Chapter Forty-Seven
“Jack! Wake up!”
The words started to penetrate the thick fogginess in which Jack’s head seemed to be swimming. Slowly, though, the voice got louder and more urgent, as did the shaking against her shoulders.
“Jack, wake up.”
Blinking, Jack found herself staring up into the eyes of Mrs. Thompson.
“Oh, thank goodness,” the woman murmured. “I thought he’d given you too much ether and you weren’t going to wake up at all.”
Slowly, the mist floating across her vision gradually started to recede. “Mrs. Thompson?” she said, her throat croaky as she glanced around what looked to be a cellar room of some sort. “Thank goodness you’re alive.”
“Hush, now,” the woman whispered as she patted Jack’s hand from where she was sitting on the chair next to the wooden bench upon which Jack was lying. “Don’t tax yourself. You must regain your strength.”
“What happened?”
“You were taken and bought back here.”
With suddenly clarity, everything came back to Jack, and she sat up abruptly. “Where is he?” His voice had sounded so familiar, but a face was eluding her still.
“He’s gone to fetch his tools,” Mrs. Thompson replied.
“We have to get out of here,” Jack said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bench, but then she had to brace herself as a wave of dizziness came over her. “Where are we?”
“Jack, you must rest,” Mrs. Thompson said. “He gave you a heavy dose of ether, and it’s obviously affecting your balance. You’ll be of no use to anyone if you pass out again.”
“We don’t have time to rest,” she replied before taking in a deep breath as she felt the pockets of her skirts and then the pockets of her jacket. Only her packet of playing cards was still in the pocket above her waist.
“He took all of the weapons out of your pockets and skirt before putting you in this cell,” Mrs. Thompson said.
She had known he would, but she quickly rolled up the left sleeve of her jacket and felt along her inner arm.
Thank goodness! He hadn’t found the two thin wires she’d hidden under some rubber adhesive, then painted with makeup to blend seamlessly into her own skin. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”
She got to her feet and shook her head free from the last remnants of fuzziness, then hurried over to the door of the room. She rattled the handle and was shocked to find it unlocked. “It’s not locked.”
Mrs. Thompson seemed surprised. “It’s not?”
“No, come on.” Carefully, Jack opened the door an inch and peered out.
It looked like they were in a very dark basement of some sort, with some gas lights along the walls, just barely lit.
The floor was paved with cobblestones, and the ceiling was made of wooden planks from the floor above.
Wooden planks that started to creak overhead. “We need to hurry.”
She slipped out of the room as Mrs. Thompson followed behind her. “Do you know how to get out of here?”
“Yes, I do. It’s that way.” Mrs. Thompson pointed over to Jack’s left.
Jack nodded and started to carefully hurry down the hall, but then she passed a door to her right and could hear a muffled moan from inside.
She paused at the threshold, then bent down and peered through the keyhole.
She could see the back of a man tied to a chair, facing away from the door.
She rattled the handle of the door, but this one was locked.
“We have to hurry,” Mrs. Thompson whispered.
“We can’t leave. There’s someone trapped in there.
” Quickly, she pulled off the adhesive from her arm and grabbed the two wires hidden underneath.
Without hesitation, she inserted them into the lock and began to manipulate the mechanism, coaxing the pin tumblers to align.
A moment later, the sweet click of success sounded, and she twisted open the handle of the door.
Hurrying into the room, she strode over to the man before recoiling in horror; it was Doctor Ignatius Patterson, whom she recognized from the photo in Dr. Morton’s office.
And he was alive, but only just… Embedded into the center of his chest was Jack’s very own missing dagger, its silver hilt with a dragon carving engraved upon it staring boldly back at her as the bright crimson of the man’s blood oozed from the silver edges of the blade.
“I don’t understand… This is Dr. Patterson, the man we thought was Thomas Clorren… ”
The man moaned and Jack realized that she had to do something to help him.
Quickly, she ripped at the material of her skirt, tearing a piece of it off and pressing it around the edges of the dagger, not daring to remove it.
The blood quickly turned the gold of the fabric into a deep red, so she ripped more of the material off, bunching it up and pressing it against the edges of the wound.
“Mrs. Thompson, you need to go get help! I can’t leave him here bleeding to death. ”
“It’s too late for him, my Jack of Hearts,” a deep voice resonated from the doorway, and Jack glanced up, feeling her whole body freeze in shock as she recognized the man standing before her, with a gun pointed directly at her.
*
Tobias followed the passageway out to the street, which was two over from the alley they’d been expecting Thomas Clorren to leave from.
But there were no clues or anything to suggest where Thomas had taken Jack, so Tobias returned to the understage room, to see if perhaps there was something else there that might give him some inkling as to where she could have been taken.
Iain had by that stage found a ladder and was placing it from the room above into the space Jack had been taken from, and Tobias used it to climb back up into the room.
“Did you find anything?” Miss Fennessy asked as he got to his feet.
“No, it led to an alley two blocks over, but there wasn’t a sign of anything unusual,” Tobias answered. “Have you found anything else here?”
Iain shook his head. “Nothing.”
“What do we do now?” Miss Fennessy asked, throwing her hands into the air. “How do find where he took her?”
“They could be anywhere in London by now,” Miss Montague added.
Tobias swore and kicked his foot at a wooden prop resting on the ground. “How could we have missed there being another trap door here?” He glanced down at the wide-open space and felt like punching something as a sense of profound helplessness washed over him.
“It was impossible to tell there was a trap door there,” Iain replied. “It was built into the wood-floor panels almost invisibly.”
Tobias exhaled harshly, staring at the wooden floor and feeling more helpless than he ever had before. “God damn it, I should have known he’d have another plan. It was too simple.”
“We all should have known something was wrong,” Miss Montague said. “I mean the very floor itself should have told us something was underneath.”
Tobias pinned her with his eyes. “‘The floor’?”
“Well, yes. What basement floor is made of wooden floorboards? Most are made of dirt or stone.”
His mind began to whirl. “You’re a genius, Miss Montague. I think I know where he’s taken her!”