Serena shoved off the blankets, swung her feet off the bed, and promptly slid to the floor. She looked up to find the room tilting back and forth in a way that caused her gorge to rise.
“Nounou.” The word was a hollow croak and her head tipped back, unwilling to stay upright on her shoulders.
Strong hands lifted her like a rag doll and laid her gently on the bed. A door shut, and somebody pulled the blanket up around her.
“Go to sleep, mignon. You can do no good in your condition.”
“But—” Her mouth was thick and full of cotton wadding. “What?”
“A little milk of the poppy. Sleep.”
She wanted to yell at her, but dozens of small hands clutched at her body and pulled her down, down, down . . ..
***
Gareth and Declan each held items of Oliver’s clothing the Frenchwoman said he’d worn lately. The dogs followed Oliver everywhere now that they lived in the house. The only time he put them in the barn was when he had something to do and they could not go. There had been one or two accidents in the house and Serena had told him they must stay in their stall when he was not with them.
The dogs began whining and snuffling even before Gareth opened the stall door. They had been trained not to jump, but they were rambunctious and restless, waiting for permission to leave their stall.
Gareth squatted down in the clean straw and held out the cloth cap. The dogs went wild, leaping and sniffing and making sounds he could only assume indicated dog happiness.
“They certainly know his scent.”
They took two lanterns in case they had to split up for some reason, but only lit one, and that one with its shutter lowered almost all the way and allowing a narrow circle of light that barely lighted the ground two steps ahead of them. They clipped leads to two of the hounds and turned the rest free.
The only sounds as they left the stables were the snuffling of snouts and stridulating of thousands of nighttime insects. They had both dressed in dark clothing and darkened any visible skin with ashes. Gareth hardly see his own hand.
The dogs ahead were invisible, but they stayed close enough to hear. The two they kept on leads pulled in the same direction, down toward the river.
Gareth briefly thought of the mine Oliver had led him to that day and could only be grateful he had sent workers to close the opening, especially as the dogs seemed to head in that direction.
They stumbled and cursed quietly behind them, Gareth’s heart growing heavier as the dogs led them almost directly toward the mine. But, suddenly, the two dogs on leads stopped and Gareth heard a distinct snarl and snap among the dogs ahead.
“What is it?” Declan whispered.
Gareth had no idea. This was the first time he had been with the dogs—or any dog, really—without Oliver’s company. He knew his friend suffered from the same lack of canine experience. The place where they had grown up had no dogs—they were just another mouth to feed.
The dogs’ growling became louder and almost savage sounding.
“Jesus!” Dec whispered, “if there is anyone out here they will certainly hear this. Can’t you make them be quiet? What the hell is going on?”
Gareth realized his dog had begun to strain toward the river and the old mine. Dec’s dog was pulling in the opposite direction.
He gave a soft snort. “They are having a dog argument. Look at them, Dec.”
A moment of silence and then, “By God, you’re right. What the devil do we do now?”
“We split. We’ve both got pistols and lanterns. It’s obvious something happened here, enough to make the dogs think he went in two directions. The boy knows this area like the back of his hand. Perhaps he escaped Bardot and ran away? I don’t know, but we split.” He knelt on the grass to light his lantern.
“Do you think we will be able to split them?” Declan asked, crouching down beside him, his eyes barely a glitter in the low light.
“They seem to want to. Besides, Oliver has trained them to obey.” He shuttered both lamps until they set out. “Do you think you are familiar enough with the layout of the property to find your way back to the house, Dec?”
“Yes, I’ve gone out every day while you’ve been gone and the boy took me down past the lake to where he found an old gamekeeper’s shack. In fact, it occurs to me that might be the direction the dogs want to head. He spent a good deal of time there and even had a spirit lamp and made tea for us. There were several other items of his there and he told me he often takes naps and reads there. Possibly Bardot knew about it.”
Gareth chewed his lip. He knew of the shack, of course. “Perhaps I should go with you?”
“I think we should follow both trails.” He hesitated. “Do you think the dogs will start baying and making a racket if they catch scent of him?”
Gareth lifted the shutter on his lamp a hair and snapped his fingers and all nine dogs converged on them. “Sit,” he hissed, pleased and surprised when they did just that. Eighteen canine eyes looked back at him. He could have sworn they knew this was not a game.
“Track now,” he said, his voice a little louder. Of course the dogs made no comment, but he thought their bodies tightened in anticipation.
“Oliver took them hunting hares and used this command. I can only hope it will work to track their master.” He dug his watch from his pocket. “It is seven minutes after ten o’clock. I think we should agree to meet back at the stables at a certain time, no matter what we are doing or what we have found.”
“Agreed.”
Gareth mentally made the journey to the game shack and back to the house on foot and added some extra time for a little exploration and perhaps some false trails. “Two hours. We should meet back at the stables at seven minutes past midnight.”
Dec chuckled.
“What is so funny?”
A hand landed on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Nothing. See you back at the stables at seven minutes past midnight.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Serena woke up to a pounding head and mouth full of cotton.
Nounou sat beside the bed, mending some item of Oliver’s clothing.
