Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“Wolfgang,” I said, as the train rattled into motion and I braced my feet so I wouldn’t fall. “I’m surprised to see you. I assumed you were dead.”
There was no reason to be careful or nice about what I said, I figured. After the things he had done, to both me and Christopher—kidnapping, attempted murder, not to mention deceiving me for months about where he lived and what he was doing in England—I didn’t owe him anything.
He sneered. “You assumed wrong.”
Clearly. I held out the carpet bag. “Your ransom.”
He took it. “Ought I to look inside to make certain it’s money and not newspaper?”
“You can do,” I said calmly, “but Crispin wouldn’t take a chance like that. Not with his fiancée.”
Wolfgang nodded. I guess he trusted in Crispin’s noblesse oblige in spite of having none of his own.
A beat passed, and then I asked, “What happens now?”
He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Now we get off the train.”
I assumed he meant at the next stop. That’s what we’d all assumed would happen.
There were constables on the platform at Piccadilly Circus waiting to intercept us and arrest him.
We had all assumed that that would be our first opportunity to engage, as there was no way to travel between train cars when the train was moving.
I was not prepared for him to reach out and yank the emergency brake.
The impact was immediate. The wheels locked with a scream of metal on metal.
I tried to brace myself against the sudden lack of momentum, but I stumbled sideways anyway.
The train slowed, while the wheels still emitted that high-pitched shrieking as they skidded along the tracks.
Wolfgang’s hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm.
He yanked me behind him toward the rear of the compartment.
There was an exterior door there; in case of emergencies, I assumed.
We couldn’t make it out through the passenger doors; they were too close to the tunnel walls to admit a body, even one as boyishly slim as mine.
When I stared out through the glass, I could see stone, almost close enough to touch.
There was simply no way I would fit, and if I couldn’t, Wolfgang had no chance.
In the rear, however, the tunnel stretched backward into darkness. The lights from Dover Street station were lost in the distance, and the tunnel was empty. There was no question about us fitting there. We just had to make it through the door.
Wolfgang pushed me up against the wall next to it and shoved the carpet bag back into my arms. “Hold onto this.”
I did it, because there was nothing else I could do.
I was unarmed, and no one else was here to help me.
The door on the other end of the compartment was surely locked, and I didn’t know whether anyone up there had realized yet that it was Wolfgang who had pulled the emergency brake.
I turned my head in that direction to see whether anyone was peering in at us, but there was no one there.
If I could make it to the other end of the train car, I could bang on the window and try to attract attention. But the most that that would accomplish was that I’d gain an audience for when Wolfgang strangled me, I imagined. My trying to get away from him would surely make him angry enough to try.
No, I’d be better served by staying here and then taking my chances in the tunnel. I’d just have to be very careful with the electrical rails.
By the time I had come to this conclusion, Wolfgang had removed a tool of some sort from the pocket of his greatcoat, and proceeded to slam the lock to smithereens with it. “After you,” he told me as he pushed the door open. The dank smell of the tunnel wafted into the train car.
I hesitated, and he snagged the carpet bag with one hand while he wrapped the other around my upper arm and yanked me in front of him. “You heard me. Out.”
“How am I supposed to get down there?”
My voice shook, I’m sorry to say. I told myself that I was brave, that I would make it through this—I had made it through the last time he had tried to abduct me—but I realized that my chances were poorer this time.
I had undoubtedly upset him by getting away last time.
It couldn’t have helped that he’d had to jump into the frigid North Sea to escape.
He probably blamed me for all of it, as well as for the fact that I hadn’t wanted to marry him and he couldn’t get his hands on the Natterdorff lands and money through me.
And I had just delivered myself into his hands again in the stupidest move made by anyone ever.
If I had just let Crispin hand over the bag, none of this would have happened.
Wolfgang didn’t want him. He had gotten me because I had stupidly made myself available to him.
“I don’t care,” he said now. “Go. And stay away from the middle track.”
