Mary, having no experience with such a situation, was not certain what to ask, but she decided upon, “Are you with this man by choice, madam?”
The woman shook her head, her answer coming faintly: “No.”
MacPherson, needing no translation, said to Mary, “Tell her she can go.”
This Mary did, and the woman pushed free of the man, who this time offered no resistance but stepped back, his hands withdrawn and partly raised as if to prove his harmlessness. As the woman hurried from the stable yard, the stranger complained to MacPherson, “Now look what you’ve done, man. You’ve spoiled my night’s fun.” Dropping one hand to his sword hilt, he said coldly, “Let me return you the favor.”
The coachman cried out and fell heavily as something moved in the darkness behind them, and at the same moment the man by the stable door came at them too.
Mary did not know if there were two men or twenty attacking.
MacPherson had laid hold of Thomson’s coat and all but thrown him clear into the coach, and the quick flashes of silver and steel in his hands after that told her he’d drawn his sword and the deadly long dagger, by which time she’d dropped to the ground and gone under the coach, her heart pounding in panic.
The scuffle that followed, with harsh breaths and curses and blades clanging hard against blades in a frenzied and disordered way, started Frisque barking madly. The horses, half-hitched to their harness still, sidestepped and snorted and got in the way while the horse that MacPherson had ridden shied nervously farther away from the fight.
Mary, lying as tightly pressed into the earth as she could, had a view of the lighted door to the stables, and when the men passed between it and the coach she tried hard to make sense of the shifting confusion of legs. From the shape of his boots, cast in silhouette, she knew which ones were MacPherson’s, and so she could see he had one man before him and one to the side, though it seemed to her he was the one doing all the advancing. And when the first sword fell, it wasn’t his own.
With a cry sounding only half human, another man called out, “My hand! Bastard near took my hand off!”
“You still have your hand, you great coward,” the first stranger taunted. “’Tis only your wrist. Now come help—”
But in that same breath he was also disarmed, and a second sword dropped to the dirt. Spewing curses, the man flung himself at MacPherson and found himself knocked to his knees for the effort, and Mary could see the long blade of MacPherson’s sword lower to point at the fallen man’s neck. “Are ye finished?”
The man with the slashed wrist apparently was, for he’d taken off running already, his steps growing rapidly faint in the dark.
Frisque, as always when he thought a danger had safely retreated, barked louder, until he was hushed from within the coach. Below it, Mary held her breath.
The answer came: “Not yet.”
Not from the man who should have spoken, but from one who had come forward from the place of his concealment in the stables and stood now beneath the lantern in the open stable door. The light, because it was behind him, showed his shape alone, including the short barrel of the pistol in his hand, but Mary recognized his voice.
“I had much rather do this quietly,” said Mr. Stevens.
He left the light, coming across to them steadily—keeping his pistol, presumably, aimed at MacPherson.
“Take his sword,” he instructed the other man, who rose uncertainly.
Mary, astonished and horrified, saw the sword turn as MacPherson relinquished it.
“And the dirk,” Stevens added. “A most uncouth weapon, befitting a barbarous people who can barely speak but to lie and deceive.”
He was careful, she noticed, to stop his advance a few paces beyond where the Scotsman could reach, and she guessed that, like Frisque, he barked loudest and bravest when there was little real danger of his being brought to account for it.
He said, “That was quite a neat game you played back in Chalon. And a bold move to have that lad hasten me on from Lyon. Very clever. But I’m clever, too. I did ask, on my way down the river, if any had seen you stop in at the towns, and on finding none had, I deduced you had not gone before me at all, but were coming behind. In your place,” he confessed, “I’d have done the same. And I would never have risked passing straight through Valence, where there might be so many eyes watching, and some of them English. No, I’d have come this way. So here’s where I waited. And whether you passed by or stopped, I would have you. And him.”
He meant Thomson, she knew. There was nothing but silence above in the coach. Not a snuffle or whine from her dog.
Stevens said, “I will take him, now. And I’ll be having that handsome gun too, while I’m at it.” He ordered the other man, “Take it. That case he has over his shoulder.”
The other obeyed. Mary heard the sharp slide of one blade on another as first the man gathered the forfeited sword and the evil long dagger that Stevens had called a dirk into his one fist. They must have been heavy to hold, for she saw the sword’s point touch the ground near the wheel close to where she was lying. And then she saw his boots step forward as he came between the tall Scotsman and Stevens, preparing to lift off the strap of the case.
What happened next happened almost too quickly for her to untangle its order. She heard a quick gasp and a shuddering wheeze, and then the sword point lifted and was raised beyond her line of vision as the other man was lifted too, caught hard upon whatever blade he had been stabbed with to become a human shield against the pistol Stevens held, as in a swift and fatal rush, MacPherson charged the Englishman.