stream of emotional French, wringing his hands as he alternately cursed and pleaded with his master to reconsider this folly. Better they should all bed down with une mouffette, a skunk! Oh, woe, oh, woe! Poor master, to have a cracked bell in his head. Poor Duvall, to be so overset that he could not even think which saint to pray to!
Jeremy stood stoically by, grimy paws jammed down hard on even grimier hips, waiting for the barrage of French to run itself down, then said, “Aw, dub yer mummer, froggie. Oi ain’t ’eared such a ruckus since ol’ ’awkins burnt ’isself wit ’is own poker!”
Duvall stopped in mid-exclamation to glare down at the boy, his lips pursed, his eyes bulging. “Mon Dieu!” he declared. “This insect, this crawling bug, he has called me a frog. I will not stand for such an insult!”
“Stand still,” Pierre corrected smoothly, at last succumbing to the need to filter his breathing air through the handkerchief. “Now, if the histrionics are behind us—and I most sincerely pray that they are—I suggest that Jeremy crawl back into the boot, sans the cover, and the rest of us also return to our proper places. I wish to make London before Father Christmas.”
Satisfied that he was doing his good deed just as his father had recommended—and rescuing Jeremy from an evil master certainly seemed to qualify—Pierre once more settled himself against the midnight-blue velvet squabs and began mentally preparing a missive to his father detailing his charitable wonderfulness. “And that will be the end of that,” he said aloud, eyeing Duvall levelly and daring the manservant to contradict him.
The coach had gone no more than a mile when it stopped once more, the coachman hauling on the reins so furiously that Pierre found himself clutching the handstrap for fear of tumbling onto the narrow width of flooring between the seats.
“I am a reasonably good man, a loving son,” he assured himself calmly as he reached to open the small door that would allow him to converse with the driver. “I have my faults, I suppose, but I have never been a purposely mean person. Why then, Duvall, do you suppose I feel this overwhelming desire to draw and quarter my coachman?”
“If there truly is a God, the dirty little person will have been flung to the road on his dripping nose,” Duvall grumbled by way of an answer, adjusting his jacket after picking himself up from the floor of the coach where, as his reflexes were not so swift as his employer’s, the driver’s abrupt stop had landed him.
“Driver?” Pierre inquired urbanely, holding open the small door. “May I assume you have an explanation, or have you merely decided it is time you took yourself into the bushes to answer nature’s call?”
“Sorry, sir,” the coachman mumbled apologetically, leaning down to peer into the darkened interior of the coach. “But you see, sir, there’s a lady in the road. At least, I think it’s a lady.”
Pierre’s left brow lifted fractionally. “A lady,” he repeated consideringly. “How prudent of you not to run her down. My compliments on both your driving and your charity, although I cannot but wonder at your difficulty in deciding the gender of our roadblock. Perhaps now you might take it upon yourself to ask this lady to move?”
“I can’t, sir,” the coachman responded, the slight quiver in his voice reflecting both his lingering shock at avoiding a calamity and his fearful respect of his employer. “Like I told yer—she’s in the road. It’s a lady for sure, ’cause I can see her feet. I think mayhap she’s dead, and can’t move.”
Pierre’s lips twitched as he remarked quietly, “Her feet? An odd way to determine gender, Duvall, wouldn’t you say?” His next communication to the coachman followed, both his words and his offhand tone announcing that he was decidedly unimpressed. “Dead, you say, coachman? That would be an impediment to movement, wouldn’t it?”
Duvall quickly blessed himself, muttering something in French that may have been “Blessed Mary protect us, and why couldn’t it have been the sweep?”
“A dead lady in the middle of the road,” Pierre mused again out loud, already moving toward the coach door. “I imagine I should see this deceased lady for myself.” With one foot in the road, he paused to order quietly: “Arm yourself, coachman, and instruct the outriders to scan the trees for horsemen. This may be a trap. There are still robbers along this roadway.
“Although I would have thought it would be easier to throw a dead tree into the road, rather than a dead lady,” he added under his breath as he disengaged Duvall’s convulsive grip on his coattail. “Please, my good friend,” he admonished with a smile. “Consider the fabric, if not your long hours with the iron.”
Pierre stepped completely onto the roadway, nodding almost imperceptibly to the two outriders while noting with mingled comfort and amusement that the coachman was now brandishing a very mean-looking blunderbuss at the ready. A quick look to the rear of the coach assured him that his Good Deed was still firmly anchored in the boot, as the streetwise Jeremy Holloway’s dirt-streaked face was peeping around the edge of the coach, his eyes wide as saucers. “Oi’ve got yer back, guv’nor,” the boy whispered hoarsely. “Don’t yer go worryin’ ’bout dat.”
“Such loyalty deserves a reward,” Pierre whispered back at the boy. “If we get out of this with our skin intact, Master Holloway, I shall allow you to sit up top with the coachman.” As the coachman gave out with an audible groan, Pierre began strolling toward the standing horses, his demeanor decidedly casual, as if he were merely taking the air in the park.
Once he had come up beside the off-leader, he could see the woman, who was, just as the coachman had reported, lying facedown in the roadway and looking, for all intents and purposes, extremely dead. She was dressed in a man’s drab grey cloak, its hood having fallen forward to hide her face as well as whatever gown she wore beneath its voluminous expanse. Her stockinged, shoeless feet—small feet attached to rather shapely slim ankles, he noted automatically, for he was a man who appreciated female beauty—extended from beneath the hem of the cloak, but her hands were pinned beneath her, out of sight.
He walked to within two paces of her, then used the tip of his cane to lightly nudge her in the rib cage. There was no response, either from the woman or from the heavily wooded perimeters of the road. If the woman was only feigning injury and in league with highwaymen, her compatriots were taking their sweet time in making their presence known.
Gingerly lowering himself onto his haunches, and being most careful not to muddy the knees of his skintight fawn buckskin breeches, Pierre took hold of the woman in the area of her shoulder and gently turned her onto her back.
“Ohh.” The sound was soft, barely more than a faint expulsion of air, but it had come from the woman. Obviously she had not yet expired, not that her life expectancy could be numbered in more than a few minutes or hours if she were to continue to lie in the middle of the roadway.
“She toes-cocked, guv’nor, or wot?”
Jeremy’s voice, coming from somewhere behind Pierre’s left shoulder, made him realize that he had been paying attention to the woman when he should have been listening for highwaymen. “She’s not dead, if that’s what that colorful expression is meant to imply,” he supplied tonelessly, pushing the hood from the woman’s face so that he could get a better look at her.
What he saw made him inhale involuntarily, his left brow raising a fraction in surprise. The woman was little more than a girl, and she was exceedingly beautiful, in an ethereal way. Masses of softly waving hair the color of midnight tangled across her ashen, dirt-smeared face, trailing strands that lovingly clung to the small, finely sculpted features that carried the unmistakable stamp of
