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‘Standing guard? Over what?’
‘The entrance to this corridor, of course.’
‘What would anyone want to guard it for? It’s just a corridor!’
‘Soldiers aren’t trained to think about why they do things, Mr Linton. If they were, nobody would ever get an army together. Now be silent!’
Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at his face. It was as cool and still as a block of ice. How could he do it? Inside me, fear, excitement and stress were writhing like a wounded snake. He didn’t show the least emotion. But then, he never did.
Oh yes, he sometimes does - in your imagination he does a lot of things…
Behind my back, I clenched my hands together. No! I couldn’t follow that train of thought, not now, not here of all places. Quickly, I let my eye wander through the hall to find something to distract me.
There was certainly enough to see.
At first, the red coats of the soldiers, flaring up like signs of danger, had distracted me from the rest. But now that they seemed to have lost interest in us entirely, I took in the rest of the giant room.
‘Room’ probably was not a big enough word. It was a cavern, a man-made cavern, almost as big as the entrance hall of Empire House. I could see that Mr Ambrose and his nemesis had the same penchant for giant proportions. Yet where in Mr Ambrose’s hall there had been a monument of cold barrenness, although it was the entrance to his headquarters, this hall in a simple East End outpost of the East India Company was flaming with sumptuous colour.
The walls were dark, red brick, interspersed with wooden beams painted red and white. Up above, the beams arched to support a flat ceiling. Torches hung from the wooden supports, plunging the whole scene into sinister shades of dark gold and orange. In the flickering torchlight, the glinting barrels of the soldiers' guns looked like the torture instruments of Satan’s disciples in hell.
Shadows flickered over the ceiling and the gallery that surrounded the room. Shadows also moved with the soldiers who were marching along the gallery, watching the scene below. And shadows were thrown by the gigantic contraptions that filled the centre of the hall.
I hadn’t been wrong. There were pulleys, cranes, ropes and even lorries in abundance. They formed a labyrinth through which hundreds of workers scuttled like ants over an anthill, carrying, fetching, shouting. If all things around them left bizarre shadow-paintings on the wall in the flickering torchlight, they themselves painted entire ghastly frescos in black and dark orange. The cranes were the arms of giant black octopi, and the ropes on the pulleys were snakes, waiting to strike and bite.
Under the ghastly play of shadows, on each of the four walls of the hall, hung a gigantic tapestry displaying a coat of arms: two roaring lions on either side of a shield showing a red cross on white ground. Although I had never seen this particular crest before, and the shadowy monsters on the wall made it hard to see, I had no trouble guessing what it was.
We were in Lord Dalgliesh’s lair. There was only one thing it could be: the official coat of arms of the Honourable East India Company.
Under the farthest of the tapestries, the one directly opposite me, the entrance to a tunnel gaped like an open maul. Tracks ran down into the tunnel, disappearing out of sight to God only knew where.
One thing was for sure: This was no mere warehouse or office building.
Slowly, I raised my eyes again to the towering golden lions above the entrance to the tunnel. Come on, they seemed to say. Dare approach. Dare enter into our forbidden realm. We will tear you to shreds before you’ve taken one step.
Nonsense! Taking a deep breath, I straightened and tried to look unconcerned.
Get a grip, Lilly! Those lions are just pieces of printed cloth. Do you want Mr Ambrose to think you’re scared of giant coloured bed sheets on a wall?
No. I did not want that. Particularly after the incident with the wooden dragon.
I glared at the lions, meeting their bold, glittering gaze head-on. My eyes fell on a blue band that wound like a snake under the lions' paws. There were letters on it. Yet even though they were printed in bright gold, in the semi-darkness of the hall they were nearly impossible to make out. Was this English? No, it looked more like a foreign language…
Auspicio… Regis… Et Senatus… Angliae…
What did that mean?
‘By the authority of the King and Parliament of England.’
Startled, my eyes flicked to where Mr Ambrose was standing, the perfect model of the British-Indian soldier.
‘That’s what it means,’ he said, again managing to speak in his cool, calm voice without his mouth even twitching. ‘The motto under the coat of arms of the East India Company that you were staring at. “By the authority of the King and Parliament of England”.’
‘How did you know that was what I was looking at?’ I hissed.
‘Your lips were moving, forming the Latin words. When I say “be silent”, Mr Linton, that also means don’t move your lips.’
Too preoccupied to argue, I gave a tiny nod and swallowed. My eyes once more took in the soldiers on the gallery, then returned to the roaring lions on the giant tapestries, and to the words they shouted at the world. Auspicio Regis Et Senatus Angliae…
No wonder Lord Dalgliesh felt justified in doing whatever he wanted. He had the Queen’s Official Seal of Approval.
Beside me, Mr Ambrose tensed. Tensed more than he was already tensed, I mean - which, considering his normal stance, was an impressive feat.
‘Out of the way! Quickly!’ With those words hissed into my ear, he sprang away and pulled me after him in a decidedly unsoldierly manner. We were behind a heap of crates before I could utter a word of protest. And then I heard his voice, and the protest died in my throat.
‘…have everything loaded onto the ship immediately, please, Captain. I shall await a full report in half an hour.’
Ice flooded my heart, and I stumbled after Mr Ambrose, not uttering a single word. Just before he pulled me out of sight, and we disappeared behind the heap of wooden crates, I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. I saw the golden mane and hawk’s beak. I saw the steely glint of piercing blue eyes.
Lord Dalgliesh was here.
‘So it is decided?’
The voice was rough with a hint of cockney, but many other accents mixed into it. Spying over the top of one of the crates, I saw the burly shape of a ship’s captain next to the aristocratic figure of Lord Daniel Eugene Dalgliesh.