Ghyer had once visited her father. He had been all smiles, a lean and handsome man with long, flowing locks and a neatly pointed goatee. He had spoken with her father of the emerging bandit problem, and Emily and Mary had peeked at him over the tabletop and thought him very good-looking and graceful.
She summoned the scene back now – or as best she could through the clouding years that stood between. There was the Ghyer leaning back in his chair, with a glass of wine in one hand. There was her father, his stern and regular face nodding carefully, a smoking pipe raised to his lips. It had been a long time, shockingly long, since his living face had intruded into her thoughts.
She had beaten her demons, she believed, driven them away, but instead they had been waiting inside her, all this while. They had known their time would come.
They were much deeper into the trees, where the land began to rise up in the undulating curves of the Wolds, when Grant reined in again and tutted at the ground.
‘What is it?’
‘The black’s taken a thorn. Bloody fool doesn’t know how to ride a good horse,’ the big man muttered, hurriedly adding, ‘begging your pardon for the language, ma’am.’
‘You use whatever language you feel appropriate,’ she assured him. ‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means he’ll ruin the horse if he takes her much further.’
‘But they’ll go slower, and we’ll catch them up sooner?’
Grant made a non-committal sound in response, as if that was quite secondary. ‘I’ll take it out of his hide, ma’am, if the black goes lame.’
‘If we catch them, you’re quite welcome to. I might take it out of Alice’s hide myself. What can the girl have been thinking?’
Grant touched his heels to his mount’s flanks and they were moving again. ‘Can’t say, ma’am, but she’s not been happy for a while, that one.’
‘I suppose—’ but Emily never got to reveal what she supposed, for a woman’s cry rang out, high and clear, through the trees.
‘Alice!’ Emily gasped.
‘Easy, ma’am.’ Grant stood up in his stirrups, looking first one way and then another. ‘Came from that way, I reckon.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded. ‘Round here the hillsides echo it all around you, ma’am. What you hears never coming from where you think. I’d stake my job that it’s this way, though.’ He hunched forward over his carefully pacing horse. ‘Lots of little dells and hollows all around here. Any of ’em would make a good camp, ma’am.’
Emily tried straining her ears, to make out something else from her sister, and it seemed to her that she could. Faint and jumbled, but there were distant words audible through the trees – and it was Alice’s voice, she was sure.
‘Grant—’
‘I know, ma’am.’ He continued to guide his horse forward, but she noticed he had the blunderbuss resting across the pommel of his saddle now. She tried to get the awkward length of her musket into the same position, but the barrel seemed terribly heavy, dragging itself towards the ground all the time.
The sound of her sister’s voice continued, in a long, complaining tirade. Evidently she had got tired of Griff, whoever he really was. Emily caught odd words now, and knew that Alice was demanding to go home, was criticizing her companion and her locale in as many shades of invective as she could muster. There was never anyone like Alice for complaining, Emily thought. If Griff had known that, then perhaps he wouldn’t have bothered.
They were closer now. Alice’s voice bounced through the trees: ‘. . . and you dress like a beggar, for all your pretensions, and you drag me to this misbegotten spot, this horrible dank place, and what I was thinking of, I don’t know—’
Quite. But then Emily heard a man’s laughter and she went cold when she heard other voices joining it. Three at least – or more. Not just one abductor, but a pack of them.
And Mr Northway’s warning came back to her.
‘Do you . . . remember the Ghyer, Grant?’ she whispered.
‘That I do. I went out with your father that one time. That was a rough business, ma’am.’
‘I remember . . .’ She had only been aged ten at the time, but she remembered clearly. She had been allowed to stay up well past midnight for her father’s return. He had eventually arrived, flushed with success, leading a troop of eight soldiers behind him (and hadn’t there been twelve when they set out?),