The Door in the Moon Page 16

“Maybe.” He turned. “But Jake promised to go back for her and never did. She must have waited years for him. What if this is some sort of revenge, Sarah? Paying him back for her lost hope with some of his own?”

  She didn’t like that idea at all. “She’s just some little urchin. I really can’t believe she’d do that.”

  “You don’t know her. None of us do. And believe me, waiting for rescue that never comes destroys anything human in you.”

  He was talking about himself, she knew. She ran her hands through her hair, exasperated. One thing she didn’t need was something else to worry about. She came and joined him at the window. “We have to believe Jake is in no danger. But Venn is.”

  “Venn! Venn can look after himself.”

  Sarah snorted. “Not from what I’ve seen. Summer almost owns him.”

  Gideon slid her a green, sideways glance. Lowering his voice, he said, “You must be worried about the coin.”

  That touched a nerve. She said, “The coin is safe. It’s guarded.” Then her whole body stiffened. She leaned forward, stared out into the tumult on the lawns, then said, “Come on. Quickly!”

  “What . . . ? Wait!”

  But she was already gone, running across the grass, her shadow huge in the leaping flame light. “Sarah!” Gideon drew his sword and raced after her.

  The night was an inferno. Sparks and scraps of burning cloth flew past him. The château was unbelievably brilliant, the flames reaching high, the stench almost too much for him.

  He found Sarah at a pile of tumbled goods, among ragged men picking over the spoils. One of them glared at her; Gideon lifted the blade, wary.

  “Here! Look!” She was kneeling by some contraption on its side, scorched but otherwise undamaged. It seemed to him like the statue of a masked figure holding a pen in one hand, some mortal mechanism.

  “What is that?”

  “One of the automata.” She pushed it upright with an effort. “It belonged to Moll.”

  “What do we want with that?”

  Sarah looked at him, direct, hard—what he thought of as her metallic look.

  “It’s given me an idea,” she said.

  The carriage rattled swiftly over the bridge. The moon lay low on the Seine, a track of light leading to it.

  Ahead, Jake saw the prison of the Conciergerie rising, a silhouette against the sky, its towers crowned with coned roofs, its barred windows dull with torchlight.

  Panic and fierce excitement gripped him at the sight of it. “We must be mad.”

  Moll patted his arm. “Trust me, Jake. We’ll have your dad out of there as fast as an oyster from the shell.” As the carriage rolled to a stop at the gates she glared at the aristocrat. “Out please, monsieur. Come on, Jake.”

  The small man breathed a prayer. Jake didn’t move.

  “Come on, cully!”

  “I can’t, Moll.”

  “Can’t?”

  “I can’t take this man into some dungeon and hand him over to people who’ll cut his head off.”

  She stared. “They’d have done that anyway, Jake.”

  “Would they? How do we even know?”

  “But . . . Lord, Jake, he’s nothing to you. Some rich toff. And your dad—”

  “My father wouldn’t want me to do it.” His voice was low, fierce. He knew that now, knew it as if some voice had whispered it in his ear. “He’d be appalled, Moll, and he’d be furious. We don’t need this man. We can do this on our own.”

  She looked at him, her small heart-shaped face framed with its tangle of hair. Her look was unreadable, and for a moment he was afraid that she despised him now, but instead she shook her head and said slowly, “Lord luv you, Jake, I think you’re barmy! I really do. Chucking out our best card. But it’s your party.”

  She leaned over, turned the handle, and threw open the carriage door.

  “Get out, mate. Your lucky day.”

  The vicomte stared. His handkerchief was a twisted rag in his hands. “You mean . . .”

  Moll jerked her head. “Leg it. Before my friend changes his mind.”

  He understood the gesture, if not the words. Awkwardly he grasped the carriage framework, lowered himself down. For a moment he looked back at the two of them, and his eyes were dark with fear in the warm Parisian night. “What do I do? Where do I go?”

  “Can’t help you there, luv,” Moll said sadly. “Bribe your way to England would be my advice.”

