She squared her shoulders. “As I understand it, their intention is to throw our bodies in the river. Make it look as if we suffered an accident. Any autopsy would simply show that we’d drowned, wouldn’t it?”
“Why would they care whether or not it was obvious we were murdered?”
“That I don’t know.”
He met her gaze. Her eyes were dilated so wide they looked black. “I don’t intend to drown,” he said, turning back toward the steps.
She trailed after him—or, more exactly, after the light. “Well, that’s reassuring.”
He laughed softly, the lantern making a chink as he set it down on the stone paving. “We could try shouting.”
“I did. Do you have any idea how much earth there is on top of us?”
He was trying not to think about that.
“Where are you going?” she asked as he headed back toward the rubble wall.
He selected a massive chunk of what looked like a broken ionic capital from some long-ago despoiled church. Bending his knees and grunting, he hoisted it to his chest, his head swimming sickeningly. She watched, silent, as he staggered back toward the gate and heaved it at the padlocked chain. It clattered against the iron, then crashed to the stone floor. The chained gate held firm.
Swearing, he heaved the stone at the gate again and again, until he was sweating and his hands were bleeding from the stone’s jagged edges. After perhaps the tenth try, she said calmly, “Stop it. It isn’t doing any good and you’re only hurting yourself.”
He swung to face her, his breath shuddering his chest. “Do you have a better idea?”
“We could try to set fire to the door. Someone might see the smoke and come to investigate.”
It was a crazy idea, but not without merit. He eyed the distance to the door at the top of the stairs. “And how do you propose we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Still breathing hard, he went back to select a fist-sized chunk of rock from the rubble. “Here, hold this,” he said, handing her the rock. He stripped off his groom’s coat and waistcoat, then pulled his shirt off over his head. The damp chill of the subterranean vault sent a shiver through him. He hadn’t thought to check his boot to see if they’d missed his knife. They had.
“Do you always carry that?” she asked, watching him slip the knife from its hidden sheath.
“Always.” He flashed her a smile that showed his teeth. “I even threw it at your father once.”
Using the blade, he sliced his shirt into strips and began to plait them. Her mind was quick. She said, “Let me help.”
He wrapped the plaited shirt around the rock like a long wick, then opened the hinged tin and horn door of the lantern.
“Don’t put out the candle,” she warned.
Grunting, he kindled the torn edge of the shirt, watched it flare and catch. Thrusting his arms through the iron bars of the gate, he held the burning, weighted shirt as long as he could. Then he hurled it at the door above.
It flew through the air, a flaming catapult that illuminated the shadowy stairwell and hit the stout door with a solid thud. Falling to the stone lintel in a shower of sparks, it burned up bright for one shining moment and went out.
“Hell and the devil confound it,” he whispered, then added, “I beg your pardon, Miss Jarvis.”
She stood beside him, her hands, like his, gripping the bars of the gate. “That’s quite all right.”
He swung to look at her, assessing the sturdy cloth of her riding habit. It wouldn’t burn any better than his coat or waistcoat.
She said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Your petticoats.”
“My—” She broke off. He thought for a moment that she meant to refuse him. But what she said was, “Turn around.”
He went to select more rocks from the rubble. She said, “I’m finished.”
He threw his coat up to the door first, followed by his rough waistcoat, not even bothering to try to light them first. “Why?” she asked as he set to work ripping the first of her fine petticoats.
“They’re fodder. The lawn of the petticoats will burn fast, but the wool coat will smolder.”
“We hope.”
“We hope,” he agreed.
He threw the first petticoat-wrapped rock short, so that it burned in a bright, useless heap on the second step. The second try landed square.
“Thank goodness,” she whispered, pressing against the gate, her gaze on the small fire above.
It burned for a time, long enough to fill the air with smoke and the pungent odor of singed wool. Coughing, she said, “Will it kill us, do you think? The smoke, I mean.”
“Probably not if we go to the far end of the chamber, near the rubble. I could feel air coming in there.”
But in the end they had no need to retreat. Once again, the fire sputtered and went out. They had part of one petticoat left.
“It isn’t going to work,” he said.
“It has to work.” She pushed away from the gate. “Start ripping up the last petticoat,” she said, setting to work on the brass buttons of her riding habit. “Your coat was wet from lying on the stone.”
“You’ll be cold,” he said.
She stripped off her habit with angry, purposeful jerks, the white flesh of her arms bathed in gold by the dim light of the flickering lantern. “Just hit the door.”
