There was a brief thought about that short man who had attacked me in Paris. Then it was gone as I thought of Brodie.
What would happen to him now? Was he even still alive?
I told him to trust me, and he had...The floor jolted and swayed beneath me as the train gradually picked up speed.
I tried to scream, choking on my tears, smothered by the heat inside the carpet.
After everything that had happened...
The air was knocked out of me as I was rolled over, the carpet coming loose about me. I was then rolled out into a disheveled pile at the floor of the lurching baggage car, the light from a nearby lantern almost painful.
The cloth was pushed down from my mouth. I cursed, but it was nothing more than a dry croak. My hair had come down and it was pushed back from my face. That dark gaze met mine.
“You need to take care, Herr Brodie” Karl warned. “She has a temper. She kicks like a mule, and I have never heard a woman curse like that.”
“Aye,” Brodie replied. “She does have a temper.”
There was a great deal I wanted to say. Several curses came to mind as he pulled me against him, a hand going back through my tangled hair.
“Next time, ye need to tell me yer plans. Ye verra near got us both killed.”
I was dirty from wherever that carpet had been before it was tossed in that wagon. My shirtwaist was torn from being hauled about by the butcher; my cheek throbbed. And the rope cut into my wrists.
“A hundred thousand pounds?” he then said, as he cut the rope with his knife. “Sir Avery? Something ye should have told me.”
“Not Sir Avery,” I finally managed to say as my voice returned. “I don’t trust him after…”
I was about to say when he refused to help Brodie at first in that last inquiry case, after Chief Inspector Abberline had him arrested on charges of murder and badly beaten.
He gently touched my bruised cheek. “If not Sir Avery, how did ye get the guarantee for that amount of money?”
I saw as the answer came to him, that dark gaze narrowing. He slowly shook his head.
“You know,” I told him. “Sheis quite fond of you, and there are the rumors…”
He shook his head. “Aye, that she is wealthier than the Queen. Do ye mean to tell me that these thieves now have her money?”
I managed a smile. “It is only important that they think they have the payment.”
After everything the past months, that previous case, his anger when I left for Africa, my certainty that we were too different, that he didn’t understand...
He did understand. And he had trusted me, although admittedly I should have told him about the amount I was going to bid to win that auction.
And more if necessary. It was the only way I saw of obtaining those documents.
“It worked,” I said as he bent to cut the rope around my ankles.
“Aye, it worked.”
“My bag?” Had it been lost when I was attacked by that ‘mad butcher’?
“It is here, miss,” Karl assured me. “It is good that I didn’t have to make a choice to save you or the bag that is so important.”
That could only have been something Brodie told him.
We spent the rest of the night in the baggage car as the train continued on to Paris.
There, we caught a connecting train to Calais where I made use of the accommodation facilities as best could be done on a rolling, rocking train. From there we caught the ferry across the channel, and a train from Dover back to London.
