Miles inclined his head sharply at Henrietta. Henrietta bit her lip and gave an infinitesimal nod.
Pressing her eyes briefly closed, Henrietta flung herself sharply to the side, just as Miles lunged at the marquise. The weight of Henrietta's body threw the marquise off balance, causing her to stagger wildly as Henrietta plummeted towards the floor. Miles grabbed the arm in which the marquise held the gun, wrenching it upwards into the air. The pistol went off, the shot nicking chips of plaster from the ceiling. Henrietta instinctively ducked, rolling out of the way of a large chunk of falling plaster.
"You won't," Miles panted, twisting the marquise's wrist as he struggled with her for the gun, "be needing that any more."
Too breathless for words, the marquise merely snarled. An inadvertent gasp of pain hissed through her lips as Miles applied extra pressure. At the back of the room, the marquise's minions staggered and stumbled back into action, lumbering to the aid of their mistress. The emptied gun popped out of the marquise's hand and into Miles's.
Turning, Miles tossed the gun to Turnip. "Hold this!" he demanded, bracing himself to face the marquise's henchmen, their battered faces incongruous under their formal white wigs, livery torn and stained from their prior brawl.
Catching the gun, Turnip regarded it with bewilderment for a moment, as if unsure what to do with it, and then turned and tossed it to Jean-Luc, just as Miles repelled the first of his attackers with a stiff fist to the jaw.
"The idea is not to give the weapons to the other side!" exclaimed Miles in exasperation, jabbing at another attacker with his left fist.
"Oh, right." Turnip shook his head self-deprecatingly and advanced on Jean-Luc, who responded by muttering something very uncomplimentary in French and ramming a ball into the pistol. "I say, would you mind handing that back? Wasn't supposed to give it to you."
Miles muttered something equally uncomplimentary in English, and lunged at Jean-Luc. Behind him, the marquise reached up, and yanked one of the glittering pins from her hair, revealing a slim but lethal blade. Her shining dark hair tumbled down behind her as she levered the stiletto at Miles's back.
"Oh, no, you don't!"
Henrietta flung herself at the marquise's back, grabbing at the arm with the stiletto, only to be sent staggering back as the marquise deftly elbowed her in the stomach. Gasping for air, Henrietta stumbled backwards in a half-crouch as the marquise swirled to face her in a swish of filmy fabric, brandishing the stiletto like a sword.
The marquise advanced on Henrietta, blade extended. Holding her skirts with one trembling hand, Henrietta took a corresponding step back, feeling her way blindly backwards.
The marquise's black eyes narrowed, focused on Henrietta like a snake marking out a mouse. "You, my dear, have outlived your usefulness. Just like your friend at the ribbon shop."
"My friend at the ribbon shop?" Henrietta refused to allow her attention to be diverted from the glittering blade in the marquise's hand as she picked her careful way backwards.
"Would you like to know what I did to her?"
"No," broke in Miles, sending the fallen gun ricocheting across the uncarpeted floor with one swift, sideways kick. Jean-Luc and Turnip both dove for it, like two dogs after the same bone. "She wouldn't."
Miles delivered a sharp uppercut to one attacker's jaw, before ducking a punch from the other.
"Your friend didn't want to talk at first, either, but," purred the marquise, "I convinced her. With this." Striking out with the stiletto, she raised a stinging welt on Henrietta's hand. Henrietta gasped with pain.
Angling instinctively towards Henrietta, Miles's next punch went wide. With an irritated grunt, he disappeared under four flailing Frenchmen.
"What did you do to her?" demanded Henrietta.
"She told me" — the marquise jabbed again, but this time Henrietta was prepared, and jerked out of the way in time to avoid the narrow point — "some very interesting things about you, Lady Henrietta."
The first slash had been meant to admonish, the second had been aimed straight for the heart. Henrietta would have shivered if all her energies hadn't been focused so narrowly elsewhere.
"Did she?" The marquise seemed less dangerous speaking than silent, with part of her energies directed away from her prey. If only she could get close enough to trip the marquise without exposing herself to that deadly blade! Henrietta scooted herself behind a small table, but the marquise slid gracefully around it, her draperies providing no more impediment than the mist that they resembled.
"She told me" — the marquise stalked Henrietta inexorably backwards, but Henrietta didn't dare take her eyes off the blade in her hand long enough to see where she was driving her — "that you were in communication with the Pink Carnation. All I had to do" — the marquise snagged a hole in Henrietta's borrowed bodice, but the thick cloth foiled incursions as effectively as chain mail — "was follow you."
"Not far enough," muttered Henrietta, just as her foot struck something, sending her reeling backwards just in time to evade another thrust to the heart. Flailing, her back slammed into the wall, stunning her. "So clumsy," tsked the marquise, moving in for the kill. The best swordsman fears the worst, Henrietta reminded herself, letting herself slide down the wall, as the marquise drove her weapon into the ancient wallpaper where Henrietta had been leaning a moment before. The blade bent with the force of the thrust.
Scuttling on hands and knees, Henrietta ducked around the marquise's legs as the marquise flung aside the blunted blade and reached up with a swift, vicious movement to draw another from the dark mass of her hair. Another section of hair came unmoored, slithering down the marquise's back like snakes crawling from their basket.
As if from a long way away, Henrietta could hear the thuds and grunts that betokened men in the thick of a fray. There would be no help from that quarter.
"Hen!" shouted Miles, blond head popping up momentarily from the confused mass of bodies. "You" — wham! — "all right?"
Henrietta rolled as the marquise stabbed downwards, spitting her own hair out of her mouth as she careened sideways. Through the screen of brown strands she could see the blade descending again and desperately propelled herself back in the other direction, rolling once, twice, three times, until her movement was arrested with a jarring thud, as she whammed hip-first into something hard and unstable. It rocked slightly, before settling back into place, ashes shifting and settling.
She had been tripped by her own blasted disguise. Next time, if there was a next time, she was bloody well disguising herself as a duelist. Breeches, a sword, pistols. Not a bloody, inconvenient, underfoot, why-don't-you-just-help-the-enemy bloody metal bucket and shovel, thought Henrietta hysterically as the marquise's new, and, if possible, even pointier stiletto descended in a deadly arc.
A shovel. It wasn't a pistol, or even a sword, but it was there, which counted for far more.
Grabbing the shovel out of the bucket, rocking backwards with the force of the movement, Henrietta swung it wildly upwards, knocking aside the marquise's blade, the heavy iron of the fire tool sending the slim silver blade cartwheeling through the air. From the amorphous mob of men on the other end of the room, she heard a shocked yelp of pain and a truly filthy French curse.
"Sorry!" she called out automatically.
"You, Lady Henrietta," announced the marquise, breathing heavily and looking decidedly miffed, "are proving something of a problem."
"I try," croaked Henrietta, trying to scuttle backwards and stand up all at once, a course of action that made up in desperation what it lacked in coordination.