Three friars down, Henry Innes made some sort of bawdy comment. Robert’s lips tightened with impatience. Why didn’t they just get on with it?
Once Wrothan was in custody, his debt to the colonel would be done. Only a month ago, the possibility of his quest coming to an end had left him with a hollow sensation, like falling off the end of the earth. Now he craved that resolution. Once this night was done, he need never wear a cassock again. He could break with Medmenham and his whole gruesome crew. He could try to make things right with Charlotte.
That, he knew, was the root and stem of all his impatience, not the burning desire to avenge the colonel, but the need to see this all done so he could make his amends to Charlotte. The future wasn’t a desert anymore, or an endless sea fraught with serpents; it was a garden to be tended, a pleasant place away from the rest of the world, with unicorns to be courted and flowers to be plucked. It was Girdings and Charlotte and everything from which he had been running all these years.
If she would have him, that was. After the events of the past few weeks, that was by no means a foregone conclusion.
In the centre of the nave, Medmenham raised his torch high, angling it towards a deep bowl that had been hung where a chandelier must have been, long, long ago. His sleeves fell back from his arms, revealing two red-eyed elephants, whose trunks twined down his forearms.
‘Gentlemen!’ he called out. It was, Robert thought, a singularly inappropriate term under the circumstances. ‘I give you … the sacred flame!’
Across the aisle, Wrothan inclined his head in a barely perceptible nod. Next to him, the Frenchman nodded back.
As fireworks shot into the air, cartwheeling through the high, arched ceiling, the swish of a monk on the move was barely perceptible through the crackle of the fireworks and the catcalls of the members. Robert automatically cast a quick glance around as he prepared to follow, and nearly tripped over his own habit as he saw what the explosion of light had illuminated. One by one, the babbling voices fell into silence as the hooded body of men stared, as one, at one small girl huddled at the far end of the nave, clutching at the door handle with one gloved hand.
Robert’s triumph turned to ashes in his mouth. It wasn’t just any girl. It was Charlotte. Even in a shapeless dark cloak, with a hood shading her face, he knew her. He would have known her anywhere.
Had she followed them? Guilt rose, acrid and viscous, in Robert’s throat. If he had brought her to this, however unintentionally …
‘My, my,’ drawled the amused voice of Sir Francis as the last of the rockets exploded, unleashing a shower of sparks that made Charlotte shrink back against the door. ‘The great elephant god is nothing if not quick with his rewards!’
Beneath the raucous laughter Robert could hear a pitiful squeaking sound. It was the leather of Charlotte’s glove, scraping against the doorknob as she struggled to get it to turn. Abandoning all subtlety, she turned her back on the company and used both hands to tug at the knob. It was no use. The door was stuck. And so was she.
From the left side of the church came a decided click as the door to the churchyard swung shut behind Wrothan and his companion, prepared to implicate themselves in all manner of dastardly plans. It was the moment Robert had been waiting for since the colonel’s death, the culmination of months of painstaking plotting and tracking. He had dreamt of this moment during the long voyage from India to England; the prospect of it had kept him warm against the biting winds of the endless ride to Girdings. His revenge was finally at hand.
Robert didn’t have to think twice.
He sprinted forwards, grabbing Charlotte around the waist and hoisting her up over his shoulder so that all his fellow friars could see were a pair of rapidly kicking legs in silk stockings. Let Tommy and the War Office man deal with Wrothan.
‘Mmmrph!’ bleated Charlotte into his back.
He decided to take that as ‘Thanks, awfully, for saving me’ rather than ‘Put me down right now!’
‘Sorry, my fault!’ Robert announced, making sure to keep any bit of Charlotte that might be the least bit recognisable between his back and the wall. Since there was only one bit of Charlotte that anyone in the room ought to recognise, that was simple enough. ‘This one’s mine. I forgot to tell her to go round the back.’
He could tell the exact moment she recognised his voice. Her hands stopped clawing at his back and her legs ceased their kicking. In that one moment, she went entirely rigid, with a stiffness born of shock.
