A key squeaked in the lock. The door shuddered. “Open it, you fools!” a voice thundered.

“Um, it’s stuck, sir,” someone quavered.

A very loud curse from the other side of the door, and then the door shuddered again and popped open. Two sentries tumbled to the floor. Behind them stood . . . Delaroche. He really ought to be a comical figure, Richard thought. Small and skinny, dressed all in black like a cut-rate Oliver Cromwell, strutting forward in boots that could use a polish. Richard hopped forward on his hobbled legs and executed what he hoped was a mocking bow.

“So,” Delaroche snarled, “we meet at last.”

“Actually,” Richard responded blandly, “I believe we were first introduced at Mme Bonaparte’s salon, if I remember correctly.”

“Your powerful friends cannot help you here. You are in my domain now.” Delaroche laughed. Evilly.

“You should really get that rattle in your throat looked at,” suggested Richard, peering earnestly at Delaroche. “It must be from all this loafing about in drafty dungeons. Terrible for your health, you know.”

“It is your health you should fear for.” The evil laughter was beginning to grate on Richard’s nerves. Not to mention that his neck hurt from trying to keep an eye on Delaroche as the man paced in circles around him, his boots crunching on the straw and debris scattered about the floor.

Delaroche strode on bandy legs to the door, clapped his hands together, and bellowed, “Prepare the interrogation chamber!”

“The regular interrogation chamber, sir?” one guard ventured, keeping well on the other side of the stone doorframe.

“Oh no.” Delaroche unleashed another of his humorless laughs. “Take him to the extra-special interrogation chamber!”

It didn’t raise Richard’s spirits that the guard himself blanched at the suggestion.

Down several flights of stairs, nestled in a catacomb of underground cells, Delaroche flung open the door of his extra-special interrogation chamber with housewifely pride.

“Behold!” Delaroche crowed, as the guards gave Richard a little push towards the center of the room, fleeing back towards the corridor.

Skidding a bit on the straw that covered the floor, Richard beheld. He and Geoff had heard rumors about the extra-special interrogation chamber—it was the sort of thing that was whispered from agent to agent—and had even speculated on breaking into it, as part of their what-can-we-do-to-annoy-the-Ministry-of-Police campaign. But they had never gotten around to it. And Richard had always, in the back of his mind, assumed that the whole extra-special interrogation chamber was most likely a rumor fabricated to terrify the enemies of the Republic. Sure, maybe Delaroche had a little room somewhere where he quizzed his hapless victims; maybe he even owned a pair of thumbscrews; but a whole torture chamber? The whole idea was just too medieval, too melodramatic, too . . . Delaroche.

Damn. He should have known better.

“Friends of yours?” he inquired, waving a hand at the skulls standing on pikes around the walls.

“No,” Delaroche bit out. “But they’ll soon be friends of yours.”

Richard didn’t much care for the sound of that. He was also running out of dazzling repartee in the face of what looked like an increasingly bleak situation. Delaroche was more of a madman than even he had realized. While the skulls might be a bit dusty, the extensive collection of torture tools arrayed about the room gleamed sharp and clean. Delaroche must have scoured the dungeons of castles across the breadth of Europe to acquire his toys, which looked like they included not only the full collection of the Marquis de Sade, but a representative sampling of the best the Inquisition had to offer. In his quick sweep of the room—it wouldn’t do to take his eyes off Delaroche for too long—Richard noted no fewer than two iron maidens, thumbscrews in ten different sizes, and a deluxe rack. Delaroche greeted each implement of torture personally—as far as Richard could make out, he hadn’t named them (though Richard wouldn’t have put it past him to do that), but he stopped by each one to touch spikes and grind levers with macabre tenderness.

Across the room, Delaroche carefully eased a double-headed ax onto a specially designed stand that showed off both blades to their best advantage. “Where shall we begin?” Delaroche mused, crossing his arms across his chest, as he strutted toward Richard. Richard had rather hoped he wouldn’t get to that stage for a while yet. Didn’t he have more instruments of torture to caress first? “Something appropriate, something tasteful. Torture is an art, you know,” Delaroche chided. “A skill that must be practiced with care and finesse. What is it that you use in your English prisons? The rack? Your fists?”

“Actually,” Richard drawled, “we use a little thing called due process.”

