“Then tell her to hold her tongue, ere more danger comes down upon her, and you all.”
She drew back at his sharp tone and bent back to the page.
“Tell her you will return within the week.”
She looked up swiftly. “A week?”
His dark eyes glittered at her. “I vow it on my life.”
With a shaky hand, she scribbled a note. Tadhg took it, scanned its contents, then dropped it atop the mantle and laid a fat, lumpy pouch of coin atop. Then he hurried them out the door before the sun came up on the horizon.
Chapter Fourteen
THE WAGON ROLLED slowly toward the gates through a thick mist. Magdalena sat in the seat of her delivery wagon, Tadhg below her, piled under layers of thick canvas, beneath a board that had been laid end to end over the sides of the wagon box to make a bench.
The guardhouse appeared out of the fog.
“We’re nearing the gate,” she reported in an undertone.
“Good. No tricks, now, Maggie,” he said, his hand around her ankle.
“No tricks.” She had, in fact, briefly considered tricks, but as they would almost certainly put her in closer contact with the sinister Lord Sherwood, she was adamantly opposed to tricks. Tadhg may be a devil, but he was the devil she knew.
“Good,” he murmured. “Now hush, and be nice to Gustave.”
The enshrouding fog muffled the wagon’s clattering as they drew up to the gate. A figure pushed off the guardhouse wall and approached.
“Oh dear,” she said softly.
Silence flowed out from beneath the makeshift bench. “What?”
“It is not Gustave. I do not know who this man is. I have never seen him before.”
“Sherwood’s man. They’ll have taken over the gates,” was all she heard, very quietly, from below the seat, before the guard who was not Gustave arrived at the wagon.
He looked her over in damp suspicion. “Gate’s not open.”
“I am aware of that,” she said brightly. “But perhaps I could get through, even so? The usual gate warden often lets me.”
“I am not the usual one.”
“Yes, I had noticed that.”
“I open the gates when it’s time to open the gates.” Fog swirled around his words. He was a blob of brown and rusting iron.
Perhaps indignation would work better. She drew herself up. “Sir, when the town’s men guard these gates, I am through them every day, often before and after the close, with nary an issue.”
“Well, there’s an issue now. No opening. That’s my orders.”
Bribery then. She lowered her voice to something more conspiratorial. “Sooth, sir, I am willing to pay any sort of surcharge for the privilege of passing through early.”
That earned an oily grin and an even oilier glance, which raked down her gown. “‘Surcharge,’ is it?” he said with a leer. “Right you are. Come inside and we’ll discuss your terms.”
Her heart sank. “Oh, no, I—”
Beneath the bench, she felt a dangerous shifting.
The guard reached up for her wrist. “Come on now, woman, don’t be shy.”