Through it all, the trumpets sounded. They hadn’t gone away after all; they had only changed their tune.
As suddenly as he had embraced her, Robert released her, putting her from him with sure, resolute hands, making sure she was steady on her feet before letting her go again. The air felt even more frigid cold without him.
‘Good luck,’ she croaked.
With one last wave and a jaunty grin, Robert disappeared into the urn and down into the tunnels of the Hellfire caves.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Charlotte stood like a pillar of salt, staring at the empty urn, until a loud and pointed clearing of the throat shook her out of her reverie.
‘Do I take it that you two have reconciled?’ said Henrietta.
Reconciled didn’t seem quite the right word for it. Despite the lingering tingle on her lips, she couldn’t help but remember that night on the roof of Girdings, when Robert had seemed just as attentive – until he disappeared. Just as he had before. It was beginning to look like a habit.
‘Not really,’ said Charlotte.
Henrietta’s eyes glinted like a cat’s in the dark as she groped for the handle of the church door. ‘Then what do you call that?’
‘A lady’s favour to a knight going into battle,’ Charlotte said honestly. ‘I didn’t have a scarf to give him, so a kiss had to do.’
‘Hmph,’ said Henrietta. ‘I doubt you’ll see him complaining about the substitution.’
The door swung open behind her, moving soundlessly on well-oiled hinges, revealing the oddest sort of church Charlotte had ever seen. In place of pews, there were armchairs, curved and curled at the arms in the Egyptian fashion. Alchemical symbols decorated the font, including a serpent chasing its own tail in an intimation of eternity, and Judas Iscariot leered down from the ceiling as he savoured the Last Supper. But it wasn’t the bizarre or even the blasphemous that made Charlotte bump into Henrietta’s back as they both froze in the doorway. It was a small and homely detail, one that under any other circumstance wouldn’t have warranted the slightest bit of notice.
A lamp was burning at the far end of the nave.
Charlotte felt Henrietta’s fingers clamp like a vice around her upper arm. Soundlessly, she pointed upwards. Following her gaze, Charlotte stared in wide-eyed incomprehension. There was a man slowly but steadily climbing down a long ladder propped against the wall. Mercifully, his back was to them. He also had a bulky object hanging from one arm. A bag of some sort?
With a jerky movement, Henrietta yanked on Charlotte’s arm, whisking them both around the door in a flurry of damp fabric. Charlotte stumbled and caught her balance on the side of the church, feeling the stucco siding scrape against her palm.
Pointing back at the door, she mimed confusion.
Every muscle on alert, Henrietta reminded Charlotte of nothing so much as a horse about to bolt. ‘Guard,’ she mouthed soundlessly.
Even without making noise, Henrietta managed to convey a decided air of triumph. Charlotte had no doubt she was inwardly dancing a jig, complete with pipers piping and lots of lords a-leaping.
Charlotte pointed back towards the mausoleum, framing the words, ‘Should we …?’
Henrietta gave an abrupt shake of the head. Narrowing her eyes meaningfully, Henrietta lifted her hand and brought it down in a chopping motion.
Charlotte held up both hands palm up. It was all very well and good to talk about knocking out the guard, but with what? He wasn’t particularly big or burly – in fact, he looked fairly small and malnourished – but for all that he was small, he might be fierce. And armed. They couldn’t very well just bash at him with their reticules until he pleaded nicely for pardon and genteelly submitted to being tied up.
Reaching into the folds of her pelisse, Henrietta whipped out a long, metallic object. At least, she tried to whip it out. The little curly bit – the trigger? – caught on the folds and Henrietta had to pause midflourish to disentangle herself. It was not a sight to fill Charlotte with confidence. But what were their other alternatives? By the time they made their way through the tunnels, the man might be gone, along with whatever information he might have. If they were going to strike, it needed to be now.
Meeting her friend’s eyes, Charlotte lowered her head in a brief nod. ‘If I distract him,’ she whispered, leaning forwards so they were practically nose to nose, ‘can you hit him?’
‘With the gun or with a bullet?’ whispered Henrietta.
