This was a critical moment. Griswade was acutely aware that only a single wooden floor separated him and the Keeper’s wife from the guards above.
When Mrs. Proudfoot started to turn toward him to hand him the lantern and leave, his gaze on the barrels below, he stepped forward.
Instinctively, Mrs. Proudfoot stepped back onto the landing, then edged to the side, against the wall. She glanced down at the crates.
A quick tap on the head with his pistol butt sent her crumpling. He caught the lantern before it fell, then reached back and quietly shut the cellar door.
He looked down at the figure lying at his feet. So far, so perfect.
He stepped over Mrs. Proudfoot and went down the steps. Raising the lantern, he started searching. A minute later, he found the fifteen barrels of Bright Flame Ale stacked along the side wall to the right of the steps. Hunstable’s new lads had copied the ways of their predecessors and stacked the barrels on their sides in a neat pyramid with five barrels in the bottom row. The cellar didn’t run the full width of the building; Griswade estimated the stack of barrels stood two floors below and just a fraction to the right of the central section of the Jewel House.
He allowed himself a smile—at the appropriateness of the name emblazoned on the ale barrels and at the fact that Fate had once again smiled and he wouldn’t need to reposition even one barrel. When detonated, the gunpowder would do what the old man intended.
Griswade returned to the landing, hefted Mrs. Proudfoot over his shoulder, and carried her down into the cellar. He laid her on the floor not far from the Bright Flame barrels. She remained unconscious, but he hadn’t hit her that hard.
He pulled the scarf she’d used as a fichu of sorts about her throat and quickly and efficiently gagged her. Then he tore strips from the hem of her petticoats and used them to bind her wrists in front of her. She was only a woman; he didn’t need to do more.
Conscious, now, of time ticking past, he pulled the long match cord fuse he’d prepared from his pocket. He’d spent over an hour testing and timing the rate of burn and had cut the length accordingly.
The old man had instructed him to light the fuse once the Queen and her party had gone upstairs. On this one point, Griswade had elected to improve on the old man’s plan; he hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance. He’d cut a length long enough to be able to light it before the Queen arrived and still have time to ease his way unobtrusively from the house and walk briskly back across the Inner Ward until he was on the other side of the White Tower and effectively screened from the blast.
Better by far to add more fuse so he could ensure it lit properly and got going as it should and also to have a few extra minutes up his sleeve in case he was questioned on leaving and needed to produce his inventory as excuse.
Nothing but nothing was going to get in the way of him inheriting the old man’s estate.
As he worked to ease out the bung in the central barrel on the bottom row, he went over the next steps in his amended plan. He would set the fuse in place, light it, wait until the royal party had climbed the stairs and were distracted by the business of choosing the Queen’s jewels, then he would walk calmly but silently out of the cellar and out of the house.
Once outside, the guardsmen who would have escorted the Queen’s carriage would see him, but they had no reason to suspect someone in a guard’s uniform walking openly away from the Jewel House toward Waterloo Block. He doubted anyone would challenge him, but he had the inventory as his excuse if any did.
The bung popped free. He checked the fuse, selected the end he’d marked with a pencil to show how much should extend inside the barrel, then carefully fed the cord of treated hemp into the powder behind the bung.
Then he used the bung to wedge the cord in place.
He laid out the fuse, making sure there was nothing to interfere with its smooth burning. He arranged it on the flagstones in a set of looping curves running from the central barrel in the opposite direction from where Mrs. Proudfoot lay.
That done, he straightened and consulted his watch. He still had a few minutes, and even straining his ears, he could hear no activity to suggest the Queen was approaching.
He seized the moment to examine his preparations. To his great satisfaction, everything was perfectly in place. Considering the blast, envisioning how the effects would play out, he was once again struck by the elegance of the old man’s strike. Despite the immense repercussions the incident would cause, relatively few people would die in the blast. The old man had found the perfect time and place in which to eliminate both the Queen and her husband. Aside from the royal couple and the two members of their household who would accompany them upstairs, only the Keeper, his already unconscious wife, and the four guards stationed upstairs would die. There might be further casualties depending on how close to the Jewel House the royal carriage and the outriders waited, and also on the impact of the blast on the structure of Martin Tower.
