A Lily Among Thorns(102)
Serena wondered how many times in the course of his career he had waited in darkness for the sounds of someone coming to arrest him. “Where will you go from there? What if they’re watching the street?”
“I don’t think I should tell you,” René said. “It will be easier for you to lie that way. I don’t think they’ll be watching the street. They may be watching the courtyard. I shall have to take my chances. They are better than they were a few minutes ago, sirène. Thank you.”
They settled down next to each other in the dark, counting the seconds and trying to ignore the sounds from above. Serena tried to think of what she would do if she were escaping over the back wall. She thought that if he could be quiet, René’s chances of getting out of the courtyard unseen were good—the back door to the laundry came out in a narrow strip of yard enclosed on two sides by fence and shielded from view of most of the rest of the yard. There couldn’t be many of the Foreign Office agents, and if they didn’t know about the tunnel, there was no reason to put someone anywhere he might see René. In his place, once out, she would probably cross the alley, cut through some back gardens, come out in another street, and look for a hackney working late.
She shivered, wondering how many of the agents would know René by sight. If there weren’t any watching the street—if they were watching the doors from the inside—it would probably be all right. But the thought of René walking across even that narrow strip of courtyard with nothing to hide or shield him was terrifying.
These were the last two minutes she might ever spend with him. She wanted suddenly to have one last ordinary, friendly conversation. “How did you know the earrings opened the fireplace?”
He chuckled. “The fireplace opens in two different ways. It was made by Charles the First’s own clockmaker. You saw when we opened it—there’s a clockwork timing mechanism of some sort with an unknown delay. You can open it once just by twisting Diana’s hand halfway round, as I discovered. At that moment I happened to be in a hurry to hide those papers where you wouldn’t find them. I was hasty. But once I’d hidden those papers in there and closed it, it refused to open that way again. I had given them up for lost when I saw some Stuart letters on display in an old bibliothèque in Paris. In one, Charles the Second wrote to his brother from Scotland, mysteriously assuring him that he had got the ruby earrings from their mother and would recapture his hidden treasure from the Rose and Thistle as soon as he reached London. In the other he said he’d given the earrings away to a fellow named Hathaway, in Shropshire.”
“Was there a hidden treasure?” Serena asked.
“Not when I opened it. It had been two hundred years. Anyone could have found it in the meantime.” He paused. “I am so sorry, sirène,” he said, speaking fast. “I never wanted to use the marriage lines. But when I saw you had given my room to a Hathaway from Shropshire, I panicked. For all I knew, he had the earrings and the full secret of their use. If you had found those papers and turned your father in, my entire web of informants would have been useless. Everything went through Ravenscroft.”
“It’s all right.” It wasn’t, really. He had hurt her so much. He hadn’t wanted to, but he had been willing to. And she would have been willing to kill him for the Arms. She didn’t want to think about it.
She did have one question, though, that she had to know the answer to. “My father didn’t—didn’t send you to me, did he? When you came to me and asked me to be your partner?” She didn’t know what she wanted to hear—yes, her father had wanted to save her and she owed him everything? Or no, the Arms was still hers and her father had never cared for a moment?
“Non, ma petite sirène,” he said gently. “I found you all on my own. Your father never had a say in anything I did. He took the money he needed and we used his coastline and that was all.”
Serena nodded. It was as good an answer as any, she decided. And it meant that her father’s threat of Bedlam would disappear now the war was over. It meant she would probably never see him again. It was cold in the tunnel. She leaned her head on René’s shoulder.
He went still for a moment, surprised, but then he put his arm around her shoulders. “You know how I finally figured out how the earrings worked?” he asked her, a teasing note in his voice.
She shook her head.
“When you recited that charming bit of verse to me, my first night back,” he told her. “As soon as I heard ‘place these jewels among Phoebe’s sweet hair’ and ‘shine in the sun,’ I remembered the missing rubies in the carving.”