The Tin Princess

  "But we don't know that they've got him. If Jim's rescue plan worked -"

  The key turned again, and one soldier held the door open for another to bring in a tray containing a jug of coffee, two cups, and a plate of rolls. He set them down on the table, saluted, and was about to turn and go when Adelaide got up and said, "Wait."

  She picked up a roll and held it out to him. His puzzled eyes flicked to the Sergeant in the doorway.

  "Eat this," said Adelaide. "Essen sie."

  The Sergeant nodded, and the soldier took a small bite, chewing it politely and swallowing hard before smiling uncertainly. Adelaide was pouring some coffee.

  "Now drink," she said.

  It was hot, and he had to blow on it. He sipped once, and twice, and smacked his lips.

  Adelaide looked at Becky. "How long should we give him? Saucepan keeled over at once."

  "He was only little. I should think it would take longer on a person."

  "Especially a great hulk like this one. More!" she said to him. "Trinken sie mehr!"

  Trying not to look surprised, the soldier drank it down, with Adelaide watching every movement through narrowed eyes. When he'd finished it she took the cup, still watching him, and finally nodded.

  "All right, send him away," she said to Becky.

  The man clicked his heels and saluted, still puzzled, before leaving. Adelaide fell on the rolls at once, and Becky poured out the rest of the coffee.

  "We'll have to share the other cup," she said.

  Adelaide nodded, her mouth full. But her eyes were gleaming; she had an idea. Becky ate a roll - they were dry and stale - as patiently as she could, and waited for her turn at the coffee before saying, "Well?"

  "I was just thinking. What I said before they came in - about the flag."

  "All the authority comes from the flag. Yes, and all they've got to do is collar it and give it to Leopold to carry, and the whole game's over."

  "Only if it's there to take," said Adelaide.

  "What?"

  "Suppose they woke up tomorrow morning and found it gone?"

  Becky stared at her, but she was quite serious.

  "You're suggesting what, exactly? That we get out of here without being seen and steal the flag from under the noses of the guards - and then what?"

  "Dunno," said Adelaide. "I've only got that far. It's a good start, though, innit?"

  She calmly took the last roll. Becky crossed to the window, which overlooked a narrow courtyard in which a single sentry was patrolling. On the other side of it, the building rose high against the grey sky. All the windows were barred. Apart from the sentry, nothing moved; there was no life to be seen. Becky felt desolate. As she was about to turn back, her eyes caught a movement in the air, and then another and another, and the first fat flakes of snow began to fall.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WOOL

  Nine of the students, including Karl, Anton and Gustav, had survived the fight at the grotto, although Karl and Gustav had been slightly wounded. It had been hand-to-hand fighting; the soldiers, unwilling to shoot at them in case they shot the Prince, had had to rely on fists and swords, where the students were on more equal terms. However, the fight didn't last long, for the soldiers were only interested in capturing the Prince. As soon as they had torn him away from Anton, they hustled him away towards the Palace, beating off the students who gave chase.

  And then the main party of soldiers emerged from the tunnel, and the students, outnumbered and with no firearms, had to flee. It was then they discovered that Jim had been captured as well, and a heavy sense of guilt and failure descended over the ragged, aching band who stumbled back to the alleys and courts of the University quarter.

  They woke next morning to find the city seething with rumour and counter-rumour. Knots of people stood at every street-corner discussing the situation, scanning the few newspapers, and being moved on by police. The Queen was taken ill, they heard; a closed carriage had been seen turning into the Castle; troops had been moved in from the garrison at Neustadt; a demonstration by Glatz and his friends had begun noisily and been broken up almost at once; the Stock Exchange was closed; a bulletin was expected hourly from the Palace on the state of the Queen's health. Karl and the others, who knew far more than most, felt electric with anxiety about what they didn't know. The one thing they could do was inquire among the watermen for any knowledge of a tributary stream joining the river, for each of them who'd been in the tunnel was haunted by the picture of Carmen Ruiz drifting away helplessly in the boat: assassin she might have been, but no one deserved to die like a rat in the dark, as they were all convinced she would. But even those inquiries came to nothing, and, miserably, the students of the Richterbund drifted back to the Cafe Florestan, as the city fragmented with fear and speculation around them.

