room. The door shut behind them.
“He’s ungrateful,” Thomas whispered from the corner. “After all you did
for him, after all I suffered, he’s ungrateful.”
“What’s your point, boy?” Silas growled.
Thomas blinked, then he stood, looking oddly dignified. “I’ve always
loved you, Father, always. I would do anything for you.” Then he, too,
left the room.
Silas stared after his son for a moment, then shook his head again. He
swiveled to a small door set in the wood paneling behind his desk and
rapped on it. For unknown reasons, an earlier Granville had made a
passage from the library to the cellars. After a small wait, the door
opened. A burly man emerged, ducking his head. He was bare-chested.
Heavy, muscled arms hung by his sides. The brown body hair covering his
upper torso was gruesomely flecked with blood.
“Well?” Silas demanded.
“He still won’t talk.” The big man held out swollen hands. “My knuckles
are fair bloodied, and Bud has had a go as well today.”
Silas scowled. “Do I have to bring in someone else? He’s only one man
and not nearly your size. He should’ve been whistling any tune you asked
by now.”
“Aye, well, he’s a tough bugger, that one. I’ve seen blokes crying like
a baby after what we’ve been giving him.”
“So you say,” Silas taunted. “Wrap your hands and keep at it. He’s bound
to break soon, and when he does, there’ll be a bonus in it for you. And
if you can’t do it in the next day, I’ll find someone who can and
replace you and your mate.”
“Aye, my lord.” The big man stared at Silas, suppressed anger firing
behind his eyes before he turned away. Good, he’d take it out on Pye.
The door closed behind him and Silas smiled. Soon, very soon now.
SOMEWHERE WATER WAS dripping.
Slowly.
Steadily.
Endlessly.
It had dripped when he had first woken in this room, it had dripped
every day since then, and it dripped now. The dripping might very well
break him before the beatings did.
Harry hunched a shoulder and dragged himself painfully upright against
the wall. They held him in a tiny room. He thought it must have been at
least a week since they’d taken him, but time was hard to judge here.
And there were hours, maybe days, that he’d lost to insensibility. There
was a window the size of a child’s head high on one wall, covered by a
rusted iron grill. Outside, a few weeds poked through, so he knew the
window was at ground level. It gave enough light to illuminate his cell
when the sun was at a certain height. The walls were of damp stone, the
floor of dirt. There was nothing else in the room save himself.
Well, usually, that is.
At night he could hear the scratching of tiny feet, scurrying here and
there. Squeaks and rustlings would suddenly still and then begin again.
Mice. Or perhaps rats.
Harry hated rats.
When he’d gone to the poorhouse in the city, he’d quickly figured out
that he and Da would starve if he couldn’t fight off the others to keep
their ration of food. So he’d learned to fight back, fast and ruthless.
The other boys and men stayed away after that.
But the rats didn’t.
When dusk fell, they would come out. The wild creatures of the
countryside feared people. Rats did not. They would creep right into a
man’s pocket to steal his last bite of bread. They would nose through a
boy’s hair, looking for crumbs. And if they couldn’t find any leavings,
they’d make their own. If a man slept too deeply, whether from drink or
sickness, the rats would take a nibble. From toes or fingers or ears.
There were men in the poorhouse whose ears were ragged flowers. You knew
those wouldn’t last much longer. And if a man died in his sleep, well,
by morning sometimes you didn’t know his face.
You could kill the rats, of course, if you were quick enough. Some boys
even roasted them over a fire and ate them. But however hungry Harry
got—and there’d been days when his insides twisted with need—he could
never imagine putting that meat in his mouth. There was an evil in rats
that would surely transfer to your belly and infect the soul if you ate
them. And no matter how many rats you killed, there were always more.
So now at night, Harry didn’t really sleep. Because there were rats out
there and he knew what they could do to an injured man.
Granville’s thugs had been beating him daily, sometimes twice a day, for
a week now. His right eye was swollen shut, the left not much better,
his lip split and resplit. At least two ribs were cracked. Several of
his teeth were loose. There wasn’t more than a handspan on his entire
body that wasn’t covered with bruises. It was only a matter of time
until they hit him too hard or in the wrong place or until his body just
gave out.
And then the rats . . .
Harry shook his head. What he couldn’t understand was why Granville
hadn’t killed him at once. When he’d woken the day after he’d been
caught at the stream, there’d been a moment when he had been stunned
just to find himself alive. Why? Why capture him alive when Granville
surely meant to kill him anyway? They kept telling him to confess to
killing Will’s gran, but surely that didn’t really matter to Granville.
