The Deception of the Emerald Ring

Chapter Twenty-seven

It was altogether too many dead bodies for one week, as far as Letty was concerned.

Jane moved swiftly past Vaughn to kneel next to the recum-bent form on the settee.

"Dead," pronounced Jane, reaching for the woman's wrist with a practiced hand. "And recently, too. Her skin is still warm."

There could be no doubt as to her identity this time. Whatever the means of death had been, it had left her face unmarred. The marquise's head was tilted back, fixed in an obsidian stare of perpetual venom in the direction of her killer. Her unruly wig had tumbled free, revealing a tight coil of black hair pinned close to her head, the severity of the style lending her an oddly chaste appearance. The combination of black hair and colorless skin had the stark simplicity of a nun's habit.

Without the hairpiece, her face looked thinner and older than it had during her appearances as Augustus. Letty could see the violet shadows in the delicate skin under her eyes, the hollows burred beneath her cheeks, the thin indentations incised between nose and lips. Along the corner of her slack lips oozed a dainty trickle of blood, as rust-red as the fragments of porcelain on the rug, and as finely drawn.

There was something repellent about the very delicacy of it. Driven by an impulse she couldn't quite explain, Letty took a corner of the dead woman's cravat and tried to wipe the blood from her face. Already drying, the rusty stain resisted removal.

Standing over the body, Letty could see what she had missed before. The silver knob protruding from the wrinkled brown cloth of the dead woman's coat was not a stickpin, but the head of a stiletto, driven with unerring precision straight into her heart. Vaughn must, realized Letty, have been standing just where she was standing, behind the settee, perfectly poised to hold the marquise still with his left hand while he drove the blade home with his right.

Rising from her position before the settee, Jane confronted Vaughn.

"Why?"

"The more apt question would be who."

Lord Vaughn's fingers trailed lazily around the edge of a small gilt table as he circled it, closing the space between himself and the settee. And Jane.

Sliding a hand casually into her waistcoat, Letty felt for the handle of her gun. Every movement felt painfully obvious, but Vaughn's attention was focused unwaveringly on Jane. Letty's fingers closed carefully around the wooden handle. She had, as Jane recommended, inserted the barrel into the binding wrapped around her waist at a diagonal for easier removal, but the weapon seemed to be caught on something—the binding itself, most likely.

Jane met him stare for stare, head tilted back in an age-old expression of challenge. "Not you, then."

"Do you really think it?" asked Vaughn softly, coming to a stop just in front of her. Jane did not shrink back, but from her vantage point behind the settee Letty saw Jane's fingers tighten on the head of her cane.

Letty tugged gently at the pistol and felt the wrappings tighten against her side in response. Drat. Whatever it was snagged on was caught fast. If Jane was armed, she had given no indication of it to Letty.

"The situation tells against you," Jane said, as calmly as though she were discussing the weather.

Vaughn arched an aristocratic eyebrow. "Circumstance is seldom proof."

"Aphorism," said Jane sharply, "is never answer."

"On the contrary"—Vaughn spoke softly, but there was an undertone to the simple words that made the fine hairs on Letty's arms prickle with atavistic instinct—"sometimes the truest answer lies in tergiversations."

Below her, Letty could see the eyes of the marquise, fixed in an eternal sneer. With one last, desperate pull, Letty yanked the pistol free. The fabric gave with a noise like a hundred cats sharpening their claws, drawing startled glances from the duelists on the other side of the settee.

Bracing her weapon, Letty leveled it at Lord Vaughn.

"Step away from Miss Fairley," Letty commanded, hoping that she made up in firmness of tone what she lacked in weakness of wrist.

Lord Vaughn looked as unimpressed as the marquise. But he did step away, and that, Letty reminded herself, was all that counted. Fragments of china crackled beneath his boot heel, ground to expensive dust against the weft of the carpet.

Vaughn nodded lazily toward Letty's weapon. "It's not loaded, is it?"

Letty concentrated on holding the pistol level. It was considerably harder without Geoff's hands beneath hers. "Would you care to wager your life on that point?"

