Fortune Trilogy 1 - Fortune's Mistress Read Free Page B

executioner released the traps and the two women dropped. Annie screamed and thrashed for a few seconds before going limp, but hardly anyone noticed. All attention was on Alice Abbott.
    Alice had hit the end of her rope, jerked, and fallen free to the ground. She rolled around choking and gasping for air. Above her, the frayed ends of hemp swayed in the breeze. The crowd went wild.
    “It’s God’s judgment!” someone shouted.
    “Free her!” another cried.
    “She’s innocent!”
    For an instant, Lacy caught sight of her half-brother Ben standing on top of an undertaker’s wagon. “For God and England!” he yelled. “Free God’s chosen innocents!”
    Howling like a single-brained demon, the mob charged the gallows. The soldiers’ line wavered and broke. Guards, soldiers, cleric, and prisoners scrambled for their lives.
    “My brother!” Lacy shouted to James and pointed. “Over there!” But the black funeral wagon and plumed horses were ten yards away beyond several score of stampeding men and women. Lacy realized the distance might as well have been ten leagues for all the chance they had of reaching Ben without being trampled to death.
    A wheel-lock musket fired and a horse reared up. “To me! To me!” the deputy-keeper cried.
    A dozen men and women seized hold of the condemned cart and toppled it. “Free the prisoners!” a slattern shouted, climbing on the upturned cart. “Free God’s chosen!”
    A man lunged between Lacy and James and struck the chain. Lacy’s head snapped back just as a woman shoved past her. Lacy went down on one knee as James backhanded the man and caught her shoulder, pulling her to her feet. The guard on the horse loomed above them. He raised his musket and Lacy screamed.
    James threw his shoulder against the horse’s neck, and his right fist closed around the animal’s bridle. As Lacy watched in disbelief, the pirate gave a heave and a twist, and the gelding went down on its front knees, tossing the guard over its head. Before she could utter a sound, James grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and leaped into the saddle.
    “Hellfire, woman,” he gasped as he pulled her down in front of him. “What do you weigh?”
    Her reply was lost in the horse’s snort as James gathered the reins in one hand and drove both heels into the beast’s sides. Another musket fired, and Lacy was certain she heard the lead whistle past her ear.
    The soldiers formed a line in front of them, and James yanked the gelding up hard and wheeled it around and whipped it back down the road toward the city.
    Lacy caught sight of the minister high on the platform clinging to one of the posts as the crowd tore at the wooden supports. The entire gallows swayed back and forth, threatening a terrified Alice Abbott who crouched beneath it, forgotten by the mob. Annie’s body no longer hung from the gallows, but who had cut her down or what they had done with her body, Lacy didn’t know.
    “The pirate’s getting away!” the minister screamed. “Shoot him! Shoot the pirate!”
    Lacy knotted her fingers in the horse’s mane and crouched down, trying to make herself as small a target as possible. James seized a rake from a farmer and whirled it around his head, all the while howling like an enraged bear.
    A man in Lincoln-green blocked their path with a longbow, but James gave him a look of such naked malevolence that the bowman paled, dropped his weapon, and ducked back into the throng.
    People were running and screaming. Suddenly, a mounted guard broke through the multitude and fired at them. James lashed the gelding’s rump with the ends of the leather reins. Lacy screamed again as the gelding shuddered and blood began to stream from a hole in its neck.
    “Hellfire and damnation, woman,” James said as the horse stumbled and began to fold under them. “Are you nothing but bad luck?”
    “Please ...” she whispered to the horse. “Please.” She clamped her eyes shut. Please! Whether it was a