Maggie MacKeever (32 page)

“Neither would a Portuguese
puta.
” Ned folded his arms across his chest.

Bianca hurled herself at him. “
Assistência, por favor!”
she cried.

Ned stepped aside. Bianca overshot her target, tumbled over the sopha, and landed on her backside. Unlike the Prince Regent, she was not wearing drawers. The door swung abruptly open, as Ned had anticipated that it would.

Sabine stepped into the room, closed the door behind her and leaned against it. “We thought your cousin might have been planning something of this nature. Kane has intervened. There will be no scandal and no hasty wedding. Bianca, get up off the floor.”

“You, I remember from the Peninsula. I did not like you then, and I do not like you now.” Bianca climbed to her feet, reclaimed her hairpins, and began setting herself to rights. “Your intervention is for nothing, Senhora Viccars. The lieutenant and I are betrothed. I mean, the earl.”

“Indeed?” inquired Sabine.

Ned roused from his appalled fascination. “Indeed we are not.”

“But of course we are betrothed!” Bianca held up her hand, the better to display her ring. “You are a man of honor,
caro
. You would not wish the world to think that you are not.”

“And if I refuse?”

Bianca’s dark eyes flashed. “Then you may look forward to a breach-of-promise suit.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

When you have just climbed out of a deep well and are perched on top, you are in the greatest danger of falling in again
.
— Plautus

“Kane isn’t the greatest beast in nature,” said Clea, “even if at the moment he’s acting like he is. I blame the Allied Sovereigns. Or perhaps I should blame Lord Castlereagh, for he’s the one who dropped them in Kane’s lap! The Grand Duchess told Kane that she briefly considered marrying Napoleon, after his divorce from Josephine; but then she chose her cousin and Napoleon went on to wed Marie-Louise of Austria. Kane thinks it was the Grand Duchess who persuaded Princess Charlotte against marrying the Prince of Orange, because she is contemplating the Prince as a possible husband for herself due to Holland’s wealth. I asked Kane if she was considering
him
as a husband. He said that he lacked royal connections, thank God.”

Clea paused to take a breath. She still sported the plumed hat. When Julie refused to don a dress, feeling safer in masculine attire,
Clea had changed into the clothes she’d worn for riding in the Peninsula, breeches and boots and a shirt.

She held her lantern high, illuminating one of the passages that
wound through the house’s old walls. “Kane is a libertine, like Francis Wakely was. Kane isn’t half so dissolute as Francis, but we won’t tell him that.”

Hidden staircases and secret rooms and sliding panels: Julie was impressed. Clea explained that a number of these hidden crannies had likely been devised during the latter part of the sixteenth century, when priest-hunting was a sport; had seen additional use during the Gunpowder Plot, Charles II’s escape from Worcester, the Jacobite uprisings and the Civil War, any of which would have been sufficient cause for gentlemen who backed the wrong party to seek out a hiding-place.

“Francis was one of Lord Rochester’s set.” Clea was determined to demonstrate that her forebears, and Ned’s, had blood less blue than red. “
The
Lord Rochester who died of alcoholism and the pox at age three-and-thirty. He was a favorite of King Charles II who nonetheless exiled him numerous times for his libelous poetry and scandalous behavior at court. My favorite of his poems is ‘Love A Woman? You’re An Ass’. Kane might have written that.”

“The baron writes poetry?” inquired Julie. Having found someone new to chatter to — or at — Miss Clea seldom paused to draw breath.

“To his mistresses, maybe. I wouldn’t know. Gentlemen do write poems to their inamoratas,
don’t they? I think I would like having poems written to me.”

This particular passage emptied out by way of a false fireplace into the gardens, which were overgrown and neglected and eerie in the foggy moonlight. Stone paths meandered off in various directions, through weed-filled flowerbeds. Marble statues hid in niches in the old wisteria-covered stone wall.

“Frances held orgies here.” Clea contemplated Venus bathing, minus a nose. “My brother prefers to think I don’t know what an orgy is.”

Julie preferred not to think of Clea’s brother in connection with orgies. There was no doubt in her mind that Ned knew exactly what such activities involved. Julie thought none the less of him for it. She thought a great deal less of him for not sharing what he’d learned.

