Her Ladyship, therefore, dined alone, scantily too; food choked her, wine burned her throat, and to speak truth she was heartily glad not to have to drink it, for Her Ladyship was an abstemious young lady and believed milk, Bohea and Pekoe the beverages for her sex, to the exclusion of any stronger.
At twilight, having made her duds and her tresses up into a reputable enough parcel, Lady Peggy, in a suit of claret velvet, leaving all the rest of her man’s attire hanging in the presses, sauntered carelessly out of the house, declining the footman’s offer of a chair, or even a hackney chaise, or a page to carry her parcel, and set off at a swinging pace across the square and toward the river. It was her intention, by way of frustrating any attempts at tracing her which might be set afoot, the discovery of her flight once made, to so double on her own tracks, and to seek out such unimagined and unlikely streets to traverse, as must puzzle both bell-man, watch, and redbird alike, as well as her acquaintances.
She swaggered along toward St. Stephen’s where a coach containing quality was occasionally met even now; then down Horseferry Road, almost to the river’s bank; then along Jackanapes Row, with little idea of the cut-throat locality she was haunting; back again toward better neighborhoods; then a lurch to the Thames making into Farthing Alley and Little Boy Yard, at the end of which she found herself at the old Dove Pier.
Peg stood still, her heart beating both with her quick walk, and at the strangeness of all that surrounded her. She had no fear, because her arm was stout, her aim sure, pistols at her belt and a good sword at her side; and she was perfectly ignorant of any harm here to be found, greater than at the door of Beau Brummell’s house.
The dark dwellings of the yard frowned at one another, with not an ell of sky to share between ’em at their roofs; the sign of the “Three Cups” swung and creaked in the slow breeze; the river, black and gruesome, lapped at the foot of the stone pile against which she leaned. On the river the tired bargemen rested at their oars, and the dip of a water-bird was the only sound that struck upon her ear. Peggy was casting about in her mind whether to enter the inn and inquire her road to the King’s Arms in the Strand, and had just turned to do so, when in the cavernous doorway of one of the gaunt-looking tenements she beheld three figures. The faces of two were toward her, and by the light of the fish-oil lamp swinging at the next-door tavern, she beheld them, so sinister and forbidding as to cause her to halt for a space, and then, overcoming her dread, to pursue her path, but slowly and by crossing the yard.
As she did so, her weapon caught in her heel and as she bent to disengage it, a voice speaking in low muffled tones arrested her gait.
It was the voice of Sir Robin McTart saying:
“If I make it ten guineas apiece on the spot, you swear to leave him cold on the pier yonder, come Sunday night, or to tie a stone about his throat and throw him into the river?”
“Aye, aye,” grunts one of the two companions of this most valorous gentleman. “’E’s h’always ’ulkin ’ereabouts o’ Sunday nights.”
Lady Peggy, with such a pull-string of terror at her heart as she never had before, draws closer to the wall of the tenement before which she has halted, creeps nearer to the portal wherein these cavaliers are quartered.