She hesitated, but only for a few seconds. Then she went, fast as a hare before a hawk.
But sometimes the hares did escape, Matthew thought as he returned to the gatehouse. Especially a hare who did the unexpected. He took a longer drink of rum and saw stars. Going through the coat and the desk drawers, he found nothing useful. Like one of those multiple-barreled death-dealing pistols Ashton McCaggers had told him were being developed in Prussia. He had the feeling he’d been born fifty years too early for this particular occupation. Still, here he was.
If Chapel destroyed that notebook-and he would, as soon as he thought Matthew and Berry had escaped-then all Matthew had to show Gardner Lillehorne was a madman in a cellar.
Get in quickly, break that office door open, and get out quickly. Would someone be guarding the house? Or were they all at the game? What about the women who’d cooked their feast? He could stand here and second-and- third-guess himself to death. He started to take a last drink of courage, but instead he spat some shit out of his mouth and ran toward his fate.
Forty-Eight
Before Matthew ventured into the manse he was compelled to kneel beside the lily pond and drink. Then he thrust his face into the water, for his makeup was drawing flies. He got as much of the mess off as he could. His fingers found the wounds of beak-jab and talon-scrape, his left eye was on its way to swelling shut, and there was a gash on his right cheek that felt so deep the bone must have a clawmark on it. A pretty little scar to go with his collection, he thought. At this rate he’d have to wear his own mask to be presentable in public.
But he had his vision and he wasn’t dead, nor was he severely wounded enough to wish to die. He had his hands back, and that was a blessing. Quick in and quick out, and pray to God they didn’t put a boy on the gate before he was done.
It was deadly dangerous to be out here in the open. He heard shouting off in the distance, to the right. They were combing the woods, but it wouldn’t be long before they did discover the gate. At any second he expected someone to come running along the road, knife in hand, to take up position on the front steps. He got himself up, his heart pounding so hard it shook his body, climbed the steps, and tried the door. It had not been locked by Chapel or Evans on the way to the game, and Matthew walked into the house. He shut the door behind him. The place was silent. He hurried through the corridor to the dining-room, his senses questing for movement or sound, and there stood before the door that separated him from Chapel’s office and the last remaining notebook.
Of course he’d seen it locked, but out of the habit of humans to not trust their eyes Matthew tried the handle. Locked then, locked now.
Now what?
Nothing to be done but the way of the brute. Matthew set himself and kicked the door as hard as he could manage. Then once again, when it wouldn’t budge. It seemed colonial oak was equally as strong as the English variety. The thing wasn’t opening so easily, and in the bargain the noise would awaken the eyeless failures in Chapel’s cemetery.
Matthew desperately looked around. The tall brass candelabras that shed so much light upon the glittering silverware. Their bases looked sturdy enough. He picked one up and found his muscles straining under the weight. This is what a moonbeam can do, he thought. Sir Lancelot he was not, but he backed up nearly the length of the room and held the candelabra’s base as a medieval knight might have hefted a jousting lance. If the door didn’t give this time, his ribs were going to be caved in.
He set off running. Hit the door under the handle with his makeshift lance and had an instant of feeling impaled upon it. Was that his ribs, making such a cracking sound?
No. It was the door, which burst open and crashed against the wall behind it. The battered thing hung limply on a single hinge. He had felt similarly unhinged after his drugged escapade with Lady LeClaire, who he remembered was a sleeping not-so-beauty at the top of the stairs.
Someone began to clap their hands together.
Matthew caught his breath and spun around, the candelabra still in his arms.
“A wonderful example of how to wreck a perfectly good door, sir,” said Simon Chapel. Beside him and behind a few paces stood Count Dahlgren, his face devoid of emotion but the green eyes glittering. “What do you think you’re doing, otherwise?”
Matthew couldn’t get his tongue working.
“Oh,” Chapel said, with a quick mirthless smile. “I see. Returning for the notebook, is that it? Surely. You have nothing without it, correct? Even Mr. Nack knew that.” His topaz eyes behind the square lenses ticked right and left. “Your ladyfriend? Where is she?”
“Gone,” Matthew said. “Out the gate.”
Chapel’s mouth may have twisted just a fraction. “Out the gate?” He composed himself, like any ambitious son of a poor tinker would. “Well, it’s a long way to town, isn’t it? A long way also to the nearest farm. We’ll find her.” He looked Matthew over from dirty shoetips to top of his touseled and claw-ripped hair. “Maybe you ought to go to that village in Wales, Matthew. I’m sure the professor would find some use for an escape artist of your caliber. And you got out of the cords, too! Fascinating. But some of the boys are just out front and their knives are very hungry, so you can tell me how you gave my birds the shake while we-”
He was interrupted, quite firmly, by a shouting and hollering outside the house that even Matthew could tell was not rough-housing boys eager for a killing. There was some panic in the voices that went up and up like the hawks fleeing bitter earth. “What is that?” Chapel said to Count Dahlgren, and he was answered not by the Prussian but by the crack of a pistol shot.
“Sir! Sir!” It was Lawrence Evans, shouting from the doorway. “Someone’s gotten in!” The voice was high and thin, squeezed by fear. “Riders!”
Chapel shivered. In an instant his face went pallid, as if he were freezing to death.
“Mr. Chapel!” Evans squawled, and now could be heard through the open door and along the corridor a small thunder of horse hooves, more panicked shouting, and a second pistol shot that made the master of the house shake in his shoes as if his little world had suddenly been knocked out of the sky by one of Increase Mather’s comets.
Chapel turned like a force of nature, however wounded, and grasped the front of Dahlgren’s beige coat to shove the man aside. But then he glanced back at Matthew, his face contorted and saliva glistening at the corners of his mouth. Beneath the mask of a gentleman was a mad dog. He said to Dahlgren, “Cut him to pieces.”
Chapel rushed from the room along the corridor, and Dahlgren suddenly moved with the speed of quicksilver to draw a sword from one of the displays beside the fireplace.
Matthew glanced toward the doors that led out to the terrace and the garden. They were shrouded by the wine-red drapes. He thought that if he had to spend more than two seconds trying to get through the drapes and the doors, he’d be skewered in the back. Even if he made it, he would die amid the flowers.
Dahlgren was advancing. The sounds of conflict outside the house made no impression upon him; his orders had been given.
Matthew had to move. He thrust forward with the candelabra, aiming at Dahlgren’s chest. The Count nimbly stepped aside, grabbed the knight’s lance with one hand, and tore it out of Matthew’s grip, at the same time bringing the rapier’s deadly point up in a strike at Matthew’s belly.
Matthew backpedalled out of range. Dahlgren followed, throwing aside the candelabra with Prussian disdain. Abruptly Matthew found himself pushed back against the other display of swords on his side of the fireplace. His hand chose a rapier before his brain could tell him it was a stupid thing to do, yet he pulled the weapon free. Instantly Dahlgren went into a combat posture, turning his body to make a thinner target and putting his free hand behind him like a rudder, knees bent but not too much, feet spaced for balance, hand closed firmly around the sword’s grip and the thumb locked down. All the damned things Greathouse had tried to teach, Matthew thought grimly.
He knew he had not the chance of a spit in a skillet to survive the next minute, let alone a concentrated attack. When Dahlgren realized he was facing a moonbeam, the headstone carver ought to get his chisel.
Someone was out there. Riders, Evans had said. How many? Two pistol shots and pandemonium. If rescuers had somehow arrived, he had to live long enough to be rescued.
