They all held hands, Susannah in the middle. They stayed against one wall. Rohan felt ahead with his free hand. “Damn,” he said after feeling a spider run over his knuckles. “I wish I had my gloves on.”
They walked for what seemed to be forever.
The ground sloped upward. Suddenly Rohan ran straight into a wall of dirt and rock. They searched the surface of that rock with frantic hands. “Nothing,” Phillip said finally. “I fear we are trapped.”
“No,” Susannah said very clearly, “we’re not.”
“I know you’re trying to keep our spirits up, love, but—”
“No,” she said again, her voice as radiant as a blinding light. “Come, we must go back to the wall that screams.”
“But we’ve already been there,” Phillip said. “I think we should position ourselves beneath the abbot’s tomb. Rohan can lift me and I can try to shove it open.”
“No, it is too heavy. Come with me.” She left them. They heard her light footfalls fading down the passageway.
“She’s running?” Phillip said. “But it’s dark.”
“She’ll hurt herself,” Rohan said and hurried after her, stumbling, cursing, but now slowing.
“Susannah! Wait for me!”
But she didn’t. They found her at the other end of the passage. She was leaning against the wall looking toward the skulls.
It was odd, but it wasn’t completely black now.
“Our eyes must have adjusted,” Rohan said slowly. “I can begin to make things out.”
“Yes,” Susannah said. “It’s really quite clear now. Oh dear, I can’t reach the latch.”
Rohan grabbed her and pulled her against him. “It’s all right, love. We’ll get out of here. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.” She pulled away and smiled up at him. “You’ve got dirt all over your face.”
“You can see me that clearly?”
“Oh, yes, and Phillip, your hair looks gray from all the dirt. Now, Rohan, go stand directly in front of the wall of skulls. Then reach in your arm as far as you can and press it to the wall. You will find a small latch. Pull it toward you.”
He stared down at her. He could barely make out the outline of her head. “What are you talking about? You’re ill, aren’t you?”
“No, do it, please. I want to leave this horrible place.”
“But I don’t understand—” Phillip began.
It was then that Rohan realized there was something different about her. There was a soft nimbus around her. He shook his head. No, that couldn’t be right. But why could they see? She was smiling at him, utterly calm, her expression serene. He had never seen her look more beautiful.
He said very slowly, so scared it shook him to his very being, “You can see everything clearly, can’t you?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. Go pull the latch toward you, Rohan. It’s been used only once, many hundred years ago, but it still works. It’s very smooth, so you won’t cut yourself.”
She knew, he thought. She saw the latch. He walked toward the wall of skulls. Slowly he felt his way to the edge and forced his arm through. He felt nothing but the powdery dryness of the wall, dusting his probing hand. He felt nothing more. Yet he knew she wasn’t wrong. He pressed deeper, a skull against his face now.
Suddenly he felt a small knob. His fingers closed around it. He slowly pulled it toward him.
“You have something, Rohan? You found it?” Phillip was crowding behind him. There was utter disbelief in his voice. “No, you couldn’t have found anything. There isn’t any way that Susannah could know anything, is there?”
“Quickly,” Susannah shouted, “jump back!”
Neither man questioned her. Just as they stumbled backward, there was a loud creaking sound, then a massive crash, bones slamming and grinding into each other, smashing against the floor below.
“My God, what is happening?” Phillip said, lurching back toward the wall of skulls. He reached out his hand. “The skulls are gone. My God, there seems to have been some sort of trapdoor beneath all those skeletons. When you pulled the knob, Rohan, it opened the door and all the skeletons fell through. But to where?”
Susannah said calmly from behind them, “Just to the floor beneath, not more than five feet down. Now, push the knob back, Rohan, quickly, quickly.”
He did. The open doors pulled back up. They stared into a black hole. “What is this?” he asked slowly. “What has happened?”
“There’s an escape door at the back of the opening. All of us will fit, don’t worry. Quickly, we must leave this place.”
