Since the Surrender (32 page)

And then Chase slipped all the way out of the curtains, and she was left alone in that big bed.

Quiet for a tick or so. The in-out of her own breathing was suddenly deafening, and then unnerving.

A hand burst in through the curtain.

She sucked back the shriek so quickly she nearly choked on it. Then the hand beckoned impatiently.

Chase was telling her it was safe to exit.

She tried to do it as gracefully as he had, without causing the bed to heave or squeak unduly, or any more than it already had. She’d begun to creep across on all fours toward him when he poked his head in through the curtain so he could watch her crawl, nude, across the velvet counterpane.

Another of those white grins flashed in the dark. He was enjoying himself.

If he was a gentleman at all, he would hand her the clothes and she would get to the business of dressing in the safety of the curtained bed.

Otherwise she would be forced to dress while he watched. Though dressing while he watched—and this was evidence of his effect upon her—held a certain amount of appeal. Regardless of whatever peril they might be in at the moment.

She’d been well and truly corrupted, obviously. Somehow she couldn’t find it in her to regret the loss of her morals, if indeed this was what she’d lost to him.

He handed her clothes to her then, and rudely, delightfully, refused to turn his back as she dressed, as quickly as was possible. With his eyes upon her, getting dressed was nearly as pleasurable as getting undressed, and he helped her, swiftly, his hand leaving hot places behind on her skin.

Chase relit the candle using knife and flint and nursed the spark of lit wick until it swelled and gained strength and officially became a flame. He tucked his unlocked pistol into his coat pocket within quick reach, grasped her hand, brought it to the waist of his coat and folded her fingers over it. They inched from the room, Rosalind clinging to him.

There was the giggle again. Faint, unearthly.

The nub of the lit candle turned his fingers into a grid of light, almost but not quite burning them. And in this fashion they crept quietly, just a few feet, until they stood once again before that painting. They paused and listened and felt: he could indeed smell linseed oil powerfully here. Myrtleberry had said the laughter was louder in this room.

And suddenly the candle flame swayed and twitched, slightly singeing his fingers.

Suspicion touched a cold, fine arrow point to the base of Chase’s spine.

He slowed his breaths to near silence.

He thought back to the first day he’d seen Rosalind staring at that painting. He’d studied her from behind, fascinated by just the back painting. He’d studied her from behind, fascinated by just the back of her, of course, but there had been a moment when he thought she must have turned to look at him. And in a split second turned away from him again. It had seemed impossible—for why wouldn’t he have noticed?

But the plume in her hat had been quivering. Ever…so…slightly. As though she had moved. As though someone had sighed over it, he’d thought then.

Or as if…as if…

Tentatively he lifted the candle again, level with the middle of the painting. He could see the big dark bovine.

And one by one uncurled the fingers of his hand until it burned unsheltered, tiny but shocking as a lantern in contrast to the previous moment.

He waited.

He heard the thud of his own heart in his ears.

He heard Rosalind’s breathing behind him, syncopating with his, her body tense with an unspoken question.

A second later the tiny flame gave a leap, then swayed like a tiny South Sea dancer.

With blinding speed he licked his fingers, pinched out the candle, and spun about to face Rosalind, covering her mouth with his hand to stifle her gasp.

Total dark bell-jarred them.

He held her fast, one arm wrapping her waist from behind, the other across her mouth. She was rigid with astonishment. For a worrying moment he thought she might have stopped breathing. He kept his hand firmly over her mouth for a communicative second before slowly lifting it. And then he dragged a finger over her soft lips, a luxury, a temptation, a caress, and a signal: remain utterly silent. She understood. She complied. She trusted him now, and he felt the honor of the responsibility.

And her curiosity remained nearly as palpable and dense as the surrounding dark.

He lifted his hand from her lips.

He couldn’t yet explain himself; he could only wait for the shadowy outlines of things to emerge from the blackness, which seemed tacked down around them.

And as luck would bloody have it, the first thing to materialize from the dark with any clarity—thanks to an unfortunately angled shaft of moonlight through one of the arched windows—was the hideous lumpy puppet. In the grayish light it was all leering red lips and bulging white eyes and impotently dangling limbs. Its head listed limply, like a man hauled from the water after an unfortunate diving accident.

