by Лорен Уиллиг
“I can go,” said Henrietta unenthusiastically, moving to kilt up her skirts. “If you keep watch below.”
“Will you be all right?” said Charlotte doubtfully. “The last time you tried to climb a tree, Miles had to fetch you down.”
“True,” admitted Henrietta, unsuccessfully trying to tie a knot into the fabric of her skirt. “I was fine with the climbing part, though. It was only the getting-down part that was hard.”
“The getting-down bit is rather crucial,” said Charlotte apologetically. “I’ll go.”
She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. Her own experience with tree climbing had been even more limited than Henrietta’s. She felt much about trees as she did about horses; pretty to look at, but she felt no desire to climb on them. But surely a ladder would be different? It was meant to be climbed, after all. She was smaller and lighter than Henrietta, which would put less weight on the rails — and the look of relief on Henrietta’s face was too obvious to be ignored.
“Are you sure?” said Henrietta, dropping her skirt with obvious relief.
“I don’t mind at all,” Charlotte lied. “And the King knows me. If he is there, it would be better that he see me. Would you hold this for me?”
Wriggling out of her cloak, she passed it over to Henrietta, shivering as the thick fabric lifted off her shoulders. The dress that had been possible in the theatre, with thousands of candles burning, was eminently unsuited to an unheated building of coarse stone that appeared to hoard the cold and damp, magnifying rather than mitigating it. But the extra fabric would pose a hazard while climbing. Charlotte was scared enough as it was, without an extra length of heavy velvet pulling her back.
Tentatively, Charlotte lifted one foot onto the first rung. The wooden bar pressed into the sole of her foot through her slipper. Belatedly, Charlotte wondered if she ought to have removed her shoes and stockings, but she suspected that if she descended the ladder now, she wouldn’t have the courage to go back on it again. A few more rungs and her slippers were level with Henrietta’s shoulders. Resolutely, Charlotte looked straight ahead, concentrating on the pull of the muscles in her legs, the solid feel of the scratchy wood of the rails beneath her hands. It would not do to think of how long the ladder seemed or how steep or how very far she still was from the top of it.
Her nails had gone purple with cold and she was having trouble feeling her fingers.
“Are you all right?” Henrietta called up, from what felt like an endless way below. Her voice sounded oddly hollow.
Charlotte gave a nervous laugh, clutching compulsively at the rails as the ladder wobbled with her. “I’ll let you know when I get down.”
“How on earth would they get the King up there?” Henrietta’s voice was sharp with nerves. “Perhaps you’d best just come down. We can send one of the men up later. They like climbing things.”
“A very sensible suggestion. Allow me to second that, Lady Charlotte.”
Dizzily, Charlotte clung to the ladder, understanding for the first time how the other man had come to fall as a new voice intruded into their conversation, nearly startling her from her precarious perch.
It was a cultivated voice, polished and amused, with just the slightest hint of a foreign accent. A French accent, to be precise.
Henrietta made a noise of protest that was muffled mid-squeak. There was a scuffling noise, which Charlotte deduced had something to do with Henrietta’s slippered feet attempting to do the most harm they possibly could and generally missing their mark.
Bland and unruffled, the Frenchman continued with scarcely a pause. “May I prevail upon you to descend, Lady Charlotte? I shouldn’t like to have to shoot you down.”
The elephant god had taken his mask with him when he left Wycombe.
Robert jumped lightly off the ladder, joining his two colleagues in the narrow anteroom behind the ceremonial chamber. The air smelled cold and dank, with no lingering savor of exotic spices. Damp beaded the rough walls, seeping slowly downwards to the packed earth floor.
Miles regarded the small, rough-hewn chamber with palpable disappointment. “Is this all?”
Not so much as a stray bead had been left to indicate the room’s former function. The braziers and the beaded curtain had been tidied away, thriftily stored for use at the next orgy, along with the miscellany of monks’ robes and the indicia of the elephant god. The only sign of human habitation were the torches in their metal brackets on the walls. Tommy had prudently lit one of the torches. The moonlight might provide adequate light above, but it did nothing for the subterranean regions below.
