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“I don’t know,” Sam muttered. Was Thornton insane? If his guesses were right, the man had murdered two women that they knew of. What would such a man do with the women of a man he considered his enemy?
“Extortion,” Vale said. “Perhaps he hopes to keep you from speaking, Hartley, by holding Rebecca and Emeline hostage.”
Sam closed his eyes at the thought, trying to keep down the voices inside that urged him to move rather than think. “Thornton is smarter than that.”
Vale shrugged. “Even the smartest man can panic.”
A man like Thornton would kill if he panicked.
“How far is it?” Sam asked.
Jasper was staring out the window, too, now. “Wapping? Past the Tower of London.”
Sam sucked in a breath. They were still on the fashionable west side of London. The Tower was a mile or more away, and the carriage wasn’t moving fast.
“I just remembered something,” Jasper muttered.
Sam looked at him.
The other man’s face had drained of color. “When we saw Thornton in your garden, after we went into your house for tea, he boasted to me about a large shipment he was preparing for the British army.”
“Where was it bound?”
Jasper swallowed, then replied, “India.”
Sam felt his heart stop in his chest. If Thornton got Emeline and Rebecca on a ship bound for India...
The carriage slowed and then came to a complete stop. Sam looked out the window. A brewer’s cart was stopped in the middle of the road, one of its great wheels broken from the axle. He didn’t even wait for the inevitable shouting to begin. He opened the carriage door.
“Where are you going?” Vale cried.
“I’m faster on foot,” Sam replied. “You continue in the carriage. Perhaps you’ll beat me there.”
And he swung down and began running.
Chapter Nineteen
At the sight of Iron Heart’s white-hot heart, Princess Solace gave a cry of despair. His agony was too terrible for her to bear. She ran forward and with her own hands threw a bucket of water upon him, intending to ease his pain. But, alas, although the flames were doused, it is well known what happens when metal suddenly cools.
Iron Heart’s heart cracked with a loud SNAP....
—from Iron Heart
The gun was pressed firmly into Rebecca’s rib cage and didn’t move a whit even when the carriage bumped and swung around corners. Emeline bit her lip. To either side of her, two great brutes, Mr. Thornton’s creatures, sat, effectively boxing her in. She and Rebecca had never even seen the men until they were inside the carriage. Not that it would’ve mattered. Mr. Thornton had shoved his nasty gun into Rebecca and ordered them both outside and into his carriage, and Emeline hadn’t liked to call his bluff at the time. The peril of having Rebecca die before her eyes had seemed all too imminent.
o;Oh, I don’t know about that,” Rebecca said as she poured. “It’s only tea.”
“Yes, but many wouldn’t be so gracious”—he shot a sly look at Emeline—“to a working man and all. Why, I’m a simple cobbler at heart.”
“But you own your establishment,” Rebecca objected.
“Oh, indeed, indeed. I have a grand workshop. But it’s all built up by the sweat of my own brow. My father’s business was quite small.”
“Really?” Rebecca asked politely. “I didn’t know that.”
Mr. Thornton shook his head ruefully as if at the memory of his father’s small business. “I took it over right after I came back from the war in the Colonies. Six years ago, that was. Six long years of hard labor and worry to bring my business to what it is today. Why, I do declare, that I’d kill any man who sought to take my business from me.”
Rebecca was looking curiously at Mr. Thornton now. His words, after all, had been far too emphatic for the conversation. Emeline held her breath, watching the man, and as she stared, he did a very strange thing. He cocked his head at her, grinned widely, and winked one eye.
