Page 13 of To Tame the Wild Rake
"I couldn't see much in the dark," Aldridge admitted. "Fair hair, right size for the age, smart. The face, maybe."
Wakefield nodded. "And the door was locked and guarded. Very well. Let's go down a level, sort out an escape route, and make a racket.”
6
Aldridge and Yahzak had tried to convince Charlotte to wait with the carriage. Their plan set her teeth on edge—to go into the brothel and hire two harlots, so they could get them alone and pay them for information. As if that was all Aldridge wanted from women like that!
She didn’t have a better plan, so she kept her opinion to herself. In any case, she was being ridiculous. It was not, after all, as if she wanted his attentions, or those of any man.
Even so, she insisted on being with those who watched to give whatever support they could. She pointed out they would have to split their strength to make sure she was well guarded. She was better to stay with the men all in a group, she insisted. She kept to herself the burning need to be as close as she could to Aldridge as he put himself in danger on her behalf.
Probably, she could do no good. Probably, she was just as useless here on the rooftop of a nearby building as she would be hidden away three blocks closer to civilisation in a mews that Wakefield said was safe with the driver and one man to watch the horses. “As safe as this part of town can ever be,” he’d qualified.
Yahzak watched her fidget, hugging herself against the cold, leaning forward a little to see if she could detect a change in any of the windows in the next building. “The waiting is the hardest part,” he acknowledged.
He and his cohort did not seem to be restless. Even Aldridge’s two footmen were more patient than Charlotte, though she supposed their work required a lot of waiting. It was one of them that saw the drapes twitch back in a room on one of the upper floors, and a face at the window.
“Lord Aldridge,” the footman said.
Charlotte could see little more than a pale blur outlined by lamplight and distorted by the small thick panes, but she waved, and the person must have seen them in even in the dark, because he or she waved back before retreating out of sight.
They continued to wait, but nothing further happened for long minutes, until a racket broke out loud enough to be heard even from this distance and through walls. Shouting. A crash. The light in the room they’d been watching went out. Lights moved in and out of rooms accompanied by more shouting.
“What is happening?” Charlotte asked, but, of course, none of them had an answer.
“We need to get closer,” Yahzak decided, and sent his men along the parapet and across a sloping roof to the next building. The two footmen followed, and then Charlotte, with Yahzak bringing up the rear.
“There,” one of the guardsmen said, pointing. From this new angle, they could see where the two main buildings were joined to those at the back, with a narrow alley barely an arms-reach across, bridged at multiple points with box-like passages.
On a balcony on the closest rear building, two shapes—little more than darker shadows against the grey—bent over the balustrade focused on something Charlotte could not, at first, see. Another shadow. No. Two. A woman, by the skirts, being dropped on a rope to someone who waited below.
As she reached the ground, one of the two on the balcony climbed over and began the descent. None of the shapes were small enough to be Tony.
The rumpus had moved to the rear buildings. Charlotte could hear it approaching the escapees, see the lights flickering from one window to another. “Hurry,” she whispered.
Yahzak snapped a couple of orders, and his men unshouldered their rifles and knelt to steady the barrels against the stone wall that divided this roof from the one next door. “My lady, we go down now. That is Lord Aldridge, I think, needing our help, perhaps.”
Aldridge’s footmen, their own weapons in their hands, took the rear as Yahzak led Charlotte through a trapdoor, dropping down to catch her, then hurrying ahead down a narrow flight of steps that stank of unmentionable things. Fortunately, the gloom protected her from confirming the noxious substances her nose suspected.
From above them, they heard the bark of rifles. Yahzak lengthened his stride, taking three steps at a time. Charlotte allowed one of the footmen to thunder down the steps in his wake, though the other insisted on staying with her as she hurried as fast as her shorter legs and her skirts would allow.
They were disappearing into an apartment as Charlotte and the footman reached the ground floor. She followed, apologising to the family who sat frozen as they traversed to the open window that Yahzak and the other footman had just used to exit.
It was a courtyard between the buildings, a sparse rectangle that trailed away into pathways in four directions. One was the narrow alley where they’d seen the people escaping from the balcony, though from this angle they could not see the balcony itself.
Charlotte took a step in that direction, but the footman who had followed Yahzak waited at the mouth of another way, gesturing them to follow. The path took them out between another two buildings into the back alley beyond the Heaven and Hell complex.
Aldridge was waiting. Farther down the street, two women hurried after a man. Wakefield? There was no sign of a boy.
Before she could ask, Aldridge said, “We found the room where we think Tony was being kept prisoner, but he has escaped. Come, we need to get out of here before they follow us.”
“I will cover,” Yahzak declared.
Wakefield beckoned from the corner, and Aldridge took Charlotte’s hand, breaking into a run. The carriage and the string of horses waited. The two women from the brothel were just clambering into the carriage.
“Who are your friends?” Charlotte asked Aldridge.
His eyebrow twitched at the sourness she couldn’t keep from her tone, but his reply was mild. “Let’s put some miles between us and pursuit, and I’ll explain.” He made a step with his hands and tossed her up into her saddle.