Serena’s body sat up without any command from her brain. “Oliver!” The word came out a raspy whisper.
Nounou lowered her mending. “I hope you’re not going to behave like a fool and begin running about achieving nothing.”
Serena felt as though she’d been slapped in the face. She opened her mouth, prepared to deliver the set-down of a lifetime, but the older woman was not done.
“I suppose you believe fainting from exhaustion will somehow help find your son.”
She met Nounou’s dark brown gaze, her black slashes of eyebrows drawn down into a ‘V.’ And she shut her mouth.
“Bon. Now eat.” She gestured to the bedside table, where a tray of bread, butter, and jam sat waiting, also a pot still puffing a little steam: chocolate.
While Serena tucked into the tray Nounou told her what had happened in the five hours she’d slept.
“There are eyes watching everywhere if anyone should come near. Somebody will leave at first light to collect the money.” She shrugged, her eyes once again on her mending. Although she gave the impression of calm, Serena saw how the muscles in her neck were standing out, her shoulders bowed with tension. “I do not know who will go fetch that. Right now,” she glanced up and gave her a direct look. “Mr. Lockheart and the other one have taken the dogs to see if they can find Oliver’s scent.”
Serena looked at the window, but the drapes had been pulled. “Can they see tonight?” She had been locked in a hole for a week and had no recollection of whether there was a moon or not.
“Not very well. They took lanterns but cut them to barely a glow.” She grinned up at Serena suddenly. “It reminded me of my childhood in Marseilles, with the contrebandiers.”
Serena supposed she should be surprised the rather staid older woman had once engaged in
smuggling, but people were never just what they seemed.
“How long have they been gone?”
Nounou glanced at the clock on the mantle, it was half-past midnight. “It must be well over two hours now.”
Serena drained the rest of her chocolate and set aside the tray, expecting Nounou to stop her when she got out of bed. Instead, the other woman nodded to the foot of the bed, where laid out were a long-sleeved, dark green dress, fresh stockings, her dark blue pelisse, and her scuffed leather ankle boots—all clothes she wore to work.
“You might as well dress to be useful, if the time comes.”
***
Gareth heaved a sigh of relief when he saw the entrance to the mine was still blocked with tightly packed stone. But his relief didn’t last long when the dogs kept scenting a trail north, beyond the area he had explored with Oliver that day.
They led him around the stone face that held the old mine entrance, the going rough over an outcropping of rocks that must run east until they intersected the river. As he tried to find an area that was not so steep, he encountered a section of rock that seemed to have been hewn down to make a narrow pass, the dogs shot through it like water down a spout. Gareth followed more slowly, needing to carry the lantern directly in front of his body to fit through the narrow cut out.
There was an unexpected drop-off and he almost smashed the lantern on the rock as he skidded down some loose stones and landed with a hard thump on his arse. He paused for a moment to listen. There were no dogs nearby, nothing but insects.
“To me,” he ordered in a low voice. Nothing.
When Gareth tried to stand, he realized the ground was still uneven. He had no choice but to shed more light. He lifted the shutter only a fraction of an inch but enough to see a few feet ahead. A drop of at least four feet and then what looked to be the other side of the stone face with trees growing snug up to the rocks. No sign of dogs.
He edged his way down the hillside in a shower of pebbles and dirt. When he reached the bottom he found trees growing close and hugging the rocky protrusion. A rough path had been hacked through the brambles where they met the trees and Gareth’s breathing quickened.
He pushed through thorny brush that clawed at his boots and buckskins. Sounds of snuffling and whining came from around the corner of stone ridge he was following. His heart was beating with a combination of expectation and dread when he found the cluster of dogs running back and forth in front of an opening into the rock which had once been boarded up. All but the two bottom planks had been pulled from the wall in rotten pieces. The dogs were nosing at the remaining wood and dancing around, their bodies twisting with excitement. Something white caught his eye beside one of the chunks of wood and Gareth leaned down. It was a small scrap of paper, folded several times. He unfolded it slowly, his heart alternating between excitement and dread; he recognized Oliver’s handwriting. It was part of a larger note, the words written with the graphite pencil Gareth had given him, the sheet of paper from the small pad of paper.
“Carry this with you,” he’d said, giving the boy one of the same pads of paper he always carried. “When a good idea comes to you, you do not want to be without a way to record it.”
Gareth thought the words were Oliver’s notes to himself about the automaton he was making as a surprise gift for his mother.
He carefully re-folded the note and tucked it inside his coat. One of the hounds came near enough to sniff at his face and Gareth gave the animal a pat and then scratched between its ears, just the way he’d seen Oliver do a hundred times.
“He’s in there, isn’t he?” he asked the dog, knowing as he did so how ridiculous such a thing was. But the dog seemed to like it, wagging its tail twice as hard at the sound of his voice.
Gareth stood and approached the opening on feet that were heavier than blocks of lead. The brush had been trampled and then pushed back in a poor effort to cover the hole. Gareth lifted the light until it illuminated what lay behind the boards.
“Good God.” He barely forced the words out through his frozen jaws.