A sucking sense of despair settled somewhere in Robert’s middle, like low-lying fog. The game was up. There would be no making it up to her now, no explanations that would suffice. How could she not despise him after seeing this? It would have been one thing to tell her about his recent activities – with suitable ameliorations – quite another for her to have seen it with her own eyes. He had always known the gods were cruel. He had just never realised quite how cruel.
The only slight saving grace was that Medmenham looked even worse than he. It was scant comfort.
‘No fair hogging her!’ one of his brethren called out in raucous tones. ‘Share and share alike, that’s our motto!’
Robert could have sworn that their motto was ‘only the best for our orgies,’ but a low rumble of assent greeted the man’s statement.
‘I say, pass ’er over!’ shouted out Lord Henry, losing his aspirates in his enthusiasm for female flesh. ‘Looks like a ripe ’un.’
‘Ripe but not ready,’ parried Robert, miming a hearty pat to Charlotte’s backside. In for a penny, in for a pound, after all. Her gasp of indignation was lost somewhere in the folds of his cassock. ‘Can’t you see she isn’t properly costumed? Besides, we can’t have the girls before the ceremony. The god wouldn’t like it. And if the god doesn’t like it …’
Charlotte hung heavy over his shoulder, so still, she seemed to be scarcely breathing. He could feel her listening with every fibre in her body, listening as though her life depended on it. Didn’t she even trust him to get her safely out?
But, then, why should she? Robert asked himself with brutal honesty. His record so far hadn’t exactly been one of spotless knight errantry. The truth of it stung like sharpened steel thrust straight through the vitals.
‘I’ll just go deposit her in the back, shall I?’ Robert suggested. He didn’t wait for anyone to propose an alternate plan. Instead, he lurched towards the door to the vestry as fast as he could go, with Charlotte jouncing against his back with every step, twisting her out of the reach of an inebriated monk who made a grab for her temptingly displayed posterior.
‘No sampling the goods early!’ he snapped.
‘Someone needs to teach you to share,’ pronounced Medmenham provocatively, hefting his torch.
‘Would you share?’ demanded Robert with deliberate insolence. With the resultant burst of laughter as a shield, he slipped through the door to the vestry, clipping one of Charlotte’s shoes against the door frame in the process. Charlotte made an irritated choking sound.
Fighting for balance, Robert kicked the door shut behind them. It wouldn’t stymie pursuit, but it might slow it.
Charlotte immediately began to indicate that she wished to be set down.
‘Not. Now,’ Robert gritted out, tightening his hold on the backs of her legs. ‘Do you want them to have you?’
With any luck, the members of the society would be too eager for the promised pleasure of their magical elixir and multitalented dancing girls to care to pursue, but he wouldn’t feel properly safe until there was a good mile between Charlotte and the brethren. Make that two miles, he amended.
Through the thick wooden door the chanting was beginning, calling for the elephant god. Medmenham must have used the torch to light the braziers. Scented smoke began to seep beneath the door frame, making Robert’s stomach heave in memory.
Maybe it wasn’t just the smoke making his stomach heave. Robert kicked open the door on the side of the vestry, taking out some of his anger on th
e unsuspecting planks. This was not how this was supposed to have gone. What in all the blazes was Charlotte doing barging into the Hellfire Club? Serpentlike, he could hear Medmenham’s voice urging Charlotte to improve her acquaintance with ‘architecture.’
Bending forwards from the waist, Robert eased Charlotte to the ground, trying to keep her from tumbling over into the mud of the churchyard.
Charlotte stumbled as she landed, swaying in place as she tried to get her bearings. One hand lifted to her head while the other came to rest against the church wall. Lowering her head, she took a deep breath, then another, sucking in the cool, damp air.
‘Are you all right?’ he demanded in a rough whisper, grasping her by the arms. He resisted the urge to examine her for broken bones, an absurd notion. Any bruises were undoubtedly internal rather than otherwise.
Charlotte ducked her head, still fighting for breath. ‘Fine,’ she wheezed, and then came the question he had been dreading. ‘What was—’
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said quickly, knowing he could only delay, not avoid. ‘We need to get you away. Before they come after us.’