  By the time the afternoon light began to fade, Jim's preparations were complete. A guard had looked in twice during the day, once to bring in a tray of food and once to take it away again, and each time he had found Jim apparently slumped in apathy on the mattress. He'd eaten the half-cold, greasy goulash and dumplings to keep his strength up, and had given the impression of lethargy and hopelessness, and that was useful; and he'd watched the routine the guard went through, which was even more useful. And all the time he'd been patiently undoing the wool of his jersey.

  It was strong stuff: thin and oiled and tightly knitted, and hard to see in the dismal light. When he'd finished, Jim found himself shivering for lack of its warmth, but in possession of eight balls of tough yarn. Now, how could he use them?

  Whistling softly, he picked out one of the longest and toughest splinters of wood from the broken bed. It came to a sharp point, and he sat down to wind enough wool round the other end to give it a comfortable grip; and there was a dagger.

  Next, he turned to the cell wall, where he had noticed one or two loose stones. Using another length of wood he prised out a stone about the size of his head, and reached behind it to find what he was really looking for: smaller, loose rubble. He pulled out a few handfuls until he found a stone the size of a goose's egg, and roundish, and then kicked the rest of the rubble under the mattress and replaced the large stone he'd taken out first.

  Next, by knotting and reknotting the damnably twisty wool, he made a little net into which the stone fitted, and tied it firmly to a handle he'd made by plaiting together three strands of wool, and plaiting that length with two others: a nine-stranded cord, with a loop for his wrist, from which hung a weight heavy enough to stun a horse, if he swung it accurately. He tried it time and time again on the mattress until his muscles were familiar with the weight and the movement.

  So now he had two weapons. By the time he'd finished, it was dark, and he was cold and thirsty. Presumably they didn't intend to starve him, or they wouldn't have brought him the earlier meal; so presumably they'd be in again at some stage. He considered banging the door and - shouting for attention, but decided that that was more likely to bring them alert and curious, and he wanted them relaxed, expecting the apathy they'd seen before. Better wait, he thought; and, giving the mattress a shake to dislodge the insects, he tucked the dagger in his sock, curled up and lay down, and, like a cat, was peacefully asleep in a moment.

  Adelaide, chewing a thumbnail, turned away from adjusting the little lamp they'd been given, and scowled. "You made them chessmen yet?"

  "Nearly."

  "Well hurry up."

  Lacking anything else with which to keep Her Majesty from fretting herself into an apoplexy, Becky had suggested a game of chess. They had marked out a board in the dust on the floor, and Becky had begun to fashion some pieces from scraps of paper and twists of frail cotton from the edge of the curtains. It wasn't easy, and she'd broken a fingernail rubbing half the pawns in the soot in the fireplace to blacken them.

  "I've run out of tassels," she said. "We need four for the kings and queens. I've only got two. Look, can't we just shoot the guard and run for it?"

  "If t
here's any shooting, I'll do it. But not guards. He's just doing what he's told. Mind you, he's not doing what I tell him. Perhaps I will shoot him. Where's the bishops?"

  "Bishops?"

  "You ain't done any bishops. Get out the way, let me have a go."

  Tucking her hair back behind her ears, Adelaide knelt in the dust and began twisting and folding. Becky wandered to the window. It was nearly dark, but down in the courtyard below a party of soldiers was coming out of a door with a lantern. She watched idly as they cleared a patch of snow by the far wall. Two of them began to dig a small square hole, and then four others brought a stout, heavy post and leaned it against the wall. Becky, with a sudden sickening knowledge, realized what she was seeing and turned away busily to distract Adelaide.

  "How are you getting on?"

  "I've done the bishops," said Adelaide, looking up. "You can tell who they are 'cause they've got little thingies on their heads. Where's that gun?" She got up and took it from Becky's carpet-bag. "By God, it's heavy, innit? How many bullets in it? Six. I wish Miss Lockhart was here. She'd know what to do."

