Page 3

“Lenora!” Celestia and Mama cried in unison.

“I say, miss,” called the astonished beadle behind her. “Come back here with my scepter.”

Hadn’t he seen the altercation?

Why hadn’t he rushed to intervene?

Wasn’t that his job?

“What are you doing?” Mama asked in a quavery voice. “You’ll get hurt, Lenora.”

So might the elderly lady if Lenora did nothing.

“Leave her be.” Lenora wacked one thief on his calf hard enough to deter him but not so forceful as to cause him genuine harm.

Howling in pain before unleashing a string of curses that singed Lenora’s ears, the robber hopped about on his uninjured leg. “Ye’ll pay for that, ye bloody interferin’ wench.”

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

The old woman clobbered her accoster thrice on the shoulder. “Tosspot. Lickspittle. Codpated buggering buffoon.”

The woman possessed a rather colorful vocabulary herself.

“Ouch, ye old crone,” sneered the thief, batting away the makeshift weapon. “Give me yer money, or I’ll plant ye a facer.”

“I shall not! I’ve had a lifetime of males bullying me,” she fumed as her colorful bonnet flopped onto her back, and her silvery hair tumbled onto her shoulders. “No more, I say!”

Thwack, thwack to his head.

She was a feisty old bird. Lenora wasn’t positive whether she was brave or merely foolhardy.

But as she was jumping into the fray herself, was she so very different?

Landry had warned her of the desperation that drove street youths to rob in broad daylight. Some worked for gangs, but most were simply hungry—starving, in point of fact.

Snarling, the youth raised his fist to strike the old woman as she continued to throttle him with her abused parasol, now a mass of broken sticks.

“Don’t you dare hit her, you miscreant,” Lenora warned, amazed at her own gumption. She tossed her reticule onto the ground a few feet away. “Take my coin and leave.”

At once, his cohort swooped in and, with a gleeful whoop, pocketed the small embroidered velvet bag.

His fellow ruffian laughed, a hollow, half-demented cackle, revealing a broken front tooth amongst his yellowed teeth. “Thank ye kindly, but I’ll have hers as well.”

He jerked his head toward the woman who was still taking infuriated jabs at him.

It was the hopelessness and beleaguered bleakness in the thief’s hardened eyes that stalled Lenora’s breath and sent her heartbeat into a syncopated tempo. Unlike herself and the old woman, he had nothing to lose.

“My lady,” the woman’s companion begged in a wavering voice while blinking back tears. “Just give him your purse.”

Ah, so the feisty dame was nobility. Had the thieves known that? Or was she just an unlucky target because of her age and diminutive size?

Her fraught companion huddled on the pavement, tears streaming down her lined cheeks as she nursed an injured wrist.

“Never,” declared the scrappy matron, her eyes narrowed and her puce bonnet hanging askew. She wielded her battered parasol like a saber. “Males who would strike a female are satan’s spawns.”

She spoke as if she had personal experience.

Fine then.