A Lady Never Tells(148)
“This is the fellow who has been terrorizing my cousins?” he asked finally.
“Yes. We caught him attacking Miss Bascombe and Miss Rose.”
“It was ’er as ’it me,” the man protested, gesturing toward Mary and reaching up to touch the sore spot on his scalp where she had smashed the gun into him.
“After you grabbed Rose and knocked Mary down.” Royce’s voice was cold as iron. “I think you should take him down to the cellar, Stewkesbury, out of sight of the ladies. We’ll get our answers there.”
“No! No!” The man looked around frantically for an ally. “I didn’t do nothin’. I don’t know nothin’.”
“While I am sure that is in general true,” the earl said, rising to his feet, “in this instance, I believe you have information of value to me.” He turned toward Royce. “However, I see no need for beating the information out of the man. It looks as though you’ve done enough of that already.”
“That was just to subdue him,” Royce explained. “I haven’t even started to find out why he wanted to hurt Mary and her sisters.”
“I din’t!” the attacker cried out. “I din’t hurt any of ’em. Least, not till they started ’ittin’ me. And it weren’t all of ’em.”
“No?” Stewkesbury asked silkily. “Which one were you supposed to hurt?”
The man stared at him, making a little choked noise. “None of ’em. None. I wouldn’t a ever ’urt any of ’em. Please, just let me go, and I promise I’ll not do anythin’ else. I’ll go back to London, I will, and I’ll never set foot out of it again.” These last words were uttered with such embittered conviction that Mary felt sure they were true.
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any possibility of letting you go,” Stewkesbury told him. “You are going to gaol. The question will be, I think, what you are charged with. There is kidnapping, attempted murder—”
“No! No! I never meant to murder anybody!” he wailed.
“Or lesser things such as trespass and assault,” Oliver offered. “What I tell the magistrate would depend, of course, on how much you are willing to tell me.”
“Tell you? I’ll tell you anything you want. Wot do you want to know?”
“Who hired you, for one thing?”
The man stared at him. “’Ow’d you know ’e ’ired me?”
“Yes,” Camellia agreed. “How did you know someone hired him?”
“Looking at this chap, do you honestly believe he came up with the idea of kidnapping anyone?” Turning back to the assailant, he said, “All right, suppose you tell me your name.”
“Jamie, sir, Jamie Randall.”
“You were hired in London?”
He nodded. “’E come to me, told me to follow them girls.”
“He told you to take one of them?”
“The black-’aired one, ’e said, the beauty.”
“Why her?”
Randall shook his head. “’E don’t tell me things like that. ’E just says, ‘Do it.’”
“So you tried in London?”
“I followed ’em to see wot they looked like. I was goin’ to come get ’er later, only there wasn’t a chance. So I ’ad to follow when they left.”
“And who was it who hired you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come, Randall, surely you don’t expect me to believe that.”#p#分页标题#e#
“It’s the truth! ’E never told me ’is name. He just tells me wot to do.”
“What do you call him?”
“Sir.”
The man’s response brought a twitch to Stewkesbury’s lips, but he quickly controlled it. The earl went at it from several more angles, but the answer always returned the same—Jamie Randall did not know the name of the man who had hired him.
“What did he look like?” Royce asked
Randall gazed at him blankly. “I dunno. Older’n me. Um, not tall.” He held up a hand to his arm, indicating someone who came up to his own shoulder.
“His hair?”
“Brownish—and turnin’ gray, like. Not white.”
Mary’s stomach quivered uneasily. Everything Randall had said could describe Cosmo Glass. “What about his speech?” she asked. “How did he talk? Like you or these gentlemen, or more like us?”
The man gaped at her for a moment, then said, “I dunno—sort of like them.” He gestured toward Fitz and his brothers.
Mary sagged with relief. Then it wasn’t Cosmo, whose speech was more strongly American than that of the Bascombe sisters. She looked across at Royce and saw the question in his eyes, and she shook her head slightly.