Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [104]
Dominick Cherrett had a knife . . .
Raleigh kept his head down and his feet moving. He carried a knife too. Nothing like cold steel to persuade a reluctant sailor to come with them. But he wasn’t very good at using it for more than cleaning fish. He’d never learned to throw, and the few times he’d wielded a cutlass in battle, he’d nearly died from the horror of steel meeting flesh.
“Why the village?” he asked after a few hundred yards of silence.
“There are some sailors celebrating their return home after a voyage to the East.”
“And we’re to send them back again?” Raleigh’s throat closed. “Their families—”
“They should be with their families, not out drinking and carousing.”
“True, but . . .” Raleigh sighed. “How many?”
“Four, if we can manage that many.”
“We don’t have help?”
“We’ve never had help.”
Raleigh stopped. “Didn’t you have help the other night when you hit me?”
“No, Cherrett wasn’t invited along.” A hint of anger colored the husky murmur. “He should be dead.”
“The snake?” Raleigh dared to ask.
Silence.
“That snake could have bitten Tabitha, you know.” Raleigh allowed his own anger to blossom. “She’s done nothing wrong.”
“Other than play the strumpet with Cherrett?” Now Raleigh heard amusement.
He clenched his fists. “She wouldn’t.”
“You didn’t see them embracing last night. I did.”
Embracing, not the brush of lips he’d witnessed, but an embrace.
Raleigh opened his mouth to ask where and when, but his companion raised a hand. “Silence. I hear them.”
They had reached the edge of the village, and Raleigh heard them too—tramping feet, two or three men, with two of them singing in off-key harmony. The singing was to the advantage of the captors. It masked any sound they might make.
“Go behind.”
The direction was unnecessary. Raleigh knew the drill. He slipped up behind the man in the rear, the silent one, whose lagging footsteps suggested he was either exhausted or inebriated. Either way, he should be easy prey. Grabbing the man’s hair with one hand, Raleigh drew the man’s head back so his throat was exposed to the knife blade.
The other two sailors kept going with their song, surely waking up the town.
The man in Raleigh’s grip choked. “No, want . . . wife . . . baby.”
Raleigh’s hand slipped. He knew this man. His baby was barely two days old. He was about to steal Donald Parks away from his beloved wife and brand-new baby.
“Take my money,” Parks pleaded. “Just let me see my wife and children.”
Raleigh’s knife clattered to the stone path. Parks spun. His hand swooped toward Raleigh’s already bruised jaw.
Other hands caught him. Steel flashed. Flesh met flesh. Parks dropped.
“I’ll tie him up,” Raleigh’s master announced. “You get one of the others or you’re a dead man.”
“Run.” Raleigh’s voice emerged barely above a whisper, but apparently the others listened. Pounding feet running for safety was the last thing Raleigh heard.
27
______
The minute Letty and Dominick stepped into the square, the nearest knot of people ceased talking and turned to stare. Their faces weren’t friendly; they registered hostility.
“Something’s happened,” Dominick murmured. He paused a dozen feet from the others who had come to buy fresh fish, milk, and eggs.
Letty kept walking. “Nancy, Kitty, what’s wrong?” Her voice rang out over the square like a town beadle.
Dominick didn’t hear the response. He didn’t need to. He guessed from the grim faces that more men had vanished the night before. He didn’t understand the hostility toward him. Never before had anyone blamed him for the disappearances. He was a servant just like them. Many of them were English too, though most were Irish like Letty. Even they never blamed him for his heritage—until now.
“Who was it?” Letty asked.
Dominick dared to sidle forward to hear the answer. The name Parks sent a jolt through his middle. The man’s wife had just borne him a new baby two days earlier.
Tabitha would be devastated.
Dominick glanced around, as though he would see her somewhere