‘Either,’ Charlotte hissed back.
Henrietta paused just a moment too long for confidence before bringing her chin down in a nod. But it was the best they were going to do. The cavalry was all underground.
‘Ready?’ whispered Henrietta, tilting her pistol at a jaunty, if not exactly useful, angle. ‘Go!’
What she lacked in force, she might make up in sheer insanity. They did say beginners were lucky, didn’t they? Feeling like an idiot, Charlotte did the most distracting thing she could think of. She swooped down the nave of the church waving her arms above her head and shrieking like her grandmother’s maid on a particularly bad day.
The first screech got the man’s attention. The second made him lose his grip. Twisting around to see a madwoman flinging her arms in the air, the man on the ladder lost hold of the bundle tucked underneath his left arm. Fumbling for it, his other hand wrenched free, the sweat of his palm leaving a wet trail on the worn wood. An expression of open-mouthed shock transfixed his face as he hung suspended in space, rocking back and forth with his feet on the ladder as he flailed his arms for balance. Charlotte skidded to a stop, her last shriek ending in an apologetic cough. With the inevitability of a tree toppling in the forest, the man went over, striking his head on the stone floor with an unpleasant crunch.
Wincing, Charlotte flung herself onto the ground beside him. There was a bloody spot on the side of his head – a head which, it appeared, had not been washed all too recently – but he was still breathing. He also smelt quite heavily of tobacco. Charlotte wondered if he had realised that he lost his pipe. Of course, at the moment, that was probably the least of his concerns.
‘Good heavens. Well done.’ Henrietta rubbed her ears with a grimace of remembered pain. ‘I had no idea you could hit those notes. I wonder if they heard it down in the tunnels.’
‘I doubt it.’ Charlotte rocked back on her heels. ‘I really didn’t expect him to fall like that.’
‘Neither did I,’ agreed Henrietta, ‘but I’m awfully glad he did. It saved me having to use this.’ She dropped the pistol on the floor beside the ladder as she knelt next to Charlotte. ‘I suppose we should tie him up, anyway, just in case. There goes my petticoat.’
‘It’s a good thing he wasn’t too high off the ground when he fell.’ Delicate exploration revealed that the man’s skull appeared to be intact, although he would have a dreadful lump. His hair – his very greasy hair – appeared to have provided at least a partial buffer. The blood came from one small graze. Charlotte wadded her handkerchief against it all the same.
‘Charlotte,’ said Henrietta, wriggling out of her stocking in lieu of trying to tear up her petticoat, ‘the man was instrumental in kidnapping the king. You can’t feel too sorry for him.’
‘I know,’ said Charlotte, taking one limp, slightly damp stocking from Henrietta. ‘But I still wouldn’t want his death on my conscience.’
‘Mmph,’ said Henrietta noncommittally, tying the man’s legs together with her other stocking. The flowers embroidered along the sides looked decidedly incongruous against the rough brown wool of the man’s breeches. ‘If we capture anyone else, it will have to be your stockings,’ she said, standing and wiping her hands off against her skirt. ‘I don’t think my garters are wide enough.’
‘Did you see what he was carrying?’ Charlotte asked as she tied a double knot around the man’s hands. She doubted it would hold long against concerted pressure.
Henrietta scrunched up her nose, scanning the floor for it. ‘It looke
d like a sack, didn’t it? There it is.’
The dun-coloured burlap was discoloured by a damp patch of liquid that had seeped through the fabric. Charlotte yanked her hand out of the bag as her finger grazed something sharp. Thinking better of it, she upended the sack and scattered the contents out along the stone floor. Broken glass shone dully in the light of the man’s lantern, discoloured by a coating of a viscous liquid.
‘Hen!’ Charlotte whispered hoarsely, pointing to the fallen objects on the floor with mounting excitement. ‘Look what was in the bag.’
In front of her lay a heel of bread, the rind of a cheese, and a stained cloth. Whether it had been stained before or after the bottle broke was unclear.
Henrietta’s hazel eyes lit up. ‘Not exactly your usual place for a picnic.’
