“Will you give me the key to that room, please, Lady Derring?” he asked patiently.
His hand was extended.
Her hands were trembling as she unhooked the keys from her belt and found the right one. It seemed to go on forever, the frantic jingling.
He waited patiently. All those soldiers watched.
She dropped the key into his hand, very careful not to touch his skin.
“Thank you. We shall have soldiers in every empty room of the house,” he said. “We will explain the situation to your other guests now and temporarily remove them from the premises for their own safety. Please instruct your staff to avoid that floor tomorrow. For now...” he added, standing, “try to sleep.”
This last might have been the most ridiculous suggestion she ever heard.
And he turned back to his men abruptly and they clustered in the corner of the room to listen to him, and she wondered if she was already forgotten. She’d been a means to an end, after all.
What else could they do but go back up the stairs, taking care to not make a sound?
“Fox,” Angelique muttered, dazed. “Henhouse,” as they went up the stairs.
“At least my instincts are good,” she muttered a few steps later.
But Delilah said not a word.
“You’ve always been so kind, Lady Derring,” Jane Gardner said to her, the following morning, after breakfast, when she gave the Gardner sisters the good news that they’d be moving into the larger suite. One of Tristan’s men had returned the key to her last night after they’d prepared the room for today.
“Yes,” Delilah said numbly. “Haven’t I?”
She dropped the key into Jane Gardner’s hand.
“Thank you,” Jane said in that tiny, fluting voice. Delilah suppressed a shudder.
Margaret glanced up from between her lashes. Then glanced down again. “And the food here iswonderful,” she said almost wistfully.
While Helga silently served breakfast to only the Gardner sisters, who were told that everyone else was out, a half-dozen soldiers waited in the livery stables.
Another half dozen were waiting in rooms on the first floor, waiting to pour into Suite Three.
Delilah and Angelique and Dot remained at the top of the stairs, the door closed.
And at eleven o’clock in the morning, a well-fed Jane Gardner opened up the wardrobe in the room on the first floor, lifted the hatch in its floor, climbed down the ladder, and moments later retrieved one small box from the tunnel.
Massey, down the hatch in the livery stables, watched this retrieval through the keyhole of the door.
And then the person formerly known as Jane Gardner hesitated. Eyed the barred door.
And decided that of course she ought to go back the way she’d come.
When she was lost from view to the shadows, Massey pulled on the doorknob hard and released it.
The thud was a signal.
When she struggled up out of the wardrobe, cap and wig askew, arm triumphantly extending a box of cigars to her “sister” Margaret, she discovered Margaret couldn’t quite take it from her.
She was already bound at the wrists and being held fast by two men.
Two soldiers helped her all the way out of the wardrobe, instead, by yanking her up by the armpits.
“I’ll just take those,” Tristan said.
