The Counterfeit Heiress (26 page)

“There were only the two of them. I told you as much when you stormed into the building.
Two gentlemen,
I said. I will keep these papers, but if you have not collected them by noon tomorrow—”

“You will keep them as long as I see fit,” Cécile growled. “Now. Which direction did they go when they left the building? Do not pretend you didn’t look.”

“I never said they left the building, did I?” The concierge scowled. A large brindled cat peeked his head out the door, looked dissatisfied with what he saw, and retreated inside.

“They are not upstairs,” I said. “We were just there.”

She shrugged. “If you hadn’t been so rude when you came, I might have told you not to bother with the stairs. It’s your husband, isn’t it? Can’t hold his drink, can he, though I suppose you’re used to that. They’re in the courtyard, no doubt hoping the night air would sober them up.”

Wasting no time, we darted through the foyer and out the back door to what, if well tended, would have been a lovely garden instead of an overgrown mess. There was a wrought-iron table and four chairs on paving stones, but no sign of Colin or Jeremy. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, even when the witness in question is trying his best to tell the truth, but I found it hard to believe the concierge could be so very wrong. We went back to confront her.

“They are not in the courtyard, and they are not upstairs, which means they must have left the building.”

The concierge narrowed her eyes. “They did not leave the building.”

She was impossible. “You must not have noticed them, which is odd considering that their alleged drunkenness supposedly disturbed you so very much. Please try to remember—they came down the steps, and they—”

“And they went into the courtyard. That is all.” She stepped back into her loge and slammed the door. Either she was lying, confused, or had not been paying attention. Cécile and I went back into the street, crossed it, and stood looking at Mr. Jones’s building, unsure of where to go next. I hesitated, then started to walk east. Before we had covered fifty yards, I heard a familiar voice, moaning.

“Em? Is that you, Em?”

Jeremy, blood drying on his forehead, was lying in the dark, hidden from the pavement by a large planter containing an immaculately trimmed shrub. He moaned again and reached up to me. “What happened to you?” I dropped to my knees next to him.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “You must find Hargreaves. He has Hargreaves.”

Estella

xvii

Estella could not remember when she had passed so many pleasant days in a row. Her captor—but she must not call him that any longer—Monsieur Jones had proved a reliable supplier, well able to follow directions. He came with macarons every day before seven o’clock, along with whatever else she had instructed him to bring. Today, she had even had hot coffee, as he had carried it directly to her after it had been made in a nearby café. She had finished reading Jean-François Champollion’s
Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie,
an account of that explorer’s journey through the land of the pharaohs, a place to which Estella was becoming more and more attached. Monsieur Jones had brought more Dickens as well, but she had not yet perused any of that.

She had hung tapestries on her stone walls—not the best quality, but it was proving a tad difficult to get Monsieur Jones to spend her money freely—and she now had a chair, as well as plates and cups and cutlery. “You should join me for a glass of wine,” she said as he descended the ladder.

“Mademoiselle Lamar, it has been three days now. You are going to have to leave soon. Shall we make a plan? I am of the opinion that you might feel more comfortable if you knew what, precisely, you wanted to do once you have left this—”

“Prison? Were you going to say prison, Monsieur Jones? An apt description, but one that no longer fits quite so neatly as it once did.”

“I have come to the conclusion that it might be better if I plan to take you home myself. I do believe I can trust you not to alert the police, can I not? You are fragile after this experience, and there is no one to blame for that but me. I cannot in good conscience leave you down here waiting to be rescued.”

“I have very little interest in going home,” Estella said.

“Well, I can take you wherever you want. You have a house in the south, is that correct?”

“It is as boring as the one here. I long for adventure, Monsieur Jones.” She waved her two books about Egypt in front of him. “Messieurs Belzoni and Champollion have lit inside me a fire.”

“You would like to go to Egypt?” He balked at first, but then considered the idea. It was not the worst he had ever heard.

“First, I must read more, so that I might plan a suitable itinerary.”

