“Yer late,” the new villain barked his words—shooting spittle onto the vest of her traveling companion. “Startin’ to think ya weren’t comin’. Thought we were in the suds.”
“Hey now, Morley, calm yerself down, relax and help me get this here baggage inta the barn.”
Barn? Did the villain say barn?
“What’cha tie up ’er feet for, Les? I’m not carryin’ ’er.”
“Lazy sot. Help me get her down, an’ I’ll do the rest.” And so saying, Les shoved Lydia’s feet out the door toward Morley and yanked her off the seat.
Within the confines of a coach, the distance to the floor is not excessive; however, as the move was sudden and unexpected, Lydia did not have time to prepare. Though how she could have been ready, she could not conceive. As it was, she connected with the floor in a bruising jolt. That pain had barely subsided when Les grabbed her shoulders and shoved her out the door, banging her elbows and then her shoulders against the sharp edges of the jamb. The process was obviously not a practiced maneuver.
Gritting her teeth, Lydia neither helped nor hindered; she observed and tried to plan an escape. Her resolve to wait it out—to see which way the wind blew—crumbled when lewd remarks about her skirts riding up proved to be too much for her delicate sensibilities. Writhing like a serpent, Lydia kicked out at Morley, catching him on the chin. The move proved to be very ill-considered. The nasty piece of work lost his grip, and her feet slammed to the ground. Les, juggling the whole of her weight, slipped and banged her head against the step.
In that instant, Lydia lost her hold on consciousness.
Chapter 8
In which words such as rats, cell, and rapid descent are strangely pertinent
Lydia was brought back to awareness by an odd sensation. A collection of pins ran up her leg, stopping somewhere about her hip. There was a slight weight associated with these pins, and her skirts shifted. It was almost as if a mouse were sitting on her.… But that was absolutely absurd.
Opening her eyes, expecting to see a cheerful blue-and-white coverlet, Lydia was momentarily confused to discover that she was lying on her side with her face mushed into straw … in a very dimly lit space that reeked of an unpleasant earthy odor. It made no sense until she suddenly recalled her abduction and the possibility of a mouse on her hip was no longer absurd.
With a gasp, Lydia sat up in a dizzy stupor and came perilously close to issuing a most undignified scream. Had her training at Miss Melvina’s Finishing School for Young Ladies been anything but exemplary, she might have done so, for the creature was not a mouse; it was a rat.
Lydia had nothing against rodents, but they were not her favorite animal, and she much preferred them in the stables or running through a cornfield—away from her. Certainly not sitting on her person. Fortunately, the process of sitting up served to dislodge the creature from its perch, and it scrambled across the room and disappeared through a hole at the base of the wall.
Grateful that there were no witnesses to her temporary loss of poise, Lydia looked around her enclosure and frowned. Perhaps her gratitude was misplaced; being alone was not a boon in this situation. A person could be worked upon, but this emptiness was not advantageous—certainly not to her.
The little room … stall, no, she would call it a cell, for it felt like a prison—not that she had ever had occasion to visit a prison, but it was what she imagined a jail cell to look like. This cell was long and narrow, the floor was covered with a less-than-generous helping of straw, and there was no window. Weak blades of light shone through the cracks and splits of the old wooden walls, where most of the chinking was gone. There was a door—Lydia pushed on it, shook the handle, and changed her description. There was a locked door. There was also a chamber pot, the remnants of her gloves, and the trussing ropes. Not a lengthy inventory.
Pressing her ear to the door, Lydia could hear a soft murmur of conversation. It would seem that the villains were nearby—though the volume of the chortling was muffled, giving the impression that the bounders were not close. Turning her attention to the far wall, Lydia ran her hands across the wood, looking for a board loose enough to pull off—to no avail. Squinting through one of the larger cracks, Lydia tried to see beyond her confines, but brambles and dense shrubbery prevented a long view. Still, she could see the sky; there was a hint of pink. The sun was going down? Already?
Lydia had to have been unconscious for quite a while. She lifted her hand and gingerly touched the goose egg on the side of her head. It was overly tender and the likely cause of the headache that had taken up residence behind her ear. A cool cloth at the base of her neck would have provided some relief, but she was certain that neither Les nor Morley would be accommodating.
Lydia frowned and settled back down on the straw to think. Not as easy a process as it might seem; her brain was decidedly foggy. After a great deal of concentration, she realized there was one other person to consider: the coachman. Was he friend or foe? Jailer or prisoner … or had he been pushed from his perch?
Staring at the hole where the rat had disappeared, Lydia wondered if the coachman—what did he say his name was—Mr. Boggs, no, it was longer … Mr. Brigmond … no, Mr. Burgstaller. Yes, Mr. Burgstaller. She wondered if Mr. Burgstaller was next door—locked in and feeling overwhelmed by the day’s events.
Kneeling, Lydia tried to look through the opening in which the rat had disappeared. She was forced to lie down before she could get her eyes low enough to see beyond the wooden barrier. Pausing to allow the dizziness to pass, Lydia breathed deeply through her nose and then squinted through the hole. The room on the other side was similar to the one she occupied, in size and condition. However, it was empty. No straw, no chamber pot, and no Mr. Burgstaller.
Lydia was about to rise when she noticed a great deal of nothing beside the door. In fact, it seemed to be a ribbon of dark, almost as if the door opened into an even darker room.
This presented a possibility. Several plans of escape swamped Lydia’s mind in a cascade of “what ifs.” Still, all was moot until she was in the room next door.
Sitting up cross-legged—her mother would be mortified—Lydia yanked on a board above the rat hole. A horrible and metallic scream echoed through her cell, and Lydia stopped. She held her breath and waited.
No footsteps. No shouting. No reaction.