When they were just feet from the tug, Byrne heard the grinding throb of its engine. It was a relatively new model, he guessed—no paddle wheels, so there would be a propeller beneath the water to move her forward. Lorne exchanged a hopeful look with him, the pallor of his face less deathly. A bearded man in a waterman’s smock and cloth cap was coiling heavy lengths of hemp rope while a younger fellow, stripped to his waist, shoveled coal into the boiler, stopping only to consult the steam gauges.

The captain saw them coming. “You from the queen’s party up yonder?” he bellowed over the noises of the engine and the fighting above them.

“Yes,” Byrne shouted. “Can you get us out there, to where the coach fell in?”

“Just what we’d in mind, sir. How many in her when she went over?”

“One. Princess Louise.”

“Lordamighty,” the captain said.

“Shit,” added the boy, “she’s good as dead, she is.”

The captain silenced him with a look. “Engine’s near ready. Lucky we were already heading out for a job when it happened. Hop aboard. It’ll take a few minutes to get us out there.”

“Can’t you shove off now?” Lorne wailed, his blue eyes electric with panic. He grabbed binoculars laying nearby on a crate and scanned the water.

“Pressure’s gotta build. Almost there,” the captain assured him. “We started her up soon’s we saw that boat blow.”

“Boat?” Byrne scowled at the captain.

“Dory or some such, covered over with tarp. Tied to that middle strut there. I thought they were bridge repair boys. Musta been filled to the gills with powder.” The boy slammed the iron boiler door closed and nodded at his captain. “We’re off, boys.”

The tug swung away from the dock and picked up speed.

“Let me see those.” Byrne took the binoculars from Lorne and rushed to the bow to better see the water directly ahead of them. If there was any chance of Louise swimming to shore he didn’t want them running her down.

Lorne came up behind him. “She loves you, you know,” he said.

Byrne’s heart stopped. He said nothing.

“If she’s alive . . . if you save her”—the marquess choked on his words—“I won’t stand in your way.”

Byrne shot him a quick look. Their eyes met in a moment of understanding. Then Lorne looked away, his tear-filled eyes narrowing on the water. “There!” he shouted.

“Where?” Byrne’s heart leapt with hope.

“Two o’clock. Another rescue boat.” Lorne pointed.

Not her. Not her, damn it.

“With another boat helping we’ll have a better chance of finding her,” Lorne yelled in his ear over the engine’s growl.

Immediately following the explosion, the river had cleared. Merchant ships, ferries, fishing trawlers—all made quickly away from the area, no doubt fearing their boats would be damaged by more blasts. But this lone boat had now reversed direction and was moving toward the catastrophic scene.

Byrne had always wondered whether he’d know his old enemy Rupert Clark, if they ever met face-to-face. He’d only ever seen a photograph of him during the war. And then there were the statements of a few witnesses, filling in physical details.

Now, as he peered through the binoculars at the two men aboard the rusty old ferry steaming across the water, Byrne felt his sixth sense kick in. One man stoked the boiler. But it was the other who drew his eye. He was tying a large open loop in the end of a length of rope, using his teeth to hold the rope secure while manipulating the strands into a knot. Even from this distance, Byrne could tell that something was wrong with the man’s right hand.

Fingers missing. The badge of a black powder man.

The rope man’s face was back to him. But he knew Rupert Clark by his shock of red hair and war injury. His work with the rope done, the former rebel soldier’s attention fixed on something in the water beneath the bridge. Something he intended to haul aboard with his lasso?

Byrne shifted the binoculars by sixty degrees to follow the general direction of Rupert’s gaze. At first he saw nothing but floating rubble. He swung the binoculars to the right, and stopped. There.

He’d have recognized those smooth white shoulders anywhere.

Fifty-three

Louise felt cold, dreadfully cold, head to foot. From her waist down, she was submerged in the Thames River’s slime—dark as tea, the consistency of congealed gravy. The upper part of her body stretched across a shattered door of the coach but was no less wet. She’d swallowed mouthfuls of the filthy water before kicking off her shoes and hauling herself up onto the only part of the broken coach within her reach that seemed not to be sinking.

