Page 61 of The Secret Word
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Chris rodeinto the yard of the inn where he usually changed horses, Billy O’Hara was there, walking to and fro, occasionally slapping a riding crop against his boots.
He strode over as Chris dismounted. “Christopher. Come on. We must get back to your place. I’ve sent my men on ahead.”
He turned on his heel and strode off to the road beyond the inn gate. Chris followed him, frowning to himself. What was going on? He very rarely—no, never—saw Billy be anything but under control but there had been a note of possible panic in the man’s voice. A groom in the inn’s livery drove up beside Billy in a curricle that Chris had noticed as he passed. The man had been walking his horses slowly along the road, something that wasn’t common but then again, wasn’t unusual. He might have just been warming them up for work, or cooling them off after a hard haul.
But now, he realized, the man had been waiting for a sign from Billy.
“There you go, sir,” the groom said to Billy, who was taking over the reins. Chris climbed up as the groom climbed down, and Billy set the horses into a fast walk, and then a canter almost before the groom was clear of the vehicle.
Chris fell the last couple of inches onto the seat. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“Your father-in-law,” said Billy, succinctly. “He has persuaded a magistrate to find you unfit parents. He has taken constables to pick up your son.”
“The moral turpitude clause,” Chris said.Damn.The lawyers—his own and Billy’s—had assured him that he need not worry about it. It was intended to protect Clem and the children if he turned out to be the rankest of villains.
Billy nodded. “That’s the one.”
“Is that why you sent for me?” Chris asked.
“So that was it. I did not send for you, Christopher,” said Billy. “Just after I found out about the magistrate, I learned that Wright had sent one of the post riders I sometimes use to your estate. Then he left his own townhouse taking with him a wet nurse, four constables, and his solicitor.”
“And based on that you guessed Wright had got me out of the way by pretending to be you, asking me to come to London on an urgent matter?”
“I had a hunch he’d have sent you away somehow,” Billy said. “I was giving it another fifteen minutes, then going after my men. They have instructions to delay things so I had time to arrive. But best if you are with me. Here’s what I know, what I’ve done, and what I think we need to do.”
Billy shared his plans. They didn’t talk much after that. Canter, trot. Canter, trot. Chris sat beside Billy, wishing they could gallop all the way, but the horses could become lame if they tried it. They were traveling as fast as they could—quite a bit faster than Chris had traveled the same distance this morning.
Billy had even thought to have his men arrange a new team half an hour from home, and it took the hostlers less than five minutes to unhitch the exhausted team, hitch up the fresh horses and get them on their way again.
Two and a half hours after he left home, he and Billy drove up the carriage drive, to discover a stand-off on the lawn.
The children, being held by their two nursemaids, were at the center of a ring of servants armed with brooms, spades, rolling pins, and other such implements. Among them stood men that Chris recognized as Billy’s. Clem, with Billy’s bodyguard and lieutenant Tiny at her side, was facing her father, and at his back were five men, two of them with pistols, two with batons, and one with an expression that said he wished he was anywhere else, and that he was trying hard to vanish.
Constables, Chris would guess, and the would-be vanisher was the solicitor who had led the team that produced the original marriage agreement.
The older schoolboys, led by Partridge, were approaching from the school side of the house, with determined faces and clenched fists.
Billy didn’t bother with stopping the curricle, but turned the horses to canter across the grass, slowing them so they stopped between the protective circle and Wright and his men.
Wright looked up at the pair in the curricle and screeched, “I have a warrant! You have to give me the boy.”
Chris descended from the curricle in a controlled tumble and hurried to Clem’s side. She grasped his arm, leaning against him in her relief.
“The warrant has been rescinded,” Billy answered him. He scanned the constables. “Which of you is in charge? You, Miller?”
One of the two men with pistols—Chris gave him credit for the fact he was not pointing it at anyone—moved his other hand as if his instinct was to raise it in response to Billy’s question, but his intellect said he was no longer in school. “O’Hara? What are you doing here?”
“I have a letter for you from the magistrate who issued that warrant. Further information has come to his attention, and he has rescinded his approval.”
Billy handed the letter to the constable. Wright tried to snatch it from his hands, but the constable held it up out of his reach and said to his men, “If Mr. Wright tries to prevent me from reading this, restrain him.”
“I’ll have your badge,” Wright screeched, but the constable ignored him.
“The gentleman is correct,” the constable announced after a moment. “The warrant is invalid. It can be torn up, and we, my lads, are for London.”
“No-o-o!” Wright wailed. “This man O’Hara is a criminal, constable. Arrest him. Do your duty. He may have forged that letter. In fact, hemusthave forged that letter.”
