"All clear," he said softly, padding back downstairs, where Miss Gwen was tapping her parasol with impatience against the scarred wooden planks of the floor.
"All very well and good, but I have made a thorough tour of the premises, and fail to see any explosive matter, except for one pitiful excuse for a grenade and some sorry grains of gunpowder. This has been a sad waste of our time."
"Ah, but that's what you were meant to think." Geoff grinned, feeling the rush of the mission run through him. "Allow me to provide explosive matter for you."
Striding toward the shelves on the wall, Geoff reached past a row of metal tankards, feeling along the brackets that held the shelves in place.
"This is hardly the time for refreshment," objected Miss Gwen.
"That's where you're wrong." Geoff found the latch he had been looking for, just behind a molding round of cheese. The whiff of it was enough to deter any less-determined seeker. "I'd say this is exactly the time."
Pressing down on a bent nail, he felt the catch give, and the entire section of shelving swung neatly back on well-oiled hinges. The door had been neatly done, built of bricks within a frame, then plastered over to resemble the adjoining wall. As an extra precaution, shelves had been bracketed to it, providing a third layer of protection. None of that, however, prevented a truly careful observer from noting that the house was a third larger on the outside than on the inside. Once that was established, it was only a matter of logical calculation to determine the location of the door.
Not to mention that Geoff had been watching through the window one night while Emmet manipulated the catch.
Propping open the door with one shoulder, Geoff gestured Miss Gwen into an Ali Baba's cave of armaments. Enough metal-tipped pikes to satisfy an entire Mongol horde were stacked along one wall, waiting to be passed out into the eager hands of volunteers. Halfway up, each boasted a small metal hinge, designed so that the pikes could be folded in two and hidden under a man's coat, ready to be pulled out when the signal was called. There were piles of blunderbusses, jumbles of pistols, barrels of gunpowder, miniature mounds of grenades, and trays strewn with sun-dried saltpeter.
All around the windowless room, weapons were ranged, weapons traditional and experimental, old weapons, new weapons, muskets and bayonets, pikes and swords, grenades and clubs, each clustered with its own kind, all awaiting the great day of liberation. It was an array designed to send the king's ministers into sheer, gibbering panic.
Miss Gwen drank in the sight with an expression of rapture reminiscent of Joan of Arc in the midst of a divine vision.
"I do hope this is satisfactory," said Geoff.
Miss Gwen made unerringly for the barrels of gunpowder. "I believe it will do."
Geoff carefully lit a glass-lined lantern and hung it just inside the door, as far away from explosive materials as he could. While the goal was to blow up the house, he preferred to wait until he was no longer in it.
Dying gloriously for the cause might be the stuff of song and legend, but he would rather accomplish his mission with a minimum of personal injury—the odd powder burn didn't really count—and head happily home to spend the evening before the hearth, Letty in one arm, a hot dish of tea in the other, trading tales of the day's adventures.
All the more reason to get the job done quickly.
"The trapdoors in the ceiling lead up to other storerooms," explained Geoff rapidly, pointing to a square hole just above Miss Gwen's head. "There are more pikes and muskets above and gunpowder on the top floor."
Geoff could see the ramifications clicking into place in Miss Gwen's keen mind. "Which means…"
"That each explosion will set off a successive explosion on the floor above."
It would have been uncharacteristic for Miss Gwen to express approval. "Is there enough air to feed the flames?"
Geoff indicated the outside wall, where a series of small holes had been bored in the guise of knotholes in the wood. "These rooms were designed for the potential storage of men as well as weapons. Let's get started on the rockets, shall we?"
Taking Miss Gwen by the arm, he all but dragged her over to the short stack of rockets propped against the wall. Designed to Emmet's specifications, they were all composed of iron cylinders not more than twenty inches long, with an arrowlike point at one end.
They were clumsy-looking things, and Miss Gwen eyed them askance.
"I expected something more impressive." Miss Gwen considered for a moment. "Something taller."
"Each one," said Geoff, forestalling her as she reached for the one on top, "is packed solid with a mixture of gunpowder, sulfur, and potassium nitrate."
"Hmmm," said Miss Gwen, regarding the rockets with renewed interest.
"They're meant to be tied in bunches around a central pole," Geoff explained, busily unrolling a length of twine from around his waist. "That provides the height. The pikes should be just about long enough."
That was all the instruction Miss Gwen needed. They worked swiftly and silently, grouping the rockets into bunches, securing them with thick loops of twine, and inserting fuses into the holes provided for that purpose in their bases. The only sounds in the room were the brush of rope against iron, the periodic scrape of a pike base across the floor, and the disjointed patter of mice scurrying along the baseboards.
The fuse, cotton twine coated with gunpowder, left dark flecks on their gloved fingers as they worked. The acrid smell of sulfur, stronger with the door closed, made Geoff's nose tingle and his eyes water. In the windowless room, it might have been any time from noon to midnight. The door to the back room fitted perfectly to its frame, without any cracks or chinks. The air-holes bored into the wall were too small to admit any light, and they were nearly too small to admit much in the way of air. Hide the rebel leaders in there, and they were probably in greater danger of asphyxiation than discovery.
They could not have been in the room for more than ten minutes, but it felt as though they had been there for eternity, laboring among the sulfur and saltpeter in the reddish glare of the single lamp, like an engraver's etching of the horrors of the damned. It must be well after six, time enough for Letty to be at Lord Vaughn's already.
Perhaps insisting she take embroidery scissors had been a bit much.
He might as well, thought Geoff disgustedly, slicing off a piece of twine, have laden her with the sorts of magical amulets medieval peasants wore to ward off plague. They would probably be just as effective, and a great deal lighter.
Unbidden, a memory arose, of a long, paneled corridor. They kept that wing closed now. But when he was eight, Geoff had sat there, night after night, outside his father's door, crept out of bed and lurked in the hallway, standing sentry against Death. But while he slept, nodding at his post, Death had slipped past. At the time, Geoff had imagined him as a bony man in a tattered black cape, hoisting himself through the window like a burglar in the night. Unopposed, Death had slipped down the hall, through the sleeping house, and trailed his icy fingers through the nursery.
If he had stayed awake…If he had been more vigilant…Logically, he knew there was nothing he could have done. Smallpox struck where it would, and there was nothing a small boy—or even the horde of doctors that had trooped up and down the stairs of Sibley Court, shaking their gray wigs in learned resignation—could do to arrest the disease once it struck. Other than pray.
But how many accidents, how many illnesses, could be prevented through just a bit of care and planning? So Geoff had planned and he had plotted; he had charted out his friends' missions with cold-headed precision, making sure their getaway horses were always in place, their guns always primed, their information the best his spies could provide.