A Rogue by Night Read online

  “We have to hide him,” Miss Wright whispered urgently. “There’s a trapdoor under the bed. Help me move it, my lord. Quick.”

  There wasn’t time. “No.” In a swift movement, Harland snatched up the heavy wool curtain. “Get off the table,” he ordered Matthew. The man obeyed, staggering slightly as his feet hit the ground. “Lie down underneath,” he instructed him. “And for God’s sake, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear, don’t move a muscle.”

  Matthew stared at him for a moment before Harland helped him lower himself to the ground, sliding awkwardly under the table on his stomach.

  “Good.” Harland took the curtain by two corners and threw it over the table, letting it settle as the edges pooled on the ground on all sides, concealing Matthew. “Get on the table, Miss Wright,” he snapped.

  “What?” She was pale.

  “I need to explain all this blood when neither of us requires stitches. I need a patient. Get on the damn table.”

  Comprehension dawned, and she hitched up her skirts and clambered onto the wide surface. The unseen riders were upon them, light from their torches now flickering ominously past the edges of the curtains.

  “Lie back.”

  She searched his eyes for a brief second before she obeyed, lowering herself so that she was staring up at the ceiling. Harland reached into one of the bowls, cupping a handful of water and letting it dribble across her forehead. He smoothed the moisture into her hairline to make her look fevered, trying to ignore the softness of her skin and her hair.

  He glanced up to find the elder Wright staring at him from where he still sat opposite near the hearth. His faded eyes darted to the door, the sound of men’s voices clear, and he gave Harland an almost imperceptible nod. Harland nodded back. Paul Wright had not survived as long as he had by being dull-witted.

  The horses were being reined to a stop, their blowing and stomping audible. Boots were on the ground, the sound of steel being drawn.

  Harland grabbed a handful of the bloodiest towels, shoving Miss Wright’s skirts just above her knees and then covering them with crimson-stained linen. She made a small sound of distress but didn’t move.

  “I’m so sorry,” Harland murmured, meaning it. But they were left with few options.

  “It’s fine,” Miss Wright said tightly.

  He nudged her knees apart gently with his hands, set a few more of the bloodstained towels under her legs, and swallowed hard. Streaks of blood marred the pale skin on her legs where the soaked towels had brushed against them. Jesus, it really looked like she was bleeding to death. He only hoped that—

  The door reverberated on its hinges as someone pounded on it. Which was all the warning they got before it flew open, crashing against the wall. He saw Miss Wright jerk and put a reassuring hand on her leg, willing her to remain as she was. And then he went on the offensive.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he barked, none of his outrage feigned.

  There was an officer standing just inside the door, his sword drawn, squinting into the light. Harland should have known. Captain Buhler. A bulldog of a man who had made it his singular mission to bring to justice by any means necessary every man, woman, and child who survived just outside the edges of the law. A man enamored with power and who was becoming more and more ruthless wielding it in the name of the crown. Harland had no respect for him.

  Two more soldiers crowded into the cottage behind their leader, trying to get a better view of the interior.

  “I said, what the hell do you think you’re doing, Captain?” Harland repeated.

  The captain’s eyes were glued on Miss Wright’s blood-streaked legs. “Jesus wept.”

  The men standing behind him were staring now, too, fixated on the sight of Miss Wright’s exposed, bloody calves and the stained towels covering her knees.

  Jesus wept, indeed.

  “What’s wrong with her?” one of the men managed in a strangled voice.

  “She’s bleeding,” Harland snarled. “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “From where?” The soldier was ashen.

  “From her woman parts,” Harland snapped. “Now get out and give us some privacy while I treat my patient.”

  Buhler’s soldiers visibly blanched and took an involuntary step back. One disappeared completely back in the direction he had come from.

  “Dr. Hayward.” The captain seemed to recover and was trying for an authoritative, if somewhat conciliatory, tone. “I must ask you to leave. We must search this cottage.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Harland tightened his fingers on Miss Wright’s leg. Beneath his palm, her muscles were stiff.

