Chapter Thirty
Every time he closed his eyes, Adam relived the moment over again. The sharp report of the musket. Harold falling to the ground dead.
Dead because of him.
The nightmarish dreams caused by his concussion terrified him.
Constance came to him in one. She was dead because of him. She appeared and looked at him in surprise across the tumble-down wall of the ruins in the woods. She was still young but he was as old as he was now.
Olivia!
He killed her, too? No…that was Harold. He killed Harold.
What happened to Olivia?
If only his head would stop pounding.
A bucket of cold water was tossed in his face, a blessing and a curse. It woke him up at last, but it reminded him how much his goddamned body hurt.
“Wakey, wakey,” announced Black Angus. “Major Wilkinson wants a wee word with you. Get to your feet.”
Adam started to rise, but apparently not fast enough for the Scot, who pulled him up by the arm, tugging at his already strained muscles.
The door to the room opened. The glare of a new dawning sunrise made his eyes water. From what he could see, the Carrick or even the sea itself was a short distance away. Another man, Red, Adam suspected, shoved him in the center of his back to propel him down the short hallway into a small sitting room. By the looks of things, it was the main room of a cottage; a door with a small window led into it, led immediately outside.
Wilkinson sat on a humble timber settle, looking more grey and less commanding than Adam ever recalled seeing him. Nevertheless, the man had made himself at home. A working man’s earthenware mug and a small teapot sat on a tray beside him. On a footstool were papers and a small traveling inkwell.
“Tell me what you did last night,” he asked, his voice mild, perhaps even resigned. “Who were you signaling? And what is the significance of the chandler’s shop at Charteris House?”
Despite his aches and pains, Adam stood to attention. “You’ll get no answers until I see Miss Collins set free, unharmed.”
Wilkinson thumped his fist on the arm of the settle. The tea tray rattled, but the man managed to hold his temper somewhat.
“Last night, you were in a better position to bargain,” he said. “All things considered, I’m not in a mood to cooperate. The Frenchies will loosen your tongue soon enough. I’ve seen men go mad in their prisons, they’re a living death, a horror you cannot imagine.”
“Why wait for the French? Why didn’t you do it last night? Your men demonstrated they were quite capable of killing an unarmed man.”
Wilkinson didn’t answer. No one in the room answered.
Adam’s movement was so swift it took everyone by surprise, even Adam himself. Before he had even formed a coherent thought to do so, he lunged at Black Angus, seized the dirk from the scabbard at his waist, and had a startled Wilkinson by the shirt, then around the throat with the knife at his ribs.
“Where is Olivia? Bring her here!”
No one moved. Wilkinson himself made only a token resistance, but was otherwise cooperative. Adam edged him backwards toward the door.
“You’re under orders to deliver me to France alive? Why? I can see why it mattered if you thought I was your agent, but now?”
Adam’s mind raced for possible reasons – then it struck him in one of those moments of clarity when it is as though a thin curtain has been pulled back and what was diffuse and indistinct becomes sharp and clear.
They can’t kill me. They’ve been given orders.
“Your Miss Collins is in safe hands…for now.”
He shoved Wilkinson hard in the back, propelling him forward toward the settle. The man regained his feet in time to avoid falling over the footstool. Adam brandished the knife at the men in the room.
“The young woman will remain safe as long as you are cooperative, Hardacre. Mr. Fitzgerald will be seeing to her welfare.”
It was like a blow to the gut. Wilkinson smiled as though he’d made a checkmate move.
“Where is she?”
Wilkinson’s grin widened. He shook his head. “Just give me the knife, Hardacre. You can’t get away.”
Adam squeezed the dirk’s handle and swiftly brought the blade to under his own neck.
“Yes, I can. So tell me where Miss Collins is or you’ll have to explain why the man you went to great lengths to secure just cut his own throat.”
If the situation wasn’t so dire, Adam might laugh at the absurdity of his situation. Here he was, threatening to self-murder, surrounded by men who would be only too happy to attend to the task if circumstances were different.
