“Ye’ve come out withoot yer cloak, lass. Yer cold as death.” Iona stripped off her cloak and slung it around Ravenna’s shoulders.
“Mr. Anders told us of your discovery,” Sir Beverley said. “The prince sent for the guard that the groom spoke with. He is missing.”
Iona grasped her fingers. “We’ll find them,” she said. “We’ll find them an’ it’ll be well, lass. Ye’ll see.”
TORCHES WERE LIT and servants and gentlemen bundled into woolens and tromped into the night to search. The clouds that blocked the moon now released their heavy contents, washing the snow into deep puddles and soaking Ravenna as she stood at the gate with Iona and Cecilia and waited.
“I should have gone.” She could not bear being useless.
“The prince forbade it,” Cecilia said. “The searchers mustn’t feel they need to protect ladies while they are searching.”
“I’m not a lady,” she whispered.
“There are thirty men looking for them, Miss Caulfield. They will find them.”
“But I was the last to see him.”
“They’ll search where ye’ve said. They’ll find them.” Iona wrapped her arm around Ravenna’s waist and hugged her close.
The torches returned in pairs and trios, faces visible in the circle of their glow, shimmery with rain and grim. When the final pair of guards returned with Sir Beverley, who had climbed to the hermit’s refuge, his lips were purple and his eyes grave.
“We will find them tomorrow, my dear,” he said.
But later, as icy rain clattered against the windowpane in her bedchamber, Ravenna huddled against the glass wishing she had the eyes of a wolf to see through the dark and a wolf’s strength to hunt through the night. Tomorrow would not be soon enough.
Chapter 17
Lo, What Light
Consciousness returned to Vitor with the awareness that he preferred to wake to a mongrel’s whine than to bone-chilling cold and throbbing pain in his head. Body not quite prone, his face was pressed against a hard surface, his arm pinned at an angle beneath him. He shifted, and agony exploded across his shoulders. His groan sounded like a wounded animal’s.
“Awake finally, brother?” came a murmur beside him. “Featherweight.”
“Damn you.” He lifted his free arm and touched the back of his head. He remembered the blow that had knocked him off Ashdod, yet felt only fiery tenderness.
“Are you broken or bleeding?” Wesley asked diffidently.
Vitor cracked open his eyes to make out his brother beside him in murky shadow. “Only bruised,” he replied.
“Then damn you,” Wesley said.
The chamber was tiny and round, less than three yards in diameter, void of windows and door, and tapering outward as the walls climbed. There was no visible ceiling, only hazy gray.
“Where are we?”
“An empty ice cellar, I believe. But that may be the loss of blood speaking.”
“Were you shot?”
“In the arm. I have managed to stanch the bleeding, and the cold assists in slowing the flow. But I have lost the use of it.”
Testing the strength of the arm beneath him, Vitor pushed up and smothered another groan. The cold burrowed into the pain and drove it deeper. But none of his bones was broken.
“The shot was meant for you,” Wesley mumbled.
“How do you know?”
“He was pointing the pistol at you.”
Wesley had stepped between him and the shooter?
Vitor climbed to his feet and ran his hands over the wall. The earth was packed hard and smooth, without even notches where a ladder might fit. Perhaps the cellar was yet unfinished. If it belonged to the chateau it would be within Chevriot’s walls. If it belonged to the village it could be farther away.
“How deep is the—”
“Twenty feet. Perhaps more. Even if I were able to stand we could not climb out.”
“How did he carry us down here?”
“There was no carrying. Rather, tossing. Rolling, really, as the walls are slanted. And he was not he, but they. Two of them.”
The lying guard he had assigned to Ravenna’s protection and perhaps the man she had found with Whitebarrow’s daughter.
“How long have you been conscious?”
“I never lost consciousness entirely. Huzzah for my hearty constitution,” Wesley said dryly. “Of course, I was not bashed in the skull with a branch rigged like a catapult. And you broke my fall into this hellhole. Thank heaven for small blessings. See, little brother? I told you a life of monastic discipline would be to no avail. All that tedious prayer yet you cannot even summon a saint to rescue you from assassins.”
“How long?” he repeated.
“It wanted but a quarter hour to carry us here on the back of your horse. Since then it has been perhaps six, seven hours. The light has been fading swiftly this hour. Soon we will be in darkness.”
Seven hours. The guests at the castle would be gathering for dinner.
“Did they take my horse?”
“They argued about it for some time. In the end they decided he was too fine to pass off as their rightful property and would only bring them trouble on the road. They sent him off. It sits right with me that the knaves know their worth is less than a gentleman’s mount.”
Ashdod would have returned to the castle stable hours ago, his arrival alerting the grooms. Vitor breathed deeply through bruised ribs, rubbed his hands over his face, and discovered the knuckles of one hand battered and sticky. He could not bandage it. The cellar was too cold for him to use his neck cloth for anything but warmth. He leaned back against the wall, taking care to keep his head bent.
She would wonder at his absence. She would look for him in the drawing room and be piqued when he did not appear. Would she mention his absence to another guest, Lady Iona, or Sebastiao? Would her skittish heart lead her to the wrong conclusion or would she trust in him and sound the alarm?
Hours earlier on the mountainside, as the sun had shone through bare branches, he had stood amidst the quiet and seen her in every silvery ray and glittering drop of ice. She was astoundingly confident, brazen even, and strong-willed. But at moments she became that creature he had seen on the turret stairs: wary and uncertain and ready to flee.
“Why did you follow her to the stable?” he said into the cold silence.
“I did not follow her. I came upon her entirely by chance and decided to take advantage of the opportunity.”
No monastic training had prepared Vitor for the rage that seized him now. “With a bottle of wine and two glasses?”
“I never drink alone.”
“A sprained ankle and shot in the arm will be as nothing when I am through with you, Wesley. I will break your legs. Both of them. You know I will do it. I will break every bone in them and you will never walk again.”
His brother was silent for a long moment.
“I did follow her. I sought an opportunity to question her about her intentions toward you.”
Vitor snapped his head around to stare at his brother in the gathering dark.
“I have only your best interests at heart, Vitor. She is nobody, the orphaned daughter of God knows whom. Her sister is a duchess, true. But only months ago rumor in town had it that their mother was a plantation whore in the West Indies and that Lycombe’s new duchess had not fallen far from that tree.” He said it plainly, as though reporting on a horse race.
“Only fools listen to rumor.”
“Perhaps. But the hue of Miss Caulfield’s cheeks and hair suggest that in this case rumor is not far from truth. Has it not occurred to you that she could be the daughter of a less-than-pure union between master and slave?”