Reaching out very carefully, Charlotte ran a finger along the moisture filming one of the larger pieces of the broken glass bottle. The liquid made the skin of her finger tingle. Lifting it to her nose, she sniffed cautiously.
‘The king,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Hen, he must have been coming from the king. Here.’ She thrust her hand at her friend. ‘Smell. It’s laudanum.’
Henrietta dutifully sniffed, screwing up her nose at the scent. ‘But why the ladder?’
They both looked up. The ladder stretched up and up like something out of a biblical prophet’s dream. It ended just below the folds of a disciple’s robe in the vast picture of the Last Supper that decorated the ceiling.
‘They wouldn’t have put him on the roof,’ said Henrietta doubtfully.
‘No,’ said Charlotte decidedly, ‘not the roof. But they might have put him in the orb.’
‘The what?’
The more she thought about it, the more Charlotte was convinced she was right. ‘The ornamental orb on top of the church. It’s certainly large enough to house a man. And it would be the last place anyone would look.’
Henrietta craned her head back, looking dubiously at the ceiling. ‘I suppose it couldn’t hurt to look,’ she said, but neither of them made any move to approach the ladder. It was probably no more or less sturdy than any other ladder, but it seemed an uncommonly rickety affair, propped against the wall of the church.
‘I can go,’ said Henrietta unenthusiastically, moving to kilt up her skirts. ‘If you keep watch below.’
‘Will you be all right?’ said Charlotte doubtfully. ‘The last time you tried to climb a tree, Miles had to fetch you down.’
‘True,’ admitted Henrietta, unsuccessfully trying to tie a knot into the fabric of her skirt. ‘I was fine with the climbing part, though. It was only the getting-down part that was hard.’
‘The getting-down bit is rather crucial,’ said Charlotte apologetically. ‘I’ll go.’
She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. Her own experience with tree climbing had been even more limited than Henrietta’s. She felt much about trees as she did about horses; pretty to look at, but she felt no desire to climb on them. But surely a ladder would be different? It was meant to be climbed, after all. She was smaller and lighter than Henrietta, which would put less weight on the rails – and the look of relief on Henrietta’s face was too obvious to be ignored.
‘Are you sure?’ said Henrietta, dropping her skirt with obvious relief.
‘I don’t mind at all,’ Charlotte lied. ‘And the king knows me. If he is there, it would be better that he see me. Would you hold this for me?’
Wriggling out of her cloak, she passed it over to Henrietta, shivering as the thick fabric lifted off her shoulders. The dress that had been possible in the theatre, with thousands of candles burning, was eminently unsuited to an unheated building of coarse stone that appeared to hoard the cold and damp, magnifying rather than mitigating it. But the extra fabric would pose a hazard while climbing. Charlotte was scared enough as it was, without an extra length of heavy velvet pulling her back.
Tentatively, Charlotte lifted one foot onto the first rung. The wooden bar pressed into the sole of her foot through her slipper. Belatedly, Charlotte wondered if she ought to have removed her shoes and stockings, but she suspected that if she descended the ladder now, she wouldn’t have the courage to go back on it again. A few more rungs and her slippers were level with Henrietta’s shoulders. Resolutely, Charlotte looked straight ahead, concentrating on the pull of the muscles in her legs, the solid feel of the scratchy wood of the rails beneath her hands. It would not do to think of how long the ladder seemed or how steep or how very far she still was from the top of it.
Her nails had gone purple with cold and she was having trouble feeling her fingers.
‘Are you all right?’ Henrietta called up, from what felt like an endless way below. Her voice sounded oddly hollow.
Charlotte gave a nervous laugh, clutching compulsively at the rails as the ladder wobbled with her. ‘I’ll let you know when I get down.’
‘How on earth would they get the king up there?’ Henrietta’s voice was sharp with nerves. ‘Perhaps you’d best just come down. We can send one of the men up later. They like climbing things.’
‘A very sensible suggestion. Allow me to second that, Lady Charlotte.’
Dizzily, Charlotte clung to the ladder, understanding for the first time how the other man had come to fall as a new voice intruded into their conversation, nearly startling her from her precarious perch.
