The Prince in the Tower (12 page)

But Kate, decided Miss Radish, observing her visitor out cold on the cobblestone floor, blood trickling from her hair, must bear some of the blame.  Was it really Too Much To
Ask that a person have a modicum of privacy in her own home?  She hadn’t had a moment’s peace since the stupid Cavalier started his shenanigans that spring.  It was difficult enough to sustain a viable career in counterfeiting, what with dragoons, blackmailers, and do-gooders poking their noses where they didn’t belong without Lady Katherine’s butting in, too.

Miss Radish looked about her cottage with satisfaction.  Everything packed in two trunks, the cottage neat as a pin.  In less than an hour she was supposed to be on her way to a new and better life, but no. 

She sighed.  Was anyone ever so put upon but her?  Now she had to take care of her unwanted guest.  Luckily the gig was hitched, so she loaded her trunks and tied Lady Katherine’s hands together.  With a great deal of grunting, for the lady was no light weight, Miss Radish managed to half carry, half drag her captive out and heave her up on the trunks in the gig.  She paused, wondering if she should put Lady Katherine under the trunks, but she had not time and her valuables were quite safely packed, thank you, so she straightened her hat, chirruped to the horse, and set off on her journey.  She’d just make a quick side-trip to the Castle to pick up her share of the ill-gotten gains, kill Lady Katherine, and be on her merry way.

Life was good indeed.

***

Kate’s head throbbed.  S
he shivered from the cold.  Slowly she managed to peel her eyes open.  It was black, dank, moist, and familiar. She should know where she was.  She’d been here before, but she couldn’t think.  Her head was fuzzy, but an instinct of self-preservation told her she was in mortal danger.  It was a position she’d found herself in a great deal too often of late.

The sea, she thought drowsily.  Pounding behind her, matching the throbbing in her head. She must have gone walking along the sea in the dark and hit her head.  She must get back. 
Aunt Alice and the children would be worried sick.  And Edmund, though he was more likely to yell than comfort.  She’d probably messed up some precious scheme of his to catch the counterfeiters.  Wait a minute.  She
was
his scheme to catch the counterfeiters.  Bertie!  She sat up as her memory returned, only to sink back with a moan of pain.

A
lifetime, or was it merely days ago, she’d pranced gung-ho into the caverns for the money.  Now that it was for her brother, she was a great deal more determined and a great deal less confident.  More than anything else, she wished Edmund was here right now, big and strong, yelling at her to stay back, he’d take care of everything.  Now she was in a fine pickle, lying helpless after all her bragging and big talk.

Gradually Kate’s dizziness decreased and with it the despised helplessness.  She strained to hear anyone, but nothing came to her ears but the wooshing sound of running water.  Her stomach fr
oze with fear as she finally identified her surroundings.  She opened her eyes to the damp, the darkness so pervasive she could feel in closing in on her body like a heavy woolen blanket.  She was once more in the caverns underground Wallingford Castle and the river was utterly too close for her sense of preservation.

There came the sound of footsteps and an odd sort of sliding sound, followed by the
grunt of a middle-aged spinster hauling--if Kate was seeing clearly in the gloom--oh, dear.  It was a rock the size of Kate’s own head.

Kate pushed the nausea away.  Her hands were tied, but she managed to fight her way to a sitting position.  By the wall, her ca
ptoress fumbled with something, then a spark caught and a torch attached to the wall flamed to life, illuminating the small shelf of land with eerie shadows.

In the back of the space
Kate saw bag after bag piled on top of each other.  One had ripped open, spilling a mound of coins gleaming dully gold in the torch light.  To the side was a pile of wooden boxes.  Each was marked with a number and the legend
Household, Kitchen
.

She nodded to the boxes.  “Is that it?  The machine you used to press the coins?”

Miss Radish turned to her, smiling in the flickering light.  A small woman, she loomed over Kate like a giantess.  In novels this was usually the part where the villain, laughing maniacally and with an evil dueling scar on the side of his cheek went crazily mad and confessed to his crimes before the hero came and shot him.

