Once he reached the garden, however, he summarily shed his well-bred manners and showed a loutish tendency to trample the dahlias and browse on the tender shoots of a sweet pea vine. Trev had tied the horses in the stable yard and made sure the lane was empty of passersby before they brought Hubert through the door, but he felt his alarm rising as the bull disregarded the carrots and planted himself amid the f lower beds, cropping great swaths of blossoms and vegetation with each mouthful.

"Callie!" Trev hissed, pushing at Hubert's rump. "Move him along!"

"I'm trying!" she returned in a fierce whisper, as if they weren't standing in full view of the lane with a massive black bull taking up the twelve feet of garden between them. She clucked and tugged at the animal's nose ring. "Hubert! Walk on!"

Hubert f licked his ear, lifted his nose an inch, and then went back to tearing up daisies.

Trev had been praying that Jock and Barton's absence meant that the pursuit was still decoyed away. Jock knew full well they needed time, and plenty of it, but Sturgeon had not left the premises willingly—not unless it was to go for a musket. So when Trev saw a f licker of motion through the leaves and overhanging branches far down the lane, a warning that someone was marching briskly toward them, he felt a surge of true panic.

"Someone's coming." He would have stampeded the bull in any way he could, but with Callie standing in front of the bull he didn't dare. She'd be crushed in an instant if the beast overran her. He threw a wild look round, saw a white expanse of bed linens hung out to sun over the side fence, and finished off Hubert's work by trampling down the delphiniums to reach them. He tore the sheets off the fence and waded back, dragging them in his arms, tossing the whole spread over Hubert's back. "Take the ends! We're airing linen."

Callie nodded, with a wide-eyed glance toward the lane. She grabbed a sheet corner, pulling it toward her. Hubert ignored the drape as Trev hurriedly arranged one edge over a rosebush, trying to cover him entirely under a tentlike affair of bed linens. Callie held out the ends, waving them up and down as if to shake out wrinkles while she made a pavilion over Hubert's lowered head.

To the nondiscerning eye, he might possibly resemble the lumps of covered garden bushes, assuming the bushes were small trees, but Trev feared he looked very much more like a bull with a pair of sheets and a counterpane laid over him. Trev was frantically trying to invent a reasonable tale to cover the situation when the advancing pedestrians appeared round the curve of the lane.