An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(92)
“Good,” she pronounced. “Get into the trunk.”
It seemed a rather snug fit and was awkward to maneuver, arranged as we were with my arms around Stoker.
“Mr. Templeton-Vane on the bottom,” she said. Stoker settled himself, drawing me down on top of him. He settled me as gently as he could, curving his body around mine with such innate sweetness, I might have wept under other circumstances.
It was a tidy little conundrum, I reflected. And the baroness had done an admirable job of rendering it just difficult enough for us to maneuver. But she would have to put the revolver down in order to strap the trunk closed, I decided, and that was when I would strike, levering my legs up and smashing them into the lid, forcing it backwards and into her.
But the baroness anticipated this. She gave me a thin smile as she came near, bending over us. “Good night, children.” She raised her hand, the butt of the pistol gripped tightly in her palm. She brought it down swiftly against Stoker’s temple. He gave a single sigh as he slid into unconsciousness, and I heard a roar of outrage—my own, I realized—just as her hand rose for the second blow.
And then a black curtain descended, blotting out the light.
CHAPTER
27
I struggled awake slowly, so slowly, as if I were swimming through treacle. Every bit of progress towards consciousness was a battle, and my senses returned not all together but one at a time. First was smell. Blood and salt and oil, I thought as my awareness was revived. There was a sense of cold, such perishing cold that I thought I would never be warm again, and the air in the trunk, close and damp, smelt of the sea.
I could hear the steady beating of waves, the rhythmic slap of water against an iron hull. We were seaborne, then, I realized dazedly. Somehow the baroness had contrived to have our trunk conveyed onto a boat of some sort. But where were we bound? And what did she mean to do with us when we arrived?
I had no sense of the passage of time, no way to judge how long we had been held in our makeshift prison. She had taken the precaution of tying a piece of fabric over my mouth, and Stoker’s as well, I had no doubt. It was an easy enough matter to scrape it loose by means of twisting my head. (In my experience, abductors never will tie gags tightly enough. It is a skill more of them ought to practice.) It hung loose around my neck, unpleasantly damp from having been in my mouth for some time.
There was no light, no indication of day or night, so I assessed my own condition for clues. I was mildly hungry and experiencing only a faint inclination to attend to the needs of Nature, so we could not have been aboard for too long, I decided. My hands were still bound, which I did not like at all, but I found this much more tolerable than the gag had been.
I flexed my feet and immediately rammed my toes against Stoker’s legs, causing him to groan. “Stoker, are you awake?”
For a long, terrible moment, there was no reply save silence. Then, like a bear rousing itself from hibernation, came a series of snuffles and grunts and I realized he was freeing himself of his gag.
“Where in the name of seven hells are we?” he demanded.
“At sea,” I told him.
“I deduced that,” he replied with considerable froideur. I decided to overlook his sulkiness.
“There is no call to be in a temper,” I said. “Just because we have been abducted. Again.”
“I think there is every call to be in a temper,” he returned. “This is precisely the sort of predicament I was trying to avoid.”
“I certainly hope you do not mean to suggest this is my fault,” I began.
“Suggest? No, I am stating it outright,” he told me. “I am saying it plainly. If you like, I will have it printed on the front page of the Daily Harbinger or spelt out in electric lights in Piccadilly Circus or tattooed on my backside—which, I would like to remind you, is in fact naked at this moment.”
“I think that is a trifle unfair,” I said, attempting to conceal my sense of injury.
“Unfair? Veronica, what is unfair is that yet again an attempt has been made upon our lives, one that may yet succeed,” he said in real bitterness.
“Do not be so melodramatic. This is hardly an attempt on our lives. We were merely rendered hors de combat, put into a trunk, and loaded onto a boat.”
“A boat that is at sea and from which we will most likely be flung into the ocean,” he said. This would never do. He was distinctly in the grip of “the morbs” and I would not stand for it. We were companions in adventure, and it was my duty to buck his spirits.
“That is a decidedly pessimistic way to view the current situation,” I said a trifle more cheerfully than I felt. “I prefer to believe we will prevail. But I am the rara avis, a true optimist.”
“You are not an optimist. You are a fantasist. You cannot really believe that just because we have eluded a fatal conclusion to every previous unexpected peril that we must do so again. Sooner or later, our luck will run out, Veronica. And that day may very well be today. How can you accept this with such blind and reckless equanimity?”
This was no mere momentary gloom, I realized. He was, for perhaps the first time in our acquaintance, well and truly in despair. I was silent a long moment. He had been angry with me before. When his dark moods were upon him, anger was his frequent companion. I bore the vagaries of his temper with composure. His flashes of irritation were no source of bother to me; in fact, if I am honest—as I have sworn within these pages to be—I will admit that when his ire rose, it more often than not roused some rather different emotion in me. Because I knew his rage, even in a burst of white-hot passion, would never cause him to inflict harm, I could view it from a position of detachment, appreciation even. It would have been a rare woman not to enjoy the sight of his muscles taut with emotion, his eyes flashing sapphirine fury, his hair tumbled as he thrust his hands through it. I had even, upon occasion, deliberately prodded his patience to the snapping point in order to turn that hectic emotion to some more personally enjoyable activity.