Colin placed one arm around her, gingerly and then tighter. The sobs wracked her slight body. Hot tears soaked through his shirt, wetting his shoulder.

  Long, gut-wrenching minutes passed. They progressed several blocks before she choked back the tears and slowly lifted her red-rimmed eyes to meet his.

  Dark purple smudges marred the delicate-looking skin beneath her eyes. The fire had been burning since Sunday; she’d likely not slept for days.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  She nodded her head miserably.

  “Where can I take you?”

  Sniffling, she gave a vehement shake of her head. “Nowhere,” she said in a trembling whisper. Her eyes filled again and threatened to brim over. “I have no one.”