“I think one of them hit me, you little cow,” Rafe said. His voice had a giddy, light-headed note. “I hope your hand swells up and turns blue.”
“I’ll hit you again if you’re not careful,” I told him. I felt along my ribs: my hand was trembling so hard I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think anything was broken. “Justin, you should’ve heard Daniel. He was brilliant.”
“Oh, Jesus, yes,” said Rafe, starting to laugh. “A touch of the horsewhip? Where the hell did that come from?”
“Horsewhip?” Justin asked wildly. “What horsewhip? Who had a horsewhip?”
Rafe and I were both laughing too hard to answer. “Oh, God,” I managed. “ ‘In my great-grandfather’s day…’ ”
“ ‘When the peasants knew their place…’ ”
“What peasants? What are you talking about?”
“It all made perfect sense at the time,” said Daniel. “Where’s Abby?”
“She stayed at the gate, in case he came back and-Oh God, you don’t think he did, do you?”
“I doubt it very much,” Daniel said. There was the edge of a laugh ready to burst through his voice, too. Adrenaline: we were all crackling with it. “I think he’s had enough for one night. Is everyone all right?”
“No thanks to Little Miss Spitfire,” said Rafe, trying to pull my hair and getting me in the ear instead.
“I’m fine,” I said, batting Rafe’s hand away. Justin, in the background, was still murmuring, “Oh my God, oh my God…”
“Good,” Daniel said. “Then let’s go home.”
There was no sign of Abby at the back gate; nothing but the hawthorn trees shivering and the lazy, haunted creak of the gate in that small cool breeze. Justin was starting to hyperventilate when Daniel called into the darkness, “Abby, it’s us,” and she materialized out of the shadows, a white oval and a swish of skirt and a streak of bronze. She was holding the poker, in both hands.
“Did you get him?” she whispered, a low fierce hiss. “Did you get him?”
“My God, I’m surrounded by warrior women,” Rafe said. “Remind me never to piss you two off.” His voice sounded muffled, as if he was holding his nose.
“Joan of Arc and Boadicea,” Daniel said, smiling; I felt his hand rest on my shoulder for a second and saw the other one stretch out to Abby’s hair. “Fighting to defend their home. We got him; only temporarily, but I think we made our point clear.”
“I wanted to bring him back and have him stuffed and mounted over the fireplace,” I said, trying to dust muck off my jeans with my wrists, “but he got away.”
“The little fucker,” said Abby. She blew out a long, hard breath and lowered the poker. “I was actually hoping he’d come back.”
“Let’s get inside,” said Justin, glancing over his shoulder.
“What did he throw, anyway?” Rafe wanted to know. “I didn’t even look.”
“A rock,” said Abby. “And there’s something taped to it.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus in heaven,” Justin said, horrified, the second we got into the kitchen. “Look at the state of you three.”
“Wow,” said Abby, eyebrows going up. “I’m impressed. I’d love to see the one that got away.”
We looked just about as bad as I’d expected: shaking and skittery-eyed, covered in dirt and scrapes, great dramatic smears of blood in weird places. Daniel was leaning heavily on one leg and his shirt was ripped half off, a sleeve hanging loose. One knee was torn out of Rafe’s trousers, I could see glossy red through the hole, and he was going to have a beauty of a shiner in the morning.
“Those cuts,” said Justin. “They’ll have to be disinfected; God only knows what you’d pick up from those lanes. The dirt of them, cows and sheep and all manner of-”
“In a minute,” Daniel said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. He came up holding a twig, gave it a bemused look and laid it carefully on the kitchen counter. “Before we start on anything else, I think we need to see what’s on that rock.”
It was a folded piece of paper, the lined kind, torn out of a kid’s school notebook. “Wait,” Daniel said-Rafe and I had both moved forwards. He found two pens on the table, picked his way delicately through the broken glass to the rock, and used the pens to pull the paper free.
“Now,” Justin said briskly, bustling in with a bowl of water in one hand and a cloth in the other, “let’s see the damage. Ladies first. Lexie, you said your hands?”
“Hang on,” I said. Daniel had carried the piece of paper over to the table and was unfolding it carefully, still using the butts of the pens.
“Oh,” Justin said. “Oh.”
We moved in around Daniel, shoulder to shoulder. His face was bleeding-either a fist or the rim of his glasses had split his cheekbone open-but he didn’t seem to have noticed.
The note was printed in furious block capitals, so hard that in places the pen had dug right through the paper. WE WILL BURN YOU OUT.
There was a second of absolute silence.
“Oh my God,” Rafe said. He collapsed backwards onto the sofa and burst out laughing. “Brilliant. Actual torch-bearing villagers. How cool is that?”
