Judith E French (20 page)

“Mother sends ’er best, lydies.” His thin voice grated like cut tin and made gooseflesh rise on Leah’s arms. “Maggie, come get this light, if ye want it.” His hooded eyes narrowed. “No tricks, or I’ll toss yer dinner down the stairs.”

Maggie scrambled up to take the candle. “Mother still mad at me, Shanks?” She grabbed a round loaf of bread from the bucket and broke it in half, tossing a portion to Leah. She tore into it with her strong white teeth and dug in the container for a wedge of cheese and some raw turnips.

“Mother?” Shanks grinned, showing shrunken bony gums where his teeth had once been. “Drunk as a lord since last night. Says ye both can come down, will ye go t’ that Dutch merchant tonight with Meg.” He scratched his right hip vigorously. “The first mate was ’ere early; ’E swore ye bunters would be treated like quality, an’ ’e paid Mother in ’ard coin.”

“Ye nitty knurl!” Maggie accused between bites of cheese. “Ye think me daft? I seen a draggletail come off a ship after the foc’s’le was done with her. Dead as a plague-corpse an’ still walkin’. Took the poor, bleedin’ mawks a fortnight to stop breathin’, but she were dead from the minute she set foot on the deck of that ship. I’m street canny! I’ll not go, nor her.” She threw Leah the remainder of the cheese. “And if ye’re half a man, ye’ll warn Meg. She’s a slut, certain, but she don’t deserve bein’ throwed to those animals.”

“Meg’s so drunk, she wouldn’t know the difference,” Shanks said. He scratched at his right buttock, produced a huge red flea, and cracked it between his teeth. “Mother won’t like it if ye cause trouble, Maggie. Both of ye, she said. She promised three drabs and she took the silver.” He belched loudly. “Ye’ll go, the both of ye, if I got t’ whack ye over the head and carry ye there.” He leered at Leah. “Ye got the look o’ a pigeon what knows ’ow t’ please a man. Gi’ me trouble an’ I’ll tumble ye myself, just t’ make certain what the gentlemen be buyin’.”

Maggie made an obscene gesture, and Shanks backed out and locked the door behind him. “Ole coguey! Don’t trust him, Leah. Sneaky bastard. It was him took Meg’s babe away. He tries to act friendly to the girls, but be’s Mother’s cur, he is.”

Leah swallowed a mouthful of bread. “We must get away. I’d die before I’d let that human spider touch me.”

“Damned straight. Shanks is none to toy with. He’s bad. Them fingernails—I heard he can pop a man’s eye out with them.” Maggie looked toward the door and then around the room. “We can’t wait no longer. If there was a window . . .” she began. She pressed her ear against the door. “I kin hear Mother cussin’. She’s comin’ up, Leah. What are we gonna do?”

Leah crossed the small room and seized the wooden bucket Shanks had brought the food in. She stood to one side of the door and motioned to the far side of the room. “Ye get her attention,” she said, “and I’ll do the rest.”

“Ungrateful sluts!” Mother roared obscenities as she pounded up the final flight of steps. “Tell me no, will ye!” She slammed back the bolt and flung open the door.

Maggie backed against the far corner. “I ain’t goin’ to no foc’s’le, ye drunken ole bawd!”

Mother’s bloodshot eyes scanned the room suspiciously, her gaze lingering for an instant on the heaped rags.

“Ye want them sailors so bad, ye lay with them,” Maggie taunted.

With a cry of rage, Mother sprang at her. Leah smashed the heavy wooden bucket over the back of Mother Witherberry’s head. The big woman groaned and collapsed like a split sack of wheat.

Maggie darted forward over the top of the prone woman and caught Leah’s hand. “Quick!” They ran out of the door and hesitated at the top of the landing. “Up,” Maggie whispered hoarsely. “We can’t get out that way. Shanks is down there, and the public room’s full of men.”

The narrow hallway ended at another door. Maggie threw it open, and both women dashed in. A naked man and woman were rolling on a pallet on the floor. Ignoring their cries of lust, Maggie picked up a stool and threw it through the rotting boards half covering the only window. “This way,” she shouted.

