by Anne Nesbet
“Oh, well, um,” said Darleen, whose attendance in school over the years had been spotty at best. “We’re so busy, you know —”
“Say not a word more,” said Victorine. “I understand entirely. We have both had irregular educations, then: mine because of my travels (though Grandmama was a formidable tutor) and yours because of your devotion to the arts. But the important thing, Darleen, is that I’m so grateful to have you here, brave as you are. Just tell me what we do next. I proclaim you our captain and guide, up in these alpine heights.”
And that made Dar want very much to be, in life, the Daring Darleen that Miss Berryman so mistakenly thought she actually was.
Victorine gave her little knife a final tap, folded it up, and slipped it back into its hiding place, attached to her stocking.
Darleen wasn’t sure they were any closer to making their escape, despite the knife inherited from Miss Berryman’s father and despite all the wisdom of all the Swiss mountain climbers in all the Alps everywhere.
“Well, here’s what I’ve thought of so far: ropes. Ever since you mentioned mountaineers earlier, you know. They have ropes, and we could definitely use a rope right now. Otherwise, we really do seem to be trapped.”
“Oh, good point,” said Victorine. “A very long rope would be an excellent thing to have, just at this moment.”
They looked very carefully all around the room. No ropes. There was a bed in the corner — with bedsheets that looked neither very clean nor very sturdy. They shook their heads over those bedsheets: one small bed’s worth of linens would never make a ladder long enough to get them safely to the ground from the fourth floor.
“Well!” said Victorine after a moment of silence. “I never thought it would come to this. It reminds me of when that horrible man closed you in the tower a few weeks ago, just because you wouldn’t divulge the whereabouts of your dear Papa, the exiled King.”
Dar blinked. Her dear Papa! That made her think of her own dear, real Papa, who must even now be waiting up for her back in Fort Lee, with no idea that his daughter was in a patch of pretty terrible trouble. Soon it would be very late at night, and she would not yet be home, and her father would begin to worry dreadfully. For a moment, Darleen was so struck by the awfulness of what her father would feel when he found out she was missing that she could not pay proper attention to what Miss Berryman (no, Victorine) was saying:
“Like Rapunzel, only without the long hair to help you! And then when he filled the tower room with water! That was much, much worse than this! To be imprisoned and to face drowning! That was dreadful. You were so clever then, the way you found the exit through the roof.”
Darleen remembered it well, but of course she remembered it all much differently. She remembered everyone on the film crew shouting as they struggled with the huge crank that lowered the set into a pool of water, inch by inch, to make it look on-screen as if the water itself were rising, and how glad she had been for the hot cocoa Aunt Shirley served up to all of them at the end of the scene.
Alas, no exit through the roof was visible here.
And then, just as they were leaning over the bed to consider it properly — once her gloves were off, Dar’s fingers couldn’t help but notice the miserable quality of those sheets — the door flew open, startling them all over again, and that awful Sally woman and the side-winding man came clomping into the room.
“Ready to be sensible yet, gals?” said Sally. “You there!”
And she poked Victorine quite harshly in the shoulder.
“What’s your name, gal?”
Victorine opened her mouth and closed it again. (Good for her!)
Darleen thought of the fictional Crown Princess Dahlia Louise and the old woman who came to the door of the shed where the bandits had locked her in. That had been a case where the only way out was to melt an icy heart.
“Oh, please,” she said, putting her hands together most beseechingly and quoting shamelessly from a title card in Episode Four. “‘Do think of your own dear children, good woman, and release us from this place of bondage!’”
“Har, har, har!” said the wicked Sally, and she shoved Darleen a little harder than she had shoved Victorine. “That’s rich, that is! My ‘own dear children’! That lot would hit me over the head with a log till I was dead as a squished frog if they had half a chance. You speak nice, girlie. You the rich one, then?”
“‘My identity is my secret and my burden,’” said Darleen. That had been another title card, and she liked the way it sounded.