Vaughn polished his quizzing glass with a corner of his cravat and examined the results. "In this instance? Yes."

Drat. It was going to have to be the sleeping potion.

"Perhaps," suggested Letty, waving the pistol in the direction of a chair suitably far away from Jane, "we should all sit down and discuss this over a nice cup of tea."

Jane glanced back at Letty over her shoulder with a quirk of the lips that suggested she knew exactly what Letty was about.

"I don't think tea will be necessary." Jane flipped her coattails and arranged herself neatly in a chair by the settee, next to the table that must have once borne the Japanese bowl. Her calm post next to the corpse presented a macabre tableau, a tea party straight out of Dante's Inferno.

"Indeed." Vaughn turned his back on Letty and her pistol, moving toward a table set with a decanter and set of glasses. "I could do with something stronger."

Murdering someone could have that effect on a person.

Letty kept the empty pistol trained on Vaughn as he tilted amber liquid into his glass. There was something rather comforting about holding the man at gunpoint. Even if she knew there was nothing in the gun, the weapon still provided a spurious sense of protection.

In a mockery of a toast, Vaughn raised the glass toward the trio ranged around the settee.

"Gentlemen?" Vaughn's voice was as delicately weighted with irony as a well-balanced sword. "Would you care to join me?"

"An explanation would be more to the point. Unless you have more old adages you would care to share with us?" There was an edge to Jane's voice that belied the tranquillity of her expression.

"I believe I can control myself for the moment."

Lifting the rejected glass to his lips, Vaughn drank delicately before proceeding, whether to delay or merely out of a habit of deliberation, Letty could not be sure. It was impossible to be sure of anything where Lord Vaughn was concerned.

"I entered and found the Marquise de Montval as you see her now. That is the sum total of it." Vaughn's eyes flicked almost imperceptibly toward the still form on the settee. "Teresa and I had more subtle means of causing injury to each other. We had no need for knives."

"Even the sharpest of tongues cannot do the office of steel."

Jane, thought Letty, seemed determined to out-Vaughn Lord Vaughn when it came to couching speech in obscurity. It was enough to make Letty yearn for good commonplace words of one syllable. Perhaps she should just hold up two cards, saying "yes" and "no," and demand that Vaughn point to the one that best answered the question "Did you kill the marquise?"

Knowing Lord Vaughn, he would probably find a way to point with ambiguity.

"Credit me with the common sense not to soil my own nest," said Lord Vaughn. Ambiguously.

Jane leaned back in her chair, propping one leg against the other in a studiedly masculine gesture. "That might be all the more reason to do so."

"Not," said Vaughn, "when it entails a stain on the upholstery. That fabric will be devilish hard to replace. It came from France."

Vaughn's eyes met Jane's in a way that suggested far more than a concern for interior decoration.

Letty was sure of it when Jane said, in a much milder tone, "When did you last see her alive?" For whatever reason, the interrogation had been abandoned.

"Half an hour ago?" Vaughn shrugged, as though it were of little matter, but Letty noticed that he avoided looking at the settee. A sign of guilt? Or something else?

"How would someone have entered without the servants hearing?" demanded Letty.

"You did," said Vaughn smoothly. "My cousin—no, Mrs. Alsdale, not that cousin. Nor"—he nodded to the couch—"that cousin."

Letty regarded him with unconcealed distaste. "Your cousins seem to experience considerable ill fortune."

"In being connected to me? In that case, it is an affliction to which a considerable portion of the peerage falls heir. My cousin Kildare, who is, I am sure you shall be relieved to hear, in the pink of health, was kind enough to afford me the use of his home. His staff, however, leaves much to be desired. The cook…But I digress. I returned from an invigorating visit to my tailor to find—I don't need to tell you, do I?"

"If," said Letty, leaning very heavily on the word, "your story is true, wouldn't you have crossed paths with the murderer?"

"My dear girl." Vaughn gestured expansively, snifter in one hand, quizzing glass in the other. "Look about you. The place is riddled with doors."

