“You have been watching me?” she asked. “Why? Who are you?”
Her mind whirred with the need to find a means of escape. Her heart was pounding, all the moisture gone from her mouth. She still felt cloudy, as if she were tangled in cobwebs, but she knew she needed to take action if she were to save herself.
One of the men chuckled. “We have eyes and ears everywhere in London, Miss Hilgrove. Of course we have been watching you. But you’ll not be the one asking the questions here.”
Taking a slow inhalation against the horror welling within her, she tried to maintain her calm, to make sense of her surroundings. She was seated on the hard bench of a carriage. If she could somehow find her way to the door, perhaps she could kick it open and throw herself into the street. It would be dangerous, the likelihood of her injury high, but she had a horrible prescience that remaining in the carriage with these scoundrels would be far more perilous.
“If you tell us what we want to know, you will be returned, uninjured, to your home,” added her other captor.
Perhaps if she preyed upon their mercy, they would release her.
“Return me now, I beg you,” she pleaded. “I swear I will forget this ever happened.”
“Give us the information we need, and we will return you,” said the first man, seemingly the leader of the two. His voice possessed an assurance that the man who had hit her lacked.
“I have no information that could possibly be of use to you,” she said, quite truthfully. “I am the proprietress of a typewriting school. I have not been acting as the Duke of Westmorland’s typewriter. He has merely been kind enough to help my fledgling school to grow by offering his support.”
“And now why would he do that, I wonder? A fancy duke like Westmorland, taking note of a humble lady typewriter?” he asked, his tone suggestive.
“Perhaps you are warming his bed, Miss Hilgrove?” the second man prodded. “Is that it?”
“No, of course not.” Her cheeks flamed at the suggestion, and a rush of shame hit her. Because the assumptions these awful men had made about her were not that far from the truth.
“Tell us everything you know, madam,” demanded the leader of the two.
“I know nothing.” She swallowed, still trying to gather her wits, to formulate a plan. If the carriage would sway around a turn, perhaps she could throw herself from the bench before she was caught…
“You have been typing reports, you prim bitch,” said the man who had cuffed her on the head. “Admit the truth, or I will hit you again.”
“What do you want from me?” she asked. “Please, I beg you, release me. I do not have the information you seek. I am not privy to any of His Grace’s correspondence. I know nothing of the Special League’s business.”
“You read his reports and compiled them. Tell us what they contained,” commanded the first man. “Tell us everything you can recall. Names, places, dates, suspects, defense strategies. Give us the information, and you will be freed without harm.”
“Very well,” she relented, devising a new strategy. “I will tell you everything I read. There was a letter from his steward in Wiltshire, detailing a problem with the tenants. There was also the matter of the roof on the eastern portion of Manning Hall requiring a repair. The architect His Grace employed to alter certain portions of his estate and bring them into keeping with our modern era wrote as well, questioning whether the duke would prefer to import tile from Italy for the bathing rooms he is having constructed in the private ducal apartments.”
Westmorland had once, quite unintentionally, given her some of his personal correspondence along with the reports he had wished for her to transcribe. She had glanced over some of the letters before realizing he had not meant to give it to her.
“That is not what he hired you for, and you know it.”
Undeterred, she continued spouting off useless facts, inventing when she could not recall more. “He is sending relief to the victims of the Spanish earthquake, so there were a great deal of letters concerning the disbursement of funds abroad…”
As she droned on, the carriage hit a large rut in the road, and Isabella seized the opportunity. She threw herself from the bench to the floor of the carriage and began frantically kicking in hopes she would reach the door.
“Damn it, you were warned,” growled one of her captors.
Rough arms seized her, hauling her back to the seat. Another set of arms captured her legs, though her boots connected with something solid and she heard a gratifying ooof, which told her she had at least landed a blow somewhere on one of her captors.
“Help me!” she cried, swinging wildly with her arms and kicking with her legs as desperate terror gave her new strength. “Help, please!”
She landed a blow to something that felt like a nose with her bound fists. Her knee connected with a stomach.
“Son of a bitch, we need to get rid of the troublesome wench.”
“Help!” she screamed again.
But then, a gag was shoved into her mouth and tightly tied, the fabric cutting viciously into the corners of her lips. She attempted to produce more sound, but her cries were muffled. Strong arms held her captive. The heaviness of a male body upon her legs rendered moving impossible.
There was the sudden sound of a fist thumping on the roof of the carriage. The conveyance came to a halt. She found herself being roughly hoisted between two pairs of hands and lifted into the air.
They were removing her from the carriage.
Dear Lord, do not let them kill me, she prayed.
And then she fought with all her might.
“No one has seen any sign of Miss Hilgrove since the initial morning reports of her being snatched off the pavements,” reported the latest of the Scotland Yard detectives tasked with
