The Deception of the Emerald Ring (45 page)

"Teresa took it upon herself to remove Miss Gilchrist. The rest"—Vaughn waved a hand in the direction of the settee—"is pure conjecture."

"You believe this was done in retaliation, then."

"Perhaps. It might have been meant as a warning to the others. It was a matter of order. And of power. Uneasy lies the head, and all that. No ruler can brook such a blatant challenge to his authority and expect to remain long on his throne. And so, farewell, Teresa."

For someone who claimed to be uninvolved, Lord Vaughn seemed suspiciously well informed.

"By ruler," Letty asked, "do you mean the Black Tulip?"

"As you will. That name will do as well as any other. Teresa referred to her colleague only as monseigneur. A quaint touch, don't you think?"

"It needn't have been a literal rank," mused Jane. "In French?"

"Invariably. It is," added Vaughn, "not necessarily an indicator of his place of origin. Teresa had gone native in all things. She even took to calling herself Thérčse for a time. Or simply 'the marquise,' as if she were a piece on a chessboard with no person beneath it."

"You knew her for a long time, then," said Letty, watching Vaughn closely. A germ of an idea teased at her imagination. Vaughn's explanations all fit a little too well, fell a little too pat.

"A very long time." Vaughn smiled a crooked little smile, before adding, with a studied air of nonchalance, "Odd, isn't it, how these revolutionaries cling to their titles, despite all of their republican pretensions. Bonaparte will be naming himself emperor next."

"Might I ask," inquired Jane delicately, "why you did not see fit to bring the marquise's relations with Miss Gilchrist to my attention prior to this?"

Vaughn bowed in apology. "I was only admitted to her confidence on that score last night. Ought I to have interrupted your chaste slumbers?"

"None of us," said Jane austerely, "shall slumber properly until the matter of the Black Tulip is dealt with."

She had, realized Letty, very neatly avoided either accepting Vaughn's excuse or naming him a liar.

Vaughn turned and looked straight at the figure on the settee. There was very little spare flesh on his form, but a trick of the light made the sharp bones of his face seem even more stark than usual, as though the skin were stretched too tightly over them.

His lips twisted in what might have been mockery, or grief, or both.

"'Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.'"

With an uncharacteristically abrupt gesture, he tossed back the remains of his drink. Setting the glass down heavily on the small gilt table, he said, "She wasn't supposed to be here. She had a meeting tonight, with the leaders of the rebel cause."

"Tonight?" repeated Jane. "Was it at a place called Kilmacud?"

"No. It was the name of some local saint or other. The one with the snakes."

Letty's mouth felt suddenly very dry.

"Patrick?" she asked. "As in Patrick Street?"

"The very one. Teresa had an appointment to view their armory, to make sure it would be up to snuff in time for the invasion. Tedious stuff." Vaughn flipped open a small china box and expertly deposited a smattering of snuff on the side of his wrist.

Against the lace of his sleeve, the grains looked dark as gunpowder.

Jane's face was very still. "When?"

"Six half past something of that order. She was to inspect, and then report back to her shadowy colleague later this evening." Conveying the snuff neatly to his nostrils, Vaughn essayed a genteel cough, indicative of extreme boredom. "That is all I know."

As one, Letty and Jane turned to the clock on the mantel. As if it knew it was being watched, the minute hand jerked awkwardly toward the Roman numeral IV, like a malingering sentry scurrying back to his post.

Twenty past six. And Geoff and Miss Gwen would still be there, caught red-handed among the kegs of gunpowder when the rebel leaders reappeared. They couldn't possibly fight their way through that many.

Jane's eyes met Letty's over the marquise's fallen form. "I need to search the marquise's belongings immediately."

She didn't add before someone else does, but the meaning was as clear to Letty as if she had spoken it. Whatever her arrangement with Vaughn, it didn't extend to unconditional trust. What better way to watch a potential suspect than feigning partnership? Letty approved the motivating sentiment, but if Jane wasn't able to warn Geoff, that left only one option.

On the mantel, the minute hand arched another centimeter closer to half past the hour.

"I'll go," said Letty.

* * *

"WHO'RE YOU?"

The whiskey fumes hit Geoff before the words. Propping one hand against the doorjamb of the outbuilding, the watchman took an unsteady step forward, squinting at Geoff.