There was no denying the truth of that. Aside from the door to the front hall, there were doors, cleverly aligned with the plasterwork, leading off to rooms on either side. In addition to the doors, long-sashed windows offered a further means of egress. The room was above ground level, but not by much; a tall man would have no difficulty hoisting himself up on the sill, and exiting again by the same means.

"You have quite the wrong end of the stick," continued Vaughn. "There is someone who has considerably more reason than I to wish to see Teresa permanently silenced."

"And that would be?" Jane tilted her head quizzically.

"I think you know."

"It doesn't necessarily follow. Would a hunter kill his trustiest hound?"

"He would," said Vaughn, "if the hound bit him. Teresa was never good at bowing to the dictates of others." Vaughn swirled the liquid in his glass, watching its progress with as much interest as if it had been the finishing line at Newmarket. "Recently, she had taken umbrage with the activities of a lesser personage in her organization."

"Emily Gilchrist."

Letty didn't realize she had spoken the name aloud until Vaughn's eyes met hers. He looked, she realized, surprisingly tired. Under all the bravado of his manner, fatigue lined the sides of his face and pouched beneath his eyes.

"The very one." The shadows beneath his eyes might betray him, but there was no trace of weakness in the honed cadences of his voice. "Teresa believed she needed to be removed. She broached this with her colleague. Her colleague refused."

"Ah," said Jane.

"Ah, indeed. Such a little point, to cause such a great reckoning."

A little point. Having seen the removal of Emily Gilchrist, Letty wasn't sure she could agree with Lord Vaughn's characterization of the situation. What was it that Geoff had said last night? Something about the marquise not being worthy of her sympathy. Remembering Emily's ravaged face, she found it hard to regret the great reckoning that had been wreaked on the still form on the settee.

"Teresa took it upon herself to remove Miss Gilchrist. The rest"—Vaughn waved a hand in the direction of the settee—"is pure conjecture."

"You believe this was done in retaliation, then."

"Perhaps. It might have been meant as a warning to the others. It was a matter of order. And of power. Uneasy lies the head, and all that. No ruler can brook such a blatant challenge to his authority and expect to remain long on his throne. And so, farewell, Teresa."

For someone who claimed to be uninvolved, Lord Vaughn seemed suspiciously well informed.

"By ruler," Letty asked, "do you mean the Black Tulip?"

"As you will. That name will do as well as any other. Teresa referred to her colleague only as monseigneur. A quaint touch, don't you think?"

"It needn't have been a literal rank," mused Jane. "In French?"

"Invariably. It is," added Vaughn, "not necessarily an indicator of his place of origin. Teresa had gone native in all things. She even took to calling herself Thйrиse for a time. Or simply 'the marquise,' as if she were a piece on a chessboard with no person beneath it."

"You knew her for a long time, then," said Letty, watching Vaughn closely. A germ of an idea teased at her imagination. Vaughn's explanations all fit a little too well, fell a little too pat.

"A very long time." Vaughn smiled a crooked little smile, before adding, with a studied air of nonchalance, "Odd, isn't it, how these revolutionaries cling to their titles, despite all of their republican pretensions. Bonaparte will be naming himself emperor next."

"Might I ask," inquired Jane delicately, "why you did not see fit to bring the marquise's relations with Miss Gilchrist to my attention prior to this?"

Vaughn bowed in apology. "I was only admitted to her confidence on that score last night. Ought I to have interrupted your chaste slumbers?"

"None of us," said Jane austerely, "shall slumber properly until the matter of the Black Tulip is dealt with."

She had, realized Letty, very neatly avoided either accepting Vaughn's excuse or naming him a liar.

Vaughn turned and looked straight at the figure on the settee. There was very little spare flesh on his form, but a trick of the light made the sharp bones of his face seem even more stark than usual, as though the skin were stretched too tightly over them.

His lips twisted in what might have been mockery, or grief, or both.

"'Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.'"

With an uncharacteristically abrupt gesture, he tossed back the remains of his drink. Setting the glass down heavily on the small gilt table, he said, "She wasn't supposed to be here. She had a meeting tonight, with the leaders of the rebel cause."

"Tonight?" repeated Jane. "Was it at a place called Kilmacud?"