“That’s enough nonsense out of you,” said the woman, and the side-winding man handed them a glass of water to share and a dry hunk of bread.
“It’s wasting food on the soon dead, far’s I’m concerned,” said the mean Sally person. “But fine. You go to sleep now, you gals, and don’t bother pounding on the walls or shouting for help. I’ll hear you right away if you try any of those sorts of shenanigans. Believe you me, you don’t want us angry with you, I assure you of that!”
The sidewinder smiled at them so threateningly that Dar and Victorine grabbed each other’s hands again and shuddered.
As the door closed, they heard the side-winding man say, “Ha! They’ve gone and lost their sweet minds, ain’t they? From fright, most like.”
For a moment they stood quite still, and then Victorine whispered, “Oh, well done, dear, daring Darleen, well done!”
But Darleen’s brain had been busily going over the previous scene.
“Wait! Did that woman really call us ‘the soon dead’?” she said. “That doesn’t sound good at all, does it? Victorine, we have to figure something out!”
Half a moment later, they were back at the window, surveying that forbidding wall of brick and stone. Impossible tasks sometimes look slightly less impossible when the other option is being thrown into a river by heartless villains.
“All right, here is part of an idea, anyway,” said Darleen. “I know we can’t make a ladder that would reach all the way down, but the bedsheets might be long enough to get us over there to the left, where the fire escape is. Not quite as grand as Rapunzel’s braid, but what do you think? Would it be too terrible?”
Victorine took a look through the window, her brow tying itself into worried knots.
“It does look quite terrible,” she said, “but I think you are right. I should warn you right away, however, that I may have to hum my way across. That’s a trick I learned on the rope bridges of Assam.”
“Hum?” said Darleen, but she was hardly paying attention. She was busy trying to calculate distances. It was strange: just looking outside made something flutter again in her chest. The wall was like a cliff made of bricks. How fierce and free and wicked a person sometimes felt on a cliff!
Victorine was standing next to her, looking out and down at the same wall.
“Humming, dear Darleen, helps keep fear at bay. Oh, but I will be careful to hum very quietly, of course.”
“Well. Anyway, first we will have to tear the sheets into wide strips,” said Darleen. “They may hear that in the next room. Too bad we don’t have any scissors. Oh, but your knife! I almost forgot!”
Victorine clapped her hands together (quietly) in the dark.
“How clever you are, Darleen!”
“It’s decided, then,” said Darleen. “We’ll wait a while — pretend to be sleeping, you know — so that they let down their guard. And then we’ll see what we can do with your scissors and these bedsheets.”
“How bravely you say that!” said Victorine. “But then, of course, you dangle from cliffs practically every day of the week.”
“Not quite every day,” said Dar modestly.
They were clever to wait before beginning their escape, as it turned out, because while they lay on that miserable bed and pretended to be sleeping, the door to their room opened again and someone looked in, sniffed at the sight of them, and locked the door again. They heard the awful woman’s voice in the next room:
“Sleeping like babies,” she was saying. “Good.”
“But babies don’t actually sleep all that well, do they?” whispered Victorine, her fingers nervously fingering a necklace that had been tucked into her dress. The pendant was very odd — it looked like two keys. “I have traveled in enough trains to have learned that very well, alas. Is it time for me to try my scissors?”
“Yes, don’t you think?” said Darleen. “Unless you want to wait until the awful man comes back from asking your family for money.”
Victorine sat up straight and pulled the first sheet off their bed.
“We mustn’t wait another moment,” she said. “I put no faith in my greedy cousins, and I definitely don’t want either one of us to end up drowned.”
Victorine turned out to be very good with her scissors. She cut each of the two bedsheets into thirds, and then Darleen used the Double Fisherman’s knot her uncle had taught her (Uncle Charlie had had a stint in the navy in his wayward youth) in order to tie the lengths cut from the top sheet and those from the bottom sheet safely and sturdily together.