Rohan turned around to face her. He saw her clearly, as if she were standing in a pool of light. He felt something calm fill him, felt the panic of the unknown recede. He knew in that moment that all of them would survive this. He knew that whatever had happened to Susannah would probably fade, but the part of it that had shown the strength in her, the inherent goodness, would never be gone. He accepted it, and was immensely grateful. He grinned at her. “Come, madam, let’s get out of this place.” He lifted her up into the opening. He and Phillip were right behind her. The space was nearly high enough so that they didn’t have to bend. Rohan looked back into the passageway. There was a dim, eerie light, but it was blacker than a pit deep within the opening where all the skeletons had lain for so very long.
“Ah, here it is,” she said. “Stand back just a bit, Rohan. Yes, that’s good.” In the next instant, a narrow, low door swung inward. Beyond was another passageway. “Don’t worry,” Susannah called over her shoulder. “This one opens onto the edge of the river. Everyone believes it to be a simple cave that goes in only about fifteen feet.”
Suddenly there was clear, fresh air on their faces. They all breathed in deeply.
“Here,” Susannah said. “Help me move these rocks and branches. They’re only partially hiding the opening.”
It was still dark, the moon high in the sky, when the three of them stood by the river, winded, filthy, and very relieved.
Rohan pulled Susannah down beside him. Phillip sat cross-legged next to her. He cleared his throat after a moment, cleared it again, then said slowly, his voice a croak, “I do not understand what happened, Susannah. You knew what to do; you saw everything. I don’t understand.”
Rohan had pulled her against his chest, folding her in his arms. She said, “I don’t either, not really. It’s just that everything was suddenly so very clear.” She shrugged. “It’s difficult to explain. But I simply saw everything and I knew that we would survive. There was simply no doubt in my mind.”
Rohan said, “I know what Phillip is feeling. It bothers anyone when he can’t logically explain something. If he can’t feel it or touch it or understand it.”
She merely leaned over and kissed his dirty cheek. “I know, but we can’t sit here much longer. We must find Tibolt. I don’t really want to, but I know that we must. We must get the vessel from him. He can’t keep it.”
Phillip said, “He left us to die in that passage, Rohan. I’m very sorry.”
“So am I.”
Rohan looked down at his dirty wife, at her right sleeve that was torn off her shoulder, drew her against him again, and kissed her once, then again, more thoroughly this time.
“It was the goblet, wasn’t it?” Phillip said, his voice stark, layered with fear, fear of the unknown, fear of what none of them understood.
“Yes,” she said, her voice jubilant. She was nearly dancing, laughing now. “It was the goblet. But now I know what it is—at least I think I do.”
Both men spun around to stare at her.
She said simply, her voice calm and sure, “It’s the Holy Grail.”
The only sound breaking the stunned silence was the croaking of a frog in the water reeds close to Phillip’s boots.
“But that’s a myth, a legend,” Rohan said slowly, trying to grasp the truth of it, trying to make it fit with what he knew. “Surely that can’t be true.”
“Yes, it is.
That’s why Tibolt let me drink only a few drops from it. He feared that if he gave me more that I would gain the power, not he.” She pulled away from Rohan and jumped to her feet. “We must hurry. We must get the Grail from him. You know he would abuse it endlessly.”
Rohan rose slowly, dusting the dirt off his britches, more to give himself time to think, time to come to grips with this business that he couldn’t understand, much less accept. “Yes,” he said finally, “we must find him.”
“We’ve got to go back to the inn and clean ourselves.”
Susannah was shaking her head, nearly jumping in her anxiety. “No, who cares if we’re on the dirty side? I want to find Tibolt. We must find him. He might escape. We can’t allow him to escape with the Grail.”
“I’m sorry about Tibolt, Rohan. He did leave us to die and then, well, somehow Susannah saw things we didn’t, and that hidden door saved us. But there is no reason for him to leave Dunkeld until morning. Let’s go get ourselves clean. Then we’ll find him.”