Leah was only an arm’s length behind. Before she followed Maggie out of the tiny window, she snatched up the naked man’s tunic and breeches. Behind her, Leah heard men shouting and the thud of heavy shoe leather. The ledge was as rotten as the window shutters. The wood crumbled under Leah’s weight, and she clung to the side of the house with every ounce of strength.

Maggie had her right foot on a board that ran from one house to the other across the narrow alley. “Give me a boost up,” she urged. “I kin almost—” She put her left foot on Leah’s shoulder and scrambled up onto the roof. “Toss me them clothes,” she ordered.

Leah threw them to Maggie and followed her path to the slippery tile roof. Maggie was grinning in the gray morning light.

“Ain’t it a fine day!” the redhead proclaimed. “And didn’t Mother’s head sound hollow when ye hit it with that bucket?” She threw back her head and laughed, prancing across the rooftop with the litheness of a cat. She put her hands on her hips and looked at Leah. “I’fackins! What ye got there, a blade?”

Leah discarded her ruined shift and pulled the man’s woolen tunic over her head. She belted it at the waist with the leather strap that had been tangled in it and stuck the knife between her teeth.

“Ye’re somethin’ for a lady,” Maggie said with glee. “Don’t leave them breeches. We can trade them for some real food.” She snatched up the pants. “Good wool. I know a woman who’ll pay sixpence for them.”

Leah motioned back the way they had come and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“You’re right,” Maggie agreed. “Them men is too big to get out that window, but they’ll be up here after us soon enough. Follow me.” She led the way over the ancient tiles and around the chimney pots to a spot where they could easily leap to the next house roof.

For nearly an hour, they climbed and jumped from roof to roof, wending their way farther and farther away from Mother Witherberry’s establishment and deeper into the city. At last, Maggie slid down the sloping roof of a dilapidated addition and dropped into a muddy fenced-in yard.

The bare space was devoid of grass, occupied by a sow and her piglets, and a dirty-faced child. The boy stared and picked his nose as they climbed up on a barrel and dropped into the street beyond. Leah took the knife out of her teeth and tucked it into the belt. Her arms and legs ached from climbing, and her head felt light from hunger, but she was smiling. “Thank ye,” she said to Maggie. “How did ye learn to do that? To use the rooftops as a path?”

Maggie’s teeth flashed in an endearing grin. “I’m a London street rat, my friend. Them what don’t learn ends in a pauper’s grave quick enough.” She shook her head. “Ye owe me no thanks. ’Twas yer hand with thet bucket what gave Mother her comeuppance.” Her gaze became thoughtful. “Ye got a place t’ go?”

Leah hesitated. If she went back to Brandon’s father’s house and it had been her husband who’d commissioned those men to murder her, she’d not get a second chance. All that time she’d been locked in Mother’s, she’d tried to reason it out. Her heart told her that Brandon was innocent, but her Scottish logic refused to be silenced. If it wasn’t Brandon, it had to be his mother, or even his cousin Charles. How could she point a finger if she didn’t know who wanted her dead? “Nay,” she admitted to Maggie. “I dinna know where—”

“Ye’re with me,” Maggie said warmly. She took Leah’s hand and squeezed it. “I’ll find us a safe place to sleep and somethin’ hot to eat. Ye need rest, poor thing—what with yer little one comin’. I’ve friends aplenty in the street, and friends look after one another.”

“I must find a ship to take me back to America,” Leah said. “I’ve got to go home.”

Maggie grimaced. “Ships. I hate the thought of them, but it’s my fate to drown, maybe not yers. It’ll be hard to find the passage money, but not impossible. All in good time. Fer now, let’s sell these breeches an’ buy us the biggest breakfast in London.”

Leah nodded. She was too tired and too hungry to think straight, but she was free, and she was armed with the knife. Later, she might try to find Anne, but as Maggie said, “For now, let’s buy us the biggest breakfast in London.” It seemed like wisdom that even Amookas would have approved of. Leah straightened her shoulders and followed Maggie down the muddy cobblestone alley.

