Page 64 of Lady Gambit
She tried hard to focus but couldn’t see a face. “I don’t know.”
“Where did you come from?”
The answer was out of reach, far beyond her grasp. More questions followed, but her mind was a blank canvas and she lacked the ability to lift the brush and paint a picture.
“Has someone tried to access her memory before?” she heard the Frenchman ask. “There is a resistance beyond what I would usually expect.”
Dorian spoke, his voice a beacon in the darkness. “Not that I’m aware. If there has been some mind manipulation, it would have occurred before she met Aaron Chance.”
“I suspect one session will not be enough to gain the answers you seek. Fear prevents her from opening the doors.”
Keen to keep her in this lucid state, Monsieur Chabert urged her to open her eyes and focus on the mural. He brought the picture to life by telling the story of a woman searching for a lost child missing in the woods. Again, his words were so compelling she imagined crossing the bridge and calling her own name.
“Find the girl,” he said when her lids grew heavy, and she felt herself sinking deeper into the dream. He encouraged her to take steady steps along the path towards the woods. “Find Caterina. She is alone in the darkness, longing to return home.”
As she moved closer, the woods became a park. Despite the gloom, she recognised the views of Westminster in the distance and knew the path around the reservoir meant she was in Green Park.
Fear slithered through every vein in her body.
The desperation to run had her in its powerful grip.
“Where are you?” Monsieur Chabert persisted.
“Green Park.” She was permitted to say that. It was not breaking the rules. It would not have her dangling from the hangman’s noose, limp like a cloth doll. “I must hide.”
“From whom?”
She saw a figure, nothing more, but knew to keep her lips pursed tightly. They would slice out her tongue and feed it to the crows.
Monsieur Chabert grumbled in frustration. “Someone has been tampering with her mind. I have seen this before. When under a mesmerist’s spell, the person is compelled to answer. Miss Chance, she knows the truth but has been conditioned to remain silent.”
Death comes to those with loose tongues.
She didn’t want to die.
Not while scattering the flowers or when?—
She gasped aloud then. “I’ll die if I scatter the flowers. My mother will die if I don’t.” She knew it was important when the words left her lips but had no idea why.
Monsieur Chabert muttered something in French, which sounded much like a curse. “I must bring her out of the trance. Her mind, it is too fragile. The damage was done in her formative years. Who would do this to a child?”
Dorian rubbed her shoulders. His touch calmed her restless spirit. The love in her heart was an anchor, mooring her to the present and the reason she had come to visit Monsieur Chabert.
“Wait!” she cried because there was something else she could say. A secret no one had tried to erase from her memory. “I was told to hide in Green Park, told someone would come, and I should go without a fuss.” Fragments of a memory returned. Strange flickers in her mind’s eye. “I was scared and confused and hid in the wrong place. It took them longer to find me.”
“Them?”
She recalled seeing them as she peered through the verdure, the moon a haunting silhouette behind them. She remembered the stark warning, the unsettling words they repeated for days on end.
You say nothing, do you hear?
If they threaten you with the noose, button those lips.
“Who told you to hide in Green Park?” It was Dorian’s voice this time. “Who came to fetch you the night you ran? Was it Davey?”
“No.” She inhaled deeply as the dense clouds dispersed and a picture formed. What she saw left her rigid in the seat. “It was Mrs Haggert and a faceless man with a ruby-topped walking stick.”
Chapter Fourteen
