Fourteen
You sausage-fingered blockhead! How many times have I told you? A lock is like a woman. To woo her, you must ask, not demand. Listen, not speak. Give, not take …
Antonio’s voice sounded inside Beau’s head as he knelt on the floor of his room, working a silver pickle fork—one of its prongs bent back—into the lock on his chamber door.
Antonio was the one who’d shown Beau how to make the impossibly thin tension wrenches, the slender picks and rakes, and how to use them. He’d taught him how to see inside a lock with his hands instead of his eyes, how to listen as the pins and tumblers spilled their secrets.
Do those things, boy, do them well, and there’s not a lock on earth you can’t open.
“I am doing them well, Tonio,” Beau said between gritted teeth, “but even youcouldn’t open a lock with a crappy little pickle fork!”
The fire had burned low, and the room had grown chilly, yet sweat dripped down Beau’s face. He wiped it off with his sleeve, then turned the fork’s handle once more, but the metal was too soft. The prong got stuck and wouldn’t budge. Swearing furiously, he yanked until it came free, then threw it across the room.
“I’ll never get out of here,” he groaned, collapsing onto his backside. He’d spent hours working on the lock. It had to be past midnight now. He’d hoped to be on his way long ago, but here he was, still stuck in his room.
The wind howled outside like a vengeful spirit, its long fingers poking and prodding at the old stones of the tower, trying to find a way in. Beau knew this wind; he hated it. It was the same stalking wind that swirled around the convent on the edge of Barcelona. It scoured across his memories now as if it were scouring dirt off a grave, laying bare things long buried.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the images, but they came anyway. He saw thin, pale Matti, hunched over and coughing. The sound of it, harsh and rattling, echoing in his head got Beau up off his rear end. If only he hadn’t lost Sister Maria-Theresa’s letter. Then he’d know for sure that his brother had recovered.
He shook the tension out of his hands. Cleared his mind. And remembered Antonio’s teaching.
Think of the lock as a lover’s heart—guarded, wary, full of secrets. It longs to open itself to you, and it will, if you let it …
Beau saw his error. In his eagerness to break out, he’d been impatient and clumsy, digging into the lock with his makeshift tools like a thick-fingered dentist trying to pull a rotten tooth.
His candle stood in its holder on the floor next to him. He lifted it and peered at the lock. “You’re iron and you’re old,” he said to it. “You’re rusty, too, which means you’ve been neglected. If Antonio’s right, if locks are like hearts, then yours is heavy.”
Brow scrunched, Beau set the candle down and pawed through the objects he’d stolen earlier that day from the stables and the kitchen, all laid out on a napkin on the floor. A nutpick looked promising. He inserted the pointed end into the keyhole and turned it. It promptly snapped in half. Groaning, he pulled the broken piece out, then dug through his pile again, selecting a thin iron nail and a tine from a rake.
Patience, lad, patience…
Slowly, methodically, Beau worked the lock, prodding, coaxing, listening, until finally one pin shifted into place, and then his breath caught as the rest followed in a metallic symphony of scrapes, pops, and clicks. Few sounds were as beautiful to him as the deep, satisfying thunk of a bolt sliding back.
Moving quickly, he knotted the napkin around his tools and tucked the slender bundle into his waistband. Then he pulled the door open—not far, just enough. His thief’s eyes had watched Valmont come and go and had noted the precise spot where the hinges creaked. He squeezed through the gap, taking his candle with him, leaving its holder behind.
“Yes!”he whispered as he stepped out of his room. There was still time to find the tunnel. With any amount of luck, he’d be long gone when Valmont came to rouse him.
Holding his candle high, Beau crossed the landing and started down the stairs. When he’d taken five or six steps, he glanced back at the door, but the gloom was so thick and the candlelight so faint, he could no longer see it. It was as if the night sensed him and surged toward him like a dark sea, eager to pull him under. He was surprised to feel a shiver rattle through him.
“Get a grip, you infant,” he told himself.
He continued down the steep stairway as silently as a shadow, wary of making the slightest sound. The stairs ended in a broad landing on the east wing’s third floor. Three long corridors snaked off it. Beau couldn’t see them in the clinging darkness, but he’d memorized their locations. He had no idea where the ones on his right and left led, but the one straight ahead would take him to the castle’s main stairway, which led down to the entry hall. From there, he would make his way through the great hall to the kitchen and then into the cellar.
He started for it, creeping quietly across the wooden floor.
And that’s when he heard the sound, low and blood-chilling.
He tried to tell himself that it was only the wind. Or the rain. Stones settling. Timbers creaking.
But it wasn’t.
It was the sound of growling.