Sweet Awakening (42 page)

“Yet gaming is illegal, is it not?” Clare asked with assumed innocence.

Oldfield cleared his throat. “There are laws on the books, yes. But the habit of play is too ingrained in so many, my lady.” He paused, and then said tactfully: “Now about the small matter of your brother’s debts. Just what is the young man’s name, and I can tell you exactly what he owes.”

“My husband must never hear about this, Mr. Oldfield.” Clare pulled the basket on her lap and gripped it tightly in both hands. “That is why I asked you to come immediately, for he is away this afternoon.”

“There would be no reason for me to tell Lord Whitton, my lady,” Oldfield reassured her. “Indeed, I do not believe I have ever even met Lord Whitton. I would guess, if he disapproves of your brother, he is not a gaming man himself.”

“Yet I think some acquaintances of yours
have
met him.” Clare got up and carried her basket over to the small table directly behind him.

“I do not think so, my lady,” said Oldfield, turning to address her and finding himself staring into the barrel of a cocked pistol.

“Lady Whitton, I am sure I don’t know why you wish to threaten me?” he said after a moment of shocked silence.

“Threaten you, Mr. Oldfield?”

“Uh, yes, threaten me into releasing your brother from his debts. As a gentleman, your brother himself would not approve. Here. Let me take that,” he said, starting to reach out slowly, “before you harm yourself. An inexperienced hand should never be holding a cocked firearm, my lady.”

Clare took a step back. “Oh, but my hands are quite experienced.” Her hands were also shaking, and she drew them into her body to steady them. It was very hard to have them curled around a pistol again. In front of her was Mr. Oldfield, but he also seemed to be Justin. She took a deep breath and shook her head a little. “Do you know what my name was before I married Lord Whitton?”

“No, my lady. But if you told me, I would know who your brother is and could arrange to settle his debts very easily. Or even cancel them altogether.”

The man was very cool, thought Clare, and everything depended upon him believing her capable of killing him. Please God, she had been notorious enough.

“I was married to Lord Justin Rainsborough. Until I killed him.”

Oldfield’s eyes widened, and his face paled very satisfactorily.

“You have heard of me, I see.”

“Yes, my lady. Everyone in London heard of that, uh, incident, I believe.”

“Then you know that I am not fond of bullies, Mr. Oldfield. And that having killed once, I am quite capable of doing so again.”

Oldfield put his hands out, palms up, and said plaintively: “But how am I bullying you, Lady Rainsborough, I mean, Lady Whitton. You asked me here. I came. I have offered to release your brother from his debts. What more can I do for you?”

Clare moved in quickly and had the pistol against his temple before he knew it.

“You can take me to where you are holding Mr. Andrew More, Esquire.”

Oldfield stared, and then became very still as he felt the pistol barrel brush his temple.

“You are confusing me, my lady. I do not know a Mr. More.”

“Oh, I think you do. Mr. More is to meet you in court tomorrow, and if he wins his case, you and your partners may very well spend some time in prison. And so you had him kidnapped.”

“Even if that were true, my lady, which of course, it is not, what has this Andrew More to do with you? Unless
he
is your brother?”

“I have no younger brother, Mr. Oldfield. And you have no Andrew More. Mr. More is in the park right now with my sister-in-law. Your knaves grabbed the wrong man. They took my husband, Lord Giles Whitton, and you are going to lead me to him.”

Oldfield seemed to realize that further denial was foolish, for he only said quietly: “And what if I refuse, Lady Whitton?”

“I will shoot you through the temple.”

“But then you will not see your husband again.”

“Oh, I believe I will. You see, then I will summon Mr. Carolus or Mr. Phillips or Mr. Bennett. I am sure one of you will be willing to take me there, especially if he sees what happened to his partners.”

Clare could feel hysterical laughter rising at the thought of the bodies piling up in her drawing room, but willed it down. He
must
believe she was capable of this for her plan to work.

Apparently, he did. “All right, Lady Whitton. I have no idea how this mistake happened, but I can take you to your husband. He is being held in a rookery in St. Giles, however, not a pleasant place for a lady.”

