“The captain,” I began, but she jerked her head to the side and I saw, just peeping out from behind one of the trunks, a pair of booted legs.
“Have you killed him?” I asked.
“Not yet. He is merely unconscious. He bled a lot,” she added ruefully. “I hit him in the head and it has made a mess. I will have to clean that up and I do not like a mess.”
I opened my mouth and the gun in her hand twitched towards Stoker. “Miss Speedwell, I told you not to attempt it. I will not shoot you. I will shoot Mr. Templeton-Vane instead.”
She had, unerringly, found my Achilles’ heel. The fact that Stoker had very recently been shot weighed on my conscience. It was the latest in a long line of such misadventures, but it had been the most serious—far too serious to permit a repeat performance. I would take chances with my life, but not his. I undressed swiftly, removing the corset with its slender blade and the knife from my boot as well as the minuten neatly embedded in my cuffs. When I had finished, I stood, shivering in my chemise and underdrawers.
“Now you,” she told Stoker.
“I would rather not,” he said, flushing to the tips of his ears.
“I will not be delayed,” the baroness told him, gesturing with the revolver. “Do as you are told.”
Still he hesitated, and suddenly I understood the reason for his reluctance. “Oh, Stoker,” I murmured. “How could you?”
“I was in a hurry,” he muttered. “I wanted to get to my spoonbill.”
His blush deepened as he looked to our captor. “You see, Baroness, I received a rather important trophy—a roseate spoonbill, Platalea ajaja—”
“The baroness does not care about the Latin,” I interrupted.
He carried on as if I had not spoken. “And in my eagerness to examine the bird, I am afraid I dressed in haste this morning and am only wearing trousers.”
“Then you are going to be very cold,” she said. The revolver jerked again. “Disrobe.”
He did as she said, pulling off his coat and shirt and dropping them on top of his boots. He hesitated at the buttons of his trousers, then unfastened them, stepping out of the garment and standing mother naked before her.
“Thank you both for being so obliging,” she said. “Now, open that trunk,” she instructed, pointing with the barrel of her pistol to an enormous iron-banded affair. Stoker threw back the lid. “You will find rope inside. Tie your companion,” she instructed. He did so, knotting the ropes as loosely as he dared around my wrists. “Put your arms about his neck,” she told me. I obliged her, looping my bound arms over his head in a parody of an embrace.
“Good,” she pronounced. “Get into the trunk.”
It seemed a rather snug fit and was awkward to maneuver, arranged as we were with my arms around Stoker.
“Mr. Templeton-Vane on the bottom,” she said. Stoker settled himself, drawing me down on top of him. He settled me as gently as he could, curving his body around mine with such innate sweetness, I might have wept under other circumstances.
It was a tidy little conundrum, I reflected. And the baroness had done an admirable job of rendering it just difficult enough for us to maneuver. But she would have to put the revolver down in order to strap the trunk closed, I decided, and that was when I would strike, levering my legs up and smashing them into the lid, forcing it backwards and into her.
But the baroness anticipated this. She gave me a thin smile as she came near, bending over us. “Good night, children.” She raised her hand, the butt of the pistol gripped tightly in her palm. She brought it down swiftly against Stoker’s temple. He gave a single sigh as he slid into unconsciousness, and I heard a roar of outrage—my own, I realized—just as her hand rose for the second blow.
And then a black curtain descended, blotting out the light.
CHAPTER
27
I struggled awake slowly, so slowly, as if I were swimming through treacle. Every bit of progress towards consciousness was a battle, and my senses returned not all together but one at a time. First was smell. Blood and salt and oil, I thought as my awareness was revived. There was a sense of cold, such perishing cold that I thought I would never be warm again, and the air in the trunk, close and damp, smelt of the sea.
I could hear the steady beating of waves, the rhythmic slap of water against an iron hull. We were seaborne, then, I realized dazedly. Somehow the baroness had contrived to have our trunk conveyed onto a boat of some sort. But where were we bound? And what did she mean to do with us when we arrived?
I had no sense of the passage of time, no way to judge how long we had been held in our makeshift prison. She had taken the precaution of tying a piece of fabric over my mouth, and Stoker’s as well, I had no doubt. It was an easy enough matter to scrape it loose by means of twisting my head. (In my experience, abductors never will tie gags tightly enough. It is a skill more of them ought to practice.) It hung loose around my neck, unpleasantly damp from having been in my mouth for some time.
There was no light, no indication of day or night, so I assessed my own condition for clues. I was mildly hungry and experiencing only a faint inclination to attend to the needs of Nature, so we could not have been aboard for too long, I decided. My hands were still bound, which I did not like at all, but I found this much more tolerable than the gag had been.
I flexed my feet and immediately rammed my toes against Stoker’s legs, causing him to groan. “Stoker, are you awake?”
For a long, terrible moment, there was no reply save silence. Then, like a bear rousing itself from hibernation, came a series of snuffles and grunts and I realized he was freeing himself of his gag.
“Where in the name of seven hells are we?” he demanded.
“At sea,” I told him.
“I deduced that,” he replied with considerable froideur. I decided to overlook his sulkiness.
“There is no call to be in a temper,” I said. “Just because we have been abducted. Again.”
“I think there is every call to be in a temper,” he returned. “This is precisely the sort of predicament I was trying to avoid.”
“I certainly hope you do not mean to suggest this is my fault,” I began.
“Suggest? No, I am stating it outright,” he told me. “I am saying it plainly. If you like, I will have it printed on the front page of the Daily Harbinger or spelt out in electric lights in Piccadilly Circus or tattooed on my backside—which, I would like to remind you, is in fact naked at this moment.”
“I think that is a trifle unfair,” I said, attempting to conceal my sense of injury.
“Unfair? Veronica, what is unfair is that yet again an attempt has been made upon our lives, one that may yet succeed,” he said in real bitterness.