They came in the middle of the night, swift, quiet, and deadly. The gambling rooms in Doherty Mansion were packed, the hubbub of voices, music, laughter, and the noise of many dancing feet completely masking the sounds of the creeping dragoons outside. The ever-faithful Trim, promptly and silently arrested, was unable to warn the merrymakers within.
Aimed into Aga's bedchamber, on the opposite side of the great house, the first flaming arrow went completely unnoticed. It caught in the heavy curtains around her bed and immediately ignited them, the flames slowly spreading along the velvet drapes before catching on the linen sheets. In the space of three minutes, the entire room was ablaze.
In the space of twenty, it was the entire mansion.
Down on the front lawn, Aga Doherty was struggling against the hard hands that held her, trying desperately to return to the burning building.
"He's still in there! Michael is still in there!" she cried - but it was no use. The scarlet-coated dragoons merely dragged her back, farther away from the doomed mansion.
A sudden crash rent the air as a second-story window erupted in a shower of broken glass, and the figure of a person, silhouetted against the golden-red flames, hurtled out, falling twenty feet into a bush. The young Doherty girl finally broke free of the men holding her and rushed forward, only to discover that the person climbing out of the wrecked shrub was one of the servants, Margaret Finnegan. The maid was smoke-blackened and scratched up, but otherwise none the worse for her stomach-wrenching plunge.
"Margaret!" Aga practically grabbed the young woman and shook her. "You're alright? Where's Michael?"
"'Tis still inside he is, Miss Aga," the maid replied. Her face was streaked with soot and tears. "He went in to get me out, and he...he's trapped. A beam almost fell on me, but Captain Lightfoot pushed me out the way, and it...it fell on him instead." She hiccuped slightly, mopping at her face. "'Tis most sorry I am, Miss Aga. There's naught can be done now."
Captain Thunderbolt's daughter stared at the servant, shocked and disbelieving. "No," she whispered - and then, much louder, "No! No, it cannot be! We must get him out! Michael!"
Snatching her long, scorched skirts in her fists, she ran wildly at the collapsing mansion, but the faithful maid and several dragoons pulled her back. "It's no use, miss!" Margaret cried. "You can't go back in, or you'd perish too! It's too late for the captain."
Aga struggled against them, screaming 'til her throat was raw before finally winding down into hoarse sobs. Her parents pushed the dragoons aside, glaring at them coldly, and knelt by their distraught daughter, silently comforting her with their presence. Tears rained in profusion down Lady Anne's cheeks, and Lord Doherty, his hand resting on Aga's shoulder, stared straight ahead with a stony face.
Though none could see it, his heart was screaming as loudly as his daughter had been as he thought of his fearless second in command - the courageous Captain Lightfoot, one of Ireland's greatest heroes - trapped within his ancestral home as it was consumed by the raging inferno.