Page 5 of It Takes Two to Tumble
Why would the man not just leave? Phillip felt helpless with frustration. If this had been his ship, he would have known what to do. Hell, if this had been his ship, it would never have happened, because on every ship he had ever served on, his crew had respected him. His crew did as they ought to, because to shirk duty or cut corners was to put a fellow sailor in harm’s way. And Phillip didn’t stand for that. His crew hadn’t feared him. He wasn’t a brute. He didn’t need to be—that was the entire point of discipline and order; they were the grease that made the gears of the world turn smoothly and without pain. Even when there was nothing else, there was order, and you could count on that, at least.
He quickly ran through his options. If Sedgwick was determined to stay, then Phillip had no choice but to let him stay. Having a vicar thrown bodily from the house would set a ludicrous example for the children. “Fine. Suit yourself,” Phillip said. “Stay for as long as you please.”
Ben very nearly felt bad for Captain Dacre. He was all ready to start ordering the children about but they were nowhere to be found. Ned had no doubt told the twins that their father was an ogre, so they simply disappeared. The captain was left stalking up and down the front hall by himself.
After two weeks under this roof, Ben was used to the children’s occasional disappearances. They knew this countryside well and weren’t likely to come to harm in an hour’s absence. Before too long had passed, Ben glimpsed Ned slip into the house, a fishing pole resting on his shoulder.
But when one hour turned into two and even the cook had seen neither hide nor hair of the twins, Ben began to worry. They were nearly nine, and if they had been born into a less well-heeled family, they might be sleeping in the hills with the sheep, nobody the least bit concerned about them. Still, Ben felt uneasy.
At the sound of a barking dog and a good deal of shouting, Ben sprang to his feet and looked out his bedchamber window. He could see two men and two much smaller figures, one of whom had to be Peggy because surely the entire neighborhood could hear her shouting like a fishwife. Ben ran downstairs and out the door.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded of the men.
“I caught these two poaching,” said one of the men in a broad local accent. “And they said they live here. Liars as well as thieves, I s’pose.”
“They’re Captain Dacre’s children,” Ben gritted out, leaving off the impliedyou idiot. “Not poachers. And you may let them go.”
“Then what were they doing with this?” The man held up a snare.
“We were getting our dog out of it, you stupid lout!” cried Peggy, who evidently had none of Ben’s reservations about calling a spade a spade. “And now Jack’s had to walk this whole way on a bleeding leg. If he falls ill I’ll take a knife to your leg and I’ll like it, you shovel-faced horse’s arse.”
There was a moment of stunned quiet that was only interrupted by the injured dog’s enthusiastic bark, as if agreeing with his mistress.
“You’re saying this young, ah, lady is Captain Dacre’s daughter,” said the other man, who had thus far been silent. At the sound of this well-bred, sarcastic voice, very much out of place in this tableau, Ben looked more carefully at the man’s face, and felt his heart sink.
“Mart—Sir Martin,” Ben said. “I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you.” Ben hadn’t seen Martin Easterbrook in five or six years, when Martin had been a boy of fifteen and Ben had been hardly twenty. That had been before Martin’s father died, leaving no inheritance except encumbered properties and outrageous debts. Old Sir Humphrey had spent lavishly during his lifetime, including arranging the Sedgwick children’s school fees and Ben’s living. Ben might have felt bad for the fellow, if he hadn’t spent the months since attaining his majority trying to make his tenants pay for his father’s excesses. Indeed, the church poor fund was stretched to its limits due to his efforts to wring everything he could out of his estate.
“I ought to have known that you’d be mixed up in this,” Easterbrook spat, with much more venom than Ben thought he had ever merited in his life. “Where there’s rank thievery, you don’t have to look far to find a Sedgwick.”
Ben opened his mouth to ask what Easterbrook could possibly mean by that, but he was interrupted by a loud, clear voice.
“Take your hands off my children.” The captain stood on the stairs that led up to the front door. “I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but you’ll remove yourselves from my property and you will do it with alacrity.”
Ben wasn’t surprised that Easterbrook’s henchman immediately complied with Dacre’s command. When a man like Captain Dacre laced his voice with that touch of iron, it took a strong man to resist doing as he was told.
“I’ll believe they weren’t poaching this time,” Easterbrook said. “But tell your brats to keep away from Lindley Priory.”
The captain didn’t answer, only lifting his eyebrows and making an impatient shooing gesture with one hand.
As the two men retreated down the drive, Ben knelt beside the twins. “Are you both all right?”
“Of course we are,” Jamie answered. He cradled the injured dog in his arms as Peggy wound a handkerchief around the animal’s leg. “But Jack ran off and we chased after him and when we found him he was caught in that awful trap.” Jack, the result of a hound’s liaison with a rat terrier, was small, fast, and lamentably fond of exploration. He and the twins were thick as thieves.
By then the door had filled with servants. “If he doesn’t want traps set out all over his wood, he might want to stop starving his tenants out of house and home,” grumbled one of them. Ben was inclined to agree.
“Let me look at that wound before you wrap it up,” Ben said. He pulled back the corner of the handkerchief and saw a relatively clean cut on the dog’s hind leg. “Go see Cook for some salve,” he suggested. “Then put him to bed with you in the nursery.” That, at least, would ensure that the children spent the night in their beds rather than heaven knew where. He watched the twins carry the dog into the house.
“As for the rest of you,” the captain said in that clear, commanding tone that brooked no disobedience, “be gone.”
Just those two words and the dooryard cleared out. It was utterly empty except for Ben and the captain. Ben stepped towards the house as if he could slip away from the captain’s notice.
“Not you,” the captain said in a clipped tone. “You stay.”
Ben stayed. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how to resist.
“I take it this is your idea of how to manage children?” Dacre asked in about as chilly a voice as Ben had ever heard.
“They didn’t do anything wrong,” he said mildly. He had nearly let his temper get the better of him earlier, but now he was determined to do right by the Dacre children, which meant helping their father. “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Easterbrook.”
