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Rafe eyed the stark outline of his father’s carriage. He’d lied about going to the theater again, another risk taken. One of the horses shook out its mane and stamped. Chenoweth was no longer on the box.

Rafe would apologize to her. Even if he had to make a cake of himself while she bored holes into his chest, even if she refused to ever speak to him again. She would refuse, and that was for the best.

“I’ll drive the cart back,” Alfie said, “but first, I intend to meet her.”

Rafe ignored the comment, for they were upon the vehicle now, and his heart was in his throat. The door didn’t open. One of the horses huffed. He walked around to the carriage’s other side, and found only the gatekeeper, lounging against one of the gate’s stone pillars.

“Where’s my coachman?” Rafe asked roughly.

The man cracked open an eye, and Rafe recognized him. At least wi’ a woman, quarrels meet their end in the bed linens.

Definitely a lie. This quarrel was going to end in humiliation.

“The lady wanted to go on down the street,” the gatekeeper said, his voice breaking on the high tones. “Your man weren’t keen as to set ’er off on ’er own, so he says t’ me, ‘Watch me coach.’ I’m a’watchin’ ’is coach.”

Rafe’s boots ground in the gravel as he spun to face Alfie, his hands already knotting into fists.

“I’ll stay with the horses. You go.”

thirteen

Waiting on Mr. Balfour in the carriage had quickly become intolerable. Sophie had begun to feel like she was suffocating on hot shame and the humid night’s air, and when she’d gone up to the gates to peer out, she saw none other than Barnard being hauled past on a man’s back. He’d barely looked conscious.

Much to Mr. Chenoweth’s despair, she had insisted the gatekeeper let her out. There had been just enough delay for her to lose sight of the two men and the boy, but she was certain they’d vanished into this crowd, which congregated around an alehouse.

The scene reminded her of Edmund’s parties. The smell could have been any congregation of men: the putrid pinch of cheap beer and gin against the fortifying heartiness of something beef—stew, probably. That seemed to be what was on the tables within the alehouse, but she had no need to go inside. Not yet, and hopefully, not at all.

“Miss—”

She ignored Mr. Chenoweth’s worried voice at her back and stepped over the stockinged legs of a man passed out. It really was just like one of Edmund’s parties, and that one would have been Edmund himself, always the first to overindulge in the name of good fun. But she didn’t have time to turn the hulking fellow on his side. She had woven through half the crowd, now, and still not seen Barnard.

A younger pensioner, his blue coat sagging open to reveal his throat and pale chest hair, brushed near her.

“Excuse me, sir.” She had called loudly, but still her voice seemed to hit an impenetrable wall of sound. Someone was playing a fiddle, and the scrape of their poorly rosined bow stabbed into her right ear. She put a finger to it, and called after the man again. “Excuse me, sir!”

He made a half turn, his steps faltering, and belched when he looked at her, droopy-lidded. “Eh?”

“Where is Mr. Barnard?”

He blinked, a hard squeeze. “Eh, what?”

Sophie stomped her foot, and shattered glass crunched beneath it. “Barnard? Bonnie? The child pensioner?”

“Ah.” The man’s face relaxed, as though he had been freed from some great mental stress. “What of him?”

“Where is he?” She was practically yelling now, but this man didn’t seem to care, nor anyone else around her. Except for maybe Mr. Chenoweth. She thought she heard, under layers of sound, the coachman loose another polite Miss behind her.

“Inside, I s’pose.”

She squared her shoulders and set off for the open door of the alehouse. So be it then, she muttered under her breath. She refused to leave Greenwich without finding the boy first.

She walked the center of the room. Her head was held high and she met the eyes of everyone who peered up at her. The more that looked, the better; perhaps this way she would recognize the man who had carried Barnard—if not Barnard himself—without having to speak to every table. And by heaven, there were a lot of them.

The fiddler clanged inside behind her, bringing with him a throng of singing men. “Our sails are full—”

Her breath caught. There was a pair of legs bunched in the rear corner of the room. Small, knobby, boyish legs. She rushed toward them with singular focus, not stopping when her shoulder crashed into that of a large man. He hollered, and she felt, a second later, warm liquid seeping through her cloak to dampen her arm.

“Barnard.” She crumpled to the floor when she reached him. God. Oh, God. His cheek was cold beneath her fingertips, flushed bright. “Barnard.”