Chapter Fourteen
T he Whitely brothers were, indeed, on guard, if you could call it that. Four of them were sitting beside the front gate lodge, passing around jugs of some sort of alcohol, and the other two were by the back gate lodge, doing likewise.
Pol saw them while he circled the estate, keeping always to cover. They were not guarding the dower house, but Pol soon realized there was no need. Nothing and no one was moving in the vicinity. None of the chimneys were smoking. None of the windows were open. When Pol peered through the windows, much of the furniture was gone and what remained was under dust covers.
He tried all the doors and windows until he found a latch that could be forced and went inside. Sure enough, the house had been abandoned. His Gran’s possessions were all gone. When he checked the servants’ rooms, all their clothes and personal possessions had been removed.
Had Gran been moved to the main house? Had her illness taken a turn for the worse? Surely, if she had died, the stable master would have known and would have said something?
He needed to talk to the steward. He retreated from the dower house and made his way back to the woods and from there to the wall of the main estate. He crossed the wall where the trees were thick and approached the steward’s cottage from the back, having slithered through undergrowth and skulked along hedges to reach it without being seen.
The house was locked. Pol knew where the key was kept, of course. Or where it had been while he lived there. When he felt along the top of the door, it was still in the little hollow above the left top corner of the frame. He let himself in.
His former bedchamber would give him a good view of the house, but the attic would be better. The steward had only the one live-in servant—a cook-housekeeper whose bed chamber was on the ground floor next to the kitchen, so the attic room overlooking the park and the house was bare, with nothing more in it than a couple of tea chests. He pulled one up to the window and sat on it and prepared for a long day.
The maids arrived to clean. He saw them approaching and heard them at their work. The cook-housekeeper came home with a large basket, presumably filled with supplies from the village. No one came up to the attic floor, and Pol was not disturbed.
The environs of the manor were busy, with grooms and gardeners about their work, and occasionally a visit by one or other of the Whitelys, presumably checking to see if the outdoors workers had seen Pol. The house itself appeared to be slumbering. Had the Rieses taken most of the servants with them to London, as they usually did? Pol watched and waited, ignoring his growing sense of urgency.
The steward arrived home as the stable clock was chiming twelve times. Pol waited some more. Unfortunately, it must be a day the steward had meetings, for he left again while the maids remained.
They would do the dishes from dinner, make everything tidy and clean, and leave by the middle of the afternoon, and sure enough, an hour or so later, they walked away toward the gate closest to the village.
He didn’t see the cook-housekeeper, which meant she remained here in the cottage.
Nothing else of interest happened all afternoon. Even the gardeners and the grooms had disappeared. Pol waited, fretting about his grandmother, and at last his patience was rewarded when the steward returned.
Alone, thank goodness, but Pol made his way downstairs before someone else arrived to spoil his time with his old friend.
“Apollo,” the steward said when he saw him. “I take it you have returned for your grandmother. How can I help?”
“Tell me how she is,” Pol said.
“Not well, they say. She has been moved to the main house, and the doctor has been every day. No one has been allowed to see her, except that maid of hers, and she speaks to no one. I’m glad you’re here, my boy, but you must be careful. We’ve been ordered to apprehend you if we see you, and to hand you over to the magistrate.”
“I’ve heard,” Pol said. “I will be careful, but I must see her.”
*
Pol wanted to rush to his grandmother immediately, but he waited until it was time for the servants’ tea and then entered the manor house through a side door and straight into the warren of hidden passages within the walls.
The servants’ passages were dimly lit by narrow slits of windows that were hidden in the decorative stonework of the manor’s outside walls or in the plaster adornments of the inside walls. Pol knew the lesser used parts of the warren perhaps better than anyone else alive. He had been traversing them since he was under ten, staying out of the way of Oscar and his aunt. And, for that matter, the butler, his tutor, and anyone else who might be inclined to give him a punch or a kick as he passed.
Several long passages and two steep staircases later, he was able to reach the peep holes that let him see into the various bedchambers, and he soon found Gran’s room.
One glance was all it took to see that his concerns were justified. The poor dear lady, looking frailer than ever, was vomiting into a bowl—or at least into the general direction of the bowl. Her so-called maid was out of his view, but he could hear her voice in an endless string of vituperation aimed at Gran, calling her useless and telling her that even her favorite grandson had abandoned her.
Pol had planned to stay in the walls until the nasty shrew abandoned her charge for her tea, for she always took it on a tray in her own room, but seeing Gran suffer and hearing the maid’s abuse tried his self-control to the limit.
The last straw was her saying, “The doctor does not know why you are still alive. Just die, you old hag. Nobody cares about you.”
Pol could wait no longer. He fumbled for the catch of the hidden door that would let him into the room and opened it. As he stepped out, he saw the door on the other side of the room close behind the nursemaid. Which was probably for the best, though confronting her would have given him some satisfaction.