The small platform we were standing on, at the back of the train, was some three feet above the tracks. I thought about sitting down first, but I wasn’t certain Wolfgang would allow me the time to do it, so in the end I did the only thing I could do: bent my knees and jumped.
I landed hard—the floor of the tunnel was uneven, and I was jumping at an angle—but I stayed upright, and at a safe distance from the rails.
There were four of them: a double set for the tires to run along, an inner rail that I was certain was electrified, and then a rail running down the middle of the other two, that surely must be where the electricity came from.
“Out of the way,” Wolfgang said impatiently, and I moved a couple of steps up the tunnel to give him room to jump. “That’s far enough. Stay there.”
I stayed. I could have tried to run, I suppose—part of me wanted to, the part that was busy calculating how far we’d come from Dover Street before he pulled the emergency brake, and whether I could make it back there before he caught me—but he was half a foot taller than me, with correspondingly long legs, and while I’m young and fleet, I didn’t think I was fleet enough to outrun him.
He jumped, greatcoat flapping like the wings of a raven, and landed a few feet away from me.
It took him less than a second to reorient himself, and then he snagged my wrist in another death-grip and strode down the tunnel while he pulled me behind him with one hand and kept a tight hold on the carpet bag with the other.
I allowed it, since I thought that getting into a tussle with the man while surrounded by high voltage rails that could kill me wasn’t a good idea.
Nonetheless, as I looked around as best I could in the dark, I felt myself lose my breath a little bit.
It’s not that I’m claustrophobic, particularly.
And the tunnel wasn’t even what I’d call narrow or low-ceilinged.
There was enough space in here for a tube train to pass.
It shouldn’t have felt like the walls were closing in, but it did.
I could feel the weight of the roof pressing down on me.
On top of my head were thousands of people, hundreds of buildings, and motorcars.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds right over my head.
How was it possible for me—for us—to be down here without being crushed?
My breath came faster and I was working my way up to a full-fledged panic attack when Wolfgang’s voice cut through the silence. “I suppose it’s safe to assume that your boyfriend will have left by now?”
My boyfriend?
“Christopher’s my cousin,” I said, and was happy to hear that my voice was mostly steady, “and he’s queer, as you very well know.
And Crispin’s engaged to Laetitia, so not my boyfriend either.
But yes, I assume they would have run back upstairs when the train left.
They’re probably halfway to Piccadilly by now. ”
It wasn’t a prospect that gave me much joy.
I would have liked to believe that they were both back at the platform, waiting, and when we reached it, they would be there to engage Wolfgang in battle.
But I didn’t really believe it. It made more sense that they had gone on to Piccadilly, hoping to find me there.
Dover Street station would be empty, no doubt.
And that was if we got there at all. Wolfgang might be planning to strangle me and leave me in the tunnel, now that I had assured him that no one was likely to be waiting for me back at the platform.
And then there were the other dangers inherent in walking along high voltage tracks in an underground tube tunnel.
As if to punctuate this thought, the tunnel started to rumble.
Softly at first, but then with increasing power.
The walls vibrated, and so did the tracks.
The noise of a train motor filled the space from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall.
Wolfgang stopped, and perforce, so did I.
We stood in the middle of the tunnel, unmoving, while we waited to see what would happen next.
The sound rose to a roar, and then came the sound of hydraulics engaging. At the same time, a faint light lit up the tracks up the tunnel.
“Scheisse!”
Wolfgang spat what I knew to be a bad word in German. His eyes flickered between the oncoming light up ahead, in the direction of Dover Street, and then back toward Piccadilly, in the direction from which we’d walked. The direction we already knew was blocked by the stalled train.
I did the same, and came to the same conclusion he must have reached, which was that there was nowhere for us to go.
Or rather, we could go back the way we’d come. We could try to make it back to the train we had left before the oncoming train—for surely that was an oncoming train up ahead—reached us.