The Savage Miss Saxon (28 page)

The largest of the trio of horsemen—easily discernible as their leader—reined in abreast of the coach and quickly took in the scene with a sweep of his narrowed eyes. “Well, look-ee ’ere, mates,” he said, extending a hand in Sir Alexander’s direction. “It’s a bleedin’ knight I’ve clapped m’peepers on, damned if ’e ain’t. Hey, square-toes, huntin’ dragons are ye?”

While his companions laughed heartily at this sport, their leader’s grin faded and he reached inside his full-skirted coat, drawing out an ugly-looking pistol and pointing it squarely in Sir Alexander’s florid face.

Nutter was the first to raise his hands in surrender, followed quickly by the coachman. “That’s the ticket, coves, hoist them fambles and keep yer blubbers mum. You too, puff-guts, else yer’ll take yer next ride on six men’s shoulders.”

The entire time the leader had been talking, Nicholas had been stealthily creeping up on the group, looking for the best way to catch them off-guard. When he suddenly halted to plan his next move, Alix cannoned into his back, forcing him to grab her sharply by the shoulders else they tumble to the ground and give themselves away.

“I thought I told you to stay back,” he hissed, totally out of patience with her. “I swear, woman, you have no more sense than a newborn babe—as do I for that matter, allowing you to come along at all. Whatever do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, don’t be so provoking, Nicholas,” Alix retorted in a fierce whisper. “Did you really expect me to stay back there twiddling my thumbs while you all risk life and limb?”

Nicholas sighed in exasperation. “Ask a stupid question—” he mused aloud before dropping a quick kiss on the end of her nose and giving her drooping white feather a gentle tug. Then he turned his face back toward the direction of the coach and found that there was no end to the folly he was to endure this night, for just then Harold could be seen entering the roadway, crouched low to the ground and carrying something in his hand.

By now the three highwaymen had dismounted and were busily engaged in emptying Sir Alexander’s pockets and searching beneath the coach seats for hidden pouches of riches. Harold, moving with the stealth of a tracking lion, approached the three horses and began sprinkling a dark powder in a large circle around their feet. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he disappeared back into the darkness.

Once he realized that nobody was paying the slightest attention to the Indian, Nicholas sat back on his heels and watched the little play with amused fascination. The man moved like a ghost, that was for sure, Nicholas thought, but he’d be damned if he could understand, even if they could not
see
him, why the highwaymen did not
smell
Harold’s presence. Perhaps, he told himself with a shrug, beargrease-smeared Indians and grubby highwaymen smelled much of a piece.

Everyone’s attention was suddenly drawn to the highwayman situated half in and half out of the coach as that man suddenly let out a shout and emerged holding up a heavy pouch. `”Ere’s ’is boung!” he announced at the top of his lungs.

The leader smiled his satisfaction, exposing a mouth sadly depleted of teeth, and admonished his fellow thief: “Keep yer breath to cool yer porridge, Jenkins, or yer’ll ’ave all the world and ’is wife down on us. All’s bob, let’s buy a brush an’ lope. Clap yer bleeders to yer gallopers, mates!”

“They mean to ride off,” Nicholas whispered to Alix unnecessarily—for she remembered enough of Billy’s book of cant to know what the highwayman was talking about.

“I know that, you dolt,” she replied with an air of impatience. “The first thief said he had found Grandfather’s purse of ‘jewels’ and the leader told him to be quiet or someone would hear him. Then he said everything is fine and they should leave—using their spurs on their horses as they are in a hurry. So what?” As Nicholas meant to rise, his pistols at the ready, Alix pulled him back down by his coattails and grumbled, “Honestly, Nicholas, for a bright man you are sometimes excessively dense. There’s no need for histrionics—those men aren’t going anywhere.”

And as Mannering struggled to release his coat from her grasp, still looking at the highwaymen, he found that Alix was correct. They weren’t going anywhere—at least not on horseback, they weren’t—for the horses wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard they were spurred.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, awestruck. “I see it—but I don’t believe it. What did Harold do to those horses?”

