Into Thin Eire Page 17

  Hetherington reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew a roll of bills, which he tossed across the table to Flynn. “That should do it, I think.”

  “Shall I be askin’ for a few lads to come back with me and help load it?” Flynn asked, pocketing the money.

  Hetherington appeared to consider the matter, but shook his head. “I think not. No need to take unnecessary risks, not when we’re so close.”

  “I don’t suppose—?” The rest of the question was left unsaid, but Flynn’s gaze shifted rather pointedly to her and then back to Hetherington.

  “Let me remind you that Mrs. Pickett is our guest,” Hetherington said sternly. “We’re not going to make her work like a navvy. She can keep to her room until the package is well on its way. Between the two of us, you and I can handle things, at least until you reach town.”

  Flynn shrugged, seemingly taking Hetherington’s scold with a good grace. “Aye, I don’t doubt I can find any number o’ lads workin’ on Nelson’s Pillar who wouldn’t object to a job a bit more to their likin’. Once we’re after finishin’ at the castle, we can take care of the wharves and be back in Sackville Street in time for ’em to collect their wages.”

  Julia was careful not to betray any sort of interest in their conversation, but her mind was awhirl. The fact that Flynn intended to hire transport seemed to indicate that she was right in thinking there were no horses in the stables; apparently the ones that had pulled the carriage that had brought her here had also been hired. By Bohannan, perhaps? And what sort of “package” required not only a wagon and team to deliver it, but five or more men—Flynn, Hetherington, and Flynn’s “few lads”—to load it? One thing was certain: she would discover nothing by keeping meekly to her room.

  “If my help is needed, I don’t mind—” she began, only to be cut off by Hetherington.

  “Now, now, Mrs. Pickett, you won’t want to muss your pretty dress. We can’t have your husband coming and seeing you looking like a chimney sweep, now, do we?”

  As she had been wearing her “pretty dress” for more than a se’ennight, as near as she could tell, Julia thought there was very little she could do to it to make it look worse than it already did. But what was in the package that might leave her looking like a chimney sweep? Coal, perhaps? She thought the Irish used peat for fuel. Did it leave the same black smudges? She had no idea, and didn’t even know what questions to ask that they might be willing to answer.

  “If I set out at first light,” Flynn continued, “I can be after hirin’ a wagon and team and returnin’ by noon. We can be loadin’ the package and then deliverin’ it to Dublin first thing the next mornin’.”

  Hetherington scowled fiercely at him. “I can’t possibly go in two days! What if Mr. Pickett should arrive and find me absent?”

  If delivery must wait until John’s arrival, Julia thought with some satisfaction, then the people of Dublin will be awaiting their package for a very long time. For he must surely have received her message by now, and turned back. Curiously enough, it never occurred to her to think that perhaps he had lost the scent, and was searching for her in quite the wrong place—the Lake District, perhaps, where he and Hetherington had first crossed paths. No, he would certainly trace her as far as Dublin, where he would be warned not to pursue her.

  One thing was certain: with Flynn gone, she and Hetherington would be alone in the house from early morning until noon. If she could contrive to escape from the house unseen, she might even be able to outrun the much older man, should he spy her from one of the windows and give chase.

  Tomorrow it must be, then. She would never have a better opportunity.

  17

  In Which John Pickett and His Brother-in-Law

  Make a Surprising Discovery

  “Here!” Jamie called to the driver, rapping on the roof of the carriage to make sure he was heard. “Set us down here.”

  The jarvey obliged, but cast a dubious eye about at his surroundings. Night would be falling soon, and there were no houses, no buildings at all, only trees and dry-stone walls zigzagging up and down the rolling hills, enclosing fields where recently shorn sheep grazed. Nor were there any sounds of human habitation, nothing but the chirrup of nocturnal insects interrupted by the occasional bleat of the sheep or the disapproving snort of one of his horses. He was inclined to agree with the horse.