“Your knots are very lovely,” said Victorine, eyeing one of those double lengths. “But I’m not sure about the strength of these sheets. Do you think they’ll really hold us?”
“Not as they are,” said Dar. “That’s why we’re going to braid the strips together. Everything’s stronger when braided.”
“Clever girl!” murmured Victorine. “Of course!”
So they ended up with a thick braided rope of about sixteen feet in length. And that, thought Darleen grimly, would just have to be enough.
Fortunately the little bed was flimsy. The two girls moved it up next to the window without making noise of any kind.
To attach their braided bedsheet rope to what she could only hope would prove to be the most solid part of the not-very-sturdy bed frame, Darleen used another of her Uncle Charlie’s knots: the Round-Turn Bowline — good enough for the professional daredevils who do go up and down cliffs (and tall buildings) almost every day.
“And those climbing fellows are much bigger than we are and would plummet like lead if their knots should fail!” she pointed out to Victorine (and to herself).
From Victorine came only the gulp of someone determined not to say a single uncourageous word.
They took off their stockings and shoes and hats and gloves and gathered them into a little parcel that Victorine fitted cleverly onto her back. Darleen tied the other end of the bedsheet rope around her waist.
Then they had a scary moment getting that window open. It was stiff, and it threatened to creak — but they eased it open slowly, and it did not give them away.
All of these preparations had the advantage of keeping their minds busy so they would not be thinking too much about what it meant to be exiting a window four stories above the pavement, but finally, when they were about to have to face that thought square on, they saw a man coming around the corner at a trot, looking at the houses as he went.
The girls drew back to one side of the open window.
“But that’s not the man who drove the car,” said Victorine into Darleen’s ear.
And the man looked up, a bit wild-eyed, as if he were worrying about something and rushing to a place he did not know well, and as he did so, a shard of light from a streetlamp caught his very distinctive face and his shock of golden hair. Darleen gasped.
It was Jasper Lukes! What in heaven’s name was he doing here?
He vanished as he entered the door of the very building they were currently trapped in. Only four flights of stairs, and Jasper Lukes would be right outside their door. And that brought another urgent and dreadful thought.
“Oh, no! We have to go now!” said Darleen. “We have to go now — and fast. That man knows who I am — and that means they’ll know which of us is you!”
And not wasting a single moment more, she hopped onto that windowsill and started feeling around for a crack in the bricks that would be friendly to her toes.
She had been so careful for so long, ever since that cliff-side incident, about trying to keep her feet on the ground, but oh goodness, here she nevertheless was.
I’m just doing what needs to be done, Darleen told herself. I can’t help it, can I, if getting out of this mess means another cliff.
But at the same time, a deeper, more inward voice was saying, Oh, Papa, I’m sorry!
Because she realized, to her horror, that as her toes reached out for the helpful crack in the bricks, that feeling must have woken itself back up in her chest — because she couldn’t help it: she could feel herself smiling.
What kind of monstrous person smiles on cliffs?
Oh, Papa! Darleen thought. After this, I promise my feet will stay on the ground.
“Hurry carefully,” said Victorine, looking out that window. “Oh, my. Do please be as careful as you possibly can.”
They were in luck: there was a useful crack in the brickwork running along a few feet below the window, and for a while, of course, an actual sill to hang on to.
Facing the wall, Darleen scooted sideways.
“You’re making simply beautiful progress,” said Victorine, leaning out a little farther to get a glimpse of the lay of the land. “And now there’s another nice crevice for your fingers, just a few inches above the sill. Reach up to the right and you’ll find it — there!”
For a moment Darleen perched like a four-legged spider (a half-spider! she thought a little incoherently) on the side of the wall, her fingers and toes ensconced in the cracks between bricks. The fire escape was just a few more feet to her right. She moved her right hand over and then her right foot.
