Rook (31 page)

René was swaying on his feet a bit now, as if he were drunk. Just as they’d planned. It was almost time to slap him. Just as they’d planned.

“… might injure your health, Mademoiselle?”

She jerked her eyes back to Amber and LeBlanc, who were both watching her curiously. She hadn’t been listening. Émile inched closer on her left.

“I …” And then she gasped. A strong burst of laughter from the group around René made several heads around the room turn. René was leaning down to the young blond now, whispering something in her ear while she giggled. “Did you see that, Amber?” Sophia said loudly. “Did you see him?”

Émile went still, and both Amber and LeBlanc craned their necks to look behind them. As soon as they had both turned back to her Sophia yelled, “Oh, there! He did it again! Come with me.”

She snatched Amber’s arm with her left hand and marched past, wrenching the girl from LeBlanc’s grip, pulling her at a trot toward René. René saw her coming and got ready.

“My love!” he called, much too loud for politeness, especially with his arm around another woman. Émile was sidling along, still on their left, Benoit now with him and speaking into his ear.

“Friends!” René slurred. “This is my fi … my wife … my fiancée! Sophie, my love, have you met …”

“How could you?” she said. “How?”

It was what they’d planned for her to say. Ask him “how could you,” step one, two, three, and slap. But now she meant it. The talk around them fell away, a rippling tide of silent air. She paused, still clutching Amber, then came forward one, two … and slapped René’s face with everything she had. She caught him full force, LeBlanc’s ring still on her finger, the sound of her palm on his cheek reverberating, snapping his head around, making the signed paper with his signature rustle against her chest.

He turned his head slowly back, hand to his cheek. She met his eyes, such a hot fire-blue against the white hair, and for one brief moment was confused by the confusion she could see inside them. His lip was bleeding.

Amber made a feeble attempt to move away, but Sophia didn’t allow it. She was supposed to berate René now, to complete the scene they had created, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. Everything that had been making her tick was stuttering, all her inner workings grinding to a halt. And when they did, she would detonate. She walked away, forcing Amber along beside her, her high heels clacking on the polished floor.

“Comfort me,” she ordered Amber, in barely a whisper. “Don’t make me drag you. Do it. Now.”

Amber whimpered, but she put an arm around Sophia’s shoulders, walking her to the corridor door, the crowd parting for them like wheat in the wind. Sophia opened the door, shut it behind them, and then grabbed Amber’s hand.

“Run,” she commanded.

They ran around the curving hall, past the noisy kitchen full of people Sophia had never seen, and to the door at the very end. Sophia pushed up the drop bar, opened the door, and shoved Amber through it.

“These are the stairs to the ground. You can go all the way down to the street, or take the air bridge on the eighth floor.” Amber stared at her, goggle-eyed. “Unless you want to stay here with LeBlanc?”

The girl shook her limp curls. Then she shook them harder.

“Do you have somewhere you can go? Can you hide, or get out of the city?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle, I …”

“Then go. And here.” Sophia reached between the edge of her bodice and the top of her skirt and drew out one of her sheathed knives, shoving it into the girl’s hands.

“Thank you,” Amber whispered.

“Go!”

When Amber started moving, Sophia shut the door, dropped the bar back into place, and ran again, down the hall and up the back stairs, pausing before the corridor that led to her room. She darted her head around the corner. What she could see of the hall was empty, so she flitted quickly through the shadows, drew out the knife strapped around her ankle, put an ear to the door of her room, and then opened it cautiously. Except for the table on its side, the room sat ordinary and deserted, as if it hadn’t just experienced the catastrophic collapse of her entire life. Spear and the forged gate passes were gone.

She jerked open the cupboard, found her fluffy underskirt hung among the other dresses, and drove her knife into the white cloth with a ripping tear. The firelighter was in a sack of burlap that was now in her hand, and there were men’s voices coming to her door. Benoit, she thought, and probably Émile. She darted silently to Madame Hasard’s connecting door and slipped through it just as hers was opening. When both men were in her room, she dashed out of Madame Hasard’s and down the stairs, around the curve and to the linen closet, where she’d left a covered lamp burning. She shut the door behind her.

Sophia paused. It was excruciating being in this room; it nearly stopped her ticking altogether. She thought of Tom, and Jennifer, and pretended to be somewhere else. Pretended to be someone else. The wig came off and so did the dress, hidden quickly behind the hanging tablecloths, her black breeches and black shirt already underneath, cut low so as not to show beneath the lace of her former neckline. Her vest she fished out from the ironing pile, supplies already sewn in, the feathers from the party going into the bag with the others. The denouncement of the Bonnards she left in her shirt. Then she took her second knife and pushed the tip twice through the burlap that held the firelighter, making two holes, cut a cord from the washed curtains and strung the whole thing sideways across her chest. Her sword went from her leg to her back, for climbing; a soft black cap was pulled over her pinned hair; dark leather gloves onto her hands. And when the door of the linen closet opened again, the Rook peered out into the empty hall. She flitted across to the water room, shut herself inside, and opened the sliding panel to the lift.

She leapt up onto the ledge and looked down. The bucket was dangling one level below on the nearest rope. Hoping that meant the other bucket was near the bottom and full, she reached out, and that was when the door to the water room opened. Madame Hasard stood looking in at her, vivid hair piled high for the party, one red eyebrow raised.

