Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Ormdale
Deep in the night, Una woke, as she sometimes did, with a profound sense of disquiet.
Placing one hand on her heart, she felt the racing of it in a detached sort of way. Her other hand found the comforting bump in the bed that was Oolong.
And she began to tell herself, as she usually did, that everything was not in fact teetering on the brink. It was always hard to believe at this hour, when the world felt fragile as an eggshell, one small crack away from destruction.
The conversation with Pip had troubled her. She must try harder to make him see how much he meant to the family. The visit of the strange American had been unsettling, but not enough to fill her with this conviction of disaster.
Una stopped breathing.
“The Cornish way,“ he had said, with a little sneer when she handed him his scone.
She sat up straight. Oolong raised his head and gazed at her out of one eye.
“Why, he wasn’t even an American!” she exclaimed indignantly to the little dragon.
Surely there was no American in existence who would care a fig for the historical disagreement between Devon and Cornwall about which should be applied first, the jam or the cream!
An enemy had come—a pantomime villain, in fact—and what had she done? She had unlocked the family legacy and placed it in his hands.
What if he had stolen it? Had she left him alone in the tower long enough? What if she had forgotten to lock it and he had come back and taken it already?
Una swept back the coverlet and seized the lamp by her bedside. She unfastened the ring of keys from her dragon-keeper’s belt.
Moments later, Una emerged onto the roof and into the pale light of a waxing gibbous moon, Oolong all skittering claws behind her. I ought to trim his nails, she thought.
Una tried the muniments room door. It was locked, to her relief.
Oolong slid to a stop behind her with an ominous huff.
Una looked down at him. His tail twitched from side to side—a sign of nervousness in dragons.
Una knew that a sensible person would go back to bed instead of running about on the roof in her nightgown like that lady who went mad in the Italian opera about Scotland.
“Don’t be anxious, Oolong, it’s just Una worrying,” she said, making her voice reassuring. “Look, I did lock it.”
She paused. She ought to go back to bed now. But she knew, in her heart, that she would not sleep peacefully until she reassured herself the relic was still in the tower.
She unlocked the door and stepped into the cold stillness of the room, the moonlight making a silver path for her to tread, the dried herbs rustling in the night air. Oolong followed her and began nosing about in a corner, probably after a mouse.
Every small sound seemed loud in the stillness of the night. Which is why she so clearly heard—not a footstep, but the brush of someone’s clothes moving against their body, behind her, at the door.
And the moonlight was snuffed out.
Una froze. She used to go still just like this when her father was in a shouting mood. Perhaps if she was very still, very quiet, he would forget about her, like her father had.
But of course this man wouldn’t forget her. He had been waiting for her.
And she had come to him, and let him in.
He cleared his throat, the way one might at an awkward tea party, and spoke.
“Let me relieve your mind,” he said, and his voice sounded different now that he wasn’t trying to sound American. “I’ve no intention to hurt you, Miss Worms. I’ve come for the relic. I mean you no harm. But I will do what I must if you make things difficult for me.”
There was a heavy mortar and pestle on the far side of the table, within her reach if she lunged for it. Gwen had taught her self-defence years ago, but she couldn’t remember any of it. She would feel much better if she had something heavy in her hand.
“Please don’t come near,” she said. “I’m going to scream.”
Una made a dive across the table. She heard a scream which must have been hers, but wasn’t nearly as loud as she had intended, and before she could improve upon it, she was caught from behind and forced upright with a cloth pressed over her mouth, abruptly restoring the quiet of the night.
A sickly-sweet smell overwhelmed her, but nothing seemed to happen except an endless gasping against the cloth for air, which did not seem able to reach her lungs.
The pestle was in her hand, but he had that arm pinned to her side.
It crossed her mind that being chloroformed was far more distressing than it was made out to be in novels.
There was such a lot of time to wonder why the person wielding the chloral needed you to be unconscious, to feel his unwanted nearness, and to wish you had asked to be gagged instead while he went about stealing the family relic.
A flutter of wings about her head, and he hissed an unfamiliar but unmistakably nasty word and her arm was free at last—glorious!
She hit the man behind her somewhere in the vicinity of the brow with the pestle as hard as she was able, but she was shocked to find that her limbs did not feel properly hers anymore. They were soft and useless once more, just as they had been when she was six years old.
Then it was all over.