Both parts of the riding habit landed with satisfying plops atop his coat and waistcoat. He’d have added his breeches, too, but they were of buckskin and would never burn. Clad only in her short, lightweight stays, a thin chemise, boots and stockings, she watched him carefully kindle the last petticoat. He let it flare up until it was almost burning his hand, then lobbed it at the pile of clothes above.
This time, the cloth beneath the burning missile caught, blazing up hot and fast. The air filled with the crackle of flames, the smell of singed wood. They stood and watched it burn, the big bell of St. Clements tolling four times in the distance. Then, as the small bell began to toll again for those who might have miscounted the first bell, this fire, too, hissed softly and went out.
Chapter 41
“I’m sorry I involved you in this,” she said.
They sat side by side on the ledge that ran along the near wall of the stone vaulted chamber. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs so that she could hug them close. He had set the lantern next to her on the ledge, but its feeble warmth provided a pitiful defense against the cold gloom of the subterranean room.
He turned his head to look at her. She’d lost most of her pins. Her hair was coming down, falling in artless disarray about her face. It made her look uncharacteristically approachable. He said, “I involved myself.”
“Why?” That frown line appeared again between her eyes as she studied his face. “Why do you involve yourself in the investigation of murder?”
He tilted back his head, his gaze on the ancient vaulting above. “I’ve been told it’s a form of arrogance, thinking I can solve a mystery that baffles others.”
“But that’s not why you do it.”
He felt a smile curve his lips. “No.”
“It’s the victims, isn’t it? That’s why you do it. For them.”
He said, “It’s why you involved yourself in this mess, isn’t it? For the woman who died in your arms?”
She was silent for a moment. He could hear the distant drip of water, feel the weight of a thousand tons of earth pressing down on them. She said, “I’d like to think so. But I have the most lowering reflection that I’ve been doing it for myself.”
“Yourself?”
She shifted restlessly, edging ever so slightly closer to him. If she’d been any other woman, he would have offered her the warmth of his body—for his sake as well as hers. But one did not offer to hold Lord Jarvis’s daughter, even if she was freezing and about to die. She said, “My father thinks I involve myself in reform because I have a maudlin attraction to good works.”
“He doesn’t know you well, does he?”
She surprised him by letting out a soft huff of laughter. “In that way, no. I’m not a charitable person. I work for reform out of a sense of what’s right, a conviction that things ought to be different. It’s far more intellectual than emotional.”
“I think you’re being too severe with yourself.”
“No. I concern myself with the fate of the poor women and children of London the way I might concern myself with the well-being of cart horses. I empathize with them as fellow creatures, but I certainly never imagined I could ever find myself in their position. But then—”
She broke off, swallowed, and tried again. “Then I met Rose—Rachel Fairchild. And I realized . . . there was a woman like me. A woman born into wealth and privilege who had danced at Almack’s and driven in her carriage in Hyde Park. And yet somehow she had ended up there, at the Magdalene House. That’s when I think for the first time I truly understood . . .
there but for the grace of God go I
.”
He swung his head to look at her. The light from the lantern limned the proud lines of her face with a soft glow, touched her hair with a fire it lacked by the light of day. He said, “So that’s why you set yourself to discover who she was and why she was killed? Out of guilt? Because your life remained privileged and safe while hers . . . fell apart?”
A trembling smile touched her lips. “I’m not exactly safe now, am I?” She shivered, and he reached awkwardly out to draw her against the heat of his body. He expected her to resist, but all she said was, “I am so scared.”
He chaffed his hands up and down the cold flesh of her arms, rested his chin on the top of her head, and held her close. “So am I.”
At one point, she said, “Tell me about your time in the Army.”
And so he talked to her about the places he’d been, and about the War. He found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone, not even Kat. He talked to her about the things he’d seen, and the things he’d done, and why in the end he’d realized he had to leave it all behind or lose himself in a world where everything he believed in could be sacrificed for a chimera. When he fell silent after a time, she said, “Don’t stop. Please. Just . . . talk.”
And so he did.
She said to him, “If we die here today, what will you regret never having done?”
He tightened his arms around her, holding her so that her back was against his bare chest. Holding her that way, he couldn’t see her face and she couldn’t see him. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I suppose I regret having failed my father. The one thing above all else he wanted of me was that I marry and sire an heir. I didn’t do that.” He hesitated. “Why? What do you regret?”
She leaned her head back against his shoulder. “So many things. I’ve always wanted to travel. Sail up the Nile. Explore the jungles of Africa. Cross the deserts of Mesopotamia to the land of the Hindu Kush.”