Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “‘Twas an ague that kept Clare’s maid from returning to England with her,” Edmee said, “but perhaps not quite an innocent one. I’ve found that small, frequent doses of wolfsbane produce a very credible lingering illness, complete with chills, fluxes and a gradual wasting away of the body—which left her position vacant and ready for me to step into. What more perfect vantage point with which to monitor Clare’s activities than as her personal maid?”

  Phillipa closed her eyes against the nightmare of Hugh’s lifeless body, and saw it all...Edmee lurking in the background all these weeks, watching and listening, seeing everything with those shrewd little eyes...Edmee allowing Istagio to seduce her after he’d made the terrible mistake of trying to impress her by igniting those packets of black powder. He would have been surprised but intrigued when she tied him up and produced the whip, bewildered when she lowered the pillow over his face.

  Suspicion would naturally fall on Marguerite, her proclivities being well-known and the stockings and whip being hers. It would have been a simple matter to see to the rest of it...a late-night ewer of warm spiced wine laced with arsenic, a litany of penance in the queen’s code...

  And Hugh. Hugh, forgive me. I should have known. I should have puzzled it out sooner.

  “You wanted us to think the queen’s agent was dead so we’d let down our guard,” Phillipa said.

  “I wanted Clare to think the queen’s agent was dead,” Edmee corrected, “because she’d gotten too inquisitive as to who that agent might be. I could tell she was beginning to suspect me, and the queen had instructed me to maintain my disguise at all cost. As for your husband, ‘twas only this morning that I came to realize he was in the king’s employ. And you as well, I take it. A workmanlike job, I must admit.” With a glance toward Hugh’s inert form, she added, “Not quite workmanlike enough, of course...”

  “Burn in hell,” Phillipa rasped, fresh tears welling in her eyes, clutching at her throat. Hugh...oh, Hugh...

  Edmee smiled, the light from the lantern on the floor casting her face into sharp upward shadows, producing an eerily demonic countenance. “Not all hells are fiery, as you should know after four days in that thing.” Slipping the arma and tongs under her girdle, she sorted through the keys hanging around her neck until she located the little iron one with the square top, which she removed. “Why, look what I’ve found.”

  “You...you had it all along,” Phillipa said.

  “Let’s see...what to do with it?” Edmee tossed the key in the air, catching it in her big fist. “I know!” Pivoting, she walked back to the well and held the key over it. “How deep do you suppose this is? Let’s see if we can tell by how long is takes to hear a splash.”

  “Edmee, listen to—”

  She dropped the key.

  Phillipa hitched in a breath.

  Presently there came a faint, muted splash as the key hit the water and sank to the bottom of the well.

  Edmee let out a long, impressed whistle as she peered into the well. “Forty feet, I’d say, till the water starts—maybe more, and that’s straight down. Can’t imagine how they dug it.”

  Phillipa closed her eyes. That was it, then. She would never be free of this sachentage. She would die here.

  Perhaps it’s just as well, she thought. Without Hugh, she would be empty, forever incomplete.

  “You understand why I couldn’t possibly let you live,” Edmee said, her voice farther away now. Opening her eyes, Phillipa saw Edmee hold a taper to the coals in the brazier, then light the lantern that hung over Orlando’s worktable. “‘Twould be most injudicious, after all the effort the queen has put into developing these new weapons, to leave alive anyone who knows of them and cannot be trusted to keep his counsel. That includes not only you and your husband, but Orlando and—”

  “No, not Orlando,” Phillipa said. “Please—he’s just a gentle old—”

  “And, of course,” Edmee continued implaccably, “Clare and Aldous, who know far too much for people who have a hard time keeping their mouths shut. They’ve proven themselves naught but liabilities to the queen’s cause.”

  “Surely even you have your limit as to how many people you can bring yourself to kill.”

  “If I do, I haven’t reached it yet. Dispatching large numbers at once can get a little awkward, though.” She regarded the contents of the cage thoughtfully. “How do those work? Do you happen to know?”

  “I have no idea,” Phillipa lied.

  Crossing to the door, Edmee said, “I know someone who does.”

