Hugo and the Maiden Read online

  His plan for the future was a simple one: get control of Solange’s—one way or another—and operate the brothel until he died. He had no desire to move to a cottage in the country and grow turnips and raise chickens—or whatever the hell it was an old whore did once they didn’t whore anymore. He enjoyed what he did and had no interest in quitting.

  He flicked the stub of his cigar into the flames and took another pull from his brandy. He didn’t want a lover and he didn’t want friends; all he wanted was money, lots and lots and lots of money. At the end of the day, money was the only thing that mattered. Without it, you were weak, vulnerable, and at the mercy of the rest of the world. And the world was a cold, cruel, ugly place and human beings were the worst part of it. The only person on the entire planet that Hugo trusted was Hugo.

  And if that bothered other people? Well, they could go sod themselves. He didn’t give a damn who hated him, how much, or why. In fact, he was used to people hating him. Hell, his own father had hated him so much that he’d sold Hugo to a stranger—and a twisted one, at that.

  So, yes—thank you very much—he was quite comfortable with hatred.

  “Mister Hugo?”

  He looked up to find one of the maids, Mindy, standing in the doorway. She was pale, shaking, and wringing her hands.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he asked, putting down his glass and getting to his feet.

  “It’s Mrs. Maitland. Something has happened to her and—” She shook her head and looked away, biting her lower lip.

  Hope surged in his breast. “Is she … ill?” Or perhaps dead?

  God. He was such a bastard.

  “Oh, please, Mr. Hugo, come and see, I—I can’t bear to look at her.”

  Hugo couldn’t bear to look at the woman, either. He decided poor Mindy was too overwrought to see the humor in such a comment.

  He followed her from the room, not even bothering to put on his slippers. “Is Mr. Morgan with her?” he asked as they padded down the hushed corridor.

  “No, sir. She’s all alone.”

  Laura’s quarters were in the same part of the house as his—the employees lived in one area—which meant he and Mindy had to go all the way to the other side of the building.

  By the time they reached the stairs leading to Laura’s apartment Hugo was breathing hard, mainly from suppressed excitement: if Laura died, Hugo had first right of refusal on her half of the business. He knew it made him a bad person to hope something had befallen her, but that’s because he was a bad person. He’d made peace with that years ago.

  Mindy stopped in front of Laura’s door, which was ajar. There was a sliver of light coming from somewhere beyond the door and Hugo stuck his head inside.

  “Laura?”

  Blinding agony exploded in his skull, his vision went black, and Hugo dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  “Tie ’is hands, ’e’s a skinny bastard but ’e’s strong,” a voice he didn’t recognize ordered.

  Hugo shook his head to try and clear his vision, and promptly vomited from the pain.

  “Bleedin’ ’ell,” somebody muttered.

  Hugo tried to reach up and keep his skull from exploding, but his wrists had been tied behind his back. When had that happened?

  “Pick ’im up.”

  Rough hands grabbed him around his middle and he went flying through the air and landed on something hard—a shoulder?—just before his head smacked into another hard object.

  Blackness and pain pulled him under.

  When he came to, he was lying face-down on rough, smelly leather.

  “Wasss happening?” His words came out choked with drool.

  “You ’ear that? The tough bastard is awake again.”

  Somebody chuckled.

  “I fink he needs anovver sleeping draught.”

  Once again Hugo’s head exploded.

  This time, he gave up swimming against the darkness and slid into blessed oblivion.

  Chapter 2

  The Island of Stroma

  North Coast of Scotland

  Martha Pringle hurried toward the cluster of lights moving erratically at the north end of the island.

  Everyone on Stroma knew when the church bell rang at this hour of the night that a ship had failed to clear the rocks. Now it was just a matter of how bad things were. Or how good they were—depending on a person’s point of view.

  She grimaced at the cynical thought. You should be ashamed of yourself, Martha Jane Pringle.

  “Have a care, Martha, the trouble will wait for us to get there safely,” her father said, his words more of a wheeze.

  “I’m sorry, Father.” She slowed her pace, if not for her own safety, then certainly for his. At seventy-six Jonathan Pringle was as agile as a man half his age. But Martha knew that old bones were brittle, and it would only take one break to put an end to his active existence; people did not mend quickly at his age.

  “Did you bring the black bag, Martha?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “And the torches we made last month?”

  “Yes, Father. I brought everything.” Martha hoped most of it wouldn’t be needed, and that the lights meant something other than what she feared.

  They reached the tiny shingle beach in time to see several of the distinctive boats that the islanders called yoles push off the shore and head out toward the dark shadow near the rocks.

  “My, that is a large ship,” her father said as Robert Clark approached.

  Mr. Clark was a strapping, handsome man who acted in the capacity of harbormaster, although Stroma had no actual harbor. Only small boats could be brought near Stroma as the beach was the sole point of access, with sheer, craggy cliffs bordering the rest of the island.

  “Good evening to you, Miss Pringle,” Mr. Clark said, nodding at Martha, his admiring look one that made her cheeks heat. Mr. Clark was attractive and unmarried, and Martha wasn’t the only woman in their tiny village who found his person engaging.

