‘I think it might be a little obvious where we’ve gone, dear,’ she said with a giggle. ‘And do please call me Georgie. My own servants can call me “my lady”, but I think I could stand to be on more familiar terms with the wonderful woman who rescued me.’
‘Righto, my lady,’ I said automatically. We both laughed and then set about working out the mechanics of our escape.
By lifting the bottom sash Lady Bickle was able to sit on the sill, and from there she was able to shuffle to one side where a drainpipe offered her the opportunity to clamber upwards. To my absolute astonishment, she scrambled up the wall like a seasoned mountaineer, going hand-over-hand up the pipe and with her expensive boots finding tiny toeholds in the uneven stone wall. She reached the roof and clung to the chimney so that she could lean down and talk to me.
‘Easy as pie,’ she said. ‘Come on, Flo.’
I gaped.
‘You look like a codfish, dear,’ she said. ‘I've one a little mountaineering in my time, that's all. Nothing to it. Hurry, or they’ll be on to us.’
With a fair amount of fiddling and a good quantity of very unladylike swearing I was able to pull the shutters closed behind me and tried my best to copy her skillful scramble up the drainpipe. As I neared the top I saw a delicate hand reaching down towards me so I grabbed it and allowed her to pull me up.
‘Now what?’ she said, obviously exhilarated.
‘Now we head that way,’ I said, nodding towards the lower roofs farther down the street, ‘and look for a way down. We need to–’
The sound of the gunshot was shockingly loud and I flinched away from the chimney.
‘We need to get moving, that’s what we need to do,’ said Lady Bickle and led the way up to the ridge of the roof and down the other side. As we scrambled along I could hear the sounds of shouting from the street and the clanking of boots and hands on the drainpipe as one of our captors gave chase.
We had a good head start on him and had reached the end of the block before there was any actual sign of him. There was a gap between the two buildings and we hesitated as we contemplated the jump.
‘If we can get onto that roof,’ said Lady Bickle, ‘we might be able to smash our way through that skylight and get down to the street that way.’
‘It’s better than staying here to be shot at,’ I said, and just at that moment, another shot rang out and I heard the whizzing ping of the bullet as it scudded off the roof tiles beside us.
‘I’ll go first,’ she said. ‘Just do as I do and you’ll be fine.’
She took a couple of steps back and then ran towards the edge of the roof, launching herself across the gap and landing, catlike, on the adjacent roof below. I was less confident, but it was a straightforward jump and I’d done much more dangerous things in my time. I took my run-up and kicked off from the edge of the roof.
Years of training and practice in the Chinese arts had given me an excellent sense of balance and I landed on the lower roof with a grace and elegance that would have made Chen Ping Bo proud, even though I do say so myself. Sadly, I had never thought to train the soles of my boots and, despite the beauty of my landing, they had other ideas about what ought to happen next. A smooth leather sole and a slate roof were never destined to be firm friends, and I immediately began sliding down the steeply gabled roof towards the back of the building.
I scrabbled to grasp the gutter as I shot past but only succeeded in slowing, not completely arresting, my fall. The last thing I remember is the sound of Lady Bickle desperately shouting my name, interrupted by the shrill blast of a police whistle.
I awoke, groggy, befuddled, and in some considerable pain in an unfamiliar, but blissfully comfortable, bed. This wasn’t at all what I had anticipated. As I had fallen, part of me had doubted ever waking up at all, but even the optimist within had imagined coming to on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance while a concerned attendant tried to reassure me that everything would be all right. A feather bed in a high-ceilinged Regency bedroom hadn’t featured in even the most outrageously positive possibilities.
The door opened and a familiar face peered round it into the room.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘How wonderful. How are you feeling, pet?’
‘I feel mildly doolally, my lady,’ I croaked. ‘And it’s surprisingly difficult to move my left leg.’
‘That’s what you get for going out drinking with the inspector. It’s that or falling from a roof and then being given large doses of morphine for the pain.’
‘Is the leg broken?’ I asked.
‘In two places,’ she said. ‘You don’t do things by halves, do you?’
‘I try always to do a thorough job, my lady,’ I said.
‘It’s only thanks to the efforts of a rather splendid apple tree growing in the back yard of that house that you survived at all; it broke your fall.’
‘We must write and thank it,’ I said, smiling weakly.
‘And drink a toast to it in cider. Or would that be in bad taste, do you think, to be drinking the fruit of one of its relatives? No matter. The main thing is that you’re alive and well and on the mend.’
I patted my leg through the bedclothes and found that it was encased in plaster all the way up to my thigh.
‘How long will I be like this?’ I said.
‘Five or six weeks according to the quack. It might slow you down a bit.’
‘I’m sure I’ll manage. How long have I been here? What happened at the house? Is Lady Bickle all right? And what about Inspector Sunderland?’
She laughed. ‘You've been here almost two days; we found you the day before last. Georgie Bickle is right as ninepence and sings your praises constantly. And the inspector is well on the mend. Someone in the street in Bedminster saw what happened when Ehrlichmann and his two thugs attacked you, and managed to get a doctor to the inspector before it was too late.’
‘Ehrlichmann?’ I said, struggling to sit up. Günther Ehrlichmann had killed Lady Hardcastle’s husband in China eleven years ago, and had returned from hiding last year to try to finish the job by killing the both of us as well. He had escaped our trap, leaving Lady Hardcastle with the bullet wound from which she was still recovering. We had presumed he had fled home to Germany, but clearly he was back in England again.
‘Or Gerber or whatever his stupid name is,’ she said dismissively. ‘He’s been responsible for the majority of the unpleasantness, yes.’
‘But the inspector is all right?’
‘Fragile, but on the mend,’ she said reassuringly. ‘By the time I came to look for you both, he’d been whisked off to the BRI, but I was able to speak to him in the morning. He was able to tell us what had happened and to make sure everyone was on the lookout for you.’
‘Thank goodness it wasn’t worse.’
‘He’ll have a nasty scar and some nightmares, but he’ll be right as rain in no time. And then, you clever girl, you managed to get yourself and Georgie Bickle out of the window. She’s frightfully impressed by you, you know. Thinks you should patent your corset escape kit.’
I laughed.