Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

" T hat's not a bush ," Frances whispered, aghast. "That's a hole ."

"It's not a hole ," Evan returned, mocking her tone. It was really more like a ditch. "And what do you call that?"

He pointed at an admittedly sad-looking shrubbery.

"A stick?" she asked. "Maybe two sticks, if I'm being generous?"

Damn him, but she made him want to laugh. Even now, when the promise of answers made him want to leap out of his skin.

She was, he privately admitted—because he refused to endure her smugness if he said as much out loud—right to have insisted on accompanying him. He didn't think she'd be much help in a physical altercation, histrionics about being left behind to marry a farmer's son notwithstanding. But her presence had forced him to be cautious, to be sensible, even when every part of him wanted to forge ahead and rail at anyone who may have had something to do with his sister's death.

Her ability to needle him even in the most serious of circumstances was also surprisingly helpful at keeping him out of his own head.

But the sun was starting to make the horizon dusky with the promise of a new day. He needed to start moving if he hoped to retain the element of surprise.

"Frances," he said firmly. "Please hide."

She bit her lip and he realized that while her jibes may have relaxed him, they'd only been covering up the way in which she was decidedly not relaxed.

She let out a long, low breath. "Fine," she said levelly. "I will. But don't die."

Now he wanted to be the one reassuring her with levity. "Kiss for luck?" he asked.

She scowled at him. "You can have your kiss when you come back not dead ," she retorted. "Now excuse me while I climb into this muddy hole."

As he walked the last hundred or so paces to the worn old mill, he did so with a ghost of a smile on his lips.

All levity vanished, however, at the first flicker of movement in the dark.

The building was that kind of stone edifice one could find scattered throughout the English countryside, half living monument, half mausoleum to its bygone heyday. The bulky stone that made up the main building looked as though it could stand for a thousand years more, even as the wooden mill wheel looked like the tragic loser in a longstanding battle with the weather. It was a small operation—or had been back when the mill had ground wheat into flour. The little snake of a river would not provide enough force for a larger scale of production.

Still, it looked like the kind of place that should be bustling with life and activity, and which looked unspeakably wrong in its current, nearly abandoned state.

Evan could not have ignored the emerging signs of life if he'd been trying.

The man who emerged from around the side of the building was the broad, burly type that one could find on any street near the London docks, for all that this iteration of the type was visibly past his prime. He was drawn in the kind of rough-hewn lines that suggested a practical kind of strength, the kind that could haul cargo or gut a man with the same unaffected way of moving.

Or, Evan observed as he dropped back into the shadows, watching his prey, the kind of man who could carry a large cordon of wood over one shoulder, as he did now. The logs were clearly heavy, but Evan didn't focus on the man's show of prowess. Instead, he noted where the load limited the man's line of sight.

Evan was a duke's son, a duke's heir. He'd been raised with the best fencing masters, had whiled away afternoons in sports clubs with other well-to-do young men who played at fighting with decorum, their conduct constrained by rules that ensured that not one drop of blue blood was spilled.

But Evan was also a man who had spent portions of the past three years digging through the country's criminal classes to find clues to his sister's murder. One didn't go through such a search without a scuffle or two.

That, and he'd fought with Benedict a time or two, as boyhood friends were wont to do, and Benedict was a bloody giant . In short, Evan was not afraid of a fight—and he was not afraid to get his hands dirty.

Besides, he thought with grim determination as he crept up behind his target, did Dowling and his ilk fight fair when they killed my sister ?

Evan didn't feel so much as a flicker of remorse as he seized the man by the shoulder, using the way the wood unbalanced him to smash him against the side of the building, leading head to crack into stone.

"What the?—"

Evan had to hand it to the man—for all his age and the fact that getting attacked outside his own home had to come as a surprise, the fellow was quick to respond. He dropped the wood and swerved quickly enough that instead of striking the side of the building with an incapacitating thunk , the man only glanced the stone with his head, taking the brunt of the impact on his shoulder instead.