"No. It was the name of some local saint or other. The one with the snakes."

Letty's mouth felt suddenly very dry.

"Patrick?" she asked. "As in Patrick Street?"

"The very one. Teresa had an appointment to view their armory, to make sure it would be up to snuff in time for the invasion. Tedious stuff." Vaughn flipped open a small china box and expertly deposited a smattering of snuff on the side of his wrist.

Against the lace of his sleeve, the grains looked dark as gunpowder.

Jane's face was very still. "When?"

"Six…half past…something of that order. She was to inspect, and then report back to her shadowy colleague later this evening." Conveying the snuff neatly to his nostrils, Vaughn essayed a genteel cough, indicative of extreme boredom. "That is all I know."

As one, Letty and Jane turned to the clock on the mantel. As if it knew it was being watched, the minute hand jerked awkwardly toward the Roman numeral IV, like a malingering sentry scurrying back to his post.

Twenty past six. And Geoff and Miss Gwen would still be there, caught red-handed among the kegs of gunpowder when the rebel leaders reappeared. They couldn't possibly fight their way through that many.

Jane's eyes met Letty's over the marquise's fallen form. "I need to search the marquise's belongings immediately."

She didn't add before someone else does, but the meaning was as clear to Letty as if she had spoken it. Whatever her arrangement with Vaughn, it didn't extend to unconditional trust. What better way to watch a potential suspect than feigning partnership? Letty approved the motivating sentiment, but if Jane wasn't able to warn Geoff, that left only one option.

On the mantel, the minute hand arched another centimeter closer to half past the hour.

"I'll go," said Letty.

"Who're you?"

The whiskey fumes hit Geoff before the words. Propping one hand against the doorjamb of the outbuilding, the watchman took an unsteady step forward, squinting at Geoff.

Geoff curved his back in a casual slouch, doing his best to look harmless. Only a yard from the back door, he had begun to hope that Emmet had left the house completely unattended. There were, after all, several other rebel caches throughout the city, and limited staff on hand to man them all.

When Geoff saw the watchman, he understood why Emmet had left him behind. Graying stubble caked the bottom half of his face, and his hands bore witness to his trade in the faint shadow of indigo that overlay his skin. Dye could be scrubbed off, but over time it left its mark, especially on the careless. McDaniels might have been a good dyer once, but his fondness for the bottle had lost him most of his custom, leaving him with tinted skin and a bellyful of bitterness against anyone he could find to blame.

Of all the members of Emmet's band, McDaniels was the least likely watchdog Geoff could imagine. Emmet must be growing careless as the big day drew nearer. A mistake.

A mistake Geoff could use.

"Byrne sent us," Geoff said confidently, hooking his thumbs in his belt. He jerked his head at Miss Gwen, similarly attired in a coarse shirt, loose vest, and baggy pants.

Despite Geoff's protests that laborers generally didn't carry parasols, Miss Gwen had refused to relinquish her chosen weapon. Geoff could only hope she was holding it discreetly behind her back, otherwise they might have some explaining to do, even to McDaniels.

"I'm Dooney and this is Burke. We're here to work on the fuses." Geoff lowered his voice to an eager whisper that could be heard three houses away. "For the rockets."

Either it sounded plausible to McDaniels, or he had imbibed enough that he just didn't care. With a grunt of assent, he waved Geoff on toward the house.

"Much obliged!" Geoff called back over his shoulder, and was rewarded with the slosh of liquid as McDaniels waved his bottle at him in salute.

Miss Gwen wrinkled her nose in an eloquent expression of distaste.

They slipped through the back door into the barren work-room that occupied the back of the house. There was little in it, only a few benches and some long trestle tables where the bulk of Emmet's experiments with weapon manufacture took place. Shelves lined most of the white-plastered walls, covered with a motley assortment of items, from coarse ceramic plates to a dented kettle. The ashes had been shoveled from the hearth, but not thoroughly enough. Bits of melted metal added an odd luster to the hearthstone, and a clear indicator of illicit activity. The more common smells of old meals and spilled ale were underlain by another, more acrid scent that stung Geoff's nose. The reek of sulfur was hard to hide, unless Emmet intended to pass it off as a basket of bad eggs. The hens in the coop outside would undoubtedly be deeply offended by the slur on their capacities.