  “Where...were are you going?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” Edmee said as she closed the door behind her. “I can imagine how lonely it would get down here—” she glanced at Hugh “—with only one’s dead husband for company.”

  Phillipa cursed Edmee at the top of her lungs as she departed, only to collapse into wracking sobs once she was gone. “Hugh...oh, God, Hugh...” If only he hadn’t come. She could have borne this so much better, perhaps even with a little dignity, if only he had been spared.

  When Edmee returned, not long afterward, it was in the company of Orlando. Phillipa screamed at him as he entered the cellar ahead of Edmee, warning him to flee, but he just blinked at her in astonishment across the length of the lamplit cellar.

  “Lady Phillipa! Il Dio mio! What happen to you?”

  Edmee smirked. “A bit of ill fortune. Happens to all of us from time to time.” Edmee closed the door and chose an arma from the table. Withdrawing the tongs from her girdle, she lifted one of the glowing wires from the pan on the brazier.

  “Orlando, run!” Phillipa cried.

  “If you’re going to run,” Edmee said, leveling the weapon at his head, “please be so kind as to run in this direction.” She nudged him toward Phillipa’s side of the cellar. “Otherwise I’ll be forced to put a hole in your head, and as you can see—” she nodded toward Hugh “—the results can be most debilitating.”

  Orlando muttered a prayer as they passed Hugh. “Is he dead?”

  “If he’s not,” Edmee said, “he will be soon enough. Sit there.” She pointed to the iron chair.

  Orlando shook his head and tried to back away from it, but Edmee shoved him forward with the arma. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning on cooking you—unless you’re particularly uncooperative, and then I make no promises.”

  With a weighty sigh, Orlando seated himself in the chair and obeyed her when she ordered him to lay his left forearm on the arm of the chair and buckle it down. Setting her weapon down briefly, she secured his right arm.

  And then she aimed the arma at Phillipa’s head. “This is how this conversation will take place, Signore Orlando. I will ask questions and you will answer them in a direct and straightforward manner, or else Lady Phillipa will experience a sudden, crushing headache. Am I understood?”

  “S.”

  “Don’t tell her anything, Orlando!” Phillipa said. “It doesn’t matter if she kills me—she’s going to kill us all, anyway.”

  “Those things in the cage,” Edmee said, as if Phillipa hadn’t even spoken. “Those...bombe, is that what you call them?”

  “S. From the Latin bombus—mean much loud noise.”

  “How appropriate. Is it true that they’re powerful enough to destroy buildings?”

  “Depend on how big is the building and how many bombe—”

  “Say, this building,” she said. “Castle Halthorpe. Could the bombe in that cage destroy—”

  “Don’t answer her, Orlando!” Phillipa cried.

  Edmee held the hot wire just a hairs-breadth from the touch-hole. Nodding toward Hugh, she said, “I think I’ve shown that I’m more than willing to shoot one of these into a person’s skull. So just tell me the truth, Orlando. If all of those bombe were ignited at once, what would happen?”

  Grudgingly, Orlando said, “The building break apart, and probably is much big fire.”

  “Fire?” Edmee smiled slowly. “Fire would be good. F
ire would be excellent, in fact. If Halthorpe Castle were to burn to the ground, killing everyone inside, who could say how it had started once there was nothing left but smoldering ruins?”

  “Everyone?” Phillipa asked. “You would kill every soul in this castle just to take four lives?”

  “If you think those people upstairs have souls, then you haven’t been paying very much attention these past few weeks.” Edmee turned to Orlando. “Do the bombe work like those little parchment packets? One sets fire to the cord and waits for it to burn down?”

  “S,” Orlando said on a sigh.

  “Will I have long enough to get out of the castle and get as far as, say, the outer bailey before they erupt?”

  He nodded. “Is very long fusibili. You be much far away before the boom.”

  “Thank you, signore,” said Edmee as she strode back toward the other side of the cellar. “You’ve been most accommodating. Ah—one more thing. Where might I find that extraordinary black powder of yours?”

  “In the green pot on the table.”