  “There’s nothing here,” he pointed out to the man who appeared to be the leader of the four passengers—a military man, or used to be, unless he missed his guess. “It’ll soon be nightfall, and where will you be then?”

  “In the dark, I suppose,” Jamie said with a smile. “But there’s still enough of a moon to see by, so we’ll rub along well enough.”

  The jarvey shrugged and let the fellow have his way. As soon as the last man had disembarked, he flicked his whip over his leader’s flanks, and the carriage moved away.

  “Well, I like that,” Carson said in a voice that conveyed just the opposite. “How the devil are we supposed to get back to the village?”

  “We walk,” Jamie said, starting off down a weed-choked drive.

  “Walk!” complained Carson, scrambling to catch up with the other three. “But it must be five miles!”

  “It’s less than four,” said Pickett, who would gladly have trudged twice that distance to rescue Julia. “I can tell you’re on the Horse Patrol. The Foot can walk that far by noon,” he added, having spent five years of his life with that organization before his promotion to principal officer.

  “Buck up, Mr. Carson,” Jamie chided. “In the army, it’s not unusual to march twenty miles in a day.”

  “I thought you were in the cavalry,” said Carson, not at all placated.

  “I was,” Jamie conceded with a nod. “For thirteen years. On two occasions, my horse was shot out from under me, and on a third, the brute took fright, unseated me, and bolted. Believe me, I was just happy to get out of there with a whole skin, never mind the walk! Now, since the secret of a successful reconnaissance lies in not being discovered, I suggest we stubble the small talk.”

  Since Carson was the one doing most of the talking, it was very clear for whom this warning was intended. Much as Pickett enjoyed the spectacle of Harry Carson being put in his place, he was too impatient to reach Julia to savor the moment as he otherwise might have done. He glanced at Jamie and gave him a grateful nod. This was why he had fetched his brother-in-law in the first place: to plan the rescue mission and see to its execution when he himself was too distraught to think clearly.

  Now that the moment was at hand, however, Pickett found that his mind had never been sharper. He stopped and pointed down at the ground, then looked up to make sure his companions saw and understood. The drive was badly overgrown, but the long grasses had been bent and broken as if crushed beneath carriage wheels, or horses’ hooves, or both. Someone had passed this way recently, and very likely more than once. Jamie and Carson both nodded. Thomas merely looked confused, but he had the wisdom not to ask for enlightenment.

  Pickett, taking pity on him, put his hand on his valet’s shoulder and leaned in close to his ear to whisper, “Someone’s been here. See how the grass is bent?”

  Thomas nodded in belated understanding, and the four resumed their trek. At last they rounded a curve and topped a hill, and beheld a house in the middle distance, a large, stately house of gray stone. As they drew nearer, keeping to the trees for cover, signs of neglect here, too, became clear. The roof was missing its shingles in places, and although the last rays of the sun were reflected in most of the windows, the absence of any reflection in others betrayed the fact that the glass panes had been broken out. A light burned in one of the windows on the ground floor, and another one on the floor above.

  Even as Pickett’s brain registered this fact, a female figure moved to the upper window and drew a curtain across it, cutting off all but the faintest sliver of light. Julia!

  He must have made some instinctive move in her
direction, for Jamie grasped his sleeve and mouthed a single word: Tomorrow.

  Pickett nodded, making note of that window’s position relative to the others. At least he knew where to look for her if—no, when they gained access to the house.

  “At least we know they don’t have her chained up in some attic or cellar,” Jamie leaned close to whisper. “That might be useful to know, if we should have to fire the house and smoke them out.”

  A knot formed in Pickett’s stomach at the idea of setting fire to the house with Julia inside. For all they knew, she might be locked inside that room, and Hetherington and company might decide to cut their losses, letting the fire destroy any evidence of their crimes. The end result—Julia’s death—would be the same. With any luck, they would be able to rescue her without resorting to such a tactic. Well, they would just have to, Pickett thought, setting his jaw. The alternative was unthinkable.