Holding up a finger in warning, Geoff slid through the next door to check the front room, which had been fitted up as a sort of rough parlor. Equally empty. There was an empty plate bearing breadcrumbs and a rind of cheese, remnants of someone's hurried meal. The only sign of illicit activity was a hollow grenade shell that had rolled beneath a table, and a scattering of dark grains that were clearly not meant to be ingested, at least not if one didn't intend to fling oneself into the air and scatter body parts over a large area.

A perfunctory check revealed the upper stories to be equally empty of both human inhabitants and extraneous weaponry.

Geoff couldn't have asked for better.

There was, he thought, a basic irony in the fact that Emmet deliberately understaffed his most important depot for fear that excessive activity would draw attention to the building. That very same strategy meant that his biggest arsenal lay open, completely unprotected except for one drunken dyer, who, at this point in his nightly binge, probably couldn't tell a pig from a pike, much less a Royalist from a Republican.

"All clear," he said softly, padding back downstairs, where Miss Gwen was tapping her parasol with impatience against the scarred wooden planks of the floor.

"All very well and good, but I have made a thorough tour of the premises, and fail to see any explosive matter, except for one pitiful excuse for a grenade and some sorry grains of gunpowder. This has been a sad waste of our time."

"Ah, but that's what you were meant to think." Geoff grinned, feeling the rush of the mission run through him. "Allow me to provide explosive matter for you."

Striding toward the shelves on the wall, Geoff reached past a row of metal tankards, feeling along the brackets that held the shelves in place.

"This is hardly the time for refreshment," objected Miss Gwen.

"That's where you're wrong." Geoff found the latch he had been looking for, just behind a molding round of cheese. The whiff of it was enough to deter any less-determined seeker. "I'd say this is exactly the time."

Pressing down on a bent nail, he felt the catch give, and the entire section of shelving swung neatly back on well-oiled hinges. The door had been neatly done, built of bricks within a frame, then plastered over to resemble the adjoining wall. As an extra precaution, shelves had been bracketed to it, providing a third layer of protection. None of that, however, prevented a truly careful observer from noting that the house was a third larger on the outside than on the inside. Once that was established, it was only a matter of logical calculation to determine the location of the door.

Not to mention that Geoff had been watching through the window one night while Emmet manipulated the catch.

Propping open the door with one shoulder, Geoff gestured Miss Gwen into an Ali Baba's cave of armaments. Enough metal-tipped pikes to satisfy an entire Mongol horde were stacked along one wall, waiting to be passed out into the eager hands of volunteers. Halfway up, each boasted a small metal hinge, designed so that the pikes could be folded in two and hidden under a man's coat, ready to be pulled out when the signal was called. There were piles of blunderbusses, jumbles of pistols, barrels of gunpowder, miniature mounds of grenades, and trays strewn with sun-dried saltpeter.

All around the windowless room, weapons were ranged, weapons traditional and experimental, old weapons, new weapons, muskets and bayonets, pikes and swords, grenades and clubs, each clustered with its own kind, all awaiting the great day of liberation. It was an array designed to send the king's ministers into sheer, gibbering panic.

Miss Gwen drank in the sight with an expression of rapture reminiscent of Joan of Arc in the midst of a divine vision.

"I do hope this is satisfactory," said Geoff.

Miss Gwen made unerringly for the barrels of gunpowder. "I believe it will do."

Geoff carefully lit a glass-lined lantern and hung it just inside the door, as far away from explosive materials as he could. While the goal was to blow up the house, he preferred to wait until he was no longer in it.

Dying gloriously for the cause might be the stuff of song and legend, but he would rather accomplish his mission with a minimum of personal injury—the odd powder burn didn't really count—and head happily home to spend the evening before the hearth, Letty in one arm, a hot dish of tea in the other, trading tales of the day's adventures.

All the more reason to get the job done quickly.

