“Not Woodrow!”
“Eh?” Mr. Pemminey stroked his chin. “No—that’s the boy: Woodrow. He mentioned you, too, now that I recall. I’ve let him watch me now and then. Most clever lad.”
“He didn’t bring my notes?”
Mr. Pemminey was staring down at the diagram in her hand. “No, no—it was the other one brought them. The young man. I say, do you suppose that this stay attaching to the number six strut could be lengthened and replaced with steel?”
Merlin looked where he was pointing. “Steel! I thought you were using aluminium. But short stages of catgut are the thing. As I’ve told Woodrow over and over, the strength must be in the skin over the bamboo framework.”
“I’ve been using steel wire. I had to abandon the aluminium when I found out it stretch—”
A pounding on the oaken door interrupted him. Merlin stiffened. “The French!” she whispered.
“Rubbish,” Mr. Pemminey said. “It will just be Thomkins with my lunch. Good fellow, that Thomkins. I never have to go anywhere anymore; he serves me so well I just stay in this room and work. Only time I have to leave is when I go up onto the battlements to tinker with The Matilda herself. I named the gliding machine that, you see. The Matilda. After a girl I knew once.” He rubbed shyly at his thinning hair. “But you wouldn’t be interested in that, no, no. Would you take luncheon with me?”
Merlin had no chance to answer the question. The door opened, and a man of intimidating size and shape stuck his head in. His sword clanked against the iron bolt on the outside of the door. “That lad is here to see you, Mr. Pemminey.”
“Ah, of course. Woodrow!” Mr. Pemminey rubbed his hands. “Ask him up. We can all have lunch.”
“Nay—you ain’t to see him today, I’m told. They want you to write him a note and say you’re occupied.”
“Oh, but I’m not. Tell him that Miss—uh—”
Merlin stepped hard on Mr. Pemminey’s toe.
“Ow! My dear, do have a care, if you please!” He turned toward her. Hidden from the guard behind his wispy halo of hair, Merlin mouthed, The French in silent urgency.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Dear me, are you choking?”
Merlin rolled her eyes and abandoned the attempt. She bit her lip, staring at the guard as Mr. Pemminey said again that he wasn’t at all too busy to receive Woodrow for lunch.
“Yes, you are,” the burly man said placidly. “Write us the note, now—there’s a good fellow.”
Mr. Pemminey rubbed his palms together, looking flustered. “Well, yes—I suppose perhaps I am. The Matilda is quite ready for her first flight, and I’ve much to do to prepare myself for it.”
He shuffled among the papers, searching out a pen and inkwell. Merlin chewed her knuckle. She had to get a message out; she had to do something. Woodrow was outside. That note was going to go to him…
And suddenly it was as if Ransom himself stood behind her, issuing orders and taking control of things as he always did.
She must not let Woodrow know she was here.
She could almost hear that command as if Ransom had snapped it. The boy was in danger—clearly he’d been allowed to come and go here only because he knew nothing of Mr. Pemminey’s “sponsors.” No one took him seriously. But Merlin was learning the ways of kidnappers and Frenchmen. If they discovered that Woodrow had seen or heard of Merlin—then, of course, they could not let him go back to Mount Falcon.
She looked at the heavy-set guard standing over Mr. Pemminey, and wondered if he could read.
No, Ransom’s incisive, imaginary voice warned her. Too risky.
“We,” the guard had said. Even if this one were illiterate, he wasn’t alone in defending Mr. Pemminey’s castle.
She watched Mr. Pemminey fuss with the inkwell, blotching the table with black and deciding that he needed to cut a new quill. She put her palm to her cheek. The guard looked up at the sudden move, his hand twitching toward his sword. Wetting her lips, Merlin gave him a wan smile. He grinned back at her.
“Mr. Pemminey,” she said, “have you ever tried a hedgehog quill?”
He cast her an impatient glance. “A hedgehog quill! You don’t mean to write with?”
“Oh, yes.” She turned to the wooden settle, where her kidnappers had kindly placed her bandbox, and swung it up by the braided strap. “Look!”
She dumped the hedgehog out onto the table. It rolled a few inches and began to uncurl.
