Vintage Love (38 page)
“No one seems to be hearing him,” she said, ignoring the clamor the butler made as he pounded at the door.
“I don’t mean that,” Kingston told her. “He has our weapons! They were in the bloomin’ basket!”
“Oh!” she said groaning. Then, “Never mind, we shall have to manage without them.”
“We won’t get far, I know that,” Kingston whispered fiercely.
She whispered back, “maybe we can snatch a weapon from the next one who comes by!”
The frail man stared at him, saying, “I should have listened and known better,” he turned and let Valmy direct him toward a door along the rear hallway.
They moved to the big stairway at the front of the house. Outside the sound of the gathering army group could be plainly heard. It meant they would be attacking soon. And there was this eerie silence and the great house was seemingly deserted. She glanced toward the doors to the right, large double doors, and from behind them she heard voices suddenly in an urgent dialogue.
She gave a signal to Kingston to crouch in the shadows under the stairway so as not to be seen. She also took a place beside him, scarcely daring to breathe!
The double doors opened, and Valmy came out in a mood of angry tension. He cried, “We have no choice! It must be the sewers!”
Behind him came the frail-looking gray-haired man whom she remembered from Venice: Napoleon, even more thin and ill looking than he had been. The former emperor was wearing a dark jacket and white breeches in his familar style.
Now he faced Valmy and said, “I cannot do it! It is beneath my dignity! I have not come all the long way to Paris for this!”
“Damn your dignity!” Valmy said in a frenzy. “Don’t you understand? They are outside about to attack the house and take us prisoners. The king’s army! All my guards have deserted me! There’s no hope but the sewers!”
“Then go,” the worn former emperor said. “I shall stand my ground. The king will give me the honorable consideration of which I’m entitled!”
“Fool!” Valmy cried. “You will come with me!” And he whipped out a pistol and pointed it at the emperor.
By this time the clamor from outside was so loud that the noise of the butler trying to escape from the kitchen closet could not be heard.
Soon after Valmy escaped with his prisoner, she motioned Kingston to emerge from their hiding place. She raced across to the room from which the two had come to try and quickly find a weapon of some sort. A hasty glance showed nothing. And then she saw it as it lay on a polished table near the door. A sword in a sheath! And she recognized the sheath and knew it to be the emperor’s sword!
She seized the sheath and drew out the sword and joined Kingston again. “All I could find,” she told the astonished little actor. “We must hurry after them!”
“He’ll kill us if he sees us,” Kingston quavered.
“One of us, perhaps,” she said. “The other must finish him.”
They ran down the hall with the splintering of the front door and the shouts of incoming soldiers in their ears. They found the door open through which the emperor and Valmy had vanished. She led the way, eyes alert on the shadowed stairway as they descended, sword at the ready in her hand.
Kingston was breathing hard behind her. “Caught between them!” he gasped.
“This way,” she said as they reached the cellar.
Ahead was an open trap door, and there was a ladder leading down to the sewers from it. She turned to Kingston and told him, “I’ll go first!”
BETSY STEPPED gingerly off the ladder and tried to adjust her eyes to the near darkness of the dank sewer. Then Kingston came down after her. A short distance ahead they saw the glow of a lantern.
She whispered, “That will be them. Trying to make their way to another house and escape!”
“It’s Valmy wants that, not Napoleon!” Kingston whispered in return.
“I know,” she said. “Watch your step!” she warned. For at that point the tunnel narrowed, and there was only a platform of perhaps two feet running alongside the poisonous-looking sewer water.
She pressed close to the slimy side of the tunnel, and Kingston did the same. Slowly they gained on Valmy and his distinguished prisoner. All at once the platform widened again to about four feet.
Ahead Valmy said, “We should be able to find an entrance to a house about here!”
“I will go no further!” his captive said, facing him sternly.
“You’re right! It is the end of the road!” Valmy sneered and he lifted his pistol and fired at the man on whom he had pinned all his hopes.
The former emperor received the bullet direcly in the area of the heart. Blood poured out over his waistcoat, and he fell back into the polluted stream of sewerage and vanished.
Betsy watched in awe, and a great rage surged up in her. “Traitor!” she cried! And she lifted the emperor’s sword.
A surprised Valmy turned around quickly and aimed his pistol to shoot her, but she was too quick for him. She was close to him and the emperor’s sword was through his chest as he pressed the trigger of his weapon. The pistol went off with the bullet harmlessly spending itself in the wall of the tunnel.
Valmy’s expression was one of sheer horror as she withdrew the sword from him. He lifted his hands as he tried to hurl some imprecation at her. Then blood spurted out from his mouth, and he tottered back to join his victim in the sewer stream.
Kingston was at her side, panting, “I didn’t think you’d manage!”
She was staring at the dark stream of the sewer. “I had to,” she said, her own breath coming with difficulty. “I had to do it for Napoleon and for myself!”
It was then the voices of Eric and the others came to them from far along the sewer tunnel. She turned and touched Kingston on the arm.
