A Wicked Conceit, Anna Huber [best e book reader txt] 📗

Chapter 20

I could hear the panic stretching his voice, see it in the taut stillness of his stance. And so could Gage, who had fallen silent, his anger draining from the muscles of the arm beneath mine that had earlier flexed, ready to lash out.

“I ken it wasna very likely, but I thought . . .” He broke off, shaking his head, unwilling or perhaps unable to finish that thought.

“May-maybe she went for a walk,” I suggested hesitantly.

He nodded. “She does that sometimes.” A vee formed between his brows. “Least she did before.”

Before the threats to him had increased after the publication of The King of Grassmarket and his decision to keep her close for her own protection? Or before she’d run off with a former member of his gang and returned to him hollow-eyed, malnourished, and pregnant, only to lose the baby a few weeks later? I didn’t ask.

“But she kens no’ to go anywhere wi’oot me or Stumps or Locke,” he insisted. “She wouldna disobey me.”

I wasn’t so certain of that. As docile and obedient as Maggie was most of the time, I’d recognized that she had a dogged streak that was just as strong as her brother’s. She’d simply been too beaten down from her experiences in the wilds of Northumberland, betrayed by the man she had believed loved her, to summon her will to resist. But she was seventeen and chafing at the tight control her brother exerted over her life and his failure to acknowledge her needs. It was only a matter of time before she rebelled again.

“What time did you notice she was gone?”

“A little before sunrise.”

I felt a pulse of alarm, for that was almost four hours ago. Even if Maggie had dared to go for a walk alone, she would never have been gone that long.

“Are your men searching for her?” Gage asked.

“Aye, as we speak.” He glanced behind him, his jaw hardening. “Though I’ve a fair idea noo who has her.”

His thunderous expression and the red suffusing his features alarmed me. “Who?”

He turned to look at me, hesitating to say the name as if I might try to dispute him. “Who else but McQueen.” He fairly spat the word. “No’ that he was directly responsible. McQueen never gets his hands dirty.”

“Don’t be rash, Kincaid.”

He turned to glare at Gage, who held his hands up palms out.

“I know you don’t want my advice, but you need to hear it anyway. It could be McQueen or it could not, but you need confirmation before you send your men after him. Who do you think will be the first person McQueen will harm if your men start attacking his?”

Bonnie Brock’s chest rose up and down with each angry, heaving breath, but he appeared to be listening.

“You also need to consider that all of this might easily be a trap to catch you. If you’re killed or arrested, that won’t help your sister.”

Brock looked away, struggling to master his emotions, and then nodded.

“Let us help look,” Gage surprised me by offering. “And if it turns out McQueen, or someone else with nefarious intentions, has Maggie, let me help you get her back. Safely.”

His eyes narrowed in obvious mistrust.

“It may shock you to know, I have some experience with recovering captives,” he retorted. “And I doubt McQueen’s men could possibly be more vicious than the Turks. Or the Greeks for that matter,” he added in an undertone.

Gage almost never talked about his time fighting in the Greeks’ struggle of independence from the Ottoman Empire. It had taken me months to convince him to share even the smallest detail with me. So to hear him speak of it now, and to help Bonnie Brock no less, made my heart swell with love for him.

When Bonnie Brock still didn’t speak, Gage retorted impatiently, “I’m not about to let your sister come to harm. Regardless of her relationship to you.”

At this derisive quip, he seemed to regain some of his self-possession, nodding stiffly. “Aye.”

I knew it would be too much to suppose he would thank us, so I added my input before Gage began to expect it. “I’ll tell our staff to admit her if she comes here. My maid will know what to do.”

He began to turn away, but then I remembered I still had a question to pose.

“Don’t take offense, but I need to ask you about the men you have watching the house.”

He didn’t sneer mockingly as I’d expected. “Aye.”

“Is one of them a brawny fellow in a brown coat? Perhaps a new recruit?”

His frown deepened. “Nay. That’s no’ my man.” His eyes narrowed. “But it sounds like one o’ McQueen’s. Has scars from smallpox and a dark smudge beside his eye here.” He tapped his right temple.

“I didn’t get a good look at his face,” I admitted, looking up at Gage, who was listening intently. “But he was standing across the street watching our house yesterday afternoon.” I didn’t add that I’d seen him outside Lennox’s shop as well, not wanting to tip that hand to Bonnie Brock.

“I’ll speak to my men,” he promised. “But I can tell ye it’s no’ the first time they’ve noticed McQueen’s men shadowin’ ye.”

“And you’re just telling us this now?” Gage protested.

Bonnie Brock shrugged. “Ye didna seem to want to ken.”

What he really meant was that he didn’t want us to know precisely how much he was monitoring our movements. He probably already knew about Lennox and every other place we’d visited since returning to Edinburgh in early February.

“Dinna fash. My men’ll keep ’im in line.” His brow furrowed, perhaps recognizing that these were the same men he had also been relying on to keep Maggie safe, and they’d failed at that.

This time when he turned to go, I halted him with a single word: “Brock.”

He glanced over his shoulder.

“We’ll find her.”

He didn’t speak, but I could sense the distress rippling through