“Nor that you refused to fire, then. Tom Carthew, I never expected to find you a traitor!”
“You wait till you’re promised to have your nose and ears and eyelids cut off, and be tied down and stuck out in the sun for the ants and the hornets and the vultures and the pi dogs to finish, Miss Evie! See if you wouldn’t fire then. And I didn’t go for to fire straight, neither. You tell me if any soul in the Residency had a finger hurt through my shooting.”
“No, I believe they did not,” reluctantly. “So you played both sides false. And since then you have gone from bad to worse—laying plots against your own old friends.”
“It’s a cheat, I tell you—a nasty trick they’ve played me. I was bid make a plan for catching Captain Lennox, the General’s nephew, so that the Khan might hold him for a hostage and bargain with his uncle.”
“And why would you be plotting against poor Captain Lennox—who never did you any harm?”
“Why but because they can make me do what they like now, just by threatening to hand me over to the General?”
“I see. Then there’s nothing you’d baulk at now? Indeed and I’m sorry for you, Tom Carthew!”
“That you may well be, ma’am—but there is something I wouldn’t do, and these chaps know it. They didn’t dare ask me betray an English lady into their hands—least of all you. So they choused me with the tale that it was Captain Lennox they wanted. You believe that?”
“I do, I do; it explains things. But d’ye see now, as you have got us into this hole, it’s for you to get us out of it. And how will you do that?”
“Now you’ve beat me, ma’am. Not that there’s anything for you to be afraid of—in the way of bad treatment, that is——”