Henrietta dutifully sniffed, screwing up her nose at the scent. “But why the ladder?”

They both looked up. The ladder stretched up and up like something out of a biblical prophet’s dream. It ended just below the folds of a disciple’s robe in the vast picture of the Last Supper that decorated the ceiling.

“They wouldn’t have put him on the roof,” said Henrietta doubtfully.

“No,” said Charlotte decidedly, “Not the roof. But they might have put him in the orb.”

“The what?”

The more she thought about it, the more Charlotte was convinced she was right. “The ornamental orb on top of the church. It’s certainly large enough to house a man. And it would be the last place anyone would look.”

Henrietta craned her head back, looking dubiously at the ceiling. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to look,” she said, but neither of them made any move to approach the ladder. It was probably no more or less sturdy than any other ladder, but it seemed an uncommonly rickety affair, propped against the wall of the church.

“I can go,” said Henrietta unenthusiastically, moving to kilt up her skirts. “If you keep watch below.”

“Will you be all right?” said Charlotte doubtfully. “The last time you tried to climb a tree, Miles had to fetch you down.”

“True,” admitted Henrietta, unsuccessfully trying to tie a knot into the fabric of her skirt. “I was fine with the climbing part, though. It was only the getting-down part that was hard.”

“The getting-down bit is rather crucial,” said Charlotte apologetically. “I’ll go.”

She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. Her own experience with tree climbing had been even more limited than Henrietta’s. She felt much about trees as she did about horses; pretty to look at, but she felt no desire to climb on them. But surely a ladder would be different? It was meant to be climbed, after all. She was smaller and lighter than Henrietta, which would put less weight on the rails — and the look of relief on Henrietta’s face was too obvious to be ignored.

“Are you sure?” said Henrietta, dropping her skirt with obvious relief.

“I don’t mind at all,” Charlotte lied. “And the King knows me. If he is there, it would be better that he see me. Would you hold this for me?”

Wriggling out of her cloak, she passed it over to Henrietta, shivering as the thick fabric lifted off her shoulders. The dress that had been possible in the theatre, with thousands of candles burning, was eminently unsuited to an unheated building of coarse stone that appeared to hoard the cold and damp, magnifying rather than mitigating it. But the extra fabric would pose a hazard while climbing. Charlotte was scared enough as it was, without an extra length of heavy velvet pulling her back.

Tentatively, Charlotte lifted one foot onto the first rung. The wooden bar pressed into the sole of her foot through her slipper. Belatedly, Charlotte wondered if she ought to have removed her shoes and stockings, but she suspected that if she descended the ladder now, she wouldn’t have the courage to go back on it again. A few more rungs and her slippers were level with Henrietta’s shoulders. Resolutely, Charlotte looked straight ahead, concentrating on the pull of the muscles in her legs, the solid feel of the scratchy wood of the rails beneath her hands. It would not do to think of how long the ladder seemed or how steep or how very far she still was from the top of it.

Her nails had gone purple with cold and she was having trouble feeling her fingers.

“Are you all right?” Henrietta called up, from what felt like an endless way below. Her voice sounded oddly hollow.

Charlotte gave a nervous laugh, clutching compulsively at the rails as the ladder wobbled with her. “I’ll let you know when I get down.”

“How on earth would they get the King up there?” Henrietta’s voice was sharp with nerves. “Perhaps you’d best just come down. We can send one of the men up later. They like climbing things.”

“A very sensible suggestion. Allow me to second that, Lady Charlotte.”

Dizzily, Charlotte clung to the ladder, understanding for the first time how the other man had come to fall as a new voice intruded into their conversation, nearly startling her from her precarious perch.

It was a cultivated voice, polished and amused, with just the slightest hint of a foreign accent. A French accent, to be precise.

Henrietta made a noise of protest that was muffled mid-squeak. There was a scuffling noise, which Charlotte deduced had something to do with Henrietta’s slippered feet attempting to do the most harm they possibly could and generally missing their mark.

Bland and unruffled, the Frenchman continued with scarcely a pause. “May I prevail upon you to descend, Lady Charlotte? I shouldn’t like to have to shoot you down.”


The elephant god had taken his mask with him when he left Wycombe.

Robert jumped lightly off the ladder, joining his two colleagues in the narrow anteroom behind the ceremonial chamber. The air smelled cold and dank, with no lingering savor of exotic spices. Damp beaded the rough walls, seeping slowly downwards to the packed earth floor.

Miles regarded the small, rough-hewn chamber with palpable disappointment. “Is this all?”

Not so much as a stray bead had been left to indicate the room’s former function. The braziers and the beaded curtain had been tidied away, thriftily stored for use at the next orgy, along with the miscellany of monks’ robes and the indicia of the elephant god. The only sign of human habitation were the torches in their metal brackets on the walls. Tommy had prudently lit one of the torches. The moonlight might provide adequate light above, but it did nothing for the subterranean regions below.

Robert flexed his shoulders, edgy with energy and anticipation. What more appropriate place to beard a dragon than in its cave? The entire scenario was directly out of one of Charlotte’s story books, the stuff of myth and legend. He was fairly sure he had his lady’s favor already, despite the reservations she had voiced on the boat, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to emerge triumphant with a rescued King to place before her as trophy.

If the King was there.

