Ravished by the Rake by Louise Allen Page B

alley was a dead end. Dita snatchedthe child as he reached her and clambered up a pile of baskets as though it were a stepladder until they were perched on the top of the teetering heap, the dog leaping and snarling at the foot.
    ‘Hilo dulo naha,
’ she murmured to the boy as he clutched her, his dirty, skinny little body wrapped around hers. But he needed no warning to keep still and, as their fragile sanctuary began to tilt with an ominous cracking sound, he seemed to stop breathing.
    The dog leapt at them, clawing at the baskets. It was mad, there was no mistaking it. Dita tried to put out of her mind the memory of their
jemahdar
who had been bitten. His death had been agonising and inevitable. She had to stay calm. If the baskets collapsed—
when
they collapsed—she would throw the boy to Averil and pray she was strong enough to hold him. And she would try and get behind the baskets.
    Something flew through the air and hit the dog and it turned, yelping. Alistair, a long, bloody knife in his hand, came down the alley at the run and kicked out as the dog leapt for him, catching it under the chin. As it spun away he lunged with the knife, but his foot slipped on rotting vegetables in the gutter and he went down on to the snapping, snarling animal.
    Dita screamed as she slid down the baskets and thrust the little boy into Averil’s reaching arms. As she hit the ground, groping for the stone he had thrown, Alistair got to his feet. The dog, throat cut, lay twitching in the gutter.
    ‘Did it bite you?’ Frantic, she seized his hands, used her skirts to wipe the blood away. ‘Are you scratched? Have you any cuts on your hands?’
    Alistair dropped the knife and caught at her wrists. ‘I’m all right. Dita, stop it.’
    ‘You fell hard, you might not have felt a bite.’ She tried to see if there were any tears in his coat or the light trousers he wore. ‘Alistair, don’t you know what happens if you’ve been bitten, even a graze—’
    ‘Yes, I know. I am all right,’ he repeated. ‘Dita you are getting covered in blood. What the devil were you thinking of, scrambling up there with that child?’
    ‘There was nowhere else to go,’ she protested as the alley began to fill up. One man, a fish seller by the state of his clothes, picked up the bloody knife and walked away with it. A woman, weeping loudly, ran and snatched the child from Averil. The noise was deafening.
    ‘It wouldn’t bear the weight of both of you.’ Alistair released her and she began to shake. ‘It was going to collapse at any moment.’
    ‘I know that. I couldn’t leave him!’ ‘Most people would have.’ Someone brought a bowl of water and Alistair plunged his hands into it. Dita held her breath until they emerged, the skin unbroken. His coat was stained, but she could see no evidence of teeth marks on it, or tears in his trousers.
    Alistair gestured for more water. When it was poured he took her hands in his and washed them and she thought back over the crowded, terrified, minutes. ‘You came to rescue the child,’ she said. ‘You must have gone for the knife the moment you heard him scream, or you wouldn’t have got here with it when you did.’
    ‘Well, that’s two of us who are sentimental,’ he said, his voice harsh, but his eyes as he looked at her held admiration and the shadow of fear, not for himself, butfor her. ‘Don’t do that to me again, Dita. My nerves won’t stand it. The mast was bad enough, this—’
    They stood, their hands clasped in the reddening water and the noise of the crowd faded. Dita wondered if she was going to faint. Alistair was staring at her as though he had never seen her before.
    ‘Dita! Dita, are you all right?’ She looked round, dazed and a little dizzy, to see her friend supporting their weeping chaperon. ‘I don’t think Mrs Bastable can walk back.’
    ‘Rickshaw,’ Alistair snapped at their two porters. ‘Two. Can you help Lady Perdita, Miss Heydon?’ As Averil’s hand came