A Lily Among Thorns, page 26
“Solomon, you have to let me look at it.”
“It’s nothing.” But he could only resist for so long, and finally he sat still and let Elijah lift the lamp to examine his head. Elijah froze. Solomon braced himself.
“This isn’t a bullet wound,” Elijah said in a hard voice.
They couldn’t ask the kitchen to bear the burden of treason with them, so when they went through the kitchen door, Serena was in front of René like a shield. This was the part with the most likelihood of going wrong. His arm was around her throat and he had the cool butt of the pistol pressed against her temple. “Open the tunnel,” René said.
There was absolute silence. This late, the only people working were Antoine, marinating meat for tomorrow’s dinner, and two kitchen boys readying food for breakfast. Frozen in horror, they stared at the pair.
“Open the tunnel or she dies,” René said. Antoine reached for his knife.
“Please, Antoine,” Serena said. “Just let him go.” It worked. Antoine hurried across the floor to the trapdoor and tugged on the iron ring. René pushed her gently across the kitchen.
“You son of a bitch,” Antoine said viciously, all traces of his French accent gone. “You’ll never get out of here alive.”
“Then neither will she,” René said, his voice strung taut. Serena shuddered. It was probably true, if not for the reasons Antoine thought.
The chef spat on the ground at their feet, but he stepped aside and left the way to the tunnel open. Hatred twisted his face. Serena, remembering the hours he and René had spent together, wanted to explain to him that it was all right, that it wasn’t real. But that was impossible. She let René drag her down the stairs.
“If I hear anyone else come through this door, I will shoot her on the spot,” René told them. “If you can hold them off long enough, though, I’ll let her go safe and sound. Now close it and go about your business.”
And the door closed over them, sealing the tunnel in darkness. René let her go, and they raced down the tunnel. When they got to the other end that came out at the laundry, they crouched down and listened.
Serena’s heart sank. The laundry should have been empty at this hour, but the distinct sounds of sex came from above them: a faint rhythmic thumping and the occasional moan. Someone was using the laundry for illicit dalliance. She cursed.
“We’ll give them two minutes to finish and go away,” René said quietly. “Then we try to brazen it out, like we did back there. Once we get out, I can scale the fence behind the laundry.” He sounded unnaturally calm.
Serena wondered how many times in the course of his career he had waited in darkness for the sounds of someone coming to arrest him. “Where will you go from there? What if they’re watching the street?”
“I don’t think I should tell you,” René said. “It will be easier for you to lie that way. I don’t think they’ll be watching the street. They may be watching the courtyard. I shall have to take my chances. They are better than they were a few minutes ago, sirène. Thank you.”
They settled down next to each other in the dark, counting the seconds and trying to ignore the sounds from above. Serena tried to think of what she would do if she were escaping over the back wall. She thought that if he could be quiet, René’s chances of getting out of the courtyard unseen were good—the back door to the laundry came out in a narrow strip of yard enclosed on two sides by fence and shielded from view of most of the rest of the yard. There couldn’t be many of the Foreign Office agents, and if they didn’t know about the tunnel, there was no reason to put someone anywhere he might see René. In his place, once out, she would probably cross the alley, cut through some back gardens, come out in another street, and look for a hackney working late.
She shivered, wondering how many of the agents would know René by sight. If there weren’t any watching the street—if they were watching the doors from the inside—it would probably be all right. But the thought of René walking across even that narrow strip of courtyard with nothing to hide or shield him was terrifying.
These were the last two minutes she might ever spend with him. She wanted suddenly to have one last ordinary, friendly conversation. “How did you know the earrings opened the fireplace?”
