The Rose Garden (33 page)

‘The… yes, sir. Yes.’ The boy recovered. ‘I can take you there.’

‘Then do so. Mr. Hewitt?’

‘Sir?’

Creed shot one final glance behind him, cold and purposeful. ‘Bring Butler’s whore.’

I saw fire on the hillside.

At first my mind just lumped that observation in with all the other things about the night that seemed surreal—the violent drama I’d stepped into, Fergal lying senseless on the floor, the man named Peter being killed before my eyes, and now the fact that I was being hurried by the hands of strangers over the dark field that lay between Trelowarth and the woods… why
shouldn’t
there be fire on the hill as well, I wondered?

But even through the fog of shock that masked my sharper senses I could see it was no random fire, nor any strange imagining.

The Beacon had been lit.

I’d never seen it lit in my own lifetime. I had seen my parents’ snapshots of the Beacon being lighted for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, before my birth, and Claire had sent me pictures of it burning on the eve of the Millennium, when all of Britain’s ancient beacons had been set ablaze, but what the photographs had captured was a fraction of the full effect.

The sight was truly awe inspiring: flames of brilliant gold that speared the star-flecked sky and shifted shape in random sprays of sparks. At any other time I might have marveled at it, but my mind had narrowed in its focus and refused to be distracted long by anything that fell outside the needs of self-protection.

I had little memory afterwards of passing with my captors through the wood or scrambling down the jagged slickness of the rocks onto the beach—it blended into one long nightmarish descent where I was scraped by branches, cut by rocks, and finally hit the shingle with a bruised knee and the taste of my own blood upon my tongue. It wasn’t serious. I’d bitten through my lip to keep from crying out when I had whacked my knee, but still the pain of it was real, and my lip swelled so much that when we’d found the entrance to the cave and stumbled in, and Creed had set the shuttered lantern that he’d carried from Trelowarth House in place on top of one wide barrel, opening its sides to let the light spill out, the man named Hewitt looked at me with pity and discomfort.

I felt pity for him too, because I knew he couldn’t come to my defence the way he might have liked to. Both of us had seen what the result of that would be. I drew the stiff edges of Peter’s jacket tighter round my throat against the penetrating dampness of the cave and turned away from Hewitt’s gaze.

The constable was watching us. Without a word he took a long look round the shadowed cave and said, ‘This is a most agreeable arrangement. Have the Butlers used it long?’ He aimed the question straight at Hewitt, but it was the boy who answered.

‘Why, they’ve always used it, sir. ’Tis common knowledge in the village. I was shown it by my father, years ago.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Creed took his pistol from his belt, examining its workings with an attitude of unconcern, but I could see his underlying tenseness. He looked not unlike a predator prepared to spring, and I was sure the people of Polgelly would be made to feel the depth of his displeasure with them. Taking out the knife he had just used to kill a man, he turned its point to make some small adjustment to the flintlock mechanism of his gun.

And that’s when I remembered.

It was over there, I thought, just
there
, between the barrels to my left, that Daniel’s own dropped dagger had been lying on the floor the last I’d seen it.

If I picked it up I knew I would be changing what was meant to happen, but then I’d already changed things once tonight by being here. A man lay dead because of me, because he’d tried to help me, and however that one act had changed the future it was done, and there was nothing I could do to change it back. All I could do was try to stay alive myself, and if I had a weapon I’d be bettering my odds.

The challenge was to find a way to get from where I stood to where I thought the dagger lay. I was deciding how to do it when my thoughts were interrupted by a noise approaching steadily outside the cave: the heavy crunch of footsteps over shingle.

Creed held one hand up to warn the men to silence and aimed his pistol at the entrance as a second sound rose up now with the shifting steps—the sound of someone whistling a careless tune I recognized.

My heart dropped. Jack.

And then in almost sickening slow motion all the things I’d seen and heard tonight slid into place like pieces of a puzzle, and I knew then why the Beacon had been lit. I could hear again the boy’s voice telling Creed what he had overheard the one man tell the other as they left the Spaniard’s Rest: that he’d be happy when the day was over, for a year of King George on the throne was not a thing that should be celebrated.