He had an hour, perhaps two, before the maid came back. Would it be enough? Just to be safe, he turned the key in the lock.
“Frederick?” said Gran’s quavering voice. “Is that you?” Apollo sighed. Frederick Riese, his grandfather, was close to twenty years in his grave.
“It is me, Gran. Apollo. I’ve come to take you somewhere safe.”
She waved her hand as if to chase away the thought. Her answer came in short bursts of words, as if speaking, even breathing, was a struggle. “Too late… My dear boy… The doctor says… I am dying… But I shall die… happy for seeing… my Frederick.”
Apollo had always thought the doctor was another of Lady Riese’s sycophants, a quack who would only attend those who could afford to pay his bills, who bled his patients to the point of death and dosed them with all sorts of questionable nostrums, and who blamed the frequent deaths on “the will of God”. It chilled him to think that his beloved Gran was suffering that snake’s “care”.
Gran’s hand, when he took it, shook as much as her voice, and felt like parchment stretched over bone. She was so pale that her skin was translucent—all the skin he could see was crisscrossed with a network of blue veins beneath. What had they done to her? She had been nowhere near as bad as this when he saw her last. He’d returned just in time, he thought. Hopefully.
She had lowered the basin to the bed. That evil crow had not even bothered to collect it and find her a clean one. Pol took it to the washstand, where he was pleased to find that the cupboard held a slop bucket. He emptied the basin, rinsed it out from the jug of water on the top of the stand, and put it where he could easily reach it. He then wet a linen cloth and used it to wash Gran’s face and hands, and to wipe up a spill from the bed linen.
“I’m taking you out of here,” he insisted. “I’ll take you to see another doctor, and if it is your time, Gran, then you will die in a clean bed surrounded by loving care.”
Gran nodded. “That would be… nice,” she agreed.
“I’ll just pack for you,” Pol said. He emptied the contents of several drawers into the bag he took down from the top of Gran’s armoire and added as many gowns as he could fit. They would be crushed, but it couldn’t be helped.
“What else do you need me to take, Gran? Grandfather’s miniature? Your jewelry?”
“Louella… took my… jewels,” Gran said. “Take… Fred. And… my Bible.”
Pol took down the little painting and put it into the bag, then searched for the well-worn Bible, which had been on Gran’s bedside table for as long as he could remember but was now tucked into a shelf near the window.
She would need something to wear for her travel. He took a warm woolen coat from a hook on the wall and then retrieved a pair of socks from the bag. “I’ll just get you into these, Gran,” he said. She nodded but could do little to help as he moved her this way and that to fit her arms into the sleeves and tuck the coat around her. She had been bled. Her arms and legs showed the distinctive scars of recent leech bites, some almost faded and others more recent.
And other bruises, too. Pinch marks, by the looks. Anger surged in him so powerfully that he almost choked on his need to remain gentle in the way he touched her.
How was he going to manage the bag and Gran? And all the dozen or so bottle of medicine, too! Should he take them? He stopped to read a few of the labels, but apart from one which said clearly that it was laudanum, he didn’t know what they were for. On one of the armoire’s shelves, he found a cloth bag, and on another a couple of towels with which he wrapped the bottles. He’d better take them all.
A dose of laudanum might make the trip easier for her, but from the look of her pinpoint pupils, she had already had plenty. He didn’t dare give her more.
“Gran, I’m going to take the bags downstairs and then come back for you,” he said. He gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I will be as fast as I can.”
It hurt to leave her. He was afraid something would happen to her while he was gone. The nurse would return, or she would simply breathe her last. Almost as bad would be for him to be caught, for if he was unable to take her away today, he feared she would lose all chance of surviving.
But the servants’ ways were still deserted, and he made it to the side entrance without seeing anyone. He hid the bags in the shrubs outside the door and hurried back upstairs. The nurse was still absent. Thank God or whoever was listening. It was a fervent prayer. He sent up another that she would stay away until he had Gran safe.
He wrapped Gran in a blanket and lifted her into his arms. She had fallen asleep and didn’t wake when he lifted her. She was all skin and bone, and no burden at all, but he needed to be careful not to bang her legs in the narrow passages. The poor dear had bruises enough.
All the time he was negotiating the passages and stairs, he was worrying about his next steps. How was he going to escape the house without being detected? Not once, but twice, because he had to take the bags, as well. As he approached the panel that opened from the servants’ passages into the little hall where he had entered the house, his senses were on high alert.
Being primed for action saved him. As he went to step into the hall, he heard the voices beyond the outside door and glanced up to see the handle tilt downwards. He shifted his weight backward and closed the panel, then stepped sideways to the peepholes that allowed a view of the hall.