by Oisin McGann
Nate examined the cord again, touching it tentatively with his fingers. He sensed the faintest twitch of movement. Frowning, he looked either way into the darkness again … and allowed himself a slight smile. No stranger to the house could find their way around down here. And if they tried, it would not be long before they lost their bearings and could not find their way back. They would need a means of keeping track of their route.
The arrows had disappeared a few floors up, but Nate had followed the obvious route from there. It seemed someone had rubbed out the chalk markings. Perhaps it was the kidnapper himself trying to erase his path. Or perhaps the kidnapper’s guide had done it, either to make Barnum harder to find or to make it harder for him to get out on his own. It would be a typical act of Wildenstern guile.
To Nate’s right, the tunnel zigzagged into darkness, where a set of steps would lead farther down into the bowels of the building. To his left, he knew, the passage went on for a while before coming to a cul-de-sac. The only way out of the passage was a concealed door that led into the wine cellar, but that door could be hard to find even when you knew where it was, and the wine cellar had a heavy door that was kept securely locked and bolted to protect the valuable contents. Nate looked both ways and made a decision.
Careful not to disturb the thread, he set off down the left-hand tunnel, covering the lamp with his hand to stop it shining too far ahead. It was not long before he heard voices. He paused, lowering the flame on the lamp as far down as he could, and listened intently.
“Goddamn it to Hell, woman! You mean you don’t know where we are?” a voice rasped quietly. “I should’ve bloody suspected. Confounded hag! You’ve led me down a dead end! You’ve been playing me for a fool. But now we’re both lost, don’t you understand? We’ll have to retrace our steps and start again. You’ve gained nothing with this!”
“I’ll ask you to watch your language, Mr. Barnum,” a second voice retorted. “Profanity will not improve your powers of navigation. There is no reason to go all the way back. We must simply try another direction, that’s all. Will you lead the way, or shall I?”
Hearing his sister-in-law’s galling, self-righteous tone, Nate extinguished his lamp altogether and laid it on the floor. Then he slipped the satchel from his shoulder and drew the revolver out. There was no time to put on more clothes, but perhaps his near-nakedness would give him an advantage, taking Barnum off-guard.
The kidnapper was obviously using the thread as a means of finding his way back the way he had come—a safety precaution to remove himself from the very kind of predicament Daisy had just led him into. Nate pushed the bag and lamp behind a supporting post in the wall and pressed himself back behind the post on the opposite side. He need only wait for them to come back toward him.
And back they came, Barnum winding the thread in on a spool as he walked. The trans-portmanteau, once more in the shape of a traveling trunk, glided along the floor behind, pushed by Daisy, whose wrists seemed to be bound to the top of it.
Nate listened to their approach, waiting for the right moment.
“We’ll return to that passage we crossed about fifty yards back,” Barnum was saying softly. “We’re about level with the cellars now. …”
Nate was stepping out from behind the wall post when the trans-portmanteau unfolded, unwrapping itself from Barnum’s traveling trunk. Perhaps it had smelled Nate, or detected him with some other, more mysterious sense. With a sound like the rush of air over a metal sail, it swept past Barnum, filling the width of the tunnel by the time Nate had moved out and raised his gun. He swore as it rushed at him. He couldn’t shoot without the risk of the bullets passing through the thing and hitting Daisy, who was still tied to the traveling trunk. The creature came at him, swinging sharp corners like axe blades. It cut his right forearm, then his left shoulder, and then the side of his neck as he jerked his face away. Any closer than that and it could have taken his head right off. Nate fell backward, firing upward as the thing rose over him.
It flinched, squealing as one shot punched a hole in its thin form, then two more. But if it had any vital organs, they had not been hit. The shots hardly slowed it down. Nate felt the length of cord lying along the floor under his back. As the engimal thudded one of its axe-like corners into the floor by his head, he rolled, grabbed the thread and whipped the spool out of Barnum’s hands. It clattered past his head. Nate avoided another slashing metal edge, tumbled backward, and fired another shot at the engimal, getting his feet under him again. Two shots left before he had to reload.