Robert flexed his shoulders, edgy with energy and anticipation. What more appropriate place to beard a dragon than in its cave? The entire scenario was directly out of one of Charlotte’s story books, the stuff of myth and legend. He was fairly sure he had his lady’s favor already, despite the reservations she had voiced on the boat, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to emerge triumphant with a rescued King to place before her as trophy.
If the King was there.
He had to be, Robert assured himself. There was no other logical place. If the King wasn’t being kept in Medmenham Abbey, that left only the caves and Medmenham’s church, directly above. Of the two, the caves were by far the more defensible, composed as they were of a warren of tunnels and chambers. It was the ideal situation for a small force of men — or even one man — to ward off a would-be rescue committee.
“The main ceremonial chamber is next door,” Robert said in an undertone. “I doubt the King would be kept there.”
Tommy released the torch from its brackets, hefting it high, so that the flaring tip sent orange-red light guttering across the uneven surface of the walls. “Where, then? You’re the nearest we have to a map, Rob.”
Remembering his trek from the main entrance through the labyrinthine passageways, this was not an observation that filled Robert with confidence.
Pretending to an assurance he was far from feeling, he took out his penknife and drew a small square in the dirt. “This is where we are.”
The others followed suit, crouching beside him in the dirt, Tommy’s torch illuminating their dirty and tired faces. The remnants of their formal evening clothes made an incongruous note to the scene, squatting in the dirt of the cave floor by the light of a single, sputtering torch.
Leading off the square, Robert drew a round shape, followed by two wavy lines. “The main chamber is through this one. The ceremonial cavern is separated from the rest of the tunnels by a narrow river, which can only be crossed by boat. The boat carries two or, at most, three.”
Impatiently shaking his hair out of his eyes, Miles looked up from the drawing. “And you believe the King lies on the other side of the river.”
“Almost certainly.” Robert drew another line, leading off from the river. A thick one, this time, to indicate a corridor. “Across the River Styx, a series of small cells have been dug out of the tunnels. Most are secured by their own grilles and equipped with a bed and chamber pot.”
“When you say grilles,” asked Miles, “do you mean with locks?”
Robert nodded.
“Well and truly cells then,” said Tommy soberly. “The perfect place to store an unwilling guest.”
“My thought precisely. The only problem is finding the correct cell before someone else finds us.”
“We’d best get to it then, hadn’t we?” said Tommy, and Robert was reminded of a dozen other instances in which they had ventured forth together to confront a mass of faceless adversaries, charging forward through the thick of powder smoke, shying away from the concatenation of cannons, running and firing, firing and running, horses shot out beneath them, men groaning and dying, adversaries faceless in the smog.
In comparison, this was a stroll in the park, an afternoon’s tea party. But that didn’t mean a stray bullet couldn’t bring one of them down. All it would take would be one man, with the benefit of surprise and a quick trigger finger, one lucky s
trike, one fortunate ricochet. He had never worried himself about that sort of thing before. Battle was battle, and he knew that he could die as easily as the next man, that a sniper’s rifle could kill just as effectively as a cavalry charge. It was all part of the job and there were no guarantees. He had simply been lucky so far.
But that had been before. How could he climb that ladder and explain to Lady Henrietta that her husband wasn’t coming back? He wasn’t particularly thrilled with the notion of having his lifeless body borne back to Girdings, either. He had other plans for his return, and they had nothing to do with mausoleums.
Robert spared a moment’s gratitude that the women were safely aboveground. It would be ten times worse having to worry about them as well. They might be cold in the deserted church, but at least they would be unmolested.
Robert staggered to his feet, jerkily wiping out the drawing with sole of one shoe. “I go first,” he said, “since I know the way. Tommy, you take the rear. Dorrington — ”
“Understood,” said Miles with a grin that suggested a mind happily free of funereal thoughts. “I take the middle.”
“Once we pass the bronze doors to the river, I want total silence,” Robert said sternly. “No talking, no whispering. We don’t know how sound carries in these caves.”