"The trapdoors in the ceiling lead up to other storerooms," explained Geoff rapidly, pointing to a square hole just above Miss Gwen's head. "There are more pikes and muskets above and gunpowder on the top floor."

Geoff could see the ramifications clicking into place in Miss Gwen's keen mind. "Which means…"

"That each explosion will set off a successive explosion on the floor above."

It would have been uncharacteristic for Miss Gwen to express approval. "Is there enough air to feed the flames?"

Geoff indicated the outside wall, where a series of small holes had been bored in the guise of knotholes in the wood. "These rooms were designed for the potential storage of men as well as weapons. Let's get started on the rockets, shall we?"

Taking Miss Gwen by the arm, he all but dragged her over to the short stack of rockets propped against the wall. Designed to Emmet's specifications, they were all composed of iron cylinders not more than twenty inches long, with an arrowlike point at one end.

They were clumsy-looking things, and Miss Gwen eyed them askance.

"I expected something more impressive." Miss Gwen considered for a moment. "Something taller."

"Each one," said Geoff, forestalling her as she reached for the one on top, "is packed solid with a mixture of gunpowder, sulfur, and potassium nitrate."

"Hmmm," said Miss Gwen, regarding the rockets with renewed interest.

"They're meant to be tied in bunches around a central pole," Geoff explained, busily unrolling a length of twine from around his waist. "That provides the height. The pikes should be just about long enough."

That was all the instruction Miss Gwen needed. They worked swiftly and silently, grouping the rockets into bunches, securing them with thick loops of twine, and inserting fuses into the holes provided for that purpose in their bases. The only sounds in the room were the brush of rope against iron, the periodic scrape of a pike base across the floor, and the disjointed patter of mice scurrying along the baseboards.

The fuse, cotton twine coated with gunpowder, left dark flecks on their gloved fingers as they worked. The acrid smell of sulfur, stronger with the door closed, made Geoff's nose tingle and his eyes water. In the windowless room, it might have been any time from noon to midnight. The door to the back room fitted perfectly to its frame, without any cracks or chinks. The air-holes bored into the wall were too small to admit any light, and they were nearly too small to admit much in the way of air. Hide the rebel leaders in there, and they were probably in greater danger of asphyxiation than discovery.

They could not have been in the room for more than ten minutes, but it felt as though they had been there for eternity, laboring among the sulfur and saltpeter in the reddish glare of the single lamp, like an engraver's etching of the horrors of the damned. It must be well after six, time enough for Letty to be at Lord Vaughn's already.

Perhaps insisting she take embroidery scissors had been a bit much.

He might as well, thought Geoff disgustedly, slicing off a piece of twine, have laden her with the sorts of magical amulets medieval peasants wore to ward off plague. They would probably be just as effective, and a great deal lighter.

Unbidden, a memory arose, of a long, paneled corridor. They kept that wing closed now. But when he was eight, Geoff had sat there, night after night, outside his father's door, crept out of bed and lurked in the hallway, standing sentry against Death. But while he slept, nodding at his post, Death had slipped past. At the time, Geoff had imagined him as a bony man in a tattered black cape, hoisting himself through the window like a burglar in the night. Unopposed, Death had slipped down the hall, through the sleeping house, and trailed his icy fingers through the nursery.

If he had stayed awake…If he had been more vigilant…Logically, he knew there was nothing he could have done. Smallpox struck where it would, and there was nothing a small boy—or even the horde of doctors that had trooped up and down the stairs of Sibley Court, shaking their gray wigs in learned resignation—could do to arrest the disease once it struck. Other than pray.

But how many accidents, how many illnesses, could be prevented through just a bit of care and planning? So Geoff had planned and he had plotted; he had charted out his friends' missions with cold-headed precision, making sure their getaway horses were always in place, their guns always primed, their information the best his spies could provide.

For the most part, he had been successful. But when he thought of Letty entering Lord Vaughn's den, all his preparations seemed as flimsy as a veil hung at the end of a sheer drop. If Lord Vaughn drew a pistol, no number of straight pins and vials of sleeping potion could stop him. It was enough to make him want to barge straight back there, carry her home, and just tie her to the bed for the next fifty years or so.

