Page 39 of The Marriage Method

“Stop, I said. You will answer to me!” Coming up behind Nell, Mrs. Pritchard caught her hard by the arm. She wrenched her around in a painful grip.

Nell spun on the woman in a swirl of skirts and, lifting her cane with a practiced flick of her hand, pressed the tip of it straight against Mrs. Pritchard’s heart.

The madam stopped in her tracks with a sharp intake of breath. “Silas!”

The bully boy charged forward to intervene.

Miles deftly moved in front of him, placing himself squarely between the hulking brute and Nell. “Not another step,” he warned.

Silas came to a stumbling halt.

Seeing her henchman intercepted, Mrs. Pritchard reached to jerk Nell’s cane away from her chest herself.

“I wouldn’t,” Nell advised her. She brushed a gloved finger over the hidden button beneath the raven’s head handle. “There’s a mechanism at my fingertip that will release a spring-loaded blade from the end of this stick. I should hate to conclude such a cordial meeting by running you through.”

Silas gaped at her. So, too, did Mrs. Pritchard. Possibly Miles as well, though Nell wasn’t perfectly sure. Her entire attention was fixed on her adversary.

“We’re going to take our leave now,” Nell said steadily. “If that’s agreeable to all parties?”

Mrs. Pritchard raised both her hands in a show of surrender. Her face was mottled with strangled fury. “Who are you?”

“A schoolteacher,” Nell said. She returned the tip of her cane to the floor. Miles was immediately at her side. Slipping her hand through his proffered arm, she turned with him and exited the house.

10

Miles had once observed a dozing cat spring up from its deceptively lazy slumber to effortlessly—and ruthlessly—dispatch an unsuspecting bird. It was the closest thing he had to compare with what he’d witnessed in the entry hall of Mrs. Pritchard’s Gentlemen’s Establishment. There, his new bride had transformed as instinctively as that feline into…

Miles didn’t know quite what.

In the moment, he’d had no time to consider it. He had only reacted, putting himself between Nell and what he’d perceived to be the greater danger. But it was Nell—lovely, elegant Nell, with her pronounced limp and her ridiculously large crinoline—whose reflexes had won the day.

A mechanized sword cane, by God.

Miles flashed it a frowning look as he guided her away from the brothel. It appeared no different from any other fashionably made walking stick. But it was different. Unless of course…

“You weren’t bluffing?” he asked her.

“What?” Nell’s gray gaze flashed to his, distracted. “No. Not at all.”

“Then—”

“We are stopping at the Red Lion, I presume?” she interrupted.

His muscles tensed at the prospect. He wasn’t some boorish oaf, unable to admit when a woman had had a stroke of genius. Neither was he a careless idiot who would willingly lead a lady into further danger.

“It was clever of you to ask where they spend their half days off,” he acknowledged. “In other circumstances, we might be able to pursue the lead, but—”

“There won’t be any other circumstances. We have little enough time as it is.” She directed a look behind them. “I pray Mrs. Pritchard hasn’t sent anyone after us.”

Miles fully expected the madam would do just that the moment the shock wore off. He’d been on his guard for it ever since they exited the brothel. “Not yet. Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Then we should make the most of it. It’s nearly half past six. Providing Claudine was speaking truly, one or more of Mrs. Pritchard’ girls should be drinking at the Red Lion right now. If we make haste, we may yet catch one of them.”

Miles agreed in principle, though his gentlemanly instincts were all but shouting at him to haul Nell into the next cab that crossed their path and take her straight home to St. James’s Square where she would be safe. She wasn’t one of his reporters, to be pounding the streets for hours in pursuit of a story. She was his blasted wife.

He nevertheless steered her down the next lane and the next, not back toward Commercial Street, but toward the dissolute public house at the center of the slum.

“Did someone at the Academy teach you to wield a cane that way?” he asked her.