Laura Kinsale (29 page)

A breath of cool, musty air emanated from the ob
scurity behind the door. He waited for another flash of lightning. When it came, he made out a rough stone wall, and just beside the door, a small wooden pedestal, complete with candles, a blackened brass snuff and a tin box that would be certain to hold matches. He opened the box and extracted one, silently blessing the efficient lamplighters of Ashland as a sharp scratch against the stone brought forth the familiar flare of blue light.

Armed with a lit candle and two extras stuffed into his waistband, he took a guess at a direction. The corridor, hardly wider than his shoulders, ran the length of the room he had been in and then intersected a broader hall. He headed left at random. At intervals steep stairs led off the passage, up, and so he did not investigate them. He was trying to second-guess Stephen, no easy task, and the only conclusion Gryf could come to was that he needed to find Tess and get out in a hurry.

Inside the stone corridor no lightning penetrated, but the low-timbred thunder seemed to make a continual echoing roll. It rose to a dull boom at one point, almost as if another door had slammed shut, and he stopped. The candle sputtered and went out in a gentle rush of air that swept past.

Gryf turned his head. He pressed against the cold stone, staring into nothing in both directions. After a moment, the unmistakable click of footsteps punctuated the thunder, but he could not make out the direction. The sound seemed to come from all around him.

He froze, straining his ears to locate the source. The sound grew louder, closer, and still more confused with echoes. Gryf tensed, and drew a great breath of air into his lungs.

“Eliot,”
he shouted, and the word reverberated off the walls and ceilings and floors, as directionless as the footsteps, he hoped. While it still rolled through the cor
ridor the response came: a flash of light to Gryf’s left, and the simultaneous report of gunfire that mingled with the echo and created a crescendo of sound in the hollow space.

Gryf scrambled. The shot answered one question, anyway: Stephen was armed now, and he had murder on his mind. Gryf ran, away from the light, one hand out to find the next side passage. He came to it and threw himself up the stairs, cracking his knee on the cold stone as another shot rang within the walls. An involuntary yelp escaped him. That sound too carried, weirdly loud in the strange acoustics of the corridor. He crouched on the stairs, rubbing his knee, and listened as the noise died away. Then there was silence, no footsteps, no voice. Only the dull rumble of thunder. He waited.

And waited longer.

And then he began to moan.

It was a fairly good imitation of a wounded man, but the damned echoes garbled it. He stopped and listened, then started again. Over his own voice he heard a soft footfall. He drew the trigger of his revolver back. Another footfall, and another: measured, suspicious. He left off moaning and set up a slow, ragged pant. The footsteps paused. Gryf made his breath uneven, a gurgling vibration in his throat; a death rattle. One last squeaky gasp, and he went silent.

Half a minute later, Stephen took the bait. Gryf counted the footsteps…seven, eight, nine…
close.

He fired into absolute blackness.

Missed.

He threw himself down the stairs after the shadow he had seen in the split second of detonation, and fired once again in that direction, too wildly to do anything but keep Stephen on the run. Gryf himself went with all
speed the opposite way—he hoped it was the opposite way—careering between the walls in the dark until he smashed face-first into solid stone.

He staggered back, knocked half-silly by the impact. Some angel of mercy kept him from triggering his gun and killing himself in the ricochet. He put his hand over his face and bent double. God, it felt like his jaw was broken, his nose and all his teeth, too. He probed them carefully: they were solid, except for a stabbing agony that went through his jaw when he moved it in one direction.

The corridor was silent again. He might have hit Stephen; there was a decent chance he had, in that last unaimed shot within the confined space. But he wasn’t going back to find out—too easy to figure Eliot might try the same fake that Gryf had. He felt the walls beside him, looking for another side passage.

“Merid-don-n-n…” The name was just discernible in the hissing echoes. Gryf jerked around and plastered himself against the wall. The sibilant vibration came again. “Wrong-g-g w-w-way…”

It was late information. Eliot’s gun cracked again, deafening echo and yellow fire, and Gryf flung himself down. As the sound died away he began crawling out of the dead end on his belly, quiet, as quiet as he could, an awkward scramble to keep his boots from dragging on the ringing stone. It wasn’t far to the stairs he had just left. He had a headache from trying to see in the blackness; couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or shut. He didn’t fire, for fear of giving away his location, and it was either that same fear or lack of ammunition that kept Stephen’s gun silent.