“Don’t worry about my sensibilities, Mr. Oldfield. I assure you, I have become rather hardened over the past two years, due to my experiences.” Clare took a deep breath. “You are going to stand up, and I am going to hold my pistol close by your side. We will walk down to the street, where my butler will have summoned my chaise.”

“Yes, my lady.”

They proceeded down the stairs just as she had said. “Is the chaise outside, Henley?" Clare asked when they reached the door.

“Yes, my lady. Let me get your pelisse.”

"No, thank you, Henley. I am in rather a hurry.”

The butler wanted to protest, but it was hardly his place. The sun had disappeared behind clouds, and it had become a chilly afternoon. But he could not insist. He opened the door and watched his mistress and her visitor down the steps, and frowned as he saw the man climb into the chaise ahead of her and not even reach back to help her in. He would have to find out just where Lady Whitton summoned this Mr. Oldfield from.

* * * *

Clare sat facing Oldfield, the pistol pointing straight at his stomach. “I do not claim to be anything of a marksman, so I will not threaten to shoot you straight through the heart should you move,” she said with an ironic smile. “But I do not believe being gut shot is a pleasant fate.”

“No, my lady, I would agree,” Oldfield responded dryly.

They were silent for a while, and then he spoke again.

“If I may ask, Lady Whitton, how did you figure out why your husband had disappeared?”

“There was no other reason for him to have disappeared. When Andrew More remembered he had loaned Giles his greatcoat to keep off the rain and when a Runner found witnesses who had seen Giles bundled into a cab, we decided it had been you and your partners trying to insure the success of their case.”

“But your husband could have just identified himself, and he would have been released.”

“No doubt Giles realized whom you thought you had. He is very chivalrous, my husband, and a good friend of Andrew More’s.”

“I see.” Oldfield was sitting there silently cursing his hired thugs. It was one thing to hold Andrew More, Esquire for a few days, quite another to hold the Viscount Whitton. He hoped they had treated their prisoner decently.

The chaise was going slowly now as the coachman picked his way through the narrow streets of St. Giles. Oldfield had given him the address, but several times the driver had to stop and ask directions from some street urchin or beggar.

“I haven’t been here in years myself,” said Oldfield, holding his handkerchief to his nose distastefully.

“So these men do not know you?”

“Oh, we didn’t hire them sight unseen, Lady Whitton. One of our blacklegs, Boniface, knows them and brought them to 75 St. James Street for instructions.”

“And what
were
their instructions?” asked Clare, dreading the answer.

“Only to hold Mr. More until the trial had begun and then release him that evening.”

“So my husband would have been released by tomorrow night, then?”

“Yes, you see all this effort is for no good reason, Lady Whitton.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Oldfield,” Clare answered thoughtfully. “Once you and your partners saw Andrew More in court, you may well have decided to dispose of your mysterious prisoner. You were very good at hiding your associations with these men. We have had a Runner watching you for these last few days, and he could pick up nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Of course not. We were very careful. Only two of us have even met these men, Lady Whitton. You are very lucky that I happen to be one of them.” Oldfield paused. “As for your husband, I will not lie to you: we may well have ordered him disposed of, especially since we didn’t know who he was. And it might have happened even without our orders, once the men found out they had the wrong man.”

Clare shuddered.

“So perhaps, Lord Whitton should be grateful after all that he wed a murderess.”

“Indeed, Mr. Oldfield, I think he should!” Clare replied boldly, hoping that her brave words would convince herself as well as him that she was able to go through with this.

The chaise finally stopped at the corner of what looked like an alley but was actually a narrow street. The coachman came to the door and announced that he could not get the chaise any farther if this was indeed the place.

“You said number three?” Clare asked.

“Yes, Lady Whitton.”

“Robert, I am going to remain in the chaise with Mr. Oldfield. You will go to the door of number three and inform—?” she glanced over to Oldfield.

“George and Henry.”

“... That Mr. Oldfield is here to see them regarding their prisoner. Bring them here to us.”

“Yes, my lady.” Robert knew that his mistress had embarked on something dangerous but important to Lord Whitton’s release, and so he overcame his own fear and distaste, and stepped down the street.

