He grunted unhappily, eyeing her, before finally nodding his head. “Very well,” he said. “But I will take you to the gate and watch you on the road all the way back into town.”
He was already starting to direct her toward the door. “You can see that far?”
“I have the eyes of a hawk.”
“At night?”
“At night,” he said. Then he came to a halt and quickly went to collect the taper on the mantel. He handed it to her. “Take this and I will be able to see that point of light as you walk.”
“What if it goes out?”
“Then I will come for you, so you’d better hope it does not go out.”
She waggled her eyebrows, unsure if she could keep a flame from blowing out, but she was willing to give it a try. The road from Blackchurch into the village was straight and the village could be easily seen from the gatehouse of the guild. She didn’t need the man running after her down that road because whatever the gatehouse could see, the village could mostly see also. And that would include her grandfather if he were out looking for her.
It was going to be a dicey situation.
True to his word, Creston escorted her to the gatehouse and then went to the wall to watch her walk all the way back down the road and into the village. As he would tell her later, he was reasonably certain she would be safe because outlaws had all but been purged from the forests around Blackchurch. St. Denis didn’t want them around, so the trainers and their recruits would happily go out on a regular basis and ride through the groves, hunting down any outlaws that might be lingering. Almost every brigand in Devon and Cornwall knew that after all of these years, so their woods were some of the safest around. Therefore, Ophelia made it back to The Black Cock, snuck in through the rear door used to access the alleyway and the livery behind, and climbed back into her bed without her mother ever knowing she’d been gone.
Unable to sleep, Creston remained on the wall for the rest of the night, his gaze on the sleeping village in the distance and a certain young woman with beguiling hazel eyes.
And he wasn’t the least bit sorry about it.
CHAPTER NINE
This is goingto work out better than I hoped.
Oscar was, if nothing else, a bright man.
As leader of the Septum Port Alliance, he’d learned to deal with every kind of man—the plotters, the brutes, the liars, and everything in between. Men who dropped their anchor in his inlet or on his beaches always had to deal with him directly. They had to pay a toll or, sometimes, they would barter with goods. Oscar had accumulated so much merchandise over the years that he actually had a merchant stall in town where he sold it. The business was quite lucrative. He was a man who was all about opportunity.
And this was a big one.
It had all started last year.
Given that he had a port on the south side of England, and a very busy one, he had anywhere from ten to twenty ships a day coming in or going out. He had an entire group of men who managed the ships for him, and that included the safety of the port itself. Although there was a small inlet, it was only big enough for five ships, depending on the size of them, which meant any other ships that entered his area had to drop anchoron the beach, and that could leave them vulnerable to the many pirate groups that marauded in the area.
One of those groups was Triton’s Hellions.
Oscar had had a few run-ins with Abelard de Bottreaux, the commander of that particular pirate faction. Triton’s Hellions mostly stayed in Bristol Bay, but they also roamed the Irish Sea. Even though they tended to stay to the north, there had been occasions when they came south, including last year.
That had been a particularly disruptive visit.
They’d closed in on the beaches of Sidmouth and immediately cornered four cogs that had been clustered on the west side of Sidmouth’s beach. Three of those ships had come from Malta and points east, while the fourth ship had come from somewhere along the African coast. Fortunately, they had managed to offload most of the goods before the pirates came in and ordered their vessels, but when they refused to cooperate with Abelard and his men, Abelard ordered the ships torched.
All four vessels had gone up in flames, and due to the wind blowing from the south, embers had been transported upon the breeze like flotsam upon the ocean, to the homes and businesses along the beach. Most of the roofs were sod, but some were thatched, and those roofs caught fire. A large portion of those who lived that close to the water ended up homeless because of the fire that spread very quickly.
Oscar had been helpless to watch a chunk of his town burn even as he sent his army down to fight the fire. Axen Castle, his hereditary homestead, sat back on a hill overlooking both the lands to the north and the sea to the south, a position of maximum strategy, and given the castle was built of stone, there was very little chance of it burning. It did, however, have flammable things in the bailey, including the stables, so the roof of the stable was wetted down and the hay, which was sitting outside because of the warm and dry weather as of late, had beenmoved into the armories and any other outbuilding that didn’t have a flammable roof.
But that seemed to be the least of his troubles.
As the fire was going on, Abelard and his Hellions took that as an invitation to raid the village. They used the chaos of the fire to their advantage and proceeded to confiscate valuables or anything else they wanted as the villagers fled in terror. How Abelard managed to keep his three vessels away from the fire that was burning brightly was anybody’s guess, but he’d managed to do so. He stole horses and coin and many other things, taking his booty into his vessels and then setting sail, leaving devastation in his wake. It wasn’t until three days later when the fire was completely out and people were returning to what was left of their homes that stories of the pirates’ thievery began to trickle back to Oscar.
In the end, Triton’s Hellions had greatly damaged Sidmouth and her occupants.
And that had given Oscar an idea.
With Sidmouth badly damaged, Oscar was concerned with the perception of the other members of the Septum Port Alliance. It made him look like a weakling, and, as the leader of their alliance, that did not sit well with him. He’d been dealing with the fallout of that horrific fire when he received word that his granddaughter was to be married, something that enraged him because he’d had no part in her betrothal. Not that he paid a lot of attention to her or his daughter, but as the head of the family, he felt strongly that he should have been the one to find Ophelia a husband. She was, after all, his heiress. Thankfully, her foolish betrothed had hightailed it off to the priesthood, where he could live a pious and celibate life, which gave Oscar the opportunity to find his granddaughter a husband who would benefit him.
