The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Booted feet slapped to a stop outside the door of Richard’s cell. Levering himself on his bound wrists, he wriggled to a standing position from the floor where the guards had thrown him with unnecessary force several hours before. He had informed them that the use of that much force was a waste of their energies, but they had just grunted in response to his kindly professional advice. They had also proved churlish in not giving him opportunity for the escape ploy in which they bent over to untie him, and he bashed them over the head with his bound wrists, then stole their clothes. A pity, that. It had worked so well in 1801. Maybe the word had spread. At any rate, they had avoided that prospect by simply declining to untie him. So Richard had spent the past several hours reclining, still bound, on the straw-scattered floor, his mind turning anxiously elsewhere. Not to Delaroche and the tortures the disturbed little man was arranging for him, but to Amy, lying bound and helpless on the cobblestones outside Delaroche’s lodging.

A key squeaked in the lock. The door shuddered. “Open it, you fools!” a voice thundered.

“Um, it’s stuck, sir,” someone quavered.

A very loud curse from the other side of the door, and then the door shuddered again and popped open. Two sentries tumbled to the floor. Behind them stood . . . Delaroche. He really ought to be a comical figure, Richard thought. Small and skinny, dressed all in black like a cut-rate Oliver Cromwell, strutting forward in boots that could use a polish. Richard hopped forward on his hobbled legs and executed what he hoped was a mocking bow.

“So,” Delaroche snarled, “we meet at last.”

“Actually,” Richard responded blandly, “I believe we were first introduced at Mme Bonaparte’s salon, if I remember correctly.”

“Your powerful friends cannot help you here. You are in my domain now.” Delaroche laughed. Evilly.

“You should really get that rattle in your throat looked at,” suggested Richard, peering earnestly at Delaroche. “It must be from all this loafing about in drafty dungeons. Terrible for your health, you know.”

“It is your health you should fear for.” The evil laughter was beginning to grate on Richard’s nerves. Not to mention that his neck hurt from trying to keep an eye on Delaroche as the man paced in circles around him, his boots crunching on the straw and debris scattered about the floor.

Delaroche strode on bandy legs to the door, clapped his hands together, and bellowed, “Prepare the interrogation chamber!”

“The regular interrogation chamber, sir?” one guard ventured, keeping well on the other side of the stone doorframe.

“Oh no.” Delaroche unleashed another of his humorless laughs. “Take him to the extra-special interrogation chamber!”

It didn’t raise Richard’s spirits that the guard himself blanched at the suggestion.

Down several flights of stairs, nestled in a catacomb of underground cells, Delaroche flung open the door of his extra-special interrogation chamber with housewifely pride.

“Behold!” Delaroche crowed, as the guards gave Richard a little push towards the center of the room, fleeing back towards the corridor.

Skidding a bit on the straw that covered the floor, Richard beheld. He and Geoff had heard rumors about the extra-special interrogation chamber—it was the sort of thing that was whispered from agent to agent—and had even speculated on breaking into it, as part of their what-can-we-do-to-annoy-the-Ministry-of-Police campaign. But they had never gotten around to it. And Richard had always, in the back of his mind, assumed that the whole extra-special interrogation chamber was most likely a rumor fabricated to terrify the enemies of the Republic. Sure, maybe Delaroche had a little room somewhere where he quizzed his hapless victims; maybe he even owned a pair of thumbscrews; but a whole torture chamber? The whole idea was just too medieval, too melodramatic, too . . . Delaroche.

Damn. He should have known better.

“Friends of yours?” he inquired, waving a hand at the skulls standing on pikes around the walls.

“No,” Delaroche bit out. “But they’ll soon be friends of yours.”

Richard didn’t much care for the sound of that. He was also running out of dazzling repartee in the face of what looked like an increasingly bleak situation. Delaroche was more of a madman than even he had realized. While the skulls might be a bit dusty, the extensive collection of torture tools arrayed about the room gleamed sharp and clean. Delaroche must have scoured the dungeons of castles across the breadth of Europe to acquire his toys, which looked like they included not only the full collection of the Marquis de Sade, but a representative sampling of the best the Inquisition had to offer. In his quick sweep of the room—it wouldn’t do to take his eyes off Delaroche for too long—Richard noted no fewer than two iron maidens, thumbscrews in ten different sizes, and a deluxe rack. Delaroche greeted each implement of torture personally—as far as Richard could make out, he hadn’t named them (though Richard wouldn’t have put it past him to do that), but he stopped by each one to touch spikes and grind levers with macabre tenderness.