  From his position near the hearth, Paul stirred. “What’s going on? What do they want?” he asked in a wavering, feeble voice that made him sound three hundred years old.

  “Captain Buhler was just saying that he was sorry he lacked the common decency to allow me to treat your daughter in privacy,” Harland growled, not taking his eyes off Buhler. “And that they were leaving now.”

  Paul labored to his feet and shuffled toward the soldiers, coming to stop directly in front of the men. “My daughter, she’s very ill,” he bleated plaintively.

  “We have information that says there is a dangerous criminal on the premises.” The captain had dragged his eyes from the scene on the table and was addressing Harland.

  “A dangerous criminal?” Harland laughed without humor and made a great show of looking around him. “Which one of us would you consider to be most dangerous?”

  “Dr. Hayward, again, I must ask that you leave—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Captain? You can see the interior of the entire damn cottage from where you stand. There is no dangerous criminal here.”

  “I have orders from the king himself.”

  “Orders? To watch a woman bleed to death?”

  Paul made a wheezing noise followed by a spate of coughing. “She’s dying? Don’t let my daughter die,” he gasped.

  “She’s not going to die.” Harland reached for one of Miss Wright’s knives she hadn’t put away. He held it up to the light, examining the edge of the gleaming blade. “So long as I can excise the source of the inflammation and bleeding.” He was making this up as he went along.

  “I have orders,” the captain repeated with impatience, “to eradicate the scourge of this county. Smugglers. The men who would cheat their king of his due.”

  Miss Wright moaned then, her head thrashing from side to side, her eyes tightly shut. She looked, Harland thought with some admiration, like a woman about to suffer a seizure.

  Or perhaps an exorcism.

  “Dammit,” Harland swore loudly, and moved to press his hand against the flat of her stomach.

  “What’s happening?” Paul had never sounded more pitiful.

  “I need to stop this bleeding now,” Harland said. “Before it is too late.”

  Buhler’s expression was one of profound distaste, but still he refused to budge. “Dr. Hayward—”

  “Search the barns, search the grounds, do whatever you need to do, Captain. But unless you want the death of this young woman on your hands, I suggest you take your men and get out.”

  “Not yet. Where is your son right now, Mr. Wright?” Buhler, apparently unhappy and unsatisfied with Harland’s lack of cooperation, was now directing his questions at Paul.

  “My son?” The man pulled his blanket more tightly around himself and looked confused. “I don’t…what…who—”

  “Matthew Wright is your son?”

  “Yes?” Paul’s answer sounded more like a question.

  “Where is he?”

  “He went to war,” Paul said faintly, looking confused.

  “War?”

  “To fight the little French madman. He’s artillery,” he said proudly. “My son, not Napoleon.”

  Buhler shook his head in impatience. “Where is he now?”

  “I told you he’s at war.”

  “
The war is over, Mr. Wright. Has been for years.”

  Paul twisted the edges of the blanket around his thin shoulders. “That can’t be right.”

  “What has your son been doing since he’s returned?” the officer demanded.

  Paul shook his head helplessly. “He’s not back.”

  “I can assure you, he is.”

  Paul put a shaking hand out as if to steady himself on the captain’s arm. Buhler moved away in distaste.

  “He used to fish,” Paul warbled with a faraway expression. “Yes, my Matty loved to fish.” He paused, his eyes widening. “Is he drowned? Tell me he isn’t drowned. He’s drowned, isn’t he?”

  The captain frowned. “What? No, he—”

  “The selkies come ashore on nights like this, you know.” Paul peered around as though he expected to see such a mythological creature crouched in a dark corner. “Come from the black depths to claim their revenge on the men who have killed their selkie sons and husbands. I’ve seen them, you know. Luring men out into the dark sea or off the edges of cliffs. I’ve warned my Matthew against them.”

