How To School Your Scoundrel (28 page)

He stiffened. “Quiet! He’s coming back.”

In perfect tandem, Olympia and Somerton dropped to the floor, lying as if mortally wounded. Somerton groaned piteously as the key rattled, as the hinges ground open.

“Here’s your bucket, Herr Doctor. There’s soap at the bottom.”

She rose and took it from him. “Thank you,” she said, and swung the contents into his face.

In the next instant, Somerton had leapt silently from the floor to swing a heavy fist into the guard’s jaw, followed by a driving blow to his middle. The man crumpled without a word, only a pathetic small cry that ended in a squeak, smothered by the clank of his keys hitting the flagstones.

“Quickly,” said Somerton. He scooped up the keys and handed them to Luisa, and bent down again to pry the service pistol from the guard’s belt. He tucked it into the waistband of the trousers.

Olympia stepped out of the cell. “Which way?”

“To the right,” she said.

“Are you quite certain?”

“Yes. My father never used this place; there’s a modern prison just outside of town. My sisters and I used to run away from Dingleby on rainy days and play here. Now put your hands behind your backs, both of you.” She started off down the corridor.

Somerton obediently put back his hands, as if held by restraints. Olympia did the same. Luisa leaned down and picked up the guard’s baton and drove them forward and around the corner.

“Up the stairs,” she said.

Olympia put his hand out to the wall and stopped.

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“Yes.” He lifted his head, put his hands once more behind his back, and climbed the stairs, one by one, as if borne down by a sackful of gravel.

She couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about what had been done to them, or the way Somerton’s shoulders slumped forward, or the blood on his shirt, or the limp in his right leg, or the rotten smell wafting from both of them, unwashed and unloved. She would go mad if she thought about any of it. She would break down and cry, she would lose her calm control, and they would never get out of here alive.

“Hurry along,” she said. “Turn left at the top of the stairs, and I’ll unlock the door.”

Marvel instead
, she thought.
Marvel that these two men can walk, that they can react in seconds to the shock of your arrival, that they have been trained and honed for just such a moment as this.

You will survive this. They will survive this.

They reached the door. Luisa reached between them and fumbled with the keys until she found one that fit.

“Where does this lead?” asked Somerton, in a low voice.

“To the outer prison corridor, and then to the hidden entrance, the one they used to use for political prisoners, according to the older servants.” She swung the door open and urged them on.

The corridor was a long one, but it smelled fresher than the network of cells and corridors in the inner dungeon. Luisa breathed it gratefully into her lungs. In another moment, they would reach the tunnel to the secret entrance, which had given her so much delight in her youth, playing with her sisters, and now meant freedom.

She did not stop to wonder why the atmosphere of this corridor should be fresher, when the passage and entrance were both too inconvenient to be used in the ordinary course of prison business. She tested the handle and found it unlocked, and had just nudged Somerton’s back to guide him and her uncle into the familiar bracken lit by a slim crescent moon, when the click of a revolver sounded through the clear night air, followed by the deep masculine voice of Gunther Hassendorf.

“My dear princess, how utterly predictable.”

•   •   •

A
noble effort,” said Olympia, “if astoundingly unsuccessful. Would you stop rattling the bars, Somerton? You set my teeth on edge.”

He whipped around. “I beg your pardon. I had rather hoped that you would face the prospect of public execution with a little less sangfroid.”

Olympia waved his hand. “These are the sorts of misfortunes that happen in our business, my dear fellow. One must accept one’s losses philosophically. We have been bested, that’s all.”

Somerton turned to his wife, who sat on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her jacket was gone, and her shirt was untucked from her trousers. “I will get us out of here, Markham. I swear it.”

“You needn’t speak platitudes for my sake, Somerton. I’m not a child. I recognize the reality of our circumstances.”

“I will not allow my wife and my unborn child to die in a public square for the amusement of a set of bloody anarchist revolutionaries, Markham.
That
is reality.”

She looked up at him with hopeless dark eyes. “There is no child, Somerton.”

The world spun. He curled his fingers around the bar of the cage and stared at her. “No child?”

“I discovered the fact shortly after you left the farmhouse in Huhnhof.”

“I see.”

“So I’ve failed at that, too. I’ve failed to rescue my people, I’ve failed to rescue you. I suppose it’s up to Stefanie and Emilie now, to carry the banner, except that I suspect they won’t. Will they, Olympia? They never cared for duty the way I did.” She put her head back into her knees. “But they will live, at least. They have their husbands and their babies and will probably go on to lead very lovely English lives.”