“And we don’t want to alert anyone to our presence,” agreed Tommy. “It would be deuced unfortunate if they decided to do away with the evidence.”
It would be more than unfortunate. It would precipitate an immediate succession crisis. How was one to explain that the King had been kidnapped and murdered? The country would be in an uproar. And the Prince of Wales, with his dubious political allies, would be on the throne.
Robert grimaced. “I don’t think any of us have any interest in a Medmenham ministry.”
One by one, they ventured through the square-cut hole in the wall, lowering themselves from the altar to the ground. As Robert had suspected, the circular cavern was deserted, the great lamp hanging light-less from the arched roof. The bronze doors were shut.
With a finger to his lips to indicate silence, Robert put his shoulders to the door on the right-hand side, where Dionysus reveled with his maenads in a perpetual debauch. The door resisted slightly and then gave, moving open by inches onto total darkness.
The darkness was pregnant with the whisper of the water as it slapped and slithered against the banks, like a nest of serpents stretching. The silver chain chimed softly as the boat rocked in its moorings, like a spectral bell, tolling a mythical hero to his death. And through it all, Robert seemed to hear the hiss and whisper of drowned voices, batting against the banks, fighting the waves for release.
Kicking himself for supernatural fancy, Robert motioned peremptorily behind him for Tommy to bring the torch. It was a chancy thing, potentially signaling their presence to the enemy, but still less of a liability than plunging headfirst into the river. Into that chorus of drowned voices, a nasty voice in the back of his head provided, and he squished it.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark waters. It was simply common sense. If he recalled correctly, there were enough twists and bends in the tunnels that their light would only be visible to someone standing directly on the other bank. Or a creature within the water. It would be like Medmenham to stock his subterranean river with his own private sea serpent.
Silently, Tommy obeyed, circling Miles’s broad form. The torchlight cast their shadows in relief along the bank and lent a reddish glow to the surface of the water, as though it burned with subterranean fire. The boat had been chained to the near bank, creaking lightly in its moorings, the long pole braced against one side.
Robert listened. He listened hard, sorting out the slap and echo of the water, the natural noises of the subterranean system. It was too easy to imagine the sounds he sought, to turn the creak of the boat’s timbers into the distorted echo of a man’s voice or the slap of the water into the shuffle of boots in the tunnel beyond. The opposite bank gave way to a tunnel, narrow and slope-roofed, stretching upwards into unmitigated darkness. Once in the tunnels, there would be nowhere to hide, no cover from a wildly aimed bullet, save the very cells that might serve as bolt holes for a waiting adversary.
Frowning, Robert stepped to the very edge of the water. His shadow stepped with him, a black blot stretching back across the far wall. There was something wrong. He only wished he could pinpoint what it was.
Miles waved one large arm to get his attention, jabbing in the direction of the boat, mimicking climbing in.
“By God, that’s it,” Robert exclaimed, breaking his own vow of silence. “Don’t you see?”
“See what?” asked Miles cautiously.
“It’s the boat,” Robert said, looking from one man to the other. He was met by confusion on Miles’s part and narrowed eyes on Tommy’s. “The boat is on the wrong side of the river.”
“I should think it’s on the right side,” offered Miles, scrutinizing the offending craft. “If it were on the other side, we’d have to swim across.”
“Exactly,” said Robert. “So how did our man get across?”
“Maybe he took the other entrance?” suggested Tommy. “He might have come in through the front.”
“But the pipe was on this side,” Miles pointed out, looking perturbed. “Right by the entrance.”
“Near the entrance,” Robert corrected, his lips feeling as though they had been frozen. He forced them to move. “Near the entrance. Not at the entrance. What if we were wrong? What if your wife was right?”
“You mean — ” began Tommy.
The torchlight burned like hellfire against the cavern walls as Robert gave voice to the nightmare prospect. “What if our man with the pipe was never in the caves?”
He didn’t need to say more.
