When she was a little girl growing up in a small white house overlooking the misty emerald swath of a Dublin green, Kat’s mother and stepfather used to take her to the market that set up every Wednesday afternoon in the cobbled medieval square of their parish church. She could remember running excitedly from one stall to the next, exclaiming over the displays of satin hair ribbons and lace collars and carved wooden tops. But her mother’s favorite stalls were always those selling bunches of yellow daffodils and rainbow-hued tulips, or pots of rue and pennyroyal, hollyhock seedlings and briar rose cuttings. She’d take them home and plant them in the narrow strip of garden beside their cottage’s front stoop. Even now, all these years later, if Kat closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could still see her mother’s strong hands sinking into the rich dark earth, a faint faraway smile on her lips that told of a deep and rare contentment.
In some indefinable way, Kat knew that the child she’d once been had resented the joy and peace her mother found in her garden. But she’d never been able to decide if her selfishness came from the wish that her mother would find that deep, unalloyed joy in her daughter alone, or if she’d simply envied the tranquility she glimpsed in her mother’s face. And it shamed Kat now to remember that she had begrudged her mother those brief interludes of peace and happiness.
There had been so little of either in Arabella Noland’s short life.
Now, as she breathed in the heady scents from the banks of Michaelmas daisies, ferns, and chrysanthemums, Kat found herself wondering if it was her mother’s spirit that had guided her here, to the peace of this place. Or was this love of growing things a trait passed down from mother to daughter, like dark hair and a talent for acting? A tendency that had always been there, nestled hidden within her, only waiting to be discovered.
She smiled at the thought. Then the smile faded as she became aware of a sudden charge of tension in the atmosphere, the rush of heavy feet. A trader’s high-pitched voice whined, “’Ey! Wot the ’ell ye doin’?”
Kat’s eyes flew open.
Rough hands seized her from behind. She lunged against the unseen man’s fierce grip, tried to scream. A calloused palm slapped down across her mouth, grinding her lips against her teeth and flattening her nose so that she had to fight to draw air. She smelled dirt and onions and fetid breath as he pressed his beard-roughened cheek against hers and whispered, “Come wit’ me quiet-like, an’ I’ll see ye don’t get hurt.”
Chapter 39
K
at heaved against the man’s hold and felt his arms tighten around her in a fierce hug. He dragged her backward, toward the shadowy, narrow lane that ran along the old, soot-stained nave of the church. She tried to bite the thick, dirty fingers smothering her, but the pressure was so brutal she could get no purchase.
“I say, there,” bleated one of the florists, stepping from behind his stall. “You can’t do that!”
A second man—a wiry, black-haired brute with a pock-scarred face and small, sharp nose—turned to thrust a blunderbuss pistol into the trader’s face. “Mind your own business or lose your head.” His English diction was careful and precise, but Kat caught the faint, unmistakable traces of French inflection and knew a new leap of terror.
The florist backed off, hands splayed out at his sides, face slack.
Her heart was pounding, her mouth achingly dry, the shouts of the scattered costermongers and stall keepers echoing oddly in her head, as if she were at the base of a well. The market square spun around her in a blur of startled, frightened faces, wet paving, spilled chrysanthemums. A flock of pigeons whirled up from the church portico, pale outstretched wings beating the cool damp air. She tried to twist her body sideways, but her captor’s fingers dug into her cruelly, his breath hot against her ear. “Ye want to live, don’t give me trouble. Ye hear, girl? Because wot I do wit’ ye afterward is up t’ me. Ye got that?”
She made herself go utterly limp, as if fainting from fear, her hands dangling slack at her sides. She heard him give a grunt of satisfaction. “Have yer friend bring the bloody cart up, quick,” he told his pockmarked companion. “Let’s get out o’ ’ere.”
They were passing the last stall in the row, a rough shed given over to the sale of earthen crockery, the stall’s seller cowering wide-eyed against the rickety frame, as if he could somehow make himself disappear into the weathered post behind him. Kat’s captor was half dragging, half carrying her now, a drooping deadweight that sagged in his arms, so that his effort was more focused on keeping her upright than on restraining her.
Flinging out one hand, she grasped the lip of a stout pitcher from the edge of the stall’s counter and swung it up and back to smash it against the side of her captor’s head. He let out a rumbling roar, his grip on her slackening with surprise and pain.
She twisted sideways, ignoring the wrenching pain that shot from her wrist as he tried, too late, to tighten his hold on her. “You bloody son of a bitch!” she screamed, grabbing a platter off the stall and breaking it against his face. “I ought to cut out your bloody liver and feed it to the crows!”
He howled, blood spurting from his cut face, his arms flinging up to protect his head as she snatched up a bowl and hurled it at him.
“Oy, wot ye doin’ to me crockery?” bleated the stall owner.
“Your bloody crockery?” shouted Kat, whirling to heave a plate at him. “You worthless, stinking coward! You would have just stood there and watched him kill me!”