He backed against the door and felt the knob under his free hand. So far, no one had approached him. He opened the door.
No more than half a dozen steps away, a half-dozen horsemen, their noses and mouths covered, tricorn hats pulled low on their faces, bore down on him out of nowhere.
*
Olivia had managed to persuade Fitzgerald to free her hands and give her a few moments of privacy as she attended to her needs. While waiting for his return, she scoured the boatshed, looking for anything she might use to effect an escape. There was nothing, just discarded detritus – the head of an old iron boat hook, missing its timber pole, lengths of rotten rope, a worm-eaten oar.
Through the warped timbers of the double doors, she could see the glint of sunlight on water. It was morning. If she could get away, surely there would be a nearby farmhouse and someone to give her aid.
Where on earth was Sir Daniel? Surely when she didn’t arrive back at the inn, he’d have sent someone in search. But where? Where was she? The carriage last night had traveled for hours. She might be anywhere twenty miles up or down the Cornish coast from Falmouth.
Olivia looked at the door out to the water at the far end of the shed. The promise of freedom sparkling through the gaps between the old timbers drew her closer to the little slipway. Perhaps, she could force the open the rusty lock and chain that held the doors closed. What with?
The boat hook.
She picked it up, conscious that Fitzgerald would return at any moment. The weight of the iron was awkward in her hand but it was the best she could think of.
She stepped down onto the wear-polished timbers of the slip and reached out to the chain, trying to twist the hook into a link, imagining it somehow opening up. It didn’t, and she couldn’t get the leverage or purchase she needed at arm’s length. She looked down at the lapping water. How deep was it, how slippery were the boards beneath?
Then she noticed the gap between the bottom of the door and the slipway planks. No more than two inches, rising and falling with the lapping of the water. But how much more space was there under the door beneath the water?
There was no time to remove stockings or shoes. She stepped down the ramp until she was ankle deep, then turned sideways and, lowering herself, put one foot into the gap to gauge the water’s depth. It did not reach as far as her knee. Her foot squelched in mud, but she felt sure there would be enough of a gap slide to under, even if she was momentarily submerged.
The chain that locked the side door rattled.
Fitzgerald!
It was now or never. She dropped the useless boat hook in the water with a splash, sat on the slipway timbers and plunged both feet in. She gripped the lower edge of the boat doors and began to pull and slide her body beneath them. Her skirt, weighted with water, hampered her. She warred with the panic in her breast and lowered the rest of her body into the water.
“Olivia!”
She heard Fitzgerald yell, but she was committed. With one deep breath, she squeezed her eyes shut and shoved herself beneath the water and the boathouse door.
She felt her rear sliding on mud and her nose scrape the bottom edge of the door. She let go with her right hand – and felt her left wrist grabbed by Fitzgerald who plunged onto the ramp above her.
Olivia scrambled in the water, her feet slipping in the mud, unable to get purchase or pull her arm free. She fought against the urge to open her mouth to scream underwater. Then her head popped up above the surface again inside the door as Fitzgerald tugged her back inside. She gasped for breath.
“Stupid bitch!” Fitzgerald cursed. “What the hell are you trying to do? Kill yourself?”
Fitzgerald began straining to haul her up the ramp by the one arm, fulminating as he went.
“I’ll make you regret crossing me, you sow. For as long as you live, you’ll regret it. But you won’t live long, I promise you that, you worthless c—”
He stopped mid-curse as his heels slipped on the wet wood and he dropped with an “oof!” on his behind. They slid together back down the slipway and ended in a tangle in the water, jammed between the planks and the bottom of the door.
“Bitch!” shouted Fitzgerald.
He went to throw his arm over her, his fist clenched, aiming for her face. Olivia’s right hand felt something hard in the mud below and she grasped it instinctively and swung it in Fitzgerald’s direction. The man’s fist struck her cheek and, simultaneously, she heard a scream, but it wasn’t hers.
