by Лорен Уиллиг
“Are we there yet?” came Miles’s plaintive voice from inside the tilt.
“Not quite,” Robert said dryly.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Charlotte was shaking with more than cold as she climbed out of the barge.
She had lost her lap rug somewhere on the deck of the shallop. Her lap rug and her senses, too. She could still feel the warmth of Robert’s fingers in her hair, like a phantom of her own folly. If the boat hadn’t turned when it had, quite literally dousing her with cold water . . . she didn’t want to think about that bit. Not with the others all waking and milling and stretching. Only so much of the color in her cheeks could be convincingly attributed to windburn.
Robert offered her a hand to help her out of the barge and she took it, feeling the clasp of his fingers sure and firm around her own. Charlotte glanced fleetingly up at him. He returned her glance with a slight, reassuring smile.
That smile made Charlotte bristle.
Was it her imagination, or was there something ever so slightly smug about that smile? As though he knew he had her in the palm of his hand and could decide to pick her up or drop her as the whim moved him.
Charlotte seized on that tiny, warming spark of anger. What did he think he was playing at? One moment Robert was all compliments and deep, burning looks, the next it would be calm reserve and protestations of indifference. Did he just have a horror of cold places? Charlotte would have laughed if she weren’t afraid her frozen facial muscles would crack with the strain. It had been frigid in the chapel at Girdings, too, and on the roof. That would be the most lowering explanation of all, to be wanted not for one’s wit or charm but for one’s ability to serve as a chest and lip warmer in cold places.
He couldn’t keep changing the terms. Charlotte was cold and numb and miserable, but she managed to grasp that one simple concept with her frozen senses. She — she told herself indignantly — had been more than accommodating in her willingness to forgive his last lapse and be friends despite it all. It wasn’t fair of him, just as she had worked her way around to understanding and forgiveness, to go and start the cycle all over again. This sort of romantic tangle wasn’t meant to be a cycle. She didn’t think she could bear to keep playing the same scenes over and over again, earnest affection followed by terse words of denial, followed by cautious forgiveness, followed by earnest affection again. It sounded like one of the more inventive torments derived by the Greek gods for their favored guests in Hades. Sisyphus didn’t even begin to compare.
Charlotte would have told him so, but now didn’t quite seem to be the time, not surrounded by their raggle-taggle band of adventurers with a king to be saved. Charlotte had always had the lowest possible opinion of those heroines who caused unnecessary delays in the middle of a quest by dragging in their own petty romantic problems.
What she had failed to allow for was that it wouldn’t feel nearly so petty when it was her own. But having a proper Lansdowne temper tantrum at Robert could wait until they had the King safely tucked into his own bed, attended by his own attendants. Minus Lord Henry Innes, that was. Even if Lord Henry had been merely the unwitting dupe of Robert’s mysterious Mr. Wrothan, he was still not fit to be entrusted with the care of a lapdog, much less the King.
Despite the fact that she was safely on dry land and in no imminent danger of falling over, Robert had taken casual possession of her arm, grasping it through her cloak, just beneath the elbow, as though he had every right to offer that support.
It would not have infuriated Charlotte quite so much if she hadn’t caught herself leaning into that gentle pressure, like a dog preening to be petted.
Charlotte pulled herself stiffly upright.
Robert, still casually bracing her arm as though — as though she were a dog he had on the lead (having chosen a metaphor, it seemed simpler to stay with it, as unflattering as it was to her), didn’t seem to notice. He frowned up at the stucco façade of Medmenham Abbey.
“Look at the lights,” he said, keeping his voice deliberately low. “Someone is in the Abbey.”
“Not unusual, surely?” said Miles, vaulting easily over the edge of the boat and landing on the dock with a satisfied thump. Miles had always been particularly fond of jumping over things. “Medmenham would have a left a staff behind. Servants and . . . well, servants.”
Household management had never been Miles’s forte.
The lantern light trailed from one window to the next, casting strange plays of light and shadow onto the winter gray grass of the bank. To Charlotte’s dazed and dazzled eyes, the light seemed to ripple like the tail of a salamander.