The baron didn’t need a confession to hang him. Nobody would care much
about Harry’s death or would protest it, except maybe Will.
Harry sighed and leaned his aching head against the mildewed stone wall.
That wasn’t true. His lady would care. Wherever she was, either in her
fancy London town house or her Yorkshire mansion, she’d weep when she
heard of her lowborn lover’s death. The light would go out of her
beautiful blue eyes, and her face would crumple.
In this cell he’d had many hours to ponder. Of all the things in his
life that he regretted, he regretted that one thing the most: that he
would cause Lady Georgina pain.
A mutter of voices and the scuff of boots on stone came from without.
Harry cocked his head to listen. They were coming to beat him again. He
flinched. His mind might be strong, but his body remembered and dreaded
the pain. He closed his eyes in that moment before they opened the door
and it all began again. He thought about Lady Georgina. In another time
and place, if she’d not been so highborn and he not so common, it might
have worked. They might have married and had a little cottage. She might
have learned to cook, and he might have come home to her sweet kiss. At
night he might have lain beside her and felt the rise and fall of her
body and drifted into dreamless sleep, his arm draped over her.
He might have loved her, his lady.
/Chapter Fifteen/
“Is he alive?” George’s face looked like a piece of paper scrunched up
and smoothed out again. Her gray dress was so rumpled, she must have
been sleeping in it all the way from London.
“Yes.” Violet hugged her si
ster, trying not to show shock at the change
in her appearance. She’d only been gone from Woldsly less than a
fortnight. “Yes, he’s alive as far as I know. Lord Granville isn’t
letting anyone see him.”
George’s expression didn’t lighten. Her eyes still stared too intently
as if she’d miss something important if she blinked. “Then he might be
dead.”
“Oh, no.” Violet widened her own eyes frantically at Oscar. /Help!/ “I
don’t think so—”
“We’d know if Harry Pye was dead, Georgie,” Oscar cut in, rescuing
Violet. “Granville would be crowing. The fact that he isn’t means Pye is
still alive.” He took George’s arm as if he were guiding an invalid.
“Come into Woldsly. Let’s sit down and have a cup of tea.”
“No, I have to see him.” George flung Oscar’s hand off as if he were a
too-eager vender importuning her with wilted flowers.
Oscar didn’t turn a hair. “I know, dear one, but we need to show
strength when we confront Granville, if we hope to get in. Better to be
fresh and rested.”
“Do you think Tony got the message?”
“Yes,” Oscar said as if repeating something for the hundredth time.
“He’ll be on the road right behind us. Let’s be ready for him when he
comes.” He put his hand on George’s elbow again, and this time she let
him lead her up Woldsly’s front steps.
Violet followed behind, absolutely amazed. What was wrong with George?
She’d expected her sister to be upset, to cry even. But this—this was a
kind of harrowing, tearless grief. If she heard today that Leonard, her
summer lover, had died, she would feel a certain melancholy. Maybe shed
a tear and mope about the house for a day or two. But she wouldn’t be as
devastated as George seemed to be now. And Mr. Pye wasn’t even dead, as
far as they knew.
It was almost as if George loved him.
Violet stopped in her tracks and watched the retreating back of her
sister leaning on her brother. Surely not. George was too old for love.
Of course she’d been too old for a love affair as well. But, love—real
love—was different. If George loved Mr. Pye, she might want to marry
him. And if she married him, why . . . he’d be part of the family. Oh,
no! He probably had no idea which fork to use for fish, or how to
address a retired general who was also a hereditary baron, or the proper
way to help a lady mount a horse sidesaddle or . . . Good Lord! What if
he started dropping his /H/s!
George and Oscar had reached the drawing room, and Oscar looked around
as he guided her in. He saw Violet and frowned at her. She hurried to
catch up.
Inside the drawing room, he was helping George to a seat. “You’ve
ordered tea and refreshments?” he asked Violet.
She felt her face heat guiltily. Quickly she leaned out the door and
told a footman what was wanted.
“Violet, what do you know?” George was looking at her fixedly. “Your
letter said Harry was arrested but not why or how.”
“Well, they found a dead woman.” She sat and tried to order her
thoughts. “On the heath. Mistress Piller or Poller or—”
“Pollard?”
