It was two hours after he’d hidden behind the screen in Axia’s room, and during that time he’d been through hell. Rhys had been shot through the leg with an arrow while attempting to follow the painted wagon out of Lachlan’s land. It was only by chance that he’d seen the wagon when he was returning from a day’s hawking with Lachlan. His first thought was that the wagon was being sent for repairs, but he decided to make sure.
He was still a hundred yards from the wagon when he was brought down by an arrow, an arrow with a crudely written message attached to it.
“You took my woman so I will take yours,” the message read.
Jamie quickly ascertained that his man was not in life-threatening danger, but he still didn’t know who had taken Frances. How could a man walk into the gates and in the midst of a few hundred people take her without anyone noticing? Surely the man had to make a threat or cause some commotion to get Frances to go with him? Surely Frances would have raised an alarm. Her sense of self-preservation would undoubtedly cause her to do something to let people know she was in danger.
Jamie reread the message and knew it made no sense to him. Who had done this thing? Was it something personal to him, or did it have to do with the Maidenhall heiress?
All Jamie knew for sure was that Tode and Axia knew a great deal more than they were telling. Now, standing while they sat, he paced in front of them. “You have two seconds to tell me everything.”
“Or you will do what?” Axia taunted, her arms folded. “I would rather eat live frogs than tell you anything at all. Not that I know anything, but I am sick of being blamed for everything. I had nothing to do with Rhys being shot. If you’ll remember, Rhys asked me to marry him, and I think I might. I think I will nurse him back to health and marry him. Then—”
“Axia and Frances planned to fake a kidnapping,” Tode said tiredly.
“Tode!!” Axia gasped, looking at him with hurt eyes for his betrayal.
He didn’t turn to her, but she could see that his eyes were furious. “Do you not yet realize that Frances has actually been kidnapped? We do not know where she is, and if the villain knows that she is the Maidenhall heiress, he could ransom her piece by piece.”
As though a mountain had dropped on her head, Axia suddenly realized that Frances could very well be in danger. And if anything did happen to Frances, it would be her fault. Frances had said that if she posed as the heiress, she would be the one in danger.
“Why?” Jamie said, looking at Tode, trying to keep his anger under control.
“The letter,” Tode answered, not looking at Axia. “You said you were going to write and ask permission of Perkin Maidenhall to marry his daughter. Frances thought she could prevent you from sending such a letter because she knew that her father would never agree to her marrying anyone other than the man he’s chosen for her. She desperately wants to get out of her marriage to Gregory Bolingbrooke any way she can, and she thought that if she could trick you into a secret marriage …”
Trailing off, he looked at Jamie, his eyes dark as he stared at Tode. Until now Jamie had been gentle and kind, but now Tode could see how he’d become a renowned soldier. Tode ran his hand about his neck as the room seemed to have become suddenly very hot. “When Frances found out that you’d sent the letter, she was afraid her father would send men. So we decided that I was to take Frances away, and we thought that you would follow so neither of you would be here when Maidenhall’s men arrived.”
“So you planned a fake kidnapping,” Jamie said flatly.
“No,” Axia said heavily, “I planned everything. Tode had nothing to do with it. I was going to put the plan into execution, but I fell asleep.”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, Tode looked at Axia. If nothing else, she was brave. But now all he seemed to remember was James Montgomery pushing down that screen in her room and walking across it. Axia had been behind that screen dressing. What had they been doing in the room before he entered?
“What other secrets do you have?” Jamie asked calmly.
“None that have any bearing on the matter at hand,” she said honestly for Frances’s safety was all that mattered now.
“It is not her fault,” Tode said quickly before Jamie could ask another question of Axia. “She was trying to save Frances. Can you not think what Maidenhall will do to Axia? He thinks that the cousins should look out for each other.” Tode swallowed as he thought of Maidenhall’s wrath when he found out about the switch. “It was Frances who was trying to trick you into a marriage that her father would no doubt have annulled even if he had to buy half of London to achieve it.”
