“What is it you gentlemen want?” Vicky’s father asked in a steady voice.
The man near Vicky said nothing. He motioned to his accomplice standing on the other side of the carriage. The other man was shorter, but just as pungent. His clothes, nothing more than rags, hung from his gaunt figure.
He seized Althea’s arm. Althea screamed. Vicky held tight to her sister’s other arm. She wouldn’t let them take her without a fight.
“Damnit,” the one near Vicky said, “not ’er. Get the other one. This one.” He pointed at Vicky.
“Gentlemen,” Vicky’s father said louder, “perhaps we can come to some arrangement. You must know I could give you any amount of money you desire. Leave my daughter.”
The pockmarked man moved the gun closer to her father’s head. “Shut yer gob. Yer not long for this world, and wer takin’ ’er.” He turned to his partner, who still pulled Althea’s arm.
Althea shook her arm, trying to break the thin one’s grip.
“I told you,” the big one barked. “It’s this one.” He grabbed Vicky’s arm.
His grip squeezed her upper arm through her cape, and Vicky winced at the pain.
The other man shook his head, revealing a deformed ear. “This one,” he said, yanking Althea’s arm again.
“Get over ’ere and take this one ’fore I shoot you,” the pockmarked man said.
The accomplice made a face, but he let go of Althea’s arm and abandoned the door, presumably to walk around to the other side of the carriage.
When he disappeared, Vicky’s father hit the other one’s gun hand, forcing it upward. The pistol exploded into the roof of the carriage. Her mother screamed. The man let go of Vicky’s arm in the confusion, and Vicky gaped in horror as her father lunged at him, knocking him onto the street. Her father landed on top of him and pummeled him before the fellow could get his bearings.
By then, the thin man had reached them both. He kicked Vicky’s father in the side as Vicky’s mother shrieked. Vicky looked around for a weapon, but the only thing she’d carried to the musicale was her reticule. Although she doubted it could do much damage, it was all she had. Reticule at the ready, she jumped from the carriage and hit the thin man in the head. He turned and grabbed her arm, crushing it in a punishing vise.
“Unhand her!”
Vicky looked up.
Her sister stood at the foot of the carriage, gray-faced but angry. The man sneered. Still gripping Vicky’s arm, he lunged for Althea. She blanched.
At that moment, something within Vicky snapped. She brought her knee up into the man’s groin with as much force as she could muster. The grin left his face as he released her and stumbled backward, holding his breeches.
Vicky looked at her sister.
Her torso wavered as though she would faint.
“Blast it, Thea, get back in the carriage!” Vicky helped her climb inside and shut the door.
She threw a glance at her father over her shoulder. The pock-faced man had somehow pushed her father away and had gotten to his feet. They circled each other. Though the ruffian’s pistol no longer held powder, he wielded it by the barrel, trying to hit her father with the butt of the gun.
Vicky saw a few people watching from the sidewalk. “Help!” she yelled.
No one moved. What was wrong with them? She screamed again, cursed at the bystanders, and looked for the carriage driver and footman. The footman lay unconscious on the ground, bleeding from the leg, but the driver had disappeared. Meanwhile, her father took a punch to the gut. He crumpled forward and the brute started bashing him in the face.
Vicky threw her arms in the air to hail a hackney cab coming down the road in the opposite direction. The cab carried on despite her shouts and the wailing of her mother and sister within the carriage. The other scoundrel—the one she’d struck—raised himself onto his knees, but his eyes were squeezed shut. Hopefully he was too dazed to help his partner.
The villain continued to thrash her father. She jumped on his back, throwing all her weight on top of the huge man. Grabbing a handful of his hair, she yanked it as hard as she could. He grunted and threw her off, sending her flying backward. The dull pain in her joints, left over from Thursday’s fall, flashed to life as she landed on the packed dirt. An even harder object poked into her side. She reached behind herself and felt cold metal. The footman’s pistol.
