Since the Surrender

by Julie Anne Long

  He was midway across the painting, his finger level with the cow’s haunches, when the tip of his finger chilled. He held it there for a moment, his scalp prickling again with confirmed suspicions.

  A tiny but unmistakable breeze was blowing…

  Right out of the cow’s arse.

  He spared an ironic thought for Colin in that moment.

  As this was an entirely new dilemma in his experience, he allowed himself a moment of consideration.

  If fresh—or close to fresh—air was blowing through the cow’s arse into the dense, close air of the museum, there was something behind that wall. But what could it be? A windowed room? An alley? A passageway?

  The muffled, ethereal giggle had originated there. He was certain of it.

  This wing of the museum faced nothing but other buildings. Ah, but the English were clever, and history was riddled with stories of the need to hide or smuggle something: priests, gunpowder, women. Tunnels and passageways were seldom built whimsically. Inherent in their nature was the need to hide or flee.

  But then he remembered the tunnel dug between Brighton Pavilion and the King’s Arms—a brothel. Where would this tunnel lead?

  Of course: just yesterday evening he had stood with Buckthwaite, staring at Mezza Luna, the old theater owned by the Kinkade family in the very worst part of Covent Garden, boarded shut, seemingly abandoned.

  But large.

  Large enough to accommodate a brothel.

  And easily and quickly reachable from the museum…through a tunnel. Bypassing busy streets clotted with carriages and horses and prostitutes. And Kinkade had met him in the Queen of Bohemia, right near the theater.

  Mezza Luna…meant half-moon in Italian. And there was a half-moon in that painting.

  He turned and pressed his lips right against Rosalind’s ear. “I think this might be a tunnel.”

  She understood. Her eyes flared whitely in the dark.

  It occurred to Chase that the cow’s arse was a peephole. Even now someone could be watching them.

  Though if a human stood on the opposite side of the painting watching them, a breeze wouldn’t have been able to exit it.

  He rotated, wrapped his arms around Rosalind and swept her aside. Surely no one would be able to identify them in the dark.

  Should he attempt to relight the candle and have a good peer up the cow’s arse?

  What would happen if the white of someone else’s eye met his?

  Christ.

  He waited. He listened. He rotated slowly about and studied their surroundings once more, ensuring they were alone. His eyes, invariably, snagged on the bulging white eyes of that leering puppet.

  “You might try pressing the brass plate beneath the frame,” the puppet whispered helpfully.

  “Fucking hell!”

  Chase leaped straight upward and aimed to blow the thing to smithereens.

  “Ack! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Aye, it’s me, ain’t it?”

  The puppet made a grating, shifting noise on the shelf, its head flopping first left, then right, then flopping forward as though it were casting its puppety accounts on the museum floor. It seemed to be attempting to lurch into a standing position.

  It was horrible, horrible.

  What felt like a million spiders with ice cold feet marched up Chase’s spine.

  Rosalind had a steady hold of his elbow, and she was aiming her pistol, too, with all evidence of steely determination. A restraining and yet reassuring grip. His heart was slam slam slamming in his chest.

  “Hate puppets,” he muttered.

  “One would never have guessed,” she whispered.

  This almost made him smile.

  Odd how the grip of her small hand on his elbow should make him feel as though nothing in the world, even demon puppets, could harm him. He still felt a little separate from his body. He’d levitated from horror.

  Though he was proud of the fact that his pistol hand was steady, and it was cocked and aimed.

  The thing made a shuffling sound, righted, then tipped over with a sickening thunk as though he really had shot it.

  Rosalind gripped his elbow a bit more tightly.

  And out from behind the toppled puppet stepped Mr. Myrtleberry, the puppeteer. “Come closer so I can kill you,” Chase growled at him.

  “You wouldn’t kill me, aye, Captain Eversea. Just a puppeteer.”

  They glared at him, because his very presence had yet to make sense.

  “You hopped like a spring lamb there, you did, Captain Eversea.” Myrtleberry was whispering, but unconscionably amused.

