The Counterfeit Gentleman Read online

  Feeling quite disgusted with himself, and knowing how weak was his own resolution where this girl was concerned, he quickly left the bedroom. This time he closed the door firmly behind him, but he was quite unable to close his mind as easily to thoughts of what might have been—and what could never be.

  Despite Miss Pepperell’s fears, by tomorrow night the identity of her wicked cousin would doubtless be known, and in two more days, information could be laid against him in London. Which meant that in less than a sennight, just as soon as the miscreant was safely incarcerated, Miss Pepperell would no longer have any need of his protection ... or any reason to be sleeping in his bed.

  Glancing around the room, he realized that he was not well equipped for company. With only one bed in the cottage, he had but two options, the floor or the chair. Neither promised him a good night’s sleep, and his only consolation was that he had passed many a night under far worse conditions. At least the cottage had a good roof, and he had ample driftwood for a fire.

  In the end he decided upon the chair, but sleep was a long time in coming and was troubled by unpleasant dreams, in which he searched in vain for Miss Pepperell, whom he could hear crying to him for help.

  Bethia was not sure what woke her early the next morning, but all at once she was wide awake, her ears straining to hear the slightest sound. Everything was quiet—too quiet.

  Sliding noiselessly out from under the covers, she tiptoed over to the door, opened it a crack, and peered into the other room. She fully expected to see Mr. Rendel’s reassuring form, but he was not there.

  Immediately the desperate terrors of the day before flooded back, turning the little cottage into a place of fearful danger, of frightening shadows, of unseen perils lurking in every corner.

  The clock on the mantel began to strike the hour. Automatically she counted the chimes—five times they sounded. She had not slept too late and missed the rendezvous with the other smugglers, so why then had she been left alone? Had the murderers returned and done something horrible to Mr. Rendel?

  Frantically Bethia struggled against the waves of panic that washed over her, threatening to pull her down, to drown her. Desperately she fought against the desire to let loose her hold on sanity, to melt away into the darkness, to shrink down into nothingness.

  Then she heard footsteps outside, and she would have screamed if she had been able to take a breath.

  The door was slowly pushed open while time stretched out into an eternity of heartbeats. Then Mr. Rendel stepped into the room, his arms filled with wood for the fire, and at once everything returned to normal. The shadows retreated, and the room became a cozy place again, filled with warmth and the mouth-watering smells of food cooking, which made her realize how ravenously hungry she was—as if she had not eaten in three days, which indeed she had not.

  The only remnant of her terror was her heart, which still raced wildly in her chest. But perhaps it beat so quickly not from the residue of fear, but because the man closing and bolting the door behind him was altogether too attractive?

  “I am surprised you are awake already,” he said, dumping his armload of wood into a bin by the fireplace and then crossing to the table and pulling out a chair for her.

  Feeling as if her legs might give way at any moment, Bethia walked the few steps to where he was waiting and sat down. Unexpectedly, bitter memories intruded. She was not supposed to be here. Someone had intended that she should never see the light of another day, never eat another meal, never...

  “I was going to let you sleep another half hour.” Taking a bowl out of the cupboard, Mr. Rendel filled it from the iron kettle hanging above the fire, then set it down in front of her, the very casualness of his manner dispelling the dark thoughts from her mind.

  The kedgeree he offered her was not what she was accustomed to eating first thing in the morning. She was used to hot chocolate and a shirred egg and two slices of toast lightly spread with marmalade, not rice cooked with lentils and smoked fish.

  But although the food was peasant fare, the bowl Mr. Rendel handed her was fine bone china and the spoon he gave her was sterling, as were the candlesticks on the table. And the candles were wax, not tallow.

  While they ate in silence, she wondered again at the incongruities and inconsistencies of this man, whose polished manners were also more suited to a London drawing room than to a peasant’s cottage.