Should Martin Tower be breached sufficiently that it crumpled, it would fall outward into the Outer Ward. A few might be killed there, but the numbers would be limited. That wasn’t a public area. Meanwhile, in the Inner Ward, the side wall of the relatively new Waterloo Block would take the brunt of the explosion and should contain the fallout from the blast. The much older White Tower was too far away to sustain much damage.
While Griswade himself didn’t care much about such things—the trappings of state, as he thought of them—he suspected the old man did. He certainly wasn’t against the monarchy—quite the opposite. If anything, he was the sort who had reveled in the trappings of it all his long life.
Monarchy, in fact, was the old man’s obsession.
Mrs. Proudfoot stirred, uttered a small moan smothered by the gag, then lapsed back into unconsciousness.
Griswade still couldn’t hear anything above stairs, but his watch informed him the time was nigh.
Victoria held to an inflexible schedule; she wouldn’t be late for her death.
A smile on his lips, Griswade crouched, and at precisely five minutes before the Queen was due to walk into the room two floors above, he struck a lucifer, steadied the flame, then lit the fuse.
It fizzed, then settled to a smoldering burn.
CHAPTER 57
Drake approached the Jewel House on silent feet.
He’d been forced to waste precious minutes establishing his credentials, giving orders for various evacuations, and dealing with the babbling Keeper and, despite the man’s state, extracting vital information before having to give orders to the guards to restrain Proudfoot from following him to the Jewel House. Drake understood the man’s wife was inside, along with four guards, although the guards would be in the jewel chamber on the upper floor.
The guards at both the main entrance and the passageway to the Inner Ward had confirmed that a guardsman they hadn’t recognized but who fitted the description Inspector Crawford had compiled of the man suspected to be Connell Boyne’s killer had walked past them between ten and fifteen minutes before. The guards at the Bloody Tower had thought the unknown captain was heading for Waterloo Block, but they hadn’t actually seen him go inside.
As Drake climbed the steps to the porch of the Jewel House, he was perfectly certain that Griswade was inside, in the cellar with the gunpowder.
While they’d spiked Nagle’s plot to blow up the royal couple, the threat was far from over. Quite aside from those who got caught in the blast, blowing up the Jewel House would strike at the very heart of the British Empire.
A blast of such size hard up against the walls of Martin Tower would almost certainly collapse that tower, along with buildings in the Outer Ward—buildings with people in them. Drake had ordered a silent evacuation of those buildings, but had no way of telling how quickly the area would be cleared. Equally importantly, the planned blast would blow the Crown Jewels—more or less all of them—to kingdom come. Over the centuries, crowns and state jewels had been lost from time to time, but never
all at once.
The political and social fallout from such a blast—in the capital at a site synonymous with the endurance of the monarchy and also one of the most highly defended and defensive installations in the realm—would be immense. Incalculable.
Britain would be rocked to her foundations.
And as was men’s wont, they would search for scapegoats; few would believe such an act stemmed purely from an old man’s obsession sparked by a thirst for petty revenge.
Drake acknowledged such a tale bordered on the ludicrous. Unfortunately, in this case, it was the truth.
As silent as smoke, he opened the Jewel House door, entered the hall, and quietly shut the door behind him.
He glanced up the stairs. He couldn’t risk warning the guards on the upper floor; their inevitable movements would alert Griswade, and he might act precipitously.
Drake’s entire focus now was on preventing Nagle’s explosion from taking place.
The door to the cellar that the nearly hysterical Keeper had managed to describe stood open, swinging across the corridor. Drake approached it cautiously. At this point, he had no real plan, and there was the Keeper’s wife to be considered. He had no idea where she was—whether Griswade had already killed her and left her body somewhere in the Keeper’s rooms or…
He didn’t have time to debate the point, much less look for the woman. By his calculation, he had perhaps five minutes before Griswade—who Drake felt certain would know the Queen’s schedule—realized the Queen’s party was overdue.
