Free The Black Hand by Will Thomas Page A

protested. “Surely they didn’t follow us here.”
    “They found us all the same. Get your pistol. We must prepare to repel all boarders.”
    Suddenly, there was an exchange of gunfire by the gate. Almost simultaneously, we heard the sound of glass shattering in the conservatory, followed soon by a second crash. Someone had breached the house’s defenses.
    Barker and I ran to Mrs. Ashleigh’s room and flung open the door. Inside, I saw her turn quickly. There was a case on her bed, and she held an old-fashioned ball and powder dueling pistol in each hand.
    “They have come,” Barker said. “Bolt the door.”
    The Guv ran down the stairs to the ground floor, and when he arrived pulled a handful of the sharpened coins he always keeps in his pockets. He threw them down the hallway as men stepped out into it from the other side. There were cries of pain and cursing, but when Barker fired his pistol at them, they scattered. I’d counted at least three.
    My employer and I moved down the hall shoulder to shoulder, and when we reached the end, stood back to back. The intruders had vanished.
    “You take the left, lad, and I’ll go right,” the Guv said. Before I could suggest that it would be wiser if we stayed together, he was gone. I went into the dining room, where earlier that day I’d been cosseted and cross-examined by the lady of the house. I thought the room was now empty, but as I stepped across to the parlor, I realized it wasn’t. There were too many good places to hide. When I reached the rug, I dropped onto it, looking about as the lightning illuminated the room. I could see something between the legs of the couch, and I fired at it. There was a yelp; and as fast as I could, I pulled myself to my feet, sailed over the couch back, and landed on top of him. We were a tangle of arms and legs, and then I hit him with the butt of my Webley.
    My assailant looked more like a farm lad than an Italian assassin. He was stocky and unshaven and couldn’t havebeen more than my age. Knowing I’d probably get in trouble for it with Mrs. Ashleigh in the morning, I cut the cording of the curtain behind me with my dagger and tied him up good and tight. Then I proceeded cautiously into the conservatory.

19

    T HAT WAS HOW I MANAGED TO FIND MYSELF stepping over the shattered glass door into a darkened conservatory in the teeth of a Sussex gale. Even now it seems a bucolic place to be set upon by Sicilian assassins, but it was our presence that had brought them there. Like Barker himself, the Sicilians lived by an inviolable code. Having sent him the Black Hand note, and found it ignored, they felt duty bound to go through with the threat.
    Less than ten minutes later, I stood in the shattered greenhouse drenched with rain and bleeding freely from the face. At my feet lay the Sicilian intruder I had encountered there, pierced through the heart with a dagger. My dagger. He had sliced open my cheek but, in doing so, had left himself exposed and I had struck as Gallenga had trained me to do. When the opening appeared, I’d thrust a knife into his vitals without thinking and without hesitation. I stood over him, my heart pounding wildly.
    “Thomas!” Barker’s rough voice bellowed over the crashing of the storm.
    “Here, sir!” I called.
    “Are you all right?”
    “I think I’ve killed one of them.”
    “Stay there,” he called. “I’ll come to you.”
    About a minute later, there was a yellow glow that eventually resolved itself into an oil lantern Barker was holding aloft. My employer bent and rolled the slack body onto its back. The assailant was a thin, hawk-faced fellow with thick stubble. This was no farm boy here. I recognized a true Sicilian by now.
    “One blow to the heart dead-on. He’s one of the Sicilian dockworkers, by his clothes. Mr. Gallenga would approve, though the fellow seems to have opened your cheek.”
    “I’ve got another man tied up behind the sofa, sir,” I said.
    “Have you, then?”