“Yes.” Violet stared at her, startled. “How did you know?”
“I know her grandson.” George waved the interruption away. “Go on.”
“She was poisoned in the same manner as the sheep. They found those
weeds by her, the ones that were by the dead sheep.”
Oscar frowned. “But a woman wouldn’t be so stupid as to eat poison weeds
like a sheep.”
“There was a cup by her.” Violet shuddered. “With some kind of dregs in
it. They think he—the poisoner— forced her to drink it.” She looked
uneasily at her sister.
“When was this?” George asked. “Surely someone would have told us had
they found her before we left.”
“Well, it appears they didn’t,” Violet replied. “The local people found
her the day before you left, but I only heard the day after you’d gone.
And there was a carving, an animal of some sort. They say that Mr. Pye
made it, so he must have done it. Murdered her, that is.”
Oscar darted a glance at George. Violet hesitated, anticipating a
reaction from her sister, but George merely raised her eyebrows.
So Violet soldiered on. “And the night you left they arrested Mr. Pye.
Only no one will tell me much about his arrest, except that it took
seven men to do it and two were very badly wounded. So,” she inhaled and
said carefully, “he must have put up quite a fight.” She gazed
expectantly at George.
Her sister stared off into space, worrying her lower lip with her teeth.
“Mistress Pollard was killed the day before I left?”
“Well, no,” Violet said. “Actually, they’re saying it might’ve been
three nights before.”
George suddenly focused on her.
Violet hurried on. “She was seen alive in West Dikey four nights before
you left—some people at a tavern saw her—but the farmer swears she
wasn’t there the morning after she’d been seen in West Dikey. He
distinctly remembers moving his sheep to that pasture the next morning.
It was several days before he went back again to the pasture where she
was found. And they think, by the condition of the body, because of the
. . . uh”—she wrinkled her nose in disgust—“the /deterioration,/ that it
had been on the heath more than three nights. Ugh!” She shuddered.
The tea was brought in, and Violet looked at it queasily. Cook had seen
fit to include some cream cakes oozing a pink filling, which under the
circumstances were quite disgusting.
George ignored the tea. “Violet, this is very important. You are sure it
was three nights before the morning I left that she is thought to have
been killed?”
“Mmm.” Violet swallowed and dragged her eyes from the ghastly cream
cakes. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Thank the Lord.” George closed her eyes.
“Georgie, I know you care for him, but you can’t.” Oscar’s voice held a
warning. “You simply can’t.”
“His life is at stake.” George leaned toward her brother as if she could
infuse him with her passion. “What sort of a woman would I be if I
ignored that?”
“What?” Violet looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s quite simple.” George finally seemed to notice the steaming teapot
and reached to pour. “Harry couldn’t have killed Mistress Pollard on
that night.” She handed a cup to Violet and met her eyes. “He spent it
with me.”
HARRY WAS DREAMING.
In the dream there was an argument going on between an ugly ogre, a
young king, and a beautiful princess. The ugly ogre and the young king
looked more or less as they should, considering it was a dream. But the
princess didn’t have ruby lips or raven black hair. She had ginger hair
and Lady Georgina’s lips. Which was just as well. It was his dream after
all, and he had a right to make his princess look like anyone he wanted.
In h
is opinion, springy ginger hair was far more beautiful than smooth
raven locks any day of the week.
The young king was nattering on about the law and evidence and such in
an upper-crust accent so refined it made your teeth ache. Harry could
quite understand why the ogre was bellowing in reply, trying to drown
out the young king’s monologue. He’d bellow at the blighter if he could.
The young king seemed to want the ogre’s tin stag. Harry suppressed a
laugh. He wished he could tell the young king that the tin stag wasn’t
worth anything.
The stag had long ago lost the better part of its rack and stood on only
three legs. And besides, the animal wasn’t magic. It couldn’t talk and
never had.
But the young king was stubborn. He wanted the stag, and he was going to
have the stag, by God. To that end, he was badgering the ogre in that
overbearing way the aristocracy had, as if everyone else was put on this
earth merely for the joy of licking his lordship’s boots clean. /Thank
you, m’lord. It’s been a pleasure, it really has./
Harry would have sided with the ogre, just on principle, but something
was wrong. Princess Georgina seemed to be weeping. Great drops of liquid
rolled down her translucent cheeks and slowly turned to gold as they
fell. They tinkled as they hit the stone floor and rolled away.
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