Chapter 53
In Separate Rooms
… she felt a moment’s regret. But they should meet again. He would look for her, he would find her out before the evening were over …
Jane Austen, Persuasion
When Elizabeth left her alone in the darkened stillroom, the first thing Rosalind did was to stand up.
With her hands and feet bound as they were, the process was slow, tremendously undignified, and involved several false starts.
But at last, by a combination of pressing her back against the wall, digging her heels against the edge of a crooked flagstone, and sheer determination, she did manage to inch, wriggle, and will herself into a standing position.
She felt weak as water. The strap had begun to bite into her wrists, but worse than that was the cold.
The rain had soaked through her cloak to her dress, and that—along with the cold from the stones she’d been sitting on—had stolen all the warmth from her body.
Even just standing with her back pressed against the wall, she was shaking so badly she was sure that she was going to fall over again.
For a moment, she had considered doing as she’d been told. Just staying still. Just waiting for someone to come set her free. But in the middle of this moment of weakness, memory had surfaced. It was Adam’s voice, soft and serious.
Having come this far, I don’t think our lovers are going to risk leaving any witnesses behind.
The thought caused her to sob, a final indignity.
At the same time, a burst of anger surged through her.
It gave her the strength she needed. Rosalind tightened all the muscles in her abdomen, and forced herself to take a tiny step away from the wall.
There was a shelf up above the carcass of the brick stove.
She remembered that. On that shelf, there had been a bottle.
It gleamed in her mind’s eye. That bottle was her chance.
Because she and Adam were witness to all that Elizabeth and Nathanial had done. Because if they were brought to court, it was Rosalind and Adam’s testimony that would hang them both.
But there was something more than this. Rosalind knew that wherever they had taken him, Adam was looking for a way out. The least she could do was be ready to meet him when he found it.
Rosalind tightened her stomach, swallowed her fear, and moved herself another inch forward.
When Adam was a boy, he’d spent a long stretch of time on a country estate. There, he’d made friends with a man named Joshua. Joshua took care of the gardens at the local vicarage. What made that remarkable was that Joshua was stone blind.
He was the only gardener the vicar employed, and yet the gardens were beautiful. Adam had followed the man about like a puppy, trying to understand how he could even take two steps forward, let alone tend such a variety of plantings.
Joshua could have chased him away. Doubtlessly, the man faced enough ignorant or pitying inquiries without having to deal with a boy’s crass questions. But he didn’t. He let Adam stay, made Adam help, and he talked.
“The secret is to make friends with the dark,” he said. “Dark’s my ally. Keeps me sharp, keeps the distractions away. Lets my hands, my ears, my nose, my mind”—he’d tapped his forehead—“do the needful work.”
Later, when Adam joined the horse patrol, he remembered Joshua’s words. It was following that advice that gained him such a reputation that the newspapers dubbed him “Watchdog Harkness.”
Adam remembered those words, that practice, now. The darkness was his friend. The darkness would let him work. If he let it, it would help get him and Rosalind out of here.
So Adam held himself still. He kept his eyes open, letting them focus and find any light there might be. He listened. He heard the rustle and scratch of the mice and the rats, but nothing else.
Adam sat up. It wasn’t easy. It would have been even harder if Spence had thought to tie his hands behind him. He hadn’t, however, and Adam was grateful for that small mercy.
Once he was on his bottom, Adam wriggled, and twisted, and shoved, until he got himself onto his knees. From there, he was able to lever himself to his feet.
Adam paused, waiting for his breathing to slow and his senses to orient themselves. He let his mind’s eye open.
There were shelves around him, he remembered. It was a root cellar, and it stored all manner of things that might become useful in the future. He had seen boxes and sacks—old and dusty and probably mostly empty. There were those shovels, and the rakes, however. That might be useful.
And there was something else. Adam’s brow furrowed. A crock? No. It was a pouch. It had stuck in his mind, colliding oddly with the memory of discovering the attic window had been nailed shut. Why, of all the detritus he’d seen, was he remembering that?
Trust that instinct. He told himself. Find the thing.
For one heartbeat, Adam thought of the danger—of stumbling, of falling again, of losing his way in the dark and this whole desperate escape attempt dissolving into farce.
He thought of Spence’s threat to kill Rosalind.
He would do it. He would hurt her. Would spill her blood across the ground and in doing so bring the world to an end.
If he lay back down, he might save her life, save his whole world.
But he remembered her sitting in the dusty attic, as poised as if she were in her parlor, turning to him and calmly inquiring.
“I gather we do not believe in this promise that we will be released shortly?”
I gather we do not believe in this promise that we will be released when they have accomplished their … task?
And he remembered his answer.
No. Having come this far, I don’t think our lovers are going to risk leaving any witnesses behind.
But beyond all that, he knew, like he knew his own heartbeat, that Rosalind away in the old stillroom, wherever it might be, was already looking for a way out. And he knew she was counting on him to do the same.
Adam moved.
Traversing the width of the stillroom might well have been the hardest thing Rosalind had ever done.
She hopped and tiptoed and shuffled. She gasped and cried and screamed through her teeth in frustration.
She nearly fell half a dozen times. She cursed her skirts, mourned her lost dignity, and tried to imagine how this business would unfold in one of Alice’s novels.
Alice, she thought, would have managed to provide her heroine with both a white nightdress, and a knife.
Well, we will just have to make do. She set her jaw and managed another hop.
The rain had let up. The world outside the window was still mostly dark, but the false dawn had turned the room pale gray. She was grimly certain that daylight would bring either Elizabeth or Spence back to check on her.
At last, breathless and shaking, she reached the old stove. She ran her hands over the bricks, and found a crack where the mortar had begun to crumble. It was not big, but it might serve her purposes.
On the narrow shelf overhead waited the one lonely bottle, forgotten by everyone but the spiders who had used it as a support around which to build their webs.
The skin on Rosalind’s fingertips crawled with revulsion as she reached through those webs to grab the bottle and bring it down.
She did not let herself think, or hesitate.
She turned the bottle so she held its neck.
Then, she turned her head away, and squeezed her eyes shut, and brought the bottle crashing down against the bricks.
Glass shattered. Shards scattered across the bricks and the floor. Rosalind laid the bottle neck carefully down on the edge of the stove, and awkwardly bent to pick up the largest of the broken shards. The wicked edge sliced through her finger. She hoped the blood would not interfere with her grip.
Working as carefully as she could, she used the shard’s corner to pick away at the crack in the mortar she had found before. Slowly, she enlarged it, until she could jam the shard into the gap until it protruded from between the bricks like a wicked fang.
Rosalind rested the edge of the leather strap that bound her wrists against the edge of the glass shard. She prayed her makeshift knife would hold steady; prayed it would not break; prayed she would not cut herself too badly; prayed she could make this work.
Slowly, carefully, she began to saw.