  When she finally pushed her bowl away, feeling remarkably restored in body and in spirit by the simple repast, there came a knock at the door—a sharp rat-tat, which immediately destroyed all her hard-won equanimity.

  “Stay here,” Mr. Rendel ordered her, as if he thought she could actually have forced her legs to move. She waited, trembling in her chair, while he opened the door a crack and spoke to someone outside.

  A few moments later, he returned to the table and tossed some articles of clothing down on it. Boy’s clothing, she saw, and somehow the sight of it made her realize just exactly what she had gotten herself into.

  “I think you are being remarkably foolish to insist upon coming with us,” Mr. Rendel said, and it was no more than she herself was thinking.

  With the hour for action at hand, Bethia could not find the same reckless courage she’d had in the middle of the night. But weighed against the fear she now felt at the thought of confronting her two abductors was the even more paralyzing fear of being left alone.

  Doing her best to show more determination than she was actually feeling, she said, “Since it is obvious that I have become an intolerable burden to you, I will not trouble you any longer. If you will but loan me some money, I shall take a stagecoach back to London and pick one of my eager suitors at random and marry him.”

  Digory cursed under his breath. Apparently, Miss Pepperell had had a better night’s sleep than he’d had. Her spirits were greatly restored even if her common sense appeared to be still woefully deficient.

  With an effort Digory kept his own voice calm. “I have no wish for you to leap blindly into marriage with a stranger, especially one who may tum out to be a villain, and I have never even hinted or implied that you should do such a foolish thing.”

  Grudgingly, she nodded her head.

  “The only thing I am objecting to this morning is taking you along on this expedition. You will have to be patient with me if I do not appear overjoyed at the prospect of putting you back into danger. Having saved your life once, I confess I am not looking forward to doing it a second time.”

  Miss Pepperell bit her lip and looked as if she were about to burst into tears, which only made Digory feel like a miserable cur, deserving only of a kick.

  “I do not mean to be a burden,” she said. “It is just that I feel safer when I am with you.”

  A single tear escaped to run down her cheek and past her quivering lips, and Digory would have liked to take her in his arms and comfort her. But there was even more danger in that direction, so instead he left her alone to finish her breakfast while he changed out of the ridiculous clothes of a gentleman.

  Once again wearing the smock and breeches of a smuggler, he emerged from his bedroom, and the sight of his guest sitting there looking quite bereft and dejected made him feel like some sort of monster. Wholly against his better judgment, he said, “I must own, I will undoubtedly be easier in my mind if I have you where I can see you. So you might as well see if those clothes fit.”

  They fit, but did little to disguise Miss Pepperell’s charms. She looked, in fact, like a very pretty young woman dressed in boy’s clothing. But after she tucked her hair up under one of his caps, Digory had to admit that from a distance her disguise would probably be adequate.

  Even so, he could not entirely shake off the feeling that he was making a mistake.

  Although she would never have admitted it to her companion, Bethia needed all the courage she possessed to follow Mr. Rendel out of his cozy cottage and into the chill air of a Cornish morning. Not even the roosters were awake yet, and the only t
hings moving on the horizon were the thin columns of smoke rising lazily from the chimneys of the cottages they hurried past.

  Any pride she might have felt in her own fortitude deserted her when they arrived at the top of the path leading down to the beach. If there had been no fog obscuring the sea, she might have managed alone. But staring down into the soft white obscurity, she knew she could not reenter that world of terror. Before she could prevent it, a soft cry of despair escaped her lips.

  Mistaking the cause of her fear, Mr. Rendel turned back and held out his hand. “The path looks steep from above, but it is not really dangerous. If heights bother you, you can hold onto me.”

  She wanted very much to run back to the cottage like a craven coward, but instead she took the hand he was offering her and discovered she had enough courage—barely enough—to follow him down the path into the formless world waiting below.

  Even when the other smugglers appeared noiselessly out of the fog, she did not even shriek with terror ... but then she did not let go of Mr. Rendel’s hand, either.

