Eames pulled her up and out of the chair.
“I’ll take you someplace safe, my dear,” he said reassuringly, although he was thinking of where might be best to dump her to avoid attracting police attention himself.Somewhere safer than this, hopefully, but his first concern was to get away.
A few of the sailors were giving him hard glances now, elbowing each other and speaking in their confounded babble.
He shuffled them both to the door.She wasn’t the deadweight he had feared, and moved her feet quite helpfully.
They were half out the door when one of the sailors clapped him on the shoulder.
“See ‘ere,” the man said in startling cockney.“What’s going on?Do you know this bloke, miss?”
“Miss Fairweather!”a woman’s voice called sharply from behind them.
This adventure was souring quickly.
“Oh, do call the policeman!”the girl whimpered at him, pawing his arm.
At this point, Eames heartily wished he had left the English girl to her fate.It was entirely her fault for risking her freedom and virtue in this reckless way.
“Police!”he shouted, and dropped her on the threshold to make a run for it.
Only to stagger and fall flat on his face, banging his nose on the pavement.
There was a thumpety-thump of boots around him as the coolies spilled out from the restaurant and formed a circle around him.He groaned and clutched at his knee—something had made it seize up.Was his old injury coming back to plague him?But no—his hand found the curve of an umbrella handle.He twisted himself round.His eyes tracked up the umbrella to the face of the rosy English girl.
She flipped the umbrella round so that its glinting point pointed at his throat.
The girl used your chivalrous instincts against you.But you’ll be all the more on your guard next time, won’t you?
But Eames hadn’t been on his guard.And now he was in a dreadful spot.
“Harold Eames!”she shouted.“This is a citizen’s arrest.You are wanted in Yorkshire for trespassing, assault, damage to a dragon, attempted theft of an ancient relic, and…being a general nuisance!”
A policeman’s whistle caught everyone’s attention.Through the sailors’ legs, Eames saw two bobbies coming at a fast clip down the alleyway.
This was his last and only chance.
Eames clutched his midsection as if he’d been kicked.“They attacked me!”he wailed.
Confusion reigned.Several of the sailors slipped away, others shouted at them in protest.A brotherly scuffle broke out between two of them.
Meanwhile, the English girl was shrieking and pointing at Eames, but there were so many people all knotted together that it wasn’t clear who had attracted her ire.
It was now or never.Eames scuttled across the alley and into the darkest, narrowest passage that presented itself to him.
Chapter forty-one
Ormdale
“Goteverythingyouneed?”Una asked, trying to keep her voice light.
Violet had set up her own little camp for the night in the Drake-Forresters’ paddock.It took all Una’s strength of will not to grab her sister and rush them both indoors.Everything she had learned from her governess about evening damps and miasmas sang in her head like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
But Violet, gloriously indifferent as always to cautionary tales, had determined it would be a full moon tonight, and that this would be the perfect time for kindling to flame whatever embers might remain of the bond between Violet and Elfed.
“Yes, I’ve got everything,” Violet said happily, swathed in the old great coat that Gwendolyn used to wear.
Una vividly remembered Gwendolyn running down wyverns at night to stop them picking off the spring lambs in the days before the menagerie was built.Their oldest sister had gone about any and all dragon business quite grim-jawed and determined, but Violet’s eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed.
