Chapter 17 #2
I went to the door, listened intently, cracked it open, and motioned for Dantry to follow me into the corridor. Thank whatever angels presided over fools in love and prisoners in danger, the earl came along behind me without making a sound.
We had wasted precious time discussing ancient history and my trustworthiness. By subtle signs—a thump from the lower reaches, the scent of baking bread mixing with the less appealing aromas of the house—morning was approaching.
Not good.
The footman was absent from his post, and that wasn’t good either. Where in blazes was he, and was a replacement likely to accost us?
I wasted more moments searching for the mechanism that opened the panel to the back steps, an oversight on my part. One should scout the escape route in every detail before attempting to regain one’s freedom.
Dantry waited silently behind me, and when I did find the little latch, the snick sounded louder than a pistol shot.
I slipped into the frigid stairway and closed the door behind Dantry. We made our way up one flight, to the window that lacked bars.
“The ground beneath the snow will be hard,” I whispered. “Try to land silently. Head for the trees as if the demons of hell are in pursuit.”
The window was stubborn and, worse, loud when I finally raised the sash. A gust of brutally cold air wafted through just as I heard a creak from the floor above.
I shoved Dantry to the window. To his credit, he leaped without hesitation and landed softly. I followed, but not before I heard a heavy tread descending the steps.
“Now who’s left the ruddy winder open?” a male voice grumbled.
I hit the ground and caught my balance as a dark head poked out of the window.
“Git back in the ’ouse now, ye ruddy blighters, or it’ll go fearsome ’ard for yerz.”
I pushed Dantry toward the woods. Our tracks would be obvious unless evasive maneuvers proved effective.
“Through the stable,” I said, overtaking Dantry and pulling his sleeve. “Hide our tracks.”
He was country-bred enough to grasp the point. Hoofed traffic, the myriad passings of stable boys, mud, manure, and melting would make our footprints harder to detect. Then too, in our makeshift blanket boots, we weren’t leaving the clear impressions that shoes or bare feet would have.
The stable was without illumination, but as we emerged on the far side of the barn, I could see enough to spot a gray horse in the last stall—a gray who stood with one hip cocked as he lipped at his hay.
Bad luck. Very bad luck. A shout went up from the direction of the house. Worse luck.
“Don’t go that way,” Dantry panted when I would have cut to the east. “Graveyard lies that direction.”
Open ground would leave us exposed, but sunrise was not yet upon us. “Do the unexpected.” I sprinted for a break in the trees. The pine boughs lashed at my face and arms. The ground was by turns covered in snow, full of unobliging roots, and graced with the occasional very painful rock.
Dantry kept pace, and to my surprise, we came upon a graveyard that could have sat beside any rural house of worship. A wall surrounded the whole, complete with a roofed lych-gate. The gravestones varied from small ghostly white monuments to grand marble gestures.
“Perfect. Get up on the wall and make your way to the west side.”
While Dantry complied, I took off to the south, as if heading for the paddocks, then stopped and jogged backward in my own steps. I did the same thing in the northern direction—heading deeper into the trees, then jogging backward over my own trail—and then hoisted myself onto the wall.
“Dantry, grab that branch and swing out as far as you can from the wall.”
An unmistakable baying came from the direction of the house. Dantry muttered something short and ungentlemanly and did as he’d been told. I followed and pelted off up the pine-covered slope.
“Northwest,” I said, “toward the road that leads to the Dovecote.”
“We won’t make it. Bloody”—he shoved a branch out of his face—“hell.”
We were both tiring, while the damned hounds were fresh and did not need light. They had much better hearing than any human boasted and a phenomenal sense of smell.
“Tell her I love her,” Dantry said, laboring beside me. “Dulcie.”
“Tell her yourself.” Now that I longed for the broad light of day, we were doomed to thrash through the forest in all but pitch blackness.
We needed time, and my delaying tactics at the graveyard would give us only so much of that.
“The hounds will alert our reinforcements,” I said, nearly falling on my face as I tripped over a root.
“You hope. What reinforcements?”
Sir Clive and his blunderbuss weren’t much comfort at the moment, nor were Her Grace’s thespian capabilities.
“Save your breath.”
We hobbled onward, Dantry’s face bleeding, my heel paining me with every step. I lost one of my blanket boots somewhere along the way.
“How far to the road?” I asked, not that an empty road would afford us any safety. We needed to reach the Dovecote, or Lord Huffnagel and such henchmen as he’d mustered would prevail.
“Half a mile, at least, and we’re too far uphill.”
The hounds were momentarily quiet, doubtless trying to puzzle out my false trails. “You travel uphill. Leap from boulder to boulder if the opportunity arises. I’ll take the more expected track downhill.”
“So Huffnagel can claim you threw yourself from the roof? Not on your life.”
Dantry was a man of conviction—I’d known that—but now he also revealed himself to be a man of honor.
Inconvenient timing. “Huffnagel can’t catch us both if we split up. He hasn’t enough infantry.”
“He has at least two hounds, Caldicott.”
“One pair of coupled hounds plus two beagles, and the beagles aren’t likely to be trained to follow human scent.”
Such was our shortness of breath that this argument had slowed us to a scrabbling walk. We moved neither up or down the slope, and we were making progress toward the road.
“We should be on or near a game trail,” Dantry said. “It cuts through pines from the road over to the Retreat, and I suspect Huffnagel uses it as his personal bridle path.”
“He came to grief doing so, if that’s the case. He and his horse were both liberally decorated with mud the other morning.”
Dantry stopped. “Heaven help us.”
The hounds were in full cry again and working their way up the slope.