There was something entirely uncanny about the whole scene, something that whispered of old and cruel enchantments. Behind her, she could hear the harsh laughter of the wind whistling through the reeds. It made Charlotte think of Shakespeare’s Puck. But this was a very old Puck, an old and a malicious Puck, wheezing with spiteful pleasure at tricks still to be played on a band of self-satisfied and unsuspecting mortals.
Pure fancy, she told herself. But she still drew her cloak more tightly around her, wishing she had some iron in her pocket to touch to keep away the fairies. It might be silly, but it couldn’t hurt.
The others were more concerned with human malefactors than malicious spirits.
“Who prowls about at midnight?” said Robert. “Those aren’t servants. Someone is looking for something.”
“Or for someone?” suggested Charlotte, thinking of the King.
His eyes caught hers. “Or for someone,” he agreed, and for a brief moment Charlotte wasn’t sure whether they were discussing the King or something else entirely.
“The Frenchman’s men, I’d wager,” said Lieutenant Fluellen lazily, coming up between them. Time returned to its normal pacing. “Wrothan would know where he had stashed his prize.”
“And the Frenchman had an hour’s start on us.” Turning back to the boat, Robert had a brief conversation with the boatmen, involving the exchange of gold from Robert’s hands to theirs and assurances given on either side. The breeze carried their words away to the far bank, robbing Charlotte of the ability of eavesdrop.
Within a moment, Robert was done, driving the rest of the group before him like a professional sheepdog.
“Shall we?” he said briskly. “I suggest we don’t let them find us here.”
“I second that,” said Lieutenant Fluellen, falling easily into the secondary place by Robert’s side, as he must, Charlotte imagined, have done many times before, away across the seas. It made Charlotte feel staggeringly superfluous. “Where to?”
“The caves.” Robert led the group away from the Abbey, into the protective lee of the shrubbery. The gravel crunched beneath Charlotte’s feet as she hurried along behind, her skirts held up in both hands. Behind her, gargoyle faces glowered from the portico. She very much hoped they were made of stone. Twin harpies, their faces proud and cruel, looked as though they might take flight at any moment, cackling as they tore apart their prey. “If the Frenchman’s lot are still searching the house, there’s a good chance they haven’t yet looked in the caves.”
“Where are the caves?” asked Charlotte, her breath coming in uneven pants as she struggled to match the others’ longer strides. Before her, the gardens seemed to stretch on endlessly, dotted with statues whose white stone gleamed dully in the moonlight and odd follies whose peaked and rounded roofs reared out of the topiary like fantastical beasts in the night. The path twisted and turned back upon itself in unnumbered tangles like a sinner’s conscience.
There was no turning back, though. The boat had already pulled away from the dock. With its long oars extended, it looked like a water insect skimming on top of the moonlit river. The lanterns — at Robert’s instruction? — had been shuttered.
“The caves are several miles inland, near the family mausoleum and the Church of St. Lawrence. We have a long walk ahead of us.” He frowned down at Charlotte. “Are you — ?”
“I’
m fine,” she asserted haughtily. No need to tell him about the blister on her heel or the fact that she could really rather use a few moments alone with a chamber pot. The last thing she wanted was his solicitude. One kind look, one sympathetic gesture, and she would dissolve into his arms in a pitiful little ball of jelly, cravenly crying for warmth and reassurance. She hardened her features to try to prevent any sign of weakness from slipping through. “Lead the way.”
Robert regarded her closely and Charlotte felt herself unconsciously trying to make her spine straighter, as though posture might be an indicator of stamina.
“Right,” he said. “Onwards!”
He would have taken Charlotte’s arm, but Charlotte evaded him by leaning over to brush an imaginary leaf off her cloak.
Within a very short period of time she began to wish she had been more practical and less proud. No wonder most heroes in stories staged their adventures for summer, thought Charlotte despairingly. There was no romance to their expedition, only grim endurance and grueling cold that bit through her bones and sapped all energy and strength. Not that she had had much of the latter to begin with.
