“I don’t know.”
Still breathing hard, he went back to select a fist-sized chunk of rock from the rubble. “Here, hold this,” he said, handing her the rock. He stripped off his groom’s coat and waistcoat, then pulled his shirt off over his head. The damp chill of the subterranean vault sent a shiver through him. He hadn’t thought to check his boot to see if they’d missed his knife. They had.
“Do you always carry that?” she asked, watching him slip the knife from its hidden sheath.
“Always.” He flashed her a smile that showed his teeth. “I even threw it at your father once.”
Using the blade, he sliced his shirt into strips and began to plait them. Her mind was quick. She said, “Let me help.”
He wrapped the plaited shirt around the rock like a long wick, then opened the hinged tin and horn door of the lantern.
“Don’t put out the candle,” she warned.
Grunting, he kindled the torn edge of the shirt, watched it flare and catch. Thrusting his arms through the iron bars of the gate, he held the burning, weighted shirt as long as he could. Then he hurled it at the door above.
It flew through the air, a flaming catapult that illuminated the shadowy stairwell and hit the stout door with a solid thud. Falling to the stone lintel in a shower of sparks, it burned up bright for one shining moment and went out.
“Hell and the devil confound it,” he whispered, then added, “I beg your pardon, Miss Jarvis.”
She stood beside him, her hands, like his, gripping the bars of the gate. “That’s quite all right.”
He swung to look at her, assessing the sturdy cloth of her riding habit. It wouldn’t burn any better than his coat or waistcoat.
She said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Your petticoats.”
“My—” She broke off. He thought for a moment that she meant to refuse him. But what she said was, “Turn around.”
He went to select more rocks from the rubble. She said, “I’m finished.”
He threw his coat up to the door first, followed by his rough waistcoat, not even bothering to try to light them first. “Why?” she asked as he set to work ripping the first of her fine petticoats.
“They’re fodder. The lawn of the petticoats will burn fast, but the wool coat will smolder.”
“We hope.”
“We hope,” he agreed.
He threw the first petticoat-wrapped rock short, so that it burned in a bright, useless heap on the second step. The second try landed square.
“Thank goodness,” she whispered, pressing against the gate, her gaze on the small fire above.
It burned for a time, long enough to fill the air with smoke and the pungent odor of singed wool. Coughing, she said, “Will it kill us, do you think? The smoke, I mean.”
“Probably not if we go to the far end of the chamber, near the rubble. I could feel air coming in there.”
But in the end they had no need to retreat. Once again, the fire sputtered and went out. They had part of one petticoat left.
“It isn’t going to work,” he said.
“It has to work.” She pushed away from the gate. “Start ripping up the last petticoat,” she said, setting to work on the brass buttons of her riding habit. “Your coat was wet from lying on the stone.”
“You’ll be cold,” he said.
She stripped off her habit with angry, purposeful jerks, the white flesh of her arms bathed in gold by the dim light of the flickering lantern. “Just hit the door.”
Both parts of the riding habit landed with satisfying plops atop his coat and waistcoat. He’d have added his breeches, too, but they were of buckskin and would never burn. Clad only in her short, lightweight stays, a thin chemise, boots and stockings, she watched him carefully kindle the last petticoat. He let it flare up until it was almost burning his hand, then lobbed it at the pile of clothes above.
This time, the cloth beneath the burning missile caught, blazing up hot and fast. The air filled with the crackle of flames, the smell of singed wood. They stood and watched it burn, the big bell of St. Clements tolling four times in the distance. Then, as the small bell began to toll again for those who might have miscounted the first bell, this fire, too, hissed softly and went out.
Chapter 41
“I’m sorry I involved you in this,” she said.
They sat side by side on the ledge that ran along the near wall of the stone vaulted chamber. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs so that she could hug them close. He had set the lantern next to her on the ledge, but its feeble warmth provided a pitiful defense against the cold gloom of the subterranean room.
He turned his head to look at her. She’d lost most of her pins. Her hair was coming down, falling in artless disarray about her face. It made her look uncharacteristically approachable. He said, “I involved myself.”
“Why?” That frown line appeared again between her eyes as she studied his face. “Why do you involve yourself in the investigation of murder?”
He tilted back his head, his gaze on the ancient vaulting above. “I’ve been told it’s a form of arrogance, thinking I can solve a mystery that baffles others.”
“But that’s not why you do it.”
He felt a smile curve his lips. “No.”
“It’s the victims, isn’t it? That’s why you do it. For them.”
He said, “It’s why you involved yourself in this mess, isn’t it? For the woman who died in your arms?”
She was silent for a moment. He could hear the distant drip of water, feel the weight of a thousand tons of earth pressing down on them. She said, “I’d like to think so. But I have the most lowering reflection that I’ve been doing it for myself.”
“Yourself?”
She shifted restlessly, edging ever so slightly closer to him. If she’d been any other woman, he would have offered her the warmth of his body—for his sake as well as hers. But one did not offer to hold Lord Jarvis’s daughter, even if she was freezing and about to die. She said, “My father thinks I involve myself in reform because I have a maudlin attraction to good works.”
“He doesn’t know you well, does he?”
She surprised him by letting out a soft huff of laughter. “In that way, no. I’m not a charitable person. I work for reform out of a sense of what’s right, a conviction that things ought to be different. It’s far more intellectual than emotional.”
“I think you’re being too severe with yourself.”
“No. I concern myself with the fate of the poor women and children of London the way I might concern myself with the well-being of cart horses. I empathize with them as fellow creatures, but I certainly never imagined I could ever find myself in their position. But then—”
She broke off, swallowed, and tried again. “Then I met Rose—Rachel Fairchild. And I realized . . . there was a woman like me. A woman born into wealth and privilege who had danced at Almack’s and driven in her carriage in Hyde Park. And yet somehow she had ended up there, at the Magdalene House. That’s when I think for the first time I truly understood . . . there but for the grace of God go I.”