Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [121]
The first plan involved criminal acts.
The second plan merely required keeping a sharp lookout— and listening to common sense, meanwhile. Even if Lady Dain had tattled, even if Dain decided to hunt Charity down, the bad weather would keep him at home for the present. In another two hours, the sun would set, and he was not likely to set out in the dark, through the mud, for Postbridge, especially when he couldn't know Charity was there already. That, anyone would agree, was too much bother for Dain.
All the same, Vawtry couldn't help wishing that Charity's common sense extended to child care. If she'd minded the boy properly in the first place, matters wouldn't have reached a crisis with Athton's populace. If she'd beaten the brat in the second place, instead of dosing him with laudanum, he wouldn't now be vomiting up the dinner he'd just wolfed down and working on spewing up whatever he'd had for breakfast as well.
Vawtry turned away from the window.
Dominick lay on a narrow cot, clutching the edge of the thin mattress, his head hanging over the chamber pot his mother held. The retching had stopped, for the moment at least, but his dirty face was grey, his lips blue, his eyes red.
Charity met her lover's gaze. "It weren't— wasn't— the laudanum," she said defensively. "It was the mutton he ate for dinner. Spoiled, it must've been— or the milk. He said everything tasted bad."
"He's got rid of everything," said Vawtry, "and he doesn't look any better. He looks worse. Maybe I'd better fetch a physician. If he D-I-E-S," he added, hoping Charity's spelling abilities were better than her mothering ones, "Her Ladyship won't be pleased. And someone I know might find herself closer to a gibbet than she likes."
The mention of the gallows washed the color from Charity's rosy cheeks. "Leave it to you to look for the worst in everything," she said, turning back to the sick child. But she made no objection when Vawtry collected his hat and left the room.
He had just reached the top of the stairs when he heard an ominously familiar rumble…which might as well have come from the bowels of the inferno, for it was Beelzebub's own voice.
Vawtry did not need a whiff of brimstone or a puff of smoke to inform him that during the moment he'd looked away from the window, the Golden Hart Inn had turned into the black pit of Hell and that, in a very few more moments, he would be reduced to a shriveled bit of ash.
He raced back to the room and flung open the door. "He's here!" he cried. "Downstairs. Terrifying the landlord."
The boy sat up abruptly, to gaze wide-eyed at Vawtry, who ran frantically about the room, snatching up belongings.
Charity rose from the boy's side. "Never mind the things," she said calmly. "Don't fly into a panic, Rolly. Use your head."
"He'll be here in a minute! What are we to do?"
"We're going to hustle out real quick-like," she said, moving to the window and surveying the innyard. "You take Dominick out this window and scoot along the ledge down to that hay wagon and jump."
Vawtry darted to the window. The hay wagon looked to be miles below— with not very much hay in it, either. "I can't," he said. "Not with him."
But she'd left the window while he was assessing the risk, and she'd already opened the door. "We daren't chance meeting up tonight. But you must take my boy— I can't carry him, and he's worth money, remember— and look for me in Moretonhampstead tomorrow."
"Charity!"
The door shut behind her. Vawtry stared at it, listening in numb horror to her footsteps racing toward the back stairs.
He turned to find the boy staring at the door, too. "Mama!" he cried. He crawled off the cot, managed to stagger three steps to the door, then swayed and crumpled upon the floor. He let out a gagging sound Vawtry had heard all too often in the last hours.
Vawtry hesitated, halfway between the sick child