The churchyard looked even more derelict up close, the scraggly remains of the summer’s weeds crawling over the broken stones. The air whistled sharply through the cracks between the buildings, stirring the sodden weeds and sending broken shutters thumping back and forth. It played auditory tricks, carrying the sounds of voices and laughter from the tavern and swirling them through the churchyard like the faint cackling of malicious spirits.

Imagination, Charlotte assured herself. It was all imagination and the wind. Who would possibly be in a ruin of a church by night? Except for the King’s false physician, that was. Charlotte turned her mind from ghostly revels and tried to focus on him instead.

Freeing one arm from her cloak, Charlotte reached out to squeeze Henrietta’s hand. “Are we ready?”

“I’ll see you inside.” With an answering squeeze, Henrietta disappeared around the side of the church while Charlotte stepped gingerly onto the broken flagstones leading up to the stone stairs.

The faithful must have walked that same path to Sunday prayer once upon a time, but now the paving stones were little more than pebbles, cracked and broken, and the stone stairs sagged in the middle from the press of generations of feet. Charlotte put her hand carefully to the warped wood of the door and was surprised when it gave with no sound at all. Charlotte had heard tales of miracles of oil, but none involved hinges.

It was darker inside than out. In comparison to the snow gray sky, the interior of the church pressed down on her like a heavy fall of black cloth, textured with the lingering scents of old incense and damp stone, as though the very air had grown mold. Charlotte groped her way past the door, feeling only rough wall, bare of paintings or statues. In the blackness, space had no meaning; it was a struggle simply to determine the shape of the space around her. The church had been stripped long ago, the only sign of any habitation the looming bulk of the heavy pillars that marched double file down the center of the nave. Any pews had long since been stolen and broken up for firewood. If there had ever been a confessional, it had gone the same way. Charlotte didn’t like to think where the baptismal font must have got to.

It was dark, but not silent. All around her, Charlotte could hear the distant rumble of voices, low voices, masculine voices, talking all at once, the peculiar acoustics of the vaulted ceiling projecting and echoing the sounds like a song sung in round.

Charlotte started nervously as the first clamorous stroke of a bell reverberated stridently through the nave. The sound was almost palpable in the darkness; it seemed to be swinging straight towards her. Again it tolled and again, the noise filling the blackness, making Charlotte’s head ring even as her nose twitched with the scent of incense, which appeared, inexplicably, to have grown stronger. At nine strokes, Charlotte expected the bell to stop ringing, but it kept on, battering against the walls of the church, marking something more than the hour. It rang out a thirteenth peal before finally echoing into unnerving silence. A superstitious shiver ran down Charlotte’s spine.

There was no time to dwell on ghost stories. Before the final peal had ceased to ring, a door burst open in a flare of light. Through the incandescent gap processed a shadowy line of dark-robed men.

For an insane moment, Charlotte wondered if she had stumbled through a gap in time, falling backwards into a London of long ago, well before King Henry’s Reformation, when skirted friars held their ceremonies in chapels lit by sputtering candlelight. But there were no vespers being sung by this congregation, no holy chants. Instead, Charlotte could hear the low mutter of decidedly modern conversation, scented by a strong tang of spirituous liquor below the pervasive reek of scented smoke. There was nothing insubstantial about these phantoms. Their feet shuffled and their robes scratched and their breath misted in the air.

Charlotte pressed as close as she could to the nearest pillar, molding herself to it as though she could become a part of it. Thank goodness her evening cloak was a dark color! Hopefully, if anyone looked her way, they would just think it was a particularly lumpy pillar. Charlotte drew as much comfort as she could from that thought.

Along the length of the nave, the friars had drawn themselves into double ranks. Even in the poor light, Charlotte could see that their costume was careless at best. Polished black boots protruded beneath some robes and bare feet from others. Only one or two had elected the roped sandals of their pretended order. Now, as one, they turned their hooded heads towards the glowing door.

The light lurched forward like a living pillar of flame. Charlotte ducked behind her pillar. Not a living flame, Charlotte realized, carefully peering from behind her pillar, but a living man carrying a torch nearly as tall as he was, with a center twice as wide as the head of a man. It made him look as though he were wearing a fiery headdress rather than the same monastic attire as all the others.