Across the room, Delaroche carefully eased a double-headed ax onto a specially designed stand that showed off both blades to their best advantage. “Where shall we begin?” Delaroche mused, crossing his arms across his chest, as he strutted toward Richard. Richard had rather hoped he wouldn’t get to that stage for a while yet. Didn’t he have more instruments of torture to caress first? “Something appropriate, something tasteful. Torture is an art, you know,” Delaroche chided. “A skill that must be practiced with care and finesse. What is it that you use in your English prisons? The rack? Your fists?”

“Actually,” Richard drawled, “we use a little thing called due process.”

Delaroche looked momentarily intrigued, then shrugged. “Whatever that is, it is the work of amateurs to use the same instrument for all crimes! Here, we very carefully match the punishment to the crime.”

“How very refined.”

“Your compliments will not help you, Selweeck. I could give you a painful poison in that tea you English love so well, nothing that will kill you—no, no!—but something that will make you writhe with pain and beg to confess. Or I could cut off an appendage for every enemy of the state you stole from Mme Guillotine. . . .”

“Why not start with my head?” Richard suggested.

While Delaroche vacillated among his toys, Richard once again twisted his wrists to test the slack in his bonds. There wasn’t any. It could have been worse, though. At least they had bound his wrists in front of him, instead of behind. If Delaroche would come close enough, he had the chance of mustering enough force to strike him a blow on the head, something the Assistant Minister of Police was clearly not expecting. Ideally, he’d follow that up with a kick, but his feet were tied tightly enough that in the attempt he would more likely bowl himself over than his adversary.

“Ah! I have it!” Richard had stopped listening about four suggestions ago, but the glee in Delaroche’s voice yanked his attention away from his escape plans. “Since you are so fond of the company of the fairer sex,” Delaroche sneered, “we shall start with an introduction to the lady in the corner.”

He gestured towards the iron maiden, and Richard’s eyes involuntarily followed. It was, most certainly, the most deluxe iron maiden imaginable. Like the mummy cases Richard had seen in Egypt, the casing had been painted to resemble a woman. Knowledge of what lay inside suggested a rapacious slant to that red mouth, and a hungry glint to the painted eyes.

Delaroche grasped the handle cleverly concealed among the lady’s red-and-gold skirts; inch by ominous inch, the gaudy façade of the iron maiden jerked open, revealing its spiky intestines.

For the first time in a long and successful career, it occurred to Richard that he might actually be facing death, a very painful death, and that there was little more he could do to outwit it.

Death was, of course, a possibility he had considered in the past. Percy had counseled them all very seriously about it when they joined the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Mortality hadn’t seemed all that pressing at the time, but then, after Tony’s death, Richard had been convinced that his own turn was bound to come at any moment, his life forfeit for Tony’s. Given the suicidal recklessness with which he had rushed into missions for months thereafter, death had seemed a probability, if not an inevitability. But he had survived. Fate was funny like that.

All those times he’d contemplated his potential demise—in the moments before he’d crawled through a Temple prison window, or plunged into a group of armed French agents—he had consoled himself with the thought that he’d left a legacy of which he could be proud. He had done something heroic with his life. How many men could say the same?

Blast it all, why wasn’t that enough anymore? Glory, he reminded himself. Think of Ajax, of Achilles. Glory, glory, glory.

But all he could think about was Amy.

When he tried to picture Henry V, plunging into the breach at Honfleur, instead he saw Amy, popping out from underneath a desk. Instead of Achilles roaring beneath the walls of Troy, there was Amy, swinging a punch at Georges Marston. Amy, Amy, everywhere—and usually somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, Richard thought, with what might have turned into a grin, if Delaroche hadn’t tested one of the spikes of the iron maiden, and sprung away, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding finger.

Devil take it, he didn’t want to die. Not that he’d ever really wanted to die, even after Tony, but now . . . how in the blazes was he supposed to tell Amy he loved her if he was dead?

Delaroche dropped the bloody handkerchief and bore down upon Richard.

“Selweeck,” he panted triumphantly, “meet your doom!”

Richard hoped to hell that Miles and Geoff had come up with a rescue plan.

“I didn’t think there would be so many of them,” whispered Amy.