It was a cultivated voice, polished and amused, with just the slightest hint of a foreign accent. A French accent, to be precise.
Henrietta made a noise of protest that was muffled midsqueak. There was a scuffling noise, which Charlotte deduced had something to do with Henrietta’s slippered feet attempting to do the most harm they possibly could and generally missing their mark.
Bland and unruffled, the Frenchman continued with scarcely a pause. ‘May I prevail upon you to descend, Lady Charlotte? I shouldn’t like to have to shoot you down.’
The elephant god had taken his mask with him when he left Wycombe.
Robert jumped lightly off the ladder, joining his two colleagues in the narrow anteroom behind the ceremonial chamber. The air smelt cold and dank, with no lingering savour of exotic spices. Damp beaded the rough walls, seeping slowly downwards to the packed earth floor.
Miles regarded the small, rough-hewn chamber with palpable disappointment. ‘Is this all?’
Not so much as a stray bead had been left to indicate the room’s former function. The braziers and the beaded curtain had been tidied away, thriftily stored for use at the next orgy, along with the miscellany of monks’ robes and the indicia of the elephant god. The only sign of human habitation were the torches in their metal brackets on the walls. Tommy had prudently lit one of the torches. The moonlight might provide adequate light above, but it did nothing for the subterranean regions below.
Robert flexed his shoulders, edgy with energy and anticipation. What more appropriate place to beard a dragon than in its cave? The entire scenario was directly out of one of Charlotte’s storybooks, the stuff of myth and legend. He was fairly sure he had his lady’s favour already, despite the reservations she had voiced on the boat, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to emerge triumphant with a rescued king to place before her as trophy.
If the king was there.
He had to be, Robert assured himself. There was no other logical place. If the king wasn’t being kept in Medmenham Abbey, that left only the caves and Medmenham’s church, directly above. Of the two, the caves were by far the more defensible, composed as they were of a warren of tunnels and chambers. It was the ideal situation for a small force of men – or even one man – to ward off a would-be rescue committee.
‘The main ceremonial chamber is next door,’ Robert said in an undertone. ‘I doubt the king would be kept there.’
Tommy released the torch from its brackets, hefting it high so that the flaring tip sent orange-red light guttering across the uneven surface of the walls. ‘Where, then? You’re the nearest we have to a map, Rob.’
Remembering his trek from the main entrance through the labyrinthine passageways, Robert was not filled with confidence.
Pretending to an assurance he was far from feeling, he took out his penknife and drew a small square in the dirt. ‘This is where we are.’
The others followed suit, crouching beside him in the dirt, Tommy’s torch illuminating their dirty and tired faces. The remnants of their formal evening clothes made an incongruous note to the scene, squatting in the dirt of the cave floor by the light of a single, sputtering torch.
Leading off the square, Robert drew a round shape, followed by two wavy lines. ‘The main chamber is through this one. The ceremonial cavern is separated from the rest of the tunnels by a narrow river, which can only be crossed by boat. The boat carries two or, at most, three.’
Impatiently shaking his hair out of his eyes, Miles looked up from the drawing. ‘And you believe the king lies on the other side of the river.’
‘Almost certainly.’ Robert drew another line, leading off from the river. A thick one, this time, to indicate a corridor. ‘Across the River Styx, a series of small cells have been dug out of the tunnels. Most are secured by their own grilles and equipped with a bed and chamber pot.’
‘When you say grilles,’ asked Miles, ‘do you mean with locks?’
Robert nodded.
‘Well and truly cells then,’ said Tommy soberly. ‘The perfect place to store an unwilling guest.’
‘My thought precisely. The only problem is finding the correct cell before someone else finds us.’
‘We’d best get to it then, hadn’t we?’ said Tommy, and Robert was reminded of a dozen other instances in which they had ventured forth together to confront a mass of faceless adversaries, charging forward through the thick of powder smoke, shying away from the concatenation of cannons, running and firing, firing and running, horses shot out beneath them, men groaning and dying, adversaries faceless in the smog.