Chapter 18 #2
Isabel squeezed her eyes shut, clasping her hands tight around Lily as she struggled to pray.
She felt her own breath misting warm on her chilled fingers, but ’twas difficult to concentrate on talking to God with all of the banging and shouting going on beyond the keep’s walls.
There were no windows to see outside the solar. No way to tell what was happening.
“It sounds like a big fight,” Ian yelled, his breath hanging in white puffs in the air.
He hopped from the tabletop to a trunk ten paces beyond it, finally leaping to the massive mantel, where he dangled for a moment like a monkey before dropping to the stone hearth.
He clambered up onto the unlit logs inside, standing up so that his head disappeared from view as he peered up the chimney, hoping for a glimpse of the action.
“Get out of there,” Isabel yelled, getting up from her prayers to yank him from the fireplace.
Ian coughed and scrubbed his sooty arm across his eyes, leaving black smudges all over his cheeks. “You didn’t have to grab me like that! I was just scouting.” He coughed again and scowled at her. “Now I can’t see, and you made me breathe in a pile of cinders!”
“Well, look at you!” Isabel scolded, brushing flakes of ash from his blond hair and using her sleeve to wipe his eyes. “What would Mummy say if she saw you, Ian?”
“Mummy isn’t here.” His lower lip wobbled a little and Isabel sighed, putting her hands on her hips.
“Well she will be, just as soon as she talks with Uncle Eduard.”
“Uncle Eduard doesn’t talk, he hits,” Ian muttered, kicking his toe against the hearth.
Isabel felt the sick feeling in her stomach too, but she couldn’t show that to her brother.
He might get scared again, and if she’d learned anything in the year that they’d fostered away from home, it was that you could pretend yourself into feeling any way you wanted. It worked most of the time, anyway.
“We need to do something,” she said, pursing her lips and tapping her toe.
“Like what?”
“Like getting out of here to find Mummy.”
“But we can’t! Uncle Eduard told those two men to stay outside our door. If we try to leave they’ll just throw us back in here.”
“Not if we trick them, they won’t.” Isabel paced slowly to the fireplace again, sticking her head in to look up at the square of blue sky she could see at the top of the chimney.
“Hey, I thought you told me not to do that!”
“I’m not doing what you were,” she retorted, leaning her head out to glare at him. “I’m thinking out our plan.”
“Our plan?” Ian’s face lit up and he clambered back onto the wood next to her. “What is it? Are we going to climb the chimney to freedom?”
Isabel crossed her arms over her chest and favored her brother with a look of disgust. “And what good would that do? We’d end up stuck on the roof.”
He shrugged, squinting to peer up at the patch of blue. “Once we were up there we could wave and jump about until someone threw a rope to us.”
“Or shot us with an arrow.” Shaking her head, Isabel peered up again. “Nay, I think we should reach a stick up there and scrape down the ash.”
Now Ian screwed up his face with derision. “And why in blazes would we want to do that?”
“Don’t say blazes—Mummy said ’tis a foul word.”
She ignored the even more foul sight of Ian’s tongue sticking out at her, instead ducking from the fireplace and pointing at the large chamber pot in the corner. “We could gather the ash in that, then hang it above the door and begin shouting and jumping, as if something was amiss…”
Ian’s scornful look faded. “And when the guards rush in to see what’s the matter, the ash will fall on their heads and blind them so that we can escape!”
“Well, the pot might hit the first guard,” Isabel conceded, “but I think we’ll need something else to stop the second one.”
Ian grabbed a large, knotted walking stick that was propped against the wall near the fireplace. “How about this? I can hide behind the door, and when the second guard comes in I can trip him with it.”
Isabel frowned, not at all certain that these plans fit in with the virtues that Mummy had always taught them.
They were to say their prayers, tell no lies, be good to each other, and treat no other living thing with harm.
’Twas that last part that would be a problem now, Isabel thought, grimacing.
But they weren’t really going to harm the men, just trick them so that she and Ian could escape.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Isabel sent a prayer up to God, asking Him if what they were about to do was bad. She stood very still, waiting for some kind of sign against it, anything to let her know that they should think of something else in order to escape.
There was no answer.
She whispered the prayer again, just to be sure.
Heaven remained quiet.
That was it, then. God must understand. Perhaps He even approved. With a sigh of contentment, she opened her eyes and gazed at her brother with a look of determination.
“All right, Ian,” she said firmly. “We’re going to do it. Now let’s get to work.”