Striding to the center of the long line of friars, he thumped the base of his torch twice against the flagged floor, sending the flames waving through the air like pagan dancers.

Holding the torch in two hands, he raised it high above his head, his long sleeves falling back from a pair of elegant wrists, circled in barbaric gold bracelets that appeared to twist up and up and up, ending near the elbow in stylized elephant heads.

“Welcome, my brimstone brethren!” he roared, and the congregation roared back, an earthy sound that resounded through the arched ceiling and made Charlotte’s cold limbs tremble. “Well met by moonlight!”

Charlotte’s fingers tightened on the fluted stone of the pillar. She knew that voice. Charlotte had an excellent memory for voices. She had always thought it must be nature’s way of compensating for making her so very bad at recognizing faces. It was a voice more suited to Almack’s than to pagan ceremony. And it had been whispering innuendos into her ear only hours before.

“I don’t see a moon, do you?” someone called out. Lord Henry Innes! That was quite definitely Lord Henry.

“You want a moon, I’ll show you a moon!” someone else rejoined, in slurred tones that suggested he had supped on more than moonlight. Bending over, he mimed what was obviously meant to be a vulgar gesture.

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” the master of ceremonies admonished, and this time there was absolutely no doubt as to who it was. “Would you defile the court of the elephant god?”

Elephant god? Charlotte felt as though she’d taken that tumble Robert had prophesied, right off her horse onto the hard winter ground in Hyde Park. Her chest felt very tight, as though all the breath had been knocked out of her, and her lungs refused to function properly. Nothing made the least bit of sense.

That was Sir Francis Medmenham. Sir Francis Medmenham and Lord Henry and the false doctor and goodness only knew who else. Charlotte froze behind her pillar, as still as a stone saint. They mustn’t find her here. The scandal surrounding Penelope’s betrothal would be as nothing to this. Whatever her defiant words to Robert, Charlotte had no desire to find herself the brimstone bride of Sir Francis Medmenham. With the torch in front of him, his face seemed made of flame, more demon than man.

Feeling her way back towards the wall, moving as softly as she could, Charlotte began inching towards the door. If she could just keep her back to the wall and silently slip out while they were all occupied with Sir Francis . . .

Charlotte bumped backwards into the wall, giving silent thanks for the shadows cast by the pillars and the general dark decrepitude of her surroundings. Just a few yards to the left and she would be safe. All she had to do was find the doorknob, turn it, and dart into the night. And then she was never going to do anything like this ever, ever, ever again. No matter what Henrietta or anyone else said. Adventure was for heroines, and Robert had proved quite conclusively that she wasn’t one.

In the center of the room, Sir Francis raised his torch high again, sending the light scorching across the upturned faces of his comrade, across the blunt features of Lord Henry and the clean-cut good looks of Lord Freddy Staines. Heavens, thought Charlotte, what would Penelope have to say about that? Did she know? Would she even care?

With profound relief, Charlotte felt the change that signaled the shift from plaster to wood, from wall to door. Her hand jammed into something hard and rounded. The knob! It was all she could do not to sob in gratitude. She didn’t even begrudge the broken fingernail.

Her arm fully extended at an awkward angle, Charlotte folded her fingers carefully around the heavy bulk of the knob. One twist, that was all that was needed, one twist and then a mad dash to freedom.

Halfway down the nave, Sir Francis was entertaining his congregation, keeping their attention focused mercifully on him rather than her. “Gentlemen! I give you . . . the sacred flame!”

It was the perfect time to flee. With her breath burning in her lungs, she sprang for the door, giving the knob a brutal twist just as light exploded through the room.

Fireworks cartwheeled through the air, streaking the air with ribbons of flame, catching Charlotte in their glare as sure as a fox in a snare.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bacchanalian orgies had never been intended for a cold climate. Outside, the snow still fell. Instead of casting a purifying veil over the scene, it turned to slush as it touched the tainted ground. Robert considered it an appropriate indictment on their activities, yet more proof that one couldn’t touch pitch without being defiled.