“I thought it was too,” Emm said. “Did you ask the butler? Or whoever’s at the door?”
He shook her head. “Let’s go.” He gave a brusque nod to Sylvia, took Emm’s arm and hurried toward the exit.
Inquiries from the butler revealed that Lady Lily had indeed left the Mainwaring house some twenty minutes earlier, along with a tall young gentleman who’d collected her cloak.
Cal sent a footman out to summon his carriage.
“I’m going to strangle Rose,” Cal muttered as they waited for the carriage to arrive. “I thought she’d given up on her old tricks.”
“I thought so too.” Rose and her antics were the reason Cal had married Emm in the first place. “Even so, if there was some problem with Rose, I don’t understand why Lily didn’t come to tell us.”
“Don’t you?” Cal darted her a grim look. “Lily’s very loyal. If Rose is up to some mischief, wild horses wouldn’t drag it out of Lily.”
Emm gave a rueful grimace. It was true. “So where do you think she’s gone?”
Cal shrugged. “I’ll take you home first, then—”
“Oh, no, I’m feeling much better now.”
Cal snorted. “Says the woman who’s as pale as paper and looking ready to cast up her accounts at any moment.” He slipped his arm around her waist and said in a softened voice, “Home first for you, my love, to put your feet up and rest. And don’t worry about my wretched sisters. I’ll track them down soon enough.” He glanced at her face and added, “And when I do find them, I’m going to throttle them for adding to your worries.”
• • •
Lily lay on the floor of the carriage, gagged, bound up in a shroud of heavy cloth and unable to see a thing. She struggled to breathe. Waves of dizziness and a strange lethargy added to her fear and confusion. She tried to move her legs, but it was as if there were weights attached to them.
The cloth covering her was musty and stank of horses and mildew. A horse blanket? She pushed at it. “Keep still, you!” a man snarled. Not Mr. Nixon; his voice was rough and uneducated. Something pressed down on her neck—a foot? She froze, her heart hammering in her chest. She could barely breathe as it was. If he pressed any harder . . .
After a moment Mr. Nixon said, “Ease up. She’s no use to me if you break her neck.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“No, but a bump or pothole might jar your foot and then where would I be? With a useless body to dispose of. I didn’t pay you for that.”
A body? The flat indifference in the voices was terrifying. Lily’s heart hammered harder.
The pressure on her neck eased. She lay still, struggling to breathe. Questions swirled uselessly in her brain. What did these terrible men want? It sounded like Sylvia’s cousin, Mr. Nixon, was in charge. Was Sylvia part of this? Did she know what was happening to Lily or not? And who was the other man? Some rough hireling from the sound of things. Most pressing of all, why had they taken her? For what purpose?
And why was it so difficult to marshal her thoughts? Had she been hit on the head, that she was so dizzy and lethargic? She thought about her head. It wasn’t sore—at least not in the way it would be if something had hit it.
Her mouth tasted sour and cobwebby. So much fabric had been jammed into her mouth that her jaw ached from being forced open for so long. Her tongue was wedged to the side, pressing painfully against a sharp tooth. Every jolt and bump and swerve of the carriage was painful.
What did they want with her? Were they planning to murder—no, he said a body was no use to him. What then? Ransom?
She recalled something her brother, Cal, had said to her and Rose a lifetime ago in Bath, when they’d sneaked out alone at night. Something about girls being kidnapped and sold into some kind of slavery. Yes, that was it. White slavery—do you know what that means? Sold into a Turkish harem or a brothel in the seamiest foreign cities. And never seen again.
A chill ran down her spine. Was that it? Would she disappear into some Turkish seraglio and never see her family again? Tears squeezed between her tightly closed eyes.
She couldn’t give in to despair. She wouldn’t. She had to fight this. Somehow. She swallowed convulsively, and immediately had to battle the instinct to gag.
Lily didn’t know how long she lay there on the cold floor of the carriage, in a kind of stupor of helplessness and nausea, but eventually she realized the carriage was slowing. It stopped. Now what? She blinked hard, trying to breathe, to force herself to think. It was like wading through a heavy fog.
“How much of that stuff did you give her?”
Stuff? What stuff?
“A bit, just enough to keep her quiet. Any more and she’d have tasted it.”
“Better give her another dose before I leave you, then.”
She snatched a realization from the swirling bewilderment. The fruit punch at the party. It must have been drugged. No wonder she was so confused.
She could hear them moving in the carriage, shifting things, and then abruptly she was grabbed by the shoulders and jerked into a sitting position. The blanket was pulled off her face, and the wad of cloth dragged from her mouth. She swallowed, gasping deep gulps of air in relief, but before she could gather her wits, someone grabbed her hair and forced her head back, painfully.
A hand gripped her chin, hard, and the neck of a small bottle was thrust between her lips. She choked and spluttered as some nasty-tasting liquid was forced down her throat. She struggled with all the feeble strength left to her, but it did no good. The holder of the bottle—she couldn’t see his
