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I tried lifting my hands to shield my face. I suppose it scared the guards because they swatted my hands down and forced me to endure the morning sun.
It could have been a lot worse. Still, I scowled at them as they pushed me toward a carriage in the road.
We were somewhere on the outskirts of Nottingham, a bit north. The other small houses surrounding the one I’d just exited told me it was a village. Taking a quick gander at the edge of Sherwood Forest nearby, and the landscape I recognized beyond, I believed we were in Bestwood. I’d never been to the hamlet of Bestwood, yet I’d passed by it in my youth, and with the Merry Men, when leaving Nottingham to go north.
Peculiar. Could that mean this is Guy’s house? Surely not, for a knight. He would have much more land than this crude hovel.
“Hurry up now,” grunted the driver at the head of the carriage. He glanced over his shoulder at the three of us approaching, and frowned. “We’ve got places to be.”
My heart skipped a beat when I recognized the surly expression and the white beard. Dear God. That’s Carter’s father. The man who was so against Carter helping the Merry Men as a soldier when we captured the two of them during the coach robbery.
I ducked my head down in an attempt to hide my face from him.
He didn’t call out for me to stop, which led me to believe he didn’t recognize me. Granted, I looked a bit different now than I had when I was standing tall in front of him and he was tied against a wheel spoke. I looked like a shell of a girl—hunched over, greasy and unwashed, scrambling along only as far as the ankle manacles would allow me.
When we came to the back of the carriage, I finally let my breath go.
One of the guards leading me swung the back door open and my breath shot to my throat all over again.
The cargo bay of the coach was filled with women. My eyes bulged so wide I thought they’d leap out of my skull.
“Get in,” one of the soldiers grunted, and then shoved me hard in the back.
I staggered onto the step, and then scurried through the landing, trying to lock eyes on every woman in here.
No, these are hardly women. They’re girls. My age and younger.
Dear Lord help me.
The faces I passed were grimy and tear-stricken. They wore threadbare clothes, with two of the girls clothed in nothing at all. It was abhorrent, seeing them shivering in the corner of the cart, barring their breasts with their arms and protecting their bodies.
None of the girls met my eye. The shame written on their faces was too great, and my heart broke at the sight.
In my mission to retrieve Emma, I had inadvertently discovered what I feared was going on all along. The people who have gone missing from the almshouse and from the servants’ quarters of noble houses. The strange disappearances that have been happening all across Nottinghamshire.
Emma, Ada, Liz, Little Mary, Tilly-a-Wilds . . . even boys like Much the Miller’s Son and Rosco’s friend, Bucktooth Jimmy.
They’ve been stolen. Shoved into carriages like this one. Transported somewhere they’d never be found, never to be seen again. Sold into slavery, or other houses, or places I can’t even imagine.
I realized I had stumbled upon a massive ring of perversion unlike anything I had ever imagined. Looking at the destitute, defeated faces of these girls, I knew they had seen the worst that life had to offer.
And they still had more to see.
The warped, twisted truth of where I found myself now wrapped around my heart and squeezed the life out of me.
I was shocked still, unblinking. Hardly even able to think.
I kept tears down as one of the guards followed me into the carriage, sat me harshly at the end of one of the two long benches facing each other, next to another girl, and dragged a rope through my shackles to keep me bound to my seat.
He bared a mouth full of misshapen teeth. “Rule is, no talking. Got it?”
I nodded.
“Good.”
I shuddered from his breath, and then he squeezed past the knees and legs on his way to get out of the carriage.
“Gods,” he said once he hopped down to the ground. “Smells like a ripe tannery in there.” He laughed with his friend, and then took a seat at the empty space at the end of the bench, closest to the outside.