  “What the devil are you doing here? How long have you been there?”

  “I just arrived, aye? I finally got hold of the plans for this building, Captain—and Montmorency built a tunnel between his house and the Mezza Luna. I once worked upon a great estate o’er Marbury way riddled with passage and doors and such like. This is a door, right here by this painting, I’m sure of it, and something will release this one, lad.”

  Chase spun back toward the painting. “Rosalind, would you—”

  But she’d thought ahead. She put her finger over the cow’s arse to block the peephole should anyone care to look through it.

  He put his ear to the painting and heard nothing on the other side of the wall. No giggling, no footsteps, no thundering herds of armed men, no screams.

  Chase began fumbling blindly at the edges of the frame. He lifted the frame up, looking for signs of a seam, a hinge, anything that might indicate this wall was anything apart from a wall sporting an ugly painting in a disreputable old museum.

  He pressed the painting itself with delicate hands, every inch of it. He slid his hands down to feel for the brass plate beneath it.

  Mr. Myrtleberry spoke up. “Perhaps you ought to try the brass plate at the—”

  There was a subtle grinding sound as the wall swung violently outward and swept Chase and Rosalind into blackness.

  Chapter 20

  The wall thunked closed, and Rosalind heard a loud grunt and a sickening thud as she tumbled down a grade.

  That thud, she knew, was the unmistakable and unpleasant sound of a body hitting the ground hard.

  “Chase!”

  She was surprised to find herself on her knees on what appeared to be a dirt floor, in a dimly lit chamber, very happy her pistol hadn’t gone off.

  “Chase!”

  “I’m here.”

  He was standing, uninjured, unrattled, and he bent to grip her arm.

  Her own head was still spinning, and her breath had been knocked from her.

  She stared at the door in disbelief. It looked precisely like a wall.

  “Are you injured? Can you stand?”

  She shook her head; a mistake, as it was already swimming. “Just a bit dizzy. Breath knocked from me. Limbs intact. One moment.”

  She’d learned how to report just the facts.

  “But I thought I heard someone fall,” Chase said.

  “So did I,” she said.

  “Then who—”

  They were still for an astonished moment. He helped her to her feet when she nodded, her breath regained, and they looked about in wonderment.

  The passageway—it was indeed a passageway—narrow, seemingly endless, was lit along its length by torches arrayed in sconces at the very top, throwing out flickering light and long leaping shadows. It smelled of earth and smoke.

  A lovely draft came from somewhere down where the passage originated.

  And terminated in the cow’s arse, of course.

  “But…I could have sworn I heard another pers—”

  Something tickled Rosalind’s ankles. She kicked out with a hoarse shriek and leaped backward.

  A moment of focusing in the shadows revealed that she’d violently attacked a plume. A dark purple one. About as long as her arm.

  She followed the length of it with her eyes. A moment of focusing on the ground revealed that the plume was attached to an enormous hat, w
hich was lying upside down, like a creature gone belly up in death.

  A hat rather like one King Henry VIII would have worn.

  She gingerly followed that hat with her eyes.

  Which is when they both saw the body.

  It was man, and he was wearing a doublet, a cape…

  And stuffed hose, à la sixteenth-century fashion.

  The hat had obviously been knocked from his head when they’d inadvertently clubbed him unconscious with the museum door.

  “He was clearly trying to exit as we came in and we knocked him out cold.” Chase knelt down and reached for the limp hand, his thumb seeking out a pulse. “Still alive.”

  Rosalind stood on tiptoe and helped herself to one of the many torches, then crouched over the body, next to Chase, holding the torch low enough to illuminate the man’s face. A round face, an unfashionable short beard, long lashes shut against his cheeks. Apart from the burgeoning bump on his head, he might have been peacefully asleep.

  “Do you know who he is?” she asked.

  “It’s Ireton,” Chase whispered in disbelief. “Friend of Kinkade’s. What the devil—”

  And suddenly, from out of the darkness, that damned flesh-crawling giggle floated, reverberating through the tunnel like a crazed thing swooping to attack them.