They stayed close, for safety and the meager warmth that came of keeping together. Robert took the lead, as by right, and Lieutenant Fluellen the rear, by an unspoken prearrangement as smoothly orchestrated as the movement of the mechanical devices Medmenham kept in his garden to shock his visitors. In the beginning, Henrietta and Miles kept up a quiet stream of desultory conversation, but by the time they reached the wilderness garden, with the willows weeping above their heads, the fronds catching at their cloaks like the fingers of mourning nymphs, and the mulch sopping sloppily beneath their feet, even they lapsed into grim silence, keeping their eyes on the path and reserving their strength for the task of carrying on.
There was no time to brood about Robert; every ounce of energy was expended on simply staying upright as they staggered down the tangled paths of Medmenham’s personal maze. Charlotte had thought that nothing could have been more like torture than the gravel paths that pounded her frozen feet through her thin evening slippers, but as they left the formal gardens for a carefully planned wilderness, she discovered that wood chips were worse, sinking unevenly beneath her weight and leeching forth an icy brown liquid that seeped through the sides of her slippers and made her frozen toes tingle painfully.
Charlotte lost all sense of time. They might have been wandering Medmenham’s grounds for hours or years, trapped in a sorcerer’s silver glass, miming the motions for his amusement.
The moonlight cast an unearthly glaze over the landscape, lending an eerie illusion of life to marble statues and the tortured shapes of trees. The topiary, clipped to resemble all manner of mythical and exotic beasts seemed to scowl and roar as they ventured past. Griffins arched their unnatural claws and tigers yawned with green-fanged mouths. Charlotte felt as though she had stumbled into a mad poet’s disordered dreams. At every turn, a new grotesquerie confronted them. Marble nymphs fled across their path, pursued by a team of grinning, gloating satyrs displaying anatomical properties Charlotte had heard whispers of, but had never viewed in either stone or flesh. Leda disappeared between the wings of an amorous swan, while a sultry Venus beckoned them off the path to a pavilion whose scrolled marble benches glimmered dimly in the moonlight, double the width of any bench that graced the gardens of Girdings and hollowed in suspicious places.
“Medmenham’s predecessor was a great patron of the arts,” explained Robert stiffly, hauling Charlotte out of the way of an Apollo who, flinging himself to his knees, had buried his head between Daphne’s legs — no doubt in an excess of grief at seeing her turn into a tree. “He spent a good deal of time in Italy.”
This time, when he took her arm, Charlotte didn’t protest. She wasn’t quite sure how many more yards she still had in her. Her legs felt disconnected from the rest of her, like a doll she had possessed as a child, made of cylindrical pieces of polished wood with the limbs loosely connected by metal pegs, so that when you picked it up, the doll would dance, legs and arms jiggling disjointedly. That had been before Girdings, before her grandmother declared such simple playthings fit for the tenantry, not for the daughter of a duke. Charlotte had said she would give it away, but she hadn’t. She could still remember, then, her mother holding it and making it dance.
Fragmented memories circled through her mind, more real than anything around her. Whispering in the corner of Almack’s with Henrietta and Penelope during their very first season; summer days in the gardens of Girdings with Evelina for company; Robert, as he had been once upon a time, boosting her onto the edge of the fountain to watch the goldfish swim in the sunlight. And, behind it all, she could see her mother’s arms, in blue wool sleeves, holding on to her old wooden doll, making it dance.
With a flutter of anxiety, Charlotte realized she was drifting away into a sort of waking sleep.
With a strength born of fear, she struggled back to reality. Cold, miserable, clammy reality. Charlotte stepped down hard on a stone, feeling the bite of it straight through her sodden slippers. That was real, just as the damp cling of her muslin skirt against her legs was real.
“You don’t want one of these statues for the gardens of Girdings, then?” Charlotte’s lips were cracked and clumsy, her voice rusty. Talking to Robert would keep her awake, at least. She had a feeling that she looked even worse than she sounded. The hem of her once fashionable dress was caked with mud and it clung to her legs as she moved, making the going even more difficult than it would otherwise be.