Giles had stopped eating after his second day in the cellar. He had tried, but the smells from the building, the street, and his own waste had made it impossible for him to keep food down. He had developed a great thirst, however, and asked for more water, but Toad only laughed and said, “We don’t want yer chamber pot overflowing, do we, gov,” and so he still received only a pitcher a day. He arranged his days around what he thought were mealtimes, and made drinking his cup of water as much of a ritual as eating a full meal, forcing himself to sit and sip slowly rather than gulp it down as he had the first day.

He kept to his regimen of exercise also, pacing to the rhythm of Greek and Urdu poetry. Occasionally, to keep up his spirits, he declaimed the verses loudly and dramatically, trying to imagine himself in an amphitheater.

The evenings were the worst of all, and after his “supper” it had been dark already for hours. He would fall asleep and men awaken in what he imagined was the middle of the night. He would lie there for hours, or so it seemed, unable to summon poetry or anything else to comfort him. He would reassure himself that this ordeal was almost over. He wasn’t a prisoner of war, after all, condemned to years of this, nor was he a criminal condemned to a lifetime of more subtle torture. Andrew will be made to pay for this, he would say to himself, trying for humor.

They were not very pleasant, his midnight thoughts, and by the fourth day, he was not able to confine them to the dead of night. By the fourth day, he was nearly out of his mind with hunger, thirst, and the stench. He walked a little in the morning, but was too weak to get off his pallet in the afternoon. He was lying there, drifting in and out of consciousness when he felt someone shake his shoulder.

“ ‘E’s not dead, is ‘e?”

“Don’t be a fool, George. Of course not. Get up, Mr. More.”

Giles sat up slowly. Sitting up made him dizzy and nauseous, and he sank his head into his hands to keep the room from spinning around him.

“ ‘E don’t look well, ‘Enry.”

“ ‘E don’t ‘ave to. ‘E ain’t going to see the queen, just Oldfield.”

Giles felt himself being dragged to his feet, and the sudden vertigo made him uncontrollably nauseous. There was nothing in his stomach, so all his retching brought up was bile. His captor let go, and Giles fell to his knees on the dirt floor.

“Get ‘im up,” grumbled Tall Man.

Toad yanked Giles to his feet again, and this time his head was clearer.

He stumbled up the stairs, and when the door to the street was opened, he was blinded by the light and groaned as he covered his eyes with his hands. He didn’t see the chaise or recognize his own coachman. He was only conscious that Toad was handing him over to someone else, and a shiver of fear went through him. Did they know who he was? No, they had called him Mr. More. Were they letting him go or was this new captor going to dump him in the river?

After they had walked a few steps, he pretended to stumble again and pulled away in the half second that the grip on his arm relaxed. He couldn’t see well enough to do more than a stumbling run, and in a minute someone was next to him. “It is all right, my lord,” the someone said as he tried to get away. “The chaise is only a few yards now.”

“My lord?” Then they did know who he was. Giles felt himself being pushed into the chaise, and the last thing he thought before losing consciousness was: “She is going to kill me, too,” as he saw Clare, or a phantom that looked like Clare, pointing a pistol in his direction.

* * * *

“You may get out, Mr. Oldfield,” said Clare, gesturing with the pistol. “I am sure you will be able to find your way home somehow?” she added sarcastically.

“Indeed, my lady.” Oldfield climbed down and let his breath out in a sigh of relief. Clare may have tried hard to keep her hands steady, but he had seen the trembling, which had scared him even more, for he knew how easy it was for a cocked pistol to go off.

“Ye’re a day early, ain’t ye, gov?”

“And you’re five days with the wrong man, you fools,” Oldfield replied. “That wasn’t Andrew More. That was Viscount Whitton. Andrew More will be in court bright and early tomorrow, and will no doubt win his client’s case.”

* * * *

Clare had kept the pistol pointed at Oldfield as he stepped out and even as they drove off, just in case he and his henchmen tried to rush her. When they finally were out of sight, she lowered her arms and dropped the pistol on the floor. Except, when she looked down, the pistol was still in her hands, which just wouldn’t, couldn’t open, they had been clenched so tight so long. And so she sat there with the pistol on her lap, gazing over at Giles, who was slumped on the seat opposite her.