“Keep moving, dammit.”
“No point.” He took off down the slope with renewed vigor.
Preserve me from noble fools. I caught him with a flying tackle. “I am not out of tricks, so don’t you dare give up. If Miss Weatherby can make herself hobble yard after agonizing yard with only two canes for support, you can damned well live to thank her for the effort.”
“Dulcie can walk?”
I yanked him to his feet. “That one,” I said, pointing to a venerable pine. “Up you go. Climb as high as you can and then keep utterly still. The hounds can hear you breathing.”
“Climb the tree?”
“Tracking hounds aren’t in the habit of treeing game, though the beagles might have the knack.
” I jogged over to said tree, cupped my hands, and boosted his muddy, bloody lordship into the lower branches.
I trotted in the direction of the road for a dozen yards, jogged backward over my own trail, then chose another tree.
My climbing skills were rusty, but I made steady upward progress. I could hear Dantry thrashing his way up through the branches twenty yards off, and then the sound ceased, and the pine boughs went still.
I was easily thirty feet up when I decided I had gone far enough to elude the notice of our pursuers, and at that height, I could see a dim sliver of light emerging above the eastern horizon.
We were close to freedom and closer to capture. I waited, slowing my breathing as the hounds came snuffling and baying up the slope.
“If you cannot inspire those beasts to work any more quickly,” Lord Huffnagel said, “you can consider yourself out of a job, with no character and no severance, Fines.”
From what I could see, the bloodhounds were yoked as a couple, as foxhounds often were. The wiser choice would have been to put leashes on them and assign each canine a separate handler.
“They work how they work,” Fines said, “and it be half dark, the ground be covered in snow, and all manner of game travels through this undergrowth.”
I watched the sliver of light in the east and tried to will it to widen. Below me, the hounds sniffed and circled and whined, while Huffnagel held a lantern aloft, as if he might see with human eyes what eluded the more sensitive perceptions of the canines.
I made a promise to myself as I sat in that damned tree and tried not to shiver, move, or breathe.
At the first opportunity, I would use the special license I had obtained some weeks ago and speak my nuptial vows with Hyperia.
I would not wait more weeks, would not pass more nights in solitary slumber or more days cantering around the frigid countryside in hopes of eluding megrims and melancholia.
“They’ve lost the scent,” Fines said as the two hounds went over the portion of trail where I’d backtracked again.
If Hyperia would have me, I’d marry her within a sennight.
If she’d have me and if I survived to enjoy being had by her.
“Two grown men in stockinged feet do not simply disappear into thin air,” Lord Huffnagel insisted. “Cast the hounds again and find the damned trail.”
The hounds sniffed pointedly at his lordship’s boots.
“Was you walking this way recently, milord?”
Yes, he had been, when his horse had tossed him off the other morning.
“I come this way frequently. What of it?”
Fines signaled for the hounds to sit, which they did with a disappointed air.
“You want Bob and Bill here to find a needle in a haystack. Been rabbits, squirrels, deer, horses, half the village, you, them beagles, and heaven knows what else traveling right along this stretch. Ground was likely covered with snow for most of the past week and partly still is. Wait until it’s light, and you can do some proper tracking, but you can’t expect miracles of these hounds. ”
Fines’s tired tone said he wasn’t to be a source of miracles either.
“You have no idea of the consequences that will follow if these two men remain at liberty, Fines. You may consider yourself sacked. Keep casting.”
“Beggin’ milord’s pardon, but a man who knows how to lay a false trail is not yer average lunatic.”
“No, you idiot. He’s a ducal lunatic, and he got himself into the Retreat under false colors precisely so he could spirit Lord Dantry out.
I go to the trouble to circle back and remain on the premises myself throughout the night, anticipating just such mischief as this, and I am awakened to find this…
this exercise in disastrous incompetence by people I pay handsomely to know better. ”
“You sayin’ we had the local earl in the south wing?”
“I am saying no such thing.”
The beagles circled worriedly at Huffnagel’s feet, alternately nosing at his boots and at the ground, then wagging an experimental tail, whining, and starting the pattern again.
The sliver of light to the east was infinitesimally wider.
“Who is the best tracker in this shire, Fines?”
“I hear it’s a Frenchman named Fontaine. Lads in the village say he’s uncanny good followin’ sign.”
“For mercy’s sake, not Fontaine. Who is the best poacher?”
My nose was itching unbearably. I turned my head and tried to ease the sensation against the wool of my collar.
“Mrs. B barely lets us stop by the posting inn for a pint on half day, milord. We aren’t even allowed to attend divine services of a Sunday. The locals keep to theirselves, we keep to ourselves, and I don’t know no poachers on any account.”
Fines was disgusted, probably hungry, and doubtless tired. Three items in his favor, as far as I was concerned.
“You stay here,” Lord Huffnagel said. “Work these damned hounds and find us a trail. These men should be half drugged, shoeless, and exhausted. Find them. I will return with more appropriate talent within the hour. Come!”
He snapped his fingers, and the beagles leaped to his side.
I hope you trip on a rock and smack your noggin so hard you’re consigned to the Retreat for the rest of your greedy, criminal, scheming life.
Perhaps I should not have allowed myself to think what amounted to a curse aimed at another man.
Perhaps the good and bad luck needed to find a different balance.
For at that moment—as Huffnagel turned to limp back down the pine slope, as freedom became a real possibility for Dantry and me, as hope peeked out from behind determination and terror—the Earl of Dantry let forth a great, honking sneeze.
Huffnagel whirled. “What was that? I heard a sneeze. I know I heard a sneeze.”