Stephanie Laurens – A Buccaneer At Heart (страница 17)

The tiny lane was the perfect spot from which to observe all comings and goings from the priest’s abode. Well and good. But the waiting was getting on her nerves.

She shifted on her seat. She lifted her reticule, feeling the weight of the pistol inside it, then set it back down on the seat beside her. She had no idea if anything would come of this covert surveillance. If she was asked to explain what she expected to happen and what she hoped to achieve, she wouldn’t be able to formulate any real answer beyond that this was something she could do, and she had no other viable avenue to pursue.

And, deep down, some instinct—that conviction of the emotions her mother called a woman’s intuition—insisted that this was the way to go, the path to follow if she wanted to find Will.

Everything revolved about Undoto. Surely, through watching him, she would see something and learn something more.

Thus far, all she’d seen had been an old woman who had come out of the side gate into the narrow lane and fed table scraps to the neighborhood dogs.

Stifling a sigh, Aileen fixed her gaze on the front of Undoto’s house and lectured herself for the umpteenth time to be patient.

She heard the men approaching before she saw them; the tramp of heavy feet coming down the dusty street reverberated through the quiet and reached through the open carriage windows. Eagerly leaning forward, she peered out through the small window; she prayed Dave was following her instructions and pretending to be asleep on the box.

As it happened, the image Dave projected mattered not at all. The four large armed men who appeared from the left and turned off the street onto the path to Undoto’s front door didn’t spare even a glance toward the carriage. Their arrogant confidence was absolute, demonstrated unequivocally in their swaggering gaits, in the soft laugh they shared as the leader reached out to thump a meaty fist on the door.

The moon was high, casting a silvery light over the scene. Aileen studied the four men. Although all were deeply tanned, the leader appeared English, the others of mixed European heritage. They were at ease, relaxed, transparently at home. This was their territory, and in it, they reigned supreme; they didn’t expect to be challenged.

She had the sudden thought that if they’d known she was watching, they would merely have leered and shrugged it off as of no account.

The door opened, and Undoto stood framed in the doorway. Even though the narrow porch was poorly lit, she could make out his smile of welcome. He shook hands with the leader and stood aside to wave him and his three cohorts into the house, beaming and exchanging comments and claps on the shoulders with the men as they filed past.

Close acquaintances, at the very least. Almost brothers-in-arms.

Undoto stepped back and shut the door.

Aileen sat back.

Now what?

She was tempted to get out of the carriage, sneak across the street, and crouch beneath the single window of Undoto’s front room. But the house was long and narrow; there was no reason to assume Undoto was conversing with his guests in that particular room, and the risk...

Was too great.

Quite aside from the danger of being discovered by those inside the house, she would be readily visible to anyone in the street and in the houses opposite. Even in her dark clothes, she would stand out.

She huffed and forced herself to remain where she was. In the dark, looking out of the small window at Undoto’s uninformative front door.

Impatience and impulsiveness were abiding weaknesses; she had to hold against both.

In search of distraction, she directed her mind back to what she’d actually seen, to replaying the images and studying them for clues.

The four men. What could she deduce about them?

They’d come from farther up the hill. She’d noticed the street looped over and around the squat hill’s flank, dipping away into an area of the settlement into which she’d yet to venture. That was the direction from which the four had appeared.

Was that where they lived?

Certainly, nothing she’d seen suggested that they lived with Undoto or even in this quieter neighborhood; they certainly wouldn’t have fitted in.

She’d got the impression they were brothers-in-arms. Colleagues, at least. Reviewing the interplay between them only strengthened that conclusion.

So what enterprise did Undoto share with these men?

Other than his ministry, she knew very little of Undoto. Sampson hadn’t known much about the priest, either.

That brought her back to the four men. They’d been large, but most of their size had been muscle. Quite a lot of it.

Undoto was tall, well built, and had a commanding presence, but that presence relied more on the force of his personality, not merely his physical size.

In contrast, the armed group’s leader was taller by several inches and was significantly more physically overwhelming. That, too, was not simply due to size but to the menacing way the man moved, the intimidating way he stood.

Adding to the image of danger, each of the four men had carried at least one long-bladed weapon strapped to his side or back, and all four had bristled with smaller knives; she hadn’t had to look hard to see that. They wore their weapons openly...

Mercenaries?

The more she thought of it, the more the description fitted.

What connection might lie between a priest and a group of mercenaries?

Was stumbling on the mercenaries why Will had disappeared? And Dixon before him?

Undoto’s front door opened. The mercenaries trooped out. The leader was the last to leave. He turned on the narrow porch to speak with Undoto.

Aileen watched the exchange like a hawk. She strained her ears; although she couldn’t make out the words, the tone of both men’s voices reached her.

The mercenaries weren’t happy, but it didn’t seem that they were angry with Undoto. For his part, the priest appeared—and sounded—resigned. He didn’t seek to appease the hulking mercenary leader, but his responses were grave, as if he shared their...disappointment?

That was the impression Aileen received. That the mercenaries, and Undoto, too, had hoped for something, but had been denied.

The mercenaries turned away from Undoto with no exchange of smiles, waves, or any farewells. They strode up the short path and turned into the street—heading back the way they’d come.

Aileen gave a little jig on the carriage seat. If her luck held...

The trapdoor in the coach’s ceiling lifted.

“You want me to follow them, miss?” Dave’s disembodied whisper floated down.

“Please,” she whispered back. “But entirely unobtrusively. Hang well back.”

“I’ll do me best, miss.”

The trapdoor fell shut. The carriage moved forward, then halted. Aileen realized Dave had stopped where he could see up the hill, but he hadn’t yet turned the carriage into the street.

He waited, waited, and eventually gave his horse the office and slowly, ponderously, rolled around the corner and on up the street. Like most streets outside the settlement’s center, this one was potholed and rutted, forcing any driver to ease their conveyance over dips and bumps; a very slowly moving carriage wasn’t as suspicious a sight as it would have been in London.

Aileen peered out of the forward window. There were no streetlights, and clouds had now veiled the moon; she could just pick out the four dark shapes as they moved through the shadows.

The street continued to climb. There was a flare burning at the side of the road at the crest. Beyond lay nothing but the blackness of the night sky as the land dipped on the other side of the ridge.

“Miss.” Dave’s voice reached her. “The street narrows just over that crest ahead. It quickly becomes too tight for me carriage. ’Nother of the slum areas starts about there. Must be where those four are headed.”

Aileen considered their situation. “How far can we go before turning back?”

“Well, there’s a side street ahead, a little way below the crest—we can take that, and it’ll carry us back to the streets of Tower Hill. I wouldn’t want to go over the crest—it’ll be hard to turn the carriage if’n I do. I’ll have to get down to manage it, and if you don’t mind, miss, that’s not something I want to do at this hour in this area with the likes of those four hanging about.”

“No, indeed.” Aileen bit her lip. She didn’t want to pull back, to give up this odd chase, but the danger...and it wasn’t just her involved but Dave, too.

Ahead, the four dark shapes walked into the circle of light cast by the flickering flare. The first three trudged on and over the crest, but the leader halted. And looked back.

Directly at the carriage.

He stood bathed in the light from the flare.

Less than thirty yards away, Aileen saw his face—saw the scar slashing across one cheek. Saw the hard, merciless gaze he trained on the carriage.

Even though she knew he couldn’t see her, she felt herself freeze like a rabbit before a rabid dog.

“Miss?”

Dave’s urgent whisper jerked her into action. Into speech. “Take the side street!”

Smoothly, as if that had been his direction all along, Dave angled his horse slowly to the right, away from the watching mercenary and on into the quiet street leading across the hillside.