“You see,” she said with an excess of enthusiasm, “the spines are quite sharp. Just the thing for making a very fine line.”
“Nay, don’t muddle him about while he’s trying to think, miss,” the guard said.
Mr. Pemminey nodded. “Really, my dear. You have the most peculiar notions.” He bent over the hedgehog. “Why, the quills aren’t more than an inch long! How in heaven could one hold on to the thing?”
“It’s quite simple.” Merlin reached for the hedgehog and caught its hind legs, pulling it toward her and knocking over the inkwell in the process. “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry! Here, quickly—” She plopped the hedgehog paws-down in the puddle of ink, as if to sop it up.
“Now see what you’ve done,” Mr. Pemminey exclaimed. “And there it goes, making footprints right across my note paper!”
“Forgive me!” She used the tail end of Ransom’s cravat to wipe up the excess ink from the table.
The guard waved dismissively as Mr. Pemminey began to rummage for another piece of paper. “Never mind that. You ain’t writin’ to the prince. I need to get back down to the gate with it.”
Merlin dabbed at the hedgehog, pretending to clean off the ink, while she tried to see if a clear paw print showed through Mr. Pemminey’s letters. But the animal had had enough of espionage. It rolled up tightly and would not uncurl.
Mr. Pemminey dashed off his signature and sanded the paper. “There you are. And bring us a bite of lunch, if you please.”
The guard made a casual salute with the note. “Soon’s I deliver this.” He grinned again at Merlin, and gave her a suggestive wink. She bit her lip and let her mouth curl upward just a little, peeking at the man under her eyelashes.
The door closed behind him. Merlin heard the bolt slide into place.
“There,” Mr. Pemminey said. “You see?”
“See what?”
“Why, the fellow’s going to bring us lunch! How could he be French? And an excellent lunch it will be, I’ll wager. Lobster and boiled artichokes with some melted butter to go along.”
“But he’s locked us in,” Merlin said.
“Nonsense. Why ever would he do that?”
“Because.” She held back an urge to pick up the ink-pot and dash it on him. “They’re the French.”
Mr. Pemminey trotted to the door. “Locked us in,” he muttered. “What a pack of—” The door shifted and clunked under his tug. He pulled at it again. “Good God,” he said.
Merlin looked at him smugly and clasped her hands behind her back.
“But—” Mr. Pemminey ran plump fingers through his mist of gray hair.
“We’re prisoners.”
“Oh, come now. I’m sure…” He wet his lips, looking at her dubiously. “It must be an oversight.”
“Hah.” She walked to the narrow window and pushed the leaded casement wider, leaning out. Below, it was an unimpeded drop from the tower to the smooth hazy silver of the Channel. “Look at this. We’ve been kidnapped, I tell you.”
“I haven’t been kidnapped, young lady. I live here in perfect freedom.”
“When your servants wear swords, and won’t let you out of the room!” She gave a scathing snort. “Don’t you know anything?”
Mr. Pemminey tapped nervously on the tabletop. “Well. I suppose the domestics have become a trifle high-handed.” He watched her peering out the window. “You aren’t expecting that I should do anything about it, are you?”
She looked back at him. “Whatever could you do?”
“Oh—” He cleare
d his throat. “Fight our way out. Swords and pistols. Things like that. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know.”
Merlin rolled her eyes. “Of course not. You’d be killed.”
“Yes, yes, I did think that might be a consideration.”
“You won’t have to do anything.” She peered out the window again. “I’ve been looking the situation over. The front gate is quite ineligible, of course. But that path on the side of the cliff—” She pointed outside along the coastline, where the vertical face of white chalk plunged down to the water below. “Do you see? It goes right round the edge at the gatehouse wall and out onto this peninsula. It isn’t very wide…and there’s that one ravine to cross, of course. But I’m sure that’s a leap of only a few feet.” She turned around and smiled at Mr. Pemminey. “So there,” she said comfortably as she rolled the hedgehog off the table and back into the bandbox. “We might as well have lunch. It will be a little while before Ransom can come to rescue us.”
This is stupid, Ransom thought.