They met again at the front of the inn twenty minutes later, the three of them as clean as one basin of tepid water could make them.
Where were Tibolt and Theodore Micah?
33
IT WAS JUST AFTER THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WHEN they walked to the Dunkeld stable.
It was a moldering old building of wattle and daub with a thatch roof. It smelled of decades-old sweat, cracked leather, linseed oil, and horse manure. A horse neighed when they eased inside. They could see very little even with the stable doors wide open.
“I hope the owner doesn’t come down with a gun,” Phillip said quietly. He gave Susannah a brooding look. “I suppose if the owner does come, then she can simply wave her hand at him and he’ll forget we’re there. That or he’ll offer us his services with a smile. I don’t like this, Susannah. It makes me feel cold inside.”
“I as well, Phillip,” Susannah said.
“We will get through this,” Rohan said. “Come along, you two, and keep quiet.” Even as Rohan turned away from them, he heard his mother telling him about her vision of him and a young lady in a cave and they’d been frightened, only Susannah hadn’t been frightened at all.
They stepped into the stable. “There are no empty stalls,” Phillip said after exploring. “One of the old mares actually bit my arm, then she smiled at me. I wonder if there are some oats about for that old girl over there. I think I’m in love.”
Rohan sighed. “No clue here. If one of these horses is Tibolt’s, I don’t recognize him. There must be other inns in the town. There is only this one main street. We will simply walk the length of it. If he’s still here, he must be in another inn.”
They did wait the one minute it took Phillip to feed some oats from a half-hidden bag, which was probably meant to be wholly hidden, to the sweet old mare who had bitten and smiled at him. They heard him say, “I will send for you, my pet. You are meant to be mine. Rohan says I must have a wife. I believe that to accustom myself to the concept, I will begin with a mare. I wonder if a wife will bite, then smile.” He turned to face them. “Damnation, for those few moments I forgot. The Holy Grail,” he added on a near whisper, “it exists, it has powers a man can’t accept, and yet it is real. All right, let’s get to it.”
“Yes. Now,” Rohan said to Phillip once he’d rejoined them, wiping his hands on his breeches.
Ten minutes later they stood in front of the Abbot’s Inn, the very last building on Cathedral Street. It was set back a bit from the street, very old, three stories high, and completely dark, except—
“Oh, goodness, look,” Susannah whispered, “a light. In that third-floor window, there on the corner.”
Phillip looked down at the gun he’d just pulled out of his pocket.
Rohan cursed, and said in a low voice, “It’s got to be them. Damn, there’s no hope for it. My brother is a rotter, more than a rotter. He would have left Dunkeld faster than a snake if he’d thought we could have escaped. This is too much to bear. But we must bear it. We must have the goblet.” He realized he had great difficulty calling the goblet what it was: the Holy Grail. It was too wondrous, too fantastic, too otherworldly. He agreed with Phillip: it wasn’t easy to accept even though they’d seen it with their own eyes.
The front door of the inn was securely locked, just as the front door of their inn had been. They found an unlatched window in the Abbot’s Inn just off the big old kitchen that had soot and stains older than the three of their ages piled on top of each other.
“We need a candle,” Susannah whispered, once they stood in the middle of the kitchen, which smelled of old grease, fresh carrots, and sour ale. “We can’t take the chance of bumping into things and perhaps waking the owner.”
Rohan grunted and began to root about for a candle. “Aha, here we are.” He raised the candle for them to see. Once they got it lit and the flame protected with Rohan’s cupped hand, they made their way toward the inn stairs. They were narrow, very old, and creaked louder than a shrieking maiden aunt with each landing footfall.
No one came out yelling at them, thank the good Lord. Rohan was beginning to wonder if anyone at all was staying in this inn. It even smelled empty, except for that fresh carrot smell in the kitchen.
They walked to the chamber at the very end of the dark hallway. A thin line of light showed beneath the old door.