This time as it jabbed down at him, he dived over it. It turned as he did, but caught itself on the thread. It thrashed against the near-invisible cord, but that just got it even more tangled. It swung an edge at him and he rolled under it, getting another loop of thread around the engimal. He prayed its edges could not cut the cord.
But Barnum wasn’t about to wait. Nate saw the light of Barnum’s lamp glint on a gun barrel. He threw himself behind a supporting post as the blast from a shotgun blew splinters out of the wood and tore a much larger hole in the edge of the trans-portmanteau. It shrieked and turned toward Barnum, as if to protest at this betrayal. It lunged back toward its master, but tangled even more of the thread around it, tripping itself up. It was badly injured now, moving with a staggering, jerky gait. Nate ducked behind it and Barnum took another shot, blowing another hole in the engimal. It gave a weak wail and collapsed.
Nate fired his last two shots at Barnum, but the man darted to the side, dropping his sawn-off shotgun, taking cover behind a post, and pulling a pistol from inside his jacket. There was an unladylike snarl from behind him and Daisy rammed the traveling trunk into his legs, a look of pure hatred on her face. Her hands were still bound to a brass hasp on the top, but she hooked her elbow around his gun arm and pulled him out into the open. He shoved her back against the wall, driving the air from her lungs, but she shouldered him away. As he stumbled, he kicked over the lamp, making its light flicker, then tripped over the traveling trunk and smashed his head and shoulders into the wall behind him. But the stones he hit were thin fascia mounted on wood. A latch broke, the wood gave way and he tumbled backward through a doorway.
Daisy was struggling to get her breath back, but she righted the lamp with her foot before it went out. Nate raced forward.
“Nathaniel!” she gasped at him. “Have you lost your senses? You’re virtually naked!”
“This is hardly the time for a debate on propriety!” he snapped back.
“Oh really,” she hissed, her voice low, but her breath seeming to come easier. “And when launching a rescue in your underwear, where do you keep your spare bullets?”
Nate growled and quietly laid his empty pistol on the floor. He had spare ammunition back in his satchel, but finding his way to it would waste valuable time; Barnum could be getting away. And in darkness, this would be a close-quarters fight anyway. Had Barnum kept hold of his gun? There was no way to tell. There was no light from beyond the doorway, only Barnum’s lamp. Nate swore—taking it in with him would just make him a target. He dived through the door, rolling and coming up against a wall that seemed made of a diagonal wooden grid. A wine rack. He was in the wine cellar.
Lifting his hand, he brushed his fingers across the top of a bottle and eased it from the rack. It was incredibly large and heavy, and he realized it must be a magnum, containing one and a half liters of wine, twice the size of a normal bottle. The Wildensterns demanded good wine—no doubt this was worth more than the average peasant earned in a year. Hefting it in his hand, he decided it would do admirably as a bludgeon.
Wildenstern defense training was second to none. He had trained for times such as this, wearing a blindfold while sparring, sometimes against more than one opponent. He closed his eyes, trusting his other senses and his instincts as he raised the bottle into a guard position, holding it by its neck. He stepped quietly away from the rack behi
nd him, careful not to silhouette himself against the dim light from the open doorway. Barnum had nowhere to go. To leave the locked cellar, he had to come back past Nate.
A mental image of the room formed in Nate’s mind. The walls were filled with holes or shelves for bottles, as well as freestanding racks that lined the middle of the room. There were too many hidden places for his liking.
The faintest sound of a blade cutting through the air made Nate duck. He dropped into a crouch as a knife with a long blade slashed over his head. He spun and his bottle caught Barnum on the side of the knee. There was a cry of pain, but then silence, the man moving away quickly and quietly. Nate ground his teeth. Barnum was the worst kind of opponent: smart, skilled, quick, and tough. The knife jabbed straight at Nate this time, his reflexes saving him once more as he batted the weapon away with the bottle, then swung back at Barnum’s head. He missed, but Barnum grunted as he dodged aside and Nate knew he had done some damage to that knee with his last hit.