Nose to the floor, Gryf inched forward. He could not tell how far or fast, or from what distance Eliot’s voice had come. Gryf was terrified that his exploring hand
would encounter Stephen’s ankle instead of the staircase. The thought of dying at Eliot’s feet in the godforsaken dust and dark made Gryf sick to his stomach, and the pain that pierced his jaw with every move didn’t help settle it. A cobweb spread light, sticky fingers across his face. He held his breath.

It was like something out of a penny-dreadful weekly, lying there struggling not to sneeze and reveal himself. He rolled to one side in silent convulsions, and his boot heel scraped loudly across the floor.

It was enough. The hall resounded with Stephen’s shot. Gryf saw—actually saw—the blue-white spark where the bullet hit the floor a foot in front of his face. He started back with his eyes squeezed shut as chips of stone spattered his chest and neck like hot pinpricks.

So much for Stephen being out of ammunition. Gryf wiped the cobweb off his nose.

“Mer-idon-idon-n-n” came the echo again, and right after it, another shot. Gryf didn’t see where that one hit: he was cowering with his arms over his head and waiting for the bullet or its ricochet to plow into him. After a moment, he resumed his crawl for the stairs, keeping himself in the dirty space against the wall for what poor safety that afforded in the narrow corridor. The cut on his palm ached. His jaw was killing him, and he was furious with himself for ending up as target practice in the dark.

One more shot exploded, bringing the echoes to thundering life. He went still, instinctive paralysis, and then forced himself to scramble fast under cover of the noise. Miraculously, his searching hand found a rough-hewn corner. He heaved himself forward onto his knees as the echoes died away. How many shots was that? Five? Six? Six, he thought, the limit of a revolver without reloading, but he wasn’t willing to stake his life on his ability
to count under fire. He crept up the bottom step. Just as he pulled his foot up into the stairwell, light flickered and then blazed in the corridor.

It seemed incredibly bright to his dark-adjusted eyes. Every crack and hollow in the stone walls sprang to pinpoint clarity and then just as quickly disappeared. The dark closed in again like a coffin. It took Gryf a moment to realize what had happened.

The son of a bitch had struck a match.

Just soon enough to see an empty hall. If he had lit it a second earlier, he would have seen an easy mark.

Gryf pressed his fist over his mouth to stifle a hard exhalation. Once he was in the side passage, his situation was radically improved. He had options again: go up or wait in the ample cover of the stairway. He didn’t want to kill Stephen. He really didn’t want to, for a few logical reasons and a whole slew of stupidly emotional ones. Stephen, on the other hand, had shown no sign of any such scruples, and he also had logical reasons for wanting Gryf dead.

The afterimage on the back of Gryf’s eyelids from the brief flash of light faded slowly. He heard nothing from Stephen. After a long time, the silence began to prey on Gryf’s nerves. He thought of a hundred ruses Stephen might be planning, and the one that stuck in his mind was an idea that Stephen might have stolen out of the warren of corridors and was even now in the process of locking all the doors from the outside. Gryfs conscious mind told him there was no way Stephen had had the time, but his instincts quailed in panic at the prospect.

He began to crawl up the stairs, stopping between each one to listen. Then when he reached the top a new possibility occurred to him: Stephen knew the house; knew which stairwell Gryf had to have taken. Stephen might be waiting when Gryf opened the door.

He rubbed his injured jaw. Stephen might be behind the door. He also might be waiting in the corridor below. Gryf chose the more pleasant of alternatives: escaping the musty dark. He leaned back against the wall and reached to ease the door open.

The room beyond was just as dark, except when lit by the storm outside the heavily draped windows. Gryf peered carefully around the corner. In a moment’s flash, he saw a huge, empty bed and the shine of an oval mirror above a dressing table. He pulled out one of the candles still in his waist band and tossed it into the room. It landed and bounced with a dull thud on the thin carpet. Nothing else moved. He edged out into the opening.