Rohan drew a very deep breath. He pulled Susannah against him and whispered against her ear, “You will stay out here. There is no way you will come into that room. If you even try it, I will become irate. I will seethe. My belly will cramp and bow me to my knees. Swear to me you will remain out here.”
It was difficult. He could see that she wanted to argue, since she wanted very much to be in that room, to face down Tibolt and Theodore Micah. She’d been in on everything since the beginning, and he hadn’t, at least not the three robberies at Mulberry House. His look never wavered. Finally, giving in to that look, she nodded. “All right, I will stay here, but only because the room is probably small and there would be too many of us and it could be chaotic.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Rohan said. “Stay pressed against the wall.” He looked at Philip, who was smiling very grimly.
He handed Susannah the candle. He nodded. Phillip very gently turned the doorknob. The fools hadn’t even locked the door. They’d been that sure of themselves and their safety. That made Rohan so furious he could have howled with it. The door wouldn’t have been unlocked if they expected any trouble. It was difficult to accept, but he had to. Tibolt had left him to die—had left all three of them—without a backward glance.
Very carefully, he eased the door open, then paused at the sound of arguing.
“You expected brilliant gems, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the Holy Grail, you bloody fool! You will have as many gems as you desire.”
Theodore Micah was silent for a moment, then he said thoughtfully, “I think, Tibolt, that I don’t wish to be your lieutenant, your flunkey. I want to be the one to hold the Grail, the one to drink holy water from it. I want the power, the immortality. You said that George’s slut came to no harm after drinking from it. You have proved that this Devil’s Vessel was all a sham carried through the ages to keep robbers away from it. You proved that it is indeed the magical Grail.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Tibolt said slowly. “It is mine, only mine.”
“It belongs to neither of you. Don’t move, either of you, or I will blow your brains out of your heads.”
Tibolt and Theodore Micah were standing in the middle of the floor, the cask lying on a tabletop between them. They didn’t seem to be doing anything except staring into that cask.
“Rohan,” Tibolt said, stumbling back. “It can’t be. There was no way out of the catacomb. I checked. Theodore looked and looked. There was no way out!”
“It appears you were quite wrong, both of you. There was a way out and we found it.”
Theodore Micah made a dash
for his gun, which lay on top of the bed. Phillip kicked his arm away. He didn’t care if he’d broken the bone. Micah yelled in pain. Rohan called out, “Susannah, come in and close the door. Yes, everything’s all right now. Now, stand against the door. You were right, there’s very little room in here.”
As for Tibolt, he didn’t move, except for shifting his gaze back and forth from his brother to Susannah, who was now standing with her back flat against the closed door. As for Teddy, his face was drawn in pain. Mercerault had broken his arm with that kick. It had sounded like a very solid kick.
He turned to Rohan. “There was no way out. I left you in total blackness. How did you do it?”
Rohan wasn’t about to tell him that Susannah had seen through the darkness, had seen the small knob against the wall with all the skeletons and skulls pressed against it, that she had seen the ancient door that led to freedom. No, first he wanted to have the Grail.
Theodore Micah was whimpering in pain. Tibolt turned on him. “You stupid puking little sod. Shut up!”
“I’m not a stupid puking little sod. What I am is unlucky to believe such a coddy bastard as you. So they couldn’t escape, could they? What about your blessed Grail? It probably has no more power than a paper knife.”
“Phillip, why don’t you quickly search these two?”
Phillip leaned down to Theodore Micah. He found a knife strapped to his ankle. “Nasty little thing,” he said, pulled it out of its strap, and shoved it into his belt after he’d straightened. “Tibolt,” he said quietly, “don’t move. It would give me too great a pleasure to batter you to a pulp.”
Even though he was wounded, Theodore Micah had other plans. In a flash, he grabbed the reliquary and threw it with all his strength at Rohan’s arm, sending the gun flying. He lunged at Susannah, pulling her back against him in an instant. He pressed a small blade against Susannah’s throat.
“Damn you, where did that second knife come from? How can you move your damned arm? Phillip broke it.”
The Wild Baron Page 33