Unwilling to relinquish my hold on the door, I sidled closer by baby steps, one hand still braced against the heavy door, propping it open as far as my arm would allow. Whatever was inside there looked like something straight out of The Avengers, a diabolical machine bristling with levers and gears.
I was so occupied in squinting at the amorphous shape in the darkness that I didn’t hear the steps behind me. All I noticed was that the light, that feeble trail of light coming through the doorway, had suddenly been eclipsed, blotting out what little light there was with a large, man-shaped shadow.
And then it was too late to do anything at all.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It took nearly an hour to find a crew crazy enough to convey them thirty miles along the Thames by night.
On hearing that their party wanted to go farther than just across the river, the first three boats turned them down flat. The river was treacherous by day, they protested; to go by night was a fool’s game. Only the promise of ten times their normal fee, in gold, had prevailed with the fourth boat, and even then the boatmen had grumbled on their benches, pulling their oars with visible reluctance.
Burdened with six oarsmen and five passengers, the boat moved slowly through the dark waters of the Thames. A foul reek rose from the river, a compound of all manner of waste that human habitation could devise, all dumped into the murky waters of the Thames. The stench of a cantonment in India in summer was nothing to it.
The ladies had retreated beneath the tilt, or canopy, that formed a rudimentary cabin in the middle of the boat, although the open-walled cabin provided little barrier between them and the unwashed bodies of the boatmen that warred with the Thames for the prize of most noxious stench. Curled up one against the other for warmth, Charlotte and Henrietta had been lulled by the rocking of the boat into sleep. Miles had been the next to go, slumped at his lady’s feet like a dog on a medieval tombstone. Even Tommy had succumbed, his long legs stretched out in front of him across the width of the cabin. At least, thought Robert, his presence formed a sort of windbreak for the ladies.
Only Robert remained awake, alone at the prow of the boat, staring sightlessly at the waters ahead while the oars splashed rhythmically in and out of the water behind him. The lanterns hanging from the sides of the tilt did little to illuminate what lay ahead.
He sincerely hoped the boatmen knew where they were going. After all those years away, the Thames was as foreign to him as the Ganges. If the sun had been shining, he still wouldn’t know Henley from King’s Lynn. One town looked much the same as another to him and the blurry memories of his youth provided no sure guide.
The not knowing where he was scraped at his nerves. It wasn’t just the physical landscape that confounded him; it was everything. Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. An actor played the king, the king played the fool, and Charlotte – his own sweet, unworldly Charlotte – abandoned her tower to rout her dragons herself. The world had turned upside down and his head was spinning with it.
Or perhaps that was just the rocking of the boat. He had never been particularly good with boats. He liked his feet on firm ground.
There didn’t seem to be any firm ground to be had. His mind couldn’t quite close around the fact that Wrothan was dead. When he thought of the end of his quest, he had always assumed that there would be a duel, pistols at twenty paces or swords on some damp heath, with plenty of time to toy with his enemy, to make him sweat, to regret what he had done, before shouting something suitable to the occasion – like, ‘For the colonel!’ – before plunging his rapier home. He had never expected to be beaten to the post by a French agent who had driven his knife home without so much as a by-your-leave, with no preamble, no ceremony.
Nor had he ever expected to find himself trailing in Charlotte’s wake, following her lead through a maze of palace paths and assumed identities where his sword arm meant less than her calm knowledge of the court. He had been wrong. She wasn’t made of porcelain but of wrought iron, deceptively delicate, stronger than stone. It was tempting to believe that this was something new, forged from the strange enchantments that seemed to have turned the whole world on its head. Remembering Charlotte’s quiet fortitude in the face of her grandmother’s tantrums, Robert thought not. It had always been there. He had simply been too busy basking in the glow of her adoration to pay any notice.
The realisation made him feel oddly bare, stripped of the only role that lent him any hope of dignity. What good was he, if not to slay her dragons for her? What good was he to anyone? He hadn’t even accomplished his own revenge. Someone else had seized that for him.
