Daring

by Jillian Hunter

  “Was it my fault Hugh got himself caught?” She stood, her face defensive. “Was it my fault a woman got herself abducted with me as a witness? And Lord Buchanan is on Jamie’s side?”

  “Abduction or not, there was no call to be makin’ a heroine of yerself. Any more good deeds, and ye’ll be ruinin’ the Court’s bad name.”

  Arthur was an enormous man, as huge as a hill with a thick muscular body and long apelike arms. He was terribly nearsighted, but he refused to let anyone outside the court see him in spectacles because he said it would weaken the impact of his appearance.

  In decades past he had actually been a respected chief in wild Caithness, before a smallpox epidemic had wiped out most of his clan and family, his beloved wife, brother, and sons. With a handful of scraggly followers, he’d moved his young daughter and aging sister to Edinburgh where, unskilled and desperate, he had fallen into a career of crime. Within a few years he had risen through the ranks of the underworld to command a small force of petty criminals, vagrants, and displaced persons.

  “Let’s go, lass. I came to take ye home.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she whispered in frustration. “I can’t just leave without permission. I’m a witness now, and you can’t stay here, either. They’ll have you arrested for housebreaking like they did Hugh.”

  “Hugh is waiting for us down in the cart, but ye’re right. We havena got all day. Here.” He took off his heavy black cloak and draped it over her shoulders. “It shocks me senseless to find you half dressed in the devil’s own bed, defendin’ him, no less.”

  Maggie pulled away, alarmed by the rumble of activity rising from below. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Arthur. Look, it’s supposed to be a secret but Lord Buchanan is going to hide me away in his Highland home until the men who kidnapped his sister are found. He thinks they might come after me because I’m the only one who could identify them.”

  “Balderdash.” Arthur gave his cudgel an experimental swing. “I’ll protect ye, little one. I always have.”

  “I have a moral obligation to help Lord Buchanan’s family.”

  “Moral obligation, my arse. Don’t let Connor intimidate ye, Maggie.”

  “I was caught breaking into the man’s house,” she said quietly. “He has the power to have me put in prison for—” She and Arthur glanced around simultaneously, their argument forgotten. There were voices filtering from outside the door, footsteps pounding up the stairs.

  “You’d better get out of here the same way you came in,” Maggie whispered, pulling off his cloak. “They’ll never believe you weren’t one of the kidnappers last night.”

  “I’m not leavin’ without ye,” Arthur said firmly. “For one thing, no one can hold a member of my family hostage. For another, that old butler of yers is fretting his bowels into bowstrings over yer absence. Then there’s that silly wee creature that tries to pass itself off as a dog. None of the lads would be caught dead takin’ care of a French poodle.”

  Maggie caught her breath. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie. But they’ll be out on the street tonight if you don’t return. I’m not runnin’ a charity institution.”

  Maggie turned away in distress, picturing Claude, frail, loyal, with failing eyesight and the painful rheumatism that plagued him. She could never abandon him. No one would employ a man of his age and infirmity. He would be lost and bewildered if he found himself on the streets. He lived in the past, still clinging to a world of wealth and privilege that had disintegrated over a decade ago. He and her little dog, Daphne, were all Maggie had left of her old life.

  “This is blackmail, Arthur,” she said angrily.

  “Aye. That’s my specialty.” He flashed her an unapologetic smile, revealing two rows of teeth as irregularly spaced as tombstones. “Will ye be goin’ down the rope before or after me?”

  Chapter

  15

  Connor had ventured into the depths of Heaven’s Court more than once in the course of his career to seek out informants. He had met with murderers in underground cellars and interviewed witnesses in abandoned warehouses.

  But never in his life had he with such single-minded determination gone looking for a girl, a girl he’d offered to protect against his better judgment and who had betrayed him in return.

  He’d hurried home from a hectic day in the courtroom to find Ardath, Norah, and his uncle half hysterical, the chambermaid ranting that Miss Saunders had been stolen away in her nightwear by a big monster of a man with a fierce scarred face, a man, the maid babbled, who had a nose like a sausage.