Somerton looked down at his wife, curled up in misery. A giant helplessness opened up inside him: he, Somerton, who had never met the foe he couldn’t vanquish, the ill wind he could not blow away with a rank puff from his scoundrel lungs. What could he say, in the face of this grief? What could he say to comfort his wife, his true and noble Markham, whose only fault was to have chosen her husband with such disastrously poor judgment?

He lowered himself next to her and touched her hair, her soft, shorn auburn hair that he loved.

“We’ll have a daughter, one fine day, with hair just like this,” he said.

She turned her face into his chest and sobbed.

He leaned back against the stone wall, every muscle protesting, every bruise and scar howling, and wrapped his arms around her. “A daughter, a son. Whatever the devil, really; it doesn’t matter, as long as they’re ours, Markham, yours and mine. We’ll spend the springtime in England, if you don’t mind all the blasted rain, and take them climbing in Wales to toughen them up. Children need a bit of toughening, in my opinion. The rising generation is entirely too soft.”

He went on talking, until her sobs slowed down and she slept, curled up against his chest like a child, and eventually he slept, too.

He knew he slept because they were awakened together by a clang a minute later—or what felt like a minute, and must have been a few hours—and a female voice of such sharp command, such crisp efficiency, such wanton disregard for the ease of others, it could only belong to an English governess.

“Well! This is a fine predicament, Your Highness. I expected better of you.”

Luisa bolted to attention. “Dingleby?”

Somerton’s tired eyes flashed open. A tall and slender woman stood before them, flanked by guards, her features too shadowed to pick out properly and her hair pulled back in a strict governess knot. She was wearing a simple black dress and a pair of eminently sensible shoes, a detail he wouldn’t ordinarily have noticed at first glance, except that he was sitting on the floor.

“Dingleby,” said Olympia, rising to his feet. “My hat is off to you indeed. The student usurping the master.” He made a flourish with his hand.

Somerton levered his aching body upward, still holding Luisa. “
This
is Miss Dingleby?” He lent his voice its most scathing tone of condescending disappointment. “
This
is a woman who sends a young lady off to be murdered most ignobly in a public square, for a pointless cause, to say nothing of the persecution she has visited on her charges over the past several months?”

“I regret the public square deeply,” said Miss Dingleby.

“How comforting,” said Olympia.

“It’s true. I made my wishes known to Gunther, but I’m afraid my supporters in the organization have become few. Ironic, since I recruited Gunther to begin with, after his disappointment with Stefanie first planted those vital seeds of disillusionment with this archaic, creaking method of government we call a monarchy.” She spread out her hands. “Still, I far prefer to work without the messiness of bloodshed. I believe he’s making a great mistake, an act of barbarism that the world will condemn. But he sees things differently.
Propagande par le fait
, he says.”

“Propaganda of the deed,” murmured Luisa. “The dramatic act that rallies the masses to your cause.”

“Nothing more dramatic than a public regicide,” said Olympia. “Just look what it did for the French.”

“I assure you, I’ve spent the last year protecting you and your sisters from Gunther’s more violent tendencies. It was I who arranged your escape from Holstein last October, I who brought you to England and hid you from his agents. But he convinced old Hans that he was right, that the princesses had to be eliminated, and poof!” She snapped her fingers. “The fiasco at Emilie’s engagement ball.”

“Yes, yes. And you laid us low with typhoid, so you could make your escape back to Germany before I discovered your subterfuge.”

“I didn’t mean for Luisa to eat that cake,” she said. “My deepest apologies for your illness, my dear.”

Somerton growled, low in his throat.

She turned to him. “You don’t believe me, but I’ve always defended their interests, haven’t I? I made certain there were no further legitimate heirs. I’ve protected them from the Revolutionary Brigade for years. You’ve no idea the trouble I had, the recriminations when it all went wrong in England. There’s nothing more I can do, I’m afraid. Everyone’s turned against me.” She spread her hands piteously.

“But your Brigade won’t win, not in the end,” Luisa said fiercely. “Stefanie and Emilie will carry on the royal line, and one day . . .”

“Rubbish. They will mind their own business and become proper Englishwomen, turning out babies like runner beans, year after year. As you should have done, my dear. I could perhaps have kept Gunther from seeking you out, but you had to return and play straight into his hands.” She clucked her tongue. “Now he’ll bring you out for the ritual sacrifice tomorrow, and I don’t know how the cause will recover. Perhaps I shall emigrate to America and join one of the more pacifist groups there. Yes, I think I shall.”