The futility of his vigil – of all his vigils – pressed in around him like the dark waters of the river.
Behind him, a rustling noise caught his attention. He turned to see Charlotte emerge from the tilt.
Hunched over beneath a motley collection of rugs taken from the carriage, she moved like an old woman, her limbs stiff with cold and sleep. Aside from being slightly blue around the lips, she looked just the same as she always had: slight, soft-featured, defenceless, her hair rough with sleep and her eyes slightly unfocused. She did not look like anyone’s idea of a warrior maiden.
‘Hello,’ she whispered hoarsely. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with two hands, she blinked blearily at him as she asked, ‘Are we there yet?’
‘Close,’ Robert lied, although he wasn’t sure whether it was precisely a lie or not. They had certainly been on the river long enough – three hours, by his last count. They should be close to Medmenham by now. Shouldn’t they? He bloody hated not knowing where they were.
He bared his teeth in a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
‘G-good.’ Charlotte nodded her approval. She was sleepy enough that even that small movement made her sway in place.
Reaching out, Robert hastily caught her by the shoulders. There wasn’t much chance of her going over the side, but why risk it? Through the layers of cloak and dress, the bones of her shoulders felt tiny and fragile beneath his hands, like a bird’s. She had lost weight since Girdings. Weren’t they feeding her at the Palace?
‘You’re cold,’ he said, just to say something, before his undisciplined, sleep-deprived mind could wander off in any more inappropriate directions. Judging her steady enough not to pitch over into the river, he released her.
Charlotte’s blue lips cracked into a wry smile. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again.’ She hitched up the blanket that had fallen to the crooks of her elbows, shivering where the cold wool touched her shoulders. Her dress was muslin, thin and entirely impractical for winter, short-sleeved and scoop-necked.
Robert held out an arm, lifting his thick cloak to provide a place for her. It was only for warmth, after all. Soldiers might bunk together for warmth on a cold night, if it meant the difference between death and survival. The cold wind off the river shot through the opening in his cloak, attacking the thin linen of his shirt like a plague of stinging needles. ‘Come here.’
Charlotte went very still. Robert was reminded of a rabbit in a field, scenting a predator. The comparison was not a pleasing one. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, even though her lips were blue and her teeth clattered together as she said it.
Her wariness cut him to the core.
‘Are you sure?’ Robert held the cloak open, enduring the bite of the wind, willing her to change her mind. It could be so simple, just one step, then another, such a small space to cross to reach where they had been before. He tried to inject some levity into his voice, to camouflage the enormity of what was at stake. ‘Don’t freeze just to spite me.’
It didn’t have the desired effect. Charlotte shook her head, taking a step back, away from him. What had happened to the Charlotte on the roof, the Charlotte who would have followed him anywhere? He hadn’t realised how much he prized that trust until he had betrayed it. He wanted it back.
Charlotte tugged at the corners of her rug, hunching her shoulders beneath
its meagre shelter. She looked very small and very alone as she said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m quite all right on my own.’
‘I can see that,’ he said, trying to substitute humour for hurt. ‘I felt decidedly superfluous tonight.’
Sluggish with sleep, Charlotte frowned at him from beneath her rumpled hair. ‘What do you mean?’
Robert grimaced, feeling like a churl. ‘Consider it a badly botched compliment,’ he said. And then, because it was true, he added, sincerely, ‘You were magnificent in the Queen’s House.’
‘All I did was show you the way,’ said Charlotte. ‘Anyone familiar with the Queen’s House could have done the same.’
He was losing her. He could see her starting to retreat into the tilt, angling back towards the shadows beneath the canopy, slipping away from him as quietly and politely as a dream on waking.
‘That was hardly all,’ said Robert hastily. ‘How did you know that the man in the bed wasn’t the real king?’
