The lad was explaining, “Danny and I arrived home from our wedding trip this morning. You can imagine my surprise when my butler immediately pulled me aside—he didn’t want to fret m’wife—and told me that you commandeered my entire household last night. Then he handed me this. It had been anchored down with a large rock on our front steps.”
“This” was a note that Jeremy handed to Anthony. Apparently, the wait was over.
“Delivered to another wrong house?” Boyd guessed as he sat up and stretched the sleep from his limbs. “These people obviously don’t know your family very well.”
“Morning, Yank,” Jeremy greeted him, adding, “If they knew our family well, they never would have done this.”
“Good point,” Boyd agreed.
The Malory family wasn’t just very large, very rich, and very titled. The two younger brothers, James and Anthony, had been such rakehells in their day, never losing a duel whether with fists or pistols, that they were also well known for being quite deadly. Bottom line, you didn’t cross a Malory without ending up very sorry for it.
Anthony wasn’t paying attention to the two younger men as he glanced over the note, then tossed it on the table in front of Boyd. “Tomorrow!? Do they really think I can’t get my hands on a fortune today? I’d drag my banker from his bed if need be.”
Boyd picked up the note. It was much more detailed than the first note had been. It mentioned the place, the time, the date, and, lastly, that the fortune was to be delivered by someone other than a family member, and that Anthony wasn’t to be involved or to come anywhere near the place of the exchange. That was stressed twice. They might not know the family well, but it sounded as if they did know Anthony Malory. There were also a number of misspellings, though that wasn’t necessarily pertinent.
“Do you even know how much money they want?” Jeremy asked his uncle.
“A fortune is a fortune. I’m not putting a price on my daughter’s life.”
“Quite right.” Jeremy nodded. “Who are you going to send to make the exchange?”
“I’ll go,” Boyd offered immediately.
He was ignored, or perhaps just not heard. He was clearing his throat to say it louder when Anthony said, “I’d send Derek, but he’s visiting his father at Haverston this week.”
“What about Uncle Edward?” Jeremy suggested.
“No, my brother’s up north on business.”
“There’s no reason why—,” Boyd tried again, but he was again ignored.
“I suppose I could send for Derek. There’s time enough for him to get back to London before tonight.”
“No need for that,” Jeremy said. “I’ll go.”
Anthony snorted at his nephew. “From a distance, you look just like me. You ain’t going.”
Jeremy grinned, but then said, “Well, damn, where’s m’father when he’s—”
Boyd stood up in annoyance, interrupting loudly this time, “Have either of you heard a word I’ve said? I’m perfectly capable of handling this.”
Anthony stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “No offense, Yank, but I’ve heard you’re a bit of a hothead.”
“Since I’ve been provoked a number of times in the last few minutes and haven’t lost my temper, that speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Besides, I’ve grown very fond of your daughter since Jack has been in my care.”
“Did you just call my sister Jack?” Jeremy said with a raised brow. “Thought you and all your brothers hated the name m’father gave her.”
“No, we just hate your father,” Boyd said with a tight-lipped smile.
Jeremy chuckled. Boyd wasn’t amused. “Look, I might be the youngest of the Anderson brothers, Anthony, but I’m thirty-four years of age and even your own brother trusted me with the care of his daughter. That note says you can’t personally make the exchange, and I’m sure you’re not going to let your wife go or trust this to a servant or someone you don’t know personally. And the rest of your family appears to be out of town. So I’m volunteering. Much as I’d like to put my fist into whoever did this, and believe me, I’ll be glad to help you track them down afterwards, I think getting Judith safely home first is more important.”
Jeremy pointed at the note Boyd had returned to the table. “The meeting place is the first crossroads south of the town of Northampton. Do you even know where Northampton is?”
“No, but even us Yanks know how to follow directions,” Boyd replied drily.
Chapter 6
KATEY STOPPED for the woman once Judith was huddled under a blanket on the floor. It wasn’t a matter of choice. The woman’s coach nearly ran them off the road in her effort to get them to pull over. Then she climbed down from the driver’s perch of her coach and stood next to theirs, windswept and wild-looking, belligerently demanding to search it.
“I think not,” Katey indignantly told the woman through the window they’d opened. “You nearly caused us an accident! If you’re trying to rob us, be warned, I have a pistol in my hand at this very moment.”
She didn’t really have a pistol, but she should have had one, and she was now determined to buy one in the next town they came to.
She gripped the handle of the door, though, just in case the wild woman tried to yank it open. But the woman appeared to believe her about the pistol and quickly lost her belligerence. She began to whine instead about an ungrateful, willful, lying daughter with copper hair and the bluest eyes who had run away from home.
And just so they’d be sure to doubt the child if they were helping her escape, she added, “She makes up fantastic tales, she does. I ne’er know when tae believe her m’self. Hae ye seen her?”
Katey had just come from Scotland so she recognized the woman’s accent easily enough. And later she was going to laugh about the likelihood that her own mother might have said the same thing about her many a time.
Grace even whispered at her back, “Sounds like you, doesn’t it?”