“This is my latest discovery.” Clea shone her lantern on a
section of the wall where, behind the wisteria, the outline of a doorway could be seen. She picked up the pruning-saw that she’d left lying nearby on the ground.

Her curiosity aroused, Julie made good use of her smallsword. The old wisteria put up a good fight but at last gave way.

The gate squeaked reluctantly open, into a narrow service street that led off the mews at the back of the house. The stables were dark, equine and human occupants alike asleep.

Reluctant as the gate had been to open, it was equally reluctant to remain so, and swung shut with a rusty thud. Clea tugged, to no avail. Muttered Julie, “Bloody hell.”

Clea was disappointed at her companion’s tone. Someone with Julie’s background should have a better-developed sense of adventure. She kicked the gate. It remained firmly stuck.

Julie hissed, “The lantern. Put it out.”

Without the lantern they wouldn’t be able to see a foot in front of their noses. As Clea turned to stare at Julie, two rough-looking men headed straight toward them. A third man emerged from the direction of the mews.

Clea blew out the lantern. Julie took firmer hold of her smallsword. “Get ready to run.”

The men came closer, closer; close enough to touch. “Now!” Julie cried, and slashed out with her sword. One man stumbled back,
clutching his forearm. Clea smacked the other in the face with the lantern. He howled, victim of hot oil and broken glass. The third man was tripped up by his flailing comrades, and the three of them tumbled in a tangle on the ground.

Julie tugged Clea’s arm. “Come on!” Already the men were scrambling to their feet. Clea got in one last good thwack before she dropped the pruning-saw.

They ran, this way and that, zigged and zagged through streets that quickly changed from broad and spacious to narrow and mean; passed between two rotting tenements into a small badly paved court. Julie snatched up a handful of grime, rubbed it on her face and clothes; mixed soot with stagnant water and smeared it through her hair; artfully rent her clothing with the blade of her sword. Clea cried out in protest when Julie grasped her precious hat and plucked out the plumes, crushed it and rolled it in the dirt.

Julie led her up an ancient drainpipe and onto a roof.
Clea peered over the roof’s edge. Below them sprawled a rabbit warren of courts and alleys and covered passages. Houses in one narrow street connected with those in other streets by roof and yard. They descended from the rooftops some several streets over by means of back windows that led one to another by a series of large spike nails, one row for hands to grasp and another for feet to rest upon.

A drunken young gentleman stumbled out of a gin-shop, right into their path; tripped over Julie’s out-thrust foot and fell flat on his arse. She helped him up from the garbage-strewn pavement and brushed him off, apologizing for bumping into him, scolding him for venturing into so rough a part of town.
The gentleman closed one eye, as if by so doing he might improve his vision, and staggered off into the fog.

They slipped down a back alley; passed through a shattered door with rotting hinges into a tiny room where the walls bulged in some places and in others had collapsed. Dim light filtered in through broken windows obstructed by the bits of this-and-that which replaced the fractured glass. Clea made out an iron chair and straw pallets on the floor. In one corner was the sort of apparatus used by a baked-potato man, in another a cage filled with sleepy songbirds, beside it a pile of rags.

The pile stirred. A lean wolfish-looking dog emerged from the shadows with a snarl. “Stow it,” Julie snapped. A brief conversation followed, the piles of rags turning out to have people underneath; a conversation conducted in what might as well have been a foreign language, for the only word Clea recognized was ‘Jules’. At its conclusion, Julie retrieved a candle from behind a thicket of broken boards and struck a light.

Clea trailed Julie down a rickety staircase. “What if they hadn’t known you?”

“We wouldn’t have been allowed to pass.”

The staircase ended with a closed door. Julie knocked. The door swung open a scant inch, and then a foot. Beyond it lay a low apartment, all rotting wood and broken stone. The room was crowded with ragged filthy children aged six years to fourteen. Some were seated at benches by a long deal table. Others sprawled before the hearth. “Ain’t seen you in a while, Jules,” the oldest boy drawled.

