‘Get out.’ She said this quietly, imbuing as much menace as she could in the command.
‘You going to make me? The old man you are with don’t look like he could hurt a fly.’
‘I said get out.’
When he did not leave she simply stepped forward and laid her hand upon the side of his throat, pressing hard. He went down quite gracefully, falling through the door with a quiet ease, but then her own problems truly started.
She felt the blow to the back of her head almost with a calmness, a fist she supposed or something heavier, the dizzy unbalance catching her off guard. Two others had her now and they were dragging her into the bush behind the outhouse, one ripping off her jacket, the buttons popping with such force that everything below was exposed.
She tried to get her fingers around the second man’s throat, but he swatted her off and punched her again, this time in the side of the head.
With the last bit of her energy she screamed, a high-pitched cry for help that gave away any last vestiges of her supposed masculine identity. The other man beside her had his hands around her left breast and was scrabbling for more. She bit at his arm with all the force she could muster.
Then Summer was there and he appeared like she had never seen him before. Here was the man legend told of, the soldier and the hero, his face unreadable and indifferent, his eyes almost black with fury.
‘Let the girl go.’ He stepped in front of her and the lad on her right laughed in his face.
‘Who’s going to make us do that?’ he spat out, dirty fingers squeezing the outline of one breast.
‘I am.’ Raising his hand, Summer smashed the fellow in the face, grabbing the other one as he went for a knife. A quick kick to the groin had the miscreant kneeling, a discarded piece of wood lying on the ground doing the rest. Even in Paris Celeste had never seen anyone use such damaging force and so elegantly. She was astonished at the pure violence meted out with such careful precision. No wonder he did not use a knife or a gun, his hands were twice as effective as any conventional weapon. She simply stared at him open-mouthed, seeing in his demeanour a thousand hours of practice. Unstoppable and unmatched. A savage and fierce peril.
All the rumpus had others streaming in and among them were soldiers in uniform.
Within a second, he had assessed the capability of the three men to relate a coherent story and found them wanting. Grabbing her by the arm, he led her away through a gate at the far end of the garden before circling around to reclaim their one remaining horse. A moment later, she was on the animal in front of him and they were galloping down the road.
‘Will anyone follow us?’
‘If they do, we will be ready for them. Are you hurt?’
‘I feel strange.’ The world was blurring in and out of focus, a ringing sound in her ears that made it hard to hear. It was shock probably, she thought, for the shivers were already coming, her hands barely able to hold on to the edge of the saddle. ‘They hit me at the back of the head.’
‘I know. It’s bleeding.’
‘Badly?’
‘Scalp injuries always do. If it was bad, you’d be unconscious.’
He stopped her hand as it rose to check out the damage by simply holding on to her fingers and bringing them down inside his own on the reins.
‘I think I am going to be sick.’
He’d left the road now to skirt around a thick stand of trees, tipping his head to listen against the wind.
‘Someone is coming and coming fast.’
After he’d helped her down she threw up in some bushes on the side of the pathway, clammy sweat beading on her top lip as she closed her eyes to try to regain the centre of things.
The next moment, the hooves of galloping horses were right upon them and then past, three of them by her count. Soldiers, she imagined, her identity and his discovered in the most unlikely of circumstances, for no one watching Summerley Shayborne dealing with those men today could have failed to understand that he was not the old gentleman he seemed.
Her head was becoming clearer, though, as the nausea dissipated and, if she was still shaking badly, she at least thought she might well live.
Summer had discarded his wig, the hairpiece lying strangely in the hook of a shrub’s branch. He’d also torn the sleeves off his jacket so that it was a working man’s jerkin he now wore.
‘We probably have fifteen to twenty minutes until they turn around. There is a track through the fields just there. We will use that. Get on the horse, I will walk behind you.’
‘We can’t both ride?’
‘No. There will be observers, I should imagine, even in this unpeopled part of the world. If we gallop through together, they will see us clearly. This way we can find other byways, less used and more out of the way.“From each point one finds oneself there are a thousand other ways to travel.”My father used to say that all the time and he was right. Are you well enough to stay in the saddle?’
