Chapter Twenty-Five
A t first, no one had any idea that Pol was missing. Jackie assumed he must have either gone for an early ride with most of the other men, or slept in. Even when Drew and the others joined them for breakfast, she wasn’t worried. Until Drew couldn’t answer when she asked if Pol was coming.
Then it got scary. Drew said he had not come riding that morning, nor to combat practice. They soon discovered that no one had seen Pol that day and he was not anywhere in the house. Neither was Scruffy.
Questions to the servants and the retainers established only that he had gone out into the garden with the dog in the early hours of the morning. Jackie joined Drew and several of the retainers as they hurried outside. The gardens, though extensive for a London townhouse, were soon searched. No sign of Pol.
“Over here!” The voice was by the gate into the lane that led along the side of the garden to the mews at the back. One of the retainers had opened the gate, and—wasn’t that Scruffy? Poor dog. She looked nearly as bad as she had when Pol and Jackie rescued her—bedraggled and covered in muck. On seeing Jackie, she bolted into the garden, evading the retainer who tried to catch her.
She was limping as she ran, one hind leg dragging. She still made a valiant effort to jump up on Jackie but subsided at Jackie’s skirts with a whimper. “Who hurt you, girl?” Jackie asked. “Where is Pol?”
The dog whined, then half-walked, half-hopped a few paces away, turned back to look at Jackie, and whined again. “You want us to follow you?” Jackie guessed, and sure enough, when she took a few steps toward the dog, it set off back to the gate and waited for her.
The retainers exchanged a few words in a language Jackie didn’t know, and then a couple of them joined her, following the dog out into the mews and east along the little lane, garden walls on one side and stables on the other.
Before they reached the street that cut across the mouth of the mews, Drew joined them at a jog with his friend Jamir, whose mother Patience was governess to the household’s children and whose father was some sort of aide-de-camp to the duke. Drew handed Jackie a bonnet and a shawl, and commented to the others, “The dog seems to know where it is going.”
The dog was limping along the street, heading north now, but it stopped and waited until their little group started walking again. “It could be showing us where the cat went that it chased,” one of the retainers said, dryly.
“You have a better idea, Jamir?” Drew asked.
Jamir was looking around. “A crossing boy,” he said, obscurely, and broke into another jog to talk to the boy. The rest of them continued following the dog. Jamir caught up with them after a minute or two.
“The boy sleeps in that area, on damp nights like last night,” he explained. “I thought the heat might have kept him awake, and we were in luck. He saw the dog following a carriage,” he reported. “Green, with red wheels, and a near-matched team of bays, one with a white sock on the rear offside. He was fairly certain of the colors, even in the lamp light. Also, a crest that included, and I quote, ‘one of them crown things above, a lion on one side, a weird beast on the other, and a shield with three patterns. Half with blue stripes on an angle, then the other half with three lions on the top and flowers on the bottom’. The boy was most distressed about the flowers. He felt they were unmanly.”
Jackie had a sinking feeling. “I don’t know the carriage or team, but the crest is that of Oscar Riese,” she said.
“What an amateur,” commented Jamir in a disgusted tone. “Who kidnaps someone using their own carriage? With a crest, for goodness’ sake!”
The dog led them farther along the street, around a corner, and then past several more streets. Eventually, she turned a corner and stopped a few yards farther along, sat in the street, put her nose to the sky, and howled. A passing hack skirted the beast, the driver sending her a string of oaths and a flick with his whip, which fortunately missed.
“Is this where you lost him, girl?” Jackie asked, as they came up to the dog. Another driver, swinging wide to avoid them, shouted, “Gerrof the road.”
“Come on, Scruff,” Jackie said to the dog, but one of the men had to pick her up before they could move her from the spot where she had lost her deity.
“Any idea where they might have gone?” Drew asked.
“Possibly to the Riese townhouse?” Jackie suggested. “I do not know where that is, but Clara Lady Riese will.” The dog whimpered, and Jackie rubbed behind its ears. “Yes, dog, you have done well. Good girl. Good girl.”
“Yours, is she?” The speaker was a man lounging against the side of a building—a workman of some kind, from the look of him.
“She belongs to my betrothed,” Jackie told him. “He went out with the dog, and only the dog came back. We think he may have been abducted.”
“Did you see the dog here, very very early?” Drew asked. “Perhaps at about three in the morning? It would have been following a carriage.”
The man’s eyes shifted from side to side and then narrowed at Drew. His lips thinned. Jackie feared he was about to refuse to help.
“Anything you can tell us,” she coaxed. “I fear for his life, for the owner of the carriage is heir to my beloved’s estates.”
The man examined her as if looking for evidence she spoke the truth and then sighed. “I don’t hold with kidnapping, nor with murder. The carriage was green, with red wheels and a crest on the door,” the man said. “Team of bays. Came along with the dog barking behind. Carriage got stopped behind a dray. Dog attacked the door. He was whining and scratching to get in. Footman jumped down and kicked the poor beast. The carriage moved off and the footman left the dog and got up again. Dog must have been knocked silly for a minute, because it didn’t duck the next team to come by. Yelped like nobody’s business. Then it limped off back the way it came.”
Drew thanked him and passed him a coin. “Thankee, sir,” the man said, and then, to Jackie, “Hope you get him back, miss.”
So did Jackie. The man faded back into the shadows of a nearby alley.
“What was he doing here at three in the morning?” Jackie wondered aloud.
