by Jane Ashford
“Lord Royalton!” Ariel’s head was reeling. “They said Bess had quarreled with him.”
Flora gave a thin smile. “It was far more than a quarrel. Bess was trying to have him exposed and prosecuted, but he has too many powerful friends, and he blocked her at every turn. It was like a kind of game to him, I think. All she accomplished was to make him more…discreet.”
“But how is that possible? How can he…?”
“No one listens to children from the gutter,” was the acid reply. “They can accuse, but if he denies…” She shrugged. “He is a peer of the realm and a close friend of our glorious sovereign.” The last two words dripped with sarcasm.
Ariel bent her head, trying to take all of this in. Each new vista that opened on her mother’s life brought fresh pain. “Poor Bess,” she murmured.
Some of the fierceness faded from Flora Jennings’s eyes. “Poor Bess indeed,” she repeated. “I wanted some revenge for her, so I suggested the haunting to the younger actors. They never knew who sent them the plans, but they didn’t need much prodding. They were delighted with the idea.”
“There’s more to this,” Ariel said. “They were caught.”
Flora released another sigh. “That is why I’m here, and what I must tell you.” She looked down at her hands. “I should have been content with the actors’ tricks. The prince was humiliated; everyone was laughing at him. It was all I could expect. But I wanted…more.” She looked as if she had bitten into something bitter.
“And…?” prompted Ariel.
“I spoke with some of the young people Royalton had used and discarded. Bess had been searching them out and helping them as she could. I suggested that they might want to carry on with the pranks, and they jumped at the chance.” She paused and put a hand to her mouth. “What I didn’t understand was the depth of their anguish and their hatred,” she went on. “How could I understand?” But she made a gesture to negate the protest. “I should have.”
“And now they are going too far,” Ariel added. “People are being hurt.”
“It’s worse than that,” replied her guest. “They intend to kill Lord Royalton—tonight, I believe—and anyone who gets in their way…” She gestured again, as if throwing something away.
“Alan,” exclaimed Ariel.
“And the servants,” Flora agreed, “and guests, perhaps even the prince. Not that I care so much about him.”
“We must go at once and warn him, tell him how to find them.”
“Yes. That is, warn him, certainly. I don’t know how to find them.”
Ariel gazed at her.
“They don’t trust me anymore. I tried to tell them that their plan was foolish and that all they would accomplish was their own destruction.” Her expression grew bleak. “They said they were already destroyed.”
“We must go and find Alan at once.”
Flora nodded. “Will…will you have to tell Lord Robert?” she asked. She flushed with embarrassment, either at the thought or the request, Ariel couldn’t tell.
“I don’t see why,” she answered.
“I…should hate for him to think me a fool.”
Even in her haste, Ariel had to suppress a smile at the idea. “I’m sure he never would,” she said.
“No?” Flora looked hopeful and doubtful at the same time. Ariel merely nodded and turned toward the door.
Lord Robert rose at once. “What?” he said.
“We have to find Alan,” Ariel told him.
“Why?” Lord Robert looked from her to Flora and back again.
Flora made a distressed sound, then seemed to gather resolution. “I have information vital to Lord Alan’s task,” she replied. “I must go and tell him. It is my duty.”
“What sort of…?”
She gave him a stern look, looking remarkably like Aunt Agatha, Ariel thought. “My duty,” she said again.
Robert frowned. “Have you been filling her head with melodramas?” he asked Ariel. “This has the sound of one.”
“Do you doubt my judgment?” snapped Flora. “I do not say a thing is important if it is not.”
This silenced him. He frowned, started to speak, then changed his mind. “Let’s go.”
They moved together to the door. The corridor outside was empty, but the atmosphere of Carlton House had become distinctly unnerving, Ariel thought. There was a sense that traps lurked everywhere. Exchanging glances with the others, she saw that they felt it, too.
Side by side, they started down the hall, moving as silently as they could. At the first turn, they stopped and peered carefully around the corner. This passage, also, was just as usual, except for the fact that there was no one in it. “Where is everyone?” whispered Flora Jennings.
Somewhere nearby, a clock chimed, and Lord Robert jumped.
“This is silly,” said Ariel, abandoning her furtive pose and striding along the carpet. “We will go back to the front door and ask…”
She turned another corner, and the world abruptly went black.
* * *
She had the worst headache of her life, Ariel thought. It pounded in her temples and behind her eyes and most particularly in a spot right above her left ear. She tried to raise a hand to the pain, and found she couldn’t. She couldn’t see, either, she realized. She was in a place without light, lying on some hard surface. She tried to move and discovered she was most efficiently bound; all she could manage was a wriggle, which only intensified the pounding in her head.
She groaned, and took in the fact that her mouth was free. “Hello?” she ventured. Her voice sounded curiously flat and muted. “Help!” she tried, louder.
There was no response.
Straining, she listened to the silence. Where was Flora? Where was Robert? “Help!” she cried again.
Again, nothing.