  Edmee laid the arma and tongs on the table, emptied the purse hanging on her girdle of its few coins and filled it with powder from the green pot. Crossing to the cage, she fumbled with the keys until she found the one that unlocked it. When she held the taper to the hot coals, Phillipa said, “Edmee, don’t do this. No cause is worth the death of all these innocent people.”

  “Innocent?” Edmee sneered. “You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?” Oblivious to Phillipa’s continued pleading, she squatted down at the cage and lit the ends of the long, trailing cords, one after the other. They burned steadily, but so slowly that it was obvious Edmee would be far beyond Halthorpe Castle’s curtain walls before they exploded.

  She relocked the cage so the burning cords couldn’t be tampered with, then carried the keys to the well with Phillipa begging her to rethink this.

  “No!” Phillipa screamed when she tossed them in. “How can you do this? What kind of monster are you?”

  “The best kind,” Edmee said with a smile. “The kind who can pass for human.” To Orlando she said, “If it’s any comfort to you, your inventions will live on. Those bombe should be simple enough to reproduce, and I’ll take this—” she picked up the arma she had set down “—as a prototype so that more can be made in its image.”

  He sat forward, shaking his head. “No...”

  “No?” Edmee’s eyebrows rose. “After all the years you spent developing these weapons, I can’t imagine you’d want the world to lose the knowledge of how to make them.”

  Neither could Phillipa when she recalled how Orlando had rationalized his work for Clare...All knowledge is good. All learning is worthy.

  “I no wanta lose the knowledge,” Orlando said, “but that is not the arma della mano from which to make others. Is one of the type that make esplosione when the hot wire go in.”

  Phillipa groaned in dismay, wishing desperately that Orlando had not volunteered this piece of information. Would that the only surviving arma would destroy itself the first time it was fired!

  Edmee laid the weapon back down with the others. “Which ones are safe to shoot?” she asked.

  “That one on the end,” Orlando said. “The one with the curved handle.”

  Edmee hefted this larger weapon, weighing it in her hand.

  “You will need to know how to make the black powder,” Orlando said. “The armi and the bombe, they are just useless piece of iron without the powder.”

  “For pity’s sake, Orlando,” Phillipa moaned.

  “I have some as a sample,” Edmee said.

  He shook his head. “Cannot be reproduce that easy from sample, or would not have take Orlando so many year.”

  With a quick glance at the bombe, the fusibili of which appeared to be burning down slowly enough, Edmee said, “Very well, then. How do you make it? What goes in it?”

  To Phillipa’s surprise, Orlando smiled. “I say you will need to know. I not say I will tell you.”

  Phillipa almost laughed. It seemed he had come to the conclusion that all knowledge was not, after all, worth preserving.

  After a moment’s incredulous pause, Edmee grabbed the tongs and plucked a hot wire out of its pan. Stalking toward them, her arma aimed toward Phillipa, she said, “You will tell me, and now!”

  “She gonna die anyway.” Turning to Phillipa, he said, “Sorry, but is true.”

  “Quite,” Phillipa agreed. “Don’t tell her a thing.”

  Edmee, a red tide of anger crawling up her throat, swung the weapon toward Orlando’s legs. “How do you suppose it would feel to have a leg blown off? And then, if you don’t talk, I’ll get another one of these and blow off the other one. And then—”

  “S, I am understand the idea,” Orlando said with a shrug. “Is all right with me. The longer it take you, the more likely you get caught in the esplosione.”

  With panic in her eyes, Edmee turned to check on the fusibili, which had burned down about a quarter of their length. Spinning back around toward Orlando, she leveled the gun at his right leg. “Tell me now, or I swear I’ll shoot, and then you’ll not be so cocky, I’ll wager.”

  “Will be interesting to see.” Turning to Phillipa, he said, “What you think? I still be cocky or no?”

  Edmee bared her teeth, snarled, “You stupid old bastard,” and shoved the wire into the touch-hole.

  There came a roar as the weapon erupted in her hand, followed by a second, more violent blast as the black powder in her purse exploded.

  For a long moment, Phillipa could hear nothing but the dull, incessant ringing in her ears, see nothing but the caustic black smoke that hung in the air, stinging her eyes, tickling her throat.