A clinking noise made him spin around, but the tapping, bouncing sound that followed an instant later told him it was a coin thrown against the rack behind him. The distraction was enough for Barnum to get close and Nate felt the blade slash open the flesh of his back. He gasped, the pain causing the breath to catch in his throat and Barnum cut him again, this time across the face, narrowly missing the side of his neck. The skin of Nate’s jawline split and poured blood. Barnum grabbed Nate’s hair to pull his head back and expose his throat for the killing strike, but Nate swung the magnum bottle back between his opponent’s legs, slamming it into his groin. Barnum let out a strangled squeal and Nate whipped the bottle up and over his shoulder at the sound. It cracked against the top of Barnum’s head, then slipped from Nate’s numb fingers and struck the floor somewhere behind them with a fizzing explosion. The fruity, toasty smell of champagne flooded the dark space.
The kidnapper staggered, but still held onto Nate’s hair. They both fell backward onto the alcohol and broken glass. Nate shrieked as his right buttock was impaled on Barnum’s knife. Pain burst in white-hot splinters through his hips and groin. Barnum rolled Nate’s thrashing body off him and wrenched the knife free. He was pressing the cold sharp steel to Nate’s throat when they were suddenly illuminated by the light of an oil lamp. Nate’s eyes were clenched closed in pain, but Barnum looked up, pausing for just a moment.
It was all the time Daisy needed to shoot him in the chest. Unfortunately, she was no marksman, and she hit his leg instead. He flinched and crumpled over, growling curses, but did not let go of the Bowie knife. Then he raised himself up on one knee again, murder in his eyes. Her hands were still tied to the hasp on the end of the trunk and she leaned her arms on the top as she looked over it from the far side.
“I’m by no means an expert shot, Mr. Barnum,” she said to him in a level voice. “Even if you were determined to make me kill you, I fear it might take some time, given my appalling accuracy. It would be easier for all concerned if you simply surrendered now.”
Staring back into her chilly gaze, his face gave in to the pain that wracked his body and he dropped the knife, slumping into a hunched crouch, his head hanging onto his chest.
Daisy suppressed a sigh of relief and kept Nate’s pistol leveled at her kidnapper. In her rush to find Nate’s ammunition, reload the weapon, and get into the cellar to help Nate, she had only loaded two of the gun’s chambers. If Barnum had come at her, she could easily have missed with her second, and last, shot.
Nate was a squirming, groaning mess on the floor. Blood and champagne coated his bare skin; his drawers were soaked in the macabre cocktail. Daisy wanted to help dress his wounds—not to mention his nakedness—but she felt it was best to keep her attention, and the gun, directed toward Mr. Peter Barnum. The door of the wine cellar swung open, the kitchen staff finally alerted by the gunshot. Footsteps rushed in along the flagstones, voices shouted, and gas lamps were lit. The cellar was enormous and the three combatants were in a far corner, so it was a minute or two before they were found in the crisscrossing network of shadows.
Daisy did not take her eyes off her kidnapper until the strong hands of several servants had forced him to the floor and bound his arms behind his back. Nate was spouting some colorful language as he was lifted bodily from the floor. She turned to look at him, free now to thank him properly, but he was barely conscious from the loss of blood. She knew he would recover quickly enough—he was a Wildenstern, after all.
Trembling with shock and exhaustion, she allowed someone to pull the pistol from her grasp and untie her wrists. She found she could not stand without the help of two stout parlor maids supporting her weight.
“Dear God in Heaven,” she heard one of the maids exclaim quietly to the other, averting her eyes from Nate’s state of undress. “What kind of monster strips a man to his underwear before tryin’ to kill him?”