Geoff curved his back in a casual slouch, doing his best to look harmless. Only a yard from the back door, he had begun to hope that Emmet had left the house completely unattended. There were, after all, several other rebel caches throughout the city, and limited staff on hand to man them all.

When Geoff saw the watchman, he understood why Emmet had left him behind. Graying stubble caked the bottom half of his face, and his hands bore witness to his trade in the faint shadow of indigo that overlay his skin. Dye could be scrubbed off, but over time it left its mark, especially on the careless. McDaniels might have been a good dyer once, but his fondness for the bottle had lost him most of his custom, leaving him with tinted skin and a bellyful of bitterness against anyone he could find to blame.

Of all the members of Emmet's band, McDaniels was the least likely watchdog Geoff could imagine. Emmet must be growing careless as the big day drew nearer. A mistake.

A mistake Geoff could use.

"Byrne sent us," Geoff said confidently, hooking his thumbs in his belt. He jerked his head at Miss Gwen, similarly attired in a coarse shirt, loose vest, and baggy pants.

Despite Geoff's protests that laborers generally didn't carry parasols, Miss Gwen had refused to relinquish her chosen weapon. Geoff could only hope she was holding it discreetly behind her back, otherwise they might have some explaining to do, even to McDaniels.

"I'm Dooney and this is Burke. We're here to work on the fuses." Geoff lowered his voice to an eager whisper that could be heard three houses away. "For the rockets."

Either it sounded plausible to McDaniels, or he had imbibed enough that he just didn't care. With a grunt of assent, he waved Geoff on toward the house.

"Much obliged!" Geoff called back over his shoulder, and was rewarded with the slosh of liquid as McDaniels waved his bottle at him in salute.

Miss Gwen wrinkled her nose in an eloquent expression of distaste.

They slipped through the back door into the barren work-room that occupied the back of the house. There was little in it, only a few benches and some long trestle tables where the bulk of Emmet's experiments with weapon manufacture took place. Shelves lined most of the white-plastered walls, covered with a motley assortment of items, from coarse ceramic plates to a dented kettle. The ashes had been shoveled from the hearth, but not thoroughly enough. Bits of melted metal added an odd luster to the hearthstone, and a clear indicator of illicit activity. The more common smells of old meals and spilled ale were underlain by another, more acrid scent that stung Geoff's nose. The reek of sulfur was hard to hide, unless Emmet intended to pass it off as a basket of bad eggs. The hens in the coop outside would undoubtedly be deeply offended by the slur on their capacities.

Holding up a finger in warning, Geoff slid through the next door to check the front room, which had been fitted up as a sort of rough parlor. Equally empty. There was an empty plate bearing breadcrumbs and a rind of cheese, remnants of someone's hurried meal. The only sign of illicit activity was a hollow grenade shell that had rolled beneath a table, and a scattering of dark grains that were clearly not meant to be ingested, at least not if one didn't intend to fling oneself into the air and scatter body parts over a large area.

A perfunctory check revealed the upper stories to be equally empty of both human inhabitants and extraneous weaponry.

Geoff couldn't have asked for better.

There was, he thought, a basic irony in the fact that Emmet deliberately understaffed his most important depot for fear that excessive activity would draw attention to the building. That very same strategy meant that his biggest arsenal lay open, completely unprotected except for one drunken dyer, who, at this point in his nightly binge, probably couldn't tell a pig from a pike, much less a Royalist from a Republican.

"All clear," he said softly, padding back downstairs, where Miss Gwen was tapping her parasol with impatience against the scarred wooden planks of the floor.

"All very well and good, but I have made a thorough tour of the premises, and fail to see any explosive matter, except for one pitiful excuse for a grenade and some sorry grains of gunpowder. This has been a sad waste of our time."

"Ah, but that's what you were meant to think." Geoff grinned, feeling the rush of the mission run through him. "Allow me to provide explosive matter for you."

Striding toward the shelves on the wall, Geoff reached past a row of metal tankards, feeling along the brackets that held the shelves in place.

"This is hardly the time for refreshment," objected Miss Gwen.

"That's where you're wrong." Geoff found the latch he had been looking for, just behind a molding round of cheese. The whiff of it was enough to deter any less-determined seeker. "I'd say this is exactly the time."