“You ain’t seen me now.” Julie tossed the stolen handkerchief and Francis Wakely’s plumes onto the table, along with a handful of the coins that had made their way from the drunken gentleman’s pocket into her own. Clea kept close to her side as they crossed the small room and crawled through a half-hidden portal in the opposite wall.

The atmosphere was stagnant, dank. Julie held the candle higher so as to get the most benefit from its light. From deep in the darkness, rats’ eyes glowed red.

They had emerged into a maze of damp, gloomy stone vaults. Beneath London lay a fascinating other world. Clea saw arches and corridors and disappearing staircases; ancient bones and tombs and crypts dating back to Roman times. Plague pits. A Saxon cross of powdered sandstone. Remnants of the Great Fire. Julie urged her through a hole two feet square in a cellar wall, even while admitting this act required a considerable amount of trust on Clea’s part, for only a beetle-headed half-wit would creep on his hands and knees through an unknown in the bowels of the Rookery. As they skirted a large cesspool camouflaged so that
anyone who put his foot on the covering would fall into a vat of sewage, the sound of running water grew louder. Julie explained that they were hearing the Fleet River as it made its way alongside London’s other buried waterways to dump its filthy contents into the Thames. T
he air grew fresher as they passed through an opening in another shattered wall and climbed a narrow staircase with broken steps and rotten rails. At the top stood an ancient door reinforced with mismatched pieces of wood, and a stout lock.

Julie inserted a key. The door was barred from the inside. She knocked, paused, knocked again. A code, concluded Clea, who was relieved to find herself once more above ground.

Sounds of movement came from within. The door edged open and Julie slipped inside. Clea followed. Julie closed the door and turned the lock.

Clea looked curiously around. This room was ten feet by twelve, the ceiling and parts of the wall green and mildewed, the floor dry but bare. Near a small utilitarian fireplace stood a narrow bed. On a rickety wooden table sat a lantern and a book, a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese, a gin bottle and a teacup.

An old woman wrapped in a shapeless dark gown and shawl shuffled over to the bed. As soon as she was seated, a black cat sprang into her lap. Julie blew out her candle and placed it with her smallsword on the table; removed a battered tin from behind a
chink in the wall, and tucked the remainder of her stolen coins inside
. Clea glimpsed faded scraps of ribbon, a deck of torn stained playing cards.

Julie tucked the tin back in its hiding place. “Rose, say hello to Lord Dorset’s sister. Clea, meet my friend Rose from Drury Lane.”

Against one wall leaned a basket filled with wilted flowers. A single sad posy drooped in a cracked vase on the windowsill. “That is an excellent disguise,” Clea politely remarked.

Rose eyed the girl with interest. This was her first acquaintance with the sister of an earl. “Thank you,” she said.

“I especially like the wart on your chin,” Clea added. “However did you get your skin to wrinkle so? I think I would like to tread the boards.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Fresh cucumber juice, Rose thought glumly. Oil of cacao.
“There’s always some ambitious youngster waiting in the wings to step on stage in your place. Such as now, when my understudy will take a turn as Lady Macbeth.”

“Pritchett warned you?” Julie sank down beside her on the bed.

Pritchett had told Rose enough to turn her hair whiter than her wig. “What have you done, you foolish girl?” Gently, she touched Julie’s bruised chin.

What had she done? Aimed above herself, that’s what. Julie explained
how she had visited Astley’s in company with Clea and her brother. “We saw the Flemish Hercules,” Clea put in.

Julie stroked Ophelia’s soft fur. “I was given a note that Mother Yarwood wished to meet with me. But I met Pego and Mick instead. Ned rescued me from them.”

“I wasn’t supposed to know about it, but of course I did,” Clea put in.

Julie finished, in a rush: “Someone tried to push me under a carriage, and I was snatched out of Tony’s house and carried to a brothel and ended up at Wakely Court.”

“I hid her in the turret.” Clea picked up the deck of cards and sat down on the floor to lay out a game of patience, or as Napoleon called it,
solitaire.
“But then I decided to show her the other secret rooms — Wakely Court has a great many secret rooms — and we went out through the hidden gate.”

Rose poured more gin in her teacup. “The house was being watched?”

Julie nodded. “I should have guessed it was.”