To Seduce an Angel (28 page)

The day was warm, but she pulled her shawl close around her three layers of dresses. She entered the inn behind a crowd of passengers off a stage and ordered tea and a bun. It was as she left that she saw the flyer for the match.
Open rounds for amateurs. The Somerton Stinger challenges the Copthorn Croaker to fifteen rounds.
He was going to do it. He was going to go openly where his enemies could get at him.

Wallop's words had nagged at her every step of the way. Daventry believed her to be his betrayer. He hated her, but she could not hate him. Tatty had no saying that Emma could remember about being stupidly in love. Apparently, if you had the worst luck in love, if you loved someone who could not love you back, you still loved.

She told herself that Daventry's brothers would be with him, that he was strong, that Wallop and Aubrey did not have the power to control a prizefight. But she read the announcement again. It did not say where the thing would be because the organizers would not want any constables to arrive and spoil the event.

It made her angry that he would risk himself.

A parson in a broad-brimmed black hat saw her standing in front of the broadside and stopped and tore the flyer down. “Ye'll not be thinking of such doings, miss.”

He went on his righteous way, and Emma came back and scooped up the torn flyer.

 

 

LARK could hear a hum over the rattle of carriages in the road. It sounded almost like Oxford Street, different because of woods and fields instead of cobbles and bricks, but with the same, restless, surging rise and fall of sound a decent crowd made. He grinned at Rook and picked up his pace. He'd missed crowds in the country.

They had spent the night in a barn. In the morning they'd filled their pockets with apples stored in a farmer's hayloft and departed before he came to tend to his cows. They'd trudged along the dark road half dozing on numb feet until the sun rose. Then they'd looked at each other and stopped to knock and slap the straw from their clothes and hair.

Now they turned into a churned-up path across a common headed for the buzz of sound. Greening woods circled the open expanse. If Dav kept to his plan, he'd be among the millers today. Lark hadn't decided whether he wanted Dav to see them or not. Mostly he blamed Dav for spoiling everything. Once or twice a stealthy thought sneaked into his mind that he and Rook were not cut out for the respectable dull life Dav wanted them to have.

One thing was certain. If Lark wanted his old town life back, he had to get tough again. Their eight nights on the road had shown him just how soft he'd become sleeping in beds under roofs with a full belly as he'd done for three years since Dav had taken them to live with his family. He and Rook had tried sleeping back-to-back for warmth. They wore boots and coats and waistcoats and stockings, and still their teeth chattered and sleep did not come easy. It was a sorry state for a pair of street rats.

A fine curricle pulled up beside them, and a swell toff hailed them. “Where have you lads escaped from? Eton, I'll wager. You'll be flogged for it, but hop on up, I can bring you closer.”

Eton?
Rook's brows shot up, but Lark accepted the ride with his best accent and scrambled into the carriage. The driver had a friendly face, a head of fashionably cropped black curls, and a gold ticker, as fat and round as a turnip, dangling where a gold ticker had no business dangling if it wanted to stay long with one owner.

Lark looked away from the watch. “What are the odds on the Somerton Stinger?”

“The Stinger? What, is he your favorite? You'll lose your shirt and your boots, too, if you lay your blunt on the Stinger, lads. Everyone in Thorndon favors the Croaker. He's made mush of five hopefuls since he came into the ring.”

Lark figured the gentleman got to keep his ticker only because he'd done them a service. He let them down at the edge of the crowd where pie men and peddlers circulated, shouting their offerings to knots of spectators who hadn't yet joined the main press. Legs called out the odds and collected bets.

Rook's gaze watched a pie man go by, but Lark pulled him along by the elbow and made him look at the restless, shifting crowd.

“What do you see?”

“Coves. 'Undreds of 'em.”

“By my count maybe two hundred. What don't you see?”

“Ladies?” Rook turned a puzzled frown Lark's way. Rook would never go to the head of the class.

True, there were few women present, drabs and hawkers mainly, they looked to be. No ladies, though Lark glanced at the carriages to confirm it. He had heard that sometimes wicked ladies came to mills for to see the men strip down and bloody one another. Before Nate Wilde had told them of it, Lark had thought only Bread Street doxies had a taste for blood and battle.

Lark gave Rook a cuff with the back of his hand. “Wot you don't see is constables. That's the beauty of a mill. No one invites the beaks. There are probably fifty tickers and a hundred purses, and not a constable for miles. And, wot's more, we look like toffs.
Eton
the gentleman said.”

A slow satisfied grin spread across Rook's face, and a larcenous gleam lit his eye. He nodded his head. “They're all ours, ain't they?”

“As many as we can hold,” Lark confirmed. “Then we lay some money on Dav, and clean the pie man out of his wares.”

“And 'ave a good chop and cucumber and ketchup, too.”

“Done.” Lark shook his partner's hand and slipped into the crowd.

 

 

EMMA wore black. Today she was a soldier's widow on her way to her husband's family in Poole. The disguise worked well with strangers, but there were few women on the Thorndon common, and it would be easy for Wallop to pick her out in the crowd. She was sure he would be here planning an accident for Daventry, and she didn't want Wallop to find her before she pointed him out to Dav's people.

She hadn't meant to come, but the flier had changed her plans. She meant to be miles farther west by now. But Tatty and the babe would be on a ship bound for America now, out of reach forever of the past. Emma could not lose Tatty now, only Daventry. If Aubrey and Wallop found a way to destroy Daventry, they would. And if Daventry did not exist, what kind of world would it be for Emma to live in?