He stood beside his horse in the dubious cover of wind-dwarfed brush, looking up at the crumbling walls and towers of Pemminey Castle.
Behind him, the South Downs rolled away in gradually descending billows of olive-green. Before him, the smooth, grassy hill rose up and up, crowned by the half-ruined castle walls standing cinder-gray against the hazy sky.
As far as Ransom was concerned, attacking fortified positions single-handedly was something best left to fairy tales and the rather ill-advised knights who inhabited them.
Very, very stupid.
Almost as moronic as believing that a smudge between a “b” and a “u” on a sweat-grimed note matched a smudge on the leather blotter on his desk at Mount Falcon. And that both ink stains represented the literary ramblings of a particularly well-traveled hedgehog.
Listening to twelve-year-old boys: that was his mistake. Letting a pair of earnest, tear-filled eyes look up at him in spite of a murderous scold and the sentence of a week’s confinement to the nursery, and allowing a bravely stammer-free voice to say, “Begging your pardon, sir; just a moment of your time, sir. Would you look at this before I go? I think I might have found Miss Merlin, sir.”
The Machiavellian young cub. He’d probably timed it for maximum effect. But if Woodrow thought anything was going to soften his punishment for disobeying Ransom’s direct order not to leave the estate, he could think again. Hedgehog footprints be damned.
It was no doubt smugglers who’d taken over Pemminey Castle, as Ransom had been at pains to explain to Woodrow. Since Bonaparte had turned his attention to more promising shores, the Gentlemen of the Sussex coast had expanded their illegal activities tenfold. It would come as no surprise to anyone if the impoverished Pemminey had decided to finance his eccentricities by hiring out his strategically located castle to run a few contraband kegs.
So Ransom had a choice. He could march up to the gatehouse, which effectively cut off the castle itself on its little peninsula, and begin negotiations for a new supply of brandy, or he could skulk about like some revenue officer and try to find a covert way in. The first, he felt, would get him laughed at. The second was like to get him shot.
Then there was the third possibility, of course: the remote chance that Merlin and her abductors were here—a secret in plain sight.
It had a certain consistency, that notion. Like imprisoning her the first time in Ransom’s own park. If it were so, he could begin to get a feel for the mind behind these schemes: the sharp eye for character and how a person would respond to pressure, the detailed knowledge of events at Mount Falcon, and the clear familiarity with the countryside around.
If it were so.
All he had to go on was a smudge on a piece of smudgy paper. And hope…which he didn’t trust for a moment.
He’d sat at his desk half the night, thinking. Early this morning, he’d abandoned thinking and proceeded ahead to foolishness. He’d saddled his horse and ridden out to Pemminey Castle alone.
He dug in his saddlebag and took out a spyglass, steadying his arms on his hunter’s back. The castle looked like a hundred others, stone walls kept in repair in a few places, falling down in most. The curtain wall, with its gatehouse pinched between two ponderous towers, curved around and out of sight at the crest of the hill. Somewhere beyond was the limestone cliff of Beachy Head, highest on a coastline of dauntingly high cliffs.
Perched at the edge, Pemminey Castle was doomed. The sea ate away at the shore. A fortress that must have stood on a solid promontory centuries before now balanced on a crumbling peninsula, with half the ramparts already fallen away.
At least, so Ransom had been told. He had never in his life entertained the least desire to see this phenomenon for himself.
He closed his eyes at the very thought.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
He opened them again and focused on the gatehouse. There were figures there. He counted four men, and possibly more, slouched against what was left of the crenellations in a casual, confident watch. If they were smugglers, it was a major operation and an unusually delicate one, to require any more safeguard than a good hiding place and some well-greased palms.
Beyond the curtain wall, there seemed to be an interval of empty space—a courtyard, most probably, hidden behind the stone fortifications. Much farther back, the castle walls mounted into view again, and rose to a culmination in the highest tower of all. Through his eyeglass, Ransom followed the wall of wind-scoured stone upward, from window to narrow window, until he reached the topmost one.
“Damnation,” he muttered.