  Connor deduced by this absurd description that she could only have been taken by Arthur Ogilvie. While Connor was relieved that the kidnappers hadn’t gotten her, he resented the fact that the old rogue had broken into his house. That she was gone.

  It had been almost twenty-four hours since Sheena’s kidnapping. In court he had functioned like an automaton.

  Right up until the very moment he left his chambers in Parliament house, he’d expected one of the clerks to confide in him that Sheena had been found unharmed and brought home.

  Not a word.

  The fraudulent ransom notes had stopped. He had traced every route out of the city. Late that afternoon a cattle driver had come forward claiming he’d spotted a carriage on the road to the Highlands during the night. He remembered seeing a woman’s face in the window.

  The information didn’t give Connor much to go on, but coupled with gut instinct, it told him that Sheena’s kidnappers had fled Edinburgh. How would he find her? She could be hidden in one of a hundred obscure shieling huts on the road to the Highlands. His young protégé, Donaldson, so eager to prove his worth, had already begun to alert every judge, sheriff, and magistrate from Dumfries to Dunnet Head about the kidnapping. But the prospect of tracing her looked dim.

  Shadows stirred as he turned into a darkened alleyway. He realized suddenly he was being followed. Windows creaked open above the dark twisting wynds like the slitted eyelids of a slumbering beast resenting the disturbance. He had just crossed the invisible boundary and entered no man’s land. When a pile of bricks came crashing down at his feet from a gabled rooftop, it wasn’t a welcome sign.

  He quickened his pace.

  It was said the Chief’s home could only be reached by a secret tunnel that ran beneath a series of interconnecting cellars below the city. Connor hated to think of Maggie Saunders living in some subterranean hovel, to realize that Arthur might turn her appealing vulnerability into a talent for vice. How had she fallen into such an existence?

  The footsteps behind him had grown bolder.

  He didn’t carry a weapon. He half wished that someone would pick a fight so he could vent the frustration he had been forced to suppress all day.

  His wish came true a little sooner than he expected.

  He’d barely turned the corner when a trio of burly teenage boys jumped him from behind, two grabbing his arms, the other butting into his back like a goat. A fist came flying at his face. A stiletto flashed in the moonlight.

  “Damn it.” He grunted, ducking to avoid the punch and the knife. “You’d better not tear my evening coat.” Then he slammed all three of them at once against a stone wall, feeling immeasurably better as they stared at him in stunned silence before stumbling over one another to flee.

  He backed away from the wall, straightening the cuffs of his ruffled evening shirt. Just ahead he could see the way barred by a mountain of rubbish: wheelbarrows, empty barrels, piles of rotting lumber, the corpse of an old coach.

  Then someone whistled. Obscure shapes moved, resolving themselves into human features. A pistol poked Connor in the ribs. He refused to acknowledge it, staring in exasperation at the girl in a man’s shirt and trousers who had just popped out of the coach roof like a jack-in-the-box.

  She hopped down nimbly onto the rubbish heap, grinning from ear to ear. Two fat chestnut-brown braids framed her long freckled face. “Who dares to enter
my father’s private sanctuary?” she demanded in a friendly voice. “Speak, stranger, before I blow yer head off.”

  Connor leaned back against a wheelbarrow. “It’s a bit late for you to be out, isn’t it, Janet? Children are supposed to be in bed at this hour.”

  She grinned rudely. “Oh, it’s you, Buchanan. I’m not used to seeing ye without yer wig and long black dress. How are things on the good side of the law?”

  “You’ll be seeing me in that costume in the courthouse soon enough if you don’t let me pass.”

  “Rules are rules, and I’m not lettin’ you into Papa’s headquarters unless ye know the password.”

  “This is a legal matter, Janet, and if you don’t let me in, I’ll return with a search warrant and every policeman in the city.”

  She gazed at him for a moment, hands on her hips. “I’d like to make an exception in yer case, Connor. But I really can’t. What’s the password?”

  Connor raised his voice to a deafening roar. “How the bloody hell should I know?”

