The Spellbinder (Tom & Laura Series) (22 page)

Fred had told them the steps ended at a large flat rock that formed part of the entrance to the harbor in the cave. When they got to the rock they would be able to walk around the side of the cave and into the harbor. Currently the rock was completely underwater. If it took a long time for the tide to go out they would be dead from exposure before it happened. Laura looked down the zigzag of the steps looking for somewhere to shelter.

“Look, Tom. There’s a small cave down there.”

The smugglers had carved a small cave into the rock. It had a tiny entrance. When inside they found it protected them from the wind. Laura pulled parchment from her bag along with pen and ink.

A few words on paper later and their clothes were warm and dry. Laura smiled at Tom. “I’ve made our clothes waterproof. I wish I’d thought of that earlier.”

“Well, we live and learn,” Tom said. “As long as we keep on living, that’s fine by me.”

Chapter 26
   
Morning

Another morning at Hobsgate and the sun broke through the morning mist to cast a pale glow through the windows. The teachers were sleeping in the staff room. The door was locked from the outside and a soldier stood guard on the room in the corridor outside.

There had been a lot of shouting and finger pointing when they arrived in the room.

‘
Somebody should have noticed the Headmaster has gone insane.’

‘We should have fought the minute we saw them.’

‘We should have negotiated.’

‘We should have done something.’
And it was that last idea that stuck in their minds, the thought that they should have done something, though they had no idea what.

It took them longer to accept that from the moment they had walked into the Mess the fate of the Spellbinders and
Leon
had been sealed. There had been nothing they could have done. It was well into the early hours before they agreed this simple fact and finally stopped shouting at each other and went to sleep.

Dr. White was the first to wake. He stirred the embers of the fire back into life and put more wood on. In less than half an hour the fire was blazing away merrily and he had boiled a large kettle of water. Then he brewed tea in the pot.

The scent of the tea woke the others. Philus Brown the physical education teacher poured himself a cup and blew on the brew to cool it down; his thick handlebar moustache dipping into the liquid with every breath.

Miss Pruitt combed her hair using the small ornate mirror that hung on the wall. Not that anybody could tell the difference when she finished, than how it had been when she started.

Mrs. Trenchard fussed at her clothes, attempting to remove the creases a night spent on the chair had put into them, while Strength McGuiness coughed disgustingly as he packed his pipe for his first smoke of the day.

‘It was so unreal’
, Dr White thought as he sat down with his tea and sighed.
‘Soldiers should not murder innocent people like that. It should never happen.’

It would be easy to pretend it was a bad dream and he would wake from it any minute. Unfortunately, he knew that it was real and he would have to deal with it soon, but for now, he sat and drank his tea.

“What can we do?” Mrs. Trenchard asked. “We can not let these people carry on killing with the Prince of Wales as their next target.”

There was no obvious response. Strength coughed and Dr White stirred his tea as if no one had spoken.

“What else can we do, but let them?” Miss. Pruitt asked. “They have all the weapons, they have that Gatling monstrosity. They have everything. We have nothing to fight them with.”

“We have our brains and our hearts, Amanda,” Dr White said wearily and paused to let that thought sink in. “We must do what is best for our students, for our country, and stop thinking only of ourselves.”

“I sense that you have a plan, my man.” Strength gripped his pipe firmly in his teeth and took a series of short puffs on it that filled the room with acrid smoke. “Out with it then, we haven’t got all day.”

Dr White shook his head and rose to his feet to address them. “As a matter of simple fact we do have today, and tomorrow morning. Late tomorrow morning, the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales will come down the drive in a coach with a retinue of soldiers surrounding them on horseback. They will expect to see students and tutors gathered at the front door. I believe that two of us, the men folk only,” he said looking sternly at the women, “Should run towards the coach shouting out a warning.”

Mrs. Trenchard was not impressed. “That is suicide. Our captors will shoot you.”

Dr White nodded his agreement.

“Yes, they will certainly shoot us both. They will have no choice. But then our soldiers will hear the shots and see us fall, and that will give the Prime Minister and the Prince a chance to escape this trap. At the very least, our captors will give chase as they flee, and that will give our students an opportunity to escape. It is only a chance, but they deserve it, and we owe it to them. I shall be one of the two who runs.” Dr White sat down.

“I would not be able to live with myself if I did not try,” Philus Brown said solemnly. “And I can run quite fast for a man of my advancing years. It would be my privilege to join you, Dr White, for just such a stroll tomorrow.”

“Then it is decided.” Dr White sipped at his cup of tea meditatively.

“You are both mad, and I forbid you to do it,” Mrs. Trenchard sounded angry with them. The two men said nothing and drank their tea in silence.

Cam
felt washed out. Her room was filled with a dozen or more students and she couldn’t find a way off her bed without treading on their sleeping bodies. Not that her bed was free, Daisy and Virtue Williams were sharing it with her.

‘We have to do something,’
she thought anxiously.

“Wha ?” Daisy replied. Apparently
Cam
had spoken her thoughts out loud.

“We’ve got to do something,”
Cam
repeated. “We need a plan.”

“Breakfast would be a plan,” Tompkins said cheerfully from somewhere on the floor. “Do they plan to starve us, do you think. They are certainly evil enough.”

“I know not and I care not,”
Cam
said dismissively. Her current agenda was far from food. “We need to gather intelligence, so we can plan.”

Tompkins grinned. “Don’t look at me. I get ‘F’s in all my lessons.”

Cam
frowned at him. “Now is not the time to come out of a blue funk and start spouting bad jokes. I need ideas.”

