I shouted and ran toward them as the man lugged the falling Hawes across the threshold.
I felt a draft behind me, then something heavy landed on my neck. I fell to my knees, hard stones scraping them. Strong hands grabbed the back of my coat and hauled me unceremoniously into an inky dark space, where I knew nothing more.
I dragged myself awake, at first too groggy to comprehend where I lay. It was dark, which meant it was night, but what had awakened me?
The hard surface beneath me was not my bed. For a fleeting moment, I believed myself in a tent in Spain, taking a few last moments of sleep before I’d rise and prepare my men for the next battle.
Was I truly back on campaign, and my life since leaving the army a hazy dream? A profound sense of loss wrenched me. Was marrying Donata, reuniting with my daughter, starting a second family, and finding friends and a purpose all a lie?
I vowed I heard the bluff tones of Colonel Brandon, my erstwhile mentor, outside my tent, but as consciousness eased back to me, I realized the voice belonged to another man entirely.
“Will ’e live?”
I peeled open my eyes, expecting to find menacing ruffians standing over me, but no one lurked in my dark corner. I then realized the speaker wasn’t talking about me.
I pushed myself up from a stone floor, climbing sickeningly to my knees. I knelt there, holding myself steady on a damp wall beside me, simply breathing and trying not to collapse.
After a while, I forced one foot underneath me and used the wall to pull myself up. I rested again, hugging the wall, waiting for my dizziness to abate.
When I could finally stand without support, I left my sanctuary and staggered toward a circle of light. I no longer had my walking stick. Either I’d dropped it outside, or my captors had taken it from me.
The light proved to emanate from a single candle held aloft by a beefy man. Here were the ruffians, two of them, hovering over a table where Hawes lay face down. Hawes was breathing, albeit raggedly.
“Why’d ye stick him?” the speaker I’d heard before was saying to the man with the candle.
“He was going to bring the law down on us, weren’t he?” his compatriot replied, somewhat fretfully.
They both swung around as I scraped my way forward, unable to be silent limping across this floor.
“Where the hell am I?” I demanded. “If you thought I was the law chasing Hawes, you could not be more wrong.”
“Who are you then?” the man with the candle asked in puzzlement.
I halted a little way from them, mindful of how handy the candle-wielding gent had been with his blade. “A fine way to greet a guest. I am Captain Lacey. This is Mr. Hawes, the manager of the Arlington.” I pointed at him. “Where are we? Under one of the lavish palaces of St. James’s?”
The first man ignored my questions. “If you’re a military bloke, you’ll know about wounds.” He jerked his chin at Hawes. “Patch this one up. We don’t need ’im dying.”
I hobbled toward them, keeping a wary eye out for weapons. “I’m hardly a surgeon. Why do you care if he lives?”
“None of your affair,” the first man said. “Help ’im.”
They’d removed Hawes’s coat and waistcoat, revealing a lawn shirt soaked with blood. “You need to cut that away,” I commanded.
The man in charge produced a knife that glinted in the candlelight. I half-expected him to turn it on me, but he lowered the blade and competently slit Hawes’s shirt lengthwise down the middle.
“Don’t toss it aside,” I said as he slid the garment from under Hawes. “Tear the clean parts into strips. His only hope is a good bandaging.” Without the tools to sew him up, or the knowledge of exactly how to do so, this was the best I could devise.
Hawes’s wound lay in his lower back. It was not deep, but it didn’t have to be. If the blade had penetrated one of his organs, he’d perish, and there was nothing we could do about it.
If he were lucky, and the knife had only torn flesh and muscle, he would eventually heal, if the wound didn’t take sick. He’d be in agony for a while but live.
I used one of the cloths the man had ripped from the shirt to wipe the blood, now drying, from the wound. I folded the cloth into a pad and then bound it tightly to the gash with the other strips.
The man helped me, lifting Hawes’s body so I could pass the strips beneath him. The man with the candle held the light steadily and competently. They must have performed such tasks before.
Hawes woke during the procedure and began to wail in pain. By the time we were finished, he’d subsided into an exhausted whimper.
“My walking stick,” I said to the lead man. He resembled Mr. Stout, with a hard face, thick body, and wiry hair, though I doubted they were related. Of a similar type, I’d say, being raised to a similar life. “Where is it?”