Kate looked hopefully toward the doorway, but no hero showed up, and Miss Radish wasn’t laughing, maniacally or otherwise.  Instead, she was alarmingly brisk and matter-of-fact.

“You cannot know how very much in the way you’ve been, Katherine.”  Miss Radish produced a rope which she proceeded to tie around and around the rock, knotting it at strategic intervals.  “That’s actually the reason we chose young Bertie to incriminate, to try to scare you off.  But you accidentally tumbled to the correct answer.”  She looked at Kate disapprovingly, as if Kate had blotted her copy book or was wearing a long-sleeved gown, when the rage was all for short sleeves. 

“You know,
Katherine, I was a good friend of your dear mama’s.  Many’s the time I dandled you on my knee when you were an infant.”  She shook her head.  “What dear Rachel would say if she were here I’m sure I don’t know.  But this is going to be terribly difficult for me, Katherine, for I really quite like you.”

“Why is it that everyone who likes me is always about to blackmail
me or kill me?”  Kate demanded.

Miss Radish fixed her with a knowing eye.  “Mr. Dalrymple?”  Kate nodded.

Miss Radish didn’t ask how or why or about what he was blackmailing Kate, which gave her reason to wonder if her reputation was not as circumspect as she’d hoped.

Kate nodded, trying surreptitiously to loosen the bonds at her wrists.

“Stop that,” Miss Radish scolded.  “Have a bit of dignity in your death, Katherine.  Be British.  Stiff upper lip and all that.”

Kate eyed the
rock on which her mama’s good friend was working with such diligence.  She burned to ask what the rock was for, but was morally certain she wouldn’t care for the answer.  Miss Radish saw the direction her eyes moved and answered her politely.

“I’m going to tie this rock around your neck so you will not float when I throw you in the river.”  She gave the knots an experimental tug.  Unfortunately, they held with admiration.

Once again, Kate was in mortal danger in the tunnels under Castle Wallingford.  Once more, no one knew where she was or could come to help her.  Quite frankly, she was getting rather tired of it all.  It was time, she decided forcefully, to think of a Plan.

Miss Radish, the knots tied to her satisfaction, picked up the rock and moved toward Kate.  But she must have misjudged her step in the flickering torchlight, for she stumbled slightly.

“Fiddle,” she muttered, ever the lady.  “Here, hold this for a moment, Katherine.”  She handed Kate the rock and bent to take a pebble out of her shoe. 

Blinking in surprise, Kate grabbed the rock awkwardly in her bound hands before it
smashed all her toes.  As her captor shook the pebble out of her shoe, then bent to put it back on, Kate heaved the rope-tied rock with all her might.  Which was really pathetically not far enough.  It rolled several times, then balanced, teetering, on the rock ledge inches above the river.

With a cry of a schoolteacher whose pupil has been especially stupid, Miss Radish tossed Kate a dirty look.  She
dashed to the river, but as she passed, Kate stuck out her foot, and her enemy went sprawling.  She bumped the rock and it splashed into the river, the long rope end slithering rapidly after it.

Miss Radish
tsk’d.  She stood up to brush her hands on her skirt.  With the delicacy of a debutante at a ball, she smoothed her hair carefully into place. 

“That
was quite annoying of you, Katherine.  You are a silly, thoughtless girl.  Now I’ll have to go get another rope.”

“In the village?”  Kate asked hopefully.  She checked the crudely cut doorway.  Still no hero in sight.

Miss Radish gave her look.  When she turned around to find another likely rock, Kate rolled onto her hip, then her knees, pressing herself up awkwardly with her bound hands.  She almost made it upright, but found herself half standing, half kneeling on her skirts and fell backwards with a grunt.

In a moment, Miss Radish attacked, but Kate, having been having a great deal to do with fisticuffs for much of the week, was ready for her.

She rolled to her back, shooting her feet up to catch Miss Radish brutally in the abdomen.  The older woman’s breath whooshed out, but it was lucky for her that her penchant for wearing only the finest of whale-boned corsets could come in so very handy.  She scarcely hesitated before rattling in again in fine style.