God, I thought, that must be it. In my time the Polgelly folk had marked a royal jubilee by lighting up the Beacon, so it made sense the people here would do the same. Uncaring fate had brought me back on the first anniversary of King George’s rule, the same day when, according to the note in Jack’s unfinished memoirs, Jack ‘did chance to fall afoul of the lawmen of Polgelly, and while fleeing from their constable was killed by one sure pistol shot.’

I knew what was about to happen—knew because the constable was with me, and the men who walked around us
were
the ‘lawmen of Polgelly’, and the night was not yet over.

Jack would die, because I’d read it on a printed page and printed pages weren’t meant to be changed. Like in the lines I’d quoted on the ship to Daniel from the
Rubáiyát
, The Moving Finger had already written what must be.

But then I thought of Daniel telling Fergal, ‘He’s my brother,’ and God help me, I just couldn’t stand there silently and watch another man be killed.

As Jack was stepping through the opening into the cave, I made a sudden lunge against the constable and shouted, ‘Jack, get out! Warn Daniel! Run!’

The pistol’s deafening report in that confined space drowned my words and I could not be sure he heard them, and a second after that I couldn’t see him for the powder smoke that seared my throat and stung my eyes and drifted like a white cloud through the cave, but as it cleared I saw the place where Jack had stood was empty.

The constable’s shot had gone wide. Several feet away the boy took an unsteady step and stared at me with wonder and bewilderment, and then he touched a hand to the new spreading stain upon his chest and stumbled once again and fell.

Creed’s eyes, much closer, had held wonder too at first, but by the time I met them they were freezing over into something terrifying. With the gun still in his hand he swept his arm out savagely and struck me full across my face. I felt the pain against my cheekbone and the trickling warmth of blood start down the bruised skin of my temple, but although I staggered back I didn’t shame myself by falling down.

When Hewitt made a move as though to protest, Creed stopped him with the cold reminder, ‘This is none of your affair. Nor yours,’ he told the other man behind. ‘Now go, the pair of you, and bring Jack Butler back.’

The two men hesitated, and he wheeled on them. ‘I told you, go!’

And without any further argument the men edged off. I heard their footsteps scraping on the shingle, walking first, then moving off more quickly, breaking to a run.

Creed didn’t move, but still I felt the space between us shrinking.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You have a voice.’

I tried to think. I hadn’t said that many words, and with the pistol’s firing it was likely that he hadn’t heard me clearly, so there was a fair chance that he wouldn’t know I wasn’t Irish, wasn’t who he thought I was. And even though he knew that I could speak, my safest course now might just be to keep my mouth shut and not risk him finding out that I did not belong here.

‘A clever play on Butler’s part,’ he said, ‘and on your brother’s, for it made me ill inclined to ask you questions, as they no doubt hoped it would.’

The knowledge that he still thought I was Fergal’s sister would have eased my mind more if he hadn’t been reloading the pistol while he talked, brushing the used powder out of the firing pan and repriming it deftly.

‘But now that I have heard you speak,’ he said as he took practice aim towards the entrance of the cave and idly sighted down the barrel, ‘I’ve a mind to find out for myself how well you sing.’

I watched the pistol swing around to point at me.

He said, ‘You can sing, can you not, Mistress O’Cleary? You will find it is a useful art for keeping your own head out of the hangman’s noose. Come now, tell me what does Butler mean to shift from here tonight, and where will it be bound?’

Shaking my head once I took a step backwards, reminding myself he was trying to frighten me. Doing a fabulous job of it, certainly, but he had no real intention of killing me yet. He still needed me for the same reason he’d told his men earlier—Daniel would never submit to arrest without force or coercion, and I was the constable’s leverage, his bargaining chip.

He wouldn’t kill me yet, I told myself again, and clinging to that little fragment of uncertain courage I stepped back again and hoped he’d think I was retreating from the pistol. I knew well enough I didn’t have a hope of moving out of range—I’d seen the damage his last shot had done the boy, who had been standing farther off from Creed than I was standing now—but the dagger, Daniel’s dagger, was still lying on the damp stone floor somewhere between the barrels just behind me.