Delaroche looked momentarily intrigued, then shrugged. “Whatever that is, it is the work of amateurs to use the same instrument for all crimes! Here, we very carefully match the punishment to the crime.”

“How very refined.”

“Your compliments will not help you, Selweeck. I could give you a painful poison in that tea you English love so well, nothing that will kill you—no, no!—but something that will make you writhe with pain and beg to confess. Or I could cut off an appendage for every enemy of the state you stole from Mme Guillotine. . . .”

“Why not start with my head?” Richard suggested.

While Delaroche vacillated among his toys, Richard once again twisted his wrists to test the slack in his bonds. There wasn’t any. It could have been worse, though. At least they had bound his wrists in front of him, instead of behind. If Delaroche would come close enough, he had the chance of mustering enough force to strike him a blow on the head, something the Assistant Minister of Police was clearly not expecting. Ideally, he’d follow that up with a kick, but his feet were tied tightly enough that in the attempt he would more likely bowl himself over than his adversary.

“Ah! I have it!” Richard had stopped listening about four suggestions ago, but the glee in Delaroche’s voice yanked his attention away from his escape plans. “Since you are so fond of the company of the fairer sex,” Delaroche sneered, “we shall start with an introduction to the lady in the corner.”

He gestured towards the iron maiden, and Richard’s eyes involuntarily followed. It was, most certainly, the most deluxe iron maiden imaginable. Like the mummy cases Richard had seen in Egypt, the casing had been painted to resemble a woman. Knowledge of what lay inside suggested a rapacious slant to that red mouth, and a hungry glint to the painted eyes.

Delaroche grasped the handle cleverly concealed among the lady’s red-and-gold skirts; inch by ominous inch, the gaudy façade of the iron maiden jerked open, revealing its spiky intestines.

For the first time in a long and successful career, it occurred to Richard that he might actually be facing death, a very painful death, and that there was little more he could do to outwit it.

Death was, of course, a possibility he had considered in the past. Percy had counseled them all very seriously about it when they joined the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Mortality hadn’t seemed all that pressing at the time, but then, after Tony’s death, Richard had been convinced that his own turn was bound to come at any moment, his life forfeit for Tony’s. Given the suicidal recklessness with which he had rushed into missions for months thereafter, death had seemed a probability, if not an inevitability. But he had survived. Fate was funny like that.

All those times he’d contemplated his potential demise—in the moments before he’d crawled through a Temple prison window, or plunged into a group of armed French agents—he had consoled himself with the thought that he’d left a legacy of which he could be proud. He had done something heroic with his life. How many men could say the same?

Blast it all, why wasn’t that enough anymore? Glory, he reminded himself. Think of Ajax, of Achilles. Glory, glory, glory.

But all he could think about was Amy.

When he tried to picture Henry V, plunging into the breach at Honfleur, instead he saw Amy, popping out from underneath a desk. Instead of Achilles roaring beneath the walls of Troy, there was Amy, swinging a punch at Georges Marston. Amy, Amy, everywhere—and usually somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, Richard thought, with what might have turned into a grin, if Delaroche hadn’t tested one of the spikes of the iron maiden, and sprung away, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding finger.

Devil take it, he didn’t want to die. Not that he’d ever really wanted to die, even after Tony, but now . . . how in the blazes was he supposed to tell Amy he loved her if he was dead?

Delaroche dropped the bloody handkerchief and bore down upon Richard.

“Selweeck,” he panted triumphantly, “meet your doom!”

Richard hoped to hell that Miles and Geoff had come up with a rescue plan.


“I didn’t think there would be so many of them,” whispered Amy.

The uneven stones of the wall rasped against Amy’s back as she cautiously tilted her head around the corner of the corridor for a second glance. Drat. They were still there. Three sentries in dark blue coats, muskets at their sides, ranged in front of a large wooden door banded with iron. There were five other doors on the corridor, four of them mere grilles, revealing the cells within. When she craned her neck, Amy could see a hint of movement in one, and something that might have been a bony arm in another. The fifth portal was a smaller version of the guarded door, a heavy oaken affair hinged and studded with iron, with a tiny shuttered window at the height of a man’s head. Amy’s gaze darted back to the largest portal. The window was closed, the thick wood of the door and the massive stone walls muffling any sounds from within. But Amy had no doubts that they were finally within view of Delaroche’s extra-special interrogation chamber. And Richard.