As she led the way off the beach onto the path that led to the schoolroom, Sally was contemplating the likely problems for the next two days.
The path wound around the inevitable shacks that surrounded the port, and the two guards separated, one taking the lead and the other the trailing, both of them alert for beggars and hawkers.
But as the group left the poorer areas for the cluster of warehouses and offices, a group of half a dozen dirty limping mendicants descended on them, hands out for alms, shrill voices declaiming their worthiness for charity.
The two guards closed on them, telling them to stand back and the lady would give them some alms, but all of a sudden, Lieutenant Bracken was on the ground, his throat gushing blood, and Moxley was falling from a blow to the head. Suddenly, the girls were backing away from men with knives; men who had straightened their hunched backs, removed their eye patches, and put their lame feet to the ground.
Sally opened her mouth to scream, but choked the sound back when one of the men growled, "Shut your gob, mort, or I kill one of these others." He held the knife with the balance of a skilled thrower, and she could not risk it. Instead, she let them herd her, with the others, into an alleyway between two warehouses while she slid her hand surreptitiously into the pocket that gave access to her weapons.
A door opened behind them. Should she and her friends make a stand here in the alley, where they were more likely to attract attention from the street? Yes, because who knew how many thugs might be waiting in the warehouse. She stopped, and the other three stopped with her, taking the cue from Aronui to spread out slightly to give her room.
"Shy, princess?" said a voice from behind her. A familiar and hated voice.
"Crowhurst?" She turned to face him, the man who had tried to destroy her. Her eyes widened and he sneered.
"Like what you see?" He pointed to his crushed nose, the scar that bisected his cheek and split his lip. "Your cousins gave me these, curse them." He touched the patch that hid one eye. "And this I got when I took leave from the navy. Left your cousin St James dead behind me, though, so that was some justice. You owe me more, though, princess. More justice."
One of the thugs spoke from behind Sally, but she did not take her eyes from Crowhurst, trusting Aronui, whom she could see from the corner of her eye, fallen into the relaxed crouch she had learned from the knife fighter on the ship, scanning the alley from Crowhurst to the group behind her.
"We should get these morts inside, duke," the man whined. "Out of sight, like."
"Out of sight of whom, man?" Crowhurst demanded. "You killed the guards, as I ordered?"
Sally kept her face still, but Melody let out a soft whimper.
"Yes, duke," the man agreed. He came up beside Sally, and went to grab the arm she needed to defend herself, but Crowhurst roared.
"Don't touch her," and the man leapt back.
Crowhurst dropped his voice to the same chilling purr he'd been using. "Not until I've finished with her. Shall I explain what is going to happen now, princess? To a little bitch that refused my very respectable offer and whose father sent me into hell? I swore I would make you all pay." He sniggered. "Oh, how I will make you pay."
Sally glanced around, confirming the position of Crowhurst's gang and her own ladies. Crowhurst roared again. "Don't look at them! Look at me! I am the one who is going to make you whimper; make you beg for mercy; make you grovel at my feet and..."
The shot from her hip was not as clean as she would have liked. Either the position put her aim off, or her skirt slightly deflected the bullet. Crowhurst was still howling as he went down, but down he went, and as the thugs gaped, Sally pulled the pistol the rest of the way out of her clothes, set her back to the wall, and gathered her friends to her with a jerk of the head.
One of the men — the spokesman, she thought, rushed to Crowhurst's side and yelled at the others, "Get them!"
From seven to five, Sally thought, as the remaining men formed a half-circle around the group of girls, eyeing her gun warily. "I have six more bullets," she said calmly, "and am an excellent shot."
They looked at one another and stayed where they were.
"If we move fast, she won't get us all," one of them suggested.
Aronui pulled out two knives, one held in a position for throwing and the other at the ready to replace it. Huala had picked up a discarded piece of wood and was weighing it in her hand like a club. Melody whispered, keeping her voice so soft that Sally could only just distinguish the words, "Is there a reason we are not screaming, Sally?"
An excellent point.
"Scream for help as loud as you can," Sally instructed her friends, and they split the air with their shouts. The man who thought Sally could not get them all hurled himself toward them, and fell with a bullet in his forehead. The man by Crowhurst also rushed them, and was dropped by Aronui's first knife. The others held back.
"It's unnatural," one of them complained. "Girls fightin' back."
"I didn't sign up for this," one of the others said. "Three of us dead, including Duke? I'm getting out of here."
The four of them took a step back, towards the alley entrance. And another step, and another. Sally stayed where she was, letting them go. But before they could escape into the street, more men poured into the alley, one of them shouting, "In here! We've found them!"
In moments the thugs were surrounded and subdued.
Still next to her wall, but her gun now lowered, Sally saw that the mix of sailors, soldiers, and local tribesmen was led by Mr Penchley and — surely that was Merry, not dead after all? At that moment, a loud thunk had her looking back into the alley. Crowhurst again! He had recovered enough to attack them, clearly, but not enough to avoid Huala's club. He lay unconscious at her feet.