  “Good evening, Mr. Pringle,” he said to her father. “She is a big vessel,” he said in response to her father’s comment, crossing thick arms over his muscular chest as he turned to stare out at the dark form. “Jem Packard got close enough to see she’s called The King’s Folly. I’ve never seen her in these waters before, so I reckon she must have wandered off course.”

  Martha could not tell from Mr. Clark’s expression whether the ship had received any help wandering into the rocks that surrounded that part of the island. Although her father said nothing, she knew the question would be weighing heavily on his mind, as well.

  The only area of dissention between the islanders and their vicar—an outsider to Stroma for all that he’d served the small community for two decades—was their wrecking activities.

  To a man—or woman—they would have denied it, but the people of Stroma were known up and down the coast as wreckers: men and women who lured ships to their ruin and stripped them of their cargos.

  Clark cleared his throat. “The ship looks like a transport, which makes me think her destination was New South Wales.”

  “You mean a ship for prisoners?” her father asked, his eyes widening in disbelief.

  “Aye.”

  “And yet she is up here?” Martha asked.

  “It is unusual, there is no denying that,” Clark admitted. “My guess is the convicts were locked in the hold—maybe even chained. I think many won’t make it out alive.”

  “Jesus wept,” her father said, swaying like a reed in the wind.

  Martha put her arm around him and sucked in a breath when she realized how fragile his shoulders felt beneath her hand. Jonathan Pringle had never been a big man, but he’d always been healthy. Now he felt as insubstantial as a bird.

  “Martha brought our medical bag,” her father told Mr. Clark. “Where would you like us to set up?”

  “Actually, I think you should open up the meeting hall to treat survivors.”

  “That’s quite a walk
. You wouldn’t rather use the church?” Mr. Pringle asked.

  The church was the largest building on Stroma and also close to the beach.

  When Mr. Clark hesitated, the vicar smiled. “I know tomorrow is Sunday, but the Lord will understand why we can’t have our usual service.”

  Clark looked uncomfortable. “We’ll need the church for other purposes, sir. I’m afraid the dead will outnumber the living this night.”

  ◆◆◆

  It was ironic that Hugo probably owed his life to being a piss-poor sailor.

  From the moment he’d woken up half naked aboard the ship, he’d begun puking.

  Shackled and chained to men on both sides of him and crammed in with convicts all around him, he’d quickly become the most unpopular man onboard: nobody wanted to get near him.

  Sometime in the middle of the third or fourth night—he’d lost track—the prisoners around him had finally had enough of the inhumane conditions and began to riot. Hugo could have told them that his stomach was, by then, as empty as a killer’s conscience and that if they’d but waited another few hours he would have coughed up his innards and that would have been the end of it.

  But his fellow convicts had long since lost any interest in being reasonable. A riot with men chained to one another could only lead to one thing: some men living, some men dying.

  Once the violence broke out, those in charge of the prisoners simply shut the two huge hatches to the ship’s hold, periodically opening them just enough to toss down food and lower the occasional bucket of water.

  Hugo discovered that the best way to avoid becoming a dead convict was to be so covered in puke that nobody wanted to touch you. So, he crammed his back up against the splintery hull and watched the fighting. Puking weakly from time to time.

  It was soon evident which of the convicts had been arrested for crimes against property and which for crimes against their fellow man. The compulsion to steal a loaf of bread—usually driven by hunger—could not compete with the compulsion to kill or rape—two actions Hugo had witnessed more than once growing up in the rookeries.

  Luckily for him, the two men chained closest to him were of the former variety. When the killing began, they both squashed themselves against Hugo like hens huddling for warmth, no longer put off by a little puke.

  The three of them watched the horrifyingly lethal proceedings with growing terror as the days passed, their curiosity leavened with a healthy dose of self-interest.

  It took no time for one prisoner to reach the top of the pile. The man was a mountain of a brute whose small, piggy eyes were those of a person who enjoyed exercising dominion over others. Once he’d made it clear that he was in charge, the situation in the hold settled into an uneasy peace.

  But then no food or water came down the following day, and none the day after.

  The big man—Graybow was the name tattooed in uneven blue letters across his massive chest—seemed to go mad on the third day, sawing off the foot of the man attached to him with a wicked, rusty blade he appeared to have snatched from thin air.

  The prisoner on Hugo’s right prayed loudly while the one on his left had taken up where Hugo left off and was puking—or at least heaving, since there was nothing left to bring up.

  Graybow then sawed off the foot of the man on his left. When he’d finished, he forced the terrified prisoners nearest to him to form a human platform, which he climbed to reach the hatch doors, and began beating on them.

  This went on for hours.

  As the daylight that bled through the planks overhead faded, Hugo looked from the maniac’s broad back to the rest of the convicts. Other than a few who were actively supporting Graybow—or themselves sawing off body parts of the men chained to them—most of the prisoners were as terrified as Hugo’s two neighbors.

  Hugo no longer had the energy to be afraid; he would rather die then and there—at least he’d escape the vile smell in the hold—than suffer through another day in Hell.

  “Do you want to live?” The words came out of his mouth without direction from his brain.