Despite the agony in her skull, she pushed with all her strength against her bonds. When they didn’t yield she attempted to roll over, and found that she was imprisoned in a small space, perhaps a closet or storeroom, hardly bigger than a coffin.
Hastily she suppressed the comparison. What had happened? she wondered. They had been walking down the corridor, and… That was all she could remember. Flora’s young friends must have attacked them, she decided, and put them out of the way so that they could carry out their plans. Someone would find her, eventually.
There was a soft scrabbling sound, and then utter silence again. Where was she? Ariel wondered a bit frantically. The cellars? Unbidden came images of rats and beetles. She struggled against her bonds again, but they were tight. She was alone, in the dark, apparently far from anyone who might hear her cries and come to the rescue. She had to get free! But though she squirmed and strained and twisted in the narrow space, Ariel made no progress whatsoever against the ropes.
* * *
“It would be far wiser, sir, to cancel this card party,” Alan was saying to the prince regent. “We cannot guarantee that your guests—”
“A man has to have a little amusement,” whined the monarch.
“Of course,” answered Alan, controlling his temper with great difficulty. “If you would only go down to Brighton for a—”
“At this season? The place’ll be empty as a tomb. Shocking unfashionable. What would people think?”
“If you prefer to put yourself at risk…”
“I can’t understand Bess,” complained the prince for the thousandth time. “Why would she do this to me?”
Alan had given up correcting his assumption that the dead woman was responsible for the invasion of Carlton House. All he cared about was getting rid of the invaders and taking his life back. His life, and his wife, he thought savagely, memories of the night with Ariel vivid in his mind. At such moments, he came perilously close to throttling the ruler of his country.
“Did they get that �
��96 claret?” asked the unwitting object of his wrath.
“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” said Alan stiffly. “You will have to ask the butler.”
“Eh? Oh, right.” The prince rubbed his hands together. “I’ll do that. And you’ll see that we have no unfortunate odors or visitations tonight. Just a few friends in for cards. A man must have a little amusement,” he repeated plaintively as he waddled out.
Alan found he was grinding his teeth and stopped. How was he to guarantee a lack of visitations when this new “haunting” seemed to be managed by spirits indeed, he thought. Wires materialized across staircases; noxious smells wafted from corners; bloodcurdling shrieks plagued the night. The culprits were in the house, he had concluded. No one except trusted servants was getting in or out; he was sure of that. Yet they had searched the place from top to bottom and found nothing conclusive. They had exposed every hiding place the actors had used without result. It was frustrating, maddening.
At least Ariel was safely away from this now. She had sworn she wouldn’t set foot in the place, and he could think of her sitting calmly in her own front parlor, out of danger, perhaps sewing. Alan grinned at his own imaginings. More likely she was pacing the floor and cursing. But she was safe. As always, when he thought of her, his pulse accelerated. It was damnable that he should spend the first days of his marriage trapped with Prinny in Carlton House, but when he had mentioned this fact to the prince, the only response was, “Married? My dear boy, how could you make such a disastrous mistake? Marriage is pure hell.”
The prince’s might be, Alan thought grimly. But if he ever got the chance…
“My lord?”
He turned to find one of the guards under his unwanted command. “Just wanted to let you know,” the man added. “It’s probably nothing, but we seem to have a footman missing.”
“Missing?”
“They’re still looking. And he could have taken to his heels.”
Several servants had simply fled in the last few days, unnerved by the barrage of malicious pranks. “Let me know,” he said curtly.
The man nodded and went out. After a moment, Alan followed to check on his other arrangements.
* * *
The prince’s cronies began arriving at seven. Watching them assemble in the room that had been set up for their card party—with enough bottles to stock a pub—Alan thought that if you removed the trappings surrounding these aging men, they would resemble nothing so much as the drunkards one saw lying in the gutters. The prince did have friends who were intelligent and more moderate in their habits, he acknowledged to himself—his own father insisted that the monarch was a fascinating conversationalist when he wished to be—but those friends were not here tonight. These were the gamesters, the libertines, and worse, who gave the prince’s subjects such a distaste for him at times. And listening to the joke one of them was telling, Alan could only share that sentiment. His longing to return to his own life swept over him so strongly that he had to clench his fists.
The guests gradually settled in their chairs, and the cards were dealt. Servants were kept busy refilling glasses and fetching various small articles that were called for. The air grew smoky and close. Alan was fighting an uncomfortable combination of mind-numbing boredom and wild impatience when one of his men beckoned urgently from the far doorway. Instantly alert, he made his way around the perimeter of the room, praying for action and for a chance to end this cursed vigil once and for all.
In the next room he found several of his men standing in a loose circle around his brother Robert, who looked as if he had been crawling through a coal bin. This extreme departure from Robert’s customary dapperness left him speechless for a moment.
“They’ve got Flora and Ariel,” Robert said, moving toward him with a slight stagger. “We have to find them.”
Alan felt apprehension shudder through him in a breath, as if a giant hand had grasped his heart and squeezed. “Who has her? Where?” he demanded.