It wasn't enough to save him, however. The man went down, not able to keep his feet, and had only enough time to look up and exclaim in a low-born accent, "Who in the blazes are you ?" before Evan's swift clip to his chin sent the man tumbling into unconsciousness.

Evan shook out his hand. He'd not even broken a sweat.

If this struck him as too easy, he was, alas, right, for the man's cry was enough to bring another arrival, similarly burly, but young and hale. The first man's son, no doubt.

"Pa?" the younger man asked, squinting into the darkness. Then, realizing that the person standing before him was not, in fact, his father, he repeated the older man's words.

"Who in the blazes are you ?"

It was about then that Evan threw one of the logs from the older man's abandoned bundle at the burly lad.

It was an awkward, underhanded throw—and an awkward, underhanded trick—and the lad dodged it easily. No matter. Evan had not so much intended to hit him as he had hoped to knock the young man off kilter, and that much was accomplished by the lad's hasty sidestep.

It was the subsequent application of Evan's shoulder to his midsection that knocked him on his arse.

This younger assailant was not so easily subdued as the first. He reacted quickly—not quickly enough to save his balance, but with enough agility that he ensured Evan came down with him.

Evan didn't try to fight the pull down; he knew it was no use, not when fighting a man this much bulkier than he.

When he got back to London—assuming this fellow didn't turn him into mincemeat—Evan was going to buy Benedict Hoskins a bottle of his favorite brandy as thanks for being such a bloody behemoth. Marquessates did not otherwise offer much expertise in fighting those larger than oneself.

And Evan needed those skills now. When the lad rolled them so that Evan was beneath him, he quickly raised one of his ham-sized fists and aimed a punch that would have crushed the bones of Evan's face like they were the soft skin of a ripe berry. Instead, Evan jerked his head to the side—a motion his neck would not thank him for later—so that the lad punched directly into the hard, rocky ground.

When the lad reared back with a howl that revealed him to be fighting with brute strength rather than skill—a seasoned fighter never would have given Evan such an opening—Evan applied his free arm to the man's cheekbone, his forehead to the fellow's nose, and his knee to his gut in a series of movements that left the bruiser tumbling off him.

This time, the young man did not recover so quickly. He scuttled back on his hands while Evan regained his feet in a flash. The man looked up at him, chest heaving, expression almost wounded.

If he didn't suspect the man's complicity in his sister's murder, Evan might have thought this fair. After all, one never did expect to be attacked in the predawn of one's own yard. Couldn't be a pleasant way to start the day.

But he did suspect such complicity, so when the man burbled out a wet gasp, asking piteously, "Is this about that girl? After so long?" Evan did not cease his movements to ask any questions. Instead, he brought the front of his boot against the man's temple, leaving him slumped unconscious just like his father.

After this second battle, Evan was considerably disheveled. He took a moment to catch his breath, then to check himself for injuries. The blood pounded too hot in his veins for any hurts to make themselves known, which, Evan decided, meant no terrible physical harm had occurred.

The heat of a fight could obscure many things, but it didn't make a broken arm suddenly whole again. Evan could move, and he could fight more if necessary, and that was all that mattered at the moment.

"Right," he said crisply, looking down at the two prone forms. They were both breathing. Evan reminded himself that this was good, that he was no murderer, and that these two men were only suspected villains in Grace's kidnapping—he could not harm them further, no matter how much his soul ached for vengeance.

He could, however, stop them from attacking him again. That much was only sensible. He used the loose cording that the older man had used to hold together his cordon of wood to lash the unconscious assailants' hands and feet together.

He felt no guilt about pulling the ropes tight. The younger man's final words had all but confirmed that he'd had something to do with Grace's death.

That girl . He hadn't even known her name—or not cared to remember it. The thought made Evan's lip curl.

But there would be time aplenty to worry over all this after they were safe. After he had his answers.

Evan squinted out into the rising sun, where he thought he glimpsed the sight of a small, red head peeking out from inside a hole—er, from behind a bush, that was.

He raised a hand to signal that he was fine after the scuffle, and the glint of sunlight on fiery locks disappeared.

"You had better be thinking ‘I have the good sense to stay where I've been left,'" Evan grumbled.

