Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (23 page)

It had a marble floor in shades of red and cream and green. The central staircase swept up from it, magnificent and curly like the horns of a goat. The walls were lined with portraits of puffy-faced, stern-looking folk who all appeared to disapprove of him. An ugly bunch, and not even the work of a decent portrait artist among them. But he approved of the vases that stood on the rococo tables along the walls, roped off. They were worth something, late period Tang dynasty if he wasn’t mistaken.

In fact they looked suspiciously like the vase Benny had tried to sell to him. He hissed in annoyance at the thought. Bloody Benny and Lisa, when would they stop getting in his hair?

“Here we go, then,” said Whiskey behind him, as Driver opened a door on the second floor and ushered Finn inside with a tug on his elbow. He caught a quick eyeful of Italian stucco work on the ceiling and William Morris wallpaper—probably the genuine article, considering how it had faded. A large white fireplace surrounded by optimistic fire screens held a small and sullen fire.

He was dragged in front of a Chippendale desk and parked there while his two companions touched the peaks of their caps simultaneously, in an old, old gesture of respect that made Finn’s skin crawl.

The woman behind the desk smiled coolly up at him. She had the same sort of careful hair as the queen, apparently casually upswept but actually a work of intense art that would survive hurricanes. It was darker than the queen’s, and she was a younger woman, hale and hearty and big-boned under her designer jacket. Her mohair jumper was pale lavender, accessorised with three rows of flawless pearls like moons on a string.

“Mr. Hulme.” She rose automatically as if to shake his hand, revealing a matching Carven skirt, all very expensive and understated and sure of herself. He reached out for a handshake, and she snubbed him, drawing back with a horrified expression as if his fingers were dipped in shit. “I have a bone to pick with you. Let’s go for a little walk.”

Since he had no choice—the shotgun at his back a persuasive argument for obedience—he followed her out, down the corridor, across a landing (where a nice Caravaggio hung above a Queen Anne table covered in flowers), through a maze of small rooms and into an old wing, into the library.

He could tell at once from the bindings that whatever ancestor of hers had kitted this place out had ordered his books by the yard, more interested in the status of owning a library than the actual content of the books. The place was as regimented as a soldiers’ dormitory.

The first long room terminated in a turret, a little magical cylinder of stone, white painted, with a window seat set into the tiny mullioned window, and an oak display case in its centre. Picturesquely but somewhat unwisely, his guards entered the room before him, and stood on either side of the window like pilasters, trying to pretend they were somewhere else. The empty space at Finn’s back beckoned him.

“Do you see this?” The lady of the manor encompassed the display case with both hands, leaning down over it.

The glass-fronted case had been padlocked in three places. He could still see the scars where the hasps had been gouged out by some kind of crowbar.

“On the night of the thirteenth of October we had a break-in. The thieves took a number of paltry items of silverware—some candlesticks, a commemorative plate—and this book.”

It was the right size. The velvet cushion in the case had a dimple just the right size. Finn went cold and then hot all over with enlightenment. This was the psalter’s home? This was where Briggs had stolen it from? Scarcely ten miles from his shop? What kind of amateur tried to fence an instantly recognisable item in the town it was stolen from?

He gave an artfully unconcerned shrug. “I didn’t take it.”

She gave him the mild look of a woman who doesn’t need to raise her voice to be instantly obeyed. “That’s not my concern, but you are going to get it back for me, or failing that you’re going to tell the police where they can find it so that they can retrieve it themselves.”

Oh, and he hated being told what to do by some hoity-toity English aristocrat, who’d probably built her wealth on the starvation of his people, whose family had probably sat back and laughed as the Irish rotted alongside their crops in the famine.

“Look at that now.” He waved a hand at the case, buckled down as it was. “You left it lying wide open in sunlight. Did you not care you were fading the ink and destroying the vellum? Did you ever read it? Did you give one thought to it at all before it was taken from you? Do you care now, beyond the fact that it’s yours?”

She raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows in astonishment at being spoken to in this tone of voice, and Finn lost it at the condescension, lost it for long enough to speak the truth. Perhaps he had a death wish. Perhaps he just wanted to get this off his chest. “Yes, they brought it to me. The ones who took it from you. They put it in my hands like a baby. I didn’t know who it belonged to. They didn’t tell me that. But they said they would burn it.”

He was shouting now, pacing and gesticulating as it all came out, his emphasis swamped in the big rooms, provoking only the smallest of smiles from her. “They said they would
burn it
!” he hissed again, because she clearly wasn’t getting it. “It was a thousand years old. Unknown, a discovery beyond price. It belonged in a museum, where they could scan it and preserve it. Where scholars could read it and learn from it and share that knowledge with the whole world.”

“And that’s where it is, is it?” she interrupted his rant effortlessly, her voice scarcely raised but pregnant with authority. “You donated it to a museum?”

He hated that she felt so damn secure on the moral high ground there.
It’s fine for you to be so smug with your own private army.
“And if I did? Would you go in, guns blazing, and get it back?”

“While I admire your passion for the past,” she said graciously, “the book is
mine
. It was donated to my ancestors by the abbot himself in exchange for twelve hides of land for his hunt. Whether I choose to share it or to bury it under the floorboards, it belongs to my family. It is mine to keep or to destroy, mine to hand down. It’s the principle, you see. People do not steal from the Harcombes and get away with it. It is my job as the head of the family to make sure that tradition continues. Now you can tell me where my book is, or I will—”

Yeah, this would be terribly frightening two centuries ago. Right now, Finn had had enough. “You’ll do what? You can’t keep me here and torture me until you get it out of me. That’s false imprisonment, and I suspect your good gentlemen here won’t stand for that. My boyfriend sure as hell won’t, and he’s barely hanging on to his sanity at the moment as it is. You don’t want to get on his bad side, believe me.”

Empty bluster and bravado. It was a wonderful thing.

“So yes, this was a lovely chat, and it’s nice to know the provenance of the book I
saved from the fire
, but I am walking out of this mausoleum right now, and there is not a thing you can do to stop me.”

He took a step back, turned. The lads by the window stirred as if waking up, their honest faces confused. Lady Muck’s expression creased into bemusement too, as though she couldn’t believe he would be so rude as to break off the conversation before she was finished. He considered the relative merits of a dignified walk away weighed against running as fast as humanly possible. Dignity would be nice, but— He took off like a rocket down the bouncy wooden floor of the ancient library.

A click behind him made his back prickle all over—the sound of a shotgun being armed. He wouldn’t outrun that, but he didn’t really believe that Whiskey would shoot him, and he was going to stake his life on that belief.

He poured every ounce of his strength, of his terror, into running, the soles of his poor blistered feet on fire again with pain. Behind him, heavy footfalls broke into a jog and then a run in pursuit, but he was faster. And no shot came. The library door took a lifetime to reach and then suddenly it was there. He burst through into a pink-striped room he didn’t actually remember, slammed the door behind him, and looked round for something to slow his pursuers.

Yes. When visitors came round, the doors were wedged open and one of the wedges was visible beneath the overstuffed pink velvet couch. Cupids, painted on the ceiling, smiled down vapidly on him as he darted forwards and grabbed it, kicked it firmly into place, pinning the library door closed.

The burly lads would break it down soon enough—probably go through the hinges if they put their minds to it—but it bought him time. And frankly he needed time because he didn’t remember which of the three doors that opened off this room they’d come in by.

The first thud and shudder came at the barred door as he was peeking through the one opposite. No, fairly sure he would have noticed a piano and a harp as he was forced to edge around them. Next. He thought he’d have registered the heavy gold bullion on the curtains, if he’d come this way before, but could he really be sure?

The library door boomed against its frame, making the chandelier tinkle above him. Through the third door he could see, yes, the Queen Anne table. He ran through, hearing a wooden crack behind him.

No time for this! Jogging again, he chose the next door at random, pelted through a succession of grotesquely overdone bed and sitting rooms, skidded out onto a little landing on the left of which was, dear God, steps down into a hollowed-out cavern of a room in which stood a nineteenth-century shower of the sort that had a water tank on top that needed to be filled by manservants as you bathed.