Chase was riveted. The little hairs on his arms pricked up in revulsion.

Rosalind, perhaps sensing his tension, instinctively pressed her body even closer to him, gathering up a tighter grip on his coat. He almost smiled. She was protecting him from the puppet. He jerked his gaze away and redirected it at the painting, willing it to come into something resembling focus.

come into something resembling focus.

In seconds he could make out the bosomy angel, because she was all in white, and then the cherubs, glowing in their flowing nappies and wings, and then the contours of the enormous blob of the cow. He licked his finger again, held it up before him and waved it with painstaking thoroughness, with something akin to ceremony, horizontally across the painting. Beginning at one end. Rather like a sorcerer conducting a ritual. He was distantly amused when he became aware that Rosalind was watching him with grave concern. Doubtless thinking he’d finally surrendered to lunacy. He was midway across the painting, his finger level with the cow’s haunches, when the tip of his finger chilled. He held it there for a moment, his scalp prickling again with confirmed suspicions. A tiny but unmistakable breeze was blowing…

Right out of the cow’s arse.

He spared an ironic thought for Colin in that moment.

As this was an entirely new dilemma in his experience, he allowed himself a moment of consideration.

If fresh—or close to fresh—air was blowing through the cow’s arse into the dense, close air of the museum, there was something behind that wall. But what could it be? A windowed room? An alley?

A passageway?

The muffled, ethereal giggle had originated there. He was certain of it.

This wing of the museum faced nothing but other buildings. Ah, but the English were clever, and history was riddled with stories of the need to hide or smuggle something: priests, gunpowder, women. Tunnels and passageways were seldom built whimsically. Inherent in their nature was the need to hide or flee.

But then he remembered the tunnel dug between Brighton Pavilion and the King’s Arms—a brothel. Where would this tunnel lead?

Of course: just yesterday evening he had stood with Buckthwaite, staring at Mezza Luna, the old theater owned by the Kinkade family in the very worst part of Covent Garden, boarded shut, seemingly abandoned.

But large.

Large enough to accommodate a brothel.

And easily and quickly reachable from the museum…through a tunnel. Bypassing busy streets clotted with carriages and horses and prostitutes. And Kinkade had met him in the Queen of Bohemia, right near the theater.

Mezza Luna…meant half-moon in Italian. And there was a half-moon in that painting.

He turned and pressed his lips right against Rosalind’s ear. “I think this might be a tunnel.”

She understood. Her eyes flared whitely in the dark. It occurred to Chase that the cow’s arse was a peephole. Even now someone could be watching them.

Though if a human stood on the opposite side of the painting watching them, a breeze wouldn’t have been able to exit it. He rotated, wrapped his arms around Rosalind and swept her aside. Surely no one would be able to identify them in the dark. Should he attempt to relight the candle and have a good peer up the cow’s arse?

What would happen if the white of someone else’s eye met his?

Christ.

He waited. He listened. He rotated slowly about and studied their surroundings once more, ensuring they were alone. His eyes, invariably, snagged on the bulging white eyes of that leering puppet.

“You might try pressing the brass plate beneath the frame,” the puppet whispered helpfully.

“Fucking hell!”

Chase leaped straight upward and aimed to blow the thing to smithereens.

“Ack! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Aye, it’s me, ain’t it?”

The puppet made a grating, shifting noise on the shelf, its head flopping first left, then right, then flopping forward as though it were casting its puppety accounts on the museum floor. It seemed to be attempting to lurch into a standing position.

It was horrible, horrible.

What felt like a million spiders with ice cold feet marched up Chase’s spine.

spine.

Rosalind had a steady hold of his elbow, and she was aiming her pistol, too, with all evidence of steely determination. A restraining and yet reassuring grip. His heart was slam slam slamming in his chest.

“Hate puppets,” he muttered.

“One would never have guessed,” she whispered.

This almost made him smile.