The window flew a pennant of crimson. Hidden from the gatehouse by the curve of the tower, the splash of color waved and fluttered. As an odd gust of wind flattened it against the wall, he made out the sleeves and voluminous outline of his truant dressing gown.
He closed the eyeglass, crossed his arms, and buried his face in the leather curve of his saddle.
It took a few moments to compose himself. The elation at finding Merlin here was dampened considerably by the circumstances. He discarded any ideas of calling out the garrison at Eastbourne to storm the place. It was highly unlikely Merlin would be allowed to survive a direct attack.
He squinted again at the castle. He knew nothing of its layout, despite having lived in the neighborhood his entire life. Castles on cliff edges were not prominent on Ransom’s list of places to spend time. Poor Pemminey, last of his noble Norman line, was clearly a lunatic. No sane man would choose to live in that sea-girded ruin while there was a leaking hovel to be found anywhere.
Ransom thought of returning to Mount Falcon for help; of waiting until night for a secret attack. He abandoned both ideas. Time crowded at him. It seemed likely they meant to take her to France in the dark of the moon like any other sensible smugglers of humanity or brandy. And with the help of an overcast sky, it would be dark enough tonight.
He looped the horse’s reins in a bush and took off his hat. He was armed, at least—with a rapier and two pistols. When he left his mount, he moved away from the castle, staying amidst the gnarled bushes to angle around the hillside. When he’d gone far enough to be hidden from the gatehouse entirely, Ransom began to work his way higher, toward the castle itself.
The blind crest of the hill still hid the peninsula. Amidst the increasing roar of the wind in the bushes above him, he could see only the tower and its telltale crimson pennant floating over the curtain wall. The path was leading him straight toward the place where the wall took an abrupt turn and disappeared from view at the crown of the hill.
When he straightened from the cover of the scrub, hard wind caught his hair. In front of him the bushes came to an abrupt end, giving way to the grassy summit a few yards ahead. Beyond the crest, he could see nothing but sky, bluish-gray in the haze.
The castle wall was deserted, the protective crenellations long since crumbled away. Ransom judged that any threat along the top of it would have been visible. He looked
up, eyeing the place where it made a corner and vanished over the crown of the hill. If he could reach that spot…
He put his hand on his sword and ducked, keeping low to cross the short space of open ground. Wind buffeted him the instant he left the cover of the bushes. He headed up, across the slant of the incline, looking back toward the gatehouse towers. No alarm came. He had nearly reached the crest and the safety of the wall when he glanced to his other side.
His stomach turned. He lurched to a sudden, frozen halt.
Beside him, there was nothing. No hill curving down from the summit, no wall, no bushes, no grass…nothing but wind, in ferocious force, and the blinding white face of a perpendicular drop.
His wits deserted him. His body arched back in a wild hiss of recoil. Hummocks of wind-ripped grass clung where the castle masonry had long ago torn away, stone evaporating into space at a ragged edge. Below it, the chalk cliff plummeted toward nothing.
He crushed his fist over his mouth and took one step backward. Then terror and vertigo made him wrench around in a crazed dread that the ground had opened up behind him, too. The wind seemed to grab, pushing and pulling in willful violence. He flung himself toward the nearest solid thing, the wall, and pressed back against it as if he could drive his fingers and skull and spine right into the stone.
He braced there, his heart and the wind a mad battery of sound. The rapier angled awkwardly, its sheath stabbing his thigh, but he could not bring himself to move enough to ease it. His body twitched, wanting to curl, wanting to roll up in frantic self-protection.
He let his knees collapse, a quick, hard drop to the solid ground, with his heels braced in the dirt and his back shoved as vigorously against the stone as his muscles could manage.
He closed his eyes. Sickness rolled in his chest and stomach. He tilted his head back against the stone, taking air in great gulps that gradually slowed as his mind began to agree with his senses and assure him that he was on firm earth.
When his breathing had come back to something more or less like normality, he ventured a brief look. From his position at the base of the wall, the cliff was invisible again. On one side of him, the hill sloped up from below, unfaltering in its even incline. On the other, grass tossed and rippled at the summit, creating the comforting illusion that the land went on beyond.
The Regency Romances Page 35