Kate put up her hands to ward off the blows, but Miss Radish managed to land several, includin
g a real corker to the eye.  Kate instinctively threw up her bound hands to protect her face and groaned.  Over her stood Miss Radish, as neat as a pin, but her hands clenched for battle.

“What ever happened to fighting
with honor?”  Kate panted.  “What about not fighting an unarmed opponent?”

“A
ll your limbs look perfectly intact to me, Katherine,” she was told sternly.  “Really, what a fuss you’re making.”

Kate looked up, but the woman looked perfectly sane, save for the fact she was in an underground cavern trying to protect her counterfeiting ring by killing her purported best friend’s eldest child.

A brilliant idea came to Kate, fully formed, as Athena from the head of Zeus.  With a start, she looked over Miss Radish’s shoulder.  She gasped.  Her eyes grew round.  She pretended to start forward.

A
child’s trick, but Miss Radish fell for it.  Swiftly, she turned, braced for attack.  As she turned her head, Kate hurled herself up, looped her bound hands over the woman’s head, and yanked.

Not expecting attack from the rear, Miss Radish fell back, throwing them both heavily to the hard packed earth.

The woman wasn’t quite as dainty as she looked.  She landed on Kate with a thud hard enough to knock the wind out of her.  Instinctively, Kate tightened her hold, but she wasn’t fast enough.  Miss Radish ducked out of Kate’s grasp.  Kate grabbed the woman’s skirt, using it to leverage herself to her feet.  The pain in her head receded as power and hope coursed through her body.

Miss Radish took one look at Kate’s blazin
g face and raced for the opening, Kate following on her heels.  She put on a burst of speed, reaching, reaching, reaching, until her fingers just grasped Miss Radish’s elaborate coiffure.  The woman screamed, skidding to a halt, but it was too late.  The hair came off in Kate’s hand, startling her so that she screamed and threw it to the ground.  For a second she had some hazy idea it was a furry bat and stomped on it hysterically.

Miss Radish
screamed again, flinging herself to rescue her wig.  She tried futilely to cover her baldness with the mangled remains.

“
I’ll kill you with my own bare hands!”  She lunged at Kate with all the fury of a woman who has confronted middle age and lost miserably.  She tried a sucker punch to the gut, but Kate was prepared.  She dodged, countering, swinging her bound hands down and up with massive momentum to Miss Radish’s jaw.  The woman dropped like a stone and lay unconscious in a flutter of torn lace.

F
inally, as she stood panting, wiping the perspiration out of her eyes, Kate looked to the opening to see a hero rush through it.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t her hero but Miss Radish’s.

A
greater shock than that of Father Flannery bursting through the doorway came only when he rushed to the woman on the floor, taking her tenderly in his arms.  Footsteps, echoing in the passage, thundered closer.  As glad as she was, Kate assured herself, that rescue was at hand, it was rather an alarming sound.  Prudently, she moved to the side of the opening, pressing herself close to the wall.

She had just time enough to regret
that the rope Miss Radish had so calmly planned to use on her was now at the bottom of the icy river, when crashing into the cavern came, in order: Edmund, Marquis of Granville, a.k.a. the Honorable Mr. Frederick Dalrymple, looking murderous; Constable Mackey, looking determined; Major Goodwillie, looking officious; and Tom Appleby, looking annoyed.

The
reason for his annoyance was soon apparent, for after these good gentlemen came Lucy, Caro, and Lady Alice, all in various degrees of shock, fear, or glee.  Following them snaked a dozen dragoons in scarlet coats who swiftly ran to form a circle about the cavern, pointing their rifles at the couple in the center.

“Kate!” shouted Edmund.

"Lucy, be careful!" thundered Tom.

“
Katherine!” whispered Lady Alice.

“Lady
Katherine!” stated Major Goodwillie, for the record.

“
Father Flannery!”  This last was from Kate, who was staring with as hard as she could, unable to believe the evidence of her own eyes.