Not an unpleasant option.

Unfortunately, also not a practicable option.

Tying off the last bunch of rockets, Geoff took a professional look around the room. He had ranged the groups of rockets so that the sparks from one should light the next. With any luck, their upward passage would set off the gunpowder in the room above.

Once any sort of fire started…the rest would go from there, neatly wiping out a substantial part of the rebels' store of weapons. They still had the depot at Marshal Lane, piled high with cartridges, grenades, and pikes, as well as lesser hiding places on Winetavern Street, Irishtown, and Smithfield, but those alone would not be enough for a rising on the scale that Emmet had envisioned. Cartridges were all very well, but they didn't do much good unless one had the proper weapons to fire them from. And pikes, even cleverly hinged ones, were only of so much utility against trained British forces' blazing bullets.

Glancing down at the floor, Geoff noticed that the mice had already been at the sacks piled along the side of the room. The gunpowder was mostly stored in barrels, but the mice had gotten at the saltpeter, leaving a trail across the center of the room, as daintily strewn as sugar along the top of a bun.

"It can't hurt to scatter some gunpowder and saltpeter about," he commented. "The bigger the explosion, the better for our purposes."

At the words "bigger" and "explosion," Miss Gwen's eyes took on a rapacious gleam.

"I shall scatter the gunpowder." She added graciously, "You may lay the fuse."

"Charmed, I'm sure," murmured Geoff, taking the long tail of powder-flecked cotton twine and unreeling it toward the wall. One of the knotholes near the ground was large enough to thread the string through. The less distance the flame had to travel, the better. Feeding the fuse through the hole, he said, "When I see you leave the building, I'll light the fuse. Once I've done that—"

Miss Gwen struck a regal pose, chin lifted to the heavens, hand in a keg of gunpowder. "We light the sky."

"—we run like the devil," finished Geoff dryly.

"Young man," announced Miss Gwen, abandoning her tableau, "however urgent the situation, there is never the need for profanity."

Geoff forbore to argue. "When I light the match," he repeated, "run."

He left Miss Gwen neatly arranging gunpowder in the design of a large Union Jack, surmounted by the royal arms, complete with unicorn.

Outside, McDaniels appeared to have succumbed to the effects of the bottle. Propped against the outhouse wall, he was snoring fitfully, one arm wrapped protectively around the remnants of his drink, like a child with a favorite toy.

From neighboring houses, he could hear the normal noises of daily life. Hens scratching. Men scratching. Kettles clanging against the hearth. A woman's voice raised in anger. A child's agitated wail, abruptly stifled with a slap. The sound of an explosion might rattle their kettles, but the depot was set far enough back to prevent unnecessary harm to the innocent.

Geoff peered cautiously down Hanover Alley, the narrow street that abutted the back of the house on Patrick Street. With Patrick Street a popular thoroughfare, the narrow alley formed the main means of rebel access to their stronghold, a way to come and go unremarked. In the fading light of early evening, the alley drowsed in dusty quiet, undisturbed except for the sound of McDaniels's snuffling snores, and a strange, low rumbling sound coming from within the house. Tuneless and toneless as it was, it took Geoff a moment to identify the noise. Miss Gwen was humming.

He could only be glad she didn't do so more often.

Finding the tail of the fuse, masked by a clump of grass, Geoff began carefully playing it out along the side of the house, engaging in minute mental calculations. Pull the fuse too far, and there was a good chance the flame would burn out before it reached the rockets. Place the fuse too close, and none of them would make it home for supper. They needed just enough time to run like the devil. The henhouse, set close by the house, provided a convenient screen behind which to lay the end of the fuse.

"You just might want to consider finding a new nest," Geoff informed the residents, sotto voce.

The hens cackled irritably in reply. They were clearly committed to the revolutionary cause.

But they weren't cackling at him.

One hand still holding the fuse, Geoff whirled toward Patrick Street. A man pounded across the street, two agitated chickens at his heels and a pistol in his hand.