Midsummer Moon (35 page)

"Yes, yes, I did think that might be a consideration."

"You won't have to do anything.” She peered out the window again. “I've been looking the situation over. The front gate is quite ineligible, of course. But that path on the side of the cliff—” She pointed outside along the coastline, where the vertical face of white chalk plunged down to the water below. “Do you see? It goes right ‘round the edge at the gatehouse wall and out onto this peninsula. It isn't very wide ... and there's that one ravine to cross, of course. But I'm sure that's a leap of only a few feet.” She turned around and smiled at Mr. Pemminey. “So there,” she said comfortably as she rolled the hedgehog off the table and back into the bandbox. “We might as well have lunch. It will be a little while before Ransom can come to rescue us."

This is stupid, Ransom thought.

He stood beside his horse in the dubious cover of wind-dwarfed brush, looking up at the crumbling walls and towers of Pemminey Castle.

Behind him, the South Downs rolled away in gradually descending billows of olive-green. Before him, the smooth, grassy hill rose up and up, crowned by the half-ruined castle walls standing cinder-gray against the hazy sky.

As far as Ransom was concerned, attacking fortified positions single-handedly was something best left to fairy tales and the rather ill-advised knights who inhabited them.

Very, very stupid.

Almost as moronic as believing that a smudge between a “b” and a “u” on a sweat-grimed note matched a smudge on the leather blotter on his desk at Mount Falcon. And that both ink stains represented the literary ramblings of a particularly well-traveled hedgehog.

Listening to twelve-year-old boys: that was his mistake. Letting a pair of earnest, tear-filled eyes look up at him in spite of a murderous scold and the sentence of a week's confinement to the nursery, and allowing a bravely stammer-free voice to say, “Begging your pardon, sir; just a moment of your time, sir. Would you look at this before I go? I think I might have found Miss Merlin, sir."

The Machiavellian young cub. He'd probably timed it for maximum effect. But if Woodrow thought anything was going to soften his punishment for disobeying Ransom's direct order not to leave the estate, he could think again. Hedgehog footprints be damned.

It was no doubt smugglers who'd taken over Pemminey Castle, as Ransom had been at pains to explain to Woodrow. Since Bonaparte had turned his attention to more promising shores, the Gentlemen of the Sussex coast had expanded their illegal activities tenfold. It would come as no surprise to anyone if the impoverished Pemminey had decided to finance his eccentricities by hiring out his strategically located castle to run a few contraband kegs.

So Ransom had a choice. He could march up to the gatehouse, which effectively cut off the castle itself on its little peninsula, and begin negotiations for a new supply of brandy, or he could skulk about like some revenue officer and try to find a covert way in. The first, he felt, would get him laughed at. The second was like to get him shot.

Then there was the third possibility, of course: the remote chance that Merlin and her abductors
were
here—a secret in plain sight.

It had a certain consistency, that notion. Like imprisoning her the first time in Ransom's own park. If it were so, he could begin to get a feel for the mind behind these schemes: the sharp eye for character and how a person would respond to pressure, the detailed knowledge of events at Mount Falcon, and the clear familiarity with the countryside around.

If it were so.

All he had to go on was a smudge on a piece of smudgy paper. And hope ... which he didn't trust for a moment.

He'd sat at his desk half the night, thinking. Early this morning, he'd abandoned thinking and proceeded ahead to foolishness. He'd saddled his horse and ridden out to Pemminey Castle alone.

He dug in his saddlebag and took out a spyglass, steadying his arms on his hunter's back. The castle looked like a hundred others, stone walls kept in repair in a few places, falling down in most. The curtain wall, with its gatehouse pinched between two ponderous towers, curved around and out of sight at the crest of the hill. Somewhere beyond was the limestone cliff of Beachy Head, highest on a coastline of dauntingly high cliffs.