He chuckled. “The fireplace opens in two different ways. It was made by Charles the First’s own clockmaker. You saw when we opened it—there’s a clockwork timing mechanism of some sort with an unknown delay. You can open it once just by twisting Diana’s hand halfway round, as I discovered. At that moment I happened to be in a hurry to hide those papers where you wouldn’t find them. I was hasty. But once I’d hidden those papers in there and closed it, it refused to open that way again. I had given them up for lost when I saw some Stuart letters on display in an old bibliothèque in Paris. In one, Charles the Second wrote to his brother from Scotland, mysteriously assuring him that he had got the ruby earrings from their mother and would recapture his hidden treasure from the Rose and Thistle as soon as he reached London. In the other he said he’d given the earrings away to a fellow named Hathaway, in Shropshire.”
“Was there a hidden treasure?” Serena asked.
“Not when I opened it. It had been two hundred years. Anyone could have found it in the meantime.” He paused. “I am so sorry, sirène,” he said, speaking fast. “I never wanted to use the marriage lines. But when I saw you had given my room to a Hathaway from Shropshire, I panicked. For all I knew, he had the earrings and the full secret of their use. If you had found those papers and turned your father in, my entire web of informants would have been useless. Everything went through Ravenscroft.”
“It’s all right.” It wasn’t, really. He had hurt her so much. He hadn’t wanted to, but he had been willing to. And she would have been willing to kill him for the Arms. She didn’t want to think about it.
She did have one question, though, that she had to know the answer to. “My father didn’t—didn’t send you to me, did he? When you came to me and asked me to be your partner?” She didn’t know what she wanted to hear—yes, her father had wanted to save her and she owed him everything? Or no, the Arms was still hers and her father had never cared for a moment?
“Non, ma petite sirène,” he said gently. “I found you all on my own. Your father never had a say in anything I did. He took the money he needed and we used his coastline and that was all.”
Serena nodded. It was as good an answer as any, she decided. And it meant that her father’s threat of Bedlam would disappear now the war was over. It meant she would probably never see him again. It was cold in the tunnel. She leaned her head on René’s shoulder.
He went still for a moment, surprised, but then he put his arm around her shoulders. “You know how I finally figured out how the earrings worked?” he asked her, a teasing note in his voice.
She shook her head.
“When you recited that charming bit of verse to me, my first night back,” he told her. “As soon as I heard ‘place these jewels among Phoebe’s sweet hair’ and ‘shine in the sun,’ I remembered the missing rubies in the carving.”
Serena could have kicked herself.
“If I don’t get out of here, will you send some money to my mother? Elijah knows where.”
“Of course,” she promised. “But you’ll get out. Do you want me to give Elijah a message?”
“No. If he wants me, he knows where to find me.”
The thumping from above stopped abruptly. They both froze, listening. Serena thought about a minute and a half had passed. The couple had thirty seconds for pillow talk. Luckily, they didn’t bother with it at all. Someone laughed, footsteps shifted, and a few seconds later the door banged shut. There was silence.
“It is time, sirène,” René said. They stood. “How do you want to play your end of things?”
Serena had been thinking about this. “They can’t suspect I was involved. You’ll have to knock me out.”
René cursed. “Take your stockings off. I’ll bind and gag you. I should have been thinking of it all this time, instead of talking.”
“I’m glad we talked, and there’s no time.” As she said it, they both heard yelling from the kitchen.
“Take off your stockings,” René repeated.
Serena grabbed the lever that controlled the trapdoor from that end and pulled on it. Slowly, with a grinding of gears, the door swung open. Dim light and the scent of lye filled the tunnel.
Then she saw, as if in answer, a widening ray of light at the other end of the tunnel. The yelling was suddenly much louder.
“Don’t go down there,” Antoine shouted frantically. “Please! He’ll kill her!”
Sophy appeared in the doorway of Solomon’s room. “Is Serena all right—ohhh!” A hand flew up to cover her mouth when she saw the blood caked on Solomon’s forehead. “What happened?”
“I’m fine, Sophy,” he said reassuringly. “Here, why don’t you come help me get cleaned up so my brother can go chasing after Sacreval?” He smiled at Elijah, ignoring the fury in his brother’s eyes.
