Page 86 of Peril in Piccadilly
I doubted I could make it to land if he did do. I can swim—now—but I’m not strong enough to want to brave the North Sea, especially at night. I still have something of an aversion to water after that incident in the Neckar when I was small, as well.
Or the plan might be something entirely different. I could be reading the whole thing wrong. Perhaps he didn’t want to marry me or kill me at all. Perhaps he wanted something else. But it didn’t matter. The whole plan would be moot if I could just remove myself from the equation. So I grabbed the doorknob in my hand and twisted it.
I had been afraid that I had been locked in here. Such was not the case. The door opened easily from the inside, and I put my head out into a narrow hallway lined by half a dozen other doors.
It was possible—not likely, perhaps, but possible—that Christopher was behind one of them. The temptation to start opening doors in the hope that I might find him was almost overwhelming. A bit of sympathetic company in this situation would have been very nice. I didn’t do it, however, for two reasons. Firstly, because I had decided that getting myself away would be the better part of valor, and secondly, because I was afraid that I would open a door and come face to face with Wolfgang.
Or if not Wolfgang, then whoever had brought me here. But it was most likely Wolfgang.
It was instinct to begin to take my shoes off before I set off, the better to move soundlessly, but a mere half second of thought told me that there was no point in trying to be quiet. The boat was already making so much noise that no one would hear anything I did. Nonetheless, I shut the door carefully behind me and headed down the hall towards the steep and narrow staircase I could see at the end of it. I walked quickly and with my heart in my throat, but I didn’t run. At the bottom of the stairs, I started up, holding on to the railing the whole way.
There was another corridor and another staircase after that, less narrow and less steep. So far I hadn’t seen a soul, and when I came out at the top of the second staircase, it was obvious why. The entire panoply of the sky arched above me, thousands of stars on a velvet background, with a waxing gibbous moon that would be full in a few more days. It was the middle of the night, and all I could see around me was water.
It was also freezing cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself to stop shivering. My wrap was below deck somewhere, no doubt—perhaps Wolfgang had it, along with my handbag, unless, of course, I was on this boat by myself, while Wolfgang was still on English soil.
I seemed to be on the deck of what was more a freighter and less a passenger conveyance. There were no deckchairs in sight, nor anything else you would expect to find on a passenger liner. The bridge was up ahead—I could see the lights and hear a faint murmur of voices from the seamen who were awake at this time of night. They didn’t sound like they were speaking English—the words were more guttural, the consonants less refined—and after a few seconds of pricking my ears I could confirm that yes, they were speaking German. My own was no longer fluent enough to make out what they were saying, but I recognized the cadence and enough of the more basic words to verify it.
That seemed to take care of any question of what I was doing here, then. No one beside Wolfgang would surely think to carry me onboard a German freighter as a mode of abduction.
I had, it seemed, no good options. I could go back to my cabin and wait for Wolfgang to put whatever plan he had concocted into action, which might involve killing me or might only involve forcing me into marriage. I was honestly not keen on either of those choices, especially after this.
I could jump into the water and most likely drown, if I didn’t die of hypothermia first.
I could approach the bridge and explain the situation, but there were no guarantees that the crew wasn’t in cahoots with Wolfgang, or if not that, that they had at least been paid enough to look the other way. They’d more than likely give me back to him if I approached them. Or at least there was enough of a chance of it that I didn’t want to take the risk.
I could try to hide. Leave the cabin empty and find somewhere else to stow away. Perhaps Wolfgang would believe that I had jumped overboard, and wouldn’t look for me. Perhaps I could stay out of sight for long enough that the boat would reach shore somewhere. And once we got to where we were going—whether that was Bremerhaven or Kiel or somewhere further afield; hopefully this wasn’t a cross-Atlantic voyage—I could attempt to make my way back home from there.
In fact, it might be better if we were going to America. The language would be easier there. I hadn’t spoken German in more than a decade. And seeing as I was a German citizen, if I ended up in Germany, the authorities might even refuse to send me back to England.
If I made it to America, I could contact the Schlomskys for help. They owed me that, after I had figured out what happened to their daughter. And surely it couldn’t actually be as far between New York and Toledo as I had been led to believe?
It was at this point that I heard the scuff of a shoe behind me, and then two hands grabbed my upper arms while a male voice said, “Got you!” in my ear.
I shrieked, of course, as if I had been stabbed. The voice—or more accurately, the man it belonged to—muttered something (likely a curse) and moved one hand up to slap over my mouth. He was wearing gloves, or I would have bit him.
His other arm went across my chest so he could haul me backwards and then shake me. “Quiet!”
There wasn’t anything else I could do, of course. Or rather, I did my best to scream, but the hand across my mouth stopped anything but muffled outrage from escaping.
“Should have let him do it himself,” the voice muttered, and my blood chilled as I realized that Wolfgang might have accomplices onboard. Not just sailors he had paid to look the other way, but actual accomplices. Perhaps he wasn’t even here. Perhaps he had loaded me into a motorcar outside the Savoy, and someone else had taken me to the boat, while Wolfgang himself led Tom and Crispin on a merry chase all over London. They may not even have noticed that I was missing yet.
Perhaps this had nothing to do with marriage at all. Perhaps Wolfgang was part of a white slavery ring, and he had abducted both Christopher and myself and was shipping us off to darkest Arabia for some sultan’s harem.
I renewed my efforts to get free, to the obvious irritation of the man holding me. He gave me a shake, the way a terrier might shake a rat it had caught. “Stop it! We’re the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and we’re here to rescue you. You’re going home.”
I was?
“Here. You take her.” He shoved me at someone else, whose scent and tweed coat was familiar.
“It’s all right, Pippa,” Tom’s voice said. “Come with me. We’ll get you off the boat.”
That was the point when my knees buckled, of course, and he had to put an arm around my waist to keep me standing. There was no going anywhere, not while I was like this. And he must have realized it, because he stayed where he was while I buried my face in his tweed coat and hung on, shaking.
“Christopher?” I managed after a few seconds, my teeth chattering.
His head came up alertly. “Is he here?”
“I haven’t seen him. I thought maybe you?—”
