Home. A rented hovel—but the place where the people he trusted resided. Amazing to have people he trusted. After a lifetime of needing no one, the presence of his hired family provided reassurance, as physicians or soldiers could not.
He might need physicians and soldiers later, if he didn’t gather his wits and settle the roiling emotions promising imminent explosion.
Complete strangers called reassuringly or shouted huzzah from the lane’s edges as he lurched back to the house with his sodden boots squelching water. Apparently soldiers approved of the idiocy of swimming upstream to trounce a scoundrel. Grey had never particularly needed approval. He’d given that up as a child everyone called cursed. So this was one more new experience warming him sufficiently to keep his feet moving in the right direction.
Well, that, and Eleanor at his side, touching his shoulder, catching his hand, keeping him straight so Andrew didn’t bear his full weight.
Unfortunately, upon finally entering home sweet home, they discovered the leather couch he’d been anticipating had been overturned. The bottom had been ripped open, leaving its guts hanging out and scattered about the worn floor. A pair of strangers flipped the heavy furniture upright. The leather cushions were somewhat intact. Grey gingerly lowered himself, testing the stability under his weight. Thankfully, the solid frame held.
Eleanor briefly vanished while Andrew helped him off with his sodden coat and boots. Grey accepted a blanket rather than force himself up the stairs to change. Obviously, more had happened than his brief sojourn in the water.
He waited until Ellie returned with a huge mug of hot tea laced with brandy before he sought answers. Even on one of the worst nights of his life, he felt pampered. Sipping the blessed heat, he wanted to kiss her for her thoughtfulness but reckoned he’d only embarrass her. He’d give that urge some thought another time.
To Grey’s astonishment, Blackie Bradford arrived hauling the scoundrel Percival. He’d actually caught the scheming bastard! Grey wanted to take the breadth of a sword to the wretch’s head and heave him into the river, but Bradford handed the wretch over to one of the guards. The soldier yanked a rope from his belt and tied up the protesting prisoner.
Besides, his sword was now at the bottom of the river. Grey leaned into the cushions, sipped his tea, and tried to stay upright.
“They’re bringing in Tiny and Mort from the privy,” Andrew reported, producing a basin of hot water for Grey to soak his feet in.
He ought to be embarrassed by the familiarity in front of Ellie, who was bringing out mugs for everyone. But somehow, she had become a part of him as much as his right arm. Odd. He’d ponder that later as well. Right now, as warmth seeped into him, he needed answers. Like, what had they done with his miserable heir? But as long as Percy was under guard and looking deuced uncomfortable trussed like a pig. . .
Grey lifted an inquiring eyebrow at Blackford, since he didn’t know any of these others hovering about.
“Relations,” the burly Australian explained gruffly, nodding at both Percival and the pair they were hauling in from the privy.
The man was from Australia and related to half the shire?
“Ain’t no family to me,” the lean lad called Tiny spat. “Else you’d be out helpin’ instead of hurtin’! It’s our coins and land they’ve taken! You ain’t been here long enough to know how the rich steal and lie and cheat us.”
“This place ain’t never been yor’n,” Bradford growled back.
“We had our own place! They took it too!” the lad shouted, until the soldier shook him into silence.
Settling beside him with her own cup of tea, Ellie murmured, “The skinny one is Tiny, the one who fixed your carriage wheel. And Mort does look a bit like Mr. Bradford, doesn’t he?”
If Mort was the other of the pair the soldiers had been holding in the privy, he did bear some resemblance to their hirsute neighbor, just a little more polished. Grey remembered him from Thea’s gallery and winced at the headache forming behind his eyes.
Bradford turned his back on his cousin’s outburst to offer explanation. “Dad said I had second cousins, his uncle’s family. Said they had a farm and big herd and I could find work there.”
“Yeah, and the bank got it all!” the noisy one shouted.
Grey did mental calculations and gathered it had been over thirty years since Black Dickie’s father had been transported. Bradford must have been a valued prisoner for him to have found a woman and created a family in the penal colonies.
Tall and bulky, Mort merely looked drunk. If slender, blond Tiny was his brother, they bore no resemblance to each other.
Percival, apparently not as cup-shot, futilely struggled against his ropes, cursing and protesting. The guard in a tattered infantry coat cuffed his shoulder to shut him up.
Grey had thought he knew the hack’s origins. Born into aristocracy, Percy should have been expected to act as a gentleman. Grey should have realized the slime favored the long line of river thieves he’d crawled from. No amount of polish concealed a lack of morals.
Rafe finally arrived, bringing with him Captain Huntley, the cook, and Ellie’s maid.
Miss Fields gasped at the sight of the prisoners. “Misters Bradford!”
“The family you once worked for?” Eleanor asked, apparently remembering everything she’d ever been told about anyone in the village.
Their cook nodded, wide-eyed, then grasping the seriousness of the situation, she fled to the kitchen without another word.
Andrew hastened to haul in a dining room chair so the magistrate could rest his leg. Acting as hostess, Eleanor leaped up to offer brandy. Rafe refused, as usual. The long-suffering captain accepted. He’d probably been sitting at the manor table with friends and family and fine wine at this hour.
