The Frenchman pulled a pistol from his waistband and pressed the muzzle against the girl’s temple. “Only, make certain you have the right tomb this time, ma petite. No more games, hmm?”
Jenny Davie froze, the moist wind curling the honey-colored hair around her fine-boned face and flattening the skirts of her ragged dress against her legs. Unlike the two men, who were muffled in greatcoats and hats, she was bareheaded, her arms covered only by the thin stuff of her dress and wrapped across her chest for warmth. She stared back at the Frenchman, as if evaluating the seriousness of his threat. She must have decided he meant it, because she jerked her head toward a tomb that lay closer to the long wall of the church’s nave. “I think maybe I made a mistake and it’s over there.”
The Frenchman grunted.
She led them to a tomb so old the weathered, moss-covered stones were cracked and crumbling, the top tilted at a forty-five degree angle. Crouching down near one end, she began to dig at the base, the rush of the disturbed, falling rubble sounding unnaturally loud in the fog-shrouded night.
At some point, she’d obviously brought the diamond here, to the place where she’d played as a child, and hidden it. As Sebastian watched, she hesitated in her digging. Then her left hand swooped into the rubble to close over something just as her right seized a chunk of stone the size of her fist. He could see the tension in every line of her body, see her gathering herself like a sprinter ready to run.
Leigh-Jones had set the lantern atop the tomb and now stood slightly off to one side, while the Frenchman had positioned himself nearby, his pistol held in a slackened grip. As Sebastian watched, Jenny drew back her hand and chucked the jagged rock at the Frenchman’s head.
“Mon Dieu,” he swore. He tried to duck, lost his footing, and went down with a grunt.
Darting up, Jenny took off running across the darkened church-
yard, toward the ancient ruined gatehouse shrouded by mist in the distance.
“Don’t just stand there, you fool,” shouted the Frenchman, scrambling to his feet. “After her! She’s got the diamond!”
Leigh-Jones started off down the slope in a lumbering trot. “For God’s sake, just shoot her!”
Taking careful aim on the girl’s running figure, the Frenchman was tightening his finger on the trigger when Sebastian barreled into him.
The impact knocked the Frenchman flat on his back, the pistol exploding harmlessly into the air as it flew from his hand and spun out of sight into the high grass.
Rolling nimbly away from Sebastian’s grasp, he reared up into a crouch, a knife gleaming in his fist. “You again,” he spat.
Leaping to his feet, Sebastian snatched the horn lantern from the tomb’s cracked surface just as the Frenchman lunged, blade flashing.
Pivoting, Sebastian smashed the lantern down on the Frenchman’s hand, plunging them into darkness and sending the knife clattering against the side of the tomb. As the Frenchman staggered back, Sebastian swung the lantern again, this time at the man’s head.
The Frenchman ducked, then came up with an explosive kick that drove the heel of his boot into Sebastian’s right knee.
Sebastian’s leg collapsed beneath him in a fireball of pain. As he fell, the Frenchman kicked at him again, aiming this time for Sebastian’s head.
Hands flashing up, Sebastian grabbed the French agent’s boot with both hands and twisted.
Caught off balance, the Frenchman fell back, his head making an ugly thwunking sound as it struck the edge of the tomb. He slithered down the side of the moss-covered monument in a disjointed sprawl, then lay still, an ugly sheen of dark wetness staining the weathered stone behind him.
Staggering to his feet, Sebastian gritted his teeth and set off in an ungainly lope toward the ancient abbey gatehouse at the base of the churchyard. Every step sent an excruciating jolt of agony radiating up from his injured knee, so that by the time he reached the rubbish-strewn cobbled court before the ruined gatehouse, a cold sweat filmed his body and his breath was coming ragged and fast.
Built of coursed rough stone, the gatehouse rose a story and a half above its central vaulted archway. Once, the recessed arch had been richly ornamented with carvings, the mullioned windows above embellished with a vinelike tracery. But the passing centuries had battered and crumbled the stone, while the smoke and grime of generations had blurred and obliterated the details of what remained.
To the west of the gatehouse ranged a long, two-story stone building that might once have been an attached guesthouse or almonry but had long since degenerated into mean lodgings. Now the buildings stood vacant, windows and doorways gaping, roof tiles broken and missing, their supporting timbers collapsing. All other traces of the abbey had vanished long ago; beyond these few ruined fragments stretched only market gardens and open fields, empty beneath the wind-bunched clouds scuttling and thickening across the black sky.