The uneven stones of the wall rasped against Amy’s back as she cautiously tilted her head around the corner of the corridor for a second glance. Drat. They were still there. Three sentries in dark blue coats, muskets at their sides, ranged in front of a large wooden door banded with iron. There were five other doors on the corridor, four of them mere grilles, revealing the cells within. When she craned her neck, Amy could see a hint of movement in one, and something that might have been a bony arm in another. The fifth portal was a smaller version of the guarded door, a heavy oaken affair hinged and studded with iron, with a tiny shuttered window at the height of a man’s head. Amy’s gaze darted back to the largest portal. The window was closed, the thick wood of the door and the massive stone walls muffling any sounds from within. But Amy had no doubts that they were finally within view of Delaroche’s extra-special interrogation chamber. And Richard.

And three armed sentries.

And she had thought that just getting into the building had been nerve-racking. There had been that heart-stopping moment when the guard at the front entrance of the Ministry of Police had demanded their passes. He had peered at the seal Geoff had purloined from Delaroche with a care that could denote either suspicion or poor eyesight. Amy and Lady Uppington had avoided looking at one another, lest they betray their fear in a guilty glance. But after an agonizing hour of scrutiny (which in reality had been thirty seconds at the most), the guard had shoved the papers back at Amy, with a grunted “All in order.”

He had, nonetheless, demanded to see the contents of their pails. “The minister thinks there might be trouble tonight,” he growled by way of explanation, as the water sloshed in Amy’s bucket, and the rag that had been draped over the side slid down into the liquid with a slow plop. Amy had endeavored to look nonchalant, but the unaccustomed bulk of her dagger’s sheath burned against her calf. She tried to stand as a charwoman would stand, perhaps with a bit of a slump from the weight of the bucket.

Glancing over at Lady Uppington, Amy couldn’t help but be impressed by Jane’s handiwork and the older woman’s acting abilities. There wasn’t a hint of the English marchioness left in the woman beside her. Lady Uppington’s silvering blond tresses had been liberally combed through with ashes, to turn them a rough, dirty gray, and then covered with an equally sooty kerchief, that looked as though it had served as both a cleaning rag and someone’s handkerchief before being pressed into duty as a head covering. Her tattered brown dress hung shapelessly from her form as she slouched forward, unspeakably aged, clutching two voluminous shawls around her shoulders to warm her old bones and make up for the ripped and patched state of her sleeves. Even her face looked different. Jane had accentuated her crow’s-feet with a careful web of lines drawn in charcoal, but it was more than that. Something about the slack hang of the mouth, the tired droop of the eyelids.

Past the first obstacle, Lady Uppington and Amy had scrubbed their way down the midnight hallways of the Ministry of Police. Torches along the walls cast flickering reflections in the water in their pails as they lurched through the halls in search of the staircase that would lead them down to the dungeons and Richard. They stayed in the pools of light, rather than the shadows. “Less suspicious that way,” Miles had advised. “Why would a washerwoman hide unless she wasn’t really a washerwoman?”

The flagstones of the ministry provided echoing warning of anyone’s approach—unless that person had, like Amy and Lady Uppington, removed their shoes. But the only people to pass them had been soldiers, whose booted and spurred feet gave the alarm in ample time for Lady Uppington and Amy to fall to their knees and pretend deep absorption in grime removal.

All their earlier trials paled when compared to the prospect of having to fight their way past three sentries with what Amy had to confess to herself was a fairly meager arsenal. In her daydreams of espionage, she had always been armed with an epée and a pistol (never mind that she had never been taught how to use either), and an escort composed of well-muscled members of the League of the Purple Gentian, who presumably knew how to employ both sword and firearms. Never had she imagined that she would find herself in the dungeons of the most closely guarded building in Paris, accompanied by an aging English noblewoman, with an armory consisting of one dagger strapped to her calf, one elderly dueling pistol (courtesy of Lord Uppington, who had last fired it in 1772), and a bottle of drugged brandy. Jane had insisted on the brandy, over Miles’s protests that opiates had little place in hand-to-hand combat. Amy supposed they could always use the bottle as a club.

A dagger, a pistol, and a bottle against three large men armed with muskets.

“Do you think he’ll have more men inside with him?” Amy whispered to Lady Uppington, leaning over to make sure her dagger was still safely in its sheath.