“He merely sprinkled some dried blood—blood of some animal or another—and some secret powder mixture around the horses. They’re too frightened to move,” she told him with an unholy grin lighting her features. “Now watch. The highwaymen will have no choice but to dismount and try to get away on foot.”

Of course, that is precisely what the highwaymen attempted to do—cursing and swiping at their recalcitrant horses as they managed to keep Sir Alexander and the rest safely within range of their pistols. With no other option left open to them, they then turned to make their way into the trees, planning to get themselves far away before some passerby came along and caught them.

They had taken no more than three steps when an arrow came whistling through the air to land point down in the dirt at the leader’s feet—this first arrow followed quickly by two more that figuratively pinned the remaining highwaymen where they stood.

“Wot the bleedin’ ’ell?” the leader exclaimed, whirling where he stood, half expecting attack from the rear. While all three thieves cowered in expectation of more arrows to follow, there came a blood-curdling yell from deep in the darkness—the Lenape alarm-whoop—calculated to strike terror into the hearts of anyone within earshot.

Although Nicholas had heard such a whoop before, listening to it now, coming as it did from the throat of a real Lenape warrior rather than a beautiful young woman, sent ripples of goosebumps shooting up his arms.

The thieves were petrified with fright, so paralyzed that it became mere child’s play for Sir Alexander to reach inside the coach, pull out Harold’s heavy war club (loaned for just such a purpose), and bring it down neatly on the side of one of the thieves’ heads.

Now there were just two.

“I own myself astonished at the brilliance of this plan,” Nicholas admitted to Alix as they now stood most openly in the roadway, the better to watch the fun. “In fact, lovely one, I am feeling quite superfluous—unless I was only allowed to come along to serve as an appreciative audience to this masterful strategy.”

“Don’t be silly,” Alix retorted matter-of-factly. “It was your idea to set up a decoy, Nicholas. It’s just that Harold and I decided it would be less dangerous to handle the actual capture this way rather than to go about shooting holes in everyone.” As Alix spoke, they were walking rapidly toward the coach, Nicholas refusing to pocket his pistols even though the second highwayman was now on his knees, his hands clapped over his ears, begging anyone who would listen to make the awful noise go away, and the leader of the group was busily trying to drag his now hysterically rearing horse down the roadway.

When the leader saw Nicholas approaching—his frightened eyes not quite taking in Alix’s bizarre appearance at his side—he dropped his mount’s reins and bolted for the cover of the trees that lay on the opposite side of the road from whence the ear-splitting whoops were coming.

Sir Alexander, feeling very much in his prime, brandished Harold’s war club, successfully keeping the kneeling highwayman in check, while Nicholas broke into a trot, following the escaping thief. _

“Nicholas, don’t!” Alix shouted after him. “There’s no need—honestly!”

“The hell there isn’t!” Nicholas muttered under his breath, breaking into a run. “Bloody old men and a wet-behind-the-ears girl—making me feel about as useless as a wart on the end of Prinney’s nose, by God!”

Once in the woods, Nicholas stopped to get his bearings. He could still hear Alix calling to him to turn around and come back, but he ignored her pleas, choosing instead to listen for sounds of the thief moving in the underbrush. As the man was concentrating all his efforts on flight, not stealth, it wasn’t hard for Mannering to hear him—the hapless highwayman was charging through the trees with all the finesse of a wounded elephant.

The thief ran as if the hounds of hell were after him, looking back over his shoulder as he went, although the outcome of his flight would have been no different if he had been watching where he was going. One moment he was beginning to think he could outdistance his pursuer, and the next he was hanging upside down by one leg, his thrashing arms reaching helplessly toward the ground beneath his head.

When Nicholas arrived on the scene, the highwayman, thinking the devil himself had come to fetch him, began blubbering something unintelligible and making the sign against the evil eye while his furious leg kickings set him spinning about like a child’s toy top.

