Page 135 of Where the Heart Leads
Hearing footsteps approaching on the other side of the door, she swung to face it.
Barnaby looked up as the door opened and Mostyn stood there, filling the doorway.
Before he could blink, Penelope swept in. Mostyn gave way, bowing respectfully.
“Tea, please, Mostyn. In the parlor.”
Tone and attitude were perfectly gauged; she was behaving exactly as if she were his wife. Leaving him gawping on the doorstep.
She glanced briefly back at him, then turned toward the parlor. “Your master and I have matters to discuss.”
What matters?Brows rising along with welling hope, Barnaby took a step forward.
“Hist!”
Hist? Still on his front step, Barnaby turned and saw a man waiting by the area railings. The man beckoned, furtively glancing around.
Puzzled, Barnaby walked to the edge of the wide top step. “What is it?”
“You’re Mr. Adair?”
“Yes.”
“I was sent with a message, sir. Urgent like.” The man beckoned again.
Frowning, Barnaby stepped down. One step gave him a better perspective on the street. Abruptly he halted, staring through the darkness, premonition prickling across his nape. Seeing three—he glanced the other way—no, four—men hanging back in the shadows to either side of his house, he started to step back.
They saw—and flung themselves at him.
He caught the first with a kick to the chest, throwing him against the side railings, but before he could recover the others swarmed up the steps and over him. He downed another with a blow to the gut, but the others pressed up and in, hemming him in so he couldn’t move enough to get any force behind his blows.
They were trying to grab him, to wrestle him down the steps. To subdue and take him, but not to harm him. No knives, thank God.
He was wrestling with one, simultaneously trying to block the others from getting behind him to push, when he sensed someone else at his back. The heavy head of his grandfather’s cane appeared over his shoulder, striking at the head of the man he was wrestling with.
Mostyn had flung himself into the breach.
His attacker yelled as the blows connected; two others tried to intervene, but the cane slashed first one way, then the other, and they fell back.
The cane returned to hit the man still holding Barnaby; he put up a hand to protect his head—loosening his grip.
In the same instant, smaller hands clutched the back of Barnaby’s coat, steadying him—then hauling back with surprising strength.
A strength he used to help him wrench free of the man’s desperate hold.
With a hoarse bellow the man ignored the thumping cane, flung himself forward, lower to the step, and seized Barnaby’s flapping coat again. He got a good handful and tried to tumble Barnaby down the steps, but with Penelope’s added weight to anchor him, Barnaby set his feet and wrenched his coat free, then whirled and pushed Penelope back over the threshold, gathered Mostyn—still slashing mightily with the cane—and bundled him back, too.
Flinging himself after them, he just had time before the wrestler picked himself up and his friends joined him, hurling themselves up the steps, to slam the door in their faces.
They hit the door with significant force.
Leaning against it, Barnaby reached up and threw the bolts. Mostyn quickly took care of the lower set.
The door shook under a fresh assault.
Mostyn rushed to add his weight to Barnaby’s. The pounding continued. Mostyn put their combined incredulity into words. “This isJermyn Street,for heaven’s sake! Don’t they know?”
“It appears they don’t care.” Grim-faced, Barnaby fished in his waistcoat pocket. He pulled out a police whistle on a ribbon. Still struggling to bolster the shaking door, he held it out to Penelope. “The parlor window.”