Once Griswade woke up to the fact that the Queen wasn’t putting in an appearance…Drake had no idea and even less faith in what such a man might do.
He rounded the swinging panel without touching it, then, ghostlike, slipped into the room beyond—the storeroom the Keeper had described. No lamps were burning in that space, making the light seeping from around the edges of the cellar door readily discernible.
Drake’s eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom. He examined the cellar door. The latch was a simple lifting one, with no bolt or lock. According to the keeper, there was a small landing beyond the door, then nine stone steps down to a paved floor.
There were several places where the line of light showing around the door was wider. Drake discovered a gouge above the lower hinge; he crouched and put his eye to it.
He glimpsed a wall to the right of the landing—and past the wall’s end, to the right beyond the last step, stood Griswade.
Drake smelt an acrid scent and silently swore. Griswade had already lit his fuse. Although Drake couldn’t see the fuse through his peephole, Griswade, his hands on his hips, was looking down at the floor that was screened from Drake’s sight by the wall.
The wall was a problem. Drake couldn’t simply rush in, leap down, and stamp out the fuse, then grapple with Griswade.
Drake scanned the segment of the cellar he could see—from roughly one o’clock, where Griswade stood, counterclockwise to nearly nine o’clock. There was no sign of the Keeper’s wife, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there.
Obviously, Drake was going to have to do this the hard way.
He rose, shook his shoulders and arms, and flexed his hands. Then he grasped the latch, opened it, hauled the door wide, and leapt through.
He saw Griswade’s eyes widen in shock. Saw the Keeper’s wife lying by Griswade’s boots; she was groggy but very much alive.
Drake landed in a crouch on the flagstones beyond the end of the steps.
Griswade moved with a speed Drake had rarely seen. Before Drake could spring, Griswade had hauled the woman—gagged and with her hands tied—up in front of him, cinched a wire garrote around her throat and, holding it tight with one hand, with the other pulled a pistol from his coat pocket and aimed it unwaveringly at Drake’s heart.
Slowly, Drake straightened. His gaze on the pistol, his brain worked at lightning speed. Griswade wouldn’t shoot, not if he could help it, because the sound would bring the guards rushing down.
Drake’s gaze darted to the fuse, and he knew he had time. Griswade wouldn’t want the guards down yet because the fuse had much too far to run. Griswade had used match cord, slow burning but harder to put out. There was, Drake estimated, more than five minutes yet to burn.
The Keeper’s wife was ineffectually scrabbling at the wire about her neck. She uttered a choked sound. Without taking his eyes from Drake, Griswade tightened the garrote, and the woman came up on her toes, eyes starting from her head. She fell silent and stopped struggling.
Drake met her terrified eyes, with his gaze tried to will calmness into her, but suspected it was a lost cause. At least she’d given up her useless struggling.
Griswade was listening hard, assessing if the guards overhead had heard anything.
Drake could have told him they hadn’t. He looked again at the pistol. It was standard military issue from several years back—a single shot, not a multi-shot revolver like the gun nestling in Drake’s pocket. But there was no sense in drawing that, which was why he hadn’t. With Griswade standing squarely in front of the barrels containing one hundredweight of gunpowder, risking a shot in a room with stone walls and stone floor… Drake had no idea if a single shot would be enough to detonate the powder and had no wish to find out.
No explosion at all was his aim.