“I see,” Jamie said after a moment. “Every one has secrets, but now Frances really is kidnapped and we don’t know by whom.”
“And it is all my fault,” Axia said, her heart in her eyes. “If Frances is killed, it will be my fault.”
As Tode watched, Jamie went to her and knelt before her. “Come on now, imp, don’t lose courage on me now. Whoever has her will probably fall in love with her at first sight.” He put his fingertips under her chin. “And, besides, if this is anyone’s fault, it is mine. The note said, ‘You took my woman so I will take yours.’ But the truth is, he should have given his name and his full address so I could distinguish him from all the other cuckolded men from my past.”
When anger at those words replaced the misery in Axia’s eyes, Jamie smiled at her, then stood, and he was serious once again. “You may sit, Tode,” he said graciously. “I am sure your legs could use the rest. It looks to me as though I must find a solution to this,” he said, but in the next moment the door burst open, and Thomas shoved two people into the room. One was a pretty little maid, the other, a stable lad by the smell of him, and from the color of their faces, it was easy to guess what they had been doing when Thomas found them.
“Tell him,” Thomas said quietly but in a voice of command.
The girl sat on the floor, threw her apron over her face, and began to cry loudly. The boy looked as though he wanted to go to her, but he was shaking too badly.
After a confirming glance at Thomas, Jamie went to the girl and held out his hand to her. That was all that was needed to calm her. Between Jamie’s looks, his beautiful clothes, and the very elegance of him, her tears dried instantly.
And when he spoke, his voice was as soft as honey, and Axia had heard that tone only once before: on the night she had been Diana. “No one is going to hurt you, and there will be no punishments. I just want you to tell me what you know.”
The boy, still sitting on the floor, looked up at Jamie with jealousy. Standing, he moved toward Axia. “You mean about the lady? The beautiful lady? The most beautiful lady in the world? That lady?”
Turning his back to the girl, Jamie gave the boy a look that quelled him, then he returned to the girl. “Tell me what you know.”
After a smug look at the boy, she looked up into Jamie’s eyes. “She came to the stables by the wagons, the wagons you brung.”
“Frances?” Jamie asked.
“Yes, that one. I was there to escape the heat of the kitchens if you know what I mean.”
“Ha!” the boy said. “That’s not why she was there.”
The girl didn’t even look at him but concentrated on Jamie’s eyes. “The lady looked very upset and asked me which wagon it was to be, but then she said I wouldn’t know. Which I didn’t.”
Axia gave Tode a look. Frances couldn’t even remember which wagon she was to be kidnapped in.
The girl continued. “I, ah, I stepped behind the stable wall for a moment and—”
The boy gave a derisive snort at that.
“But I could hear everything, and since I wasn’t very busy …” She paused to give a triumphant look at the boy who had been trying to keep her very busy. “I happened to see this big man, quite huge he was. I like a big man,” she said, looking up dreamily at Jamie, “not little men or boys.”
“Get on with it, girl!” Thomas snapped.
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The girl lost her dreamy expression. “This man asked her, this Frances, if she was looking for someone, and she said yes, had he come to kidnap her? I think this surprised the man, but he said that yes he had. ‘If you are the Maidenhall heiress, then I’ve come to kidnap you.’ That’s exactly what he said.” She looked up at Jamie in awe. “Was she really the Maidenhall heiress?” Her eyes were wide.
Jamie smiled at her but didn’t answer. “Then what happened?”
“He walked with her to the painted wagon and said it was the prettiest wagon he’d ever seen. Then he said, ‘That’s you painted on that wagon,’ and he said she was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in his life, ‘cept maybe for one, so he wanted her to sit by him on the wagon so he could look at her and decide which was the prettiest.”
“And they drove away,” Jamie said softly, then turned to Thomas. “Start searching. Ask anyone anything. We must find her. Someone must know something.” After Thomas had taken the young people with him, Jamie turned back to Axia and Tode. “Go now,” he said distractedly, and they could see the worry in his face.