Given Frances, it seemed unlikely, but she did not appear again.

Good. That was good—even if he might have enjoyed her company just about then.

But it was more important that she was safe.

And he had work left to do.

The sun was coming up; there was no time to spare before this illicit adventure threatened to become a public spectacle.

The door where the two unconscious men had exited was the obvious point of entry, but Evan forced himself to take a careful circuit of the mill before he entered. There were two other ways into the building, one that looked like it would have been a business entrance, when the mill was operational, and another that seemed to lead only to a small chamber that serviced the water wheel. Both these doors, when he tugged experimentally at their handles, were locked; the water wheel door was crusted over with dirt, suggesting it had gone unused for some time.

"Good and bad," he muttered, feeling foolish for wishing he was speaking with Frances. She had a way about her that settled him—when she wasn't intentionally driving him to madness or consuming him with incomprehensible desire, that was. "Fewer ways for others to get in; fewer ways for me to get out."

He'd learned that lesson skulking around warehouses in the weeks after Grace's disappearance. He hadn't found anything related to his sister, but he'd learned the value of having an alternate escape route, if one wished to leave a place with one's life and limbs intact.

Given that he'd already battled two assailants, however, and Mr. Creedy hadn't mentioned that "the strange people at the old mill" were really "a veritable battalion of over-muscled men," Evan suspected him safe from cutthroats.

Even so, he proceeded with caution when he looped back around to the side of the building where he'd started and cautiously entered through the door where the two men had exited.

The space inside the building looked like any small country home, not that Evan was any great expert in such things. But there was a small fire still banked in an area clearly used as a kitchen, for all that it wasn't separated from the remainder of the room, likely to maximize the effects of the hearth. An iron stove stood nearby, connected so it could use the same chimney as the fireplace. Atop was a kettle, a dented copper pan, and a small pot, all clean if clearly well-used.

Moving quickly and quietly, Evan crept up the stairs at the back of the room. There were two rooms that were clearly occupied, though currently empty, coverlets thrown off and beds not yet made for the day. He rifled quickly through the small trunks in each room but found nothing of interest. No papers, no hidden weapons. The only book in sight was a battered old Bible, clearly the family book, but it was covered in a fine layer of dust as if it hadn't been disturbed in some time.

The other two upstairs rooms were not in use; their interiors were empty aside from an old, battered table standing alone in the middle of one.

Nothing strange, then, Evan concluded, even as suspicion pricked at him. There was something about this place, he just knew it.

The ancient wood creaked under his feet as he crept back downstairs. This couldn't be everything. It just couldn't be.

If he didn't find anything in the house, he'd have to drag the two men from downstairs back inside and wait for them to regain consciousness before questioning them. That would be a messy, time-consuming endeavor, especially if they realized that Evan didn't have any proof to leverage against them.

They had no real reason to tell him anything. That was the problem. He could try to throw around aristocratic privilege, though that didn't seem likely to hold much sway, not when he was alone, with only one very small woman to back him up.

And even the thought of those men so much as looking at Frances askance put his teeth on edge.

He was starting to genuinely fear that this whole bloody trip had been for naught—that he'd compromised Frances' reputation for naught; that he'd made her hide in a hole for naught—when he heard it.

The quiet rasp of cloth against wood.

His eyes darted around the space, assessing. When he looked to the darkest corner of the room, he cursed himself for missing it earlier.

There, under the shadow caused by the stairs, was a narrow door, the kind that tapered at the top to close off a small pantry or perhaps even the entrance to a root cellar. It wasn't a room, not really, but it was more than big enough a place for someone to hide.

And someone, his ears were telling him, was hiding there. And that someone was going to give him answers .

He strode across the room and seized the thin handle, which was so old that the metal felt almost fragile beneath his grip. It didn't immediately open when he yanked; looking down, he spotted the wedge of wood that kept the door secure. Carelessly he kicked it aside, then wrenched the door open.

He blinked down into the dark space only to find a pair of eyes blinking back up at him in return.

"Oh, hello," Grace said. "You came."