A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [94]
A movement behind my would-be captor sent my heart thudding in wild anticipation, until I realised that the man looking in the door over the tweed shoulder also wore a false beard. Swooping disappointment made me peevish, and I opened my mouth to complain at the lack of imagination in their disguises, but to my consternation, what came from my mouth bore little resemblance to English. The newcomer looked at me and spoke from a great distance.
“She ain’t asleep yet?”
“In a minute. She’s not far—” And at his words, the compartment began to close in on me. My field of vision narrowed, from luggage racks and seats to the figures crowding the doorway, to two heads and a torso, and finally to the small scar that emerged from the false moustache and puckered the first man’s lip, and the word far reverberated in my brain as FARFARFarFarfarfarfarfar and erased me.
When I woke, I was blind.
I was also violently and comprehensively ill onto the cold, hard surface I lay on, and when eventually I turned with a groan to escape the noxious stuff, I found that most of my body was in direct contact with the stones. Blind, stripped to my underclothing, and ill, I thought muzzily. Mary Russell, this is going to be very unpleasant. I laid my hot face back onto the cool stones and thought no more.
The second time I woke, I was still blind, still nearly naked, and felt just as ill. I did not vomit, although the sharp stink in the air made it a temptation and my mouth tasted unspeakably foul. I clawed my swarming hair out of my face, ran an automatic knuckle up the bridge of my nose to shove my absent spectacles into place, and then with an effort pushed myself upright. I wished I had not. My head pounded, my stomach quivered, and the darkness seemed to become denser, but I stayed sitting, and slowly I recovered.
I was alive. There was that. In the dark, in an unknown place, held captive for an unknown reason by an unknown number of enemies, clothed in nothing but knickers and camisole, without so much as my glasses and hairpins as weapons, but alive.
That I had lived was not in itself terribly reassuring. I sat on the stones, my head in my hands, and tried to think through the throbbing. After half an hour, I had come up with two small conclusions: First, my captor was a man of no mean ability, a remarkably intelligent, efficient, and daring individual who showed no signs of the gaol-bird in his manner and who was, therefore, among the more successful criminals. If one knew where to look, it should not prove difficult to find him—assuming I should happen to escape his clutches. Second, my mind seized on one chance remark: He had said that bullets were unimaginative. I could not help but reading into that choice of word the idea that he had something in mind for me, not just locking me in a hold. Not at all a nice thought.
He was no one I knew, personally or by reputation, which made for another question: Whom was he working for, or with? Who had arranged to pick me up so efficiently and ruthlessly and had me dumped into this hole? I assumed that it had something to do with the Temple, but I had to admit that there was no concrete reason for that assumption, that my life was sufficiently complicated to offer other possibilities. A voice from the past, taking revenge for something Holmes and I had done long ago? Or was I merely a pawn, captured to bring Holmes into a trap? My thoughts ranged and snatched at threads, meandering their way into the more remote reaches of reality. Marie hated me sufficiently to do this, although I had to wonder if she would not rather have merely crushed me beneath a lorry or had me shot. Perhaps I had been kidnapped by one of the Berlin-bound Americans, to keep me from presenting my paper. An academic rival, of Duncan’s perhaps, set to ruin us both? Or—my aunt! Breaking the will by driving me mad, proving me to be incompetent, putting me and my father’s fortune back into her hands…
That snapped me down to earth. My aunt was mercenary, but she had neither the brains nor the acquaintances