Robert’s hand tightened on her arm, with a pressure that was unmistakably an embrace. “And scandalize all your ministers of state on the roof?”
There was a tenderness in his voice that made Charlotte’s heart clench in a very inconvenient way.
Irritation, she told herself. It was the intimation of intimacy that irked her. He had no right to be bringing up that night on the roof. He had forfeited the right to that when he changed his mind the first time.
On the positive side, there was nothing like a bit of romantic turmoil to bring one fully awake.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said contrarily, keeping her head down and her eyes on her hem. “It’s been awfully quiet for them up there. A little scandal might do them good.”
“They would probably tumble off their perches with the shock,” Robert replied idly, helping her over a rough patch of ground.
“They might be stronger than that.” Charlotte could feel her heels beginning to dig in. “Perhaps they want a little variety.”
“Or,” said Robert, missing the point entirely, “perhaps they’re made of plaster and don’t really care.”
“Stone,” Charlotte corrected, kicking her skirt out of the way. “Not plaster. It’s stronger.”
She could feel his steps slow as he paused to look down at her. Charlotte resolutely kept her own eyes on the ground, struggling forward one labored step at a time. If he didn’t realize why she was upset, she didn’t want to tell him. Especially since she wasn’t quite sure why herself.
“We can rest for a moment, if you like,” he suggested, with infuriating solicitude. “At least get you out of the wind.”
If she stopped, she might never move again. And it would be just as cold wherever they were.
“And let the Frenchman catch us up?” she countered. “How far are we from the caves?”
Robert pointed directly ahead. Above the trees, an immense golden orb dominated the horizon, shimmering with reflected moonlight. It looked, thought Charlotte, like a scepter sculpted for the king of a race of giants.
“Do you see that gold ball?”
“It would be hard not to,” she said, and was a little ashamed of quite how snappish she sounded. “What is it?”
“Medmenhan’s church,” said Robert. “I was told that it is positioned directly over the deepest part of the caves, the bit they call Hades.”
Dizzy and miserable as she was, Charlotte appreciated the
conceit. “It’s like Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Inferno below and Paradise above.”
“And Purgatory in the middle.” Robert pronounced the word with a grim relish that made Charlotte wonder, for the first time, if he might not be in a sort of purgatory, too. She risked a sidelong glance in his direction. He had assumed leadership of their expedition so easily, taken charge of her so casually, that she had assumed this must all be little more than a lark for him, all in a night’s work. Including the improper proposals.
Before she could find a cautious way of broaching the topic, Robert said briskly, “Medmenham’s mausoleum covers the back entrance to the caves.” Turning his head, he raised his voice ever so slightly to carry to the people behind them. “As we approach, it’s probably best if we try to be as quiet as possible.”
“What’s that?” Miles called out.
Robert mimed lowering of voice by raising one hand and bringing it slowly down. Miles looked abashed. Charlotte swallowed her grin before Robert could see it; it looked too much like his own.
At the gates of the mausoleum, the men arranged themselves in a triangular formation. Behind them, Charlotte saw Henrietta ease her pistol out of the folds of her pelisse. Charlotte couldn’t quite recall what she had done with her own pistol. She thought she might have left it in the carriage. Since the carriage was back in London, three hours by river, she doubted it would do her much good.
The mausoleum sounded quiet enough to her. All she could hear was the sodden slap of the tree leaves and the labored rise and fall of her own breathing. But the men were clearly primed for battle, cloaks off, pistols at the ready. Charlotte, who had always dreamed of brave battles with banners flaring, felt at a loss. This was no formal joust at which she could wave her veil and cheer her champion; if anything, it would be an ambush.
But who was ambushing whom? Charlotte’s fingernails bit into her palms as the men burst through the entrance of the mausoleum.
They were greeted with resounding silence. There was no scramble of booted feet on wet grass, no jostling for weaponry, no grunts or battle cries, just the sound of their own labored breathing.