“We’ll face that when we get there. Or rather”—Lady Uppington patted the dueling pistol tucked beneath her voluminous shawl—“they will face us. Ready, my dear?”

Amy loosened the ribbons securing her bodice and edged her neckline down to the verge of immodesty. Four weapons, she thought with a surge of optimism. After all, even Revolutionary guards couldn’t be entirely proof against the male propensity to make utter cakes of themselves when faced with a shapely female form. Jane had garbed her with just that prospect in mind, ransacking the wardrobes of Richard’s maids until she had found a low-cut blouse that laced up the front, and a wide woolen skirt that stopped an inch short of Amy’s ankles and accentuated the sway of her hips.

“Ready,” Amy whispered.

Dropping to hands and knees, the two women rounded the corner, swirling their dirty cloths over the flagstones. Slosh, swish. Slosh, swish. Two yards closer to the guarded door . . . another swipe of the dirty cloth and another yard disappeared under a slick film of water. Amy wondered if the three guards, visible to her only as three pairs of boot-tops and three pairs of black gaiters, would realize that their charwomen were scrubbing very lackadaisically and neglecting whole swaths of floor. Although, from the state of the flagstones, it didn’t appear that anyone had scrubbed down in the dungeons for a very long time. Ugh, was that clotted blood? Amy scuttled around a particularly nasty brownish stain, yanking her woolen skirts out of the way.

“You!” One set of boots detached itself from the row and tromped up to Amy.

Amy’s head flew up, past black gaiters and dark blue breeches, at which point her neck refused to bend back any further. Settling back on her knees, she tilted her head up to a broad face sporting three days’ worth of fair stubble. The guard who had stepped forward was the largest of the three, and clearly their leader, a hulking Goliath of a man, with jowls sagging around a beefy face, and a shock of pale hair of an indeterminate shade. He wouldn’t be easily subdued, thought Amy grimly. Behind him, poised on either side of the massive door, the two others looked on. If the first guard was Goliath, then the second guard, considerably shorter than his companions, had to be David; Amy’s gaze caught him halfway through a yawn. As for the third, he was lean and dark; a thin mustache, not unlike the one Amy had drawn on Jane’s face earlier in the evening, shadowed his lips. There was a dangerous stillness about him, as though he was holding himself taut, waiting to spring. Like a slingshot, decided Amy. He would be one to watch carefully.

“You!” the big soldier—Goliath—barked again.

“Yes, sir?”

“What do you think you’re doing down here?”

Amy glanced down at her bucket, then over at Lady Uppington, who continued to ply her dirty cloth in slow circles, around and around the same flagstone. “Cleaning, sir?” she replied.

“I can see that.” The guard rasped his hand through the stubble on his chin. “Did no one tell you you’re not to clean down here?”

He sounded irritable, but not suspicious. Amy breathed a silent sigh of relief and feigned confusion. “No, sir,” she said eagerly, making a show of stumbling to her feet and brushing off her patched skirts. “We was just told to scrub. Did you hear that, Ma?”

“Yes, yes,” Lady Uppington croaked in cracked tones, the one word she could be trusted to say without alerting a listener to her English accent.

The guard nodded. “I can see as how it’s an honest mistake. Big place like this . . .”

Amy nodded enthusiastically; the guard didn’t seem to notice as she edged a few inches closer to the door with the movement. “You don’t know what a relief it is not to have to do this floor, too. Why, we thought we wouldn’t see our beds before dawn, and me Ma, well, she has another job days, at a big, fancy house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.” Amy drawled the last name with the contempt appropriate to any good revolutionary.

“Long night,” the guard agreed with a nod.

“Yes, yes,” Lady Uppington cawed again in her crone’s cackle.

To Amy’s surprise, the guard actually smiled. “Agreeable woman, your ma.”

Lady Uppington smiled broadly in acknowledgment, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. Amy had always known that trick with the soot and gum would come in handy someday. “Yes, yes.”

Amy might have been tempted to laugh, had she not caught the hint of a sound from behind the door. Any potential amusement at Lady Uppington’s performance drained away from Amy instantly. Richard was behind that door, being questioned and possibly—no, probably—tortured. Enough chitchat.

Amy flung back her shoulders and leaned forward so that her loosened bodice gaped. So did the short guard. His jaw fell appreciatively open, and his musket sagged several inches. Following up on her advantage, Amy twined a dark curl around one finger. “Long night for you all, too, ain’t it?”

