Page 77 of In Want of a Suspect
“Maybe,” Parry said. “Either way, you best move on now. There’s no privy behind this fence, and this street is no place for a so-called lady after dark.”
“You’re no fun!” they heard Marianne say, and Lizzie could easily imagine her pout. But the sound of their voices was moving away, and Lizzie felt her shoulders relax, even as the muscles in her back and shoulder still burned.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“I shall recover,” came Elinor’s response.
“Excellent.” Lizzie slowly rose to her hands and knees andbegan moving gingerly. “I think there’s a ladder.”
As quickly as they dared, Elinor and Lizzie made their way down to the ground, making as little noise as possible. As Lizzie had suspected, repair work had already begun on the storehouse, and the wooden frames of the windows had been replaced, although the glass had yet to be installed. From the inside, new wooden shutters blocked out the night, but Lizzie quietly tested one by pushing on it. It was latched, but the latch was easy enough to flip open by shimmying the blade of Elinor’s pocketknife between the crack in the shutters.
“Here,” she whispered, indicating that they ought to climb through the opening. “Do you need a boost, or—”
“I think that I’ve had enough boosts for the evening,” Elinor replied. “Although I am not sure I feel comfortable breaking in through a window.”
“We’ve already climbed their fence,” Lizzie pointed out. “And there isn’t any glass.”
“I was just supposed to stand watch! Perhaps I’ll keep watch out here.”
Lizzie hoisted herself up on the windowsill. “Best not. Out there, you had plausible deniability—you could claim you were simply out for an evening stroll. On this side, you’ve already trespassed.” She dropped down onto the wooden floor of the storehouse and turned to face Elinor. “Besides, the shutters weren’t locked. We broke nothing.”
She could sense rather than see Elinor’s eye roll. “And I suppose you’re the legal expert.”
But despite Lizzie’s stretch of the truth, Elinor followed her, and soon both ladies were standing in the storehouse, Lizzie gently closing the shutters behind her. It was completely black inside, and there was no adjusting to the gloom when there was no light to be had. A memory rose, unbidden, of the last time Lizzie had found herself shut in absolute darkness, in the records room at Pemberley & Associates. Darcy had been at her side, and she had followed him into Pemberley without thinking things through properly, and they’d been locked inside with no way out. But they’d held hands for the first time, and if Lizzie concentrated, she could still feel the warmth of his hand around hers, and the strength of his presence, which filled up all the dark corners and put her at ease, even as he was struggling not to panic at his own claustrophobia.
The scrape of a tinderbox jolted Lizzie back to reality.
“Sorry,” Elinor said, lighting a candle. “But we aren’t getting anywhere without some light.”
“You’re right,” Lizzie said, forcing her thoughts to the matter at hand and away from the memory of Darcy and his intoxicating scent. She withdrew her own candle from her pocket and lit the wick on Elinor’s flame. “I hope Marianne managed to get away.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Elinor whispered as they moved carefully through the storehouse. There were tables and a workbench on this end, and beyond that, stacks of crates huddled in the dark. “If anything, she’ll be peeved that she missed out on this little venture and complain about it for a week.”
“I will not!”
The whisper from ahead made both Elinor and Lizzie jump, but then Marianne herself appeared between the stacks of crates, hair in disarray and skirts streaked with mud.
“Marianne!” Elinor and Lizzie both exclaimed in a whisper.
“If you thought I was about to let you two do the fun bits after I did the hard work, then you both don’t know me at all!” She joined them and withdrew her own candle from her pocket.
“How did you get past the guard?” Elinor asked, lighting her candle.
“As soon as we got back around the front, he left me on the street,” she said. “But then there was a whistle, and he went running in the other direction. I was able to squeeze under the gate he’d been guarding and walked right through the front door. But we better hurry. It could be that someone is here for whatever they’re hiding.”
That got the three of them moving.
The storehouse consisted of an open space on the first level where they received crates of wares—mostly wool broadcloth and linen from the weavers in the countryside—before it was shipped to its final destinations all around the world. Lizzie knew from Jack that they kept back a percentage of their wares to be sold here in London, in the Western Exchange, where the Mullinses had booths. There had been a system, she recalled, of sorting, labeling, and processing the wares.
But in the dark, all the crates looked the same.
“We need to open one of these,” Lizzie said to Marianne.“Can you find something—”
“Here,” Marianne said, and there was the sound of her skirts rustling followed by the metallic clang of something. Lizzie heard Elinor say, “Oh dear,” and then Marianne returned in the circle of light, grinning and wielding a crowbar. Elinor followed, carrying both her candle and Marianne’s, and she and Lizzie held up the light while Marianne went to work, trying to pry open the nearest crate.
“These crates aren’t damaged, so they’ve been delivered since the fire,” Lizzie observed.
“If not for the stink of smoke, you wouldn’t know that a fire had taken place,” Elinor agreed, looking at the newly laid wood planks on the floor. “Where did the fire break out?”