“Learn anything?” Benson murmured.
“Enough to be going on with.” As he strode down the slope, Robert used what he now knew to construct what he thought must be the slavers’ operation. Some of the slavers would be waiting in their lair. Undoto, or perhaps Lady Holbrook when she’d been there, would send to summon them, directing them to this victim or that. The slavers waited until night, then seized their victim. They returned to the lair—possibly to report, also possibly to combine their victims—then either on the same night or the next, the slavers ferried said victims out of the settlement and took them to their camp.
It was the location of the camp Robert needed. But clearly, the first step toward finding the camp was identifying the slavers’ lair.
* * *
Night had fallen hours ago.
Seated in the small and entirely plain black carriage she’d finally chosen and hired for the duration of her stay in the settlement, Aileen fidgeted, impatient and restless.
She’d had her new driver, Dave—a cockney who, of the dozen coachmen she’d interviewed, had struck her as the most trustworthy—call for her at the boardinghouse at sunset. She’d directed him to drive on a roundabout route to eventually pull up in the tiny lane that joined the street above Undoto’s church almost directly opposite Undoto’s house.
From their position in the lane, through the forward-facing window beneath the coachman’s bench, she could look across the street. The entire front façade of Undoto’s house was within her field of vision, along with the extension of the narrow lane that ran down the right side of the house. She suspected—hoped—that meant she would see anyone entering or leaving from either the front or rear of the house.
The tiny lane was the perfect spot from which to observe all comings and goings from the priest’s abode. Well and good. But the waiting was getting on her nerves.
She shifted on her seat. She lifted her reticule, feeling the weight of the pistol inside it, then set it back down on the seat beside her. She had no idea if anything would come of this covert surveillance. If she was asked to explain what she expected to happen and what she hoped to achieve, she wouldn’t be able to formulate any real answer beyond that this was something she could do, and she had no other viable avenue to pursue.
And, deep down, some instinct—that conviction of the emotions her mother called a woman’s intuition—insisted that this was the way to go, the path to follow if she wanted to find Will.
Everything revolved about Undoto. Surely, through watching him, she would see something and learn something more.
Thus far, all she’d seen had been an old woman who had come out of the side gate into the narrow lane and fed table scraps to the neighborhood dogs.
Stifling a sigh, Aileen fixed her gaze on the front of Undoto’s house and lectured herself for the umpteenth time to be patient.
She heard the men approaching before she saw them; the tramp of heavy feet coming down the dusty street reverberated through the quiet and reached through the open carriage windows. Eagerly leaning forward, she peered out through the small window; she prayed Dave was following her instructions and pretending to be asleep on the box.
As it happened, the image Dave projected mattered not at all. The four large armed men who appeared from the left and turned off the street onto the path to Undoto’s front door didn’t spare even a glance toward the carriage. Their arrogant confidence was absolute, demonstrated unequivocally in their swaggering gaits, in the soft laugh they shared as the leader reached out to thump a meaty fist on the door.
The moon was high, casting a silvery light over the scene. Aileen studied the four men. Although all were deeply tanned, the leader appeared English, the others of mixed European heritage. They were at ease, relaxed, transparently at home. This was their territory, and in it, they reigned supreme; they didn’t expect to be challenged.
She had the sudden thought that if they’d known she was watching, they would merely have leered and shrugged it off as of no account.
The door opened, and Undoto stood framed in the doorway. Even though the narrow porch was poorly lit, she could make out his smile of welcome. He shook hands with the leader and stood aside to wave him and his three cohorts into the house, beaming and exchanging comments and claps on the shoulders with the men as they filed past.
Close acquaintances, at the very least. Almost brothers-in-arms.
Undoto stepped back and shut the door.
Aileen sat back.
Now what?
She was tempted to get out of the carriage, sneak across the street, and crouch beneath the single window of Undoto’s front room. But the house was long and narrow; there was no reason to assume Undoto was conversing with his guests in that particular room, and the risk...
Was too great.
Quite aside from the danger of being discovered by those inside the house, she would be readily visible to anyone in the street and in the houses opposite. Even in her dark clothes, she would stand out.
She huffed and forced herself to remain where she was. In the dark, looking out of the small window at Undoto’s uninformative front door.
Impatience and impulsiveness were abiding weaknesses; she had to hold against both.
In search of distraction, she directed her mind back to what she’d actually seen, to replaying the images and studying them for clues.
The four men. What could she deduce about them?
They’d come from farther up the hill. She’d noticed the street looped over and around the squat hill’s flank, dipping away into an area of the settlement into which she’d yet to venture. That was the direction from which the four had appeared.
Was that where they lived?
Certainly, nothing she’d seen suggested that they lived with Undoto or even in this quieter neighborhood; they certainly wouldn’t have fitted in.
She’d got the impression they were brothers-in-arms. Colleagues, at least. Reviewing the interplay between them only strengthened that conclusion.
So what enterprise did Undoto share with these men?
Other than his ministry, she knew very little of Undoto. Sampson hadn’t known much about the priest, either.
That brought her back to the four men. They’d been large, but most of their size had been muscle. Quite a lot of it.
Undoto was tall, well built, and had a commanding presence, but that presence relied more on the force of his personality, not merely his physical size.
In contrast, the armed group’s leader was taller by several inches and was significantly more physically overwhelming. That, too, was not simply due to size but to the menacing way the man moved, the intimidating way he stood.
Adding to the image of danger, each of the four men had carried at least one long-bladed weapon strapped to his side or back, and all four had bristled with smaller knives; she hadn’t had to look hard to see that. They wore their weapons openly...
Mercenaries?
The more she thought of it, the more the description fitted.
What connection might lie between a priest and a group of mercenaries?
Was stumbling on the mercenaries why Will had disappeared? And Dixon before him?
Undoto’s front door opened. The mercenaries trooped out. The leader was the last to leave. He turned on the narrow porch to speak with Undoto.
Aileen watched the exchange like a hawk. She strained her ears; although she couldn’t make out the words, the tone of both men’s voices reached her.
The mercenaries weren’t happy, but it didn’t seem that they