  Harland was barely following Paul’s babble but the soldier remaining behind Buhler paled and shifted nervously. Experience had taught Harland that soldiers, like sailors, were a superstitious lot. Paul, it seemed, had also been taught the same.

  The captain, however, was having none of it. “Get out of the way, old man,” he sneered, pushing past Paul and into the cottage, approaching the table.

  A bloodcurdling scream from Miss Wright split the air and made the hairs on Harland’s arms stand up. “Make it stop,” she shrieked, her head thrashing again.

  The soldier remaining behind Buhler in the doorway lost whatever color he had remaining and fled back toward the safety of the night. The captain tightened his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Make it stop.” Miss Wright was now sobbing in a performance worthy of a London stage.

  Paul started swaying and moaning loudly, punctuated by words that Harland could only guess were supposed to be interpreted as a prayer. “Save her,” he cried every time he stopped long enough to take a breath.

  Outside, distant thunder—real thunder this time—rolled through the air and shook the ground.

  Good Lord, if Harland closed his eyes, he would have thought he was in the chaos of a field hospital again amid the screaming of the patients and the booming of the guns.

  Buhler’s eyes were fixed on the incoherent Miss Wright. “I have a duty to the king—”

  “I, too, have served the king for years, Captain.” Harland pointed the tip of the knife in Buhler’s direction. “As a surgeon on the battlefields of France and Belgium. I’ve treated the king’s men—your men—in your own damn barracks.”

  “I am aware—”

  “Then I’ll trouble you to recall that I am not just a doctor, but a peer of the realm, and I have a very vested interest in this country and the men who uphold its honor. If you think I am harboring an enemy of the king in my damn medical bag, you may arrest me once I’m done here,” he continued icily, “but I would suggest that you have a care with your accusations.”

  Buhler took another step forward. His small eyes flickered from Harland to Miss Wright’s bared legs as she writhed, the toe of the captain’s boot an arm’s length from where Matthew lay concealed.

  “You are dismissed, Captain,” Harland said in a voice that would have made his ducal brother-in-law proud.

  Buhler finally sheathed his sword. “Check the barn!” he shouted in the direction of his men still waiting outside as Miss Wright continued to thrash and moan. “Every nook and cranny.” The captain lifted his eyes to Harland’s. “Then burn it.”

  Anger surged. “There is no call for that. These people have nothing.”

  “Then they have nothing to lose, do they?” Buhler sneered.

  “Captain—”

  “I act in the name of the king.” He spun on his heel and stalked toward the door. “And you can tell Matthew Wright that if you see him, my lord.”

  Paul shoved the door closed behind him and retreated back to the window, peering outside through a crack in the curtain. “Goddamn blighters.”

  Relief filtered through Harland’s fury, though he made no move to step away from the table. The soldiers could barge back in again with no notice. Outside, there was a muffled thump as the doors of the barn were hauled open. Muted torchlight flickered, and the crashing sounds of crates and barrels being turned over followed. The barn would be a loss, but far better they ravage the barn than the cottage. Barns could be rebuilt. Lives could not.

  Miss Wright had stopped moaning and was listening as well, her head cocked slightly, though she was watching him.

  “What are they going to find in the barn, Father? Before they burn it, that is.” Her voice was steady and direct, and if Harland hadn’t been there to witness everything he had, he would think she was merely inquiring after a misplaced crate of turnips.

  “Dust and mouse shit,” Paul muttered. “Bloody bastards.”

  Harland knew Paul and Matthew too well to think that they would ever leave something incriminating in the barn to be found by soldiers.

  Miss Wright lifted her head and glanced down, and with some discomfiture, Harland realized that he still had his fingers on her bare leg. He withdrew his hand, as nonchalantly as possible, suddenly feeling flustered. Which was ridiculous. He had touched hundreds and hundreds of legs before. Men, women, children. He’d stitched them, dressed them, set broken bones in them, crouched between them to deliver a baby on occasion. And like each of those occasions, this intimate contact was a product of necessity, not—

  “I’m so sorry, Father.” The muffled, miserable voice drifted out from the space beneath the table. “The barn—”

  “Is half rotted anyway,” Paul grumbled. “Not a great loss. Don’t worry yourself.”