Elijah could hardly accuse him of treason in front of Sophy. His look promised a reckoning, however. “Yes, that would be very helpful, Sophy.”
Sophy shut the door behind Elijah and hastened to Solomon’s side. “Did Sacreval do that?” she asked bitterly, pointing to his wound.
“No,” he whispered, gesturing her to come closer. “Listen, Sophy—Sacreval gave Serena papers that will give her the Arms back. She’s taking him out the laundry tunnel right now. You’ve got to keep them from finding him.”
Her eyes widened. She pushed her glasses up her nose decisively and was halfway to the door when a thought struck him.
“Sophy!”
She came back.
“My brother suspects what’s going on. He may realize what I’ve told you and be waiting outside to follow you. If he is, you must lead him on a wild goose chase.”
She nodded grimly. “Just leave it to me.” She went and opened the door partway, poking her head out into the corridor and glancing about. Then she slipped out the door and shut it softly behind her.
After that, there wasn’t really anything useful to do but wait. Solomon took up the rag and began washing the blood out of his hair. The ticking of the clock filled the room. They were still cheering downstairs. It must be for Wellington’s victory; it must.
He should have let Sacreval blow his own brains out. He should never have let Serena out of his sight.
Solomon had never felt so helpless in his life. But there was nothing more he could do without risking making things much, much worse. He picked the broken pieces of his bottle of Madeira off the floor, piling them into a bowl.
Someone kicked the door open. Solomon sprang to his feet. The Foreign Office agents were entering the room, and one of them bore a lifeless Serena in his arms.
Chapter 25
Solomon leaned on his worktable for support as the world spun around him. He watched them lay Serena on the bed. There didn’t seem to be any blood. Could he see her breathing, or was that just his light-headedness? No, she was definitely breathing, and Solomon could move his eyes again.
He seized one of the agents by his shirt and had him up against the wall before he knew what he was about. “What have you done to her? If you’ve hurt her, you bastard—”
Serena’s voice came weakly from the bed. “Solomon?”
He turned. She was watching him, an amused light in her eyes. He didn’t move. “I’m right here,” he said. “What did they do to you?”
Her lips curved. “I imagine they carried me upstairs after René knocked me out.”
“Oh.” He let out a breath and let go of the agent’s shirtfront. “Er, sorry. And did they catch him?”
Elijah raced into the room in time to hear this last question. He stood stock-still in the doorway and stared at his fellow agents. Serena swung herself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.
“No,” said the man Solomon had assaulted, brushing himself off with a dirty look in his direction. “Forced her ladyship to take him out a secret tunnel, and then he knocked her cold and took off just ahead of us, like. Went over the wall.” The two agents were the only people in the room who were not secretly relieved, Solomon thought.
Elijah closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “It doesn’t matter. We can still send men after him to recover him before he ships for France.”
“I must say I am not overly impressed with Foreign Office initiative,” Serena commented dryly. A livid bruise was forming on her jaw and her lower lip was swelling. “You set up an elaborate operation to capture a man who lives in an inn with which he is intimately familiar, and you don’t trouble to discover that there’s a tunnel to the laundry? One of my employees might have been injured.”
“Fortunate that no one was injured but the two of you, then,” Elijah said blandly.
Serena smiled at him. “Very.”
“Well,” Solomon said, ignoring Elijah’s gimlet eye, “all that terror has left me with a bit of an appetite. Do you think we might go down for a late supper?”
“Yes,” Serena said. “If you have no further use for us, I should like to get dressed and verify that your men have not unduly terrified my guests.”
“Don’t think much could dampen the mood tonight,” one of the agents said, grinning.
Solomon waited with bated breath. Had he and Serena won their gamble?
For the first time, Elijah smiled. “Bonaparte’s been decisively defeated. Rothschild was right.”
The cheering turned into a buzz of speculation when they walked into the taproom and everyone saw Serena’s bruised jaw. She climbed onto a bench.