Somerton rose to his feet. “The cause? I beg your pardon. The
cause?
”

“Why, yes,” she said calmly. “The reason for all this. The overthrow of an unjust political system, one that’s oppressed millions, has been responsible for the deaths of millions. What other end could justify such extreme means?”

“There, you see,” said Olympia. “There’s the difference between my way of thinking and yours. I don’t consider that the end does justify the means.”

She turned to him. “Oh, that’s splendid. And who was the one who taught me that the few must sometimes be sacrificed for the good of the many? It was
you
, Olympia. You who opened my eyes and trained my hands.”

“The difference, my dear Dingleby, is that I don’t advocate the killing of the innocent.”

She shrugged. “Who among us is innocent? Every man who doesn’t oppose injustice is complicit in it.” She slipped her watch from her pocket and turned behind her. “Citizen?” she said, in German.

A tall uniformed man stepped up smartly. “Yes, citizeness?”

“It’s time to prepare the prisoners. We shall need them in the Kirkenplatz in one hour. Alive, if you please.” She turned back to Luisa and smiled. “Farewell, my dear girl. I’ve no doubt you’ll do me great credit in meeting your end with the dignity and deportment it was my honor to instill in you. You may take comfort in the fact that your death will perhaps one day bring about the emancipation of mankind, if Hassendorf doesn’t contrive to make an utter balls-up of the entire proceedings.”

“Splendid speech,” said Olympia. “I couldn’t have said it more elegantly myself. Did you perhaps scribble a few words out beforehand, for the occasion?”

She laughed affectionately. “My dear Olympia. How I shall miss you. Citizen? The prisoners are yours. My train leaves for Rome in fifteen minutes.”

The officer snapped to attention. “Yes, citizeness!”

Miss Dingleby walked from the cell, without a backward glance.

E
very August of her life, Princess Luisa had traveled from Holstein Castle to the Kirkenplatz for the opening of the festival of St. Augustine, as had every member of the Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof royal family since the Middle Ages.

She had never made the journey in a prison cart.

The morning breeze blew down from the mountains today, cooler and fresher than the end of August had a right to be. Luisa closed her eyes and drank it in, that familiar scent of wood and sweet water, of the Alpine stone she loved. Somerton’s arm lay around her shoulders, absorbing the jolt of the cart. He hadn’t said a word since they’d passed through the grim prison entrance a quarter hour ago, swinging around the back alleys of Holsteinton in this ramshackle covered wooden cart with its heavy metal bars, like a cage for animals. He sat against the back of the cart with her and stared with hard and unblinking eyes at Olympia’s profile.

The cart bounced against a rut in the cobblestones, and Luisa opened her eyes again. The morning sun, pressing against the prison bars, cast long vertical shadows against the duke’s face. Ahead and alongside, the prison guards marched in twos, about twenty of them, while the officer led the way on his large gray horse.

Olympia was crafty and vigorous for a man approaching seventy years, and Somerton had the strength and cunning of a beast of prey, but they were only two unarmed men—weakened, moreover, by a week in Holstein Prison—against twenty soldiers of the Revolutionary Brigade of the Free Blood.

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” she said softly.

“It’s not hopeless. We wait for our opportunity to strike, that’s all.” Somerton’s voice was deadly.

Olympia roused himself. “What’s that? Hopeless? Nothing of the sort. A life everlasting stretches before you, pearly gates and flights of angels and all that. I, for one, am pregnant with anticipation. So many philosophical questions to be answered at last. But I confess I do have a rather more practical question for you, Luisa. It’s been preying on my mind for some time.”

“What’s that, Uncle?”

“This business of a feast day. Don’t you find it all rather unsuitably papist? Ought your people really to be celebrating such blatant idolatry, good, upstanding Protestants that they are?”

Luisa smiled. “St. Augustine is the patron saint of brewers, Uncle. We might have given up our Latin masses and our rosaries, but there was never any question of giving up St. Augustine’s Day, here in Holstein.”

“Of brewers! Ha. How remarkable. Yes, I see how it is.” Olympia closed his eyes and leaned back against the cart. “Now that I think on it, Augustine was a bit of a Calvinist at heart, when all’s said and done,” he added, a moment later.

Luisa leaned into her husband. “He’s mad.”

“The cart’s stopped,” Somerton said.