How was he even to get her away? He had come with Medmenham, in Medmenham’s carriage, which was now the devil only knew where.
‘What in the blazes are you doing here?’ he demanded belatedly. His hands tightened on her arms. ‘Did Medmenham invite you?’
‘No! I hadn’t known he would be here. Or you. Or even where here is.’ Charlotte blinked a few times, as though she were still having trouble focusing. ‘What are you doing here?’
He hardly remembered. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story,’ he promised. ‘Later. After we get you home. This is no place for a lady.’
‘But—’ began Charlotte.
‘Did you come in a carriage? A sedan chair? This is no neighbourhood to walk about in.’
It was already too late. A crunching in the underbrush alerted him to the fact that they were no longer alone.
Whirling around to face off French spies, treacherous Englishmen, and drunken monks of any nationality, Robert found himself facing a medium-size female in an expensive silk cloak lined with swansdown.
‘Um, Charlotte? Oh, hello, Dovedale.’ Lady Henrietta Dorrington flashed him a winning smile while Robert attempted to realign his jaw with the rest of his face. ‘I do hate to interrupt, but there is something you ought to see.’
Charlotte had brought a friend? Robert bypassed guilt and went straight to anger.
‘Does either of you realise that this is not Almack’s Assembly Rooms?’ Robert gritted out.
‘Of course,’ said Charlotte, as if Robert were the one being silly. ‘There’s no ratafia.’
Robert found himself entirely incapable of speech.
Now he understood why their early ancestors had expressed themselves entirely in grunts. No other noise could quite encapsulate his current level of shock, anger, and general disbelief. Anger surged to the fore, trumping shock, when Charlotte, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had just rescued her from the proverbial fate worse than death, blithely turned to her friend, dismissing him entirely.
‘Did you find the doctor?’ Charlotte asked eagerly. The who?
‘I’m afraid so.’ Lady Henrietta’s face was as grim as it could get. Swinging her lantern, she gestured, not towards the street but towards the back of the church, where pitted gravestones clustered close together in the lee of the drooping eaves. ‘Follow me.’
With mud slurping around his boots, Robert followed. His only other choice was to fling Charlotte back over his shoulder and bear her bodily forth into the street. It was an attractive option, but not one that Charlotte was likely to approve.
Did it matter what she approved anymore?
‘Who,’ Robert demanded tersely, ‘is the doctor?’
‘This is,’ said Lady Henrietta soberly, pointing to the gap between two tombstones. She lifted the shutter of her lantern, and what Robert had perceived as merely a fallen log took on a hideous resolution.
‘Or, rather, this was,’ she amended.
A man sprawled between the tombstones. Like Robert, he wore the simple brown wool cassock of the Order of St Francis, tied at the waist with the regulation leather belt, tipped with twin prongs of metal. A pair of old-fashioned buckled shoes protruded from beneath his robe, any gems that had been set into the buckle long since prized out of their frames. His hood had fallen back from his head, revealing close-cropped dark hair and a face too thin for fashion.
The light of Lady Henrietta’s lantern reflected off the glistening surface of his eyes. For a moment, Robert expected him to speak, to lever himself up, to make a dash across the tombstones, through the churchyard. But the eyes were fixed, open, unmoving. It was only the treacherous lamplight that gave the illusion of life to eyes that would never blink again.
Someone had beaten Robert to his revenge.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘Good heavens,’ Charlotte whispered. ‘It’s Dr Simmons.’ Henrietta took a step back, leaving room for the other two to get a better view. ‘I’m afraid I … well, I stepped on him. Not that it can hurt him now.’
Nothing was ever going to hurt him again. Blood mingled with the slush and mud, creating an unpleasant musky smell that made Charlotte’s stomach churn, overlaid with the faint, delicate scent of a foreign flower. The incongruity made Charlotte’s stomach churn. Catching on to a tombstone for balance, she backed away, shutting her own eyes to block out that fixed and glittering stare. The dead features were frozen in an eternal gloat.