“Oh, it’s not all that bad,” David babbled, staggering forward a few steps from the door to get a better view of Amy’s charms. One down, she thought. Lady Uppington was nudging her bucket slowly along the flagstones, closer and closer to the door.

Amy took a little step back, drawing David out farther from the door, and focused the force of her smile on Goliath. “Must get pretty boring just standing here all night,” she said with a show of sympathy. “Don’t know how I’d stay on my feet that long. But then, I’m not a big, strong man like you.”

Something like a snort emerged from the shawl-covered form of Lady Uppington, but Goliath’s chest puffed out. “Doesn’t take much strength,” he said gruffly.

“Just staying power,” put in the little one, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Amy wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but from the accompanying leer, it was obviously meant to be prurient, so she grinned back at him as though she understood and waggled her eyebrows back for good measure, with an extra dip designed to show a maximum amount of cleavage.

The only one who didn’t show any sign of succumbing to Amy’s charm or her bosom was Slingshot, who stood just as firmly at his post as he had five minutes before, his hands just as firmly on the stock of his musket. And he was eyeing Amy’s antics with a decidedly inimical eye. Drat! Either he was fanatically devoted to duty, or smarter than the others, and had smelled a rat. Neither option suited Amy.

A rat. Amy’s face almost broke into a genuine grin as an idea hit. That was how she would disarm Slingshot! Goliath was still modestly disclaiming any extra standing abilities. Amy gave an agitated squeal—not loud enough to disturb the inhabitants of the room, but just shrill enough to get the attention of all three guards.

“Raaaaaaaat!” she cried, yanking her skirt up around her ankles and hopping from one foot to the other. “Ooooh! Ooooh! There’s a raaaaat! Save me!”

She flung herself straight at Slingshot. Taken by surprise, the guard staggered sideways—away from the door. Amy grabbed his arm, and yanked him back towards the center of the corridor, squealing and hopping all the while.

“There!” she panted, pointing a quavering finger at an imaginary spot down the hall. “I saw it right there! All dark and furry with them little sharp teeth! Ooooooh!” She flung both arms around Slingshot, immobilizing him in the middle of the hallway. Through the crook of his arm, she could see Lady Uppington, poised right outside the heavy oak door. But she wasn’t opening it. Amy made little flapping motions with her hands. Lady Uppington shook her head. Drat! What was she waiting for?

Amy frowned. Lady Uppington mimed glugging noises—and hurriedly bent again to the floor as David glanced her way. Right. The brandy.

Goliath patted Amy heavily on the shoulder. “There, there, miss. It’s gone now.”

Amy whirled away from Slingshot, making sure to keep one arm linked through his, and gazed up at Goliath with big anxious eyes. “Are you sure? That big it were.” She sketched with one hand. “I could just feel it brushing against my leg.”

Amy yanked up her skirts and stared down at the limbs in question. Three pairs of masculine eyes followed.

“I’ll keep the big, bad rat off your legs,” the little one offered with a leer.

“I think . . .” Amy sagged artistically against Slingshot. He might have been staring at her ankle with the rest, but she still had a feeling that he’d bolt for his post the minute she released him. “I think I need a drop of brandy.” She pulled the bottle out of the large pocket in her voluminous skirt, uncorked it, and, turning her head to the side, made a show of drinking deeply.

“Greedy me!” She giggled, ostentatiously wiping droplets off her chin. “Would any of you gentlemen like a drop?”

“We’re not supposed to . . . ,” began Goliath, with a longing glance at the flask.

Amy thrust the bottle at him and batted her eyelashes. “Oh, go on! I won’t tell!”

“Yes, go on,” urged David. “But leave some for me!”

Goliath took a long swig and passed the bottle to David, who glugged greedily, and offered it to Slingshot. The dark man shook his head. “We’re on duty,” he cautioned with a glower.

“What harm can it—”

Thud!

David broke off midsentence as the dungeon door swung open, banging into the wall. The ragged form of Lady Uppington darted through. Slingshot made a belated grab for Amy as she hastily yanked her arm from his, sprinting after Lady Uppington. The other two guards stood frozen with surprise, as, through the open door, the ragged old charwoman drew forth an elegant gold-chased dueling pistol from the folds of her grimy shawl.

Lady Uppington leveled her husband’s pistol at Delaroche with the skill of an assured duelist.

“Drop those thumbscrews and step away from my son.”