Epilogue
A WALK THROUGH THE ZOO
The zoological gardens on the Wildenstern estate represented what was arguably one of the oddest sights in the civilized world. It was here that the family kept all the wondrous engimals that had proved too wild to train and too beautiful to trade on. It was made up of an assorted range of enclosures, with sheds containing some of the smaller beasts, as well as glass domes, ornate cages, and more spacious paddocks with moats or walls for the larger creatures.
Daisy, Nate, Gerald, and Tatiana stood looking through the brass-framed glass panels of a roofed cage at the trans-portmanteau. Its wounds were still raw, but they were already healing. Daisy had expressed an interest in trying to retrain it when it had fully recovered. Gerald had his doubts—traumatized engimals could develop unpredictable personalities. He cited the dream-catcher as a good example. It was now housed in a glass-fronted room in one of the sheds.
“So Berto’s on his way home,” Tatty said.
“Yes,” Daisy replied. “He has already set investigators on the trail of Barnum’s accomplices, and now he’s coming back on the fastest steamer he could commandeer. The negotiations were wound up pretty quickly—he can be quite abrupt when the mood takes him. He doesn’t think the East India Company was involved—a few of their directors are from families with aurea sanitas, so they would know that this ‘healing’ engimal was not the source of the Wildensterns’ unusual abilities.”
“No further clue from Barnum about the creature in question either,” Nate mused. His injuries had been severe, but not life threatening. He was already well on the way to recovery. “I have to say, I’ve never heard of any engimal with miraculous powers of healing, certainly not one connected with this family.”
He rubbed the bandage covering the gash on his jaw, trying not to scratch at the infernal itching caused by the rapid healing process.
“And we still haven’t found our traitor,” Gerald pointed out. “Someone walked Barnum right into our home and we haven’t a clue who it was. We can be sure that, whoever it is, they’re not done with us yet. We should have kept Barnum to ourselves. He would have talked eventually, if we’d kept him in the dungeons long enough.”
“He’ll answer to the law, that’s enough for me,” Daisy replied. “We mustn’t behave like the rest of the family, Gerald. It’s time we brought some law and order to Wildenstern Hall. The courts will have their way with him, and if he’s lucky enough not to be hanged for his crimes, he’ll rot for long enough in Kilmainham Gaol. I don’t envy the lot of an Englishman in an Irish prison.”
They all pondered Barnum’s impending misery for a few moments.
“He will have so many more colorful stories to tell,” Tatty observed. “Perhaps, when he is let out again, years from now, we should have him back for tea.”
“Perhaps,” Daisy said to her with a smile. “We could celebrate his rehabilitation with a magnum of champagne.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever touch the stuff again,” Nate snorted, resisting the urge to rub
the deep wound in his backside. “Likely to bring back unpleasant memories.”
“Poor Nate,” Tatty said in a soothing voice, looping her arm into his. “I feel your pain.”
“You have my sympathy, Tatty,” Gerald chuckled as he reached for one of his French cigarettes. “He’s been giving me a pain in the arse for years!”
Daisy and Tatty laughed. Nate feigned outrage and thumped him on the shoulder. Together, the four young Wildensterns turned back toward the house. The tower’s long shadow, cast by the evening sun, reached out along the ground to meet them as they made their way home.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mum and Suzanne for the early editing, the rest of my family for their input, and to Emma Pulitzer and Lauren Chomiuk at Open Road for giving the text a final check. As I originally wanted to publish this book on my own, it was vital I get other people to check it for me, and my usual reading circle has been a big help.
As ever, I’m grateful to my brother Marek, who keeps my website up and running and deals with all my niggling technical questions—and feeds me regular updates on what’s going on in the digital world.
And finally, thanks to all the people in all the venues I’ve visited over the last few years, for your interest, your enthusiasm, and for putting up with my over-excited shouting.
Oisín McGann
July 2015
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
