coming out of the house now with the weapons.
‘Be safe, Emily,’ Mary told her.
‘Let Alice be safe. I will take my chances.’
5
For so long a time, a passage of some fifteen years, the smell of spent firearms sickened me. You will know what memories the scent of hot metal and burned powder brought. We had those guns locked out of sight because I could not bear to look at them, though I am thankful we never threw them out or gave them away. They became like plotters, part of a terrible conspiracy, now consigned to an oubliette.
If I had my way, I would never have picked up a gun in all of my life. I would have sat at home and done my embroidery and read my romances, and probably married and had children, and never needed to know the secret of gunpowder.
I have learned well what my instructors since taught me. The secret of gunpowder is that anyone – a man, a woman, a child, a cripple – can kill with it.
‘Can you pick up their trail, Grant?’
He never really smiled much, but there was grim humour in his gaze now. ‘Oh, there’s precious little I can’t track, after twenty years on the estate, ma’am.’ His reins hung loose in his hands and he guided his steed with his knees. Emily’s own mount, a chestnut mare that knew her well, tagged docilely along behind. Emily rode astride like a man, her dress hitched up on both sides. The place and time did not lend themselves to the social niceties of side saddle, and privately she was proud of the approving look Grant had given her. He worshipped practicality, did Grant.
Their horses were taking them down the old path towards town, Grant’s narrowed eyes darting left and right.
‘Grant . . .’ Emily paused before asking it. ‘How old are you, exactly?’
He gave a gruff little laugh. ‘If the recruiting sergeants come asking, I turned fifty-one two years back.’
She frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound very patriotic.’ Grant was fit and strong, whatever age he was. If he had asked, as Poldry had asked and been refused, the army would undoubtedly have taken him.
‘Maybe I’m not, then, ma’am.’ Grant reined his mount in, staring keenly at the trees alongside the road. This limb of the forest was all new woodland, planted in Emily’s grandfather’s day, but towards the Wolds it was thicker and older, a deepwood that the brigands had once frequented, before they were driven away.
‘Don’t you love our King, Grant?’ she asked. She had never really spoken much to him before. He was a simple, silent presence, always a reliable pair of skilled hands.
‘As much as the next man,’ he said. ‘I did my fighting years ago. Overseas, against the Hellics. I got no wish to go playing that game again, ma’am.’
‘What . . . what was it like?’
His expression was unreadable. ‘Like hundreds of men I didn’t know were trying to kill me, ma’am.’ He urged his horse off the trail and in between the trees. ‘Looks like they came off here. Weren’t that long ago, either, for your sister always did dawdle. I reckon it’d be best to have the guns out, ma’am.’
Emily nodded, and watched him slip down off his horse to load them. The long musket came first, which he handed to her after setting it with ball, wadding and powder. After that he primed the blunderbuss, filling the flared muzzle with a handful of birdshot. Last came the sleek, vulpine horse pistol; its stock engraved with gold, it was a present from some long-ago business associate of her father’s.
She could not take her eyes off it, as Grant’s slow, sure fingers tamped the ball and wadding down the barrel, and tipped a measure of powder into the pan. This weapon had a presence of its own. It gleamed darkly with memories and family history.
When he was done, he tried to hand it to her, too, but she would not take it, so he thrust it through his belt and got back into the saddle, holding the blunderbuss barrel-up, like a lance. ‘Reckon we’re ready, ma’am.’
‘How far ahead are they?’ she asked as they got underway.
‘At a good pace, we’ll overhaul them in a half hour, ma’am. No more.’
Please, God, let her be safe. Stupid, foolish girl, please let her be safe.
She remembered the Ghyer. Before his infamy had become known, when he had still held on to his double life as a ranger and tracker, the