  After that, there was very little they could do until the house was dark, indicating that all the occupants were abed. Even after the last light was extinguished, Jamie made no move to emerge from the trees. They sat silently in the gathering darkness for perhaps half an hour (although it seemed to Pickett like they’d been waiting for most of the day), then Jamie opened the haversack he carried and removed two dark lanterns. Turning so that his body would prevent any light from being seen from the house, he lit the two lanterns and adjusted their shutters so that they emitted a narrow sliver of light just sufficient to allow the bearers to walk safely without running into a tree or falling over a cliff.

  Jamie handed one of the lanterns to Pickett and the other to Carson, then reached into the bag again and withdrew four pistols. These were no surprise to Pickett, as they had been discussed extensively before the men set out on their mission. Thomas’s pistol wasn’t loaded, for he had never been taught how to use a firearm, and Jamie intended to take no chances.

  “But they won’t know that,” he’d assured the valet. “Most men who find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun aren’t going to stop and ask questions.”

  The other three pistols were all primed and loaded, but Jamie’s instructions had been clear. “Don’t shoot unless it becomes absolutely necessary,” he’d told both Pickett and Carson. “Remember, letting off firearms will only serve to rouse the house, and we don’t yet know how many men are inside.”

  As he gave each man his weapon, Jamie fixed his comrades-in-arms with an intense look that served to remind them of his instructions without his having to say a word. Once they were all armed, he motioned for Carson and Thomas to circle the house clockwise, while he and Pickett took the other direction. Pickett received his orders with some misgivings. Wasn’t it supposed to be bad luck to circle a building counterclockwise? Widdershins, as it had been called in the days before clocks had been invented. Or did that only apply to circling a church, like Burd Ellen in the fairy tale? More to the point, why was his brain fixed on such insignificant details when Julia was only a few hundred feet away, and every step he took brought him nearer to her.

  Slowly, carefully, they approached the house, Pickett holding the shuttered lantern low so that it illuminated only the ground before their feet. The sky was fully dark by now, and the house a great black bulk rising sharply on their left. When they reached the place below the window where he’d seen Julia, Pickett held the light for just a moment on a small patch of pebbles, any one of which would have been the perfect size for lobbing at her window.

  “Tomorrow.”

  Jamie’s whisper was scarcely more than a breath at his ear. Pickett sighed, nodded, and moved on. No one stepped out of the shadows to challenge them, and he began to hope that perhaps there were not so many of them, after all. In addition to Hetherington himself, there would be at least two—the man who had seized Julia, and the driver of the vehicle that had spirited her and her abductor away—but perhaps few, if any, more. Certainly there was no evidence of a small army of Irishmen determined to pursue independence by any means at hand, including the abduction of an innocent woman. Then again, Hetherington’s unstable mental state made him as dangerously unpredictable as any number of men under his command.

  They had rounded the end of the house by this time, and a dark shape some distance away on the right indicated the presence of an outbuilding. Jamie nudged Pickett’s arm and pointed in that direction, a gesture which Pickett interpreted to mean they should investigate it. Fighting the irrational feeling that he was somehow abandoning Julia, he turned and positioned the lantern to light their way.

  The double doors were wide enough to drive a carriage through, suggesting that the building was—or had been at some time in the past—a carriage house or a stable, or perhaps both. And yet the odors usually associated with horses were absent: no smell of oats or hay, no stench of manure. If horses were still kept here, it wasn’t often, or for very long.

  Jamie reached for one of the doors to pull it open, but it wouldn’t yield. Pickett risked opening the lantern’s shutter a bit wider, and saw that, instead of the bar and staples one might expect to see on a farm building, this one had been fitted with the sort of lock usually found inside a house. Wordlessly, Pickett handed the lantern to Jamie, then fumbled in the inside pocket of his brown serge coat for the hairpin he’d kept there since his marriage in case of just such an exigency. Unlike Harry Carson, Jamie had prior knowledge of his brother-in-law’s unique talent, having once won a tidy sum by wagering on it even before he’d seen a demonstration. In view of that experience, he was not surprised when, seconds after Pickett dropped to one knee, the wide door swung open, groaning slightly on its hinges.

