“I brought hot water bottles in case we needed to do some surveillance at night.”
“Oh?” He turned toward her and grinned. “Did you make any new hot water bottle cozies?”
Her Christmas present to him had been a pair of rather spectacular hot water bottle cozies that she’d knitted herself. “Yes, I was so taken with the idea of sending you smut in the post that I knitted two cozies to look like stamped envelopes.”
He bent over laughing. She, too, emitted a smile.
The silence that followed was lovely, the silence of flowers blooming.
He sighed when he broke the silence. “I saw Bancroft today.”
“Oh?”
He gave an account of what he’d learned from his brother. “You wondered earlier whether Moriarty might have come to England for some other purpose, and sought you only incidentally. I think he would have crossed the Channel to hunt Madame Desrosiers.”
Charlotte played with his collar, enjoying the slight scratchiness of the wool. “What do you think of Lord Bancroft’s claim that I am in no danger from Moriarty because Lord Remington considers me an asset to the Crown?”
His lips thinned. “I doubt Bancroft feels much good will toward you. If he’d warned me in the starkest terms about your perils, then he might have been exaggerating to make me worry. But for him to all but dismiss the danger outright? I am not assured.”
Neither was she.
She leaned in and kissed him on his jaw. “Go to bed. It will be a long night for you.”
* * *
Paris. Spring. Birds sang, children laughed, sunlight danced on the clear water of the fountain. In the background, the Palais du Louvre soared, all slate roofs and glistening windows.
The broad walking path teemed with black top hats and pastel parasols. Mrs. Watson and Penelope walked arm in arm, trailing behind Miss Charlotte and Lord Ingram, also walking arm in arm. The sight reminded Mrs. Watson that Penelope didn’t yet know of the latest development between these two. She turned toward her niece, planning to surprise the girl.
But romance appeared to be the furthest thing from Penelope’s mind. “A real human skull in the library?” she said, her face alive with interest. “I should like that. It would make for an excellent addition to my bookshelf.”
Mrs. Watson, thwarted, called out to the new lovers. “My dears, what are you talking about?”
Surely, those two must be discoursing on their passionate desire for each other, long denied and now, at last consummated.
Miss Charlotte and Lord Ingram turned around, both looking grave.
“It’s the Battle of Paris,” declared he. “I can hear the artillery in the suburbs. The Coalition army has begun their attack.”
Miss Charlotte shook her head. “No, we are in the Paris Commune. The bombardment is in the city itself; cannons have been moved to Montmartre.”
They looked to Penelope and said in unison, “What do you think, Miss Redmayne?”
Penelope bowed her head and listened. Mrs. Watson, too, was beginning to hear something. A crack. A boom. The placid water of the fountain shuddered. People ran, shouting to one another.
“It is the Paris Commune,” said Penelope. “But it’s not the cannons on Montmartre we are hearing. The fighting is close by, right outside the Louvre. They are defending the barricade on the Rue de Rivoli!”
As if to punctuate her statement, another loud crack.
Mrs. Watson opened her eyes, groggy and confused. She was in a small bedroom. A taper had been lit. Miss Charlotte, standing by the side of the bed, her pantalets and petticoats already on, was stepping into her skirt.
“Fireworks are going off outside,” she said. “I’m going to take a look.”
“Fireworks?” croaked Mrs. Watson.
So she hadn’t been dreaming—at least not about the noises. “I’ll come, too.”
Miss Charlotte lit another taper and said, “I’ll have a lantern ready for you.”
Mrs. Watson dressed quickly. When she entered the empty parlor, there was indeed a lit lantern waiting for her. She picked it up and opened the front door.
A gale nearly shoved her backward. Candles in the parlor sputtered to nothing, plunging it into darkness. She shouldered her way out. A few steps away, Lord Ingram, clad in a mackintosh even though it wasn’t raining yet, ran back and helped her pull the door shut.
“Miss Charlotte is further ahead,” he told her.
Theirs was the eastmost dwelling in this cluster of four cottages, closest to the sea—and the eastern wall. The path on which they walked led in a west-northwest direction and went past the nearest cottage.
Something made Mrs. Watson look up. The windows of the cottage were dark, but she had the uncomfortable sense that someone was looking at her.
“When I was waiting for you I saw a curtain move slightly in that cottage,” murmured Lord Ingram.
On the tail of his words, a firework shot up with a boom and a whistle, exploding almost directly overhead in a shower of green-and-gold sparks.
They ran forward. At the center of the compound, an open space ran east to west—the central carriage path dating from the pre-wall years, when the front entrance was to the east. After the construction of the walls, with the new gate in the west wall, and the stable and carriage house immediately in the southwest corner, there was no more carriage traffic on the former path, and it grew into a grassy tract.
Miss Charlotte stood on the grass, her head slightly raised, her person still. Before Mrs. Watson could speak to her, another firework burst, letting loose a cascade of bright red trails.
“The fireworks are being released beyond the north wall. Will you go take a look, my lord?” she asked.
Mrs. Watson’s stomach tightened. They needed to know what was going on, but what if this was a plot to isolate Miss Charlotte and herself?
Lord Ingram looked at them. “You have your weapons, ladies?”
Miss Charlotte nodded. Mrs. Watson’s hand went to the pocket of her skirt, where she had a derringer. She also shifted her left foot, feeling the outline of the pistol stuck into her boot.
“Yes,” she said hoarsely.
“Then be careful.”
“You, too,” said Miss Charlotte.
Their knight ran off, the light from his lantern skidding fast across the ground. Mrs. Watson worried for a moment over how he was going to get out—Mr. Peters had used keys to open padlocks that kept several heavy bolts in place. But as he reached the gate, one more firework shot skyward, its golden combustion illuminating two people coming down the wall from ladders to either side of the entrance.
It was too far for Mrs. Watson to make out their faces, but they seemed to be a man and a woman. The woman let the man and Lord Ingram out from the gate, closed it, and then again climbed up to the ramparts.
Miss Charlotte was already walking. “That might be the same woman we saw on the wall in the afternoon, when we were on the boat,” she murmured.
Mrs. Watson caught up to her and looked behind herself. To one side, the cottage nearest their own was still pitch-dark. To the other side, across a dormant garden bed—a flower garden, not a vegetable garden—figures emerged from houses in Miss Fairfield’s cluster.
Miss Charlotte crossed the old carriage path. Mrs. Watson had thought they would follow that path to the gate in Lord Ingram’s wake, but they were now north of it, skirting the edge of the kitchen garden. Were they headed for the north wall instead?