The Temptation of the Night Jasmine (32 page)

On the positive side, there was nothing like a bit of romantic turmoil to bring one fully awake.

‘I don’t know,’ Charlotte said contrarily, keeping her head down and her eyes on her hem. ‘It’s been awfully quiet for them up there. A little scandal might do them good.’

‘They would probably tumble off their perches with the shock,’ Robert replied idly, helping her over a rough patch of ground.

‘They might be stronger than that.’ Charlotte could feel her heels beginning to dig in. ‘Perhaps they want a little variety.’

‘Or,’ said Robert, missing the point entirely, ‘perhaps they’re made of plaster and don’t really care.’

‘Stone,’ Charlotte corrected, kicking her skirt out of the way. ‘Not plaster. It’s stronger.’

She could feel his steps slow as he paused to look down at her. Charlotte resolutely kept her own eyes on the ground, struggling forward one laboured step at a time. If he didn’t realise why she was upset, she didn’t want to tell him. Especially since she wasn’t quite sure why herself.

‘We can rest for a moment, if you like,’ he suggested, with infuriating solicitude. ‘At least get you out of the wind.’

If she stopped, she might never move again. And it would be just as cold wherever they were.

‘And let the Frenchman catch us up?’ she countered. ‘How far are we from the caves?’

Robert pointed directly ahead. Above the trees, an immense golden orb dominated the horizon, shimmering with reflected moonlight. It looked, thought Charlotte, like a sceptre sculpted for the king of a race of giants. ‘Do you see that gold ball?’

‘It would be hard not to,’ she said, and was a little ashamed of quite how snappish she sounded. ‘What is it?’

‘Medmenham’s church,’ said Robert. ‘I was told that it is positioned directly over the deepest part of the caves, the bit they call Hades.’

Dizzy and miserable as she was, Charlotte appreciated the conceit. ‘It’s like Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, with Inferno below and Paradise above.’

‘And Purgatory in the middle.’ Robert pronounced the word with a grim relish that made Charlotte wonder, for the first time, if he might not be in a sort of purgatory, too. She risked a sidelong glance in his direction. He had assumed leadership of their expedition so easily, taken charge of her so casually, that she had assumed this must all be little more than a lark for him, all in a night’s work. Including the improper proposals.

Before she could find a cautious way of broaching the topic, Robert said briskly, ‘Medmenham’s mausoleum covers the back entrance to the caves.’ Turning his head, he raised his voice ever so slightly to carry to the people behind them. ‘As we approach, it’s probably best if we try to be as quiet as possible.’

‘What’s that?’ Miles called out.

Robert mimed lowering of voice by raising one hand and bringing it slowly down. Miles looked abashed. Charlotte swallowed her grin before Robert could see it; it looked too much like his own.

At the gates of the mausoleum, the men arranged themselves in a triangular formation. Behind them, Charlotte saw Henrietta ease her pistol out of the folds of her pelisse. Charlotte couldn’t quite recall what she had done with her own pistol. She thought she might have left it in the carriage. Since the carriage was back in London, three hours by river, she doubted it would do her much good.

The mausoleum sounded quiet enough to her. All she could hear was the sodden slap of the tree leaves and the laboured rise and fall of her own breathing. But the men were clearly primed for battle, cloaks off, pistols at the ready. Charlotte, who had always dreamt of brave battles with banners flaring, felt at a loss. This was no formal joust at which she could wave her veil and cheer her champion; if anything, it would be an ambush.

But who was ambushing whom? Charlotte’s fingernails bit into her palms as the men burst through the entrance of the mausoleum.

They were greeted with resounding silence. There was no scramble of booted feet on wet grass, no jostling for weaponry, no grunts or battle cries, just the sound of their own laboured breathing.

Aside from its scattering of masonry, the grounds of the mausoleum were entirely empty.

Miles straightened from his fighting crouch. ‘Where is everyone?’ he demanded indignantly.

Charlotte and Henrietta ducked under the archway into the mausoleum. It was as eccentric in its design as the rest of the grounds, open to the elements, dotted with arches and monuments and other classical effluvia, in no particular pattern that Charlotte could discern. Between the granite walls and the barren ground, it did, however, succeed in conveying a decidedly grim impression. That, at least, seemed in keeping with Charlotte’s notion of a mausoleum.

‘There should be someone here.’ Robert prowled around the side of an urn, looking more than a little bit irritated at being balked of his battle. ‘Wrothan wouldn’t have left his prize unguarded.’

Charlotte saw no need to voice what they were all thinking, that there would only be a need for guards if the king was, in fact, on the premises. After their long, miserable journey, failure didn’t bear thinking of.

‘He would need someone on hand,’ she said instead. ‘Someone to bring the king food at intervals.’

‘Poor
ton
to starve the king,’ seconded Miles.

‘Poor business sense, too,’ said Lieutenant Fluellen cheerfully. ‘You can’t ransom a royal skeleton.’

‘So where are they?’ asked Henrietta, as indignant as a hostess whose guests had failed to appear for dinner.

‘Down in the caves with the king?’ suggested Miles. ‘If I wanted to guard someone, I’d jolly well stay close.’

‘There was someone here,’ muttered Robert, squinting at the ground around the perimeter. ‘Do you see this?’ When he straightened, he was holding a long-stemmed clay pipe. ‘The bowl is still warm.’

‘Cheerful place for a smoke,’ commented Miles, grimacing at the funereal monuments.