She was fairly certain a bone in her shoulder or collarbone had snapped during her fall. Her ribs ached, and the pain whenever she took a breath was unbearable. The stench coming off of the water filled her mouth and nose. She concentrated on drawing only shallow puffs of air into her lungs between coughing fits.

Swimming was impossible without the use of both arms, even if she had been able to free herself of the wretched, water-soaked gown. She prayed a boat would come along and rescue her before she lost the last of her strength and slipped off her makeshift raft into the river to drown.

She might have lain there for two minutes or two hours, for she lost all sense of time. A guttural throbbing sound roused her from her semiconscious state. Clinging with her good arm to the door, she turned her head, trying not to move her shoulder or shift her torso and thereby anger her ribs.

A boat. Oh, Lord, yes—a boat.

It was moving swiftly toward her, propelled by twin paddle wheels, one on either side of the wide hull. She hoped the captain saw her because there was no way she could move out of his way. She was reassured when she saw a figure standing at the bow, waving to her. Never in her life had she seen a happier sight. She blinked, hoping she wasn’t hallucinating.

The captain brought the steam-powered boat chugging up to meet her as gently as if he’d been docking the queen’s yacht. Her heart swelled with gratitude.

Down came a rope and a shout from above. “Hold on a moment longer there, miss. We’ve got you. Never fear.”

Although Louise couldn’t see her rescuer from water level, she heard his shouted instructions over the thump-thump-thump of the engine and understood he was telling her to slip the open loop around her body. The least pressure on her shoulder and chest caused her increased pain, but she struggled to obey, thinking only of resting safe and warm upon a dry deck. She gritted her teeth, eased her left arm and injured shoulder through the loop, then leaned over to guide the rope around her back and thrust in her good arm.

The man must have been watching closely. As soon as the rope was secure, he began pulling her up.

Louise swallowed a shriek of agony as the rope cinched tighter around her chest. Her weight, so much more due to the sodden gown, added to the pressure of the rope tightening around her. She fought to stay conscious. Now that her rescue was guaranteed, all she could think of was her family. She had ejected her sisters from the coach, along with Lorne and the duke. But had they survived the onslaught of attackers? From a distance she still heard shots being fired, the ring of bayonets on sabers, shouts of men, and terrified cries of horses.

But her thoughts were cut short when, with a final effort, two men in dark suits leaned down over the gunwales of their boat, grabbed her by the arms, and pulled her up and over the wooden rail then down with a careless thud onto the deck.

“Oh, please, gently!” she cried. “Sirs, I’m broken.”

Their rough hands released her. She looked up into the faces of two strangers.

One was older than the other, his coarse red hair whipped up by the wind, as he wore no cap. He observed her with dull-eyed marsupial interest, devoid of emotion. “Open her up, boy,” he growled at his companion. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yessir.” The younger one beamed at her then bolted away toward the drive house. His exuberance reminded her of a beagle on the scent.

Red hair turned back to her, his eyes fixing on her, flitting away then back again, as if in deep calculation. “Went fishin’ and caught us a princess. That right, dearie?”

She was in too much pain to react to his rudeness. “You don’t look like watermen,” she murmured. In fact, they didn’t sound like it either. Their accents were wrong. American? She tried to at least straighten up to a more dignified sitting position from her sprawl on the teak planks. “But I thank you with all my heart. You’ve saved my life.”

The man leaned down and peered at her gown then still closer at her face. “Which one is you?”

If he was American, maybe he knew Byrne? She felt an immediate surge of hope at the thought of her lover. If Stephen had been down here instead of up on the bridge, he’d have swept her up in his arms, laid her on a cushion, and covered her shivering body with a toasty quilt.

“Do you suppose you might find me a blanket. Anything for warmth. I’m so terribly c—”

The stranger reached down and grabbed her hair by the roots. He wrenched her head back, forcing her to make eye contact with him. “I said, what’s your name?”

To as much as touch a princess, if you were not her husband or a family member, was unimaginably rude, a breach of etiquette as well as the law. She was so shocked she could only stare at him and answer.

“I am Princess Louise, the marchioness of Lorne.” Since she didn’t know whether it would help or hurt her cause to lie, it didn’t seem worth pretending she was someone she was not.