Without a word exchanged between them, the three men made an abrupt about-face, jostling towards the door. If the man with the pipe had never been in the caves, that meant he was aboveground. In the church.
With Charlotte.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Lady Charlotte? If you will?” Remembering the fate of the last man who had climbed that ladder, Charlotte clung tightly with both hands as she very slowly and painfully twisted her torso to look down below. She could see Henrietta pinned in the grasp of a man whose rough wool cap hid his face from Charlotte’s view.
The man who had spoken, the one who had called her by name, obligingly stepped forward, into Charlotte’s line of vision.
He wore a monk’s habit, a rough brown robe of the sort the members of the Hellfire Club had been wearing, but Charlotte could see the tips of boots beneath rather than sandals. He had thrown his hood back, revealing close-cropped brown hair and a face that Charlotte might have considered handsome had its owner not been pointing a pistol at her.
“Won’t you come down?” the Frenchman said lightly, as if he were asking her to stand up with him at Almack’s rather than threatening her at gunpoint. “I really shouldn’t like to shoot you.”
“I shouldn’t like to be shot,” Charlotte agreed, but she continued to cling to the ladder without moving. She wasn’t particularly sure that down was a safe place to be. Unfortunately, up wasn’t an option, either. He could undoubtedly shoot faster than she could climb.
“Now, Lady Charlotte,” said the monk, very, very patiently, and Charlotte reluctantly began to shimmy downwards, feeling her way down rung by rung. Henrietta had been wrong; it wasn’t any harder going down than it had been going up, but Charlotte deliberately drew out the process, playing for time. If she dawdled long enough, there was a chance the men might finish in the tunnels and charge up to rescue them. Or they might stay down there, searching for nonexistent villains and exchanging witty quips. Charlotte suspected the latter. A more likely avenue of opportunity was Henrietta’s discarded pistol. Where had she left it? Charlotte thought she remembered Henrietta setting it down by the base of the ladder, but her mind had been on other things at the time.
Twisting, shoulder level off the ground, she peered down at the Frenchman as though something had just occurred to her. Which it had. But it also made an excellent opportunity to try to look for the pistol.
Charlotte donned her daftest, vaguest expression — which, as her grandmother was fond of saying, was very daft indeed. “How do you know my name?”
The Frenchman was neither impressed nor diverted. “That would be telling.”
Charlotte widened her eyes at him in the way that had worked so well on the real Dr. Simmons. “I suppose it would be futile to ask who you are?”
“Very.” The Frenchman gestured with his pistol, but not before Charlotte thought she saw something metallic on the ground by the crumpled form of Wrothan’s fallen guard. Charlotte gave silent thanks to St. Lawrence, or whomever it was to whom Medmenham had dedicated the church. The curve of the man’s body shielded the firearm from the Frenchman’s view. “Come along, Lady Charlotte, no dawdling.”
“I’m not very good with ladders,” said Charlotte disarmingly. “I haven’t a very broad acquaintance with them.”
“All the more reason not to prolong your acquaintance with this one,” said their captor pleasantly. “Peter? Would you care to help Lady Charlotte along?”
It was decidedly unclear just what sort of help he intended. From the way Peter — Charlotte assumed he must be Peter, since he had sauntered forwards at the Frenchman’s call — lifted his pistol, potting pigeons came to mind.
“No — no!” Charlotte flailed a foot behind her as she felt for the next rung down. It wasn’t entirely an act. There was nothing like being aimed at to wreak havoc with one’s sense of balance. “That’s quite all right. I can manage.”
Moving with more speed than grace, she deliberately floundered her way down the next few rungs. It was mostly deliberate, at any rate. She was feeling more than a little bit wobbly, and her skirt seemed to catch at her calves even more than usual. Just as a pair of hands reached out to lift her off the ladder, Charlotte contrived to fall sideways, bumping into Peter in the process. Peter stumbled gratifyingly, and Charlotte fell heavily to her knees by the side of the ladder. As Peter swayed and swore, Charlotte scooped the pistol up under her skirt, wedging it as best she could in her garter under pretense of floundering on the floor.