The twentieth of the month was two days from now. It did seem by those travel papers and the handbill that Dornay had hoped to attend.
We now knew more than when we arrived in Paris, yet I wondered what more we might have learned if Monsieur Dornay was alive.
A sound, muffled and somewhat distant beyond the windows, brought me back to the present and the fact that Brodie and I, who had no right to be here and in fact had more or less broken into a dead man’s apartment, were in somewhat of a precarious position that could be difficult to explain.
“It is thegendarme.”
“The police.”
I nodded. It was safe to assume that the housekeeper from across the street had seen us enter the apartment and then notified them. It hardly mattered now. We couldn’t risk being found here.
Any explanation would require contact with London, and I knew from experience that could be a lengthy process. The much larger issue was whether or not Sir Avery would even acknowledge that he had sent us, much less provide for our release.
“We canna be found here,” Brodie came to the same conclusion. “Bring the papers. We need to leave before they come up here.”
There are some things that are easier said than done.
“There is only the front entrance,” I reminded him as sounds came again from the first floor.
That dark gaze went to the large windows at the wall.
“Do you have a plan?” I inquired.
He nodded. “I seem to remember that ye escaped a burning church by way of the roof.
The ‘church’ was in fact a brothel in Edinburgh where we first met Lily.
I looked at those large windows. “Do you intend for us to escape over the rooftops?”
The next sound brought our attention back to the situation at hand, most definitely the sound of others now inside the apartment on the ground floor.
I looked out onto the slanted roof of the apartment building behind the one at Number Thirteen. The building I now stared at was no more than three stories tall and that slanted roof was twenty or more feet below.
“How do you propose that we…?” I got no further with the question as I turned around.
Brodie had pulled most of the canvas and several drop cloths from Dornay’s paintings and was presently tying them together end-to-end. He looked up.
“Unless ye wish to await the police and explain the situation to them.”
I gave him a look he was most familiar with.
“Aye, ye might grab the cloth from that painting.”
I didn’t care to wait for the French police. They seemed to have a particular dislike for English citizens in spite of the travelers that passed through and spent a great deal of money here. We had been warned about that dislike years before at the school my sister and I attended.
I seized the nearest drop cloth and pulled it from the painting it covered to reveal a nude painting in progress.
There was enough ‘in progress’ to make out all the intimate parts as the model reclined on a settee. She was quite robust with long blonde hair that draped around her ample parts.
Brodie appeared with that trail of canvas and linen in hand. He handed me one end of the canvas rope he’d made.
“Come along now unless ye wish to greet the police at the door.”
He climbed up onto the wide window casement as if it was something he did every day and I was reminded that he hadn’t always been with the police. He held out his hand and pulled me up beside him.
He tied one of the‘ropes’he had made to the iron frame of the window, then tested his weight against it. With a nod, heturned and then dropped the loop that he tied at the long end over my head and then under my arms as he explained that he was going to lower me to that roof below, then follow.
“Yer not going to argue about it?”