“They have locked all the doors in any case,” Daisy said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and wondering how long Virtue’s arm had been resting between her thighs. She gently picked up said arm and placed it back where it belonged. Virtue was asleep and did not notice.

Cam
’s eyes gleamed with devilment. “Not true, Daisy. There are keys hidden by all the doors and I know exactly where they are. They only think they have us locked in.”

“But if we’re caught they’ll shoot us.” Daisy was strongly adverse to the idea of being shot. There were things she hadn’t even done yet. It was all right for
Cam
, she had experience with young men.

Cam
shook her head. “They will not shoot me if I dress as a servant. The servants bring them food and drink whenever they ask.
 
If caught, I shall pretend I am returning to the servants’ quarters after coming out to serve one of them. I have a costume.”

She went over to her wardrobe, carefully treading between sleeping students. She pulled out a set of servants clothes. “I had planned to serve you one night and see if any of you noticed.”

“If you are going then so am I.” Daisy tone was adamant.
Cam
would not be doing this alone.

Sounds of movements in the corridor outside stopped any further conversation.
Cam
made her way to the door and pulled it open. Almost inevitably, Emma stood outside her door and spoke excitedly as soon as she saw
Cam
.

“They are feeding us. We are to go to the Mess.”

As if a switch had been flipped, all the people in
Cam
’s room were awake and busy rubbing their eyes. It seemed that reconnaissance would have to wait until after breakfast.

Snood awoke with a start when the Captain kicked him on the leg.

“Gedd-up. My men have eaten and it’s our turn. Got to supervise those little spies some more.
 
Make sure they eat their meals. I wouldn’t want them to waste away before tomorrow.”

“Where’s the Headmaster?”

“Turner is doing a little job for me. Come on.”

Turner Black had replaced Dr Alan Fines almost a year before. In many ways he saw himself as the real Headmaster as he’d been doing the job for so long. Now he walked towards the familiar staff room aware that he had become is staffs enemy.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Black,” the guard at the door said and nodded at him. They had worked together a couple of years ago, though Black had looked totally different back then.

“Good to see you, Sparrow,” he replied. “Open the door. I have a message for the prisoners.”

The guard opened the door and Black looked into the room. “You can eat now. Go down to the Mess and don’t give the guards any trouble. You’re outnumbered and our crew’ll shoot you soon as look at you.”

His staff looked at him as though he was a stranger. He had lost his English accent and his lips were curled in contempt.

To go to breakfast, the teachers had to file past him. When they were gone he looked at the note that had been pressed into his waiting hand. He read it carefully before putting it in his pocket.

The Mess had never been so quiet. The Captain and Snood sat at the front of the room and nobody dared make eye contact with them. The students were eating as quietly as they could, desperate not to draw any attention. A dozen black clad soldiers stood around the walls with rifles ready in their hands.

The teachers filed in and went to get their breakfast. Those serving them looked terrified with the exception of Nan Hobbs. She stood supervising and looked to be holding her girls together by the sheer strength of her will.

One of the girls dropped a tray and screamed hysterically. Rifles pointed at her from all directions.
 
Then
Nan
was by her side, calming her down and helping her to clean up the mess on the floor. The rifles returned to pointing at the floor.

The soldiers shifted their positions when the tray dropped.
Cam
was aware of how much more threatening they became. The tension in the room was almost visible in the air. Nobody was under any illusions. These men would kill them and ask no questions later, if given the slightest cause.

The Headmaster entered the room and went to speak to the Captain. The two men turned to exclude Snood from hearing as they held a whispered conversation. With the Captain occupied, looks of pure hatred flashed at Snood from his fellow teachers and the students. Snood ignored them. It was all water off-a-duck’s-back to him.

As the meal came to an end, the Captain got to his feet and everybody in the room stopped eating, some of the students stopped breathing for a time.

“I thought you-all might want to know, how come I got such little time for Spellbinders and their breed.”

The Captain paused and looked pointedly at the bloodstains on the floor.

“Well, once upon a time I was in the army, the proud army of the U, S of A. You Limeys had taken a whole parcel of land off of us in the 12-18 war, land stolen from us using dirty-underhanded blaspheming witchcraft.”

“You Limeys stole
New York
and all the lands to the north of it and we wanted it back. Your empire’s so big you’re always off fighting somewhere and you only had a few thousand soldiers stationed in
New York
at the time, so we thought it was going to be easy. That was the war of 1850, anybody here knowed what-all happened?”

The Captain smiled benignly as there was no reply from the students.

“I said anybody
who don’t want to get their heads blown off right now
know what happened?” Every hand in the room shot up.

“You, the fat ugly girl,” he said, pointing at
Cam
. “You goin’ to tell us?”

“You had your little bottoms whipped,”
Cam
said, furious at the insult.

The Captain smiled again. He toyed with the gun in his holster and drew it. Spinning the cylinder to check it was fully loaded.

“See, that fat little girlies right. We surely got our asses whipped.”

The Captain stopped smiling.

“Fifty thousand of our finest bravest men against five thousand of yours. We carried the best weapons the world’s ever seen. We had the better troops and yet only three thousand of our men survived that day.”

His voice became soft, dropping almost to a whisper. “We knew you had a Class A with you, but none of us really knew what that meant. Our scouts got close enough to observe him though they couldn’t get close enough to shoot. They watched him for three hours, makin’ sure his hands went nowhere near paper or pen. We didn’t know it then, but he was tauntin’ us with his power.”