Page 32 of Lady in Ruby
“I want to believe you. But I can’t accept your story fully without some confirmation.”
“What do you need?” he asked, moving back to watch her face.
“I need to hear my father confirm what you told me.”
He nodded at once, which reassured her more than anything else would have. He said, “It’s not even midnight. He may be awake still. Shall I go and find out, and bring him back here?”
“Yes.”
Snowdon left, and Caroline stood up. Mittens leapt into the abandoned seat, curling up immediately. She paced in front of the fire, going over everything Snowdon had said. Could it possibly be the truth? Or was there some flaw in his reasoning, some way he was wrong? She tried to think logically about it, putting all the facts together one by one. Oh, there were too many gaps. She needed her father to explain what he knew.
Where was he? Caroline glanced at the clock on her mantel and saw that a quarter hour had passed. How long did it take to find her father and bring him back?
Unless Snowdon never went to her father. Caroline paused, struck by the idea that he was the thief all along and now he was running away in the darkness just before he got caught.
“Then why come to my room and give a whole mad story?” she asked herself.
Well, perhaps to enjoy a few kisses before heading out into the freezing night.
No. He might be wrong on some points, but he couldn’t have made the story from whole cloth. She refused to believe that she could give her heart to a liar.
Unwilling to wait in ignorance, she yanked open her door and went out into the corridor. The house was eerily quiet. She walked to her parents’ room and listened. There was nothing. No light under the bottom of the door either. She looked back to Snowdon’s room, and noticed it was also dark, the door slightly open.
She frowned, then moved to the window at the end of the hall, which overlooked the courtyard. There she had a clear view of the outbuilding where the laboratory was, and saw the uncurtained windows glowing with light. Of course! Her father had gone to the lab and Snowdon must have gone there as well. For just a moment, Caroline saw her father’s figure pass by a window.
No question of waiting now. She’d join the men in the laboratory and they’d all talk there. She wore only flimsy slippers, her nightgown, and her wrapper over it, but it would take just a moment to cross the courtyard, and she didn’t mean to waste time dressing.
She descended the stairs on silent feet, and eased the front door open so as not to wake any of the servants.
Clear, cold air nearly took her breath away. She took a step out onto the porch, and inhaled, preparing to run across the flat stones, now lightly coated with a sheen of crystalline snow, so lightly fallen that she could still see the stone beneath.
Just as she stepped forward, something, someone, moved up behind her and locked her in a rough embrace. Before she could shout or scream, a hand clapped a folded cloth over her mouth, and a familiar sickly chemical smell hit her nose. She knew that smell; it was used for anesthesia….
And that was the last thing Caroline knew for a long while.
Chapter 13
Caroline shivered, blinking as she woke up. She raised her head, only to find that it was dark all around, with only the faintly luminous glow of a winter night. She heard the bubbling of water nearby. The saint’s spring! She tried to get up, but discovered that her wrists were tied behind her back, and her ankles were crossed and bound together. Even if she could manage to stand up, she couldn’t walk.
“Hello?” she called out. Her voice was shaky at first, so she called again, hoping someone would hear her.
“Hello, Caro.” Francis stepped into view. He was dressed in a bulky black greatcoat and wore black hessian-style boots, so his figure was mostly a cut-out against the mist billowing up from the well.
“Francis! What are you doing? Let me go!”
“Can’t do that, Caro darling. Would defeat the purpose of taking you in the first place.”
“What do you want?”
“The formula, of course.”
“Don’t you already have the notes?” she asked.
“Yes, but I’ll get far more if I can supply a sample of the actual solution.”
“What?”
“I need to raise the price. Ever since the Russian campaign, Napoleon has been desperate to find some way to prevent it from happening again. After all, you can’t lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers every winter! It starts to hamper recruitment. So when the French got wind of your father’s experiments, they very much wanted to share in the bounty.”