  His two companions’ heads swiveled in his direction.

  “You heard me,” he said.

  When neither spoke, he turned to the one who’d been praying, a younger man who resembled a human matchstick with his flaming red hair. “What about you, Vicar? Do you want to live?”

  The lad nodded.

  Hugo turned to the other man. “How about you, Puker?”

  Eyes wide, the second man nodded, too.

  “Good, now shut up and listen; this is what we’re going to do.”

  Chapter 3

  Martha and several others worked quickly to turn the meeting room into a field hospital. There wasn’t much they could do with the long wooden benches except cover them with sheets, blankets, and anything else that might cushion their patients and keep them warm.

  Women from the small farms that dotted the island arrived carrying what little they could spare—which was still more than most could afford—and stayed to help once the patients began to arrive.

  Stroma was a hard rock of a place that the rest of Britain had long forgotten. Although it was only separated from the mainland by the two miles of the Pentland Firth, the weather often ensured those two miles were as good as two hundred and Stroma could be cut off for weeks at a time from the outside world.

  Of the three hundred and seventy-six people who lived on the island, only Martha and her father had moved here from the mainland. Jonathan Pringle had already been fifty-six when he’d accepted the long-vacant living on Stroma.

  Not until Jonathan, his wife, and nine-month-old daughter arrived on Stroma did the vicar discover that the last clergyman to preach from the pulpit in the gray stone church building had been a follower of Mr. Penn, who—when he’d left to go to the Colonies—had taken half the islanders with him.

  The remaining islanders had decided the village population could not survive another charismatic nonconformist and the church had been empty for decades.

  As opposed as they were to a new spiritual leader, it hadn’t taken long for the reserved but kind-hearted islanders to accept the soft-spoken vicar and his wife and baby.

  “I’ve brought a can of hot lobster stew, Martha.”

  Martha looked up from the sparse contents of her medical bag to find Mrs. Morag Fergusson standing behind an enormous steaming cauldron.

  “My goodness, Mrs. Fergusson. Please tell me you didn’t carry that all the way here?”

  The older woman smiled, exposing a mouth missing half its complement of teeth. “No, Small Cailean brung it.” Mrs. Fergusson’s nephew, referred to by all as Small Cailean to distinguish him from his father, Big Cailean—who’d died many years ago—was easily the biggest man on the island, even though he was only sixteen. It was one of nature’s jests that he was also one of its most gentle and timid. He smiled shyly down at Martha.

  “Thank you, Cailean,” Martha said.

  His pale gray eyes slid away, his wind-reddened cheeks flushing darker, and he nodded. He rarely spoke and could not read or write. Martha had tried to teach him more than once, his huge form hunched over a tiny desk in the little schoolhouse where she often helped during the winter and spring, but the other children—from five to fifteen—would taunt him when she wasn’t watching and he always ran away. Thankfully it never occurred to him to strike back at any of his tormentors, as much as they might deserve it.

  “Get back down the hill, Small Cailean,” his aunt ordered sharply. She tended to employ a rough tongue with her nephew, and Martha was grateful that Cailean didn’t appear to notice. “They’ll have need of yer back at the church.”

  Cailean scuttled out of the house and “down the hill,” which was really a misnomer as the highest point on the island, Cairn Hill, wasn’t even two hundred feet above sea level.

  Just as Small Cailean left, Mr. Clark entered. “Are you ready, Miss Pringle?”

  Martha nodded.

  And then her
patients began to arrive.

  ◆◆◆

  Some Hours Later …

  “Put me down, you great cabbage! Good God almighty—don’t any of you people speak the King’s bloody English?”

  The voice cut through the din of the meeting house like a cleaver.

  Martha tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and looked up to find the voice’s owner a few feet away, swaddled and cradled like a baby in Small Cailean’s arms. The giant was grinning as he stared down at the irate man, whom he held as easily as a child.

  Martha stood up and stretched, biting back a groan before resting her hands on her hips. “I understand English, although I cannot say it is the King’s.”

  The stranger’s head whipped around and she startled. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting—his voice and diction had been clipped and proper—but his face…well, it was all harsh angles and dramatic planes.

  His cheekbones were like blades and his eyes were so dark you couldn’t tell pupil from iris. They were also heavy-lidded and oddly tilted and it struck her that he looked like a satyr, or at least what she imagined one would look like.

  “Who the devil are you?” he demanded, his black eyes sweeping over her quickly and dismissing her even quicker.

  Martha’s face burned under his cursory examination. “I am Miss Martha Pringle, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would not use such language.”

  He blinked, and his eyebrows, twin black-as-coal slashes, shot up until they disappeared beneath the sheaf of pitch-colored hair that hung over his forehead. “Is that so, Miss Martha Pringle? Well, perhaps you would tell this great bloody looby—”

  Martha approached the man, as much as she didn’t want to. “That is not the type of thing we call each other here, Mr.—”

  His thin, mobile lips curved into an unpleasant smile as he crossed his arms, looking for all the world like he was lounging on a chaise instead of lying in another man’s arms. If bloody, feces-smeared, vomit-encrusted, and soaking wet men did such a thing as lounge on chaises.