When her vision cleared, all she could see was red seeping between Fitzgerald’s fingers as he clutched his face and neck. Blood gushed down his arms and colored the muddy water slopping around them. Still screaming in pain, Fitzgerald began to slide further into the water.
Olivia scrambled back and screamed, too. Fitzgerald looked at her. His cheek and neck were torn open where the boat hook had struck him. His eyes implored her to help as his screaming turned to a gurgling groan. Olivia screamed again for the both of them as Fitzgerald’s mouth seemed to open grotesquely wider than it should and more blood spilled out.
He slumped into the water and was still.
Peter Fitzgerald was dead.
And yet he screamed…no, she screamed until her voice gave out and all that was left was tears. With difficulty, soaked in bloody water and caked in mud, she pushed herself backwards up the sloped boat ramp, desperate not to slip and slide back down to where Fitzgerald’s body shifted with the lapping of the water.
She didn’t react when the side door to the shed burst open and managed only the barest flinch when a pair of hands touched her shoulders gently.
“Olivia, sweetheart.” The voice sounded it like it was miles away, a sound caught by the wind. “Look at me, my love.”
She followed the voice and fell into the hazel eyes of Adam Hardacre. She was lifted and she knew he carried her, but she could not feel his arms. She felt nothing. Around about, between the boathouse and a nearby cottage, were a dozen men, all dressed in black, their faces obscured by scarves. They seemed ghostlike and unreal, like everything else.
Adam paid them no heed, so neither did she. Her eyes fell on a cart near the cottage. Bound together in the back were Wilkinson and two henchmen whose names she had never learned.
She looked back over Adam’s shoulder to the boathouse where two of the black figures were about to enter. They would retrieve Fitzgerald’s corpse. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to make the vision of the man’s ruined face disappear.
Despite the heat of the summer’s day, Olivia was cold, her filthy, waterlogged clothes chilling her to the core. Or was it her heart that was frozen? Why could she not feel?
One of the ghostly men approached. He pulled down his scarf and adjusted his tricorn hat.
The features of Sir Daniel Ridgeway emerged from the specter.
“How is the lady?”
“I don’t know,” Adam replied.
The pain and weariness in his voice pulled her from the depths.
“I’m unharmed. C-c-cold….” Her answer resulted in Ridgeway removing his cloak and sweeping it around Adam’s shoulders and covering her with it also.
Up on the road, a carriage waited under the shade of some trees.
To Olivia’s surprise, Lady Abigail alighted with the energy of a much younger woman, though unlike previous occasions, she was dressed simply and practically in a navy blue gown, her bright white hair pulled back and hidden under a wide scarf of the same shade of blue.
“I thought I told you to stay in the village,” Ridgeway called.
“I must be getting hard of hearing,” she quipped. Ridgeway gave his wife a particular look, which she ignored.
“I was perfectly safe here with this.” From her pocket emerged a small flintlock pistol with a barrel no longer than three inches in length. “Come on. Let’s get this bedraggled pair somewhere to recuperate. Dr. Osbourne is waiting at the house.”
Adam carried Olivia up to the carriage, Ridgeway walking alongside. The older man’s expression softened as his wife approached him for a kiss.
Olivia wondered at the pair. Who were they really? What made them how they were? She waited until Adam had placed her safely into the carriage before she looked at him. A dark shadow of beard coated his chin, the skin under his eyes was dark, made more severe by the hard, concerned set of his mouth.
Lady Abigail climbed in and closed the door. “On!” she called and the carriage jerked into motion.
For now, all Olivia could do was close her eyes and allow Lady Abigail to remove her sodden, ruined clothes and cover her in blankets. She forced her heavy lids open to see Adam slumped in the corner of the bench opposite, his eyes closed, forehead against the window glass. He sported cuts and bruises, but that appeared to be the worst.
They had much to talk about – of poor Harold, Fitzgerald, and even of Constance and Christopher.
She shook her head at Abigail’s silent offer of brandy from a flask, instead leaning forward and reaching for Adam’s hand. Although his eyes remained closed, Adam took her hand and squeezed it tight.
That was answer enough for now.