‘But a logical place if one was about to go underground,’ said Lieutenant Fluellen thoughtfully. ‘The guard must have popped up for a smoke before going back down into the caves.’

‘Guard or guards?’ asked Charlotte, looking anxiously around her. She kept thinking she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, only to turn and find yet another urn or arch.

Above it all, the gold-tipped spire of the church looked smugly on. The entrance seemed to lie at the other side of the mausoleum. Could the entrance to the caves lie through there? Despite Robert’s assertion that the back entrance to the caves lay through the mausoleum, she had yet to see it.

‘Three guards at most,’ said Lieutenant Fluellen authoritatively. As all the others looked at him, he shrugged. ‘Well, it just sounded like a logical number.’

‘All down in the caves,’ said Miles, rubbing his hands together.

‘If they’re here,’ said Robert repressively. ‘We might be barking up the wrong tree entirely.’

‘Or down the wrong cave,’ said Charlotte.

‘What about the church?’ asked Henrietta, squinting at the nondescript granite façade of Medmenham’s church. With its rough stone, square bell tower, and squat design, it looked more like a fortress than a place of worship. ‘If I were your Mr Whatever-His-Name-Was, I would prefer to hide my monarch above ground.’

‘Excellent thought!’ said Lieutenant Fluellen, a little too heartily. ‘You and Lady Charlotte can investigate the church while we inspect the caves.’

‘I second that.’ Miles’s relief was palpable. ‘Divide and conquer and all that.’

No one pointed out that it was enemies who were supposed to be divided, not allies.

Henrietta kept quiet because she had already decided that she was right and the others were wrong; Charlotte could tell from the set of her friend’s shoulders that she was already planning her ‘I told you so’ in elaborate and loving detail. Charlotte held her tongue for the opposite reason. If they did encounter a cadre of hardened villains (or even not so hardened villains) down in the caves, she and Henrietta would be more trouble than help. She had no illusions about her own utility in a battle. It might be nice to seize a moment of glory, to strike a blow for king and country as she did in her daydreams, but she knew, realistically, that she was far more likely to trip over her own skirt, walk in front of someone at a crucial moment, or be captured, dragged to one side, and used to make Robert, Miles, and Lieutenant Fluellen throw down their weapons. All things considered, she and Henrietta were more use to the king out of the caves than in them.

Charlotte shivered as the grim reality of their situation set in. Maybe they would be lucky, maybe there wouldn’t be any sort of battle. It was difficult to remember that she once thought of battles with a romantic frisson of excitement; now, with the reality looming, the prospect brought only dread.

Their tiny army was already making its preparations, jostling together alongside the massive urn that Robert swore contained the secret entrance to the tunnels. As Miles peered through the hole in the side of the urn, in whispered conversation with Lieutenant Fluellen, Charlotte caught Robert’s eye. He immediately detached himself from his fellows and strode towards her.

And Charlotte realised that something rather alarming had happened. She no longer heard trumpets when she looked at him. There were no more fanfares or imaginary banners. He was just Robert, not a mythical knight in shining armour, not a hero in a storybook. The old infatuation had died, but what had replaced it was even more debilitating; like the bitter winter wind, it stripped through all her outer layers, biting clear to the bone.

It was fortunate that he had no idea, Charlotte thought, as he strolled over to her, tall and golden and radiating martial energy. It would hurt badly enough in the morning when he remembered that he was he and she was she and that he really wasn’t that enamoured of her after all. It would be even harder if he knew just how much she cared. Harder for both of them. She knew him well enough now for that.

‘We’re off to slay your dragons,’ he said wryly. ‘Or dragon, as the case may be.’

Once Charlotte would have thought it a charming turn of phrase; now she felt a whisper of superstitious dread. This wasn’t a tale out of one of her books. There was no armour to guard him, no enchantments to protect him, no happily ever after to ensure his safe return.

‘Is it very dangerous?’ she asked, knowing it was a ridiculous question even as she asked it. Of course, it was dangerous.

‘No,’ he said, and she knew he was lying through his teeth, lying right through the broad, reassuring smile he donned like armour. ‘There are three of us, after all.’

But there might be three of them as well. Their putative opponents had the advantage of knowing their terrain. Down in the darkness of the caves, who knew what might happen?

Nothing had really changed; tomorrow morning would still be tomorrow morning, but all that paled into insignificance against the gaping hole in the side of the urn that led into caves of unknown peril and treachery.

Charlotte clutched Robert’s arm, her fingernails biting through the thin fabric of his sleeve. ‘Be careful.’

‘Rob!’ Lieutenant Fluellen called softly, only his head sticking out of the back of the urn. ‘Any day now!’

‘Coming,’ Robert called back, and rolled his eyes for Charlotte’s benefit.

Charlotte was in no mood to be so cheaply diverted. ‘You should go,’ she said, very seriously. ‘I won’t keep you.’

With one finger, Robert gently lifted her chin. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll be back.’

And then, before Charlotte could say anything else at all, he grabbed her to him in a quick, fierce embrace. Although he had removed his cloak and coat, she could feel the heat radiating through his shirt as he clasped her to him, his arms like bars of iron around her back. Throwing caution to the winds, Charlotte wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, kissed him good luck, kissed him goodbye, kissed him forgiveness, kissed him everything she had meant to say and hadn’t.

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.

C
harlotte 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 looked 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.