He had to be, Robert assured himself. There was no other logical place. If the King wasn’t being kept in Medmenham Abbey, that left only the caves and Medmenham’s church, directly above. Of the two, the caves were by far the more defensible, composed as they were of a warren of tunnels and chambers. It was the ideal situation for a small force of men — or even one man — to ward off a would-be rescue committee.

“The main ceremonial chamber is next door,” Robert said in an undertone. “I doubt the King would be kept there.”

Tommy released the torch from its brackets, hefting it high, so that the flaring tip sent orange-red light guttering across the uneven surface of the walls. “Where, then? You’re the nearest we have to a map, Rob.”

Remembering his trek from the main entrance through the labyrinthine passageways, this was not an observation that filled Robert with confidence.

Pretending to an assurance he was far from feeling, he took out his penknife and drew a small square in the dirt. “This is where we are.”

The others followed suit, crouching beside him in the dirt, Tommy’s torch illuminating their dirty and tired faces. The remnants of their formal evening clothes made an incongruous note to the scene, squatting in the dirt of the cave floor by the light of a single, sputtering torch.

Leading off the square, Robert drew a round shape, followed by two wavy lines. “The main chamber is through this one. The ceremonial cavern is separated from the rest of the tunnels by a narrow river, which can only be crossed by boat. The boat carries two or, at most, three.”

Impatiently shaking his hair out of his eyes, Miles looked up from the drawing. “And you believe the King lies on the other side of the river.”

“Almost certainly.” Robert drew another line, leading off from the river. A thick one, this time, to indicate a corridor. “Across the River Styx, a series of small cells have been dug out of the tunnels. Most are secured by their own grilles and equipped with a bed and chamber pot.”

“When you say grilles,” asked Miles, “do you mean with locks?”

Robert nodded.

“Well and truly cells then,” said Tommy soberly. “The perfect place to store an unwilling guest.”

“My thought precisely. The only problem is finding the correct cell before someone else finds us.”

“We’d best get to it then, hadn’t we?” said Tommy, and Robert was reminded of a dozen other instances in which they had ventured forth together to confront a mass of faceless adversaries, charging forward through the thick of powder smoke, shying away from the concatenation of cannons, running and firing, firing and running, horses shot out beneath them, men groaning and dying, adversaries faceless in the smog.

In comparison, this was a stroll in the park, an afternoon’s tea party. But that didn’t mean a stray bullet couldn’t bring one of them down. All it would take would be one man, with the benefit of surprise and a quick trigger finger, one lucky strike, one fortunate ricochet. He had never worried himself about that sort of thing before. Battle was battle, and he knew that he could die as easily as the next man, that a sniper’s rifle could kill just as effectively as a cavalry charge. It was all part of the job and there were no guarantees. He had simply been lucky so far.

But that had been before. How could he climb that ladder and explain to Lady Henrietta that her husband wasn’t coming back? He wasn’t particularly thrilled with the notion of having his lifeless body borne back to Girdings, either. He had other plans for his return, and they had nothing to do with mausoleums.

Robert spared a moment’s gratitude that the women were safely aboveground. It would be ten times worse having to worry about them as well. They might be cold in the deserted church, but at least they would be unmolested.

Robert staggered to his feet, jerkily wiping out the drawing with sole of one shoe. “I go first,” he said, “since I know the way. Tommy, you take the rear. Dorrington — ”

“Understood,” said Miles with a grin that suggested a mind happily free of funereal thoughts. “I take the middle.”

“Once we pass the bronze doors to the river, I want total silence,” Robert said sternly. “No talking, no whispering. We don’t know how sound carries in these caves.”

“And we don’t want to alert anyone to our presence,” agreed Tommy. “It would be deuced unfortunate if they decided to do away with the evidence.”

It would be more than unfortunate. It would precipitate an immediate succession crisis. How was one to explain that the King had been kidnapped and murdered? The country would be in an uproar. And the Prince of Wales, with his dubious political allies, would be on the throne.

Robert grimaced. “I don’t think any of us have any interest in a Medmenham ministry.”

One by one, they ventured through the square-cut hole in the wall, lowering themselves from the altar to the ground. As Robert had suspected, the circular cavern was deserted, the great lamp hanging light-less from the arched roof. The bronze doors were shut.

With a finger to his lips to indicate silence, Robert put his shoulders to the door on the right-hand side, where Dionysus reveled with his maenads in a perpetual debauch. The door resisted slightly and then gave, moving open by inches onto total darkness.

The darkness was pregnant with the whisper of the water as it slapped and slithered against the banks, like a nest of serpents stretching. The silver chain chimed softly as the boat rocked in its moorings, like a spectral bell, tolling a mythical hero to his death. And through it all, Robert seemed to hear the hiss and whisper of drowned voices, batting against the banks, fighting the waves for release.

Kicking himself for supernatural fancy, Robert motioned peremptorily behind him for Tommy to bring the torch. It was a chancy thing, potentially signaling their presence to the enemy, but still less of a liability than plunging headfirst into the river. Into that chorus of drowned voices, a nasty voice in the back of his head provided, and he squished it.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark waters. It was simply common sense. If he recalled correctly, there were enough twists and bends in the tunnels that their light would only be visible to someone standing directly on the other bank. Or a creature within the water. It would be like Medmenham to stock his subterranean river with his own private sea serpent.