Outside the room, Tode said he was going to help search. “Are you all right?” he asked Axia.
“Yes, of course. I feel fine,” she reassured him. “Go and help look. Look in places other people can’t.”
With an encouraging smile, he left her.
But the moment she was alone, she found that her knees were shaking. What had started as a joke, switching places with Frances, was turning into a nightmare. And what if she had not switched places, would she now be the one held hostage? Perhaps Frances was wise in not struggling. If someone had taken Axia, she would have yelled and screamed and bitten and no doubt ended up dead.
After a word with a servant asking for directions, Axia found the Tevershams’ private chapel and went there to pray. She prayed that Frances would not find out that the kidnapping was for real, for if Frances were afraid, she might cause the kidnapper to do something that he might not do otherwise. She prayed for Frances’s safety and asked her forgiveness for getting her into this mess.
And even though she told herself she had no right to ask God for this, she asked that He might make her father a tiny bit less furious than she knew he was going to be when he received Jamie’s letter.
Chapter 17
Tode wasn’t a drinking man, but he felt that now he would like to drown himself in something that would make him forget. Everything horrible that had happened in the last weeks was his fault. Like Axia, he had no doubt that Perkin Maidenhall was now on his way to the Teversham estate with an army of men. And now, because of Tode, Axia’s bit of freedom was to be over.
A vision of Axia chained inside one of the Maidenhall wagons danced in front of his eyes, and it was a moment before he could clear them.
And not only Axia was in danger, but what would happen to Frances at the hands of the kidnappers? At this moment Jamie was tearing the estate apart to find anyone who had seen or heard anything that would give him a clue as to who had taken Frances. So far, there had been nothing.
Axia was in her room, where Jamie had set her to drawing pictures of Frances that he could send with messengers around the near countryside to ask if anyone had seen her.
Axia drew one picture after another, each of them an excellent likeness of Frances. But Tode, while concerned for Frances, found his thoughts returning again and again to the end of Axia’s freedom. In what had to be only hours now, Maidenhall would come and take her to Gregory Bolingbrooke.
And at that thought, Tode shuddered. Bolingbrooke might be wealthy, but Tode knew that, due to an accident when he was a child, Gregory wasn’t a complete man. As Axia had guessed, there would be no children, no hope of a normal life.
Gregory’s father worked hard and paid much over the years to keep this information from the outside world, but sometimes Tode’s scarred face could be used to advantage. No one paid much attention to what a jester knew or didn’t know, and traveling players and singers, going from one estate to another, gossiped a great deal. It had not been a difficult task to find people who had been to the Bolingbrooke estate and knew the truth of that household.
So Tode knew exactly what awaited Axia. Her father would come and take her to that horrible boy and force her to marry him. And Axia would do it without complaint, because above all else in the world, she wanted to please her father.
Knowing what was in store for her, Tode had been unable to deny her these few weeks of freedom from being the Maidenhall heiress. To the very depths of his soul he knew what it was like to be stared at and considered a freak; it was one of the things that he and Axia had in common. In order to give her a brief time as a normal pretty girl, he had allowed her to switch places with Frances and now everything had gone awry. Frances’s life was in danger and Axia was going to be taken by her father.
“I must do something,” he said aloud. “I should have taken care of both of them. Both of them were under my care.” Guilt nearly overwhelmed him at the way he had always favored Axia over Frances. Maidenhall had put him in charge of both females, yet he had neglected Frances to the point where she was so lonely that she’d marry the first man she saw, namely, James Montgomery.
But all anyone could do was wait. Jamie was combing the countryside, asking questions of everyone, but so far, nothing had come of his questions. In the morning, Jamie planned to go with Thomas, leaving the injured Rhys behind, and ride north, as that was where they were heading when Frances was taken.