  A delighted grin split her impish face. “That’s it,” she said, sweeping her arm over the rubbish heap as if welcoming a royal prince. “Ye should have told me in the first place. Get the blindfold, lads. The Devil’s Advocate is paying us a visit.”

  Connor stumbled through the darkness, his dignity wounded beyond belief. His trouser cuffs were soaked from splashing across some kind of noxious underground stream. He saw stars from hitting his head on a crossbeam, which no one had thought to warn him about. The lawless girl, Janet, kept prodding him in the rear with a pistol.

  But he suffered in silence because he was determined that Miss Saunders would atone for the trouble she caused him and deep beneath his damaged pride, he was curious about the Chief’s criminal sanctuary.

  None of his legal cronies had ever been allowed into the Chiefs secret stronghold. The dubious honor might serve Connor well in the future. He might gain access to untold subterranean connections.

  “Here we are, yer lordship.”

  She gave him an encouraging shove up a series of steps and yanked off his blindfold as he staggered across a threshold. The warmth of a bright coal fire enveloped him. The scent of freshly baked scones teased his nostrils. Blinking, he tripped over a tapestry stool embroidered with the Biblical quotation: god be merciful to me a sinner.

  He found himself standing in the center of a cozy candlelit parlor. The Chief was sitting in a wing chair by the fire, contentedly darning a linen shirt. A well-fed orange cat dozed in the mending basket at his feet. When Arthur recognized Connor, he pulled off his spectacles and cursed ferociously, shattering the domestic scene.

  “What the hell is that man doin’ here, Janet?” he said in an angry grumble.

  “He knew the password, Papa,” she answered from the doorway, polishing a crab apple on the seat of her trousers.

  Connor strode over to the fire, standing with his back to the flames to stare down at Arthur. “You can’t interfere with my witness, Ogilvie.”

  The Chief scowled at him. “Nobody is supposed to get by my guards. This is an unforgivable breach of criminal ethics.”

  There were four other people in the parlor, seated at a table sipping tea and playing whist. They regarded Connor in mild astonishment for several moments, then went back to their game. Connor vaguely recognized the three men present—a former embezzler, a pimp, a habitual shoplifter. The only female was a frail-looking woman with fluffy white hair and a woolen shawl secured with a broach around her stooped shoulders. She gave Connor a smile.

  He guessed she was the Chief’s elderly aunt from Caithness; Connor had heard that the woman had no inkling her nephew was a notorious criminal, and Arthur wanted it kept that way. This secret gave Connor a bit of leverage, which he would use to his advantage if Arthur forced his hand.

  He glanced past the table to the curtained alcove that presumably led upstairs to Maggie’s room. Was she listening there in those shadows? Would she come down to confront him, or had she already been warned to escape? He’d never live it down if word got out he’d lost his own eyewitness.

  The elderly woman laid down her cards to take a closer look at Connor, nodding approvingly. “With that manly physique, he must work with ye down at the dockyard, Arthur.”

  “The dockyard?” Connor said in puzzlement.

  “Where we work, Connor. Don’t you remember? Auntie Mabel knows all about us.” The Chief stabbed his needle into the shirt. “Janet, get upstairs and into bed. Ye’ll need to be up bright and early for your dancing lessons.”

  “But, Papa,” she protested over a mouthful of apple, “I don’t take dancing—”

  “Upstairs, girl. Honor thy parent, at least in front of company.”

  Auntie Mabel turned her attention back to Connor as the girl sulkily stomped from the room. “Sit down, young fellow. I’ll pour ye a nice cup of tea.” She rose to shepherd him into the chair opposite Arthur. “You look a bit out of sorts.”

  Connor didn’t doubt it. In the tussle with the Chief’s street thugs, he’d lost a button off his gray woolen coat, and he suspected he had pulled an important muscle in his groin, which would play hell with his golf game, not to mention other more personal activities.

  He sat awkwardly, not wanting to hurt the old woman’s feelings as she brought him a cup of tea. “Bide here by the fire, laddie,” she said. “I’ll brew a fresh pot and bring a plate of scones.”

  “What do you want with us, Buchanan?” the Chief said the instant the woman left the room.