  “I’m glad you’re still with us, Mr. Wright,” Harland murmured, trying to refocus on what was important here.

  “Is Kate still with us is the better question.” Matthew’s muted jest from his hiding place sounded weak. “I’m convinced the Inquisition would have nothing on you, Hayward.”

  “Everyone tells me I have a way with the ladies,” Harland replied lightly to hide his concern. He needed to get the young man up and off the floor. Just not yet. “Your performance was indeed impressive, Miss Wright.” The torchlight was still moving in the windows. Another roll of thunder echoed, momentarily eclipsing the sound of voices outside.

  “I think you should have led with the lordship bit,” she muttered. “Your title has some use after all.”

  “Perhaps.”

  A crash of thunder obliterated whatever she was about to say. In the next second, the sound of a torrential rain drumming into the thatch and against the windows filled the silence. The sky lit up with lightning, and another round of thunder shook the ground and the very air around them. Outside, horses thrashed and snorted, their panic met with exclamations and angry shouts. The rain intensified even more, and rivulets of water dripped through the thatch and into the cottage. The wavering torchlight was abruptly extinguished. Within minutes, the sound of men and milling hooves gave way to retreating hoofbeats that faded quickly in the downpour.

  “Hard to burn a barn in a storm, isn’t it, you scaly buggers,” Paul crowed before a round of coughing stopped him. He recovered and pulled the curtains tightly across the windowpanes. “Good riddance.”

  “They’re gone?”

  “Every last one of them.”

  “You sure?” Harland wasn’t taking any chances.

  “I’m sure.”

  Harland looked back at Miss Wright, still sprawled out on the table before him, wearing bloody towels and a look of worry. A sudden image of her sprawled out before him wearing nothing but a look of invitation assaulted him, and he flinched, horrified. What the hell was wrong with him? He was better than this. Certainly not so predictable as to be titillated by a pair of legs.


  With a deliberate flip of his wrist, he cast the towels to the floor and then drew her skirts gently back over her legs. As graciously and as matter-of-factly as he could, given the circumstances, he extended a hand toward her. “I’m sorry about your skirts and your shift. I think both have blood on them now.”

  “I’m not worried about my skirts or my shift, Lord Strathmore.” He was aware Miss Wright still hadn’t taken her eyes off him. She was regarding him warily, a crease between her brow, but she accepted his hand without hesitation.

  Harland would not notice how perfectly her hand seemed to fit into his. He would not reflect on the capable strength he could feel as her fingers wrapped around his. He would not wonder at the urge to keep her hand in his indefinitely. He would not imagine pressing his lips to the inside of her wrist and—

  “My apologies if I made you uncomfortable.” At least his words were civil and courteous, even if his imagination wasn’t. He needed to pull himself together.

  “You didn’t.” She sat up, and he released her hand immediately.

  “Good. Right.” He cleared his throat. “Well, let’s get your brother somewhere a little more comfortable?”

  “Of course.”

  Harland lifted the heavy wool curtain from the table. With a considerable effort and Miss Wright’s help, he got the woozy man into bed, careful of his stitches and shoulder. Paul left the window to join them, shooing both Harland and Miss Wright out of his way. “I can see him settled,” he admonished.

  I need to talk to Matthew in private, Harland translated. Because Paul and Matthew would need to make decisions tonight. Decisions that Harland suspected Paul did not want to involve his daughter in. Decisions he most certainly didn’t want to involve an interloper in.

  Harland refrained from telling Paul that he knew very well that there were still a dozen tubs of brandy sunk in the north side of the cove after the failed retrieval attempt tonight. Harland didn’t mention that it was this load that was holding up the remainder of the shipment that was already prepared and concealed, awaiting transportation to London. That the financier would need the complete delivery before he issued payment.