It was just too much. Mannering stood looking at the hapless captive for a few moments, realizing that his sole function in the man’s capture would be to cut him down from Harold’s deer snare and haul the fellow back to the coach, and loosed a pungent oath. Then, leaving the highwayman to dangle until Harold deigned to collect him, he turned to make his way back to the roadway.

Perhaps he was too busy nursing his wounded ego to take much notice of where he was stepping, or perhaps he just didn’t give a damn—but whatever the reason for his inattention, Nicholas had taken no more than ten steps before there came a small, snapping sound, followed closely by the sight of a thin sapling whipping past his head, followed even more closely by the rapid inversion of his person.

When Alix found him, he was looking quite urbane—one leg crossed over the other and his arms folded negligently across his chest. The fact that he was upside down did not seem to faze him in the least.

“Nicholas!” Alix was startled into exclaiming. “You’re in the deer share!”

Mannering turned his head from side to side, then looked up and down, seeing stars hovering above his feet and a patch of moss below his head, and replied in a tightly polite voice, “So I am, sweetings. It’s so good of you to bring it to my attention—I’d never have noticed otherwise.” Then his voice hardened and he unleashed his frustration in a loud shout. “
Get me down from here!
”

Not knowing whether to be solicitous and commiserate with the poor fellow, or whether to use her well-developed sense of preservation and run for it—leaving Harold to face Linton’s wrath once he was cut down—in the end, Alix did the very thing calculated to bring Nicholas’s fury down around her ears.

She laughed.

She plopped herself down on the ground and she howled. “Oh, Nick,” she chortled, pointing a finger in his direction as she held her other hand to her smiling month, “you look so
funny!
”

Nicholas’s voice was like chipped ice. “How that gratifies me. I live only to amuse you.”

Then, her sense of the ridiculous riding high, Alix creeped toward Nicholas on all fours, and bracing his shoulders with her hands so that he would not swing away, she planted a kiss on his upside-down lips.

“A plaguey queer time to be billing and cooing, if you ask me,” pointed out Sir Alexander, as he lumbered into the small clearing and saw Nicholas and his granddaughter locked in a rather bizarre embrace. “Linton! What the deuce are you about—hanging around in trees like a bloody bat? Good thing Harold and I were able to subdue the highwaymen, for all the good you’ve been. Thought you was with Wellington. Wonder we ain’t all talking Frenchie, if all his men were like you.”

“Grandfather, that is too bad of you,” Alix scolded, smiling only a little bit at his teasing. “Poor Nicholas couldn’t have known about Harold’s snares.”

Mention of the Indian distracted Sir Alexander, and he embarked on a lengthy recitation of all that had gone on that evening—his and Harold’s parts in the adventure taking on the glimmerings of what soon could become an epic poem—before informing his audience (one could almost say “captive” audience) that Harold would be along shortly to tie up the last highwayman and cut Nicholas down from his ignominious position.

“Jolly decent of him,” Mannering muttered. “But if you’re entertaining the notion of commissioning some artist to capture the events of this evening on canvas for the sake of posterity, I’d as lief you left me out of it. I have no great desire to have my descendents referring to me as ‘The Inverted Earl.’ ”

Sir Alexander bridled. “And why should you think you’d have any part in such a thing anyway? All you’ve done is get yourself trussed up like a chicken whilst Harold and I did all the real work. Besides,” he added, pointing out just another of the Earl’s misconceptions, “it’s not a painting I’m thinking about but a tapestry. Look good in the Great Hall, don’t you know.”

“Oh good grief,” groaned Nicholas, pushing at the ground with one hand and setting his body into a slow turn—away from Alix’s laughing eyes.

Twenty minutes later the worst was over. The three highwaymen (none of them left-handed—Alix had asked) were neatly tied up like birthday presents and stashed in the boot of the coach, their legs hanging out the back like streamers, and the coachie, with Sir Alexander sitting alongside him as guard, lumbered off in search of the local constable.