Dukes Prefer Blondes (The Dressmakers 4)

“They’re here,” he said. “Now let’s hope nobody bungles.”

She leaned forward to look out of the small window. As he’d suggested, she wore a schoolteacher’s style of garb: a severe bonnet and more severe dress of dull, dark blue with a starched collar, narrow sleeves, a prim line of buttons, and not one bow or ruffle or bit of lace to soften its austerity. Even the watch was plain and practical.

She’d dressed as he’d advised, and he could blame nobody but himself. It was his fault there was nothing to distract the eye from her figure, nothing to camouflage its splendid curves.

She smelled like fresh greenery, and this made pictures in his mind of the soul-­soothing view from his father’s house. She smelled like herself, too, and picturesque views of Richmond battled more carnal thoughts.

Her face was inches from his. He could almost taste her mouth. His other self was growing thickheaded. He pushed that unhelpful being to the farthest corner of his mind, and drew back a fraction from her, from her scent and silken skin and soft mouth.

“Let’s hope we can get Toby out in one piece,” she said. “Oh, no. What’s happening?”

Nimble as a monkey, a boy scrambled out of a window and quickly down the front of the house.

“Damn,” Radford said. “They heard our men coming.”

Another boy followed. A moment later, two more boys burst out of the building next door.

“They’re getting away!” she cried. “Can’t we stop them?”

“Patience,” he said, though he suspected something had gone awry with the plan. “The boys were bound to run, and the first thing they learn is to run very fast. That’s why we’ve blocked the ways out, and why we’ve so many men on the outside. One or two of the quicker and more agile boys might wriggle away, but not all.”

More boys streamed noisily out of the house. There must have been scores of them, climbing down the front of the building or bursting through the door, like rats fleeing a burning warehouse. But with constables in the way, they couldn’t squeeze past the hackney coach or climb over it. They turned and ran back to try the other way. Some beat on neighboring doors to be let in. Others tried to fight their way past the police waiting for them. Then a shout rose above the scuffling and cursing and threatening, and another. A chorus of young, excited voices echoed through the alley.

“What is it?” Lady Clara said.

“I’m not sure.”

He shoved the window down for a better look. “Stay back,” he said. “Do not let them see you. We . . .” He trailed off as he realized what the uproar was about.

He opened the door and climbed out. “Stay,” he said.

“Mr. Radford.”

But he wasn’t listening. He was hurrying down the alley, looking up, as everybody else was, at the figure running across the roof.

The boys had stopped trying to escape in favor of watching the show and cheering Chiver on. His hat at its usual insolent angle, he clambered from the roof of their lair to the roof of the next building. This one had a steep pitch, and he slid twice, but managed to catch hold of something—­a rope, it looked like—­and drag himself back up again.

A policeman appeared on the roof of the building Chiver had fled. The police inside must have encountered obstacles. A constable was supposed to have gone straight to the roof, to prevent this sort of thing.

“Nowhere to go, Chiver,” the officer shouted. “Give it up!”

Radford hurried along the pavement, steps ahead of the boy on the roof.

“Go, Chiver!” one of the boys shouted. “Show ’em how you can go!”

“Don’t let ’em catch you!”

“Show ’em, Chiver!”

The others took up the cry.

Holding on to the rope, Chiver worked his way upward. He took hold of the crumbling chimney and managed to work his way to the roof’s peak. The rope must have been tied about the chimney at an earlier time, Radford thought. They’d want escape routes. Freame would, in any case, though it seemed a risky choice of route for him.

By now all the alley was awake. ­People hung out of windows, trying to see what was happening. Their neighbors opposite reported.

“He’s got a foothold!”

“Won’t hold him!”

“There he goes!”

“No, he’s back!”

“He’s mad! Where’s he goin’?”

Radford strode down the alley on the opposite side, keeping ahead of the boy on the roof.

He watched Chiver straddle the roof’s peak, swing a leg over, and start sliding down the other side. The rope slipped from his hands. He grabbed the lower corner of the chimney and clung there while he fought to regain his balance.

The policeman was trying to scramble up the roof on the other side.

“He’s comin’ for you, Chiver! Keep goin’!”

Chiver slid down cautiously. The next roof was a few feet below him. He jumped down and ran across it—­and stopped abruptly, inches from empty air.

Between this building and the next yawned a gap. The two buildings leaned away from each other, making the space between them wider at the top. The roof he needed to get to wasn’t level with the one he stood on. He’d have to leap upward across ten feet of space.

“Give it up!” Radford shouted. “You haven’t got wings.”

“That you, Raven?” the boy called. “Whyn’t you fly up and get me, then?” He laughed.

“Go on!” one of the boys shouted. “You can do it, Chiver!”

“You can do it!” The boys began to chant, “Fly, Chiver, fly!”

Chiver pulled his hat to a sharper angle. “I can do it easy!” he shouted back.

He started to back away, for a running start. But the constable was climbing down from the peaked roof. “Stay where you are, boy!” he shouted.

“Don’t think I will,” Chiver shouted back.

“Don’t be a fool!” Radford shouted. “Your legs aren’t long enough!”

“Yeah, we’ll see. Watch me fly, Raven! Watch me!”

With a laugh, the boy stepped back a pace and leapt, an instant before the constable could grab him, and caught hold of the roof edge. The boys, who’d gone utterly still during the leap, burst into cheers. Chiver clung for an endless moment, legs pumping as he tried to pull himself up. There was a hush as he swung one leg up toward the roof. Then his hands began to slide, and down he went, with a blood-­chilling shriek, cut off as he struck the paving stones below.

Clara heard shouting, a sudden silence, another outburst, then silence again. She looked out of the window in time to see Radford round the corner of a building, a policeman on his heels. Other policemen were collecting boys and bringing them toward her end of the alley. She was supposed to stay in the carriage, and call out when she saw Toby, but she didn’t see him.

She tilted her bonnet brim downward, opened the door, and jumped down from the coach.

The sour aroma of unwashed boys assaulted her nostrils, and for a moment she thought she’d be ill. But she hadn’t time for that. Something unplanned-­for had happened. By the looks on the boys’ faces, it was something dreadful. Most of these children were hardened in crime, according to Radford. Yet while some struggled with the police and others shouted defiance, their hearts didn’t seem to be in it.

“What’s happened?” she asked the nearest constable. “What was that noise?”

“It’s Chiver!” a very little boy cried. “Gone off the roof, he has.”

“Splat!” someone else said with a laugh that sounded patently false.

She suppressed a shudder.

“None of these, is it, ma’am?” the constable said.

She shook her head. “Where’s Toby?” she asked the boys.

“Which one of ’em’s him, then?” one said.

“Never heard of him,?

? another said.

“Gone off the roof with Chiver.”

“No, gone to Billingsgate for oysters.”

Laughter and more fanciful answers followed.

She started for the house.

“Ma’am, you’d best not go there,” the constable said. “We still don’t know who’s inside and who isn’t. They got all kinds of bolt holes.”

If they had bolt holes, Chiver would have used one, she thought, instead of leaping from a roof.

She took a firm grip of Davis’s umbrella and marched to the house door. It stood open. A policeman tried to get in her way but she adopted her grandmother’s autocratic air and waved him aside with the umbrella.

One of the boys made a run for it then, and the policeman had to go after him.