Joy V. Sheridan writes

Charity Amour

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE part 3

His threshing about was proving rewarding. Lord Seyton Clover felt the cloth which bound his hands, giving on the rough edge of the stone window-seat. Being still restricted about the ankles by similar bindings, he had firstly moved himself off the floor and had leapfrogged to his present pose. He let the hands saw up and down on the rough edge of the seat. The gag about his mouth restrained him from conversing with his companions. But as he narrowed his eyes, looking across the watery greyness of the dawn-filtered room, he saw that they were both as arduously fast upon their own binds, positioned as they were, back to back. 

For this position was the one which Jarvis and Hinches had used to truss brother and sister together. Lord Seyton Clover set to work with his tongue. He chewed on the dry weave of cloth, feeling it padding out his cheeks with an uncomfortable, raw taste, making him almost want to vomit it from his mouth. 

Success, by Jove, at length! He felt the cloth fraying and shaking the tattered bindings to the floor, drew his hands in front of his face. Relief was in the movement whereby he removed the gag and he thrust his tongue, as though to loosen it, about inside his mouth. “Here; I’m coming, Fibbins.” Swiftly he untied his ankle bindings. 

Assuming a stance of caution, low to the ground, he avoided the corpses of the Frenchmen, stepping nimbly over a cold arm or a buckled, upright knee. Molly indicated one of her duet of daggers still sheathed about her thigh. Lord Seyton Clover released it from its position and set about letting it sing its song for freedom for his two accomplices. “Thank the Lord for that!” John Fibbins trundled to an upright stance, Molly smiled at her slender pleasure, wordless as was her dilemma.

Lord Seyton Clover was stealing back to the partially-draped window; placing himself to one side, he snicked the curtain edge with his hand. The Fibbins brother and sister joined him.

“Does it not strike you, John, that it is uncommonly quiet in this house, considering, that is, that it purportedly houses such a body of beauties and an army of staff?”

Molly turned and paced over to the partly opened door. She was looking up and down the corridor, still with that watchfulness in her movements which implies a smelling of imminent danger.

With her hands placed in front of her, she made to feel the very air which percolated chilly and unwelcoming about the deserted corridors. She was staring hard to the far end of the corridor, as though awaiting a messenger. 

“Forsooth! What the deuce is happening out yonder!” Lord Seyton Clover withdrew suddenly, letting the rim of the curtain fall back to its vertical shape. John Fibbins studied His Lordship's face. Which face had grown pale and fixed in aspect. 

“Your Lordship. Is there something even now which is more outlandishly awry?” “Look for yourself, John, if you can but make anything sensible out, for there seems to be a grey mist enshrouding all but allowing merely a few yards’ visibility.” 

John Fibbins emulated the movements of his master, his tongue clicking loudly over the edge of his teeth: “Wait, I saw somethink then, Your Lordship. Like a light, a flame, or some'at. Drat! 'Tis gone now!” Lord Seyton Clover, provocative and seemingly mindless of his actions, made to throw open the window: “We must have more light on these happenings, Fibbins!” 

He stepped onto the balcony, then with a startled bolt, withdrew into the room, slamming the window shut hard. “What is ’appening, Your Lordship?” 

Lord Seyton Clover all but stumbled over the abandoned corpse of a French nobleman, reaching backwards, his fist rested heavily upon a plaster rose decorative to a frieze upon the wall.  

Recovering his balance, he stood straight: “John, go bring your sister in here. I fear that there is foul business afoot and from parties not known to this house or Madame d’Esprit.”

John Fibbins looked at him with curiosity. He was moving towards the corridor when his eye rested on the quickly awning gap appearing in the wall. “Your Lordship, look behind you!” Lord Seyton Clover turned, wheeling on his heel, his hand upon his sword, which he had recovered. A doorway streamered with a decade or more of cobwebs, stood blankly cavernous before his vision. 

A smell of burning began to filter up the stairway from the main reception area. 

Molly, bidden by a sixth sense, had not needed her brother’s coaxing to return to the chamber. She also had smelt the brushing of acrid vapours across her nostrils. “They are setting the place alight! They are firing the Château!” 

Lord Seyton Clover’s voice was loud and hoarse with horror, “And where in the hell’s teeth is Charity?” 

The three stood inside the chamber, frozen into that fearful statuesque imagery which so often forms a tragedy out of a drama of the senses. A light cavalcade of footsteps came to their hyper-alert ears. Charity all but burst into the room, breathless, crying, mumbling, her dress festooned with the dewy drops of tears and the cold heat of her despair which she had been shedding as she searched for her lover and his companions. “Oh, Seyton, Lord Seyton Clover, dear, kind Lordship...” She moaned loudly and cast herself with abject misery into his arms: “They told me, they told me I should find you here! BUT .... QUICK we must be out of this house, they told me to find you and leave immediately. The death of this house is coming to pass! See, we MUST use that passageway.” 

She pointed with a fixed and glassy stare to the opened entrance to a secreted passageway. Molly, practical as ever, and seeing the damaged repair of the few remnants now covering the voluptuous creation in flesh which was Miss Charity Cottrell, hastily selected some garb from off their pegs in the chamber’s wardrobes. 

Now they could hear the excited jabber of voices below where they stood, the rising red-tinged glow of a vicious steam crackling from this, a veritable kettle of calamities. Dull thuds and heart wrenching feminine screams began to shake the house. 

“COME! Please, do: shake yourselves from this fixed state!” Charity was pulling the two men towards the opening:” They said we must away and away immediately. THEY SAID WE SHOULD LEAVE NOW!” 

She all but screamed the words hysterically. Molly rekindled some fresh candles and placed them into holders. She slammed the door to the chamber too, before joining the others in the privacy of the disguised exit. Its normal occupant Claude-Marie was nowhere around.