“Silence, everyone,” she said in a carrying voice. “I am pleased to announce that my erstwhile business partner, the marquis du Sacreval, is no longer on the premises. No one but Mr. Hathaway and myself have been injured in his daring escape. It is to be hoped that the proper authorities can be relied upon to halt him in his headlong flight to the Continent. In celebration of the decisive victory of His Majesty’s forces, champagne is on the house!”
Solomon and Serena were slumped on their stools, devouring a loaf of bread, when Lord Smollett walked in. “My, my,” he roared. “It’s a regular gin shop in here.”
Serena tried to draw herself up coolly and smile. Solomon could see her face trying to fall into its accustomed sardonic lines for several moments before she gave up and laughed exhaustedly.
Smollett looked rather puzzled, but he quickly recovered himself and gave Solomon a conspiratorial wink. “Women, you know. Apt to be hysterical.”
“Oh, go to hell,” Solomon said.
Serena stood up. “Lord Smollett. Lovely to see you.” She shook her head. “Christ. I can’t believe I wasted so many years giving a damn what you thought of me. Do you want to know something? I don’t regret having been your mistress. Know why?”
Lord Smollett patted his hair. “Don’t think any of my lights-o’-love have had much to complain of.”
“It was a small price to pay to be utterly ineligible ever to be your wife,” she told him. “Now that would have been a fate worse than death.”
Solomon thought he would treasure the look of stunned outrage on Smollett’s face for the rest of his life. His lordship harrumphed, turned round, and marched straight to the bar. “A large ale, please, and make it snappy.”
Serena sat down. “‘Forsake the foolish and live,’ right? What I don’t understand is why I could never do it before.”
“I think it’s one of those things that works better with two people.”
Solomon was trying to examine his cut in the mirror when a voice came from behind him. “Mr. Hathaway?”
Damn. He must have left the door open. He turned around to see a small, middle-aged man with a nasty expression on his aquiline features.
“Yes?”
The man sneered. “Should have known I’d find you in front of a mirror. Man-milliner.”
“I beg your pardon!”
“Oh, don’t play the shocked parson’s son with me, Hathaway. We don’t pay you to have delicate sensibilities.”
The penny dropped. Keeping a firm rein on his temper, Solomon began, “Perhaps you are seeking my—”
“I am seeking to know how you came to let Sacreval escape. You sodomites do stick together, don’t you?”
Solomon, stunned into speechlessness, saw his brother standing in the doorway.
“Don’t speak to my brother like that, Varney,” Elijah said coldly.
“Don’t you think that’s my line, Li?” Solomon asked. His heart was racing with fury, but he managed to smile politely at his brother’s Foreign Office superior. “Don’t speak to my brother like that, Varney.”
Varney looked from one to the other of them in fascination. “Oh yes, the twin brother. Does he take after you in that respect, too?”
“None of your damn business!” Solomon said hotly.
“Sol, stop,” Elijah said harshly.
Solomon turned to him in surprise and almost missed Varney’s gleaming, sharp-toothed smile.
“Public morality must be the concern of every citizen,” Varney said. “I imagine that is why the pillory is such a popular spectacle.”
Solomon had a sudden pleasing vision of his hands round Varney’s neck while the man choked and turned purple.
“I am so glad to hear you say so,” Serena said from the doorway, breaking through Solomon’s anger. “Perhaps, as a concerned citizen, you can offer me some advice on a rather delicate matter.”
Varney’s sharklike grin widened. “At your service, Siren.”
Solomon thought murderous thoughts, but he waited, because Serena could hold her own against this toad.
She smiled back and came to stand beside Solomon. “I’ve been thinking of publishing my memoirs.”
Varney’s grin disappeared.
“But you know,” she continued blithely, “there are a few passages I hesitate to include, for fear they will corrupt the impressionable reader. You have sons. Tell me, do you think they would be overly influenced by the frank description of the perversions of certain men of rank?”
