Page 56 of Hold Me Fast
“Signore, help me,” begged Marco. “I am sunk up to my arms.”
“Keep still then, you fool,” Coombe replied. “Haul me out, Trethewey, and I will make you any promise you like. Money? Women? Power?”
On an impulse, Jowan said, “You alone. Not your valet. Tamsyn does not like him.” He winked at the men who could see him. Was it a lie if you lied to a liar?
“Agreed,” Coombe said.
“Signore!”
“It’s hard enough to pull one man out of the mire, let alone two,” Jowan said. Which was true. And it could not be done in the dark, but if they kept still until morning, he would try.
“One of us, then,” Coombe declared.
Marco’s distressed cry was wordless, but the sound of a gunshot told its own tale. Coombe must have missed, for Marco shouted his rage, and then all Jowan could hear was sloshing and squelching, followed by a scream of pain.
Jowan stepped closer to the edge to peer into the mist but could see nothing. He would swear, though, that Coombe and Marco were fighting. A gurgle was followed by silence, and then Coombe’s voice.
“Trethewey. Marco is dead. The mud is up to my chin, man. Get me out of here.”
“No,” Jowan replied. “Nothing can be done in the dark. When the sun rises, if you are still alive, I shall try it, so you can hang for your crimes. You are a destroyer of life. It is time for you to explain yourself to your maker.”
“Devil take it!” Coombe’s voice dropped. He continued speaking, but not in English. If Jowan had to guess, he would say the man was swearing in one language after another. He would sink only slowly while he stood still. But eventually, he would no longer be able to stand. If the sun had not yet risen, the mire would have him.
It was a gruesome thought. Jowan had to sternly remind himself of how Tamsyn had suffered at Coombe’s hands and those of his minions. Jowan was not prepared to risk the life of even one of his men to save the villain.
The head ostler from the inn came up beside him. “Quite apart from what he has done up until now, he murdered his employee in our hearing,” he told Jowan. “If we could get him out of that mire, and I doubt it’s possible, he will be dead anyway, when he hangs. It isn’t worth risking any of us in a rescue.”
That was true, too. “I will wait until dawn,” Jowan announced. The ostler said that he would too, in his office as constable. Bran and several other men offered to remain with them. Jowan accepted another two, for if four of them could not get Coombe out of the bog, greater numbers would not help. He convinced Bran to return to his bride. “Look after the ladies, Bran. Coombe might have planned something else.”
Twice before dawn, Coombe tried to bargain for his life, offering money, fame, courtesans. Threatening, too, when Jowan refused to respond to his bribes. Jowan had stood, still and grim, and listened to the man bargaining, sometimes in hysterical shrieks, sometimes in a reasonable voice. With Jowan, with the other watchers, with God. Whimpering, too, and in the end, with gasps and finally, gurgling.
By the time sunlight gilded the tops of the mists, he had fallen silent.
It was late morning before the mists lifted. Neither of the villains had come out of the hollow, so they must be inside it. Jowan led the way between the ponds and the patches of unstable ground, watching for the vegetation that marked the difference between safe ground and danger, and hunting for any sign of Coombe or Marco.
But they saw only the boot marks and churned mud that marked the passage of the pair, no glimpse of either man. Not even right at the end, on the edge of the final mire, where the cliffs reared eighteen feet high around every side except that of the entrance.
In the mire, vegetation had been crushed and churned around, but the mud and the water lay still.
“They have to be under there,” the ostler commented. “Might come up. Might not. Probably not. Remember the Bowithick cow.” The other men nodded or murmured agreement or both. Just a few years ago, a herd of cows had panicked when their quiet amble along a moor road had been disrupted by a pair of racing curricles. One of the cows had ended up in a bog, up to its neck. Attempts to retrieve it had failed and the cow had sunk, never to rise again except in conversations such as this.
The cow, apparently, had accepted its fate with bovine grace, and sunk in silence. Not so Coombe. Jowan shuddered. He never wanted to think of it again, but he feared Coombe’s dying moments would haunt him for the rest of his life. The man had deserved to die. But what a horrible death.
“I’m for St Tetha,” he said. “I need to know how Miss Roskilly is after her ordeal.”
*
Tamsyn struggled fromsleep, feeling heavy and nauseous. Before she could fully open her eyes, Evangeline was leaning over her, asking, anxiously, “How do you feel?”
“Dreadful. Have I been sick?” The words came in short phrases, with pauses between as she dredged the next few words out of her mind and forced her mouth to remember how to shape them.
She had a flash of memory. An image of Coombe forcing laudanum on her. A dream, surely?
“What do you remember?” Evangeline asked.
Evangeline was truly here. “You are home,” Tamsyn said, smiling at her friend despite the truly awful headache and the equally unpleasant ache in her gut. “Welcome back, Evangeline.” She frowned. “I had a bad dream, I think. About Coombe. Coombe, Marco, and Willard.”
“They were here, Tamsyn,” Evangeline explained, “but Patricia sounded the alarm and Jowan and the village stopped them from taking you away. You have been unconscious for hours.”
