“I can help,” Alex told them. “What sort of diversion is needed?”
Brodie exchanged a look with his friend.
“Come along, lad,” Munro told Alex. “I’ll show ye how it’s done.”
There was just a thin spiral of smoke from a pallet of cotton bales that had just been lowered onto the dock. As the wind came up off the water, smoke burst into flames amid shouts that suddenly went up among the workers off-loading the cargo. Smoke churned into a grey cloud and Brodie ran up the gangway, the hound right behind him.
Mikaela
There was something to be said for being dropped into a dank hole, the smell brackish, with water up over my ankles. Thatsomethingwould have rivaled the crudest seaman if there had been anyone else about. There wasn’t.
I assumed that as I came up through the wave of throbbing pain in the back of my head, my mouth stuffed with a rag, my hands bound behind me.
I forced myself to think, ignoring the pain as I fought to stand, slipped into that brackish brine without the use of my hands to brace myself, then managed to push myself back into the corner of the angled wall at my back and an adjacent wall.
Brackish water, the smell of brine, oil, and the slow roll under my feet, and I realized where I had been taken. I was in the hold of a ship!
Everything else slowly slipped into place.
...That conversation with Adelaide Matthews the previous day; the abuse over the years; her husband’s rage over Stephen Matthews’ affair with Ellie Sutton and the child she was going to have.
...That last night at the club, a stocky man with a bowler hat seen leaving the club shortly after Stephen Matthews was found murdered, a man Ellie Sutton had seen that night.
...A man with that same description terrorizing her all these years later, and seen near the townhouse in Mayfair.
...My meeting with Sir Edward, the smile that had instantly changed to anger with my questions; the sudden movement of a stocky man behind me.
...Two people were now dead. Two murders ten years apart, linked by the events of that night.
And now?
I could only guess what my fate was to be. I had interfered, no doubt threatened Sir Edward with my questions. As for the man I had glimpsed just before I was struck? Would he return? Or would I simply be left in the hold of the ship, left to die as the ship left London for some foreign port hundreds of miles away?
Not precisely another adventure I would have liked to take.
My hands were bound and my throat was dry from the gag across my mouth. I couldn’t see anything other than a thin sliver of light overhead which had to be the hatch. I couldn’t even prevent myself tumbling into the water as the ship rose then slowly fell with the tide.
I heard shouts, the sound of someone running across the deck overhead, and what sounded like the bark of a dog, a familiar baying sound.
It came again, and I recognized that deep half bark, part howl of a hunting hound.
I tried to scream and choked on the gag. All I heard in my dark prison that was like a tomb, was that distinctive barking sound. That had to mean that someone was with him.
Desperate to catch the attention of whoever was up there with Rupert, I braced myself against that sloped wall of the hold and stomped my feet against the adjacent wall with my feet.
I lost my footing, slipped into the water once more, then pushed myself back up that sloped wall of the hold and once more stomped my boot against that wood wall.
I was exhausted, could hardly breathe for the gag in my mouth, and heard the sound of those on the deck overhead fading as they moved past.
I’m here!I wanted to shout.Come back!
Then the sound of bootsteps returned, louder this time, and more of them, along with the sound of the hound baying wildly.
That sliver of light at the edge of the hatch suddenly widened, then opened, light from the sky overhead glaring down into the hatch, painful on my eyes, as a ladder was lowered and someone slowly made their way down into the hold.
I held back. If it was Matthews or the man who had come up on me in his office...
The man on the ladder dropped into the water in the hold and cursed—first in English then in that broad Scots Gaelic.
