Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(62)
The butler, his feet fueled by fear, flew down the hall, Michael in grim pursuit. The man burst through the door to the kitchen; Michael was dimly aware of the shocked faces of cooks and maids, and then they were out into the kitchen garden. The butler slowed for an instant going down the steps, and Michael launched himself at the man, knocking him flat.
They rolled together on the graveled path, then Michael got on top of the smaller man, seized him by the shirtfront, and, shaking him, shouted, “WHERE IS HE?”
Thoroughly undone, the butler covered his face with one arm and pointed blindly toward a gate in the wall.
Michael leapt off the supine body and ran. He could hear the rumble of coach wheels, the rattle of hooves—he flung open the gate in time to see the back of a coach rattling down the allée and a gaping servant paused in the act of sliding to the doors of a carriage house. He ran, but it was clear that he’d never catch the coach on foot.
“JOAN!” he bellowed after the vanishing equipage. “I’m coming!”
He didn’t waste time in questioning the servant but ran back, pushing his way through the maids and footmen gathered round the cowering butler, and burst out of the house, startling his own coachman afresh.
“That way!” he shouted, pointing toward the distant conjunction of the street and the allée, where the comte’s coach was just emerging. “Follow that coach! Vite!”
“VITE!” THE COMTE urged his coachman on, then sank back, letting fall the hatch in the roof. The light was fading; his errand had taken longer than he’d expected, and he wanted to be out of the city before night fell. The city streets were dangerous at night.
His captive was staring at him, her eyes enormous in the dim light. She’d lost her postulant’s veil, and her dark hair was loose on her shoulders. She looked charming but very scared. He reached into the bag on the floor and pulled out a flask of brandy.
“Have a little of this, chérie.” He removed the cork and handed it to her. She took it but looked uncertain what to do with it, nose wrinkling at the hot smell.
“Really,” he assured her. “It will make you feel better.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said in her slow, awkward French.
“All of whom?” he asked, startled.
“The Auld Ones. I don’t know what you call them in French, exactly. The folk that live in the hills—souterrain?” she added doubtfully. “Underground?”
“Underground? And they give you brandy?” He smiled at her, but his heart gave a sudden thump of excitement. Perhaps she was. He’d doubted his instincts when his touch failed to kindle her, but clearly she was something.
“They give you food and drink,” she said, putting the flask down between the squab and the wall. “But if you take any, you lose time.”
The spurt of excitement came again, stronger.
“Lose time?” he repeated, encouraging. “How do you mean?”
She struggled to find words, smooth brow furrowed with the effort.
“They…you…one who is enchanted by them—he, it? No, he—goes into the hill, and there’s music and feasting and dancing. But in the morning, when he goes…back, it’s two hundred years later than it was when he went to feast with the…the Folk. Everybody he knew has turned to dust.”
“How interesting!” he said. It was. He also wondered, with a fresh spasm of excitement, whether the old paintings, the ones far back in the bowels of the chalk mine, might have been made by these Folk, whoever they were.
She observed him narrowly, apparently for an indication that he was a faerie. He smiled at her, though his heart was now thumping audibly in his ears. Two hundred years! For that was what Mélisande—Damn her, he thought briefly, with a pang at the reminder of Madeleine—had told him was the usual period when one traveled through stone. It could be changed by use of gemstones or blood, she said, but that was the usual. And it had been, the first time he went back.
“Don’t worry,” he said to the girl, hoping to reassure her. “I only want you to look at something. Then I’ll take you back to the convent—assuming that you still want to go there?” He lifted an eyebrow, half-teasing. It really wasn’t his intent to frighten her, though he already had, and he feared that more fright was unavoidable. He wondered just what she might do when she realized that he was in fact planning to take her underground.
MICHAEL KNELT ON the seat, his head out the window of the coach, urging it on by force of will and muscle. It was nearly full dark, and the comte’s coach was visible only as a distantly moving blot. They were out of the city, though; there were no other large vehicles on the road, nor likely to be—and there were very few turnings where such a large equipage might leave the main road.
The wind blew in his face, tugging strands of hair loose so they beat about his face. It blew the faint scent of decay, too—they’d pass the cemetery in a few minutes.
He wished passionately that he’d thought to bring a pistol, a smallsword—anything! But there was nothing in the coach with him, and he had nothing on his person save his clothes and what was in his pockets: this consisting, after a hasty inventory, of a handful of coins, a used handkerchief—the one Joan had given back to him, in fact, and he crumpled it tightly in one hand—a tinderbox, a mangled paper spill, a stub of sealing wax, and a small stone he’d picked up in the street, pinkish with a yellow stripe. Perhaps he could improvise a sling with the handkerchief, he thought wildly, and paste the comte in the forehead with the stone, à la David and Goliath. And then cut off the comte’s head with the penknife he discovered in his breast pocket, he supposed.