Perched at the edge, Pemminey Castle was doomed. The sea ate away at the shore. A fortress that must have stood on a solid promontory centuries before now balanced on a crumbling peninsula, with half the ramparts already fallen away.

At least, so Ransom had been told. He had never in his life entertained the least desire to see this phenomenon for himself.

He closed his eyes at the very thought.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

He opened them again and focused on the gatehouse. There were figures there. He counted four men, and possibly more, slouched against what was left of the crenellations in a casual, confident watch. If they were smugglers, it was a major operation and an unusually delicate one, to require any more safeguard than a good hiding place and some well-greased palms.

Beyond the curtain wall, there seemed to be an interval of empty space—a courtyard, most probably, hidden behind the stone fortifications. Much farther back, the castle walls mounted into view again, and rose to a culmination in the highest tower of all. Through his eyeglass, Ransom followed the wall of wind-scoured stone upward, from window to narrow window, until he reached the topmost one.

"Damnation,” he muttered.

The window flew a pennant of crimson. Hidden from the gatehouse by the curve of the tower, the splash of color waved and fluttered. As an odd gust of wind flattened it against the wall, he made out the sleeves and voluminous outline of his truant dressing gown.

He closed the eyeglass, crossed his arms, and buried his face in the leather curve of his saddle.

It took a few moments to compose himself. The elation at finding Merlin here was dampened considerably by the circumstances. He discarded any ideas of calling out the garrison at Eastbourne to storm the place. It was highly unlikely Merlin would be allowed to survive a direct attack.

He squinted again at the castle. He knew nothing of its layout, despite having lived in the neighborhood his entire life. Castles on cliff edges were not prominent on Ransom's list of places to spend time. Poor Pemminey, last of his noble Norman line, was clearly a lunatic. No sane man would choose to live in that sea-girded ruin while there was a leaking hovel to be found anywhere.

Ransom thought of returning to Mount Falcon for help; of waiting until night for a secret attack. He abandoned both ideas. Time crowded at him. It seemed likely they meant to take her to France in the dark of the moon like any other sensible smugglers of humanity or brandy. And with the help of an overcast sky, it would be dark enough tonight.

He looped the horse's reins in a bush and took off his hat. He was armed, at least—with a rapier and two pistols. When he left his mount, he moved away from the castle, staying amidst the gnarled bushes to angle around the hillside. When he'd gone far enough to be hidden from the gatehouse entirely, Ransom began to work his way higher, toward the castle itself.

The blind crest of the hill still hid the peninsula. Amidst the increasing roar of the wind in the bushes above him, he could see only the tower and its telltale crimson pennant floating over the curtain wall. The path was leading him straight toward the place where the wall took an abrupt turn and disappeared from view at the crown of the hill.

When he straightened from the cover of the scrub, hard wind caught his hair. In front of him the bushes came to an abrupt end, giving way to the grassy summit a few yards ahead. Beyond the crest, he could see nothing but sky, bluish-gray in the haze.

The castle wall was deserted, the protective crenellations long since crumbled away. Ransom judged that any threat along the top of it would have been visible. He looked up, eyeing the place where it made a corner and vanished over the crown of the hill. If he could reach that spot...

He put his hand on his sword and ducked, keeping low to cross the short space of open ground. Wind buffeted him the instant he left the cover of the bushes. He headed up, across the slant of the incline, looking back toward the gatehouse towers. No alarm came. He had nearly reached the crest and the safety of the wall when he glanced to his other side.

His stomach turned. He lurched to a sudden, frozen halt.

Beside him, there was nothing. No hill curving down from the summit, no wall, no bushes, no grass ... nothing but wind, in ferocious force, and the blinding white face of a perpendicular drop.

His wits deserted him. His body arched back in a wild hiss of recoil. Hummocks of wind-ripped grass clung where the castle masonry had long ago torn away, stone evaporating into space at a ragged edge. Below it, the chalk cliff plummeted toward nothing.