Odd how the grip of her small hand on his elbow should make him feel as though nothing in the world, even demon puppets, could harm him. He still felt a little separate from his body. He’d levitated from horror.

Though he was proud of the fact that his pistol hand was steady, and it was cocked and aimed.

The thing made a shuffling sound, righted, then tipped over with a sickening thunk as though he really had shot it. Rosalind gripped his elbow a bit more tightly.

And out from behind the toppled puppet stepped Mr. Myrtleberry, the puppeteer. “Come closer so I can kill you,” Chase growled at him.

“You wouldn’t kill me, aye, Captain Eversea. Just a puppeteer.”

They glared at him, because his very presence had yet to make sense.

“You hopped like a spring lamb there, you did, Captain Eversea.”

Myrtleberry was whispering, but unconscionably amused.

“What the devil are you doing here? How long have you been there?”

“I just arrived, aye? I finally got hold of the plans for this building, Captain—and Montmorency built a tunnel between his house and the Mezza Luna. I once worked upon a great estate o’er Marbury way riddled with passage and doors and such like. This is a door, right here by this painting, I’m sure of it, and something will release this one, lad.”

Chase spun back toward the painting. “Rosalind, would you—”

But she’d thought ahead. She put her finger over the cow’s arse to block the peephole should anyone care to look through it. He put his ear to the painting and heard nothing on the other side of the wall. No giggling, no footsteps, no thundering herds of armed men, no screams.

Chase began fumbling blindly at the edges of the frame. He lifted the frame up, looking for signs of a seam, a hinge, anything that might indicate this wall was anything apart from a wall sporting an ugly painting in a disreputable old museum.

He pressed the painting itself with delicate hands, every inch of it. He slid his hands down to feel for the brass plate beneath it. Mr. Myrtleberry spoke up. “Perhaps you ought to try the brass plate at the—”

There was a subtle grinding sound as the wall swung violently outward and swept Chase and Rosalind into blackness.

The wall thunked closed, and Rosalind heard a loud grunt and a sickening thud as she tumbled down a grade.

That thud, she knew, was the unmistakable and unpleasant sound of a body hitting the ground hard.

“Chase!”

She was surprised to find herself on her knees on what appeared to be a dirt floor, in a dimly lit chamber, very happy her pistol hadn’t gone off.

“Chase!”

“I’m here.”

He was standing, uninjured, unrattled, and he bent to grip her arm. Her own head was still spinning, and her breath had been knocked from her.

She stared at the door in disbelief. It looked precisely like a wall.

“Are you injured? Can you stand?”

She shook her head; a mistake, as it was already swimming. “Just a bit dizzy. Breath knocked from me. Limbs intact. One moment.”

She’d learned how to report just the facts.

“But I thought I heard someone fall,” Chase said.

“So did I,” she said.

“Then who—”

They were still for an astonished moment. He helped her to her feet when she nodded, her breath regained, and they looked about in wonderment.

The passageway—it was indeed a passageway—narrow, seemingly endless, was lit along its length by torches arrayed in sconces at the very top, throwing out flickering light and long leaping shadows. It smelled of earth and smoke.

A lovely draft came from somewhere down where the passage originated.

And terminated in the cow’s arse, of course.

“But…I could have sworn I heard another pers—”

Something tickled Rosalind’s ankles. She kicked out with a hoarse shriek and leaped backward.

A moment of focusing in the shadows revealed that she’d violently attacked a plume. A dark purple one. About as long as her arm. She followed the length of it with her eyes. A moment of focusing on the ground revealed that the plume was attached to an enormous hat, which was lying upside down, like a creature gone belly up in death.

A hat rather like one King Henry VIII would have worn. She gingerly followed that hat with her eyes.

Which is when they both saw the body.

It was man, and he was wearing a doublet, a cape…

And stuffed hose, à la sixteenth-century fashion. The hat had obviously been knocked from his head when they’d inadvertently clubbed him unconscious with the museum door.

“He was clearly trying to exit as we came in and we knocked him out cold.” Chase knelt down and reached for the limp hand, his thumb seeking out a pulse. “Still alive.”