“Good heavens. Well done.” Henrietta rubbed her ears with a grimace of remembered pain. “I had no idea you could hit those notes. I wonder if they heard it down in the tunnels.”

“I doubt it.” Charlotte rocked back on her heels. “I really didn’t expect him to fall like that.”

“Neither did I,” agreed Henrietta, “but I’m awfully glad he did. It saved me having to use this.” She dropped the pistol on the floor beside the ladder as she knelt next to Charlotte. “I suppose we should tie him up, anyway, just in case. There goes my petticoat.”

“It’s a good thing he wasn’t too high off the ground when he fell.” Delicate exploration revealed that the man’s skull appeared to be intact, although he would have a dreadful lump. His hair — his very greasy hair — appeared to have provided at least a partial buffer. The blood came from one, small graze. Charlotte wadded her handkerchief against it all the same.

“Charlotte,” said Henrietta, wriggling out of her stocking in lieu of trying to tear up her petticoat, “the man was instrumental in kidnapping the King. You can’t feel too sorry for him.”

“I know,” said Charlotte, taking one limp, slightly damp stocking from Henrietta. “But I still wouldn’t want his death on my conscience.”

“Mmph,” said Henrietta noncommittally, tying the man’s legs together with her other stocking. The flowers embroidered along the sides looked decidedly incongruous against the rough brown wool of the man’s breeches. “If we capture anyone else, it will have to be your stockings,” she said, standing and wiping her hands off against her skirt. “I don’t think my garters are wide enough.”

“Did you see what he was carrying?” Charlotte asked as she tied a double knot around the man’s hands. She doubted it would hold long against concerted pressure.

Henrietta scrunched up her nose, scanning the floor for it. “It looked like a sack, didn’t it? There is it.”

The dun-colored burlap was discolored by a damp patch of liquid that had seeped through the fabric. Charlotte yanked her hand out of the bag as her finger grazed something sharp. Thinking better of it, she upended the sack and scattered the contents out along the stone floor. Broken glass shone dully in the light of the man’s lantern, discolored by a coating of a viscous liquid.

“Hen!” Charlotte whispered hoarsely, pointing to the fallen objects on the floor with mounting excitement. “Look what was in the bag.”

In front of her lay a heel of bread, the rind of a cheese, and a stained cloth. Whether it had been stained before or after the bottle broke was unclear.

Henrietta’s hazel eyes lit up. “Not exactly your usual place for a picnic.”

Reaching out very carefully, Charlotte ran a finger along the moisture filming one of the larger pieces of the broken glass bottle. The liquid made the skin of her finger tingle. Lifting it to her nose, she sniffed cautiously.

“The King,” she said breathlessly. “Hen, he must have been coming from the King. Here.” She thrust her hand at her friend. “Smell. It’s laudanum.”

Henrietta dutifully sniffed, screwing up her nose at the scent. “But why the ladder?”

They both looked up. The ladder stretched up and up like something out of a biblical prophet’s dream. It ended just below the folds of a disciple’s robe in the vast picture of the Last Supper that decorated the ceiling.

“They wouldn’t have put him on the roof,” said Henrietta doubtfully.

“No,” said Charlotte decidedly, “Not the roof. But they might have put him in the orb.”

“The what?”

The more she thought about it, the more Charlotte was convinced she was right. “The ornamental orb on top of the church. It’s certainly large enough to house a man. And it would be the last place anyone would look.”

Henrietta craned her head back, looking dubiously at the ceiling. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to look,” she said, but neither of them made any move to approach the ladder. It was probably no more or less sturdy than any other ladder, but it seemed an uncommonly rickety affair, propped against the wall of the church.

“I can go,” said Henrietta unenthusiastically, moving to kilt up her skirts. “If you keep watch below.”

“Will you be all right?” said Charlotte doubtfully. “The last time you tried to climb a tree, Miles had to fetch you down.”

“True,” admitted Henrietta, unsuccessfully trying to tie a knot into the fabric of her skirt. “I was fine with the climbing part, though. It was only the getting-down part that was hard.”

“The getting-down bit is rather crucial,” said Charlotte apologetically. “I’ll go.”