Katey, still too angry to be amused, ignored her maid. Obviously, it hadn’t occurred to the woman that if they had the child, they’d know that the woman was lying about being the girl’s mother, simply because the child’s accent wasn’t the least bit Scottish.
In an attempt to get them out of there sooner rather than later, Grace stuck her nose out the window and told the woman, “We haven’t seen any children, but good luck in your search.” Then she shouted up at their driver, “Mr. Davis, continue on.”
But a few miles down the road, Grace looked out the window again and said, “I should have stayed out of it. She recognized me.”
“From where?”
“The inn. We passed each other in the corridor last night. I went downstairs to see if I could find something to eat in their kitchen. I didn’t want to disturb you for our food basket, in case you were sleeping already. I could see a bit of suspicion in her eyes back there on the road when I spoke to her. She realized I was in the same inn as she was last night. And she’s not going away.”
Katey frowned and leaned over to glance out the window, then gasped, “Good grief, she’s following us now? This is getting out of hand, isn’t it?”
Grace shrugged, then grinned. “I’m not worried about it. She’s alone. If that man you said she was traveling with was with her, he was doing a good job of hiding in their coach. And we do have Mr. Davis with us. You pay him enough that he can move his arse to take care of any trouble of that sort. What can she do?”
“I wouldn’t count on Mr. Davis helping,” Katey said as she sat back against the seat again. “He warned me when I hired him and his coach that if I wanted guards, I should hire some. He isn’t a brave sort. He hasn’t minded sleeping with the trunks, but I’ve wondered more than once if he’d actually try to stop anyone from taking them.”
“That he’s slept near them has been deterrent enough to keep anyone from nosing around.”
“I suppose, but I’ll make sure we have a real guard before we travel across the Continent. For that mat
ter, I think I’ll buy our own coach before we set sail for France.”
Grace chuckled. “I’m glad you’re getting used to being rich.”
Katey blushed slightly. It had taken her some time to get used to being wealthy. Her family had lived comfortably enough, but owning the only store in a small village certainly hadn’t made them rich. Her mother had never mentioned the inheritance she’d received from her father, who had died soon after she’d left England, before he’d had a chance to strike her from his will. She hadn’t expected his money and didn’t want it, so she’d never touched it.
Katey only found out about the inheritance after her mother died. She’d still been in shock over Adeline’s death when the Danbury lawyer came to tell her about the large sum of money that had been sitting unused for all those years. Deep in mourning, Katey simply hadn’t cared. But then her neighbor Mrs. Pellum had taken in two young nieces when their parents died, and she started desperately looking for someone to escort them to England, claiming she was too old to raise small children again, but her youngest sister in England would be glad to have them.
And that’s when Katey realized she didn’t have to live in Gardener anymore. She agreed to escort Mrs. Pellum’s three- and four-year-old nieces to England. And since Katey didn’t plan to ever return to Gardener, she gave away most of her possessions, including the store and the house. Besides her clothes, all she’d packed were a few small mementos of her mother’s to take with her.
She said all her good-byes. And while she was fond of many of her neighbors in Gardener, she wasn’t especially close to any of them. If Grace, her maid, hadn’t agreed to go abroad with her, she would have been the only person in Gardener whom Katey would have missed dreadfully.
Judith hadn’t interrupted as she’d listened to them, but as children will do, she’d latched onto one remark and asked, “You’re not staying in England?”
“Goodness, no, this was just the beginning of a grand tour for us. We’ll be sailing for France next, and come to think of it, I should probably wait until we get there to buy a couch, so we don’t have to ship it over.”
“Don’t do that,” Judith said. “French coaches are pretty, but they aren’t comfortable. If you’re going to be traveling a long way, you’ll want an English coach.”
“And how would you be knowing things like that, child?” Grace asked with a chuckle.
“My mother ordered one and within a week found it so uncomfortable she sent it to my uncle Jason to use as a decoration in one of his gardens. M’father laughed and laughed about that, which had my mother quite annoyed with him. It’s a bone of contention with her, that she has nothing to spend her money on, because he buys her everything she could ever want.”
“But why was he amused that she didn’t keep the coach?” Katey asked.
“It was that it ended up being such an expensive garden piece that he found so funny!”
Katey smiled at the girl. “Well, I’m sure not all French coaches are as uncomfortable as your mother’s was, but thank you for the warning.”
The mention of the word warning had the child offering up a warning of her own. “That woman could have a weapon.”
Katey’s expression turned serious again. “I know. But I’ll have one myself shortly, just as soon as we reach the next town. You’re probably getting hungry again, too. Let’s hope our ‘follower’ heads down a different road so we can stop for breakfast.”
They did stop at the next town, and when Katey returned to the coach with a small pistol tucked into her reticule, she already knew they were still being watched.
“She thinks she’s being clever, that we don’t know she’s there,” Grace said when Katey rejoined them. “But she’s definitely keeping an eye on us.”
Katey took her seat before she peered across the street at the old coach with the woman standing behind it, trying to be unobtrusive as she peeked around it. “We should just confront her.”
“Don’t do that!” Judith said in alarm. “I couldn’t bear it if you got hurt because of me.”
