Free The Counterfeit Gentleman by Charlotte Louise Dolan

clothes fit.”
    * * * *
    They fit, but did little to disguise Miss Pepperell’s charms. She looked, in fact, like a very pretty young woman dressed in boy’s clothing. But after she tucked her hair up under one of his caps, Digory had to admit that from a distance her disguise would probably be adequate.
    Even so, he could not entirely shake off the feeling that he was making a mistake.
    * * * *
    Although she would never have admitted it to her companion, Bethia needed all the courage she possessed to follow Mr. Rendel out of his cozy cottage and into the chill air of a Cornish morning. Not even the roosters were awake yet, and the only things moving on the horizon were the thin columns of smoke rising lazily from the chimneys of the cottages they hurried past.
    Any pride she might have felt in her own fortitude de serted her when they arrived at the top of the path leading down to the beach. If there had been no fog obscuring the sea, she might have managed alone. But staring down into the soft white obscurity, she knew she could not reenter that world of terror. Before she could prevent it, a soft cry of despair escaped her lips.
    Mistaking the cause of her fear, Mr. Rendel turned back and held out his hand. “The path looks steep from above, but it is not really dangerous. If heights bother you, you can hold onto me.”
    She wanted very much to run back to the cottage like a craven coward, but instead she took the hand he was offer ing her and discovered she had enough courage—barely enough—to follow him down the path into the formless world waiting below.
    Even when the other smugglers appeared noiselessly out of the fog, she did not shriek with terror... but then she did not let go of Mr. Rendel’s hand either.
    “There’s a boat down at the other end of the beach,” a man she identified as Little Davey said in a low voice. He was, in her opinion, not the size of man anyone could call little, except that he was slightly smaller than Big Davey.
    “It’s mine,” Mr. Rendel said. “You’d better take care of it, or it will make the murderers wary.”
    Harry appeared next, carrying the hastily constructed dummy over his shoulder. To Bethia’s way of thinking it would never fool anyone. But once the fog lifted, an hour or so after they had finished all the arrangements and hid den themselves behind assorted boulders, the dummy looked entirely too real. Harry had weighed it down with concealed rocks, so that although the waves tugged at it, the “body” did not float away.
    Even knowing it was nothing but straw and old sheeting with seaweed for hair, Bethia could not help shuddering every time she caught sight of the gruesome object. So eas ily might she have been the one lying there; just so would her body have looked after the tide carried it in.
    Unable to look at the dummy without trembling, she shut her eyes. But she could not close her ears to the waves breaking with monotonous regularity on the beach. They sounded like the ticking of an eternal clock that never winds down, counting ... counting ... counting the ever decreasing minutes of her life. And with each passing hour, the sun beat down with increased intensity.
    She was just beginning to think that they were waiting in vain—that the two villains had forgotten all about retrieving the body—when above the sound of the surf she heard voices. As they grew louder, she recognized them, and in stinctively she moved closer to her rescuer, only with diffi culty managing not to clutch Mr. Rendel’s arm in panic.
    His muscles taut, his body coiled like a spring for the at tack, he did not look at her, but only murmured out of the corner of his mouth, “Remember, you gave me your word that you will stay here behind the rocks until it is all over.”
    Too frightened of the approaching men to speak, she could not force even a single word of acknowledgment out of her constricted throat.
    Mr. Rendel turned to look at her, and the devil was in his eyes.