Tode knew without a doubt that he too would be left behind. Jamie and his man would want to travel fast, and Tode would only be in the way. He wondered if Jamie planned to leave Axia behind or to take her with him. It was Tode’s guess that he’d leave her behind, especially since he didn’t believe she was in any danger from Maidenhall’s men. Perkin Maidenhall would be interested in the whereabouts of his daughter, who Jamie thought was Frances, so he’d think Axia was safe.
But Tode knew, and Axia knew, the truth.
Since they had arrived, Tode had stayed in the old tack room off the stables. In his years with Axia he had grown used to comforts, but he well knew the worth of someone like himself in the outside world. For the most part Tode had stayed away from strangers, hiding inside his coarse robe, keeping his face hidden.
But now he picked up his gnarled staff and walked into the stables, looking into each stall until he found the boy who had seen the man who had taken Frances. He was angrily rubbing down a big horse.
“Go away,” the boy said without looking up. “I have no more answers.”
Tode had had years of sitting on the sidelines and watching; he was good at assessing what people were thinking. Jealousy was what was wrong with this boy. “I just wanted to tell you that you do a better job of taking care of a woman than he does. You didn’t lose yours.” With that, Tode slowly turned away.
“Wait!” the boy said, then watched as Tode turned back. Turning his head like an inquisitive bird, he was peering into Tode’s hood. “You one of his men?”
“Hardly,” Tode said with a laugh. There was a torch on the wall just outside the stall, and a small stream of light flowed over the wall. Moving into the weak light, for just a second, Tode lowered his hood so the boy could see his lacerated face. It was more than enough time, and Tode turned away from the look of revulsion on the boy’s face, then his superior laugh.
“I don’t think you’ll be taking anybody’s girl,” the boy said, unconcerned with Tode’s involuntary wince.
“No,” Tode said jovially. Long ago, he’d learned to hide his hurt. “I wanted to ask you about what you saw, but then you must be sick of speaking of it. But, still, it all must have been very exciting.”
Tode watched the boy as he seemed to consider this. Truthfully, he had been so busy trying to get his hands under his girl’s skirts that he hadn’t paid any attention to what other people were doing. That she had was another sore point with him. Since this afternoon, the girl
had talked of nothing but this earl— “An earl,” she’d gasped for the thousandth time. An earl talking to her and looking at her as though she were the most important person on earth.
“Nobody wants to listen to me,” he said bitterly. “No one wants to know what I saw.”
“You did see something,” Tode said eagerly. “I knew when I saw you that you were a clever boy. I thought then that Lord James should have paid more attention to you.” Leaning toward the boy, he was careful to keep his face in shadow. “I travel from house to house, and I look for stories to tell. Your exploits could be told from one great house to another, but I would need to know more than I do now.”
For a moment the boy stared in wonder. “He had half an ear.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The man had half an ear. Cut off right here,” he said, motioning to just above the hole of his ear. “The top half was missing.”
Tode could have kissed the boy, he was so pleased with this information, but instead, he forced himself to sit still for thirty minutes and listen to the boy tell everything that he imagined had happened since he’d seen the man with half an ear.
When, wearily, Tode was finally able to leave the stables, his first impulse was to take his new-found information to Jamie, but as he walked across the courtyard, he changed his plans. If he told Jamie, no doubt he would go charging off with men and weapons, and perhaps Frances would be hurt in the fracas. No, Tode thought, he would do better to do this himself, and as he well knew, he would be able to get into places that other men couldn’t. And besides, this was all his fault, wasn’t it?
Tode knew that from the way the message on the arrow sent into Rhys’s leg was worded that it was expected that Jamie would know who had taken Frances, so perhaps someone close to Jamie would also know. Tode had no hope of duping Jamie into giving him information that he did not mean to give, but perhaps Rhys would like to have some company.
“I have come to make you laugh,” Tode said as he poked his head around the door to Rhys’s room, a skin full of very strong wine under his arm.