Brandon glanced at me. "We will have to risk it," he said in a low voice. "If the lad is hit again…"
"It was a stupid idea the first time," I said. "And I cannot run as fast as I used to."
"Neither can I," he shot back.
"What idea?" Grenville panted.
"He can only shoot one of us," Brandon said. "If we go in three different directions at once, we may get away. He cannot watch all sides."
I was perfectly certain that he could. When Brandon and I had agreed, on that ridge, to split and run, so that one of us at least would have a chance, we had each been willing to sacrifice our life so that the other could live. The ruse had succeeded, and we'd both survived. But Brandon had missed being shot in the head by a fraction of an inch.
He was asking for that same kind of sacrifice now. I saw in his light blue eyes that he was willing to take the chance that the gunman would hit him. It does not matter what happens to me, his expression seemed to say, as long as we get the bastard.
I remembered, dimly, why I had once admired him.
"All right," Grenville said. "Better than lying here."
Brandon nodded once. "Best to wait until he fires again. He'll need a moment to take up the next weapon."
"Unless he's got a double-barreled pistol," Grenville said.
"He does not," Brandon replied. "The sound is wrong."
I nodded agreement.
We whispered our plan. Grenville hissed a protest, but Brandon replied, "I am stronger. I can carry your footman, you cannot."
Grenville looked back and forth between us, then nodded glumly. "How do we draw his fire? Stick our heads over the wall?"
Brandon gave him a brief smile. "That is one way."
As it turned out, we needed to do nothing. Laughter sounded once more, then a pistol shot, then Bartholomew cried out in renewed agony.
We stared at one another in stunned horror, then Brandon hissed, "Now!"
We dove from hiding. Brandon ran toward Bartholomew, I around to the right of the house, Grenville toward the woods.
The gunman decided to shoot at me. I slammed myself around the corner of the house, pressing myself against the climbing roses. Thorns pierced my coat and skin.
Breathing hard, I risked a look back. Brandon had seized Bartholomew under the arms and was dragging him toward the front of the house. I hurried around the other side to help him.
My shoulder blades prickled as Brandon and I carried the footman between us past the front windows and through the gate. Bartholomew was still alive, though his face was white, his breathing shallow, and blood stained his scarlet livery still darker red.
The coach had moved a little way down the road. The coachman had halted there, holding the frightened horses, not daring to leave them. Grenville came panting up, reaching the carriage the same time we did.
I wrenched open the door of the coach, and we slid Bartholomew in. Grenville climbed in beside him. When Brandon and I hung back, he stared down at us incredulously. "Come along, gentlemen. We will go for the magistrate."
I shook my head. "They might run, and we might never find them again."
Brandon said nothing. Grenville looked at Bartholomew, who lay groaning and bleeding on the luxurious cushions, then at us, waiting on the ground.
With a grunt, he swung down again. "Three against two is better odds. But at least, let us go armed."
He opened a cabinet under the seat and pulled out two boxes that each held two pistols and bullets and powder horns. He took two pistols himself and handed the other two to me and Brandon. We loaded and primed them, and then filled our pockets with extra balls and powder.
Grenville sent the carriage off with a curt directive to his coachman to find a constable and a surgeon. He joined us, his anger palpable.
Brandon led the way back to the house. It felt natural to follow him as I had for many years, across India, Portugal and Spain, and into France. At one time, I would have followed him to hell itself. Too much had passed between us since then, but somehow, as I kept my gaze on his broad back while we moved stealthily against the blank wall of the house, I felt a glimmer of the old bond the two of us had so thoroughly pulled apart.
We abandoned the idea of entry through the front door. We could go only single-file through the tiny hall, and anyone on the gallery could pick us off one at a time. Brandon forced open one of the downstairs windows and entered that way. While he made plenty of noise doing so, Grenville and I crept in through the cellar door we found on the left side of the house, then up through a cool deserted kitchen and back stairs to the ground floor.
Silence met us. I peered into the staircase room and spied Brandon on the other side, waiting in the shadows. We had agreed to try to disarm the two upstairs or, barring that, to at least pin them down here until the constable arrived.
One of them stepped out onto the gallery, a pistol in either thick hand, an affable smile on his face, just as I remembered from the boxing match at Lady Mary's.
"Evening, Captain," Jack Sharp said cheerfully. He peered into the gathering shadows in the hall, then upended his pistols against his shoulders. "Thought I'd frightened you off."
I said nothing. When I'd read his name on the paper James Denis had handed me, many things had fallen into place. In Kent, I had reasoned that only a very strong man could have broken Breckenridge's neck. A very strong man had been on hand, the pugilist Jack Sharp. I had dismissed him at the time because he had been laid out by the farm lad, as Bartholomew had told us, but that entire scene had likely been a farce. Jack Sharp, probably instructed by Eggleston, had simply taken a fall, making certain to show a great deal of blood on the way down.
"I won't shoot you, sirs," Jack Sharp called down. "Not my manner, not at all."
We remained in place, and silent. I believed Sharp-he probably preferred hand-to-hand combat, a bout in which the strongest and most skilled would win. But Eggleston waited up there, and I imagined he would shoot anything that moved.
"Stalemate, then, gentlemen?" Jack said. He spoke no differently than he had in the garden at Astley Close, cheerful, friendly. He was a mate you would join at the local tavern. "Well, well, if you will not come up, I will come down."
"No!" Eggleston's voice rang out.
Jack kept grinning at us. "Now, now. I'll leave my shooters here." He leaned down and dropped both pistols to the floor. They clanked heavily against the boards. "They are honorable gentlemen. We'll just have us a chat, me dears, won't we?"
He was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to fight the three of us at once, to see what he could do. It was a challenge to him, a game. I saw no remorse in him for Kenneth Spencer's death, nor for Breckenridge's.
He was wrong if he thought I would not shoot an unarmed man. I would shoot him even if Grenville and Brandon were too punctilious to; I'd shoot to bring him down until the constable came to put him in chains.
Eggleston stepped into the light. His face was white, his blue child's eyes protruding. "Lacey, you interfering bastard, go away!"
Jack grinned. He turned and pattered along the gallery to his lover and kissed him on the mouth. Then, his manner still oozing friendliness, he turned back and started down the stairs.
"Go away, all of you!" Eggleston shouted desperately.
Jack kept plodding toward us. Brandon came forward to meet him, pistol ready, despite my signaling for him to stay back. If he got in my way, I could not fire at Sharp.
Behind me Grenville quivered with rage. "If we rush the bastard-
"
"Eggleston will shoot us," I said. "And Sharp probably has a knife up his sleeve."
Brandon reached him. "I am arresting you, sir," he said to Sharp in stentorian tones. "For the deaths of Colonel Roehampton Westin, Lord Breckenridge, and Mr. Kenneth Spencer."
Brandon carried power in his voice. So he had sounded in the days when he'd commanded an unruly band of cavalry troops and kept them all alive. For a moment Jack Sharp gazed at him in astonished apprehension, the face of a clever pickpocket who'd at last been nicked. Then he moved.