The Wild Princess

Six



Rupert Clark scooped black powder into a paper cylinder. He pinched then twisted the end tight between calloused fingers. Every now and then he stopped what he was doing to check on the work of the younger man beside him. Details were what mattered in this game. Details made you famous, or blew off your hand. Or worse.

Rupert had joined up with Major General Richard Taylor in the 28th Louisiana Infantry back in ’63. He had learned from his sergeant the technique of rigging an artillery shell with a primer sensitive enough to detonate the shell if a man or horse stepped on a pressure plate. Rupert quickly discovered he had talent for the work.

Soon he was designing his own, even more sophisticated, explosive devices. General Robert E. Lee heard about his successes and ordered Rupert transferred to the general’s own Army of Northern Virginia, not long after the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg. Will McMahon came on board at Chancellorsville, and he’d taught the boy enough to make of him a good assistant, even if he was a little slow and, sometimes, too impatient for such sensitive work.

After that they’d marched together, mining roads and blowing up bridges for the South wherever they were most needed.

Rupert gloried in constructing more and more sophisticated mines and bombs, and he felt proud of his successes. He’d only made one mistake; it had cost him three fingers from his right hand. But he could kill more Yanks in one short minute than any man he knew. And without wasting a single bullet or jeopardizing his comrades’ lives. Never had he felt so empowered, so important as during those grand and glorious campaigns.

As it turned out, it was all for naught.

Rupert had believed in their cause, breaking away from the tyranny of the North, saving his family’s land and their way of life for the children he would someday have with his sweet Annemarie. Now there was nothing left back home. Nothing worth returning to anyway. His parents were dead—of natural causes, or so he’d been told. His brother had taken off for somewhere out west. Annemarie perished in the blaze that burned down their house by the ferry landing in Irish Bend, Louisiana.

Had his wife stayed to try to protect their home? Had those damn Yanks sullied her before setting the house afire? The bitterness of not knowing burned in his gut like a white-hot sulfur flame. Tortured him. Devoured him.

“We might could head on up to West Virginia, work in the mines,” he told Will.

“Guess we could.”

But blasting out shafts was dirty and particularly dangerous work. Blowing a path through granite and shale mountains for the railways out west was more to his liking.

“Okay by me,” an always agreeable Will said.

“Trouble is, those damn Chinese work cheap and know their way around dynamite.” In the end, they gave up on that too. Mines or railways—there was nothing else for a man with such a singular talent when there wasn’t a war going on. “Maybe we should just work our way up north. Might be jobs, one sort or another in Chicago.”

He and Will had left the sickening devastation of their homeland. But they found nothing other than the stinking-of-death, bloody stockyards for work. Nothing, that is, until they stumbled on an Irish-American rally to raise money for militants bent on winning freedom for Ireland. If one brave endeavor couldn’t be won, Rupert reasoned, perhaps another might be. His missing fingers itched at the thought of being back in the fight.

He and Will dropped a few words here and there in Chicago about their experiences in the military, taking care not to mention on which side they’d served.

Two days later a Fenian recruiter scouted them out in McGinty’s on the South Side. The three moved to a dark booth at the back of the bar.

“Our army o’ freedom fighters,” the man with muttonchop whiskers and a musical Irish lilt to his words explained, “is half Irish boys and half Americans and Canadians who sympathize with our struggle. All brave lads, I’ll tell you. But what we most need these days, boys, are dynamiteers. I hear you know a bit about the subject?”

“We do,” Rupert said, feeling the old excitement rise through his veins like a thread of mercury in the thermometer. He gave the recruiter an accounting of his and Will’s successes, each mission bringing with it a surge of remembered pride.

This was what he missed as sorely as a man who’d lost a limb to battle—this feeling of wholeness, of comradeship, of being respected for his trade and expertise.

“Good black-powder men are hard to find. Joining our war against England is your chance to do some good,” the recruiter said after ordering up fresh pints of Guinness, molasses dark and fragrant with hops. “Dust off the feeling o’ shame at your loss, boys. Turn your gifts into victory. Can you not see how grand it will be?” The man raised his glass to them.