  Chase scowled, looking irritated, not afraid. “I have to move him before anyone else comes down here. I wonder if he was the lookout? Or just trying to leave?”

  “I saw him that day! Remember?”

  Ireton was one of those men who packed a good deal of flesh and muscle into a compact frame, and he was remarkably difficult to budge. Carrying him gracefully out of the path of the passageway wasn’t an option. Chase took the torch from Rosalind, replaced it in its sconce, and the two of them managed, gruntingly, to drag Ireton by the ankles over to the corner near the door. Chase propped him up against the wall.

  Where he slumped. Like that damned puppet.

  Rosalind retrieved the hat and gently placed the great plumed thing over his face. The feather extended vertically. Anyone stumbling across him would hopefully think he’d merely temporarily succumbed to an excess of drink.

  And then they turned to stare down the baffling passage.

  It seemed endless, but that could have been an illusion of the flickering leaping torches and the fact that the place was bloody dark.

  Another giggle floated through. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, the very product of darkness. There was an echo to it. A hackle-raising, gut-chilling echo.

  Rosalind took in a shaky breath.

  Chase reached out his hand and took hers in reassurance, but she could sense the impatience in him. She almost smiled.

  King Henry VIII had not been a ghost. He had a name: Ireton.

  The giggle was louder now, and was of a certainty originating in this world, not beyond it. Clearly, from the end of the tunnel.

  They whirled then froze when they heard footsteps crunching toward them. Chase fingered his pistol.

  Surely anyone can hear the beat of my heart, she thought. Banging like a bloody war drum.

  How had Chase managed to acquire his aplomb?

  The crunch became a blur of white. It was definitely moving directly toward them. Rosalind felt disembodied herself, suspended in that limbo between disbelief and terror, where the mind tries to convince the eyes that everything is quite, quite normal.

  Because surely that white blur emerging from the shadows could only be a ghost.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch. The footsteps came steadily, and then a man dressed in a toga came into focus.

  “Well, good evening,” said a cheery voice.

  A wreath of gold leaves gleamed around his pearly bald head, and large hairy feet poked out of a pair of sandals that laced up his thick calves. What appeared to be a greatcoat was slung over one arm; he held his hat and a pair of boots in the other. He looked for all the world like a banker returning home from work.

  Apart from the toga.

  Not a ghost, in other words.

  “Brought a new one?” He looked up at Chase with no apparent recognition and all evidence of bonhomie. He peered at Rosalind, who ducked her head bashfully and skillfully moved aside a fold of her skirt to hide her pistol.

  “Yes! A new one!” Chase agreed brightly.

  “She looks like a screamer,” the man said encouragingly. “Cheerio.”

  He pulled his hat onto his head expressly, it seemed, so he could tip it to them, and crunched his way to the end of the passage.

  They were utterly motionless, fascinated. They watched him closely as he pressed his eye to the peephole.

  “Much more convenient, this way in and out, isn’t it, than the Covent Garden exit?” he said over his shoulder conversationally. “This one is much closer to my home. Gets me there in time to get a good night’s sleep and up to breakfast with the wife. One hates to be seen exiting in the Garden. Quite a dangerous place, that.”

  So there was another exit?

  Which would explain the peculiarities of the men going in and coming out and vice versa. Liam had been right.

  She oddly felt as proud as if her own son had done it.

  The toga-draped man glanced down and noticed the man slumped beneath the great feather hat.

  “Tsk tsk, Mr. Woodcock. A touch too much again?”

  The toga-draped man reached up, pulled at a sconce not sporting a burning torch, and the wall spun out again, revealing the shadowy museum.

  “Don’t forget to blindfold her now, lad! You’ll ruin everything if you don’t!” Rosalind craned her head: she could even see that godforsaken lumpy puppet.

  Then the man walked through the opening. He gave that hidden door a push, and it thunked softly back into place behind him in seconds, as though it had never been.

