On the other side of the tower, Isaac had unfurled his flags. She was startled to see him step closer to the fire and wave his flags through the flames. In a moment, the ends of both flags were on fire! Then he turned and walked to a corner of the tower facing the shore—and the Queen’s yacht. He raised both flags and began moving them from one position to another, sending a message: Danger? Retreat? She had no idea what he was signaling.
What would it look like, from the yacht below? The sky had grown darker. Against it, the beacon would flame brightly, and beside it, the fiery flags would dance the message that there was danger here: retreat, retreat, retreat they seemed to say.
After repeating the same motions several times, Isaac turned and threw the flags into the fire—they were almost completely burned to the sticks. In another moment, the sticks themselves would have been consumed.
He looked at her, firelight dancing over his face, which was covered with sweat from the heat of the flags, despite the drizzling rain. “We’ve done what we can do.” He was not grinning now. His dark eyes were serious, and the set of his jaws was grim. Beatrice joined him at the battlements that faced the shore. She could feel the heat of the fire on her back.
Had they done enough? They stood together at the top of the tower, looking down at the yacht, which continued its steady movement toward the harbor. In one corner of the tower, Diana paced back and forth. “It didn’t work,” she said.
For an agonizing minute, and then another, nothing happened. Then, the yacht began to turn. Slowly, it turned away from the entrance to the harbor, away from St. Michael’s Mount, away from danger—toward the safety of the great gray sea.
“Grazie a Dio,” said Beatrice.
“I’ll go tell them,” said Diana. “At least they won’t have to fight Queen Tera in the chapel!” She opened the trapdoor and disappeared down it. Beatrice could hear her clattering down the stairs.
“We did it, Mr. Mandelbaum,” she said.
“We did indeed, Miss Rappaccini,” he replied, grinning and wiping sweat from his forehead with a damp handkerchief. “I understand Miss Jekyll is down below. Shall we go help her?”
Beatrice nodded. This day was not over yet, but at least they had done one thing right—they had saved the Queen.
CATHERINE: You were heroic in the tower, Diana. It was you and Beatrice who saved Queen Victoria. Oh, come on, I said I was sorry.…
Mrs. Raymond pointed one finger at Mary. Lightning crackled from it, but reached only halfway across the distance between them before it sputtered and went out. She pointed her finger again, but with the speed of a puma, Catherine pulled the silver mirror out of Mary’s left pocket, leaped forward, and held it in front of her. This time the lightning bolt was stronger. It hit the mirror squarely in the center. The mirror shattered, but the bolt ricocheted off and struck an elaborately gilded eighteenth-century clock on a marble side table. Mary cried out. There was blood on her hands—some pieces of the mirror had hit her.
“Use your gun, Helen!” shouted Margaret Trelawny. “I can’t reach mine.” She was still kneeling by Tera, who appeared to be unconscious, with both hands on the wounded shoulder of the Egyptian queen.
Justine pulled the bottles of pepper spray out of her pockets. She held them in front of her and advanced toward Mrs. Raymond.Catherine pulled out her pistol. If she could shoot Mrs. Raymond, this fight would be over, more easily than they had anticipated. Unlike Mary, she would not bother trying for the shoulder. If she killed Mrs. Raymond, so be it.
For a moment, Mrs. Raymond simply looked at them—Catherine advancing with the mirror in one hand and a pistol in the other, Justine with the bottles of pepper spray. Then she raised both her arms. Suddenly, a gray fog rose from the floor. It roiled around their legs, then waist high, then at the height of Catherine’s chest. In a moment, she could not see anything.
“Justine!” she called. “Where are you?”
“I am here.” That was Justine’s voice. And Catherine could smell her—she smelled like lavender, probably from Mrs. Russell’s dress. She reached out—her hands found long, slender ones. Yes, this was Justine, although Catherine could barely see her face in the fog.
“Where is Mary?” she asked.
“I do not know.” Justine looked frantically around, but there was no around to look at—only fog.
Gray fog everywhere. Catherine took an experimental step to see if she could feel anything in her immediate vicinity and stumbled over a Chippendale side chair with blue upholstery. So at least they were still in the blue drawing room!
“What now?” she asked Justine.
“I think it’s starting to dissipate,” said the Giantess from her vantage point. Yes, the fog around Catherine’s head looked lighter, although her body was still lost in it. But in a few moments, that too started to blow off, until the room was at it had been. The fog was gone. So were Queen Tera, Margaret Trelawny, Mrs. Raymond, and Mary Jekyll.
DIANA: I can’t believe you let them take my sister.
CATHERINE: Well, we certainly didn’t mean to! It just happened.
DIANA: I was talking to Justine, not you. I’m never talking to you again.
Alice put her finger up to the keyhole. She concentrated as hard as she could. A small bolt of lightning leaped out of her finger and into the lock. She pulled at the door. It did not open.
“I’m not strong enough,” she said.
“But you’re getting stronger,” said Sherlock Holmes, who was sitting on the steps just below her. “Look at how far you’ve come since last night. Apparently, those electrical impulses are a physical phenomenon controlled by your brain. The more you practice creating them, the easier it will become. There’s no reason you cannot do what Tera can, with enough time and practice.
“But there isn’t enough time.” Discouraged, she sat down on the step beside him. “They’re kidnapping the Queen today, and we’re stuck in here. We’re never going to get out of here or see our friends again.”
“We most certainly will,” he said. “Don’t you trust me, Alice?”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Well, you are Sherlock Holmes.”
He threw back his head and laughed. He must be feeling better—this was the strongest she had seen him since she had found him drugged at the house in Soho. “Yes, you’re right. I am, aren’t I? Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, immortalized by Dr. Watson in The Strand, a shilling an issue, promises you that we will get out of here. And I promise as well. Come, let’s have something to eat, and then get some rest. You need to build up your strength. I believe in you, and I know that you or I, or the both of us, will find a way out of this dungeon.”
Alice nodded and squeezed his hand. Ever since she had first met him, she had been afraid of Mr. Holmes. Now, she wondered why. Once you got to know him, he was not so very fearsome after all.
ALICE: Well, he is still a little fearsome.
DIANA: Bollocks.
It was almost dark by the time Catherine, Beatrice, Justine, and Diana stepped off the small fishing boat piloted by Isaac Mandelbaum and his two compatriots, who had not given their names. They were both ordinary-looking young men who could have passed for bank clerks, but Catherine suspected that they belonged to an organization more secretive than even the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, as the Bank of England was called by those who worked in her mysterious halls.