Well, he definitely would have remembered that, had he come this way before. It was official—he was lost.

“Fuck.”

Another door opened from this landing-cum-shower room, debouched into a more conventional bathroom, if convention ran to Italian marble nymphs and gold fittings. He got the hell out of that as fast as possible, found himself in a dressing room-cum-wardrobe, equipped with heavy Tudor chests of drawers and an early-twentieth-century ironing board next to a hearth full of flat irons.

Another door, another bedroom, and he was seriously sick of the opulence and the ostentatious, unnecessary overspending by now. But this last door brought him onto the main stairwell, within sight of the overblown front doors.

He leaped down the stairs like a mountain goat and sprinted with renewed strength towards the way out. Only a statue of Zeus stood in his way, aiming a thunderbolt at an inoffensive flagstone, and he’d dare the wrath of stone gods any day. Grinning, he sped towards the exit.

And Driver stepped into his path. Finn skidded to a halt rather than run into the man’s arms, couldn’t see at first where he’d come from, but then a hidden panel, painted to look like the wall, swung open and Lady Harcombe stepped through, followed by Whiskey, still cradling the shotgun he didn’t have the ice in his soul to use.

“You can’t keep me here.” Finn held his hands up in surrender and tried backing innocently towards the door. Whiskey might not shoot him, but he was not going to bet the man wouldn’t pin him like a rogue sheep and think nothing of it. “You can’t just abduct me and keep me against my will. I have rights.”

Lady Harcombe was hardmouthed as a warhorse. “Yes, you have rights,” she said, still poisonously courteous. “But I have more. Enough of this nonsense. Gentlemen, grab him. We will continue this conversation in the cellar.”

Driver lunged for him. Finn ducked under the grabbing hand and made a run for the doors, reaching up for the enormous wrought iron rings with both hands. It took all his strength to turn one. He threw himself forwards to drive the door open. It shuddered slightly but didn’t move. Locked.

Oh fuck. He turned, set his back to the oak and watched the two men approach, out of ideas as to what to do now. Very, very nearly out of strength.

“I don’t think so.”

A shadow detached itself from behind the plinth on which Zeus’s perfectly shaped feet were planted. Black trousers, black duffle coat with the hood drawn down and the face shadowed, but Finn would have recognised everything about the guy from stature and posture and the way he walked, even if the rough, wolfish growl of a voice hadn’t started up his fainting heart like a triple espresso in the morning.

Michael got between Finn and the oncoming bully boys, most of his attention on them, his head turned only slightly towards Finn as he spoke. “The wicket gate’s unlocked. My car is outside. Get in. I’ll deal with this.”

Finn laughed, utterly delighted to be proved wrong. To think he’d given up hope that a rescue would ever happen. “I’m not leaving you here while I cower in the car. What do you think I am?”

“I think you’re an idiot.” Michael turned his attention fully on the two men in front of him, and the woman in charge, standing poised behind them with her hands folded across her stomach and a disapproving expression.

“Let me guess, you’re the mad boyfriend.”

Finn opened the wicket gate. Idiot was fair enough—of course no one would unlock the monstrous portal if they could get through a normal-sized opening in the side of it. Leaving it open, he returned to Michael’s side in time to see him smile.

The smile made him shiver. Cold, humourless, a smile that said
I’m three seconds from tearing out your throat with my teeth
. He could see it strike fear into the farmers. They didn’t step back, but they looked like they desperately wanted to.

“That’s right. Nice to know he’s been talking about me.”

Lady Harcombe raised her chin and met Michael’s eyes. Then she blanched like she wished she hadn’t.

“You know what I hate?” Michael took a step forwards, crowding into Whiskey’s personal space. Whiskey’s eyes widened, and as he struggled not to step back, Michael reached out and casually took the gun from his hand.

“I hate people who put other people in cellars. I hate people who kidnap defenceless fucking innocents and don’t let them go. Are you that kind of people?”

Whiskey gave a nervous laugh, and Finn actually felt sorry for the guy. He seemed like a decent bloke who had not bargained for this. “No. No, we’re really not. So can I have my . . .”