 

 

His lips against hers were cold. She touched his cheek, his mouth, his forehead. “Brandon?” she demanded. “Brandon mine, what’s wrong?” She grabbed a lock of his yellow hair, and it slipped through her fingers
.

“Brandon!” Leah cried aloud.

“Leah! Leah!”

Someone was shaking her. She gasped and opened her eyes. “Ohhh,” she murmured. She covered her hands with her face as intense disappointment washed over her. “I be sorry,” she said. “It was a dream.”

Maggie’s freckled face peered at her in the smoky torchlight. “Are ye all right?”

Leah nodded. “A dream,” she repeated. “Go back to sleep.” Maggie yawned and lay down, pulling a blanket over her head.

Leah rose from her bed of straw and glanced about the crude camp under the bridge. By the river’s edge, Tomkin waved. She waved back, noting the heavy staff in his hand. Tomkin was a good guard; the others in the band could sleep easy, knowing that the husky boy would keep off bandits in the night. The burning torch and the practice of always posting a guard kept Cal’s people safe.

Leah rubbed her arms against the chill of the dark-moving Thames. Maggie’s brother, Cal, and three of the older boys were away tonight. In the morning, they’d be back with food. It was best not to ask where it had come from or how they’d obtained it.

There were fifteen members in Cal’s band, sixteen if Leah included herself. Maggie said it was the best organized pack in the city. “No bloodsuckers,” Maggie had said. “We look after ourselves. We take care of our own, and we don’t pay off nobody.” Of the original fifteen, eight were boys and seven girls. Four were children too young to care for themselves; Charity’s babe was only three months old.

Leah had still not gotten over the shock of learning that hundreds of children roamed the streets of London without parents or relatives to care for them. Maggie’s words had burned into Leah’s mind like hot coals. “Poor folk throw their brats into the gutter like mongrel pups. Some children starve, some are snatched up by people like Mother Witherberry, and others hang fer stealin’ a loaf of bread.”

Maggie and her two brothers had been abandoned by their father when their mother died in childbed and the father took another woman to live with him. Maggie had been five, her brother Willy, six, and Cal nine. Willy had died under the wheels of a coal wagon, but Cal and Maggie had survived long enough to learn the rules of the street as Leah had learned the forest.

“Ye do the best ye can,” Maggie had explained. “Ye fight fer a place to sleep and fer every crust of bread. Ye steal when ye got to steal and work when ye can. I’ve even begged, but beggin’ is chancy. They’s a beggars’ brotherhood, and ye can die quick oversteppin’ their rights. It was Cal decided we needed more hands and heads. Even children can be feared, be there enough of them. Each one has a say in deciding important stuff, but Cal’s the leader. If it wasn’t fer him and the big boys, they’s plenty what would come in the night to rob and rape.”

On Maggie’s word, Cal and the others had accepted her into the band. They had given her a place to sleep and shown her how to secure food. Maggie had guided her around London to places and people Leah had never seen as the Viscountess Brandon. She’d stood in a crowd and watched the king of England pass in his gilded coach, and she’d listened to a condemned man recite a tale of his misdeeds before he swung from the rope at Tyburn Hill. She’d danced to the pipes of a strolling player and laughed at the antics of Punch and Judy puppets.

Only days after Leah had joined the band, Cal had taken her to Anne’s mansion. She’d waited in the shadows of the carriage house while he had gone to the servants’ entrance, claiming to carry a message for the marchioness. The cook had driven him from the back door with stout whacks of a broom to his head and shoulders. “Away with you, you thievin’ guttersnipe!” he’d shouted. “Lady Scarbrough has nothin’ to say to the likes of you. And if she did, she can’t, for she’s gone away to the country, and there’s no sayin’ when she’ll be back!”

“Where in the country?” Cal had asked. He’d gotten two more blows from the broom for his audacity and a threat from the cook to call the watch.