Sophia met her gaze, grabbed the rope with both hands, and jumped. The rope swung out as she got a foot wrapped around, she bounced once off the bricks, and then she was gone, dropping down the shaft, water splashing somewhere below, leaving her stomach where she’d started. She passed the closed lift door for the flat below, and the next open one, showing a man’s turned back, and glanced up. The top of the shaft was still lit and growing smaller, but no one was trying to cut her rope. Surely Madame Hasard carried a knife? But Madame wasn’t going to have time to cut anything.

Air whistled around Sophia’s ears. She wondered if she would be able to keep her grip when the rope came to a stop, or if she was about to take a cold, wet bath in a cistern. She hung on, saw the bottom coming, got her knees bent, and the rope stopped with a jerk that nearly wrenched her arms from their sockets. But she was able to swing her feet to the edge of a cistern and hop down, and as René had said, landing her boots on the stone floor of the building’s cellar.

She looked around, wary, ready to reach for her sword, but no one was there. She took a moment to lean against the wall, the great turnstile of the four-man lift creaking somewhere behind it, probably taking people up to her engagement party. She had to think.

René knew her plans, and now through his mother, he would know she was gone. And yet the rope had not been cut, and there were no gendarmes waiting for her now. Which only confirmed what Spear had said, that they needed to catch her in the act, probably to satisfy Allemande’s twisted sense of justice. She remembered the look on René’s face just that middlesun, when he’d talked about losing the flat. What would she have done, what had she planned on doing, to preserve her family and home? Was it any different? Oh yes, she thought. What he had done was very different.

She walked quickly across the cellar and found the grate in the floor, just as he’d described, lifting it away to show a circular drain. The hole bore straight down into the ground, rungs of metal making a ladder down into a dark that was blacker than where she stood. One touch without her glove and she knew the surface was concrete, like some of the laddered tunnels in Bellamy House. Cool air wafted upward, smelling of earth.

She descended two rungs, dragging the grate back over the opening, and started her way down, thinking. The farther she went, the faster she went, rung after rung, quicker and quicker, despite the fact that it made no difference whether her eyes were opened or closed, or that she was in a deep hole that she couldn’t see the bottom of. She was smiling again, the reckless sort. Because she had just changed the plan.

René picked up speed down the hallway, holding a cold wet cloth to his bleeding lip, his face like bleached stone. Benoit followed after him.

“Is Uncle Émile watching LeBlanc?”

“Yes,” said Benoit. “He has told him that his lady friend is attending Mademoiselle Bellamy with a womanly complaint.”

“Does Uncle Émile think he’s telling LeBlanc lies or the truth?”

“Possibly the truth.”

“And she’s away down the shaft?”

“Madame says so.”

“And she still has the ring?”

“The one she has just hit you with? I would guess so. I only know that Hammond has spoken with her, and there is broken furniture as a result. I arrived in time to hear that he wished her to make a new plan, and she would not. She was not herself when she left.”

René let out a string of curses that would have made Uncle Émile blush. “Where is Hammond?”

“I have had Andre and Peter detain him. They have him in her room.”

René opened the last door in the corridor. He walked past Uncle Peter, who had a split on his cheek that was going to bruise, and Uncle Andre, who was gingerly pushing upward on a loose tooth, going straight to Spear. Spear had his hands behind his back, arms and legs tied to a chair. Benoit shut the door and turned the lock while René leaned down over the big man’s face.

“Tell me what you have done, you great, lumbering bag of filth, or I will cut off your ears.”

Spear looked up, and then he smiled.

It was a long time before Sophia found the bottom of the laddered hole, the ground coming as a surprise beneath her boot. She looked up into the darkness and smiled. Too bold. That’s what Tom would have said. She didn’t care. She had to feel with her hands until she found the next tunnel. The opening was small, not a real opening at all, probably an erosion of concrete. She wiggled until she was through, careful with her sword and the firelighter, and then moved quickly, first stooping, and then crawling in complete blackness, until she came to a paler shade of night from a drain above her.

She counted three more of these, and on the fourth, instead of following the tunnel as they’d planned, she carefully pushed up the grate of the drain, panting from her efforts. She saw a back alley behind a squalid structure of ill-formed bricks, one of the buildings that formed the loose open square of the prison yard. It was also the building that squatted over the entrance to the Tombs.

She pulled herself up to the surface, hugging the dark, replacing the grate with the soft scrape of iron on stone. Then she slipped around the corner and crouched down, where the shade of the scaffold hid her from the rising moonlight and the gendarmes patrolling the yard. The scaffold had been decorated, she saw; there were shadows hanging from it, twisting around the timbers and fluttering in the breezes like tattered souls. She wondered if those decorations were for her. She waited for the guards to pass, then circled the building, slowly lifting her head to peek through a lit window.

A stout man sat with his back to her before a rickety desk, the fire low and smoldering in the hearth, his head tipped forward and still. Either sleeping or dead, Sophia thought. Silently she pushed open the window—why did no one ever think of the windows?—grateful that the holy man had had the foresight to grease it before rescuing the Bonnards. She dropped to the floor without noise, shut the window again, drew the curtain and her sword, and moved toward the man’s back. He woke with a start, a red-tipped feather before his eyes and a blade at his throat.