So it had. Luisa sat up straight and looked about. It was difficult to see around the cart sides and the bars above them, and the street itself, a residential row, remained cast in morning shadow and still as death. Even the soldiers stood quietly at attention, without moving.

“What the devil?” the earl muttered, rising to a watchful crouch.

Where were all the townsfolk? In the square, no doubt. Luisa could hear the faint hum of people in motion, of voices and commerce, but it came as if through a tunnel, muffled and distant.

She curled her fists against the bottom of the cart. Next to her, Somerton’s body radiated tension. His bruised face faced straight ahead, where the officer and his horse approached at a slow walking clop that echoed off the cobblestones.

The clopping stopped, followed an instant later by the brisk strike of boots on cobbles as the officer dismounted. The whisper of metal, as he unsheathed his sword.

He was going to murder them here.
That
was Gunther’s plan, to bring their dead bodies into the square, the deed already accomplished, so that no popular uprising could save them.

No opportunity for escape.

The opening of the cart lay on the right side, opposite Olympia. Somerton shifted position, edging his big body around the corner, flush against the wall next to the door. He glanced at Luisa and made a movement of his hand.
Stay back.

Olympia hadn’t budged an inch. His face was shadowed, but she thought his eyes were still closed.

The officer’s boots cracked confidently near. Somerton crouched on the balls of his feet now, braced by his fingertips on the wooden boards below. Like a burly black panther, ready to pounce.

The other soldiers stood in a ring around the cart, perfectly still.

Panic skidded across Luisa’s brain, lightening the blood in her veins. She held fast to the sight of the waiting Somerton; she took his calm readiness into her skin.

This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the end.

What had she done to him?

Don’t panic. Do
not
panic.

If she were going to die, she would die in dignity. She would die alongside her husband, who had sacrificed everything for her. His hair absorbed the light. His black eyes stared keenly between the bars of the prison cart. He meant to go down fighting.

I love you.

But it was too late to say it, hours and days too late. She should have said those words in Fiesole, in their little cottage with the white walls and the red tile roof, while they were lying naked and tangled and silent in the twilight. It would have been so easy.

I love you.

He might not have said them back to her. No, he probably wouldn’t have replied at all. But at least he would know.

The footsteps stopped, a few feet away. Luisa braced herself against the wall.

An almighty metallic crash shook the cart, as the officer brought his sword down on the lock. The hinges creaked wildly open.

Somerton struck in a blur. He grasped the edge with one hand, swung himself around, and launched his big body like a missile through the opening and into the chest of the German officer.

Luisa scrambled after him.

“Run!” he yelled, but she couldn’t run, she couldn’t flee away from him.

He struggled with the officer, swearing loudly as they thumped and rolled together on the cobbles in a match with no rules. Oaths and protests rang from the paving stones. The man’s hat flew off, and one of the soldiers stepped forward to pick it up.

But the match was unequal. Somerton was the bigger man, the aggressor, bloodthirsty and desperate, while the German fought a defensive game. They rolled again, and Somerton heaved his opponent on his back in a mighty growl. He lifted his arm to deliver the killing punch.

And held it there, aloft and astonished.

“I say,” said the German officer, in a flawless gentleman’s club English drawl, “you’re looking rather rough, my good man. Do you mind lowering that meaty fist of yours, before somebody gets hurt?”

Behind Luisa, the cart groaned as Olympia alighted and stretched his body to the sun.

“Ah! Hatherfield, you old sport,” he said, in the midst of a yawn. “Arrived at last.”

•   •   •

W
e haven’t much time,” said the Marquess of Hatherfield, dusting himself off. He nodded to the doorway of the nearest house. “My wife’s inside, dressed and ready. She has a change of clothing for Luisa. Your Highness?”

Luisa stepped forward, blushing pinkly along her cheekbones, looking impossibly alluring in her stained shirt and trousers, her short auburn hair running in every conceivable direction. Somerton narrowed his eyes at the sight of her, having her hand kissed gallantly by the superbly handsome Hatherfield, whose golden brown hair picked up glints of sunlight in much the same manner of another young Adonis he knew and loathed.

“My dear new sister,” he said, “I can’t tell you how charmed I am to make your acquaintance at last. When Olympia’s telegram summoned us from our honeymoon in Paris, I fairly leaped at the opportunity.”

“Lord Hatherfield, the honor is mine. I’m sure you’ve made my Stefanie a very happy woman indeed.”

“Southam, isn’t it?” said Olympia. “You’re the Duke of Southam now, my boy.”

