one spot.
“Yes.” The word seemed to rise from the depths of his soul and poison the air around them with his bitterness. “Had I been in the gallery behind the president, I’d have stopped Booth. Instead, I heard the shot from the hallway below.”
“Oh dear,” she murmured and touched his sleeve in sympathy.
He didn’t seem to feel it, and she quickly withdrew her hand. “I wasn’t technically on duty that night. But I should have . . . should have—” He shook his head. His eyes clouded with sadness.
There was nothing she could say. Her hand moved toward his arm again, but she pulled it back with the same caution as when approaching a hot stove. “You were Mr. Lincoln’s bodyguard?”
“Not officially. I worked undercover for the Union during the war, a spy if you will. The information I gathered always went directly to Mr. Lincoln. After the war, as a civilian, I asked to be put on assignment in Washington, to continue on the president’s security detail, but I was told he needed no one else.”
“And your knowledge of bombs?”
“Part of my job was to track Confederate soldiers intent on blowing up bridges, ammunition dumps, supply lines, and other things critical to the North’s winning the war. Sometimes when I found a bomb, there wasn’t time to summon the men trained to disarm them. I had no choice but to do it myself, or else trigger the thing to save lives but sacrifice a vital road or bridge.”
“So you learned by trial and error.” It seemed to her a dangerous way to train.
“Most of the devices were pretty simple.” He shrugged and started walking again, watching the ground as his boots crunched over the frost heaves and dead leaves. She followed along, matching his strides. “They were either meant to be set off by hand and thrown, or planted and triggered by pressure. Sometimes a mechanical trip wire was used to strike a flint and light the fuse after the dynamiteers were well clear. During that time, I discovered a few soldiers from the South who were particularly creative. Their work was nearly undetectable, and the materials they used were always the same.”
He held up the twine then produced—as if he were a magician performing a sleight-of-hand trick—a sliver of gray stone.
“Flint?” she guessed.
“Good Louisiana flint. So far as I know, there’s none like it in all of England.” He looked at her, his meaning clear. She felt incapable of speech her throat had tightened so. He continued. “I believe the Fenians have recently recruited two of the best black powder men in America. I doubt that dodging their trap just once will put them off their game.”
Ten
Having done all he could by the end of the day to make certain the royals in residence at Balmoral were safe, Stephen Byrne took himself off for a strenuous ponder. The locations best suited to problem solving were, in his estimation, working men’s pubs. Having obtained a stool at the end of the centuries-old oak bar in The Wooden Ox, not far down the road from the castle, he asked for a good dark stout and set to work on both it and his thoughts.
If he’d thought it necessary to station himself outside Louise’s door and watch over her the night long to keep her safe, he would have. But Brown had the place locked up tighter than the Tower of London, his own men stationed at every entrance plus reinforcements ordered up from Aberdeen to patrol and post as sentries. So there seemed little need for him to lose sleep in a drafty hallway. How the princess had slipped past the guards that morning was beyond him. He imagined she’d spent a good part of her youth at Balmoral, and like as not, she and her siblings had discovered secret passageways they’d used in their play. He’d have to alert Brown to that possibility.
Aside from his confidence in the Scot’s security measures, Byrne had another excuse for staying away from the castle. He expected the marquess would be paying a visit to his wife’s bedroom, if only as a matter of form and to calm any untoward gossip among the court. But perhaps Lorne would attempt to perform his husbandly duty.
Byrne didn’t like to think of the dandy, or any other man, touching Louise. Lurid images flashed through his mind, leaving him feeling raw.
Who could really say what went on between the couple? If anything at all. He’d seen them