Pressing down on a bent nail, he felt the catch give, and the entire section of shelving swung neatly back on well-oiled hinges. The door had been neatly done, built of bricks within a frame, then plastered over to resemble the adjoining wall. As an extra precaution, shelves had been bracketed to it, providing a third layer of protection. None of that, however, prevented a truly careful observer from noting that the house was a third larger on the outside than on the inside. Once that was established, it was only a matter of logical calculation to determine the location of the door.

Not to mention that Geoff had been watching through the window one night while Emmet manipulated the catch.

Propping open the door with one shoulder, Geoff gestured Miss Gwen into an Ali Baba's cave of armaments. Enough metal-tipped pikes to satisfy an entire Mongol horde were stacked along one wall, waiting to be passed out into the eager hands of volunteers. Halfway up, each boasted a small metal hinge, designed so that the pikes could be folded in two and hidden under a man's coat, ready to be pulled out when the signal was called. There were piles of blunderbusses, jumbles of pistols, barrels of gunpowder, miniature mounds of grenades, and trays strewn with sun-dried saltpeter.

All around the windowless room, weapons were ranged, weapons traditional and experimental, old weapons, new weapons, muskets and bayonets, pikes and swords, grenades and clubs, each clustered with its own kind, all awaiting the great day of liberation. It was an array designed to send the king's ministers into sheer, gibbering panic.

Miss Gwen drank in the sight with an expression of rapture reminiscent of Joan of Arc in the midst of a divine vision.

"I do hope this is satisfactory," said Geoff.

Miss Gwen made unerringly for the barrels of gunpowder. "I believe it will do."

Geoff carefully lit a glass-lined lantern and hung it just inside the door, as far away from explosive materials as he could. While the goal was to blow up the house, he preferred to wait until he was no longer in it.

Dying gloriously for the cause might be the stuff of song and legend, but he would rather accomplish his mission with a minimum of personal injury—the odd powder burn didn't really count—and head happily home to spend the evening before the hearth, Letty in one arm, a hot dish of tea in the other, trading tales of the day's adventures.

All the more reason to get the job done quickly.

"The trapdoors in the ceiling lead up to other storerooms," explained Geoff rapidly, pointing to a square hole just above Miss Gwen's head. "There are more pikes and muskets above and gunpowder on the top floor."

Geoff could see the ramifications clicking into place in Miss Gwen's keen mind. "Which means "

"That each explosion will set off a successive explosion on the floor above."

It would have been uncharacteristic for Miss Gwen to express approval. "Is there enough air to feed the flames?"

Geoff indicated the outside wall, where a series of small holes had been bored in the guise of knotholes in the wood. "These rooms were designed for the potential storage of men as well as weapons. Let's get started on the rockets, shall we?"

Taking Miss Gwen by the arm, he all but dragged her over to the short stack of rockets propped against the wall. Designed to Emmet's specifications, they were all composed of iron cylinders not more than twenty inches long, with an arrowlike point at one end.

They were clumsy-looking things, and Miss Gwen eyed them askance.

"I expected something more impressive." Miss Gwen considered for a moment. "Something taller."

"Each one," said Geoff, forestalling her as she reached for the one on top, "is packed solid with a mixture of gunpowder, sulfur, and potassium nitrate."

"Hmmm," said Miss Gwen, regarding the rockets with renewed interest.

"They're meant to be tied in bunches around a central pole," Geoff explained, busily unrolling a length of twine from around his waist. "That provides the height. The pikes should be just about long enough."

That was all the instruction Miss Gwen needed. They worked swiftly and silently, grouping the rockets into bunches, securing them with thick loops of twine, and inserting fuses into the holes provided for that purpose in their bases. The only sounds in the room were the brush of rope against iron, the periodic scrape of a pike base across the floor, and the disjointed patter of mice scurrying along the baseboards.

The fuse, cotton twine coated with gunpowder, left dark flecks on their gloved fingers as they worked. The acrid smell of sulfur, stronger with the door closed, made Geoff's nose tingle and his eyes water. In the windowless room, it might have been any time from noon to midnight. The door to the back room fitted perfectly to its frame, without any cracks or chinks. The air-holes bored into the wall were too small to admit any light, and they were nearly too small to admit much in the way of air. Hide the rebel leaders in there, and they were probably in greater danger of asphyxiation than discovery.