  They stared, dumbstruck, for an instant.

  “I’ll…be…damned,” Chase murmured.

  The English had a long, fine history of hidden passageways and tunnels and the like, but this one was blindingly original.

  This had once been Montmorency’s actual residence. What could the passage have originally been used for? Smuggling goods? Hiding Catholics? Most likely Montmorency had used it for precisely what it was now being used for, since this tunnel likely terminated in Covent Garden and the Mezza Luna.

  The only thing left to do was forge ahead or retreat the way they’d come. Neither one of them would dream of retreating, for at the other end of this tunnel there were answers, for good or ill.

  Chase gifted her with a smile, brilliant with wickedness. Better than a torch, that smile. Better than the certainty of the sun rising tomorrow.

  Bloody man was elated when things were at their most contrary, and he sensed he was about to win. And Rosalind simply couldn’t find it in her to believe otherwise. As usual, his certainty became her own.

  Rosalind returned the smile—how could she not?

  He tentatively took her hand, the one not sweatily gripping a cocked pistol. He held it an instant, then raised it to his lips and kissed the tips of her fingers gently, by way of reassurance.

  And then she realized the kiss was also an apology, because he pulled off his cravat and said, “We need to blindfold you. My guess is that they bring girls in blindfolded so they’ll never know where they are or how they got there.”

  Bloody hell. She had sensed this was true, but she didn’t relish the prospect.

  She sighed. “Very well,” she agreed softly.

  “I’ll be here, Rosalind, and I shan’t let you go.”

  She stared up at him, and there was no one in the world she trusted more than him. She sighed again, and nodded.

  He wound the cravat gently around her eyes. The dark became darker, and then all she saw was a dull black tinged with a reddish glow. It was fine silk, the cravat, and warm from his body and smelled like him, and it was like donning armor even as she relinquished her sight.

  “I have you,” he whispered reassurin
gly.

  He always did.

  “But keep your pistol in your hand,” he added cheerfully, on a whisper.

  He took her hand in his, and silently, pistols drawn, they moved deeper into the tunnel.

  “If that gentleman was walking casually, we haven’t far to go to reach the end,” Chase murmured. “He wasn’t precisely provisioned for a long journey.”

  The proper response to that hardly seemed “Hurrah!” given that they hadn’t the faintest idea what might be on the other end of the tunnel. But if Lucy were safe and alive, a journey to anywhere would have been worthwhile.

  The bright blobs of torches penetrated her blindfold as she walked. Dark, bright, dark, bright, was how she saw her journey now. One foot carefully placed in front of the other, her pace matched to Chase’s. Crunch. Crunch. The ground inside the passage was packed and swept dirt, scattered with pebbles. Their footsteps echoed, no matter how carefully they stepped.

  As she had when they crept toward the museum in the dark, she began to measure the world with her other senses. She counted her footsteps. She listened for breathing, hers and Chase’s. She was conscious of the hot press of Chase’s hand in hers.

  She began to feel like a ghost herself.

  On they walked; no one else approached them. But eerie fragments of disembodied voices reached them, bouncing from the walls, reverberating in the tunnel.

  A burst of masculine laughter made her jump.

  Chase squeezed her hand, but didn’t indulge her nerves. He inexorably pulled her forward.

  Once again that nervous giggle shrilled. It was louder still, less ethereal; clearly they were drawing closer to its source.

  Another hearty burst of male laughter, followed by a hoot, reverberated down the tunnel. Ricocheted, like a frightened bat.

  Rosalind’s breathing quickened. There was no way of knowing what would be at the end of this, and how could Chase know, armed with a pistol, two knives, a walking stick, and arrogance?

  And then came the scream.

  It blasted her nerves like lightning. Panic momentarily paralyzed her. Cold, then hot, then cold again with terror. She halted, sucking in a whimper. Her breath came in awful tattered gasps.

  “Chase.”

  “Listen, Rosalind.” He was stern.