‘At least he died happy,’ said Charlotte faintly, doing her best to cultivate an expression of sangfroid and failing miserably. Dead bodies weren’t something she generally encountered.
Robert swung towards Henrietta. ‘Did you see who did this?’ he asked sharply.
Henrietta shook her head. ‘I heard a thud—’ she began, when two men pounded around the side of the tavern.
‘Hullo!’ The larger of the two waved a hand in the air as he vaulted – quite unnecessarily – over a tombstone to land within a yard of the doctor’s body.
‘I see you’ve found him,’ Miles gasped, resting his hands on his thighs and bending over to catch his breath. ‘We chased the chap who did it, but – Hen?’
‘Miles?’ Recovering first, Henrietta clamped her hands on her hips. ‘I thought you had a card game!’
Miles was the picture of outraged dignity, marred only slightly by a patch of mud on his cheek. ‘I thought you were still at the theatre!’
Charlotte hastily interjected herself between the two. ‘This is a sort of performance,’ she said soothingly. ‘Like a masque.’
‘Looks more like a farce to me,’ commented Lieutenant Fluellen sagely, earning a glower from his best friend.
‘What in the – er, what are you doing here?’ Robert demanded, turning his glower on Charlotte instead.
‘What he said,’ Miles seconded, looping an arm firmly around his wife’s waist before she could get away again. ‘Including what he didn’t say.’
Charlotte cocked her head at Miles. ‘What he didn’t say?’
She tried not to notice the way that Henrietta leant against Miles, her head fitting comfortably into the crook of his shoulder. Even while ostensibly arguing, they still gravitated together. It would be so lovely to be able to lean against someone like that, with all the unspoken support it implied. Not to mention the warmth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Robert standing next to her, near enough that the hem of his cassock brushed against the side of her pelisse. He radiated heat, too, but it was all of the wrong kind. Tension and irritation rolled off him in palpable waves. Charlotte felt her own shoulders stiffen in reaction.
‘Never mind that,’ said Robert brusquely. ‘Why are you here?’
‘We were following the king’s doctor,’ Charlotte explained defiantly.
‘The king’s who?’ Miles demanded of his wife.
‘You first,’ Henrietta
said. ‘You still haven’t told us why you’re here.’
‘Are we really going to have this conversation here?’ Grimacing, Lieutenant Fluellen waved a gloved hand at the doctor’s crumpled form.
‘Well, we don’t need to worry about him eavesdropping,’ said Miles cheerfully, earning a poke in the ribs from his wife. ‘Ouch!’
Lifting an eyebrow at Miles, Robert took charge before further horseplay could ensue. ‘Perhaps we should search him,’ he suggested. Coming from Robert, the suggestion had the force of a command.
‘Jolly good idea!’ Miles hunkered down next to the body like a dog with a particularly juicy bone. ‘I say, do cassocks have pockets?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Robert, patting down the area around the wound. ‘If the owner bothered to have them put in.’
‘Unless the other chappie relieved him of any burdens before sticking him.’ Lieutenant Fluellen crouched down beside them, inspecting the dead man’s shoes for concealed hidey-holes.
Charlotte hastily stepped back to give them more room. Next to her, Henrietta stood on her tiptoes, craning her neck to try to see over the men’s bent backs.
‘He had no time,’ said Robert tersely. ‘Unless he lifted something off Wrothan in the Robing Room beforehand.’
‘Wrothan?’ asked Charlotte, head swimming in a flurry of masculine pronouns. The gentlemen all seemed to understand one another perfectly, but she had no idea who was meant to have stabbed whom.
‘The dead one,’ supplied Miles helpfully.
‘You mean Dr Simmons,’ corrected Henrietta.
‘Unless,’ said Charlotte, ‘Mr Wrothan is Dr Simmons.’
Robert pushed himself to his feet, scrubbing his hands against his robe with a compulsive gesture that reminded Charlotte of Lady Macbeth. The movement only smeared the blood rather than removing it, giving him, in his medieval cassock, the appearance of something out of a novel by Mrs Radcliffe.