Mirabelle woke in stages, fighting her way through a fog of pain and confusion. She was vaguely aware of being curled on her side in a small space, and of a bumping and rocking sensation. But nausea and exhaustion dragged her back to oblivion before she could work through what that might mean.
When next she woke, her world was still, stale, and absolutely black. She blinked her eyes experimentally to be sure they were open. When the darkness around her didn’t alter, she reached out and discovered a hard surface mere inches from her face. Not blind then, she reasoned, shoving at the barrier, but trapped. With panic creeping steadily through her blood, she searched the meager space around her with her hands and feet, and found only that she was boxed in on all sides. A trunk? She shifted and squirmed, trying to find or force a way out.
And there was a way out. There had to be.
It was like being buried alive.
The possibility of such a horror sent the panic racing. She cried out, kicked, and clawed at her confinement.
An answer came in the form of a loud creak, a rush of fresh air, and a great burst of light in her eyes.
“Now, now. There’s no need for all that,” a familiar voice admonished.
“Let me out,” she demanded even as she scrambled up. “Let me—”
“I hardly intended to keep you strapped to the top of the carriage for the whole trip.”
A set of bony fingers gripped her arm and helped her climb out of the trunk. Shaking them off, she stumbled across a few feet of dirt road toward a carriage, then simply bent at the waist and let the cool night air fill her lungs.
“That’s it, my dear. Take a few more deep breaths,” the voice advised. “A strike to the head can be a bit off-putting to the system. The man’s a brute. You’re well rid of him.”
A strike to the head, she thought dully. A road and carriage. A high-pitched voice and bony fingers. Memories came trickling back.
Oh, Lord. She’d been kidnapped—struck over the head, stuffed in a trunk, and taken away. It was beyond comprehension, surreal enough that she had trouble wrapping her mind around it. Young ladies being hauled off against their will was the sort of thing Kate’s novels were rife with—a clear indicator of how far removed the scenario was from reality.
She straightened slowly and held her hand up against the blinding light. “Where are we?”
“On the road home, my dear,” Mr. Hartsinger said, lowering the lantern.
“Home?” What was the man talking about? What sort of abductor brought his captive home? “You’re taking me to Haldon?”
Hartsinger giggled. “Of course not, silly girl. I’m taking you to your new home, St. Brigit’s.”
St. Brigit’s.
Suddenly, her circumstances didn’t seem surreal at all. Kate’s stories of damsels in distress might have been fiction, but the tales Evie told of sane but inconvenient women being sent to asylums were terrifyingly real.
Her eyes jumped from one side of the darkened road to the other. She couldn’t outrun a carriage, particularly feeling as dizzy and sick as she did, but if she could dart off the side into the trees, perhaps she could hide….
“Ah, ah, ah. None of that,” Hartsinger sang, lifting the pistol she’d forgotten he had. “And I shouldn’t bother looking to my driver for help, if I were you.” He jerked his chin toward the shadowy figure pushing the trunk off the side of the road. “I pay him handsomely. Now, into the carriage with you.”
She considered disobeying. If it was a choice of being shot on the side of the road or spending the rest of her life locked in an asylum with the likes of Mr. Hartsinger, she’d take the bullet.
Fortunately, that choice wasn’t required of her. She need only bide her time until she had the opportunity to escape. Or until Whit came for her.
Feeling determined about the first, and absolutely certain of the second, she climbed into the carriage.
Whit had known fear before. He’d felt it the day Mirabelle had fallen down the hill. And the night she’d insisted on participating in the mission.
As a soldier, he’d experienced that sick dread that proceeds every battle, and the weighted horror that comes as men die in the blood and gore of combat.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the marrow-deep terror he felt now.
He spurred his horse on, knowing it was dangerous to ride hell-for-leather with only the shadowed moonlight to show the way. He had no choice.
How much of an advantage did Hartsinger have? Five minutes? A quarter hour? Even more? How long had they been in the stable, standing about, while Mirabelle was being dragged away?
In a trunk.
Was she still in there? Trapped and frightened?
He almost preferred that idea over the alternative—that Hartsinger had taken her out and was now alone with her in the carriage.
A man could do a great deal of harm to a woman when he had a carriage and a quarter-hour’s time at his disposal.