The Daredevil Snared (The Adventurers Quartet Book 3) by Stephanie Laurens Read Free Book Online

nuts Diccon brings in. Dubois keeps them all for himself.”
    With Harriet, she turned, and they continued to the cleaning shed. It was time to return to their day’s labors. As they reached the steps that led up to the door, she made up her mind. “I can’t see any reason not to ask. I’ll suggest that one of us can accompany Diccon out each day, and that we’ll work an extra half hour each day—all of us—to make up for it.”
    Harriet’s face lit. “That sounds perfect. And Lord knows, Dubois knows that none of us are fool enough to try to run away.”
    Katherine pulled a face. “We don’t even know in which direction to run.”
    She opened the door and went in. Harriet followed, and they resumed their places on stools about the long raised table that ran down the middle of the shed.
    Mary Wilson looked up from the rock from which she was carefully chipping away aggregated ore. She flashed a smile at Katherine and Harriet, then looked back at her work. There were six women in total, all presently in the shed, and they’d banded together into a tight-knit, supportive group. They’d had to. While Katherine was the most confident and assured in dealing with Dubois, the others had backed her up on more than one occasion. Despite their disparate backgrounds—Katherine a governess, Harriet a young woman of good family searching for a position after coming out to Freetown following Dixon, Mary a shop assistant and part owner of a shop, Ellen Mackenzie another young woman who had arrived in the settlement looking for honest work, and Annie Mellows and Gemma Halliday, expert needlewomen who hailed from the slums—they’d all grown comfortable in the others’ company.
    They’d come to trust each other.
    A guard had come in fifteen minutes before Katherine and Harriet had left for their walk; the other women had gone for their walks, two by two, earlier. The guard was still there, leaning against one wall, bored and idly watching them.
    Ten entirely uneventful minutes later, he stirred. A large male of indeterminate origin, he drawled, “Later, ladies.” Then he moved to the door and left, letting the panel slam shut behind him.
    All six women looked up. Mary met Katherine’s eyes.
    After a moment of straining her ears, Katherine nodded. Mary slipped from her stool, went to the door, and carefully eased it open enough to look out.
    There was a grin in her voice as she reported, “He’s swaggering off to the barracks.”
    They never knew when a guard might look in on them—and never quite trusted in them leaving and not hovering, hoping to hear something incriminating to report to Dubois. But this one had, as most of them did, taken himself off.
    After shutting the door, Mary returned to her stool and hopped up again. She looked at Katherine. “Any news?”
    “I’ve decided to ask Dubois if we—one by one, one each day—can join Diccon on his forays. Just to break up our days.”
    “Ooh!” Gemma grinned. “I like the sound of that.”
    They fell to discussing the pros and cons and how best to present the argument to Dubois. Katherine glanced at Harriet, but as she had, Harriet chose not to mention the issue of opening up the second tunnel.
    Time enough to broach that later, after the leaders’ discussion that evening, when, no doubt, they would learn the hard facts.
    * * *
    Charles Babington stood on the worn planks of Government Wharf. Lounging in the shadows cast by a stack of cotton bales offloaded from some other vessel, he watched the Macauley and Babington inspector and the port’s customs officer as they peered down into the open hatch of The Dutch Princess , a merchantman bound for Amsterdam.
    Impatience rode him, edged with desperation. His intended, Mary Wilson, had vanished too many weeks ago, and there seemed nothing of any substance that he could actually do. Robert Frobisher had given him hope, but Frobisher had vanished and had surely returned to England long since. Whether Frobisher had