Eyes wide, she wondered how she could recall and convey anything she was seeing.Could she roll them up and put them under her skirts somehow?
At a swishing sound behind her, the hair on the back of her neck rose, and she stood up straight, scrunching her eyes closed with dread. If she were the fainting kind, she would have done so on the spot. Footsteps behind her sealed her fate. She would be taken outside and executed. No one would believe she’d wandered into the room filled with secret plans by mistake.
Too frozen even to turn around, she held her breath and waited to hear her fate.
Chapter Seventeen
“Serena!”
Whirling at the sound of Malcolm’s voice, she faced him in his baker’s costume. Next to him was a slit of darkness from a narrow opening in the wall, indicating how he’d entered without using the main door. The relief flooding through her made her momentarily light-headed. Then she dragged in a breath and staggered forward.
“We must get out of here. I heard two officers upstairs, and I just left the emperor, and they will all be coming down here to go over these plans.” The words spilled out of her like water from a fountain.
Malcolm nodded calmly and walked around the entire table, lifting the large sheets of stiff paper, taking it all in far better than she could.
“Only twenty-thousand troops to protect Paris,” he mused.
“Hurry,” she urged. “Are you going to take them, perhaps crumple them and stuff them under your shirt or in your breeches?”
He ignored her, continuing to study map after map, and she realized Malcolm was committing information to memory. Her own mind had already scrambled much of what she’d seen, and she doubted she would have anything useful to tell her grand-père so terrified was she at nearly being caught. She alternately held her breath and expelled it slowly, trying to remain calm and silent.
“I have finished,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”
She turned to the door.
“Not that way,” he said before propelling her toward the open panel, covered with wallpaper and affixed with its own small piece of chair rail. When closed, she hadn’t noticed it at all, and it appeared to be part of the wall.
Without hesitation, desperate only to be hidden, she headed into the dark passage, barely as wide as a man’s shoulders, only to nearly trip over his empty basket. She stepped into it and out of it the other side. Then she turned.
“Hurry,” she urged, wanting him to close the panel and secure them inside.
Stooping, she lifted the thick woven straw, hoping to get it out of the way, but its size wedged it between the narrowly spaced walls. She wasn’t thinking straight. She should have turned it sideways. Now, it blocked the entrance with Malcolm on the other side.
Exclaiming in frustration, she tugged while he pushed until at last, it gave way, popping past the narrowest part of the opening, and knocking her backward. He followed it. Quickly, he swung the door closed by pulling on a small rope attached to the inside until it clicked. They were plunged into darkness.
“You should have left it,” she began, but he put a hand over her mouth, finding her by the sound of her voice.