“Something criminal, or at least nefarious,” Drew suggested. “Surveillance of some kind would make sense. We should have had men like him watching Oscar’s house.”
He then spoke to Jamir. “Hail a hackney, please, Jamir. Ask him if he knows where Viscount Riese lives.” He said to the man holding the dog. “Take the hackney back to Winshire House and let my father know what has happened. Arrange for Achmed to check the dog for injuries, then bring some horses and join us at the address the hackney driver gives us.”
“Yes, bey,” the man said. “But if the hackney driver does not know the address?”
“Then we keep asking till we find the place, Akbar, and you can ask Clara Lady Riese for the address and come and find us.”
“Yes, bey,” the man repeated.
Jamir had stopped a hackney. The driver looked alarmed to be approached by a party of five tall strong men, three of them in foreign robes, but resolved to be helpful when Jamir handed him a couple of coins and told him there would be more once he had answered a question and agreed to take the injured animal and the man holding it to Winshire House.
A few minutes later, Akbar was on his way, and Jackie was striding to keep up with Drew, Jamir and the other two men. They had an address, and it was only a few streets away.
“Oscar Riese would have to be remarkably stupid to have Apollo kidnapped and taken to the Riese townhouse,” Drew commented.
Jackie was hurrying too fast to have much breath left to argue, but she said, “The point you fail to understand, however, is that Oscar is remarkably stupid.”
*
Pol was furious with himself. He had been stupid. He should never have followed Scruffy out of the gate. He’d no sooner stepped out into the mews than someone unseen had hit him on the head. When he came around, he was gagged, bound, and had a sack over his head. He could tell he was in a carriage, but he had no idea whose, or where he was going.
Even now, when he had reached his captor’s destination, he had no answers. He’d been carried inside and upstairs, then they’d loosened the bindings on his wrists. By the time he’d freed his hands and removed the sack and the gag, he was alone. Whoever had brought him had left the room.
It had been dark, then, but the sun had risen hours ago, and since then he had explored every inch of the space. The room must once have been the nursery, by the bars on the windows. It was wider than it was deep, with a locked door on one long wall, two banks of windows on the opposite long wall, and little rooms opening into the main room on the two shorter side walls, one on one side and two on the other.
The arrangement at Riese Hall was similar—a day nursery in the center, with a night nursery on one side and bedchambers for nursemaids or older children on the other.
The side rooms were empty now, and the main room nearly so, save for the narrow bed on which he had been deposited, a cupboard containing a chamber pot, with a wash bowl, a jug of water, and a towel on top, and a table containing another jug of water and a tumbler.
The bed’s mattress had no sheet, no pillow, and no blanket.
It had to be the Rieses. Or possibly the man Jackie had seen several times, but his interest seemed to be reserved for Jackie. Pol wondered whether he had been missed yet. He wondered what he could do to improve the chances that he would be rescued.
Jackie would not leave any stone unturned to find him. Would she be able to track the carriage? What about Scruffy? What happened to Scruffy? He had heard a dog barking while he was in the carriage. It had sounded like the little mutt he had rescued, but there must have been ten thousand dogs in London that sounded similar.
The search would be a lot easier if he was in Beddington House, the Riese property in London. It seemed unlikely, though. It was too obvious. Since he had never been to Beddington House, he couldn’t tell.
From the windows of the main room and the largest of the three small rooms, he could see a garden. It was perhaps a third of the size of the one at Winshire House, being both narrower and shorter. Beyond the wall on one side was the garden of the neighboring house. He could see what looked like stables over the wall at the bottom, except where the view was obscured by a pigeon loft in the conical roof of a narrow tower halfway down the garden. Presumably this row of houses followed the common pattern of having a mews lane behind.
It was the same on the other side of the garden—a wall, farther away than he might have expected. The garden appeared to be wider than the house, and when he checked in the little side bedchambers, it was. The house must be the end one of the row, for it had, as far as he could see with his face up against the glass, a narrow-paved walk between the house and the side wall. Paved, that was, except for a tree which grew taller than his window and obscured the view from the other bedchamber. From the first bedchamber, he could glimpse a lane, but he could not see any people. Nor, thanks to the wall at the bottom of the garden, could he see people in the mews, or even the mews lane itself.
If you could see anybody, Pol, he lectured himself , what could you do? Play charades until they guessed you were locked up? And if you did, I daresay they would think you were out of your head, and in need of locking up .
On the other hand, he thought he could count on those at the duke’s house to search for him. He didn’t know how easy it would be to find where he had been taken, but if they could narrow it down to this house, it would help if they could see evidence he was here.
Surely there must be something he could do? Yet the room offered little scope.
He tried the windows, but they had been nailed shut, so he didn’t even have the option of shouting to attract attention.
Wait a minute, though. The rooms had been stripped of most furniture, probably for some time, but either there had been a previous occupant who needed warmth to survive, or they had warmed the room in preparation for his arrival, for there were ashes in the fireplace.
After some experimentation, Pol managed to make a paste of ashes and water that was thick enough to stick on the glass. Carefully, he went into the room with the window that could be seen from the side lane and wrote on the glass panes of the window. He hoped the printing wouldn’t be noticed by his kidnappers, or if it was, that it would just look like random patterns in the dirt. The need to write in reverse so it would make sense from the other side might stand him in good stead in that respect.
“I am here. A.” And the picture of a sun, to reference his name. Even if it was seen, he could hope his jailers might think it was a legacy of the children who once lived here, while the hoped-for rescuers understood it as a message to them.
Now all he could do was wait and pray.