  He stared at her. Made a deep bow. Then, like a bright moth from the window, he was gone.

  Moll rubbed her nose. The carriage lurched and creaked as Long Tom clambered in. “What’s going on, Moll? What’s the idea? I thought the toff was our ticket in.”

  “Change of plan,” she said, glancing at Jake. “If you’ve got one, that is.”

  Jake’s old confidence had come back. The decision to take control had made him feel sure, invulnerable. He put his arm round her and hugged her, feeling the thin bones. “No problem, Moll. You and me, we can do anything. Time travelers and thieves and pirate-princesses, us.”

  She giggled.

  But Tom muttered, “We can’t blag our way in without a prisoner.”

  “You’ve got a prisoner.” Jake took off his sword and handed it to him with elaborate politeness, hilt first. “You’ve got me.”

  18

  And as the Abbot returned, slow and broken-hearted through the Wood, he looked up and saw that every dark tree had silver eyes. And he cross’d himself and hastened, because it came to him that he was in a place beyond the knowledge of man. And that if he remained there one more hour he would be lost for all eternity in its mazes and dreams . . .

  The Chronicle of Wintercombe

  “HOW ARE YOU still here?”

  “Because I’m either brave or stupid.” Piers lay curled in the hollow, and it was all Wharton could do to make him out. The white lab coat had become a suit of complete camouflage, so carefully formed of overlapping brown and sepia leaves and patches of bark that he blended perfectly with the background.

  “Keep still now,” he muttered.

  Above them the Shee host passed. It rippled like a gale driving a scatter of leaves, so light, delicate. Or like a flock of birds, the wind of its wings raising dust and flickering in the moonlight. There must be so many of them! Wharton kept his head down and felt the soil trickle down his neck.

  Would they sense him here? He lay curled in the hollow of his own breathing.

  Finally, the silence of the Wood was all that was out there.

  Piers murmured in his ear, “Okay. We need to move. As soon as they realize you’ve vanished, they’ll come back.”

  “Move where?” The hollow was a cramped scrape under the bracken, leading nowhere.

  He felt Piers’s soft laugh.

  “Out of this Wood.”

  “How can we cross it with all of Them—”

  “Not across, idiot. Nobody catches Piers. We go under.”

  Something peculiar happened.

  Wharton felt giddy and oddly hot. He had the strangest feeling that the hollow grew around them. The tree roots next to his hand became enormous. A nibbled acorn lying next to him was as big as his chest.

  He said, “Piers . . .”

  Piers grinned. “Don’t worry, big man. Trust me. Come on.”

  Because there was a tunnel now, and they were racing down it, and Wharton realized he was running, or he thought he was running, but did you run with your hands and feet and with your face so close to the earth? Had his nose always this been long and lean? And as he shot after Piers, he marveled that he could flee so fast, and without getting breathless at all.

  And then, the smells!

  He ran in an overwhelming stench of soil, leaves, the stink of sucked worms, the pungent sweetness of rotting fungi. He lifted his nose an
d sniffed, and there were unknown parts of him that were thin and wiry and quivered, that translated scent into a new language, into the colors of this place that were nameless, dimmed and dull, all drabs and grays and palenesses.

  There was an itch on his skin and he licked it.

  It was a peculiar thing to do, but it seemed normal.

  Under roots, over swarming anthills, through a network of dark tunnels where the earth roof dropped worms onto his neck, he ran with loping strides and small swift feet. He heard all the chatter of the underground world, all its fumbles and scrapes; the muffled thuds of rabbits, the soft rasp of a badger’s tongue. He knew that all around him, spreading like the invisible filaments of mycelium, lay the labyrinthine roads and ways of the underworld, a place without human or Shee, without light or any direction but the invisible magnetism of the deep rocks.

  Piers was a sleek shadow ahead, and when he stopped and sniffed and began to scrabble upward, Wharton pushed in beside him and dug too, scraping the soil expertly with his hands that were long and hard and narrow.