It wasn’t entirely a subterfuge; he did want to know. But, mostly, he wanted to keep her talking. It was a poor counterfeit of the intimacy they had had back at Girdings. Robert felt as though he were slowly and painfully scaling the walls of a fortress he had once occupied by right and foolishly abandoned.
It worked. Charlotte paused, leaning one hand against the frame as she looked back towards Robert, weighing the events of the evening.
‘It was mostly a guess,’ she admitted. ‘The man in the bed sounded wrong. He smelt wrong. They weren’t drugging the false king, Mr – oh, whatever his name was.’
‘Pendergast,’ Robert supplied. ‘Or Prendergast. Even so. I would never have noticed. And neither would any of the others. But for you, the ploy would have worked.’
Had he been too effusive? Charlotte regarded him warily, more nonplussed than pleased. Had he been so chary with his compliments before?
‘I – thank you,’ she said.
Oh, hell. ‘Don’t,’ he said bluntly. ‘It’s nothing more than your due.’ Feeling suddenly clumsy, he added awkwardly, ‘I’m sure the king will say the same. When we find him.’
Charlotte seized on the change of topic. ‘If we find him. Do you think he’s really at Wycombe?’
It gave him an absurd rush of satisfaction to have her looking to him again for answers, for advice, for reassurance, for anything.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, hating being caught out in an admission of fallibility, but knowing that nothing less than the truth would do. He had already dug enough of a hole for himself with lies and half-truths. A bit of cautious optimism couldn’t hurt, however. ‘It seems like the most logical place, though.’
Charlotte turned to look out over the dark expanse of the river. He wondered what she saw reflected on those dark waters. The king? Medmenham? The torches of the Hellfire Club? ‘It’s not exactly a logical scenario, though, is it? Any of it. Hellfire Clubs and counterfeit kings …’
‘Club,’ Robert corrected. ‘Only one. To my knowledge.’ Brilliant. Now he had just established himself as a Hellfire expert.
‘And not much of one, at that. I would have thought that the Hellfire Club would have been more … well, decadent.’ Charlotte glanced back over her shoulder at him. ‘Not just cassocks and fireworks.’
Robert sidled a few steps closer. To better hear her. After all, they wouldn’t want to wake the others by speaking too loudly. ‘I believe the cassocks were originally intended to make an anticlerical statement,’ Robert hedged. No need to add that the robes also provided easy access once the prostitutes were brought in, at least for those members bold enough to go bare beneath. ‘I gather it was very daring in its time.’
‘I suppose it must have been,’ said Charlotte, although she sounded less than convinced. ‘What was all that about the elephant god?’
‘I think,’ said Robert, ‘that it was Wrothan’s attempt to pique the jaded appetites of the Hellfire crowd by offering them something foreign and exotic. He took the basic Hellfire Club framework—’
‘Cassocks and fireworks,’ supplied Charlotte knowledgeably.
‘-and layered it with a lot of faux-Indian mumbo jumbo, including a man in a very large elephant mask pretending to be an elephant god.’
Unlike the gentlemen in the caves, Charlotte was not impressed. ‘But what did he do?’
Between the drugged smoke and the pure superstitious terror evoked at having a beast half-man, half-animal suddenly coming at one, a performance would have seemed superfluous. ‘Not terribly much. At least, not that I saw. I left soon after he made his appearance.’ That much, at least, was true. ‘I only joined the Hellfire Club to follow Wrothan. And I didn’t enjoy it,’ he added idiotically.
Charlotte twisted her head to look up at him. He didn’t blame her for looking puzzled. He didn’t quite understand what he was doing himself.
‘I just didn’t want you to think I was the same as those others, Medmenham and Staines and the rest,’ Robert tried to explain. ‘That’s all.’
It wasn’t nearly all, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well with the English language at the moment.