***
“It is an hour after he said he would join you. We must do something.” Serena told herself she had shown amazing restraint for the past thirty minutes.
McElroy looked up from the plan of the estate the draftsman had made. “He must have found something around here—this old chalk mine.”
Serena stood at the edge of the desk where he was seated and looked at the map even though it was burnt into her mind.
“Gareth had the mine entrance closed up the very day he first saw it.” She could not bear the thought of either Oliver or Gareth anywhere near the old mine, which the locals considered not just haunted, but terribly unstable in places. She had threatened Oliver to within an inch of his life if he was ever discovered poking around in the ruins, which Flowers, her construction foreman, said hadn’t been used for hundreds of years.
“We used to dare each other to go in them, as young ’ungs. ’Twas stupid, but boys are stupid,” he’d admitted when Serena voiced her concerns. “But Mr. Lockheart has closed up the last of ’em. The other openings either caved in on themselves or was boarded or rocked over years ago.”
She remembered those words now.
“There are other entrances. Entrances that were closed up a long time ago.”
McElroy regarded her with a steady look. When he wasn’t smiling, he looked far older, deep lines carved around his overlarge mouth and dozens of smaller lines mapping the skin around his green eyes. “I know I have only my gut to go on, but Gareth must have found something. He is, as you might know, punctual to the minute.”
Serena’s mouth curled into a smile at the thought of him ordering her to meet him at the river in an hour and twenty-three minutes.
“You might have also realized he is also not fond of dark, cramped spaces.”
She nodded, fighting down a flare of jealous anger that this man knew more about Gareth than she did. “I knew he didn’t care for the dark, but I knew nothing about small spaces.”
McElroy did not enlighten her. “I am going to take the dogs and follow the trail from where we split up.”
“I am going with you.”
He cocked his head as he looked up at her, and finally shrugged. “Fine. I don’t have the time to argue with you and you have the look of a woman who will do whatever she damn well pleases.”
Serena decided she liked the Irishman better and better upon further acquaintance. She turned away and headed for the door.
“I only need my cloak and I am ready.”
***
The cavern beyond the entrance was far wider and taller than Gareth expected. It was certainly twice as spacious as the diagrams he’d seen of a Cornish mine that Dec had been keen on acquiring.
The lantern only illuminated a few feet around him, even though he had removed the shutter and set it ablaze. There was no way he could have entered this black hole without it. Even with the light, his insides churned and his hands trembled as he investigated what was essentially a big, winding cavern. No smaller tunnels led out from this one, which must have served as some sort of staging area in the distant past. No, there were only two ways out of this vast cavern that he knew of: the way he’d come in and the blocked-up entrance.
One of the dogs was on its hind legs, its paws resting on the top of the board he’d climbed over. Gareth looked at the anxious animal to avoid looking at what occupied the far end of the big cave: a hole that dropped straight down into Hell.
A choked laugh broke from between his chattering teeth. Even with his shriveled sense of humor he could appreciate the irony. A cave, with another, smaller, cave inside of that. All the situation lacked was crippling hunger pangs and a swollen, bloody back from Mr. Jensen’s leather strap. Oh, and rats—he should never forget the rats.
There was no time for hysteria, and he knew it. At the very least, the note proved Oliver had been here. It might have
been days ago, or he might be down there right now.
Gareth approached the hole and dropped into a crouch before leaning over the edge and lowering the lantern. Hand and footholds had been chiseled out of the rough wall and metal rungs set in the stone at widespread intervals. When he lowered the lantern into the shaft, he could see what looked to be dry stone floor far below.
He glanced around the cavern, looking for something that could be used to tie the lantern around him somehow. Unfortunately, he’d worn no cravat because he owned only white neckcloths.
But the cave only held the skeletons of small animals, twigs, branches, and more cobwebs than he’d ever seen in his entire life.
And then he remembered the dog lead. It had jerked out of his hand when he’d slid down the hillside. He went back to the opening to find all the dogs waiting, eerily quiet and expectant. He quickly removed the rope lead and tied it in a knot around the metal lantern handle and then tied a knot in the rope itself and looped it over his head. It hung down his back, heavy against his throat, but not enough to cause breathing problems.
He’d taken off his gloves, thinking it would be easier to gain purchase in the hand holds, but his hands—his entire body—ran with sweat, so he put them back on.
As he took another look down the shaft, he couldn’t help being grateful he did not have a fear of heights, along with everything else. He took hold of the top metal rung and gave it a hard tug before turning his back to the hole. And then he began his slow descent into darkness.
***
Serena’s heart was pounding and it wasn’t because she’d just slid down a hillside on a wave of rocks, pebbles, and dirt.
“Are you hurt?”
McElroy leaned toward her, the cloud of dirt further obscuring the dim light from the lantern.
“I’m fine. Where are the dogs?”
He helped her to stand and then turned. The dogs were gone, but the trail they’d taken was clear.
“Gareth, or someone, has recently been this way,” he whispered. “We will need to go single file or you risk being torn to shreds by the brambles. Hold on to the tail of my coat.”
A Figure of Love Page 28