She examined it. Still loaded. She stood and aimed it at the attacker.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Vicky yelled.
The gigantic brute landed one last punch to her father’s side before turning to face Vicky. Her father fell to the ground, no longer moving; his battered frame lay prostrate on the street.
Her throat swelled; tears threatened behind her eyes.
“Come on, luv, give us the gun,” the man growled, taking a step toward her.
Her gaze flew back to the animal who may have killed her father. He was staring at her with the same sneer he’d worn when he’d shoved open the carriage door. Her jaw clenched so hard, she thought it might crack.
His lips turned up at one corner. He didn’t think she’d do it. He wasn’t afraid of her at all.
Acid burned in her throat. “Don’t try it unless you want a ball in your chest.” She cocked the pistol. The sound reverberated in the still night air.
He froze.
The other man now inched toward her.
She swung the pistol his way, and he stopped in midstep.
“Both of you get out of here before I kill you.”
“You’ve got one shot,” the pockmarked one said. “Even if you hit one of us, whoever lives can still take yeh.”
She hurled him a hate-filled glare. “Do you want to take the chance you’ll be the one I kill? Then by all means, stay.”
The men exchanged glances. It seemed neither of them wanted to die.
“This ain’t over, luv,” the pock-faced man said.
“Leave!” Vicky shouted. She aimed the barrel of the gun at his head, her finger on the trigger.
He spat in her direction. Then he motioned to his partner. They ran off, disappearing into the shadows.
Chapter the Fifteenth
“But what,” said she, after a pause, “can have been his motive?”
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
As Tom strode down the street toward Vicky’s town house, he resisted the urge to walk faster. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was actually looking forward to seeing her again. Last night at the musicale, he’d thought he only wanted to call on her to tell her what Dain and Carmichael had said. Now he wondered.
She was still so like the girl he remembered from their childhood—the Vicky who always urged her horse to jump ridiculously tall hedges or snuck into the Oakbridge kitchens to pilfer enough strawberry tarts to make herself ill.
He’d done his best to forget such images. They only caused a dull ache somewhere in his chest. But yesterday when they’d reminisced about the day she’d lost her boot in the stream, he’d felt—comforted.
Before he’d left for Eton as a boy, he and Vicky had rarely been out of each other’s company. When they were even younger, Charles and Althea had often tried to tag along, but they’d always given up. He and Vicky had never paid them much attention. They should have been kinder, especially since he and Charles had been forced apart for so many years.
His regrets returned, and with them, his hatred for his father. Tom’s mind swirled with images: playing soldiers on the staircase with Charles and the old man’s angry glare as he caught them, walloped Tom in the head, and left his ears ringing for the rest of the day; his father yanking his mother’s arm and throwing her against an armoire as he shouted at her over an imagined slight; Charles’s trembling hands and wide eyes blinking up at Tom as Tom pulled him up the stairs to hide in the nursery while their mother’s muffled screams echoed in his ears. Tom inhaled to dispel the memory of that sound, to drown the shame of never having done enough, and to quiet the rage
that always built within him when he remembered.
That rage only brought him closer to becoming his father when all he wanted was to forget him.
When his mother’s letter telling him of his father’s death had reached him, Tom hadn’t shed a tear. To this day, he never had. Instead, he’d let the old tyrant’s demise turn him into a shell of his former self. To some degree, he knew he shouldn’t have let it happen. Yet, the numbness was far preferable to . . . feeling.
Tom rubbed his left temple as he turned the corner onto Kingsford Square. The Astons’ town house stood across the way. A hackney cab waited in front. Tom had erred on the side of propriety and made certain to come during accepted calling hours. He inspected his pocket watch. Four o’clock. Perhaps Vicky was otherwise engaged.
He crossed through the small grassy park in the center of the square and peered into the ground floor windows as he strolled to the front door. People moved quickly through the house. Too quickly.
Something was wrong. He stepped up to the door and knocked.
When Vicky’s maid greeted him instead of the butler, Tom’s concern grew.