Sally stepped away, closer to their rescuers, who were running towards the girls, their own weapons at the ready. But the danger was over, all the assailants unconscious, dead, or in custody. Sally braced her legs against their tendency to shake, and put out both hands to greet Merry.
"My dear, Crowhurst told me you were dead. I am so pleased to see that he lied as usual." She managed that much with barely a tremble in her voice."
"It was Crowhurst?" Merry pushed the body over with one boot, and spoke over his shoulder. "You were right, Penchley. Well done. Sally, you owe Penchley for your rescue. Though you have to admit, Penchley, her ladyship was doing a good job of rescuing herself; her and these other lovely ladies."
"You found her?" Papa pushed his way passed the cluster of men at the alley mouth, followed by Melody's father and Huala's. All three girls ran into their fathers' arms, pouring out their story as they were hugged, patted down, and hugged again. Papa even held out his spare arm to gather Aronui in, when he heard how well she had used her knife-throwing skills.
****
Haverford exerted every ounce of self-control he'd developed in a lifetime to keep from strangling Crowhurst where he lay, and if the man had not been unconscious and bleeding to death from his wounds, even those hard-acquired disciplines would not have been enough.
No. On second thoughts, a quick death here in the alley was too good for him.
"Get a doctor," he ordered Penchley. "I want Crowhurst alive to stand trial and hang. Him and as many of these other jackals as can be saved."
Sally was standing straight and proud, and if she had not been in the circle of his arm, he would not have known she was trembling. Aronui, too. "Hold firm a moment more, girls," he murmured, then raised his voice back to conversational volume.
"Merry, I will leave you to organise moving the scum. Captain Moreton, you'll come back to Victoria Island with me and Lady Sarah. I need a secure lockup, and I need it by the time Captain St James arrives with our prisoners. Gentlemen," he inclined his head to the chief and the harbour-master, "I am taking my daughter and her maid home, and suggest you do likewise with your daughters."
The chief nodded gravely then scowled at Captain Franchett, and made a declaration in his own tongue. Huala translated. "My father asks you to agree that he was right. I have told my father that these men called that one," she pointed at Crowhurst, "the duke."
Captain Franchett looked at Melody, and then at Sally, who both nodded.
"We shall clean the rats out of the cellars," Haverford promised. "And Captain Franchett will offer every co-operation."
Franchett, at a lift of the ducal eyebrows, nodded. "Of course, Your Grace, Chief Tupuola. Of course." He hugged his girl, so perhaps he could be trusted to follow through this time, given what he had so nearly lost.
Haverford tightened his own arm around the precious treasure who had nearly met her end in this pernicious alley. "I owe every person who has ever taught you weapon-craft, my love," he murmured, "starting with Bella."
***
Even three weeks later, Penchley still shivered when he thought about how close he had come to losing Lady Sarah. If it hadn't been for her unwomanly pursuits, which delayed the villains long enough for rescue to arrive, she would have disappeared and his hopes and dreams with her.
And if Captain St James had not turned up to visit his great uncle, the rescue would never have set out. St James happened to mention in Penchley's hearing the patch that Crowhurst now wore, and the nickname he'd acquired among the lowlifes of the crew for his flawless upper-class accent and arrogant bearing.
'The duke'? A man with a patch? Penchley had cut into the conversation, for once careless of protocol. "Does he have a broken nose and a scar down one cheek?" At St James's confirmation, he'd burst out with a tarradiddle about seeing such a man in the port town across the water, and wasn't Lady Sarah visiting that very day?
It was as well that St James had arrived. Penchley couldn't regret it. He could wish, though, that the man had not brought letters from his mother and sister that set Lady Sarah singing around the residence, smiling at every person she passed. "Lord Harburn — no, Lord Abersham came back for me, Mr Penchley," she told him. "Mrs St James saw him herself, and Lady Sutton heard from Lord Sutton that he is reconciled with the Wellbridges and they are only waiting for my return to England for us to be wed."
Which meant Penchley's expensively forged letters were nothing more than a waste of ink and paper.
And now he was up for more money, since he needed to make sure that Crowhurst and his cronies never had the chance to speak at their trial. Fortunately, the man Penchley had spoken to in Crowhurst's lair — the one who pretended to be 'the duke' — had a plan. If Penchley would simply put the drug the Chinaman supplied into the guards' food, Crowhurst's gang would do the rest.
Penchley had no choice, but he would turn the setback to his advantage. He would deal with the gang, and especially the man who thought to sully the lady Penchley intended to make his own. And after a time, he would have some new letters made and try again.
He waited patiently in this upstairs room across the road from the building that had been hastily converted into a jail. A brothel, it was, and he hoped this would be sufficient alibi for his presence, and that this alibi would not come to the ears of Lady Sarah.
The girl in question slept in the bed, after a small portion of the drug Penchley had kept back from that supplied for the guard, and Penchley waited and watched, a row of loaded guns ready to cut down Crowhurst and his gang as they made their escape.