The Murders of Richard III - Elizabeth Peters [31]
Hurt, Thomas opened both eyes and blinked them till they got used to the light. It seemed blinding after the darkness that had surrounded him earlier, but it was only the dim bulb in the ceiling of the wine cellar. He was lying flat on the dusty floor, and beside him, turned over on its side, was an empty barrel—a large barrel, fully five feet high when erect.
Someone put a glass to his dry lips. Thomas drank. The liquid tasted like vintage champagne to his dusty throat. He realized that it was champagne. Jacqueline had opened a bottle. Thomas swallowed, and repeated his question.
“I’m afraid so,” Jacqueline said regretfully.
“I was in a barrel?”
“That’s the third time you’ve asked that.”
“I still can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. Oh, God—” Thomas sat up and glared wildly. “Who else saw me?”
“This is no time to be worrying about your male ego,” Jacqueline said. She spread her knees and received Thomas’s head neatly in her lap as he fell back. “Thomas, darling, you aren’t hurt, you know. Only the classic bump on the head. But—you really did scare me for a minute!”
The wobble in her voice restored some of Thomas’s battered vanity. Her lap felt comfortable—soft, cool, silky. He wriggled his head into an easier position and relaxed.
“It took you long enough,” he said grumpily. “It’s a wonder I didn’t die of congestion of the brain or something.”
“You were only in—in that thing for a couple of minutes.”
“How do you know? It felt like days.”
“I waited for ten minutes before I started to look for you. Considering the time it took to knock you out, truss you up, and—er—insert you…”
Jacqueline’s voice was still unsteady, but Thomas suspected another emotion than concern. He squinted up at her, saw the corners of her mouth quiver, and suddenly smiled with the good humor that was one of his most endearing characteristics.
“I must have looked like an absolute fool,” he said. “My feet sticking up out of that thing…I don’t blame you for laughing.”
“I’m not laughing,” said Jacqueline.
Thomas sat up. He garnered Jacqueline into his arms and for a time they sat in silence while she made gulping noises into his shirt front. Finally she detached herself and sat up on her heels. Her face was smudged with dust and her eyes were still damp; two tendrils of hair had come loose and curled wickedly over her ears.
“No,” she said, fending Thomas off as he reached for her again. “That’s enough of that.”
“Is that all I get for being knocked on the head and stuck into a barrel upside down?” Thomas inquired plaintively. “If I lost an arm and a leg, I suppose you might—”
“You’re drunk,” Jacqueline said coldly. “Thomas, be serious. I got something of a shock, that’s why I acted so silly; but this is no joke. And I’m afraid your male ego is going to suffer, although I was the only one to see you in situ. We’ll have to tell the others.”
Jacqueline’s therapy had been amazingly successful. Except for a slight headache, Thomas felt fine. He reached for the champagne bottle, which was sitting on the floor beside him. After a long drink, he nodded.
“Yes, I see what you’ve got in mind. Oh, well. At least I won’t have to hear Lady Isobel recite her poem about gallant King Richard.”
IV
The emergency meeting was in full swing, and it was getting absolutely nowhere. Thomas’s head was aching. He no longer felt like a kindly adult watching the antics of cute children; he felt like a lion tamer with a cageful of feline schizophrenics. People were pacing around the room shouting questions at each other. At the head of the table Weldon pounded his gavel. No one paid the slightest attention. The pounding only increased Thomas’s headache.
As he had feared, the first reaction to the news of his misadventure had been hilarity. Outrage soon replaced the laughter, but this emotion was just as noisy and just as ineffectual. Frank was the most indignant; he kept insisting that he had not written the note that had lured Thomas to his doom. Thomas kept reassuring him, but Frank demanded paper and pencil and produced a specimen that was certainly quite