  Pistols at the ready, Pickett and Jamie slipped inside, opening the door only as far as was absolutely necessary lest the creaking of the hinges betray their presence. Once within, Jamie pulled the door closed behind them and Pickett opened the shutter and held the lantern high. As he’d suspected, there were no horses, no animals of any kind, and no carriages. In fact, the cavernous building appeared to be empty except for a collection of sacks, crates, and barrels.

  “What have we here?” Jamie asked softly. He engaged the safety catch of his pistol and shoved it into the waistband of his breeches, then withdrew a knife from his coat pocket and cut a slit in one of the sacks. Fine black powder spilled out in a steady stream.

  A knot began to form in the pit of Pickett’s belly as he watched the little pile forming on the ground at Jamie’s feet. “Is that—”

  “Unless I miss my guess—” Jamie shifted the sack to cease the flow, then knelt to scoop up a little of the spillage in his hand. He sniffed it, then let it fall back to the ground and dusted the remains from his hands. It left black smudges behind. “Gunpowder. It looks like your friend is planning quite a party.”

  “My God,” breathed Pickett.

  Julia was being held captive in what was essentially a powder magazine.

  Rescuing her had just become a lot more difficult.

  And a lot more dangerous.

  18

  In Which Julia Attempts an Escape

  “Whatever we do, we keep him—them—away from that stable,” Jamie said softly, peering over the tops of the cards in his hands to address the little group seated around the table in the taproom of Summerhill’s only public house.

  They had claimed the table nearest the fireplace, as the crackling of the fire in the grate—necessary for both light and heat so far north, even in mid-July—provided them with some cover, should any of their fellow guests have a penchant for eavesdropping. Even so, they spoke in hushed tones, raising their voices only to indicate reaction to the card game in progress.

  Granted, all this secrecy might be unnecessary; their reconnaissance had seemed to indicate that Hetherington had very few allies who might be amongst them at that very minute, fortifying themselves with Mr. Guinness’s finest. Still, it was quite possible that the locals would be quick to throw their support behind any plot claiming Irish independence as its goal, if some carel
ess word on their part should betray the fact that such a plot existed. Better, surely, to err on the side of caution and present themselves as nothing more than four visiting Englishmen enjoying a friendly game of whist.

  “One stray bullet could blow the building and anyone inside it to perdition,” Jamie continued, punctuating this statement by playing the king of hearts.

  Pickett groaned, a supposed reaction to his opponent’s move that was only partially feigned.

  Carson, having nothing more promising in his hand, tossed down a three and asked, “How are we to do that? Keep this fellow and his cohorts away from the stable, I mean?”

  “You and Thomas said there was a door on the end of the house opposite the stables,” Jamie reminded him, as Thomas discarded. “The three of us will take up a position some little distance from it and make enough noise to draw Hetherington out—not so much as to be obvious, mind you. Just three men who are trying to carry out a stealth attack and not making a very good show of it.”

  Carson frowned. “I should have thought that would have exactly the opposite effect, and make him escape through any of the other doors.”

  “There’s always the chance he’ll try to outflank us,” Jamie acknowledged. “But I think it’s unlikely.

  “Why?” Thomas asked, then hastily added, “Begging your pardon, sir.”

  “Because that’s a maneuver you use when a frontal assault would fail. You count on an element of surprise to make up for being outmanned, or outgunned. But Hetherington has, or thinks he has, an advantage that we can’t hope to match.”

  “Oh?” Carson asked. “And what’s that? What good will his arsenal do him if he has to go through us to reach it?”

  “A good point, Mr. Carson, but that’s not the advantage I was talking about.” Jamie cast a sympathetic glance at his brother-in-law. “He has another.”