Bess’s heart was galloping faster than the horses. Lucy had been sitting on top of the carriage, on one of the outside seats, she recalled. “Was anyone else hurt? Are the passengers still here?”
God, was Lucy just inside the pub? Bess was torn between the need to see for herself, and the need to hear the rest of this story at once.
“Nay, nay, my lady.” Mr. Peabody leaned on the doorjamb, blocking the way into the Pelican, and visibly settled into having a good chin-wag while standing on the back doorstep. “Once the carriage accident was discovered, all the passengers were conveyed here to my humble establishment. My wife personally checked over the passengers of the female persuasion and not a scratch on ’em, bless their souls, though it’s an experience they shan’t forget in a hurry, I’ll warrant you. For the accident…was only the beginning.”
Mr. Peabody pulled a pipe from his waistcoat pocket and tapped it thoughtfully against the doorjamb, clearly enjoying the rapt attention of his audience. Bess congratulated herself on not leaping forward to strangle him.
“Please, continue,” she begged through a clenched jaw.
“Well, I’ve had the story now from several of the passengers, as well as Mr. Danforth, the guard, and they all agree that what happened next as they all sorted themselves out from the luggage falling about and their limbs, begging your pardons, getting jumbled and tumbled about in the near-overturning of the carriage, was that they heard a horse walking up the road behind them, and a voice. Singing.”
“The Gentle Rogue,” Nathaniel said grimly.
Lucy’s favorite fairy-tale hero, come to life.
“So the highwayman happened upon the carriage accident, where the guard had been wounded,” Bess summarized impatiently. “Then what?”
“He robbed them, didn’t he?” Mr. Peabody said, clearly a bit disgruntled at having his narrative hurried along. “Tied up the guard and took every ring, necklace, hair comb, wallet, and purse from the passengers and left—but not before binding up the guard’s shoulder in that sling you see there before you, that Mr. Danforth is still wearing! A bandage from the Gentle Rogue himself!”
As bidden, Nathaniel and Bess both turned to look at Mr. Danforth in his Royal Mail livery and white shoulder sling. Someone had brought him out a pint of ale, and he was gesturing with it as he spoke to the assembled group of potboys, serving maids, and locals, brown liquid sloshing over the sides of the glass.
“Where are the rest of the passengers now?” Nathaniel asked.
“Most are inside, taking their ease and enjoying Mrs. Peabody’s stew. A few left straight away, of course, the ones who could afford to hire one of my chaises.”
“A tall girl,” Bess said again, more urgently. “Slim and brunette, with very blue eyes. Quite pretty, you would remember her. Was she with them? Did she leave again?”
Genuinely aggrieved, Mr. Peabody cried, “Now, who’s been a-telling the story before me? Did you meet someone on the road who’d already heard it?”
“Heard what?” Bess wanted to pull out her hair.
“Why, the exciting conclusion of the tale. There was a tall young lady with the mail coach, pretty as a flower, they said, and with a lot of spirit.”
“She’s here,” Bess breathed, turning for the door of the pub at once, desperate to find Lucy and put her arms around the girl, and perhaps shake her until her teeth rattled.
“No, no, she isn’t inside.” Mr. Peabody shook his head.
“So she hired one of your chaises to continue her journey,” Nathaniel concluded. “Tell us where she was headed.”
“I’m afeared you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, begging your pardon, Your Grace. The girl was with the coach, but she never was here at the Pelican. You see, when the Gentle Rogue was done with his robbing and swung back up on his big black stallion to leave…the blue-eyed beauty went with him.”
There was a whistling in Bess’s ears, like standing in a cave, looking into the inky black nothingness and hearing the wind blowing out from a crack in the stone.
“And no one stopped him,” Nathaniel was saying when Bess could hear again. “Not one person lifted a finger to keep this criminal from abducting a young woman?”
“He had a gun,” Mr. Peabody pointed out, alarm widening his eyes at the harsh accusation in Nathaniel’s tone.
“What has been done to recover them?” he demanded.
“N-nothing! We didn’t think—because the way Mr. Danforth tells it, why?—”
He stopped, looking back and forth between them, uncertain in the face of Bess’s horrified shock Nathaniel’s cold, towering fury.
Bess couldn’t ask. Her throat was too dry to allow for speech. Nathaniel said it for her, in a voice silky with rage. “What does Mr. Danforth say?”
“Why,” Mr. Peabody faltered, “Only that the highwayman seemed to recognize the lass, like, or at any rate he spoke to her as if he knew her. And when he left…she went with him willingly. It weren’t no abduction.”
From bad to worse. Bess wavered. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up anymore, they wobbled like jelly in a trifle. Nathaniel clamped an arm around her back and kept her upright, but he never took his attention off Mr. Peabody.