  Cold hit him.

  A black patch of sky, brilliant with stars.

  He poked his head out, slithered up, found himself on a bleak and featureless surface that stretched as far as he could see in every direction.

  Piers slithered out beside him.

  They sat, staring around. They were breathless and grimy with soil and their nails were broken and black.

  Finally Wharton managed to say, “What the hell was I, down there? And where’s Wintercombe Abbey?”

  Piers ignored the first question. He looked around at the strange rocky landscape, irritated. “We should be there. The Shee are always moving everything about. There’s never any sense or order to them.”

  Wharton was already shivering in the bitter cold. “Piers. Don’t tell me.”

  The small man shrugged and stood. His lab coat was back, and under it his most scarlet waistcoat. He scratched his small wisp of beard.

  “Yep.”

  “No!”

  “Afraid so.” He looked up at the impossible stars. “Has to be the bloody Summerland. Doesn’t it.”

  The sky in the east was a paleness; Rebecca could see a point of fire that was the planet Venus, shining brilliant and low over the Wood. Worried, she said, “Wait just half an hour. Just for more light.”

  Maskelyne shook his head, tying the rope tight. “It’s already too dangerous. It’s Midsummer Eve and anything might happen.”

  The wooden bird that had come with them, and was now perched on the bare curtain-rail of the attic room, made a cheep, and said, “Well yes, but then I think you’re crazy to go after it at all.”

  “He wouldn’t have to, if you went,” Rebecca snapped.

  The bird looked aggrieved. “I told you, last time I saw Summer she had me in her talons and I was about to get my head torn off. No way am I going out there.”

  The room was the highest attic they had been able to find in the vast dim house. Maskelyne had wanted to go alone but Rebecca had insisted on coming, locking the cats and the wailing baby and the marmoset in the lab with the silent, black mirror. All the way up through the building they had found corridors and stairs and landings wreathed with ivy and sprouting flowers, until, on the highest corner of the gallery, Maskelyne had lifted a tendril of honeysuckle from the floor and said, “Look at this.”

  Sweet scent crisped from it.

  He had stared at the branch for a hopeless moment. “How can we ever win this house back from her, Becky?”

  The door to the roof, when they had found it, had been warped and wrapped tight with weed, impossible to open. Here, though, the ivy had broken the window and was thick on the attic floorboards. Maskelyne tested the rope and fixed it securely to the window frame.

  “The wood looks rotten,” she murmured.

  “Probably is.”

  “Then let me go. I’m lighter.”

  “Than a ghost?” He smiled. “I doubt it.”

  Before she could answer he had climbed up onto the sill, wriggled through, and swung himself out. In the pale predawn glimmer, the Wood was dark below, its branches close, its leaves a mass of shadow against the very walls of the house.

  “Be careful.” She leaned out, twisting to look up.

  A silhouette of darkness, he was edging along the narrow strip of roof toward the nearest chimney stack. As she watched, the wooden bird came and perched on her shoulder, its claws digging painfully in.

  “Did Sarah really get out there?” she whispered.

  “Oh, by the door it was easier.” The bird tipped its head. “She really knows this house, you know. She’s got all sorts of hiding places round it.”

  Rebecca nodded, not listening. Maskelyne had reached the chimney. He was lost in its shadow. Then his voice came softly back to them. “I’ve found the rope she tied here.”

  “Follow it,” the bird said. “Somewhere at the end you’ll find the gutter.”

  “Go back down, Becky.”

  “No. I’m staying.” She frowned. “Just hurry up.”

  And then he was gone, and only a few scrapes over the tiles betrayed where he went.

  Maskelyne moved cautiously along the rope. The rooftops of the building were an uneven landscape of slopes and gulleys, gutters and gables, the tiles great slabs of tawny limestone, clotted with moss and lichen, warm even at night to the touch. He climbed over ridges and slid down a steep slope, one hand tight on the rope, to find a level and wide walkway leading between a maze of chimneys. He followed it carefully, glancing nervously at the eastern sky.