  “I want Miss Saunders,” he said bluntly.

  “Have you pressed charges against her?”

  Connor frowned. “No.”

  “Then ye’ve no legal right to detain her, and certainly not in yer home.”

  “She isn’t under arrest.” Connor stared into the fire. “But there’s a damn good chance whoever abducted my sister will try to prevent her from identifying them.”

  “I can protect her,” the Chief said gruffly.

  “I don’t think you can.”

  Arthur leaned forward at this open affront. In the firelight shadows, they looked like a pair of warring giants brought together on the grounds of their mutual concern for a girl half their size. Sensing a confrontation, the three men at the table quietly tipped back their chairs and slipped out of the room.

  Connor looked up from the fire, scrutinizing the battered features of the man opposite him. “Do you know anything about my sister’s abduction?”

  “I never prey on women or children, Connor. You ought to know that by now. Whoever took yer sister acted on his own. ’Twas none of my men.”

  Aunt Mabel returned to the room at that moment, her wrinkled face wreathed in a blithe smile. “Och, it does my old heart good to see ye big blusterin’ lads making friends. Or is it wee Janet ye’ve come to visit, Connor?”

  “It’s Maggie he wants to see,” Arthur said with a sigh.

  “Maggie?” The woman poured Connor a cup of tea and slowly carried it over to him. “She’s a popular one lately, isn’t she?”

  Connor balanced the cup on his knee. “Popular?”

  “Why, yes.” Mabel returned to the table. “Just this morning when I was at the market, another fellow in a big black carriage was asking after her. Persistent, he was.”

  “What are you saying, Mabel?” The Chief glanced at Connor.

  “A man asked after Maggie in the market when I was shopping for supper. He wanted to know where she lived and what time she would be at home.”

  Connor released the breath he barely realized he’d drawn. “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said in confusion. “He spoke to me from the carriage window, and I couldna see inside. Besides, Arthur has warned me not to talk to strangers. He said the city is full of criminals.”

  Connor put his cup down on the hearth. “Do you know what the carriage looked like?”

  “A nice one, I’d say. Black and—” Mabel broke off as if
sensing something was wrong. “Goodness, I’m not sure. It was barely light, and I didn’t think to pay attention. Was he a bad man, then?”

  “Tell Maggie I want to see her now,” Connor said, gazing at the alcove.

  The Chief rose, his enormous frame eclipsing the fireglow. “Find Claude, Mabel.”

  Connor’s head began to pound. “Who the hell is Claude?” he wondered aloud. “The family executioner?”

  “He’s Maggie’s butler,” Arthur said curtly. “Give me yer coat while he fetches her.”

  Connor didn’t respond. A butler? A street thief had a butler? He couldn’t imagine it anymore than he could Maggie living in this place, a rare pearl hidden away in a veritable bed of sin.

  “Take off yer coat, Connor,” Arthur repeated.

  Connor shot to his feet. “What the hell for?”

  “So I can sew on another button before she sees ye. Maggie notices that sort of thing. And you may as well sit back down. Claude moves as slowly as a snail in a snowstorm.”

  Ten minutes passed before Connor lost the last of his patience, pacing the confines of the parlor like a mountain cat in a cave. Criminals of every description had paraded in and out of the house to take a peek at him. It wasn’t every day that they could watch the Chief sewing on buttons for his nemesis.

  Arthur studied the tall figure over the rims of his spectacles. “Fetch her for yerself, lad,” he said at last. “Yer prowling is gettin’ on my nerves.”

  Connor didn’t need any extra encouragement, reaching the curtained alcove in a giant stride. No one stopped him, and as he suspected, the passageway led directly to a narrow wooden staircase. He’d feel like the biggest fool in the world if he’d been watching Arthur sew on buttons while that girl gave him the slip.

  He took the stairs two at a time, slowing only on the landing when he encountered an elderly man who was making a labored effort to continue the climb. With his trim build, pinched face, and silver-gray hair, he exuded a dignity that belied his position—this had to be Maggie’s “butler.” “Pardon me,” he said. “Are you going up or down?”