Another burst of lightning made him jump. It illuminated the room, making him a clear target, but no attack followed. Satisfied that he was alone, he crossed to the main door and opened it a crack.

There, at last, was steady light: the soft glow of bubble globes on a stairway. It was a mirror image of the one he had come up to the tapestry room. Only the portraits were different. He slipped out, keeping to the shadows behind a bronze bust on a pedestal, and stood for a moment, contemplating how best to negotiate the lighted stairs in safety. As he hesitated, a latch clicked nearby. Gryf shrank back, his heart pounding, and then grinned.

Incredible, God-given, imbecilic luck. Stephen Eliot let himself quietly into the hall. Gryf watched from behind the pedestal as Stephen scanned the wide landing. When the other man crossed to the head of the stairs, Gryf cocked his revolver.

“Eliot.”

Stephen whirled. He should have frozen; that was what Gryf had expected. That was what any sane man would have done, but Stephen’s gun swung upward—an
unmistakable threat—and Gryf reacted. The revolver jerked in his hand in crashing recoil; he saw the crystal globe at the stairhead burst; he saw Stephen stumble and fall against the rail and take another globe down with him. The upper hall went dark and Gryf heard the heavy, rolling thump of Stephen’s body on the stairs, another crash of glass, and the light from the last lamp winked out.

Gryf stood in the dark, trembling. He cursed himself; he cursed Stephen and Tess and the whole blasted world. After a moment he went to the head of the stairs and waited for the next flash of lightning to illuminate what he had done.

It came, and revealed Stephen’s twisted body on the cold marble below. His gun glittered evilly on a step a few feet above him. Gryf bit down on his tongue, welcoming the sharp pain in his jaw. It helped him collect his wits. He went down the stairs to his cousin.

He knelt beside Stephen’s prone form in the dark and felt for a pulse. It was there, erratic. Gryf looked for a wound and found none, but it was so dark…he could only discern Stephen’s shallow, bubbling breath by leaning close to listen. He felt a slick wetness on the unconscious man’s face. Gryf touched his finger to his tongue. Blood. From Stephen’s mouth or nose, Gryf couldn’t tell.

“Damn,” he said softly. “God damn you for a fool, Cousin. Why the devil did you try to fire?”

For answer, there was nothing.

Gryf rose. With that kind of wound—little blood except from the nose and mouth—there wasn’t much to be done now. He had better find Tess and get out. He felt his way around the stairs and along the wall, then remembered the last candle and the matches he had saved. His hands were not quite steady as he lit the wick.

It took him a long time to find the cellars, even with the candle. He searched for a stairway down, and came to the empty servants’ quarters: kitchen and laundry and scullery. He was aided, rather ridiculously, by carefully lettered signs which identified not only a whole long row of brass bells, but each and every room in the service area. He avoided the housekeeper’s and butler’s rooms, and found at last a larder with an unmarked wooden door.

It wasn’t locked, as he had feared it might be. It came open with a loud squeak. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, holding the candle high.

A dirt-floored, brick-lined tunnel, just high enough for him to stand straight, stretched a short way ahead of him, and ended in a cross-tunnel that went an indefinite distance both ways into the dark. He stood at the intersection and quietly called Tess’s name.

A rustle came in response, and he saw the red eye of a rat far off ahead. He called again, louder, awakening echoes that were duller and softer than those in the narrow, stone corridors above. He moved down the cross-tunnel the way the rat had gone, stopping to duck through each low, arched doorway and check the tiny storerooms. All he found were bins of onions and turnips, and wheels of cheese, and in one room, two great glass-fronted cabinets in which ornate silver tableware reflected his candle flame. He came to the end of the tunnel and another short passage to a door that led back into the house.

Retracing his steps, he started down the other branch. A slow dread, begun when he had seen Stephen’s body at the bottom of the stairs, crept from Gryf’s belly into his throat. He called Tess’s name again, and hated the silence that followed. She wasn’t here. He knew in his heart that she wasn’t here. In this end of the tunnel, the
storeroom doors were all closed, each perforated by a small, barred window. Within, tall wine racks stood, casting spectral shadows as he walked among them.

“Tess,” he said loudly.

Something rattled.