She was going to have to leap. She felt that knowledge thrill its way through her, fast as a lightning strike. And then, just as all the helpful stickiness vanished from her fingertips — when she realized she really was about to fall, which made her heart feel queer and curious — at the last second, Darleen’s left foot (thinking faster than the rest of her) pushed very hard sideways, against the wall, to make Darleen’s fall slant to the right, and the fall became almost more like a leap, and her right hand found a bar and clung to it, clung to it. Oh, that hand had done it! She, Darleen, Half-Spider and Only Sprig, had done it!
Darleen whipped her other hand up so she could cling with both hands. That was better. Now her bare feet could find their way to something more solid than air. She had made it to the fire escape, and she had not even actually fallen.
When she looked back up to that window, above and to the left, she saw a ghostly pale Victorine staring out at her, her wide eyes glinting a little in the lamp- and moonlight.
“Oh, my!” Darleen could hear her saying. “Oh, my, oh, my!”
There was surely not even a second to waste now. Had she herself really climbed out of that window? Oh, but she found she couldn’t think yet about what she had just done or about how it had made her feel.
Instead of thinking those thoughts, Darleen took the loose end of their braided-sheet rope back down the fire escape until she was about half a floor below Victorine, and she used the best knot she could think of for tying one end of a rope around a fire escape bar.
Suddenly she looked at this rope traversing the cliff of the brick wall and felt afraid. What a strange thing! She could not be properly afraid about cliffs on her own behalf, apparently, but for Victorine she was, all of a sudden, terribly afraid.
She was worried that her face might give too much away, so she tried to make no expression whatsoever. She acted the part of someone with perfect confidence in the ability of her friend to do this mildly impossible thing at a great height over the hard and unforgiving paving stones.
She waved up to Victorine, perched already on the windowsill and watching Darleen’s preparations with great care.
“That’s it! Quick, now! Don’t think about it — just come on down and over, Victorine!” Darleen said in a shouting sort of whisper. “Think of it like a fireman’s pole, only going slightl
y sideways.”
“Oh, Grandmama!” said Victorine. “I am deeply terrified of heights, did I tell you that? Oh, well, here I come!”
And then she came tumble-slipping sideways and down, humming rather fiercely, as promised, and following the line of the rope they had made. And a moment later, Darleen was hauling her over the side of the fire escape, and they were hugging each other in terror and elation, such a wild mix of emotions like nothing Darleen had felt before. She had been so sure that she was about to fall and be squashed, and then she had been so terrified for Victorine, and somehow they had not fallen. They were unsquashed and alive! Oh, they were so, so very alive, maybe more alive than Dar had ever been in her whole life before. They clung to each other, shaking and laughing and trying not to make too much noise in that brief but glorious celebration.
“That was . . .” said Victorine. “That was . . .”
“That was incredible!” said Darleen.
And then there was a sound from somewhere, and they fell silent all at once and realized they were outside on a fire escape, and their legs were bare, and the air was cold, and they needed to get away from this spot as fast as ever they could before those awful kidnappers opened the door and looked into that terrible room and saw the ruined bedsheets tracing a trail out the window. So they untied their end of the rope (“no need to give them any extra help,” said Victorine) and pulled their shoes and stockings back on as speedily as they could manage and scrambled the rest of the way down the fire escape (which might ordinarily have felt like an adventure in its own right) and dropped carefully from its bottom landing to the street and then ran and ran, until there were a few streets between their panting selves and the kidnappers they were trying to leave behind.
They didn’t pause until they were under the sign for 67th Street, where for a moment all they could do was gasp for air. Then they looked around at the empty city and gasped again from the sheer unlikeliness of their circumstances. Neither one of them had ever been out alone at such an hour. They weren’t really dressed for the chill of April, either, despite their coats. The wind was picking up. The sullen, coal-tinged dampness in the air suggested that any moment now it might begin to rain. They could see that, if they paused for long, soon they would feel thoroughly miserable.