  "I'm sure she would." Becky swallowed hard; she was thinking of her mother, and a picture came to mind: the shabby sitting-room at home, warm and familiar, with Mama's colours laid out on the table in the lamplight and a muffin on the toasting-fork, with Grandmama nodding in her chair and Tom-Tom purring on the hearth... It was so vivid that she sniffed and then had to swallow hard.

  "No good weeping, Becky," said Adelaide, returning the pistol to the carpet-bag. "Pull yerself together. I ain't cried since ... I dunno when. Oh yes, I do. The last time I cried was in Mrs Catlett's, in Shepherd Market."

  "Was that..." Becky didn't know how to put it.

  "She found me in the street, starving. She took me in and fed me and cleaned me up... I couldn't understand why, at first. I soon found out. That's when I cried, when I realized how low I'd fallen, though it was silk sheets I was lying in. There was a lot further I could have fallen. I was lucky it was old Bessie Catlett and not anyone else. She'd been in service, she knew all the dukes and earls and such like, she knew how to flirt, how to please... She taught us. Drilled us. And kept us clean. She had a doctor in once a month to look us over. But one girl, she was my friend, she got infected. She was thrown out that day. Bessie Catlett never spent any money on medicine; she never wanted a girl sitting around when there was dozens, hundreds more out there in the streets. So poor Ethel was slung out. I've often wondered what happened to her. I hope she got better and found a decent bloke, but Gawd, there's bloody few of them..."

  "And that was where you met Prince Rudolf?"

  "Yeah. Some toff brought a party in, and Rudi didn't want to, you know, join in. So him and me sat talking. He was so nice... Well, you know the rest."

  "How long were you there?"

  "Two years, almost."

  "And what were you doing before that?"

  "I forget." She looked down abruptly. "We going to play chess then?"

  Becky knelt to face her across the board. It was only dimly visible, so she brought the little lamp down beside it on the floor.

  "I'll give you a rook odds," said Adelaide. "Go on, you're white, you start."

  Becky could hear a faint, regular hammering from the courtyard. Chattering inanely to cover it up, she moved her king's pawn out two squares. Adelaide tucked her hair back and began to concentrate with a little sigh of satisfaction.

  Jim awoke. There was a rattle of keys outside the door, and a dim gleam showed where the Judas window had been opened. He was awake in a moment, his right hand feeling for the stone on its thong. The door creaked open. Through narrowed eyes Jim watched the guard come in with the tray of food, leaving his lantern on the floor outside.

  Even better: there was only one man. There'd been two of them before. A bit of luck, at last...

  Eyeing Jim warily, the guard stooped to put the tray on the floor. He was too canny to turn his back, but he was too old to move fast, and when Jim suddenly rolled off the mattress and sprang up, swinging the stone, he couldn't dodge it in time.

  Jim had had to steel himself to do it: he didn't like hitting people on the head. But the thought of Adelaide lent him ruthlessness, and the stone cracked into the side of the man's skull and sent him sprawling.

  With a powerful tug Jim ripped the bunch of keys from the man's belt. Taking a slice of bread from the tray, he stuffed it into his pocket for later and slipped out.

  The key of the cell door was easy to pick out: it was the biggest and oldest. Jim locked the man in for good measure, and then picked up the lantern and set off down the corridor, silent on his rubber-soled shoes, stone in hand.

  He paused at the corner, listened, looked around. There was an open doorway at the top of a flight of steps, with light inside, and he tiptoed up and stopped to listen outside it.

  There was nothing to hear except the occasional rustle of paper. Looking through the crack, he saw part of a man's back as he sat bent over a table, and then he moved, and Jim saw that he was turning over the page of a newspaper.

  Silently he put the lantern down, put the stone in his pocket with the loop outside, and took the dagger from his sock.

  Then, moving with no more sound than a cat, he stepped through the doorway and into the little guardroom, where a stove glowed and a pot of coffee simmered. Before the man heard a thing, Jim's hand was damped over his mouth and the sharp wooden point of the dagger was jammed hard against his throat.