Hatherfield shrugged his shoulders. “To be perfectly honest, I still rather prefer Hatherfield.”

Somerton stepped forward and held out his hand. “Your Grace.” He couldn’t quite keep the gruffness from his voice. “A pleasure.”

Hatherfield turned and took his hand. “I look forward to profiting from your friendship, my lord. A great deal more comforting than your enmity, I daresay.” He rubbed his shoulder.

“Now, go. We have only minutes before that grotesque revolutionary madman begins his puppet show and wonders where the puppets have gone.”

He nodded to the doorway, where a lovely young auburn-haired woman was already bursting through the door with her arms held out. “Luisa!” she called.

In the instant before the two sisters crashed together, Somerton saw that the Duchess of Southam’s belly curved gently with child. His gut clenched, stopping his breath.

“Ladies!” called Olympia. “No time for that now! We’ve a country to wrest back.”

Ten minutes later, Somerton was shaved and dressed in a handsome pair of breeches and riding coat, a trifle short in the arms and tight along the shoulders. His bruised face he could do nothing about. He hurried out of the house to the cobbled street, where one of the soldiers handed him the reins to a large gray gelding, identical to the one Hatherfield—the Duke of Southam—rode. The soldier gasped.

Somerton turned.

His wife stood hand in hand with her sister, in the doorway of the house, wearing a silvery white dress that made her look as if she might float away. Her short hair was pinned back and topped by a small diamond tiara. The sun, rising now just over the tops of the buildings opposite, picked out the flame in her hair and turned her creamy skin to gold.

Around her throat lay the ruby necklace he had given her, sparkling brilliantly, a perfect match for the extraordinary ring of state on her right hand.

His knees, already weak, nearly gave way.

She was too beautiful. He couldn’t bear it.

Somerton turned to Olympia. “Well, sir? Any more cards tucked into your sleeve, before we act? There remains one more princess unaccounted for.”

Olympia shrugged. “I sent the Duke and Duchess of Ashland away on a honeymoon several months ago, on my own private steam yacht. I believe they were last heard from in Sydney. I’ve cabled, of course, but I haven’t a clue whether they received the message. It’s just Hatherfield in our corner, I’m afraid.”

“Just as well,” said Somerton. “I daresay Ashland would just as soon murder me as old Hassendorf. The small matter of having seduced his first wife.”

“Cheer up, old chap,” said Olympia. “If you’re lucky, Hassendorf will get you first.”

•   •   •

T
he crowd in the Kirkenplatz milled about restlessly, seething with rumor. Olympia, leading the procession, stopped where the street emptied out in the square and held up his hand.

The soldiers stopped obediently and formed a protective ring about the two royal couples.

Luisa heard a voice shout out above the crowd. Beside her, Stefanie made a sharp indrawn breath.

“It’s Gunther, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“I believe so,” said Luisa.

How close had Stefanie and Gunther been, the two of them, that long-ago summer? Had they been lovers? The possibility had never occurred to her before; it was so far beyond her imagination. The Luisa of seven years ago would never have conceived of intimacy with a man before marriage, of relinquishing her priceless virginity to the mayor’s son. In her most lurid conjectures, she had feared a kiss or two between her sister and Gunther Hassendorf.

But Stefanie’s stiffened body told her otherwise.

Good God. How had this happened? Did Hatherfield know?

Luisa recalled the feel of Stefanie in her arms, hardly a quarter hour ago. The firm new roundness of her pregnancy had pressed into Luisa’s belly, making her heart melt and her throat burn. The baby would be born in November, Stefanie had said, as they dressed together, talking at double speed, words tripping over one another as they tried to describe nearly ten months of separation. The baby. Stefanie was going to have a baby.

Somerton stood quietly on her other side, surveying the scene before them. She closed her hand more tightly around his fingers.

“Give us the princess!” someone called out angrily, from somewhere in the crowd.

“Yes, give us back our princess!” echoed another. “We know you’ve got her!”

Luisa’s heart swelled against her ribs, with a pride she didn’t know she owned. All those months of exile, that sense of crushing rejection. Thinking her people didn’t want her, her country didn’t want her. That they wanted
these
men, these anarchists, these revolutionaries.

And now this.
Our princess.

Gunther was answering them, something she couldn’t hear. He must be facing away from them.

“We don’t believe you!”

“Give us back our princesses!”

The crowd took up the call, turning it into a chant.
Gebt unsere Prinzessinnen zurück! Gebt unsere Prinzessinnen zurück!