Karen Robards - Amanda Rose

“Escape! Grayson’s escaped!”

“Look out!”

“Get out of the way, you fools!”

The report of the rifle mingled with the screams of the crowd. They panicked at the sound of gunfire, taking to their heels like stampeding cattle. Matt ran with them, knowing it would be hard to spot him among so many fleeing bodies. Dirty and unkempt as he was, dressed in torn rags, he looked no different from many of London’s army of the poor. A tremendous burst of strength surged through his veins; he felt suddenly vitally alive, reborn. He had escaped-he would escape. Spying a fat burgher astride a rearing horse just ahead of him and to his right, near the fringe of the crowd, Matt fought his way through the screaming, streaming mass of people to the man’s side.

“Get down,” he growled, and to make sure there was no possibility of mistake, he grabbed the frightened horse’s bridle with one hand and the man’s belt with the other. Before the perspiring burgher could do more than gape down at him, Matt had hauled him out of the saddle and vaulted up himself.

“My horse,” the man cried. Then, with a note of horror, “It’s him. ”

But Matt had already set his heels to the horse’s sides. He sent the animal plunging toward the edge of the crowd, knocking down those who were slow to get out of his way. Curses and screams followed his progress. Another shot-from a pistol, by the sound of it-whistled frighteningly close to his head. This added to the crowd’s panic, which aided him. He reached the road at last and crossed it quickly, too canny to travel on it in either direction. They would look for him first along the road…

Leaning low in the saddle, one hand pressed tight against his hip in an effort to stem the blood that ran warm and sticky down his side, he galloped across the field that ran at a right angle to the road. He had no idea whether they were after him yet; in his lightning glances back he had seen no one, no cavalry charge of soldiers brandishing rifles, no rush of guards on fat farm animals. Likely the crowd was hampering pursuit-not that it mattered. If they weren’t hard on his heels now, they soon would be. They would search the four corners of the kingdom for him if need be.

His escape would be a hideous black eye for Queen Victoria’s government, and they would be tireless in their quest for vengeance. The odds were high that he wouldn’t get more than five miles before he was captured. Matt’s teeth gleamed brightly in the morning sun as he considered that. He’d always been one to bet on long shots, and as often as not, they’d paid off. That brief smile flashed again as he sent the horse over a low stone wall and into the valley below it. The odds had been considerably higher this morning that he would be dead by now. Instead, he was alive, free as the air, the sun warm on his face and a horse beneath him. He just might manage to cheat the devil one more time. Thinking that, for the first time in a long while Matt laughed out loud.

“Damn.”

Lady Amanda Rose Culver took intense satisfaction from uttering a word that, had they heard it, would have sent the good nuns with whom she lived into a collective swoon. Savoring the feeling of wickedness it gave her, she said the word again, louder. But it didn’t really make her feel any better. She doubted that anything could.

As if to punish her for her naughtiness, the pale ghost that was all that was left of the moon stared at her reprovingly from the still-midnight-black sky while the early-morning wind whipped her hair across her face. Muttering impatiently, Amanda dug the offending tresses out of her eyes with both hands. Her hair-a heavy, wayward mass that fell down past her hips when released from the neat braids in which the nuns insisted it be kept confined-was the bane of her existence. Even the color annoyed her. It was a deep, true red, the shade of fine old port when the sun hits it. Coupled with the porcelain paleness of her skin, the inky blackness of her winged brows and thick lashes, and the strange, smoky violet of her eyes, it could be considered striking, she supposed. Certainly the nuns were much struck by it. They seemed to feel that it symbolized everything they found fault with in Amanda. Her quick temper, her impulsiveness, the many small rebellions with which she plagued them daily, they always attributed directly to the outrageous color of her hair. Which was why, she supposed, they required her to wear it in such a conventionally schoolgirlish style-braided and wound into a coronet on top of her head-a style she loathed. Which in turn was why she unbraided it every chance she got, and why it was free to fly in her face at that moment.

Tucking the offending tresses firmly behind her small ears, she walked farther along the beach, her arms automatically wrapped about her slender body for warmth. She should have worn a shawl; even in the springtime this isolated bit of Lands End was cold at night. But the only shawl she possessed-the good sisters practiced poverty, as well as chastity and obedience, and saw to it that their pupils did the same-was a spotless, gleaming white cashmere. Against the background of dark gray cliffs and black water it would have stood out like a beacon, whereas the unfashionably high-necked, long-sleeved gray merino dress she wore blended almost invisibly into the night. Even in the murky, predawn hours, when she loved to walk the small shale beach at the foot of the cliff on which the convent perched, it was possible that one of the sisters would be up and about. If they saw her, they would not hesitate to report her to Mother Superior, and that would mean punishment, as well as the certain end of her clandestine walks. Even pretty Sister Mary Joseph, the youngest and most sympathetic of the nuns, would betray her, feeling duty bound to do so. After all, it was neither safe nor respectable for a young lady to be out alone at night anywhere, much less on a deserted stretch of beach that had been notorious some years back as a smugglers’ haunt; and just at present there was another, more acute danger: the whole of England was on the alert for Lord James Farringdon’s murderer, who three weeks ago had made a stunning escape from the very gallows itself.

The man was said to be brutal and ruthless in the extreme-the exact details of his crime were too horrendous to have been told to Amanda or even to the nuns themselves-but it was known that he had callously slain a woman and several children, as well as the Tory lord, who had been his prime target. He was desperate, unlikely to stick at anything. Ladies across the land were being careful to stay in their homes at night unless escorted by a gentleman, and men were going about armed until the fellow was caught. As he would be; it was merely a question of when. He could be anywhere in England, although the authorities were most particularly scouring the coastal areas, certain that the man would try to flee the country. And Lands End was one of those areas under constant surveillance.

Not that Amanda was unduly worried about coming face to face with a murderer. Of all the places in England that he could choose to run to, it seemed unlikely that he would pick her own small stretch of beach. No, she had more pressing worries on her mind than a madman who was probably hundreds of miles away. Only last evening she had received word from her half brother, Edward, the sixth Duke of Brookshire, that he had made final the arrangements for her marriage-arrangements that had been undertaken with nary a word to her. In four months’ time, he had written to her, just a week to the day before her eighteenth birthday, she would become the bride of Lord Robert Turnbull, a plumpish, balding forty-year-old, nephew to Edward’s late mother, the first wife of Amanda’s father, and cousin to Edward himself.