“Trap, Nicholas?” Adrian scowled. “You persistently imagine traps, like a mange ridden fox in a snare. There’s been no trap. Only of your own making.”
“Then you’re a simpleton, cousin.” His legs were sliding a little down, unable to hold him. Emeline understood his exhaustion. But she realised something else. He was playing for time. She thought she knew why, and held her own people back. “The men you suppose loyal to you,” Nicholas continued, “made sure your message was misdirected. I was purposefully brought here, and ambushed. Twice. A trap then. Can you be sure you’re not equally trapped?”
One of the men at his side growled something Emeline could not hear. David reached out, steadying his master, but remained silent. Adrian sneered, “There’s only the result of your own arrogance. I’ve loathed you, your vile brother and that drunken sot my Uncle Symond since I was a ten year child. None of you ever gave a thought to me and my sister, though we were the penniless orphans in a family of wealth and greed.”
“Self pity again, Adrian?”
“Once I thought you a cringing coward,” Adrian said between his teeth. “Perhaps I was wrong in that. But I’m not wrong about your stupidity, Nicholas, nor your arrogance. Obnoxious avarice, brutality, conceit, and blind insistence on everything to your own benefit, even when those gains were my losses. Selfish to the end, like all your family.”
“What has that to do with treason and loyalty to your country?” Nicholas straightened himself against the wall, strengthening his knees. “You have no Lancastrian sympathies. You’ve no friendship with Tudor nor his mother. Your parents proclaimed no loyalty to any foreign cause before they died. You’ve no genuine grudge against the House of York, nor against the king who knighted you on the Scottish Marches, much to your own pride. So your treason is simply a coward’s revenge against your own family.” Nicholas spoke slowly, both through weakness and a need to slow time. Again Emeline beckoned to the group behind her, her finger to her lips, asking them to wait.
“You know nothing of me,” Adrian glowered. “Long years of ignorance, uncaring arrogance and playing the clown. You’ve no concept of my suffering.”
“You join a treacherous cause simply because you’re envious of your rich cousins?” Nicholas sighed, again wiping the blood from his eyes. “You’ll back a cold hard man without a drop of royal blood in his veins, simply to reject whatever cause I support? Even if it means your own country destroyed? Heaven help us from English bitterness and French spite.” He was slipping again, his knees buckling. “I despise you, Adrian,” he said faintly. “Now do whatever you will.”
“Kill you?” Adrian sniggered. “Too easy, cousin.”
“You killed my brother. Why stop now?”
Adrian paused. He shook his head. “I loathe you all. I loathed Peter more than anyone else, with his claws into my poor sister and his filthy prick eager to escape its codpiece at any paltry opportunity. But I never killed Peter.” He shook his head with a whirl of flying raindrops. “I know full well you killed him yourself, and probably your father-in-law as well. Yet your wretched luck continues. You married a woman who despised you just as she should have. Yet the witless girl has grown to love you, so I’m told. But your undeserved luck ends here, cousin.”
Nicholas was too weak. David was trying to hold him up but he was bleeding copiously. Emeline thought he would fall. Whatever he needed to wait for, no longer mattered. She raised her hand, picked up her skirts and ran forwards as fast as she could. The crowd followed her, splashing through mud and puddles. Sudden shouts, a rush of shadows and shapes, stones thrown and the flash of steel through the streaming waters. Nicholas and David had been disarmed but Adrian’s men, their swords raised, whirled, disorientated and alarmed, not knowing whether they faced the law, guards, or untold assailants. The crowd from the tenement carried cudgels and old bent arrows, honed kitchen knives and skillets, pots and steel butchers’ hooks. Emeline held an iron poker. Adrian and his men were outnumbered four to one. Adrian stared, and dropped his sword.
Sudden and unexpected, the rush overpowered almost at once. Adrian toppled, down to his knees in the slush. One of his men disappeared beneath five flailing sticks, and roared once before he slumped unconscious, skull cracked. Another of Adrian’s men faced three women, one with her carving knife in his face. It was thrust to the hilt into his mouth, through his tongue and down his throat. He gargled torn flesh and fell. A third man stumbled and went down, four pairs of large hands squeezing around his neck, strangling him into silence as an iron hook pierced one ear. Emeline wielded the poker, heavy as a blade, and smashed it over one man’s head. Then she ran to Nicholas.
It had taken only moments. Nicholas also fell, but he fell into his wife’s arms. Emeline kissed his blood streaked cheeks and held him tight. They sat together in the mud as the noise and violence spun around them, kicking legs, dancing skirts, wooden clogs, grappling hands and the wavering reins of one confused horse.
“Don’t kill Adrian,” whispered Nicholas, and fainted.
One last flash and crackle of lightening, a roll of thunder less distinct and more distant, and abruptly the rain began to ease.
The people crowded round. “Was that it, then mistress?”
“A fine tangle, lady, but not as profitable as we’d hoped. Eight miserable dolts and one fine gennelman without purse nor rings, what we can’t even finish off.” Then the man saw David and recognised him. “It’s Witton, lads. Look. The little bugger from next door is here after all.”
“I’m off back to own my little lad,” one woman said, shaking her head. “Ain’t no more fun to be had here and I were never no friend o’ Howard Witton, nasty bugger he were, and Liz not much better.”
“The son ain’t like the father. David’s a good boy, and a clever one.”
“No matter,” the woman said, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m off. I ain’t waiting round here ’till the law turns up.”
“True, true.” Some of the crowd drifted away, looking back only briefly. “So you look after yourself now, lady. Reckon we’re not needed no more and will be gone afore the Watch comes this way.”
“The Watch? Of course.” It was what Nicholas had been waiting for. Emeline nodded, and without rising she thanked her new friends. “I hope no one is hurt?”
“A bruise, missus, no more.”
“There’s plenty of them other buggers hurt, and that’s what was asked of us.” David Witton’s neighbour grinned. “But I reckoned on seeing them Bambrigg boys. Good boys they are, and useful in a brawl.”
David was clasping hands, thanking and praising, knowing every soul who had come at Emeline’s request. “The Bambriggs work for my lord now,” he told them. “But both Harry and Rob are off on another errand. They’d have been helpful indeed, but when they were instructed to stay behind elsewhere, we had no way of knowing this would happen. We expected no organised attack.” He smiled. “Didn’t expect all of you to come either.”
“Thanks to the lady,” he was told. “Poor lass was in a right spin and said she needed help. Gave your name. So we come for you.”
“Besides,” added another, “we’s always ready for a good fight.”
Finally, David returned to his master’s side. Nicholas was still only half conscious, blur eyed and dizzy. “It is hard,” he murmured very softly, “to believe what I’ve just seen.”
“All true, my lord. We’ve been saved by the ruffians from the tenement, roused and brought to our aid by your ingenious lady wife herself.” And David knelt in the mud, his hands carefully testing where Nicholas had been wounded. As he examined, he began to explain what had happened at the end. “We thought we had beaten them, my lady,” he informed Emeline. “After I returned here, riding your horse as you graciously instructed, I found the fight almost won. We finished them off quickly, my lord and I, and the locals who’d come to our aid thought matters done with, and left. Our attackers were fair beaten and those not hurt set off running. Two dead, but their companions carted them away. To the river maybe, being the best place for traitors. We thought ourselves free, and hoped for the Watch to come by at last, since it’s close to their usual patrol. But both my Lord Nicholas and Lord Jerrid were badly wounded.”