“Good afternoon, Sarah. Is Lady Victoria in?” Tom asked.
“She is, Lord Halworth, but she’s with her father.”
“Shall I wait?” Tom asked, but as Sarah started to answer, Vicky descended the staircase. Her eyes widened at the sight of him.
“Tom! You’re here.”
He looked her up and down, but other than a dark bruise on her arm that she must have covered with a shawl the night before, nothing looked out of the ordinary. “If I have come at an inopportune moment, I can return lat—”
“No, please, come in,” she said as she reached him. Sarah moved out of the way.
Vicky lowered her voice. “I must speak with you.”
With a frown, Tom nodded and stepped over the threshold into the entry. Vicky motioned with her head that he should follow her. Now that he stood closer, he saw scrapes on her hands and wrists he didn’t remember from the night before. She started down a hallway. He lengthened his strides until he was by her side.
“Are you well?” He gestured to her arms.
She looked down at the scratches. “Oh, I’m fine. It’s Papa we’re worried about. He was knocked unconscious. A physician is with him now.”
Unconscious. Christ. That explained the hackney outside. “What happened?”
Vicky pointed to a room overlooking the street. Tom followed her through the doorway into a sitting room with blue paneled walls. Vicky lowered herself onto the settee and waved at Tom to take the chair opposite. When they were both seated, she told him how they’d been attacked the night before.
Tom didn’t know what to say. How could one person attract such ill fortune so often?
When Vicky related that one of the attackers had said it wasn’t over, a muscle under his left eye jumped.
“Tom, do you think it’s possible that these accidents of the last few days are not accidents at all?” she asked. “I cannot help thinking that there was too much damage to that pole on Mr. Silby’s curricle.”
Tom tapped his fingers against the armrest. Silby hardly seemed clever enough to facilitate such an “accident.” Added to that, runaway carriages were fairly common, and curricles, in particular, were not the safest of vehicles. Tom shook his head. He wanted to believe the incidents were unrelated.
Yet, what about the man at Oakbridge? He had wanted to harm her.
“Could that fellow at Oakbridge have been behind it?” Tom thought aloud.
“These were dirty men with cockney accents,” she said with a decided shake of her head.
“We never heard him speak,” he reminded her.
She frowned. “True. But that greatcoat he wore . . . The men last night barely looked as though they could afford the ragged shirts on their backs, let alone a greatcoat.”
Tom nodded. “So perhaps someone paid them. But who?” The man who’d first attacked her? Or someone who’d paid for both attempts?
Vicky’s eyes widened, then looked up at him with certainty. “Dain.”
Tom’s brows knit together. “You think Althea’s husband did this to you?”
Vicky nodded. Then she exhaled. “I suppose I might as well tell you. I hope Althea doesn’t hate me for this, but—” She licked her lips. “You must promise not to reveal it to a soul.”
Apprehension knotted his stomach. “Of course. I give you my word.”
She sighed and offered him a small smile. “Althea is seeking a legal separation from Lord Dain. He has been abusive toward her. She returned home the day the bandit attacked me. She escaped from their house in the middle of the night.”
Tom sat back in his seat. “Dear God.”
Bile rose in the back of his throat. He’d hoped for Althea’s sake that Dain had changed, but he was the same selfish persecutor he’d been at school. Worse.
He choked down his disgust, but his own culpability slapped him in the face. “Had I been here during their courtship, I could have told you of his character.”
Vicky’s eyes darkened. “What do you mean?”
“When we were at Eton, he bullied the smaller boys—forced them to do things or take things he wanted. They also took the Masters’ punishments in his stead. He enjoyed having power over people.”
Vicky looked down into her hands. “When you came upon us at the ball, he was trying to intimidate me. When I weakened, he seemed to enjoy my suffering.”
