“If you knew it, you should have saved your breath, Captain.” To prove that she wasn’t a liability, Georgie sped up and knotted the sides of her skirts as she did so to stop them dragging, cursing herself for not wearing breeches beneath them as her friend Lottie always did. “Being female or compact will not slow me down, I promise.”
“Though Miss Rowe may be but little, she is fierce,” muttered the captain, misquoting Shakespeare for once rather than another pompous military man.
“She is indeed.” He clearly meant it sarcastically, but Georgie knew it was true. She might have lost Felix, but she was going to find him—or die trying. “And just like the woman the Bard described, when I am angry, I am both keen and shrewd—and Iamangry.”
“So am I.” He allowed her to have the lead for all of two minutes before he streaked past. “I am going to strangle bloody Felix if we find him alive.” She could hear the fear in his tone, theifin that sentence shrieking volumes.
“You can choke the last breath from his neck after I’ve given it a good wringing first—whenwe find him, Captain. It was me he disobeyed, after all, so surely I have earned that pleasure first?”
“How about we toss a coin for the honor if we find the little rascal?”
“Whenwe find him, Captain.”
He managed a half smile as he nodded. “Whenwe find him.”
For the next fifteen minutes, neither spoke other than to call Felix’s name into the void. Neither did either of them mention what was also becoming obvious—that as the riverbank got steeper, the rushing water in the gully beneath sounded faster and significantly angrier than it had before.
Distracted by intrusive thoughts of doom while castigating herself for not predicting Felix’s rebellion, Georgie slipped on a slimy piece of exposed rock beneath her boot. Before she hit the hard, rocky ground and did herself serious mischief, she flung herself into the cradle of a crooked tree trunk, but still managed to wind herself in the process.
Rather than alert the captain that she was down and incur yet another lecture about this being no place for a compact woman, she took a moment to recover while he continued to shout for his nephew ahead.
“FELIX!” The rushing water swallowed much of his effort. “FELIX, WHERE ARE YOU!”
In case he turned to see her collapsed in a heap, Georgie joined in, hoping he would assume that she had fallen behind again on purpose. “FELIX!” She cupped her hands around her mouth to amplify her shouts. “NORBERT!”
Something wafted on the midnight breeze. The cry of an owl? A fox?
She strained her ears, doing her best to block out the camouflaging noises from the water and the captain’s shouts farther ahead, and heard the noise again.
Could it be a human’s cry?
A child’s?
She strained some more.
No! It was a howl! It was faint and distant, but unless a pack of wolves had survived their extinction in England and had lived secretly and undisturbed for hundreds of years, then it had to be Norbert.
“Norbert!” She hauled herself out of the tangled arms of the dead tree to scan the area, and when the dog answered with another bloodcurdling howl of distress, she knew she could not possibly be mistaken. “Captain! Come back!”
Captain Kincaid burst out of the shadows ahead, barely illuminated by his lamplight in the dregs of the moonlight, and she beckoned him closer. “Listen!”
Georgie cupped one hand around her ear to show him which direction the faint howling was coming from, and his expression changed when he eventually heard it too.
He ran toward the sound like a man possessed, grabbing her hand as he rushed past, and together they dashed as close to the edge of the slippery, steep riverbank as they dared.
While they both bellowed down it, the light from the lanterns caught two pinpricks of ghostly green which seemed to flicker behind the shadowy leaves of a bush. They danced closer and closer and suddenly the entire bush collapsed beneath the weight of Norbert’s huge paws as he galloped toward them, barking.
The dog stopped directly below them, dancing on the spot, barking for all he was worth as his shaggy head stared downriver, as if begging them to clamber down the bank and follow him.
The captain wasted no time complying, but as he skidded downward on the wet rocks, he held up his hand to stop her following. “Wait there!”
“Oh, for goodness—” Then he held up both palms in surrender.
“I am not suggesting that you cannot climb—but this bank is too steep and too wet and if Felix is hurt I am going to need your help to get him back up it!” Then he sped off after the dog until his retreating lantern was sucked into blackness.
In two minds as to whether she should do as instructed or rebel, Georgie began to pace, stopping abruptly when she heard Simpkins’s party calling from up ahead.
“OVER HERE!” She waved her arms in the air to attract their attention. “HELP!”
