Page 8 of The Rogue and the Viscountess

“And you’ve dealings with the Duke of Beaufort, now?”

“Only as he commands the Monmouthshire Militia and was there to help me and the new knight rout the Black Hound. Y’ever seen a ducal seal? Got it right here on m’pardon.” Morys popped a button and pulled back his coat to show a folded parchment with a red wax seal dangling from it. “Biggest, boldest signature you ever saw. Grand as the King’s.”

“Hell’s teeth, you’ll be beaten and robbed for that seal do you go flashing it about,” Pete said. “Someone’ll make a counterfeit, and you’ll be to blame.”

“Where else’m I to hide it?” Morys wanted to know. “Took meself out of Newport to let the dust settle and don’t have a lot of baggage in m’train. Didn’t care to be around for the assizes when they bring up the Black Hound.”

“Two things.” Pete drew a long pull from his own tankard. The ale was fine, flavored with honey and hay. “The Black Hound floated away in his own ship’s yawl after we blew up his brig. You and I both saw it.”

“Cut off one Hound’s head, another takes its place.” Morys wiped foam from his mouth. “A bleedin’ Cerebus, that’un. Another gent comes along claiming to take over Darch’s business running goods along Newport, and calls hisself the Black Hound to get the old Hound’s men to him. Then, hear you this. Kidnaps his own sister to marry her off to the new knight’s brother, thinks there’s a fortune there.”

“There’s a sure place in hell for men who harass a woman,” Pete said, excusing himself for the many times he’d frightened a mother, a wife, a sister, or a sweetheart by shaking down a mark.

“Aye, that,” Morys said. “But then the new knight comes along and blows a hole in that ship, and the lady is rescued and your Morys is pardoned for his place in it all, but the knight’s brother goes off to style himself a new Hound all over, and—”

“Second,” Pete interrupted. “You keep saying the new knight. Who’s that?”

“Son to Sir Lambert of the Greenfield Vaughns,” Morys explained, licking the foam off his lips. “Hero of Acre, they call him. Kept the French general from setting himself up as Emperor of the Orient. Gunner with the Royal Artillery, was he, and got his knight’s badge for it. Friend to the lord as we made our peace with, through his lady.”

“The Viscount Penrydd,” Pete said in a low voice. Warmth flashed through his arms again, the sweet heavy warmth of a woman, as he recalled his own part in abetting his lordship. He’d once carried a swooning viscountess. That might be the memory he called up on his deathbed, a bit of sweetness to bear with him to the realms beyond.

“Third thing,” Morys said, a grim set to his mouth. “There’s another head to the Hound. The new knight’s brother, the Vaughn, he’s foiled in his schemes, but he’s not caught at it, ye see. No, he slinks off and means to take up the old one’s business, specially calling up his old loans.”

“What’s that to do with us?”

“Well, he sent me here, ye see, to collar a mark for him.”

Pete thumped his tankard on the table. “Reformed, my arse!”

Morys held out his hands, palms outward, and lowered his voice as the farmer looked blearily around. “Hold your breeches. We neither of us did a thing that would get us well and truly hanged, and I ain’t about to start now. So it’s come for your help, I am, to stop it.”

“What’s the offense?” Pete wanted to know. “Murder? Manslaughter? Robbing a lord?”

Morys put a finger beneath his collar and tugged. “Ah, now, that would be taking up a lady on her way home to London.”

Pete stared. “I won’t, and you won’t, neither. That’ll get you hanged by the neck until dead.”

“If I don’t spoke his wheels, he’ll take her,” Morys said. “And what’s the point letting him get her all over again?”

“The knight’s lady?”

“No. One of the lord’s.”

“Not the new wife—”

“The old one. The dowager.”

Pete remembered her dimly. Rail-thin, hatchet-faced, same slant to her mouth as Barbara. Widows must all drink from the same vinegar cup.

“And you want me to—”

“Kidnap her first,” Morys confirmed.

Chapter Three

They’d stopped in a village with the obscure name of Box because the postilion wanted to check a shoe on the near-side horse, and they’d stop again in Chippenham to change horses at the coaching inn. And there would be days of this jouncing, and the babble of her new maid, Jenny, as they made the trek to London.

Unless Prunella went mad, ran away, and didn’t join Lydia in London at all.