He crushed his fist over his mouth and took one step backward. Then terror and vertigo made him wrench around in a crazed dread that the ground had opened up behind him, too. The wind seemed to grab, pushing and pulling in willful violence. He flung himself toward the nearest solid thing, the wall, and pressed back against it as if he could drive his fingers and skull and spine right into the stone.

He braced there, his heart and the wind a mad battery of sound. The rapier angled awkwardly, its sheath stabbing his thigh, but he could not bring himself to move enough to ease it. His body twitched, wanting to curl, wanting to roll up in frantic self-protection.

He let his knees collapse, a quick, hard drop to the solid ground, with his heels braced in the dirt and his back shoved as vigorously against the stone as his muscles could manage.

He closed his eyes. Sickness rolled in his chest and stomach. He tilted his head back against the stone, taking air in great gulps that gradually slowed as his mind began to agree with his senses and assure him that he was on firm earth.

When his breathing had come back to something more or less like normality, he ventured a brief look. From his position at the base of the wall, the cliff was invisible again. On one side of him, the hill sloped up from below, unfaltering in its even incline. On the other, grass tossed and rippled at the summit, creating the comforting illusion that the land went on beyond.

A harsh cry made him jump. A seagull sprang into view, exploding up from the deceptive crest as if it had been shot from some hidden cannon. It hovered at eye level, wings kinked, and then tilted and fell away, disappearing with a swoop that sent queasiness rippling through his body.

Perhaps he should call out the garrison and let them storm the place after all.

Perhaps he should walk up and knock on the front door.

Perhaps he should go home.

Forget the whole thing.

He put his hand over his eyes. It still shook a little. He clenched it into a fist to stop it, curling the other around the handgrip of his sword.

He took a deep, slow breath.

All right.

Keeping his back firmly to the wall, he twisted until he'd worked off his coat. He settled the rapier across his lap and slid a few inches in the direction of the edge. He craned a little. Beyond the whipping grass, he could just see the hazy horizon, where the blue-gray of the sky shaded to the deeper bluish-silver of the sea.

He took another breath.

He moved as far as the corner of the wall. Keeping his hands firmly in contact with the ground, he peered around the angle.

Vertigo flooded him.

He clutched at a root, blinking rapidly. A yard past the corner, the wall ended, hanging by some insane concatenation of stone and mortar a full foot beyond the cliff itself. The undercut face fell away, a blaze of white rock beneath the dark olive vegetation and the stones and towers that sprawled in magnificent ruin across what was left of the jutting peninsula. Down and down and down, the cliff wall finally met the shore at a beach of silver and ebony shingle, in a sheer drop that made his eyes water and his stomach heave.

There was a particular pebble far below on the beach: oddly shaped, yellow and green against the more natural black ones. With wind tearing at his hair, he squinted down at it.

It looked like a pebble. It was a fishing boat. He swallowed and moaned softly, clinging to the root.

Merlin's crimson banner flew free and slapped back against the stone. She expected him. She needed him. Her life depended on him.

He felt like being sick.

The seagull soared up from below again, startling him with a raucous cry. It looped on the wind and pitched downward, drawing his gaze with it. His fingernails dug into the bark.

He closed his eyes and wrenched them open, breaking the fatal fascination of the bird's lift and plummet. On the opposite cliff, a faint line of vegetation descended gradually across the chalk face, disappeared from his view, and then reappeared, emerging as a narrow track just beneath the overhanging end of the stone wall where he sat.

Ransom stared at the footpath miserably. It was only what he deserved, he thought. God had been going easy with him, lulling him, leading him inexorably to this point where he would have to pay for all the sins he'd committed in a wickedly sinful life. He could hear the celestial snicker now.

Carefully, Ransom transferred one hand from the root to his sword. Then he sat for a moment. He gathered himself, mind and body, and carefully inched his heel toward the bare spot between two tufts of grass, where the path emerged onto the hill.