The Leopard Prince (21 page)

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.

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.”

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.

Harry was mesmerized; he couldn’t take his eyes away from her sorrow. He wanted to yell at the young king,
Here is your magic! Look to the lady beside you.
But, of course, he couldn’t speak. And it turned out he was wrong: It was actually the princess, not the young king, who wanted the tin stag. The young king was merely acting as the princess’s agent. Well, here was an entirely different matter. If Princess Georgina desired the stag, she should have it, even if it was a ratty old thing.

But the ugly ogre loved the tin stag; it was his most precious possession. To prove it, he threw the stag down and stamped on it until the stag groaned and broke into pieces. The ogre stared at it, lying there at his feet, bleeding lead, and smiled. He looked into the princess’s eyes and pointed.
There, take it. I’ve killed it, anyway.

Then a wondrous thing happened.

Princess Georgina knelt beside the shattered stag and wept, and as she did, her golden tears fell upon the beast.

Where they lay, they formed a bond, soldering together the tin until the stag was whole again, made of both tin and gold. The princess smiled and held the strange animal to her breast, and there the stag nuzzled his head. She lifted him up, and she and the young king turned with their dubious prize.

But Harry could see over her shoulder that the ogre did not like this outcome. All the love he’d borne the tin stag had now turned to hatred of the princess who had stolen it away. He wanted to shout to the young king,
Be careful! Watch the princess’s back! The ogre means her harm and will not rest until he has his revenge!
But however much he tried, he could not speak.

You never can in dreams.