She shoved the trunk up against the back door and refilled it with her clothes. Just in case anyone else should wander by and take a notion to try to sneak in that way while she was there.
She returned to the outdoors, where apple trees were indeed flinging their bounties on the ground. She found a metal pail next to the hearth and she used it to gather twigs and little branches she could carry that looked dry, which were very few, and apples, which were plentiful.
And during her gathering she stumbled across a well, which felt like a miracle.
After she emptied the pail of twigs and apples, shefilled it halfway up with water, and lugged it with her to the house.
Hawkes led his hired mount, a bay with a white blaze on his forehead, along the road lined with hawthorns. The two of them took it at a leisurely, companionable pace, after taking it at an almost inadvisably breakneck pace intermittently for an hour.
He and the gelding had both enjoyed it for a time.
But he could sense that at least one of the stitches had given way and pain was making itself known.
Nothing ought to surprise him after the last week, but the smuggler’s tunnel beneath The Grand Palace on the Thames, reached through a wardrobe in a room on the third floor, raised his eyebrows. It had once been used to move smuggled goods—and prostitutes, well before that, when The Grand Palace on the Thames was The Palace of Rogues. Hardy had been in search of a notorious smuggling gang when he’d arrived at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and they’d discovered it as part of their investigation.
He and Hardy had fetched his trunk, including the budget books. Clutching a borrowed lamp, Hawkes opened the hatch inside the floor of the wardrobe, climbed down the ladder leading into the tunnel, and Hardy had dropped the trunk in after him. He’d fetch it later.
Following Hardy’s instructions, Hawkes followed the tunnel, peering upward until he saw the hairline seams of light that indicated the hatch above.
The one that miraculously emerged in a stall in the livery stables.
He’d shoved open the hatch and climbed out into a stall occupied by a horse who seemed fairly sanguine about his emergence, as though it wasn’t the first timehe’d seen such a thing. Unobserved by the staff, he slipped out of the stable, entered through the front, hired that horse, and while British soldiers roamed the halls of The Grand Palace on the Thames looking for him, he was riding out for Baggleston, in Sussex.
Any pain and weariness he felt vanished as soon he saw the thin trail of smoke from the chimney of the cottage. She’d made it safely.
Either that, or marauders had decided to camp there. His money was on the former.
He paused to let the horse drink his fill from the little stream, and nibble at some of the Sussex grass, while he dipped a handkerchief in the water to drag over his own face and across the back of his neck. He’d stopped along the way to buy some food that could handle jostling, which meant sturdy bread and cheese. He’d filled a flask of water before he departed and he was equipped with a flint and steel.
Anything else he could purchase in the town of Baggleston.
As the sun dropped and the sky went mauve, Hawkes tethered the horse to the little gate outside the house, and quietly, gun at the ready just in case he was wrong, approached.
The door was ajar.
He pushed it lightly and entered.
She was kneeling next to a just-started fire, feeding it twigs she’d likely collected.
He tucked his gun away.
She stood.
She turned and saw him and went utterly still.
Rather like the first morning he’d seen her.
She had run from him. But now that she saw him again, all she felt was relief.
And a quiet, immeasurable joy.
Because she saw the expression on his face and she knew unequivocally that he was there to free her.
“You found me, Mr. Hawkes.”
And at first, he seemed unable to speak. He was drinking in the sight of her wonderingly.
“I think I would follow you to the ends of the earth.”