  "Make a noise or move a muscle and this knife'll cut you wide open," Jim whispered.

  The man stiffened. He was a stout, slow-looking, red-faced fellow, with a cigar-smoker's wheeze.

  "Now bend down and take off your boots. Move slowly. My dagger's going to stay at your throat, so don't you so much as twitch."

  The man did as he was told.

  "Now your socks," Jim said, and prodded harder to encourage him.

  Off came the socks, to the guard's embarrassment; he hadn't washed his feet for some time. Jim had no time to feel sorry for him on that account, though.

  And then he saw a prize: a revolver, in a holster, hung on a nail behind the door.

  "Put the sock in your mouth. Yes, in your mouth, all of it. Quickly."

  Reluctantly the man did so. Jim leapt for the gun and had it out before the guard could react. It was loaded, too.

  "Right," he said. "Take that sock out so you can speak, and if you even take enough breath to shout there'll be a bullet in your heart before the first word comes out. Now tell me: what is this place?"

  "The Castle," said the man in a shaky voice.

  "Where is the Queen?"

  The guard opened his mouth and shut it again, but he'd glanced involuntarily upwards.

  "Upstairs," said Jim. "I see. Where?"

  The guard clamped his mouth shut.

  "Put the sock in," said Jim.

  His ferocity must have scorched, because the guard did it at once. Then Jim kicked him on the shin as hard as he could, and a sudden muffled grunt broke from the man's throat.

  "That hurt? Well, next time I'll break one of your fingers, and that will hurt. Take the sock out again and tell me where she is."

  His eyes watering, the guard dragged the sopping lump of wool out of his mouth and mumbled, "There's a staircase just along the corridor. It's up on the fourth floor. The old Governor's apartments. Big double door."

  "And what's the quickest way out?"

  "Other end of that same landing - door to the servants' staircase. Out through the kitchens. Please -"

  "Put it back. Hurry up or I'll make you swallow it."

  With his fat face wreathed in misery, the guard shoved the sock back. It bulged over his lips disgustingly.

  "Now stand up and turn around."

  Moving as slowly as he dared, the man did so, and Jim rapidly wound some wool from one of the balls in his pocket around the man's head, holding the gag in place.

  "Put your hands behind you."

>   He bound the man's thumbs together before lashing them as securely as he could to a stout iron pipe set in the wall. The wool was as strong as whipcord; he wouldn't break loose.

  With a quick glance around to see that there was nothing for the guard to kick over and make a noise with, Jim blew him a kiss, took the lantern and the pistol, and left.

  "Check," said Adelaide. "You ain't paying attention."

  "I can hardly see. What's that? A bishop? That was a pawn a minute ago! And one of mine, at that!"

  "Suit yourself," said Adelaide, putting it back and moving another piece instead. "Checkmate. I was just spinning it out. D'you want another game?"

  Becky got up, stretched, yawned, shivered. She had no idea what the time was; she was cold, hungry, tired and frightened, and, she thought, Adelaide was much more use to her than she was to Adelaide. It was time to earn her salary, if only she had the remotest idea how.

  She looked at the lamp, to see if the wick needed turning up; it was beginning to flicker. Perhaps the oil was running low.

  She had just bent to look, and Adelaide had begun to gather up the scraps of paper and cotton they'd been playing with, when both of them heard the same sound: a scratching, scraping, clicking noise from the door. Adelaide stood up, smoothing her skirt.

  Then the lock opened as if with a key, and the handle turned.

  "Jim!" cried Becky, and at once he raised his finger to his lips.

  He was unshaven, filthy and bruised; there was a cut on his forehead; his hair was tangled. He carried a pistol in one hand and a lantern in the other, and there was a hardness, a grim determination of purpose about him that she'd never seen so clearly in anyone. It made him formidable.

  And Becky was conscious of something else, and turned quickly to Adelaide to verify it. A charge of some kind, like an electric spark, seemed to pass between Adelaide and Jim. It was physical, like an animal smell; the two of them were looking at each other with such intensity that Becky felt they'd forgotten her and the Castle altogether. But then Jim blinked, and, to her surprise, bowed.