“Me!” The man’s voice rose a little. “I’ve told you afore, I don’t mind ’andlin’ some cove, but it’s not my fancy to muck about with females.”

“You’ll do as you’re bid,” was the answer. “You’ll get a couple of jacks for the job and for that you can keep your bone-box shut.”

The first man, who had been apprehensive, seemed silenced by this.

Gretna felt her faintness lighten and her brain began to work. So the men were being paid for it.

Paid for what? That was the question she now began to ask herself.

“If she’s a-goner,” the first man said suddenly in a quavering voice, “that’ll be murder, Joe, and I don’t ’old with murder, not to please any well-breeched swell.”

“Aw, stop a-frightenin’ yourself,” Joe answered roughly. “I oughtn’t to ’ave brought you on the job. If you ’adn’t looked pretty enough to act the footman, I’d’ve ’ad Bill aside me now and none of your bleatin’. Stow it. She’s quiet and that’s all we need worry about. Some of ’em would ’ave now been a-squealin’ like a pricked pig.”

“I don’t like it,” the frightened man muttered plaintively. “’Tis a queer rig and no mistake.”

“Shut your trap,” Joe shouted. “If the mort ain’t a-goner, she’ll know enough to string you up. Not that she’ll be comin’ back from where we’re a-takin’ ’er.”

“Where be ’er goin’?” the timid man asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell and, as I don’t, I needn’t shoot the cat. You keep her mummer shut till we gets to the boat.”

There was silence after this except for the clatter of the horses’ hoofs on the road and the rumble of wheels.

Gretna lay very still.

She had no desire for Joe to think that she had overheard anything that was said and she knew only too well from the rough way she had been handled when they put her into the coach that they could easily silence her in a way that would ensure their safety for evermore.

Why had they kidnapped her? For what reason? And then gradually out of the horror and chaos of her brain, she began to understand what had happened.

It was Maria they had come to fetch, Maria whom they thought they were kidnapping and not her. As she realised this, she wondered how she could have been so dense for one moment to imagine that anyone would have been interested in her.

Now it was very clear.

The footman in the Royal livery who she had thought was rather strange in his manner. The urgent message from the Prince and the carriage waiting outside.