“Down that way!” she said. “We’ll meet them.”
He nodded and started along the dark tunnel. She held the bloodstained sword in her hands for a moment and then she tossed it into the polluted river. She picked up the lantern which was on its side but still burning and followed Kingston.
They joined with the other group within a few minutes. Eric took her in his arms and said nothing for a time. Then he began to question her as they stood there — a forlorn little squad in the dank tunnel under the Paris streets.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Valmy killed him,” she said. “I finished Valmy with the emperor’s sword. They’re both somewhere there in the river of sewerage!”
Eric gave a small gasp of dismay. “Felix Black will be unhappy.”
“There was no other way,” she said.
They found a passage to the surface and then took a carriage back to the pension. Captain Gray was to return to his ship at once, there being no reason to delay his sailing any longer.
O’Meara left them at the door of the pension. He seemed in low spirits as he told them, “I will make my way back to England on my own. It has been a sad night for me.”
“For all of us,” she said, touched by his sorrow.
“Not the same for any of you,” the Irishman said looking away. “I had great hopes for him. I always believed.” And giving her a last look which could have been one of reproach, he walked off into the darkness.
Kingston stared after him indignantly, “The nerve of the man! You’d almost think he was blaming us for what happened.”
“He’s a romantic,” she said with a small tremor in her voice. “He has to blame someone!”
Eric shook his head. “It is you who are the romantic! He’s a stubborn firebrand of an Irishman! They’re never to be satisfied!”
They went inside and were greeted by a long-faced landlady. She said, “I’m glad you have come. Monsieur Black has suffered a severe attack. The doctor is with him now. I do not know!”
Betsy felt panic. “He was ill before we left.”
“Let us find out how he is,” Eric said.
They all three went swiftly up the steps and were greeted by a sober-looking little man carrying a medicine bag. He looked at them and said, “You are his friends?”
“Yes,” she said. “How is he?”
“He has not long,” the doctor said sadly. “He should be dead at this moment. But somehow he has revived a little.”
Eric asked, “Can he be moved?”
The doctor shrugged. “It would be dangerous. I cannot say. I will come by again in the morning.”
He went on his way, and led by Betsy, the three filed into the softly lighted room. The candle on the bedside table showed a motionless Felix Black in bed, his face the same color as the white pillow. Apparently he heard them and opened his eyes.
“Well?” he asked in a low voice.
She had tears in her eyes as she took his hand and said, “Later. We can talk about it later.”
“Now!” he said in a firmer voice, and his eyes were fixed on her.
Briefly she told him. “They are both gone! Somewhere in the waters of the great sewer. The army broke in afterward but too late to come upon them.”
“Good!” Felix Black said. “My own little army completed the task.” His voice still terribly weak, he went on. “And it was proper that he was avenged. Avenged with his own sword!”
Eric spoke up. “You must not talk, sir. You are very ill!”
“I have been dying for a long time,” the old spy master said. “The time is close. But not yet. Tomorrow we begin our journey home. I wish to have the game end in Fetter Street. In England.”
Betsy asked, “Are you able to travel?”
The old man smiled bleakly. “I shall make the journey. And you, Kingston, sit with me a little. I dislike being alone tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” the actor said with emotion and drew a chair up by the master spy’s bed.
Felix Black closed his eyes. Betsy and Eric left the room silently. She turned to the man she loved and tearfully asked, “Will he manage it?”
Eric smiled sadly. “He will. Have you ever doubted him?”
“No,” she said huskily. “Nor you!” And she pressed close to him, and their lips met.
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
Copyright © 1980 by W.E. Dan Ross
ISBN 10: 1-4405-7285-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7285-2
eISBN 10: 1-4405-7286-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7286-9
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © istockphoto/iconogenic and istockphoto/javarman3
Clarissa Ross
Avon, Massachusetts
1
Lady Enid Blair, a young, sloe-eyed beauty with golden tresses and soft, creamy skin, understood that any shocking thing was possible in the city of Paris in 1789. But this wedding dinner a few short hours after her marriage to Lord Andrew Blair far exceeded anything she or any other good English virgin could have imagined. It was the climax of a series of unsettling events that had occurred ever since she had agreed to marry the dashing but dissolute young nobleman two months ago.
“La-di-da sort of fellow,” her father, Lord Alfred Henson, had commented weakly from his sickbed. Then his eyes—plum-colored like Enid’s—had met hers in a look of appeal. “Because of my illness and a slump in my business interests, we are nearly destitute. Lord Andrew has offered to extend unlimited credit to me, and your marriage to him would be provident, indeed.”
Enid had had no deep love for Andrew, but she had known that he moved in the highest social circles of London, was much admired by some for his reckless behavior, and was enormously wealthy. She had felt obliged to agree to the match for the sake of her parents, and when Andrew had made his proposal, she had accepted, but with a chill in her heart. She had sensed that even if she strove to be a good and faithful wife, the marriage was in some way doomed.