Monsieur Jones nodded. “I shall gather all the information I can about ships and hotels and guides. Is there anything else?”

“At the moment, no, unless you would care to join me for wine?”

He refused the offer, and took from her the list she now gave him daily. “No macarons this time?”

“Three days, apparently, is what it takes for me to grow tired of them. I am asking for chocolates instead, and I should like coq au vin for dinner tomorrow.”

“Very well.” He disappeared up the ladder. Estella opened the notebook he had brought her the day before yesterday and sat, not on the chair, but on the slab, so that she might have both of her Egyptian tomes by her side as she started to write:

ALEXANDRIA

She drew a line under the name of the city and then wrote:

WE WILL BEGIN HERE.

18

He has Hargreaves.

I kept hearing Jeremy’s words over and over in my head and could barely manage to focus. All of the world had narrowed for me, and there was nothing but a long, dark tunnel, at the end of which I was destined to find my husband, gravely injured, if not dead—

I felt a sharp slap on my cheek. “Forgive me, Kallista, but you were insensible.” I shook the pain away and nodded to indicate there were no hard feelings; Cécile had, after all, forced me to regain my much-needed composure.

“What happened?” I asked Jeremy. “No, first, how badly are you hurt?”

“There is no cause for concern regarding my health, and, unfortunately, there is very little more I can tell you. When we arrived at the building, Hargreaves instructed me to stay outside and watch for our cursed villain. If I saw him, I was to shout and raise an alarm. Hargreaves went inside, and I presume was able to gain access to the apartment, as he did not return again in short order. Furthermore, from my post I could see the light go on in the front room on the fourth floor. I saw Hargreaves in the window and saluted him from here. A moment later, I felt a large crash of pain in my skull, accompanied by what I can only describe as a decidedly sickening thud. Everything went black as I fell to the ground, and I remember nothing else.”

Jones—for there could be no doubt as to the identity of Jeremy’s assailant—must have spotted my friend watching the building and panicked. But what had happened to Colin? “He must have found Colin inside and somehow managed to—”

Still squatting next to Jeremy, I rose to my feet, wanting to scream, but as I am a rational person, I knew this would accomplish nothing. “We know they were both in the apartment. We know they fought—the state of the rooms and the broken window make that much clear. One of them was injured, and the other more or less dragged him downstairs and past the concierge, who assumed they were drunk.”

Cécile had pulled Jeremy up from the ground, and the two of them stood in front of me, silent. I started nodding, too quickly, as the words spilled from my mouth. “If Colin had vanquished his opponent, he would have incapacitated him and come for you, Jeremy, which means that we must operate on the assumption that it is Colin who was dragged down the stairs.” Tears were smarting in my eyes.

Jeremy took my hand, stood directly in front of me, and tipped my chin up until I was looking him directly in the eye. “We are going to the police, Em, and I promise they will find him. You know he would never let himself come to any serious harm, because then you would be left on your own and wholly incapable of fending off my advances. We all know Hargreaves would never stand for that.”

I sniffed. Cécile put her arm around my shoulders. “He is right. Monsieur Hargreaves would never leave you to suffer that sort of indignation. Nonetheless, we may as well arrange for his rescue sooner rather than later, so let us go at once to the police.”

Reason was beginning to return to me. “We do need them, I agree with you both there, but we cannot leave it all to them. Cécile, can you manage summoning them on your own? I want to search the building again. The concierge, unreliable though she might be, was adamant that they didn’t leave the courtyard.” Neither of them was prepared to argue with me, and Cécile set off at once.

The blue tinge of twilight engulfed us as Jeremy and I returned to the house. We had to bang on the door repeatedly—the concierge ignored the bell—and did not gain entry until Jeremy, blood still oozing from his forehead, rapped on the concierge’s window. “I say, good woman, I am the Duke of Bainbridge, come to collect my friend, who I believe has caused something of a commotion this evening. Would you be so kind as to let me in?”

She opened the door, but only six inches, and stuck her thin nose through the gap. “I’ve had quite enough of this lady.” She glared at me.

