Edwin waved a hand. “Why, as if they were in love!”
The words hit Sherwood like a blow. He stared at the fat little regrator, then gave the bench a violent shove backward and pushed to his feet. “I am not surprised,” he muttered to himself, circling the room. “Women are so easily turned.”
Behind him, the merchant made a sound of objection. “Oh no, sir, not just her. Him as well.”
Sherwood looked over his shoulder. “What?”
“Yes, yes, the rogue looked at her as if he was in love,” Edwin said in a tone of outrage. “Which is not to say she did not do the same. And please tell me, how could that be, a proper merchant and a…a scofflaw? I mean to say, it isn’t proper.”
Sherwood’s vision went blurry under the pressure of holding back a sudden, almost overwhelming fury.
The Irish crow had fallen for Magdalena?
She had tumbled to him? All that fine hair and pale skin and those eyes…
Bloody, accursed Irishman.
Sherwood’s jaw clenched together so hard his teeth squealed. He glared down at the fat little merchant, who sat like a frightened bunny, his jowls quivering. What Sherwood wanted to do was smash the man’s face into the wall, wad up those false writs and stuff them down his throat, but that would be unwise. There were larger things afoot here, and this untoward, unbidden fury welling up inside him meant nothing.
The dagger was all. And everything it would buy him.
This merchant knew things. It was time to extract those things, then hunt Tadhg down.
He forced his jaw to unclench and turned to one of his men. “Get the horses,” he ordered, and was turning back to Edwin when the soldier swung the door open and stopped short.
“Sir? You should come see.”
But Sherwood was already looking.
A torrent of white snow was coming down in great, fell flakes. It lay in fluffy white heaps on the sides of the streets, at least two inches thick and falling fast. It must have been coming down the entire time they’d been inside, waiting for the merchant to return.
Sherwood’s hands tightened into hard fists.
“Wouldn’t be wise to ride tonight, sir.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” he murmured, then inhaled. “Well then, that gives Master Forger more time to tell us everything he knows.” He turned to the idiot merchant. “Tell me everything that happened, Needleman. Everything you saw, everything they said, everything you have them…everything.”
The merchant’s face paled. Then he glanced at the coin, cleared his throat, and began talking. “Well, sir, let’s see, I specialize in moderately-sized towns, you know, so I focused my attentions there….”
Behind him, as the regrator babbled on, about towns and names on papers and how his papers could get one in anywhere, Sherwood stared at the snow.
Tadhg might now have writs to half a dozen towns, but chances were he would not go to any of them. He might, of course, and Sherwood would ensure the towns the merchant was mentioning were searched, blockaded where possible. But Sherwood suspected Tadhg now had an entirely different plan in mind.
His surest bet would be to continue on, perhaps double back a few times, then cut out hard for some small port or an even smaller fishing village—dozens populated the shores, it would be nearly impossible for Sherwood to cover them all—and pay some impoverished fisherman an outrageous fee to sail him over to England.
&
nbsp; Tadhg would know this too. But he would not do it. Not yet. Because he was weak.
And therefore, he would risk everything to take the woman he’d looked at as if he loved her, home again.
With everything at stake, with everything that might yet be, Tadhg would not do the hard thing, the necessary thing. He would not sacrifice her.
Fool.
Sherwood would eat her alive.
Chapter Thirty-Three