  As the smoke dissipated, she saw, through its haze, that Edmee had been hurled backward, into one of the massive stone columns that supported the undercroft. Her body, blackened and bloodied, lay slumped against the column like a rag doll that had been tossed carelessly aside. The gaping wound in her belly was awful to behold, and all that was left of the arma she’d fired were a few twisted shards of iron scattered about the cellar.

  Orlando was coughing.

  “You tricked her,” Phillipa said, impressed. “You had her put down one of the good weapons and take one of the—”

  There came a low, ragged groan. Could Edmee still be alive? Phillipa wondered, and then she realized the sound hadn’t come from Edmee. It had come... Oh, God. “Hugh! Hugh!” The explotion must have roused him. Relief washed through Phillipa. “Hugh! Thank God, Hugh, you are alive. Orlando, he’s alive!”

  “Hugh, wake up!” Orlando commanded as Phillipa offered a tearful prayer of thanks. He was alive! She felt drunk with relief.

  Hugh stirred, but he did not awaken, despite Orlando’s exhortations.

  “Hugh!” Orlando cried. “Open your eyes, now!”

  Phillipa echoed Orlando’s pleas. If Hugh came to, he could save not only himself and Orlando, but the other occupants of the castle, before the bombe detonated.

  Orlando jerked his arms against the leather straps that restrained him, swearing in Italian. Phillipa extended an arm toward the straps, thinking perhaps she might be able to unbuckle them, but her reach was too short by an inch or two.

  “My eating knife!” Unsheathing the sharp little knife, Phillipa held it by its tip and extended it handle-first toward Orlando. “Take this! Use it to cut the straps.”

  Orlando could just barely reach the end of the ivory knife handle. When he took it, it almost slipped from his fingers, but he kept his grip, carefully reversing the direction of the blade so that he could slide it under the strap around his wrist and saw away at the leather.

  Hugh groaned again. Phillipa looked toward the cage to see that the fisibili had burned about halfway down. “Hurry, Orlando!”

  “Fatto!” Orlando exclaimed as the strap split open. “Is done!” Hurriedly he unbuckled his left arm. Rising from the chair, he strode purposefully toward the other end
of the cellar.

  “Orlando, where are you going? Don’t leave yet! Take Hugh with you!”

  “I no leave,” he said as he sorted frantically through the flasks and vials on his work table. “I am look for something to...ah!” Holding up a small blue glass vial, Orlando went straight to Hugh and knelt next to him. He uncapped the vial and held it to Hugh’s nose. “If he can wake up, this will—”

  Hugh growled as if in disgust and rolled to the side.

  “Is work,” said Orlando as he leaned over Hugh, waving the vial back and forth under his nose. “His wound, is not so bad. It bleed very much, but is no big hole. The little iron ball, I think it just graze the skull, not go in.”

  “Open your eyes, Hugh!” Phillipa cried out. “Please!”

  With a bellow, Hugh opened his eyes and swatted the vial away. “God’s bones...”

  “Hugh!” Phillipa exclaimed. “Oh, thank God. Hugh, get up! Get up!”

  Hugh looked around blearily. On seeing Edmee’s body, he muttered, “Jesu...” An angry gash, matted with hair, sliced through one side of his forehead, and his face on that side was sticky with blood. He touched his wound and winced. When his gaze lit on Phillipa, he moaned her name and clambered unsteadily to his feet.

  “You’ve got to get out of here, Hugh,” she said as he staggered toward her.

  “What? Nay—not without you.” He framed her face in his hands. “Not this time.”

  “Hugh, you don’t understand. Edmee, she...” Phillipa shook her head in frustration; there was no time to explain everything. “Look behind you, at that cage. Those things inside, they’re like the Chinese weapons you told me about, the ones that are filled with black powder. Those cords are on fire, and when the fire reaches the black powder, this entire castle is going to explode and burn.”

  Hugh tugged at the iron collar around Phillipa’s neck. “I’ve got to get you out of this.”

  Phillipa shook her head wildly. “The key is gone, Hugh—it’s at the bottom of that well, along with the key to the cage. You’ve got to get out of here, you and Orlando, and make everyone leave the castle. We haven’t got much time!”