‘Then you did come to my room last night!’ exclaimed Rossanna, without displaying much concern at her predicament. ‘I was sure I heard you move across the floorboards on your way back to bed. No wonder Father was so restless!’
‘I’m not sure what this has got to do with it,’ said Cribb, lifting his head, but refraining from any further movement of the hands.
‘I should have thought it was obvious,’ said Rossanna, giggling. ‘I hope your bomb-making is more restrained than your love-making, Mr Sargent, or we shall all be blown up when you get to work with the dynamite this afternoon. Much as I am flattered by such a display of passion, I must plead to be released on this occasion. There is so much to be done before the emissaries arrive tomorrow, and Father relies on me absolutely.’ She lifted her head and pertly kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Perhaps in a day or two, when the work has been completed. . Now, if you will kindly put down my skirt and help me to my feet, we might resume our walk.’
The whole thing had happened so precipitately and without any initiative on his part-whatever she suggested to the contrary-that he felt quite weak at the knees when he stood up. If, as he suspected, she had engineered it all, then she was a remarkable young woman, a conclusion he had reached soon after meeting her, without realising how remarkable. But why should she have arranged such an accident? Was it to satisfy herself that he had really been on an amorous mission the night before? She had certainly reacted emphatically after the accidental arrival of his hand upon her thigh. Accidental? Fortuitous, more like. She had taken it as the signal of a resumption of passion. It was all she had wanted to know.
Satisfactory as the outcome was, he still felt that his reputation as an adventurer was a little tarnished by the incident. He reflected, as he obligingly removed a thistle from the back of Rossanna’s skirt, that a professional would not have behaved in quite the same way. And he would have struck a short, sharp blow in that area to rekindle her respect for the adventuring profession if she had not been wearing a bustle.
As it was, they continued their journey along the path for another hundred yards or so, when they came to a small lake. On the far side was a tall red-brick tower in the gothic style, crenellated at the top. It was accessible from the bank on one side, but supported in the water by three arches.
‘What’s that?’ asked Cribb.
‘A folly, Mr Sargent.’
‘Folly?’
‘A useless building erected at the whim of a landed gentleman. Some call them gazebos. This one is your target for destruction.’
‘Good Lord! The owner won’t take kindly to that, will he?’
‘The owner is an Irishman. He will be told that his folly was sacrificed to the cause. I am sure you must have destroyed scores of buildings more serviceable to mankind than this monstrosity.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Cribb, remembering himself. ‘But won’t the noise attract unwanted attention from people hereabouts?’
‘It is most unlikely. We are quite isolated here. If anyone heard a distant explosion they would assume it came from the cement workings at Stone. Blast the gazebo out of existence, Mr Sargent. Your reputation depends upon it.’
CHAPTER 11
The rest of that day and the next was a period of intense activity in the house by the river. The impending arrival of the emissaries from the Revolutionary Directory had galvanised everyone. Formal meals were abandoned. Nourishment was snatched at irregular intervals. What consultations there were took place in corridors and on staircases, and were confined to essential business.
Cribb, not least, needed every minute he could get at his work. Three weeks at Woolwich had given him a useful grounding in explosives, enough to pass muster among the dynamiters, but no one at the Arsenal had envisaged him making infernal machines. He had to make them now, or confess he was an impostor. To complicate matters, Rossanna had insisted that the gazebo be destroyed from underneath, by a charge placed in a watertight metal box at the base of one of the brick supports. He had tested the depth of the water there with a stone and line and found it to be over nine feet. The pressure of the water at that depth would assuredly curb the destructive power of the dynamite; how much, he could not begin to assess.
There was no shortage of bomb components. Devlin took him to an out-house beside the kitchen-garden and unlocked the door to a veritable arsenal. As well as the cases of dynamite from Hole Haven, there was at least a hundredweight of Atlas Powder stored there. ‘I shall need some detonators,’ said Cribb, trying not to seem staggered at the force represented in the store. ‘You can’t make bombs without detonators.’
‘We keep them elsewhere,’ said Devlin, giving him a long look. ‘I’m not the authority on explosives here, but I’m told you don’t store detonators with dynamite.’
‘Oh, quite right,’ Cribb airily conceded. ‘Where are they, then?’
‘In the house. We keep them in the room under yours.’
It was said in the matter-of-fact manner that could not possibly be taken for anything but literal truth. This was shortly borne out, when the two men entered the room in question. The first thing to take Cribb’s eyes was the mantelpiece. Anyone unfamiliar with the manufacture of infernal machines might have wondered at the lengths to which some people go to bestir themselves in the morning, for at least a dozen alarm clocks were crowded on the shelf. Cribb crossed the room and picked one up. ‘Benson of Ludgate Hill, eh? Nothing less than the best.’
‘McGee’s orders,’ explained Devlin. ‘He blames his accident on a faulty clock. The detonators are over here, in the tallboy.’ With conspicuous care, he pulled open a drawer. Three rows of test tubes lay on a bed of cotton-wool, each one held fast by a twist of wire. ‘Malone did all this. I don’t know what the stuff inside is.’
‘It must be a fulminate of some kind,’ said Cribb. ‘Probably mercury. What’s in the other drawers?’
Devlin opened one to see. ‘It looks like a rope to me.’
Cribb turned a piece over in his hand. ‘Slow-match. This is what I’d use to make a bomb in the normal way. It burns a yard in eight hours, compared with the yard a minute of a conventional fuse. Unfortunately, you can’t burn a slow-acting fuse in an air-tight box, so I’m restricted to a clock-timed detonation. Do we have guns?’
Devlin opened the other drawer.
‘Cartridge-firing pistols,’ said Cribb, glancing inside. ‘You can see why so many of the bombs deposited about London never go off. There’s too many possibilities of faults in the mechanism. If there isn’t something wrong with the alarm-clock or the connexion with the trigger, there’s still the possibility of the hammer not striking the cap truly, and missing fire. It goes against all my bomb-making principles to make a machine as liable to defects as that and then drop it into nine feet of water and expect it to detonate perfectly. It’s too much to expect.’
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ said Devlin, with a grin that suggested otherwise. ‘Those are the water-tight boxes beside the wardrobe. I think you’d better start work at once. The Clan doesn’t look kindly on failures.’ With that, he left, presumably to check that his own work was in order.