Rook(91)

She jerked open the cupboard, found her fluffy underskirt hung among the other dresses, and drove her knife into the white cloth with a ripping tear. The firelighter was in a sack of burlap that was now in her hand, and there were men’s voices coming to her door. Benoit, she thought, and probably émile. She darted silently to Madame Hasard’s connecting door and slipped through it just as hers was opening. When both men were in her room, she dashed out of Madame Hasard’s and down the stairs, around the curve and to the linen closet, where she’d left a covered lamp burning. She shut the door behind her.

Sophia paused. It was excruciating being in this room; it nearly stopped her ticking altogether. She thought of Tom, and Jennifer, and pretended to be somewhere else. Pretended to be someone else. The wig came off and so did the dress, hidden quickly behind the hanging tablecloths, her black breeches and black shirt already underneath, cut low so as not to show beneath the lace of her former neckline. Her vest she fished out from the ironing pile, supplies already sewn in, the feathers from the party going into the bag with the others. The denouncement of the Bonnards she left in her shirt. Then she took her second knife and pushed the tip twice through the burlap that held the firelighter, making two holes, cut a cord from the washed curtains and strung the whole thing sideways across her chest. Her sword went from her leg to her back, for climbing; a soft black cap was pulled over her pinned hair; dark leather gloves onto her hands. And when the door of the linen closet opened again, the Rook peered out into the empty hall. She flitted across to the water room, shut herself inside, and opened the sliding panel to the lift.

She leapt up onto the ledge and looked down. The bucket was dangling one level below on the nearest rope. Hoping that meant the other bucket was near the bottom and full, she reached out, and that was when the door to the water room opened. Madame Hasard stood looking in at her, vivid hair piled high for the party, one red eyebrow raised.

Sophia met her gaze, grabbed the rope with both hands, and jumped. The rope swung out as she got a foot wrapped around, she bounced once off the bricks, and then she was gone, dropping down the shaft, water splashing somewhere below, leaving her stomach where she’d started. She passed the closed lift door for the flat below, and the next open one, showing a man’s turned back, and glanced up. The top of the shaft was still lit and growing smaller, but no one was trying to cut her rope. Surely Madame Hasard carried a knife? But Madame wasn’t going to have time to cut anything.

Air whistled around Sophia’s ears. She wondered if she would be able to keep her grip when the rope came to a stop, or if she was about to take a cold, wet bath in a cistern. She hung on, saw the bottom coming, got her knees bent, and the rope stopped with a jerk that nearly wrenched her arms from their sockets. But she was able to swing her feet to the edge of a cistern and hop down, and as René had said, landing her boots on the stone floor of the building’s cellar.

She looked around, wary, ready to reach for her sword, but no one was there. She took a moment to lean against the wall, the great turnstile of the four-man lift creaking somewhere behind it, probably taking people up to her engagement party. She had to think.

René knew her plans, and now through his mother, he would know she was gone. And yet the rope had not been cut, and there were no gendarmes waiting for her now. Which only confirmed what Spear had said, that they needed to catch her in the act, probably to satisfy Allemande’s twisted sense of justice. She remembered the look on René’s face just that middlesun, when he’d talked about losing the flat. What would she have done, what had she planned on doing, to preserve her family and home? Was it any different? Oh yes, she thought. What he had done was very different.

She walked quickly across the cellar and found the grate in the floor, just as he’d described, lifting it away to show a circular drain. The hole bore straight down into the ground, rungs of metal making a ladder down into a dark that was blacker than where she stood. One touch without her glove and she knew the surface was concrete, like some of the laddered tunnels in Bellamy House. Cool air wafted upward, smelling of earth.

She descended two rungs, dragging the grate back over the opening, and started her way down, thinking. The farther she went, the faster she went, rung after rung, quicker and quicker, despite the fact that it made no difference whether her eyes were opened or closed, or that she was in a deep hole that she couldn’t see the bottom of. She was smiling again, the reckless sort. Because she had just changed the plan.



René picked up speed down the hallway, holding a cold wet cloth to his bleeding lip, his face like bleached stone. Benoit followed after him.

“Is Uncle émile watching LeBlanc?”

“Yes,” said Benoit. “He has told him that his lady friend is attending Mademoiselle Bellamy with a womanly complaint.”

“Does Uncle émile think he’s telling LeBlanc lies or the truth?”

“Possibly the truth.”

“And she’s away down the shaft?”

“Madame says so.”

“And she still has the ring?”

“The one she has just hit you with? I would guess so. I only know that Hammond has spoken with her, and there is broken furniture as a result. I arrived in time to hear that he wished her to make a new plan, and she would not. She was not herself when she left.”

René let out a string of curses that would have made Uncle émile blush. “Where is Hammond?”