Rupert could see it. Most assuredly, he could. The aching sting of his own losses—land and wife—seemed less painful when he considered returning to his old art after months of doing nothing but working in the yards under bosses who snickered at his “Loo-si-ana” accent.

Of course they’d accepted. How could they not?

Now, all the way on the other side of the ocean, on a deserted road north of London, Rupert brushed his red hair out of his eyes and waved Will over beside him. The two of them squatted down and wired their primers and fuses, just so. They didn’t need to speak. They knew what they were about, having done it hundreds of times before.

“You think it’s too much?” Will asked then smiled that sweet boyish smile of his. Rupert had seen his partner shove a bayonet through a man’s liver while wearing that same innocent grin. “I mean, the Lieutenant said ‘disable the horses.’ Not blow the whole caravan to kingdom come.”

“The Lieutenant” was the only name they knew for their handler. Most of the men in this outfit went by code names or rank. Very cautious the Fenians were. In fact they’d only met the man who gave them their orders once. A well-dressed fellow he was. But it had been at night, his face obscured by his top hat brim, features distorted by the gaslight bouncing off the soupy mustard-yellow London fog. After that, the Lieutenant always sent runners with coded messages or with cash to keep them fed and in a decent rooming house.

The good pay aside, Rupert would rather have known the man for who he was. Seeing a man’s eyes—that’s how he judged his character. Lee’s eyes were what had made Rupert willing to follow the general into blazing hell. They reflected truth, intelligence, honor. But Rupert couldn’t have said whether the Fenian lieutenant’s eyes were black, brown, or polka-dotted purple.

Their first assignment in London had been a beauty of a job. A single spectacular explosion knocked out a wall of Parliament, damaging two meeting rooms. The assault on the government horrified the public and did exactly what it was supposed to do—make the English think twice about holding on to a belligerent island. London hadn’t stopped talking about it for weeks.

“You s’pose we’ll get a bonus for this job?” Will asked.

“No tellin’, my boy. No tellin’.” Rupert felt positively cheerful at the thought. He looked around the rolling countryside. They were well beyond the city limits but still close enough for them to escape back into the dank thieves’ dens of Whitechapel. “These lads seem to have deep pockets, they do.”

Will sat back on his heels and plucked a slim green shoot of grass to tuck between his teeth. “When will the others arrive?”

“Soon as the charges blow under the horses of the queen’s carriage.” The rest of the crew—now waiting in a safe house nearby so as not to attract too much attention from locals who might send out an alarm—would descend quickly on the disabled coach.

What puzzled Rupert was how the Lieutenant knew exactly when the wedding party was to leave London and which route they’d take. One of the lesser Fenian officers had hinted that an informant was in place, maybe even inside Buckingham Palace. And it was rumored among the men that the spy was someone high up, with access to Victoria’s court.

Rupert pulled out his pocket watch. By his calculations, the royal party should reach them in about one hour. A Fenian rider was clandestinely pacing the entourage on horseback. He’d warn the dynamiteers minutes before the royal carriages arrived. Rupert insisted upon detonating the road mine himself, not risking a pressure plate for this job. He needed to make sure the charge didn’t go off directly under the queen’s carriage, or they’d have nothing but body parts and gore everywhere.

“We done?” Will asked, spitting out the grass, brushing hair out of eyes that glittered with excitement.

“Just about.” Rupert had a feeling Will rather enjoyed seeing blown-apart bodies. He had caught him on the battlefield, pulling watches and rings off of severed hands; coins out of gaping, gory torsos. He suspected something had snapped in the lad at Vicksburg, if not before. Rupert patted him on the back. “Feels good, bein’ appreciated again, don’t it?”

“Sure does.”

“Just remember, once she blows, we’re up and over that hill back of us. No dawdlin’ to admire our handiwork. Let the foot soldiers grab her royalness.”

Because that was the plan—as daring as it might seem.

Kidnap the Queen of England.