“And I have had quite enough of you.” For the second time, I flung myself against a door, this time meeting with more success. My action sent the concierge flying across the foyer, where she landed in an inglorious heap. I paid her little attention as I stormed past her, back into the courtyard. “Where can they be?”

“Not here,” Jeremy said, pressing his handkerchief to the gash on his head to stop the bleeding. There was only the single entrance to the building’s outdoor space, and nothing but windows on the walls. After thoroughly searching every inch of it, I rushed back into the foyer and stormed through the open door of the concierge’s loge. Cécile was inside with the woman.

“The police are on their way,” Cécile said. “I telephoned them from the café.”

I thanked her and then stood in front of the concierge. “Did you see them go into the courtyard? Actually see them? Or did you merely assume that is where they went?”

“I heard them on the stairs. It was quite a commotion. I was sitting here in my chair”—she spat the words—“and you can observe well enough for yourself that had they left the building, they would have passed directly in front of me.” The chair was situated so that she had a clear view of the entrance.

Feeling as if I were going mad, I returned to the foyer and then the sensation of madness gave way to that of revelation. Next to the elevator, on the opposite side from the stairs, around a small corner so that it was just out of sight, stood an iron door, almost medieval in its design, which looked better suited to a castle dungeon than an apartment building. I had not noticed it before. Jeremy, a step behind me, took me by the arm.

“Allow me,” he said, and swung open the portal. Narrow stone stairs descended into the dark, which meant we had to return to the concierge for candles (fortunately for us, Cécile had the woman now well under her thumb) before beginning our descent. The room at the bottom was dank and dusty and full of a motley collection of boxes and trunks that looked as if they had been abandoned in some earlier century. Though we listened carefully, we heard no sound but that of our own breath. I raised my candle above my head and went to the center, where I stood and turned slowly and methodically, looking for anything that might provide a clue as to my husband’s fate.

The dust of the floor was disturbed, suggesting that ours were not the only feet to have recently trod on it, but there was no clear path marked in it. Once I had made a complete rotation without noticing anything else amiss, I closed my eyes to focus my attention—all the while ignoring the pounding in my chest—and then opened them to repeat the endeavor. This time, I did not stay in the middle, but walked the perimeter, and noticed a stack of boxes that had fallen over. I kicked them aside, only to find a heavy trunk directly in front of me, more boxes piled on top of it. A handprint stood out in the dust on the dark leather of the trunk. Jeremy lifted the boxes off the trunk, the pile reaching above the top of his head, but he managed, with my assistance, to deposit them on the floor without dropping them. Our candles struggled against the unrelieved darkness as we turned back to the trunk. Now that the boxes were gone, we could see the outline of a door on the wall behind it.

Jeremy bent to move the trunk, but I was too impatient to wait for that. I reached over him and pushed against the door, finding, fortunately, that it swung in the opposite direction from the trunk and was unhindered by its proximity to the luggage. We scrambled over the top and entered into a tunnel whose Stygian darkness swallowed us. Terrified, but bent on finding Colin, we followed it as it meandered beneath the city.

I had read about the network of tunnels beneath the city, and knew how extensive it was, but until now I had not appreciated just how extensive. After walking for what felt like miles, the passage twisting and turning, we reached a junction. “Which way?” I asked. I closed my eyes and struggled to hear anything that might indicate the path Colin and his attacker had taken, but could hear nothing except the occasional rustle of rodents. I sighed. “The only thing to do is try one direction, and if we find nothing, come back and go the other. I do not think it would be wise to investigate separately.”

“Absolutely not,” Jeremy agreed.

“We should make some sort of mark so that we can find our way back.” The mere act of entertaining the possibility of getting lost made me feel as if the walls, carved out of the city’s bedrock, were pressing in against us. I reached down for a rock and struck it against the wall of the passage that led back to the entrance, but it did not leave a mark, so I tore a strip of fabric from my petticoat, rent it into three pieces, and laid them along the edge of the wall.