Maggie and Leah had returned to Anne’s house four times to look for her, but the house was closed and shuttered. And as the days turned into weeks, Leah had accepted the fact that her friend was really gone. Without Anne and without money to buy passage to America, Leah was at a loss as to what to do.

The moon had come full, melted to darkness, and come full again. Over a month had passed since Leah had escaped from Mother’s house. Maggie had promised that she could remain with the band as long as she wanted to, but Leah knew that shortly her pregnancy would begin to slow her down. She must get home—home to her wilderness—before that happened. If her child was born here in the stench of London’s back alleys, neither of them might live to see the forest. She might never feel her precious Kitate’s little arms around her again.

If the sights and smells of London troubled Leah’s days, her nights were worse. Again and again, she dreamed herself back in Mother Witherberry’s evil house. She would wake, soaked with perspiration, still feeling Shanks’s yellowed nails against her skin or hearing Mother’s twisted laughter. And when she did not dream of her imprisonment, she dreamed of Brandon.

Leah pushed back the stray hair from her face and walked to the edge of the riverbank. Part of me still loves him, she thought. Part of me knows that Brandon could never have betrayed me to those awful men. He loves me and my child—I know he does.

It was that part of her that urged her to return to Wescott House and seek out her husband—to confront him with her charges. Twice she had written him a letter telling him what had happened to her. Yet she could not bring herself to send it.

What if it was true that Brandon wanted her dead? What if he had succumbed to his family’s wishes and chosen the easiest way to rid himself of an unwanted wife and child? What if Brandon’s love for her was as false as her father’s? Could she wager the life of her unborn child’s on her intuition? If she hadn’t been pregnant, her decision would have been easy. Her heart bid her to trust her husband, but because she carried a babe, she couldn’t take the chance.

The thought that she might go to Cameron for help had crossed her mind, but she had ruthlessly pushed it away. A man who had abandoned a five-year-old child and the woman who loved him would never come to the aid of that daughter so many years later. She still had her pride—too much pride to beg for crumbs from someone who had once been her whole life.

“I’d rather die than ask Cameron for anything,” she murmured softly to the rushing tide. Anguished, she turned away and began to climb the bank to the cobblestone street.

Maggie appeared at her side. “Where do ye go, Leah? The streets are not safe at night.”

“I’ve my knife.”

“Ye’d be lost in ten minutes.” Maggie trudged up the incline. “I’ll walk with ye if ye’re bound to play the fool.”

“And risk yourself ?”

“Two is safer.” Maggie grinned. “Besides, we can always take to the rooftops.”

 

Charles frowned, lowered the leather carriage curtain, and settled back against the padded seat. It was after midnight, and he and Brandon were riding into the city by coach. “You’ve gone on like this for more than a month. Can’t you admit that your mother and I are right? She left you, cousin. She’s gone back to the Colonies.”

“With what? What money did she have? Some of her clothes were missing, true,” Brandon said, “but I can’t picture her trading her gowns for passage on a ship. I’m certain she’s still here somewhere in the city.”

“I think you contracted a disease of the brain in that wilderness. First you accuse your mother of stealing your bride, then you accuse me of robbing the family treasure house. God’s wounds, Brandon, did you ever consider that you could be wrong? I’ve enough money of my own. I don’t need to go to the trouble of stealing yours.”

“I told you that I didn’t want to talk finances with you until my accountant has completed his investigation.” The case against Charles was becoming stronger day by day, but he didn’t have time for that now. He’d spent the last weeks combing the city for any trace of Leah. He’d interrogated all the servants at Wescott House and informed the authorities of her disappearance. He’d even offered a huge reward for information leading to her safe return.

“You accused me of robbing Uncle Raymond blind,” Charles said.

“I was drunk when I said it,” Brandon lied.

“Is that supposed to be an apology, cousin?” Charles toyed with his snuffbox. “I don’t know why I bother with you. I’ve been insulted, my honor impinged. You’ve not given me any chance to defend myself, yet here I am riding around London with you in the dead of night searching for a sailor who claims he might have seen someone who might be your missing wife.” He took a pinch of snuff, sneezed, and put the box back in his inside pocket. “Mad as a March hare, the both of us.”

