Page 8 of The Rebel and the Rose
The Order was all any of them had.
‘At least I’m self-aware,’ Caruso remarked now. ‘Dufort thought the sun shone out of his own ass. He wore the shadow-marks on his face like a badge of honour.’ He jerked his chin towards Ransom, who was staring vacantly out of the window, only half listening. ‘Our pretty boy here is far more palatable. Polite as a prince. And look at those pearly teeth. You’d never know he was a ruthless bastard.’
Ransom gave him the middle finger.
‘Everyone’s been on edge since the Aurore came down,’ Nadia went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘Most nights, people are rioting in the streets. I reckon some of our smugglers got spooked too.’
‘Not Othilde. The old crone once killed a bear with a flying pitchfork. Didn’t even blink,’ said Caruso, admiration simmering in his icy-blue eyes. ‘Shedoesthe spooking. Half the village call her a witch. But never to her face.’ He offered the ghost of a smirk. ‘Cowards.’
‘They probably don’t want to get pitchforked,’ muttered Ransom.
‘He speaks!’ Caruso prodded Ransom with the toe of his boot. ‘Now that you’re done sulking, why don’t your share some of your own theories?’
‘She’s probably dead,’ said Ransom distantly. ‘It was a harsh winter. Othilde is old and lives alone.’
‘Tragic,’ murmured Nadia.
‘More like boring,’ said Caruso with a sprawling yawn. ‘And that still doesn’t explain the other disappearances.’
Ransom turned his face to the snow-laden fields. He spied smoke up ahead, a whisper of life rising above a stretch of dark spindly trees. The truth was, he had another theory about who had been getting to his smugglers, but he didn’t dare utter it aloud. Nadia had finally stopped obsessing over Seraphine Marchant and her role in Lark’s death, and Ransom was not about to stoke that fire again.
And anyway, it was only a hunch.
A tug of paranoia he had been trying very hard to ignore.
‘We’ll figure it out soon enough,’ he said, gesturing to the plumes in the distance. ‘We’re almost there.’
‘Finally,’ grunted Caruso, shifting in his seat. ‘My ass is numb.’
‘Then how are you still speaking out of it?’ said Nadia.
Ransom sighed. ‘Behave, children. You’re giving me a headache.’
As they hopped out of the carriage and sauntered up the stone path that led to Othilde Eberhard’s cottage, Ransom felt like they were walking into a painting. In the front garden snowdrops bowed under the weight of the morning dew frost. Empty flower baskets hung on either side of the blue front door, where frozen spiderwebs sparkled in the sun.
There was no smoke coming from the chimney, no lights flickering inside.
Caruso peered in the front windows, while Nadia tracked round the back of the house.
Ransom thumped his fist against the front door. ‘Othilde?’
After a minute of silence he kicked it in.
Caruso stepped over the threshold after him, inhaling through his nose. ‘Stale smoke.’ Another sniff. ‘Curdled milk. Hmm… no decomposing corpse.’
‘Why do you sound so disappointed?’ said Ransom.
Caruso whistled to himself as he moved about the kitchen, methodically ransacking his way through every single cupboard. Ransom noted an empty pot in the sink and an old loaf in the bread bin. Covered in mould. The milk in the jug on the table had indeed curdled and the apples were rotten.
He left Caruso and wandered through the adjacent sitting room. There was a ball of wool on the chair by the window, a half-knitted green scarf trailing from it. A cold pipe in the ashtray. He continued upstairs, searching the pokey bedrooms.
No sign of Othilde.
Or her corpse.
Unease stirred in Ransom’s gut.
When he returned downstairs, Caruso had torn up some of the floorboards. The crawl space underneath the kitchen was empty, save for three cracked vials.