  Venus was fading, a pale speck. The sun would rise in the next hour.

  Already, in the Wood, he could sense the stir of birds, their heads coming from under their wings, their dark, intent eyes opening.

  At the end of the walkway the rope had been looped through a rusty stanchion next to an ancient metal ladder leading to a lower section of roof. He swung around and climbed swiftly down it.

  Sarah certainly knew the house. He wondered how often she had climbed and explored it as a child, learning the complicated ruin it would become at the end of time.

  At the bottom of the ladder was a gutter. He crouched quickly.

  The gutter was deep and would carry all the water from the steep roof behind him. Normally it would have been wet, but with the long days of summer heat, even the small cushions of lichen near the drainpipe were desiccated and dry as dust.

  In the bottom of the gutter, taped securely at the deepest point, was a plastic-wrapped package.

  He tugged it away, the tape making a sharp ripping noise.

  At that moment, as if his action had caused it, the molten tip of the midsummer moon pierced the corner of the chimney. Its horizontal rays lit his face; Maskelyne whipped the package into his pocket, and turned.

  On the topmost rung of the ladder a white owl was perched.

  Its feathers lifted in the dawn wind.

  Its great dark eyes, circled with yellow, were fixed on him.

  “Is that you, Lady Summer,” he whispered.

  Venn explored the damp cell wall with both hands.

  It was solid stone. But there were niches and jutting slabs, and from somewhere above him, a tiny sliver of pale light was entering. It slid down, thin as a wand, and he stood in it and looked up and imagined the narrow crack somewhere in the darkness of the high ceiling. The moon was setting over Paris.

  Behind him, the door unlocked.

  He turned, fast, but it was a stranger who entered, a thin, officious-looking man in a brown coat and tricorn hat with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He peered at Venn, then at the papers, and put his hat carefully under his arm before speaking.

  “You are English, I think.”

  Venn drew himself up. “Absolutely. I’m not a citizen of Paris. My name is Ve
nn and I insist you release me now.”

  “Do you? But there is a problem.” The official raised a bland face. “We know very well who you are, monsieur. You are a criminal.”

  “What!”

  “We are fully aware that this night you entered the house of the Vicomte de Sauvigne and stole the priceless jewel known as the Sauvigne emeralds.”

  Venn stared, his eyes glacial. “You’re mistaken.”

  “I think not. We have the coachman whose place and livery you took to enter. We have witnesses who place you at the scene. You have been denounced, and are guilty.”

  “Even you can’t believe . . .” He stopped, suddenly seeing where this would lead. “Wait a minute. What do revolutionaries care about theft from a nobleman?”

  “Nothing.” The man fixed Venn with a calm gray eye. “Those parasites have lived on the blood of the workers of France; now their fate is their own. All you have to do is to tell me where these jewels are, and you will be released at once.”

  Venn folded his arms. “So greed is still greed, even for principled men like you. But I have to tell you, monsieur, that I don’t know where these jewels are. I’m not your thief.” He almost felt amused at the thought that he was only too likely to be executed for Moll’s daring crime. And then he thought, Will they search me for them?

  The official made a note on his paper. “A grave mistake.”

  “You can’t just execute me without a trial.”

  “You are denounced. The trial is unnecessary. Sentence will be carried out at dawn.”

  “The guillotine?”

  The shrug was silken. “Your time has ended, monsieur.”

  Venn’s laugh was harsh. “Time is the only thing I do have plenty of.”

  The man stared at him as if he was mad. “You have an hour in which to change your mind. You can be on your way back to your own country before sunrise.”

  Venn watched the man bow out, then sat, grim.

  He knew enough about this period to know that any trial would have been a farce anyway and the result the same. At dawn they would come and take him out, with others, to the Place de la Révolution to be screamed at and jeered by the crowd. The blade would fall; his head would be off. All very simple. And quick.