“You aren’t the police,” Ophelia said.
“Oh, the Gendarmerie Royale has been summoned and the commissaire will be notified. You cannot escape. Now, I really must insist”—Baldewyn leaned around, pressed the barrel of the pistol between Ophelia’s shoulder blades, and gave it a corkscrew—“that you march.”
He prodded Ophelia with the gun across the garden to the house, Prue clinging to Ophelia’s arm all the way. They reached a short flight of steps that led down to a door. Windows on either side of the door guttered with dull orange light.
“The cellar?” Prue said. “You ain’t going to rabbit hutch us in the cellar are you, mister?”
Baldewyn’s answer was a shove that sent Ophelia and Prue slipping and stumbling down the mossy steps. Baldewyn followed. He kicked open the door, and bundled Ophelia and Prue across the threshold.
The door slammed and a latch clacked.
They were locked in.
*
Prue had reckoned she’d gotten ahold of herself. A slippery hold, leastways. But something about the sound of that latch hitting home made her go all fluff-headed again. Another scream bloomed up from her lungs, but it couldn’t come out. Her throat was raw now, wounded.
Wounded. Her sister. Those creeping dark stains. Her poor, small, battered foot.
“Look,” Ophelia said in the Sunday School Teacher voice she always used on Prue. “Look. It’s only a kitchen, see?”
Right. Only a kitchen. A mighty dirty kitchen.
“And,” Ophelia added, “it’s spacious. No need to feel cooped up.”
Half of the kitchen glowed from orange cinders in a fireplace. The other half wavered in shadow. Iron kettles on chains bubbling up wafts of savor and herbs. Plank table cluttered with crockery. Copper pots dangling from thick ceiling beams.
And . . . little motions flickering along the walls. Prue rubbed her eyes. The motions didn’t stop. Black, streaming, skittery—
“Mice!” she yelled.
In three bounds, Prue was on top of the table. Crockery crashed. A chair toppled sideways.
Mice. Uck. Prue’s skin itched all over. She disliked most critters with feet smaller than nickels, and she hated mice. Blame it on her girlhood, on the lean times spent in Manhattan rookeries.
“My sainted aunt.” Ophelia righted the chair.
“Sorry.” Prue crouched on the tabletop, arms hugged around her damp, muddy knees.
Ophelia, silent, stooped to collect shards of crockery.
Probably marveling at how she’d been dragged into yet another fix by Prue. Prue was fond of Ophelia, but she knew—or, at least, she powerfully suspected—that Ophelia looked upon her as a dray horse looks upon a harness and cart. A deadweight. A chafing in the sides.
Ophelia piled the crockery shards on the table. “Tell me about your sister,” she said. “Did you never know her, then?”
“Only heard stories. Well, just one story. Ma only kept her long enough for the one story, see.”
“What was her name?”
“Don’t know. She is—was—a year or two older than me. Her pa took her off when she was only a new baby. I never got to meet her, Ophelia, I—”
“What else did your ma say?”
“That’s all. That her pa was some hoity-toity French feller, and he hired a wet nurse and took the baby off to give her a better life. Didn’t want his child raised by an actress. Do you think . . . maybe Ma married him, all these years later? Maybe this here’s his house? But then, why is my sister lying dead out there in the weeds with those fine folks inside laughing and listening to piano songs and—”
“Shush, now. Don’t work yourself up.”
Prue patted her bodice. From beneath damp layers of wool and cotton came the comforting crackle of paper.
The letter. Her treasured secret. Proof that somebody in this wide world wanted her. Maybe.
*