“These villains. Here in Carlton House.” He stumbled again. “The devil! They tied my legs so tight I can scarcely feel my feet.”
Alan looked sharply at one of his men.
“We were patrolling the house,” he reported, “and we heard noises from below. We found him in the coal cellar, trussed up like a Christmas goose.”
Robert glared at him, and then seemed to notice the state of his clothes for the first time. He groaned aloud.
“No one else?” asked Alan.
The man shook his head. “A few footprints in the coal dust—smeared.”
Alan turned back to his brother, who was holding his head as if it ached. “What the devil are you playing at?”
“Flora said we had to come,” he answered. “Practically the crack of dawn…”
“To Carlton House?” Alan’s voice was grim.
“To find Ariel. And then they said she was here. Told her we should wait till she returned, but Flora was…” He made a gesture. “Not like herself at all.”
All of Alan’s muscles had tightened. “Why?”
“I don’t know!” protested Robert. “They wouldn’t tell me, damn them.”
Making a heroic effort, Alan managed to refrain from trying to shake sense into his brother. Pulling him to a chair, he sat down opposite and put his elbows on his knees to lean close. “Tell me exactly what happened,” he ordered.
“Flora was dead set on visiting Ariel,” he replied.
Alan nearly told him that he didn’t care a whit about Flora, or what she wanted, but he held his tongue. All of his faculties were occupied in controlling the unfamiliar roil of emotion inside him. What if something had happened to Ariel? a frantic voice kept demanding. He wanted to race to her rescue, to annihilate her enemies, to howl like an animal.
“They had their heads together for half an hour or so,” added his brother. “And then they said they had to find you. Matter of great urgency and all that, but they wouldn’t say what,” he complained.
Alan heard an odd sort of sound issue from his own throat.
“If you think I could have kept them from it, you’re dead wrong,” responded his brother.
“And so,” prompted Alan, ignoring this.
“The footman didn’t want to let us in,” said Robert a bit disjointedly.
Alan looked up. “The missing footman?” he asked one of the men.
“Most likely, my lord.”
“And you still haven’t found him?”
The other shook his head.
Alan knew that he couldn’t sit still much longer. “What then?” he asked Robert.
“We went looking for you, and when I came around a corner, something hit me, and I woke up on a pile of coal.” He flexed his legs and seemed to find them restored. “They must have served Flora and Ariel the same trick. We must find them.”
Alan was already standing. “Get the men together,” he told one of them.
“Even the ones who are…?”
“All of them.” Let the prince go hang, thought Alan.
The man left to do his bidding. Robert walked back and forth across the room, testing his balance. Alan beckoned to one of the other guards. “We have to comb every inch—” he was saying when there was a shout from the room behind him and the sound of breaking glass.
Cursing, Alan ran back to the prince’s gathering. A chair had been overturned, and two of the players were standing. All of them were staring toward the far corner of the room, where a slender young man stood holding a pistol.
There was no way he could have gotten in, Alan thought. Yet there he was—a handsome lad of about sixteen in drab clothes, with eyes that burned like hot coals.
He moved slightly left, sighting the pistol as if he had found his target. Alan had a moment’s fear that he was going to shoot the prince. And then he fired and put a bullet, and then another, i
nto Lord Royalton’s chest.
There was a frozen moment when blood spurted, men gasped or whimpered, and then everyone moved at once.
All of the card players except the regent fell to the floor. The guards came pouring through the rear doorway. Surprising Alan, the prince knelt next to Royalton and sought to assist him. Alan himself dived for the intruder. But the youth had already cast the pistol aside and lunged through the doorway at his back—where there ought to be a guard, Alan thought as he raced after him. No doubt he was sharing quarters with the lost footman. But he didn’t care greatly about either of them. The only thing that mattered was catching this intruder who was his best hope of finding Ariel.
At last he could move, do something. Fear and fury pounded in him in equal parts as he ran. What if they had hurt her? kept beating in his brain as he went. These were murderers. What if she was…? But he couldn’t tolerate that thought. It made him want to rip the world apart and throw the fragments to the winds. He couldn’t face life without her. The idea was irrational, insane, but he had never uncovered a fact more true.
The boy ran like a frightened deer. When a pair of servants appeared ahead of him, he ducked and wove from their reaching arms, startling them at the last moment with a shriek like a steam whistle. The prince’s servants were jumpy at best, Alan thought, as the two hesitated and lost their chance to capture him. He pounded on, aware of steps behind him now but caring only for his quarry.
* * *
The boy knew the house intimately. He was taking a route that avoided the more populated areas and any dead ends. But he couldn’t hope to escape, Alan thought. He must have known that wasn’t possible when he took up the pistol.
He was gaining on him. Triumphant, Alan pushed harder. He told himself that he was running toward Ariel, and away from all that had bedeviled him at Carlton House for the past weeks. The need for her beat in him like a score of hammers. He would find her; she would be all right. And by God, he would never let her out of his sight again.