And he had his knives. He’d intended to take Griswade down with one, but that was before Griswade had hauled the Keeper’s wife up as a shield, with his garrote about her throat, no less. Nevertheless, now Drake had had a chance to assess the angles, if he threw true—and given the distance, there was no excuse for waywardness—then the Keeper’s wife would survive, and either he or she would pull out the fuse…
As if reading his thoughts, Griswade abruptly swung the pistol and aimed at the front panel of the barrel where he’d teased out the bung to reveal the gunpowder inside. “One wrong move, and we all go up.” Apparently immediately realizing that Drake might actually make that sacrifice in order to save the Queen, Griswade swung the pistol up, again aiming at Drake. “If you make the slightest move, I’ll shoot you, kill her, then walk out and let the place explode. Do you want the lives of the guards, and her, and all the others who will die on your head?”
Drake feigned puzzlement—not that much of a stretch. “Aren’t they going to be on my head, anyway?”
How long before Griswade realized the Queen wasn’t coming? Drake had absolutely no interest in dying that day, and there was the Keeper’s wife and everyone else to save. Let alone preserving the vested importance of the Crown Jewels and the inviolability of the Tower. He glanced at the fuse. He had at least a few minutes to work on bringing about his preferred outcome.
He looked at Griswade. “Is Nagle’s estate really worth this?”
Griswade blinked.
Drake smiled cynically. “Oh yes. More than enough people know of that connection, and that Nagle recruited you and your cousin Lawton Chilburn to act as his henchmen.”
Griswade shifted, growing more tense; he hadn’t liked hearing any of that.
“Consequently, all of this”—Drake waved at the barrels of gunpowder—“isn’t going to get you anything. Even if you succeed in blowing this place up, you won’t gain anything from it.”
Griswade wasn’t sure he believed him; Drake could see that in his face. After several moments, Griswade growled, “I’ll take my chances.” From the way his eyes repeatedly half flicked to his left, he wanted—badly wanted—to look at the fuse, but was too well trained to take his eyes from Drake.
From Griswade’s point of view, not taking his eyes from Drake was undoubtedly wise.
Drake had rarely—possibly never—faced an opponent so experienced and disciplined. But if he could get close—closer—to Griswade, Drake knew he could take the man and swiftly incapacitate him, but unless Griswade gave him an opening, there was the pistol, the gunpowder, the Keeper’s wife, and the fuse …
Stalemate.
Griswade was waiting for the fuse
to burn down to the point he could shoot Drake, kill the Keeper’s wife, and race out of the house before the guards clattered down from above and the gunpowder exploded.
He would have only one chance, and he had to judge it correctly even though he couldn’t afford to look at the fuse.
Drake, meanwhile, couldn’t act unless Griswade gave him an opening—or Griswade reached that critical point, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
Until one or the other happened, Drake’s only option was to wait, and that was no good option at all.
He needed a distraction, but God alone knew—
The front door of the Jewel House opened on a wave of voices; the words were indistinct, but one voice held a distinctly familiar, regal tone.
Drake’s blood ran cold. Had Louisa somehow failed to divert the Queen? Horror swamped him.
Then from above their heads came “I was thinking of the diamond cross and perhaps the Scottish crown. What do you think, my dear?”
The voice was unmistakably Victoria’s.
But she hated the Scottish crown, said it made her look dumpy…
Drake stopped breathing. It was an effort to keep his feelings from his face.
With his eyes locked on Drake’s face, Griswade hissed, “Not a sound, or she’s dead.” He put his face close to Mrs. Proudfoot’s. “That goes for you, too.”
Footsteps, those of four people—three men and a woman in heels—tramped over their heads as the party climbed the stairs.
“Wait! Where’s Mrs. Proudfoot?” The woman’s heels halted, then reversed direction, coming down the stairs. “Go ahead, Albert dear. I’m just going to have a word with Mrs. Proudfoot.”
Mrs. Proudfoot looked anything but thrilled. She tensed as if to struggle anew, presumably in an effort to save the Queen. That was the last thing Drake and his distraction needed. He shifted his gaze to Mrs. Proudfoot’s face, trapped her eyes, tried desperately to will her to calm—to silence and stillness; he risked infinitesimally shaking his head and finally, puzzled, Mrs. Proudfoot eased back from the brink.
The Greatest Challenge of Them All Page 37