Tom clenched his fist until it ached. “I could have spared you all this pain.” If only he’d been home when they’d announced Althea’s betrothal. He didn’t remember ever receiving a letter from his mother or Charles about Althea’s intended. They’d mentioned she’d married, but even if they had told Tom his name, it would’ve been too late to help. Of course, mail from his family had been infrequent in those days, thanks to Bonaparte’s armies.
“I don’t know if you could have changed Althea’s mind about him,” Vicky said quietly. She lowered her head. “I should have realized what he was from the first.”
Tom let out a breath. Poor Vicky. Poor Althea. “You mustn’t blame yourself. How could you have known?”
Vicky shook her head. Her gaze remained focused on her lap. “None of us saw through his charming veneer. And Thea never said anything . . .” She trailed off. “Indeed, she says very little to me at present.”
His shoulders tensed. “There is a rift between you?”
Vicky looked away. “She will tell me nothing of what Dain did. And our conversations are strained.”
Tom knew the feeling. His interactions with Charles hadn’t improved since they’d sold the horses. Not that he’d expected them to—
“’Tis silly, I know, but after you . . .” She looked up and caught his eye. “After you left, Althea and I grew very close. We had no one else. Now I have—”
She broke off, but Tom mentally supplied the rest of the sentence: nobody. And yet she had her parents, both of whom cared for her well-being, which was more than he’d had after his banishment. Until he’d met Susan and moved to his uncle’s home, he’d truly been alone.
“It can be difficult for victims of . . . a man such as Dain to speak of what they’ve endured.”
Vicky looked up, blinking rapidly.
He cleared his throat. “Have patience. She may recover in time.” The words came easily enough, but he didn’t know if he believed them. Perhaps she shared his thoughts, for tears welled in her eyes. The point of her heart-shaped face rounded out as her chin trembled. The urge to take her in his arms struck him like a blow. The force of it slammed him back, rooting his body to the chair.
He swallowed hard. He was damned tired of behaving this way.
As though it had a life of its own, his hand shot forth and gripped hers. Her tear-filled eyes flew up to meet his gaze. For a moment, the tears stopped. Her eyes widened a fraction. The contours of her cheeks relaxed. Time stood still.
Then she blinked
. “Have you recovered?”
He held his breath. He could only shake his head.
More of her tears leaked out, and she swiped them away with her free hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing you need apologize for.”
“I feel so sickened by what she went through—what you went through.”
He froze, remembering her hazel eyes filled with shock as his father knocked him to the floor. His resentment as his father laughed and put on a civilized veneer for Vicky. His hopelessness as the maid ran from the room. And finally, his shame as Vicky crouched to the floor to help him stand.
Tom gulped, hating the thickness in his throat.
Vicky looked down at his hand enfolding hers. “I tried so many times to speak with you after that day, but you would not see me. Did you ever receive my letters?”
Tom closed his eyes. He’d been so worried for her safety. He couldn’t have her dropping by at a moment’s notice. Not when he had a father who did what his did. The image of his father pressing that maid into a wall as she writhed to get away rushed into his head. The sound of her desperate wails for help as his father yanked her skirts upward—Tom shut his mind to the rest.
All he had thought of in the ensuing hours was what could happen if Vicky came back and his father caught her alone. The idea had turned Tom’s stomach. The odds that the old man would touch an earl’s daughter were slimmer, but if he did, prosecuting him would be nearly impossible, and Vicky’s reputation would be destroyed. She’d be infamous in the eyes of society with no respectable future. Tom couldn’t let any of it happen to her.
His eyes opened, and he dropped Vicky’s hand. He stood and walked to the window to avoid seeing the hurt he knew would be there. “I received a few. I didn’t know what to say.”
He heard her inhale.
“You could have said . . . anything. We always could before.”
He shut his eyes again. Perhaps now was the time to tell her everything. She wanted to know. But as he turned to her, carefully avoiding her face, the words choked him. He couldn’t force them out. He could barely think them. How could he possibly say them aloud? Instead, he said what he truly felt. “I’m sorry.”
Dangerous Alliance Page 18