  “There’s a boat down at the other end of the beach,” a man she identified as Little Davey said in a low voice. He was, in her opinion, not the size of man anyone could call little, except that he was slightly smaller than Big Davey.

  “It’s mine,” Mr. Rendel said. “You’d better take care of it, or it will make the murderers wary.”

  Harry appeared next, carrying the hastily constructed dummy over his shoulder. To Bethia’s way of thinking it would never fool anyone. But once the fog lifted, an hour or so after they had finished all the arrangements and hidden themselves behind assorted boulders, the dummy looked entirely too real. Harry had weighed it down with concealed rocks, so that although the waves tugged at it, the “body” did not float away.

  Even knowing it was nothing but straw and old sheeting with seaweed for hair, Bethia could not help shuddering every time she caught sight of the gruesome object. So easily might she have been the one lying there; just so would her body have looked after the tide carried it in. Unable to look at the dummy without trembling, she shut her eyes. But she could not close her ears to the waves breaking with monotonous regularity on the beach. They sounded like the ticking of an eternal clock that never winds down, counting ... counting ... counting the ever decreasing minutes of her life. And with each passing hour, the sun beat down with increased intensity.

  She was just beginning to think that they were waiting in vain—that the two villains had forgotten all about retrieving the body—when above the sound of the surf she heard voices. As they grew louder, she recognized them, and instinctively she moved closer to her rescuer, only with difficulty managing not to clutch Mr. Rendel’s arm in panic.

  His muscles taut, his body coiled like a spring for the attack, he did not look at her, but only murmured out of the corner of his mouth, “Remember, you gave me your word that you will stay here behind the rocks until it is all over.”

  Too frightened of the approaching men to speak, she could not force even a single word of acknowledgment out of her constricted throat.

  Mr. Rendel turned to look at her, and the devil was in his eyes. For a moment she was more terrified of him and his wrath than she was of the kidnappers.

  Then he smiled and touched her cheek lightly with his hand, and her fears—all of her fears—subsided, and she felt safe again.

  As if from an immense distance rather than just a few yards away, she heard Jacky-boy cry out enthusiastically, “There’s the body, right where I told you it’d be. Now’ll you admit I know my job?”

  The two men speeded up their steps until they were almost running, and as soon as they were past the waiting smugglers, Mr. Rendel gave a low whistle. With a suddenness that astounded her, the small cove erupted with violence.

  Bethia could not bear to watch the pain that the men were inflicting on one another, and yet she could not tear her glance away. To her astonishment, some of the smugglers were grinning, as if they were enjoying the fray.

  Her ears were filled with the sound of men shouting, and the thud of fists striking flesh and bone, and Bethia winced with each blow, as if she herself were being battered.

  Then with the same abruptness with which it had begun, the fight was all over. From her hiding place behind a boulder, she saw that Big Davey was holding one of the villains with his arms twisted behind his back, and the large man named Jacky-boy was lying motionless on the sand.

  Using his foot, Harry turned the man over, then said, “He’s dead. ’Twould appear he fell on his own knife.”

  Mr. Rendel nodded his head once, and then, as if it were commonplace for him to have dead bodies at his feet, he turned his attention to the other kidnapper.

  “We want a name,” Mr. Rendel said, and Bethia heard a world of power and arrogance in his voice. The captured man should have been intimidated, for surrounded as he was by five strong men, he had to realize how effortlessly he could be dispatched to join his companion, who was surely feeling the unremitting fires of hell by now.

  “ ’Tis you who need to explain yourself,” the man said quite brazenly. “My companion and I were merely taking a walk and enjoying a bit of brisk sea air when you fell upon us like savages.”

  “We want the name of the man who hired you,” Mr. Rendel repeated, and Big Davey gave a jerk on the man’s arms for added emphasis.