Katey gave it a moment’s thought, then said, “I’m concerned that she might stop us again on a deserted stretch of the highway and do something more reckless.” Katey didn’t really want to have to actually use her new pistol. “I’m also picturing a mad, dangerous dash through the streets of London when we get close to your house and she gets desperate to stop us.”
“You would imagine something like that,” Grace mumbled in disgust.
Katey ignored the maid and continued, “The fool woman obviously didn’t believe us and is sure we have you and are taking you back to your family. So the easiest way for us to convince her that she’s on the wrong track is for us to not travel immediately to London.”
“You want to rent a room at the inn here and wait her out?” Grace guessed.
“That would be ideal, but how are we going to get Judith inside when the woman is watching us this closely? We need to lose her first, and the only way to do that is to convince her she’s wrong. This town isn’t far enough off the highway for her to think we aren’t still heading to London. But if it appears that we’re retracing our steps—”
“North?” Grace cut in.
“Yes, maybe even back to Northampton, since it’s not that far from here. I know that’s going out of our way, but she’s more likely to think she’s wasting her time and take her search elsewhere if she sees us riding in the opposite direction of London.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Grace admitted.
“I know,” Katey said, pleased with herself. “We can even get a room in a different inn and have a nice lunch sent up while we pass a few hours, just to make sure she’s no longer in the area. I’d like to give her time to get off the highway so we don’t run into her again later. And we’ll still have plenty of time to get Judith home before nightfall.”
“That’s assuming she doesn’t follow directly behind us all the way back to Northampton.”
“Well, let’s find out.”
They implemented the new plan, heading back the way they’d come. Grace still kept a close eye on the road behind them. It was disappointing to see that the Scotswoman hadn’t given up yet. She was still back there, though at a greater distance. And then it was a relief to see her stop a rider heading in their same direction.
Grace closed the curtain over the window and sat back in her seat with a smile. “Doubt is taking hold of her. It looks like she’s starting to stop others to ask if they’ve seen the girl. Before long we might even lose sight of her.”
Chapter 7
ALL RIGHT, YANK,” Anthony said, “I’m going to trust you to carry out the switch. But I’m not going to be far away in case anything goes wrong.”
Boyd was inordinately pleased that Anthony Malory was expressing confidence in him. Perhaps it was because his family still viewed him as the “baby brother,” a hothead who was quick to engage in fisticuffs. While his brothers grew older, they failed to notice that he did, too. Yes, he admired pugilists greatly and welcomed any chance to test his own skills, but he was far less impulsive than he’d once been. He was gratified that a Malory, and one he actually admired, recognized that he was capable of handling such a tense, important situation.
Anthony wasn’t about to wait until tomorrow for the exchange to take place when he could try to find his daughter today. Northampton was only a few hours’ hard ride away, after all. They could be there and search the entire town before nightfall. Not that they were going to do anything so obvious. They didn’t know how many people were involved in the blackmail scheme and couldn’t take the chance that the criminals would be watching for a search like that, or even watching the roads. Which was why Anthony, Jeremy, and Boyd left London in a coach.
Three horses were tied to the back of it in case they needed to move more quickly. But the coach would conceal Anthony, who would, they assumed, be recognized, and Jeremy, who closely resembled Anthony. Boyd merely rode along with them while they fig
ured out their separate plans of action.
“They’d be stupid to set up a meeting place near their own town,” Anthony speculated. “So I seriously doubt they live anywhere near Northampton, which eliminates a door-to-door search. But they might be holding Judy in an abandoned house or barn, someplace where they can keep Judith without drawing notice to her.”
“You think they’d sneak her into an inn?” Boyd asked.
“Maybe,” Jeremy said. “She’s small. It could be done, so we probably shouldn’t discount it.”
“If we’re discussing all possibilities, they could take her anywhere without sneaking about if they’ve threatened her into being quiet,” Boyd pointed out. “Would she do as she’s told? Or is she brave enough to yell for help?”
Anthony slammed his fist sideways into the wall of the coach. “She’s probably too terrified to do anything!”
Jeremy tried to ignore the outburst from his distraught uncle and told Boyd, “She’s as gutsy as my sister Jack is, and too smart to do anything foolish. Why don’t you check the inns. I really can’t see them being stupid enough to use an inn where other people might notice, but we have to cover all possibilities. My uncle and I will drive around and look out for abandoned buildings.”
“You keep supposing they aren’t stupid, but I have to disagree,” Boyd said. “They did this. They’re damn stupid. But I know what I need to do and where to meet you two later to report my progress, so I’ll take off now and get started on the search. Hopefully I’ll have some news by the time you roll into town.”
They stopped long enough for Boyd to get his horse and ride off. As much as they’d like to, they couldn’t all race toward Northampton. That would attract attention. The coach was going to progress in a normal manner, while Boyd would reach the town an hour or two sooner.
Grimly thinking about what he was going to do if he got his hands on the people who did this, Boyd almost didn’t see the wild woman turning her coach around in the middle of the road. On horseback, he merely moved around the ancient vehicle, thinking the woman shouldn’t be driving if she didn’t know how to turn around without blocking the entire road.