She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. Her own experience with tree climbing had been even more limited than Henrietta’s. She felt much about trees as she did about horses; pretty to look at, but she felt no desire to climb on them. But surely a ladder would be different? It was meant to be climbed, after all. She was smaller and lighter than Henrietta, which would put less weight on the rails — and the look of relief on Henrietta’s face was too obvious to be ignored.

“Are you sure?” said Henrietta, dropping her skirt with obvious relief.

“I don’t mind at all,” Charlotte lied. “And the King knows me. If he is there, it would be better that he see me. Would you hold this for me?”

Wriggling out of her cloak, she passed it over to Henrietta, shivering as the thick fabric lifted off her shoulders. The dress that had been possible in the theatre, with thousands of candles burning, was eminently unsuited to an unheated building of coarse stone that appeared to hoard the cold and damp, magnifying rather than mitigating it. But the extra fabric would pose a hazard while climbing. Charlotte was scared enough as it was, without an extra length of heavy velvet pulling her back.

Tentatively, Charlotte lifted one foot onto the first rung. The wooden bar pressed into the sole of her foot through her slipper. Belatedly, Charlotte wondered if she ought to have removed her shoes and stockings, but she suspected that if she descended the ladder now, she wouldn’t have the courage to go back on it again. A few more rungs and her slippers were level with Henrietta’s shoulders. Resolutely, Charlotte looked straight ahead, concentrating on the pull of the muscles in her legs, the solid feel of the scratchy wood of the rails beneath her hands. It would not do to think of how long the ladder seemed or how steep or how very far she still was from the top of it.

Her nails had gone purple with cold and she was having trouble feeling her fingers.

“Are you all right?” Henrietta called up, from what felt like an endless way below. Her voice sounded oddly hollow.

Charlotte gave a nervous laugh, clutching compulsively at the rails as the ladder wobbled with her. “I’ll let you know when I get down.”

“How on earth would they get the King up there?” Henrietta’s voice was sharp with nerves. “Perhaps you’d best just come down. We can send one of the men up later. They like climbing things.”

“A very sensible suggestion. Allow me to second that, Lady Charlotte.”

Dizzily, Charlotte clung to the ladder, understanding for the first time how the other man had come to fall as a new voice intruded into their conversation, nearly startling her from her precarious perch.

It was a cultivated voice, polished and amused, with just the slightest hint of a foreign accent. A French accent, to be precise.

Henrietta made a noise of protest that was muffled mid-squeak. There was a scuffling noise, which Charlotte deduced had something to do with Henrietta’s slippered feet attempting to do the most harm they possibly could and generally missing their mark.

Bland and unruffled, the Frenchman continued with scarcely a pause. “May I prevail upon you to descend, Lady Charlotte? I shouldn’t like to have to shoot you down.”


The elephant god had taken his mask with him when he left Wycombe.

Robert jumped lightly off the ladder, joining his two colleagues in the narrow anteroom behind the ceremonial chamber. The air smelled cold and dank, with no lingering savor of exotic spices. Damp beaded the rough walls, seeping slowly downwards to the packed earth floor.

Miles regarded the small, rough-hewn chamber with palpable disappointment. “Is this all?”

Not so much as a stray bead had been left to indicate the room’s former function. The braziers and the beaded curtain had been tidied away, thriftily stored for use at the next orgy, along with the miscellany of monks’ robes and the indicia of the elephant god. The only sign of human habitation were the torches in their metal brackets on the walls. Tommy had prudently lit one of the torches. The moonlight might provide adequate light above, but it did nothing for the subterranean regions below.

Robert flexed his shoulders, edgy with energy and anticipation. What more appropriate place to beard a dragon than in its cave? The entire scenario was directly out of one of Charlotte’s story books, the stuff of myth and legend. He was fairly sure he had his lady’s favor already, despite the reservations she had voiced on the boat, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to emerge triumphant with a rescued King to place before her as trophy.

If the King was there.

He had to be, Robert assured himself. There was no other logical place. If the King wasn’t being kept in Medmenham Abbey, that left only the caves and Medmenham’s church, directly above. Of the two, the caves were by far the more defensible, composed as they were of a warren of tunnels and chambers. It was the ideal situation for a small force of men — or even one man — to ward off a would-be rescue committee.