as a brace, he levered away from the wall and walked crabwise down the rough stone until he came to the double doors that gave access to the upper floor. A stout lintel ran just below the door, forming a ledge against which he was able to brace his weight while he applied subtle pressure to the doors. The panels gave for about an inch, then stopped. These doors, too, were secured from the inside by a bar.
Shifting his weight, Sebastian retrieved the pry bar from his waistband and thrust its end between the two doors, wedging them open far enough that he was able to slip the length of iron rod in beneath the pivot bar and lever it up. He felt it catch for a moment, then drop away with a clatter that had him cursing silently into the night.
The near door swung open to a gentle nudge that drew no shriek of protest from the hinges. He eased himself inside, deftly closing the doors behind him against any sliver of light or sudden draft of cold air that might betray his presence . . . if the clatter of the falling bar hadn’t already done that.
The atmosphere here was redolent with the warm, exotic scent of coffee. Surrounded by towering stacks of bulging burlap bags, Sebastian crept toward the golden pool of light that was the central opening. The well was large, some eight to ten feet across, and configured much like that of the adjoining warehouse, with a straight flight of stairs running up one side. He could see a huge overhead beam to which was mounted a stout pulley wound with a thick rope. One end of the rope ran down, diagonally, out of Sebastian’s line of vision, but the other hung straight and tautly weighted. As he watched, it quivered slightly, as if the weight suspended from it had moved.
With a sick sense of dread clawing at his guts, Sebastian crept toward the unrailed edge of the well to where he could look down upon the scene Martin Wilcox had prepared for him.
A triangle of three lanterns were clustered together, their light shuttered so that they threw only a narrow, concentrated beam that illuminated the area directly before them while leaving the rest of the warehouse shrouded in darkness. And in that shaft of light, Wilcox had hung Kat.
Her wrists were bound together, and it was from these that she hung suspended from the great overhead pulley, her fingers twisting around to grasp painfully at the rope in an attempt to relieve the strain on her arms and shoulders. As he watched, she pivoted slowly, swinging around so that he could see the fear and the pain in her eyes, her lips drawn back in a harsh rictus around the gag that held her mouth ajar. Her ankles had been tied, too, with more rope wound around her legs, pinning the torn cloth of her velvet riding habit tightly against her.
She hung suspended some three or four feet above where the floor should have been, except that Wilcox had positioned her directly above the trapdoor to the basin and the trapdoor was now open. Through it, Sebastian could see the shimmering blackness of lapping waves as the tide rose with the night.
It was a diabolical trap, delicately baited. Whether Sebastian had entered the warehouse through one of the two ground-floor entrances, or whether he came up through the trapdoor or down the stairs, he could not reach Kat without being caught in the light. Yet because of the way the lanterns were set up, Wilcox kept for himself the protective cover of darkness. He also controlled the rope by which Kat Boleyn hung suspended. The only way Sebastian could free her would be to cut her loose. Yet, bound as she was, even if he were to plunge with her into the dark icy waters below, she would in all probability drown before he could get her to shore.
There was only one move Sebastian could make. He acted swiftly, calculating the position of the lamps and the distance to the rope. Quietly hefting one of the large bags of coffee beans, he eased it over to the edge of the well. He was just stepping back when a board creaked, betrayingly, beneath his foot.
He froze, but the damage was already done. Martin Wilcox’s amused voice came from out of the darkness below. “You may as well show yourself, Devlin. I know you’re there.”
There was a pause, during which Sebastian shrugged off his coat and clenched Tom’s knife between his teeth. Into the silence, Wilcox said, “Let me rephrase that. If you don’t come down, now, your whore here goes in the river. You hear that, Devlin? All I need do is cut the rope, and she’s fish bait.”
Sebastian gave the coffee sack a hard shove that carried it over the edge of the central well to plummet straight down on the triangle of lamps below.
It landed with a shattering crash that plunged the warehouse into darkness just as Sebastian leapt from the well’s edge.
One hand clutched only air, cold and empty. But his right hand caught the rope and closed on it, his arm wrenching in his shoulder as it took all his weight. The impact of the sideways lunge set the rope to swinging, but the movement was slight, too slight. He kicked his legs to make it swing farther, the fibers of the rope burning his hand through the leather of his glove as he slid down to Kat.
He could hear the frightened strain of her breathing. Still gripping the rope with one hand, he closed his free arm around her in a swift, fierce embrace that drew her shivering body back against his chest as he kicked again, swinging them back and forth on the end of the rope like a pendulum. Then, wrapping one leg around her hips to keep them together, he slipped the knife from his teeth and, when the arc of their swing neared its apogee, he reached up and sliced through the rope.
Gritting his teeth, Sebastian hacked at the heavy fibers, the last strands unraveling as he prayed that he hadn’t miscalculated the angle of the arc, that the rope wouldn’t give way at the precise moment they were over the open trap to plunge them into the freezing black waters below.
With a half-catching jerk, the rope unraveled and snapped, hurtling them downward just as a blunderbuss exploded in a deafening roar of fire and smoke.
Chapter 61
He rolled, shifting her weight so that she lay within the protective curve of his body. He could hear the rasp of her breathing, open mouthed behind the gag, but he had no way of knowing if she had taken any of the shot herself. Bringing his lips close to her ear, he whispered softly, “Lie still.”
He felt rather than saw her nodded response, for without the lanterns and surrounded as they were by towering piles of crates and wool bales, the blackness of the night seemed nearly complete.
Moving swiftly in the dark, he sliced through the ropes binding her ankles and tore away the coils wrapping her legs. Cautiously, he ran his hands up over her body. It was just below her ribs he felt the warm sticky wetness of blood.
His heart thudding painfully in his chest, he ripped the cravat from his neck and pressed the quickly folded cloth against her side, unable in the thick, unfamiliar blackness of the foggy night to gauge the seriousness of the wound. Holding the cloth tight with one hand, he worked awkwardly to slice the ropes from her wrists before moving to ease the gag from her mouth.
Her hand caught at his, squeezed his fingers in a silent, trembling communication, then slid away to flutter down to her bloody side.
One cheek pressed against her hair, Sebastian willed his breathing to still as he strained to penetrate the hushed blackness of night. He knew that at the time of the blunderbuss’s firing, Wilcox had been hidden amongst the crates back beneath the stairs. But he couldn’t be certain the man hadn’t moved since then. And while Sebastian doubted Wilcox’s ability to reload a blunderbuss in the dark, there was no way of knowing how many firearms he had with him. Even Kat wouldn’t know if the man had hidden a stash of carbines or pistols at various points about the warehouse before he brought her here.
If he’d been alone, Sebastian would have taken the offensive, trusting his training and the unnatural quickness of his senses to even out the disadvantages of being unarmed and unfamiliar with his surroundings. But he couldn’t leave Kat, alone and vulnerable and hurt.
Yet as the silence in the warehouse stretched out, a dark and tangible thing, Sebastian realized he couldn’t afford to wait for Wilcox to make the next move, either. He had no way of knowing how badly Kat was injured, but he could feel her life’s blood seeping hot and wet through the thick folds of his cravat, could smell the coppery tang mingling with the scents of salt and lanolin that lay so heavy on the night air.
He took her hand in his and pressed it to the cloth at her side, then slipped his own hand away. Dipping his