“I didn’t ask you to come with me tonight,” Brandon reminded him. The coach horses’ hooves striking the cobblestones made a lonely sound, and Brandon stared moodily out at the black Thames in the moonlight. “Maybe I am mad,” he said, “but I can’t shake the thought that I’ve failed her, and she’s in terrible danger.”

“She had money when she left Wescott House,” Charles replied. “Your mother was afraid to tell you, but her personal strongbox with the household funds was missing. Nothing else was touched—not her jewels or her clothing. She thought she’d lost upward of sixty pounds.”

“Now you’re accusing Leah of being a thief.”

“You didn’t hesitate to call me a thief.”

Brandon ignored Charles’s sarcasm. “If you’re so certain Leah took Mother’s money and went back to the Colonies, then why are we going to Blackfriars Stairs tonight?”

“I’ve wondered that myself, listening to you revile me,” Charles answered sharply. “Damn it, cuz. We’ve been closer than most brothers. If there’s a chance Leah’s still in London, of course I want to help you find her.”

“You’ve been scant help the past weeks.”

Charles sniffed. “You’re entitled to your own opinion. I’m not without my own sources of information, you know. I’ve sent out inquiries to various taverns along the waterfront, asking if anyone remembered seeing a lady matching Leah’s description. An informant brought a message from this ship’s mate who claims he saw her talking to the captain of a colonial merchant vessel. This is a rough section of the city. I wasn’t about to let you come here alone at night.” Charles motioned to the back of the coach. “It’s also why I brought along those two fellows.”

“There was a time when I would have trusted you, but now . . . now I’m not sure,” Brandon admitted. “We’re not boys any longer.”

“And who do you trust? Your mother? Your father?” Charles made a sound of derision. “You’ve turned your back on your family, continuing to believe in a woman who told you she was leaving you. No, don’t protest. Your own words, cuz. You told me the two of you argued that morning, and Leah told you she was going back to America. Think rationally, man. You’re behaving abominably. I really do think you’re suffering from brain fever.”

The coachman reined in the team on Ludgate Hill. “As far as I can go, sir,” he called back. “Yonder is the street that leads to the Red Goose Tavern, but the way’s too narrow for the coach. Ye must walk from here, sir.”

Brandon and Charles got out of the coach. “Wait here,” Brandon ordered the coachman. “John can stay with you and watch the coach.”

“Beggin’ your parden, Lord Brandon,” the coachman ventured. “Best take John wi’ ye. He’s a brawny lad and ready with his fists in time of trouble.”

“No need,” Charles interjected. “We’ve these two men.” He indicated Giles and Ben, both carrying heavy cudgels. “Your master has a pistol, and we are both wearing swords. I think we can walk down this street to the tavern and back.”

Brandon nodded. “We won’t be long.”

“As ye wish, sir.”

Giles lit a torch from one of the coach lanterns and led the way off Ludgate Hill toward the water. Ben followed closely behind Brandon and Charles. A few hundred yards from where they’d left the coach, Giles turned into a deserted alley.

“This way, yer lordships,” he said. “The Red Goose is offen this street.”

“Damnable spot,” Charles grumbled. “I don’t care for the smell.” He kicked a dead rat out of the way. “I don’t know how the poor devils can—”

When Charles mentioned the word
devils,
Ben leaped past him to slam Brandon on the back of the head with his club. Giles spun around, threw the torch to the ground, and attacked Brandon from the front with a wicked-looking knife. Charles flattened himself against a housefront as Brandon staggered to one side. He drew his pistol, but a blow from Ben’s club sent it spinning away. Brandon pulled his sword and raised it to protect himself.

“Charles!” Brandon yelled. “Get the other one!” He slashed at Giles, and the thin man jumped out of reach of the flashing steel blade.

Charles withdrew his sword and ran it through Brandon’s back. His cousin groaned and fell to his knees. Charles put his foot against Brandon’s back and extricated his weapon. “End of game, cuz,” he said. “Winner takes all.”