My thoughts had not yet focused through my fear enough to let me form a plan of what to do with it, but having any weapon seemed a better thing than having none at all, so I kept inching backwards with a single-minded purpose while Creed said, ‘You do know, do you not, what does befall a woman like yourself in Newgate? And for what? The law is very clear for those who comfort traitors. In the end you will be forced to testify to what you know, and he will hang regardless, and your suffering will be for naught. Speak now, to me, and I may yet persuade the courts to show you mercy.’

The voice that answered wasn’t mine. It said, ‘A kind offer, but I rather doubt she’ll accept it.’

I turned my head, astonished to see Jack not twenty feet from us, inside the entrance to the cave. Keeping his own pistol leveled on Creed and his gaze firmly fixed on the constable’s face he remarked, ‘You have given her small cause to think you’d be merciful.’

The constable shrugged. ‘Men can change.’

If Jack felt fear he was hiding it well. He looked calm and completely relaxed as he took a step forwards and ordered me, ‘Eva, go now.’

I heard Creed’s gun, still pointed at me, give an ominous click.

‘Butler, I should have thought saving yourself would outweigh any chivalrous impulses.’

Jack gave a half smile and said, ‘Men can change, so I’ve been told.’ Still coming forwards, he said again, ‘Eva, go now, he’ll not shoot you.’

The constable lowered his eyebrows at that. ‘Will I not? And what makes you so certain?’

‘Because it is not your design. You’d not even shoot me if I gave you the chance.’

‘You seem very certain.’ Creed’s voice had an edge. ‘Why not put your own pistol aside, and we’ll see?’

Jack answered without stopping his advance, ‘All right.’

And as I watched in horror he replaced his pistol in his belt and held his hands out slightly from his sides to plainly show he was unarmed.

Creed’s pistol swung away from me to aim at Jack, and as it moved I took advantage of the fact to back away between the barrels, where I’d seen the dagger on the day we’d brought the cargo back from Brittany.

I’d nearly given up when I saw one faint edge of something metal gleaming in the lantern’s light, and cautiously, my eyes still on the men, I stooped to pick it up. My hands weren’t large enough to hold the dagger’s blade concealed as Daniel did, but still I tried to keep it pointed straight so it was hidden by my wrist as much as possible.

Neither Jack nor Creed appeared to notice.

Jack had covered half the space between them now with his sure, certain steps, and all the while his gaze stayed steady on the constable. ‘You want us dead, myself and Danny, but you will not shoot me now, for should I die by your own hand the people of Polgelly will demand to know the cause of it, and even your authority has limits in this place.’ He tipped his head to one side, questioning. ‘Or do you think those two men you presumably sent after me, the ones I did see running for the woods, will yet return to lend you aid?’

Creed said, ‘The people of Polgelly have no choice. The laws have changed.’

‘Yes, I have heard. We may be taken without benefit of warrant, may we not, and sent to London for our trials? More reason not to kill me now,’ said Jack, his hands still at his sides as he came closer, ‘when you could leave that pleasure to the executioner, while you stand by the gallows and enjoy the entertainment.’ Without turning his head he repeated, ‘Go, Eva.’

‘She stays,’ said the constable. ‘For if you claim to know the law, then you will also know that trials do have need of evidence, and she can yet supply that.’

Jack said, ‘Eva cannot testify.’

‘You think I am a fool?’ Creed was dismissive. ‘She can speak.’

‘She can. But not against my brother. Or against myself, in fact, if that would so reveal my brother’s crimes.’

Jack knew. I saw it in the faint curve of his mouth before he dropped the bombshell with the satisfaction of a small boy who liked watching things explode. ‘For if
you
know the law,’ he said, ‘then you will know no judge will have a woman as a witness at the trial of her husband.’

Creed stood thunderstruck. ‘Her husband!’

‘Ay, that was my own reaction, I’ll confess, when Danny told me, but the vicar did assure me it was true, and for my part I now can see it was a good match wisely made.’ The glance Jack sent my way held reassurance, but beneath it was full knowledge of the danger we were in. ‘So you see,’ he finished off, ‘she’ll be no use to you.’

The constable’s cold eyes had taken on a colder purpose. ‘Oh, I disagree,’ he said. ‘I can imagine quite a few ways that I might use
Mrs.
Butler, and I’ll keep your brother well informed of all of them while he does rot in Newgate.’