  But even with his face contorted in pain, the man persisted in his denials. “I do not know ... what you are talking about,” he managed to say with visible effort. “I am innocent of whatever it is ... you think I have done, and I demand the right to put my case before a magistrate.”

  “You are lying,” Bethia cried out, springing to her feet and dashing out onto the sand. “You and your partner admitted quite openly that you were paid to kill me.”

  The man looked at her as if she were a ghost returned from the grave, and his face became bloodless.

  Confronting the man who would have murdered her without a qualm, Bethia was amazed to discover that he was much smaller than she remembered him. “You will tell me which of my cousins paid you to drown me, or these men will not hesitate to force the truth from you.”

  Goggle-eyed, whether from pain or from thinking himself confronted by an unearthly spirit, the man could only stare at her, his mouth agape.

  Bethia was about to repeat her demands when a shot rang out and Big Davey let out a yelp of pain. The captured man instantly wrenched himself free and was off down the beach with the smugglers in hot pursuit.

  Before Bethia fully comprehended what was happening, she was thrown down onto the sand and a heavy weight came down on top of her, squashing the breath out of her body.

  The voice cursing steadily in her ear she recognized as belonging to Mr. Rendel, and she was about to demand that he let her up, when he caught her under her arms, dragged her to her feet, and shoved her toward the cliff, which offered them protection from the assassin or assassins above them.

  Only half the curses, unfortunately, were directed toward the man on the cliff who had shot at them. The other half of the imprecations were aimed at her, and it was not hard for her to grasp the basic idea that Mr. Rendel would have infinitely preferred it if she were safely back in his cottage, or failing that, if she had followed his explicit orders, which were simple enough for an idiot to comprehend, and not taken a step away from the boulder behind which he had told her to conceal herself.

  Mr. Harcourt’s hand shook as he aimed the second dueling pistol. Shooting at a man, he had discovered, was much more difficult than making a perfect score at Manton’s Shooting Gallery. And if he missed this time ... but he could not miss. His very life depended upon it.

  Lying flat on his stomach on the top of the cliff, he waited, his sights trained on Dick Fane, who foolishly thought he was running toward freedom, but who was actually hurrying toward his own death.

  Harcourt knew he would have but this one opportunity; there would be no time to reload either of his
pistols. Should he aim at Fane’s head? It seemed at this moment a very small target. But if he aimed at the chest, though he might fatally wound Fane, still the man might live long enough to speak a name—to betray who had hired him.

  But on the other hand, the path Fane was now struggling up was narrow, so that even if the bullet did not strike a vital organ and kill him instantly, he would surely lose his footing, and the rocks below would guarantee that he died quickly.

  Taking a deep breath, then letting it partway out, the man with the gun slowly squeezed the trigger.

  Fane crumpled and fell, and even before his body struck the rocks, Harcourt was up and away, running toward his horse, more acutely aware of his own mortality than he had ever been before. The back of his neck prickled, as if a gun were even now being aimed at him—as if at any moment a bullet might slam into his back, throwing him to the ground.

  Jerking the reins free, he sprang into the saddle, kicked the horse into a gallop, and was a good quarter of a mile away from the cove before he finally managed to get his left foot into the stirrup.

  Bethia peered around Mr. Rendel’s broad shoulders and saw that two of his men were returning. The slump of their shoulders and the scowls on their faces made it obvious that the assassins had escaped.

  Even so, it was singularly obtuse of them not to notice that their leader was in an unreasonable frame of mind.

  “We should have left a man topside,” Big Davey said gruffly, and Harry added weakly, “It appears the third murderer came on horseback.”

  “So you let them both get away?” Mr. Rendel’s voice was so fierce, Bethia was amazed that either of his men had the nerve to reply.

  “Not exactly,” Big Davey said, glancing sheepishly at Harry, as if expecting some help from that quarter. “Apparently the man on the cliff was not aiming at me, which is probably why I’m still standing here with only a nicked arm.”