‘I did wonder,’ said Charlotte, not quite looking at him, ‘why you were spending so much time with Medmenham. I had thought it might be—’
‘Might be what?’ Appropriating the space beside her, Robert angled his head, trying to see her more clearly. It didn’t do any good. With her head bowed, all he could see was a scrap of profile through a mass of tangled hair.
Charlotte scraped her hair back, keeping her hand there to hold it out of the way. ‘That you might be lonely,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be looking for an entrée into the ton.’
‘With Medmenham?’ Robert sounded as horrified as he felt. ‘Is that what you really thought of me?’
Charlotte looked at him steadily. ‘What else was I supposed to think? I had very little evidence to rely on.’
You had me, he wanted to say. You should have relied on me.
But why should she have?
Because she was Charlotte, that was why. Because she gave new meaning to the term ‘blind devotion.’ Because she was the woman who had announced that it was better to trust and be disappointed than never to have trusted at all. It didn’t matter that he had warned her against all that, that he had taken her to task about her trusting nature and those who might take advantage of it. It was completely different when he was the one who needed to take advantage of it. God, he was a rotten apple.
Robert braced his hands against the rail. ‘I owe you an explanation, don’t I?’
It was meant to be rhetorical, but Charlotte didn’t take it that way. Cocking her head to one side, she considered.
‘You did once,’ she said, as though she were considering an academic proposition involving something very long ago and far away. It chilled Robert to the bone.
‘I still do,’ he said fiercely. ‘Even if it is long overdue. I was … you see, I had a personal score to settle with Wrothan. Not just a personal score,’ he hastened to correct himself. ‘It was more of a pledge.’ There, that sounded better. ‘To a dying man.’
Was it wrong to bring the colonel into it? It seemed a bit cheap, to be wooing a woman by trotting out the corpse of a friend. Robert frowned out over the river. He could recall something along those lines in a Shakespeare play he had seen years ago, on leave, a suitor applying to a lady over a hero’s corpse. ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ had been the line. The man, he remembered, had been Richard III. Robert didn’t much like the comparison.
In profile, it was hard to tell what Charlotte was thinking, and her voice gave nothing away other than a detached interest in the topic. ‘So it wasn’t just about the sale of secrets, then?’
‘No.’ Would the colonel have minded? Robert remembered how, after all those years, the gruff Scotsman had still kept a lock of his wife’s hair in his breast pocket, twenty years after her death. When Robert, as a know-it-all sixteen-year-old, had carelessly asked why he did
n’t marry again – with the consequent improvements in housekeeping and meals – the colonel had simply patted his pocket and said that he was married and would be until he died. At the time, Robert had simply rolled his eyes and gone off drinking with a set of long-forgotten mates. But, now … Yes, the colonel would understand. ‘I had … a sort of mentor in India. More than a mentor, really. He all but adopted me.’
‘I’m glad somebody did.’
‘I badly needed adopting,’ Robert admitted. At sixteen, he had been reckless, belligerent, constantly spoiling for a fight. It was a fight that had brought him to the attention of the colonel, brawling with a fellow lieutenant. The colonel had decided, like Calvin come to Geneva, that Robert was his cross to bear and, by God, he was going to make an officer and a gentleman out of him if one of them died in the process.
And so he had died. Robert wondered, as he had wondered before, what would have happened if he had had the foresight to prevent it, if he had gone to the appropriate authorities the night before instead of putting it all off till after the battle.
‘What happened?’ asked Charlotte, breaking him out of his reflections.
‘Wrothan shot him in the back. He shot him in the middle of a battle, when he thought no one would know the difference.’ And he had almost been right. If Robert hadn’t known of Wrothan’s treachery, he might have supposed the same himself, and the colonel would have gone down as yet another casualty of war. And Wrothan …
Wrothan would still be dead at the Frenchman’s hand.
Perhaps it was justice, of a sort. Robert would still have preferred to have administered it himself.
‘I knew Staines from India,’ Robert hurried on. ‘That is, I knew of him. He was part of Wrothan’s set.’