Page 57 of One Perfect Dance
“Keep still, Deffew. Keep very, very still.” Ash laid his knife against the man’s most precious piece of flesh and Deffew whimpered.
“Let’s try that again, shall we?” Ash asked. “Tell me where Mr. Paddimore is, in what condition, how he is being held, and how many people are guarding him. Make your information full and accurate. Any hesitation, any inaccuracies, and I will take a slice off your ballocks. I am interested in seeing how many slices I can remove before blood loss causes you to pass out, Deffew.”
“Eight is your record, Mr. Ashby,” said Fullaby, inventing wildly in the spirit of the moment. Deffew whimpered again.
“The trick, Mrs. Paddimore, is to slice thinly. Rex once managed nine slices.” He shook his head in feigned admiration.
Fullaby, in a piece of inspired theater, objected, “It was unfortunate that the man was a mute. If we’d only known he couldn’t tell us what we wanted to know… Poor man will never breed again.”
Ash, hearing his cue, moved the knife a fraction closer, just nicking the skin. Deffew jerked and screamed, and only Ash’s swift reflexes in moving the knife away kept the threat from becoming a reality.
“I’ll tell! I’ll tell! Please don’t cut me.” He babbled blasphemy, curses, and prayers, all mixed up until Ash held the knife in the slimeball’s view, after surreptitiously cutting his own thumb to add sufficient blood to cow the man further.
Once Deffew started talking, he spilled everything. Geoffrey Paddimore was passed out two doors down the hall, having taken drugs with his drink. One of his so-called friends was with him to keep an eye on him. The rest had set up an ambush for Ash on the lane that led into the mews behind Rex’s townhouse.
Ash raised an eyebrow. If he had gone straight home from Regina’s, he and Fullaby would have had a fight on their hands.
“You should be dead,” Deffew blubbered. “You bastard. You’re meant to be dead.”
*
They left Mr.Deffew tied to his bed, propped the door back in place, and went to rescue poor Geoffrey. Regina was pleased there was no nonsense about keeping her out of danger, though Elijah insisted she stay behind him and his burly servant and hold her pistol at the ready.
No one had come into the hall to see what all the screaming and yelling was about. Either everyone was absent, which seemed unlikely, or the determined deafness of the residents said a lot about the kind of ruckus the tenants were used to.
Regina expected the men to break down the door to which Deffew’s directions led them, as they had to reach her. Instead, Elijah called out, in a fair approximation of Deffew’s voice, “Muggers? Let me in.”
There was muttering from within and then the scrape and chink of the key in the lock. The door inched open, then Elijah and Fullaby put their shoulders to it, and they were in.
The slender youth who had been knocked back by their entry started to complain; he fell silent when he saw Regina and the gun she held. He backed across the room to the far wall, repeating to himself, “I knew this was a bad idea. I knew I shouldn’t go along with it.”
Regina handed the pistol and the candlestick to Elijah and rushed to the bed. Geoffrey, in his shirt and nothing else, lay on his back on top of the blankets, snoring.
“His clothes?” Elijah asked Muggers. The boy pointed.
“Help me get him dressed,” Elijah said, passing the pistol to Fullaby. “Fullaby, if this person moves, shoot him in the knee.”
“I won’t move!” the youth insisted.
Geoffrey shifted and muttered as they wrestled him into his clothes but did not rouse.
“What did you give him?” Elijah demanded.
Muggers shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t give him anything.”
Fullaby jerked the pistol and Muggers added. “Gin in his beer, with a bit of opium in the second tankard, just to keep him from interfering. They promised no one would get hurt. But his mother promised to marry Defter’s uncle, and now she’s broken it off, and this was the only way…” He trailed off at a glare from Regina, or more probably at Elijah’s snarl.
“I am Geoffrey’s mother, and I made Deffew no promises, nor did I encourage him in any way to believe I favored him,” she told Muggers.
Muggers hunched in on himself. “I only know what Chalky said,” he grumbled.
“And did you think to ask Geoffrey?” Regina asked.
Muggers lifted his head at that. “But Defter is my friend, and Padders is just a nobody. His father was in trade, and Padders is base born, too, Chalky says.”
Regina shook her head. It was like talking to a brick wall.
“It’s time for us to go, Ginny,” Elijah said. He propped Geoffrey up on his feet, supporting him by slinging one of her son’s arms around his shoulders. Fullaby returned the gun and candlestick to Regina and took up position on Geoffrey’s other side.