She felt light-headed with hunger and shaky on her feet, but it was best to stay in the thick of the crowd. Moving among the throng of spectators was like rowing on a choppy sea. Around her coarse men shifted and shoved each other for position. They staggered against her or trod on her feet, buffeting her with rough shoulders and ripe smells. The higher orders kept to their vehicles above the churned-up mud of the field. Emma's boots were caked with it.

She could not take a step without thinking she had delivered Dav to his enemy, and he would not know it until the enemy struck, until falling stones or a knife-wielding attacker hurtled at him. She did not know how Wallop would use the prizefight, but she knew he would. Daventry would not recognize Wallop as his betrayer, but he would know Emma. She could expose Wallop by her mere presence.

The ring looked honest and open, a square of grass perhaps fifteen feet in either direction enclosed by ropes. It lay at one end of a long, wide hollow. She had expected an accident along the road, but she could see now how much more exposed the ring would be. Once Daventry emerged from his closed carriage, he would be in the midst of hundreds of men. Any rough character in the crowd could be a tool of the duke with a weapon.

She spotted the boys with Will Jones and his young protégé, Nate Wilde, in an open carriage next to an elegant black vehicle, closed. The boys looked giddy with excitement. She looked down, shielding her face with her bonnet brim, as Will Jones's alert gaze raked the crowd. It comforted her to see Will there. Daventry had made it safely to the match, and his brother was looking out for him.

Around her men talked of the odds. Those offering three to one on the Croaker did a brisk business, but all of them studied the two closed carriages on opposite sides of the ring in a cheerful, bloodthirsty way. Everyone expected an easy victory for the local champion with plenty of blows and blood. The Somerton Stinger was an unknown. They assumed his defeat. Emma smiled to herself. No one knew Daventry at all.

Now that she'd found his supporters, Emma looked for Wallop's purple waistcoat in the tide of brown and black coats. In the ring itself four men stood conversing, indifferent to the rising hum of the restless spectators. Slowly, she swept her gaze over the carriages until she spotted Wallop. He had a slouched hat pulled low on his brow, but the bulge of his purple waistcoat was unmistakable. He leaned down in conversation with a white-haired man in a loose brown frock coat and dirty linen neckcloth.

The man at Wallop's side left him and slipped through the ropes drawing the attention of the fellows in the middle. A brief conversation caused two men to dash off toward a closed carriage on the opposite side of the ring from Dav's carriage. The remaining two officials marched over to Wallop. Wallop descended from his carriage and opened the door of a third closed carriage next to his.

For the next quarter hour Emma watched the men come and go, consulting with one another as the crowd murmured and stirred. One of the group went to talk with Will Jones, who then opened his brother's carriage. At last the four reassembled in the center of the ring and got the attention of the crowd.

“The Copthorn Croaker withdraws. The Langley Leveler will meet the Somerton Stinger.” The announcement rippled through the crowd, darkening the mood, and setting off waves of furious negotiations over bets.

A dark-haired man of about thirty emerged from the third closed carriage and tossed his hat in the ring. His seconds stripped him and brought him to the weighing stand. The crowd watched the big man closely. What one saw first was the black eye patch. Otherwise, he had a heavy black-stubbled square jaw in a long, angular face that might be called handsome under close-cropped hair. He was oddly top heavy with a great pink barrel chest covered with dark hair and tree-limb arms, but a thin waist and frog-like legs.

DAV'S brothers reported the change of fighters to him with grim faces. According to the vinegars the attending physician had pronounced the Croaker too ill to fight. Another fighter from the field of contestants had agreed to take his place. If Dav agreed to meet the Langley Leveler, the stakeholders would sponsor both men, and the match could proceed.

Dav agreed with Will and Xan that the whole thing smelled fishy. But no one outside of his family knew that the Somerton Stinger was the Marquess of Daventry. No one knew that he'd left the hall to participate in this fight.

He wasn't going to back out of the match in spite of Xan's urging. It was what he'd wanted since he was a boy, a contest that pitted him against an opponent he would have to outdo in body, wit, and spirit. He wanted blows he could feel in his ribs and belly. And if his grandfather had somehow manipulated the game in his favor, Dav welcomed the confrontation. He pointed out that if they paid attention, they could expose his grandfather's hirelings.

At the boys' urging he had worn his old black velvet coat. As he stepped down from Xander's carriage, he had to admit that a bit of theatricality added to the occasion.

Will stood at his side, looking at the white-haired fellow who had reported the Croaker's illness. “That fellow's a physician as much as I'm a bleeding lady's maid.”

“Do you think he ‘treated' Croaker?”

“I don't doubt it. He won't be treating you, however. Wenlocke's got to be behind this change.”

“Is Wenlocke here?”

Will looked annoyed. “We don't think so. I have Wilde scouting about. Listen, Dav, don't do this thing. There will be other matches.”

“You think the Somerton Stinger can walk away from this crowd?”

Will cast his shrewd gaze around at the throng of men pressed against the ropes. “We're watching every minute. Any foul play, I'm stopping it.”

Dav thought the Leveler looked appropriately menacing. Not too much hidden there. The man's reach and his fists were more of a match for Adam Digweed than Dav. The Leveler was punching the air in his corner of the ring, doing a little dance with his feet for the spectators' notice.

Dav thrust his hands into the pockets of his old coat. His fingers encountered a puzzling scrap of paper. He drew the folded thing from the depths of his pocket and froze at its message. No punch from the Leveler could knock him so.

 

 

Emma Portland had betrayed and deserted him. But she'd sat at his desk, taken his pen, and confessed her love. He'd been confused about her for days, weighing her sweet lovemaking against the evidence that she came from Wenlocke and reported to Wenlocke's man in the village. Now his ears filled with the restless noise of the crowd.