Page 157 of The Ladies Least Likely
Ren paused. She wasn’t Christiana—that had to be her mother’s name, wasn’t it? The vicar cleared his throat and shifted. His eyes widened as a sudden whoosh of air blasted through the night and a great flame rose from the square, as if a torch had been cast into a barrel of oil.
“Who comes?” the poor vicar whimpered, his face white and terrified, and Ren understood. He was watching some orchestrated ritual, something he’d never seen before, but it seemed it was important to Harriette. Her voice was strong and firm as she answered.
“I am Christiana, a poor mortal and a sinner.”
“Come in,” the vicar croaked with relief, nearly falling into the gate as it opened behind him.
At the same time a roar of noise rounded the corner, pouring into the street behind them.
The mob was in full spate. The men in the front charged any item in the street, smashing or overturning it, and those behind dashed to doors and windows, caving them in.
Screams erupted from houses, shouts of rage carried before, and smoke from the fire billowing above the market square burned Ren’s nose and eyes.
The bier and pall rocked as the pallbearers faltered, turning to gaze behind them in fear.
The bier nearly tipped to the side as the men in the rear of the procession rushed forward.
Ren stepped behind Harriette and grasped her shoulders as people jostled her, frantically pushing the pallbearers and their burden into the churchyard, with Harriette carried along in their midst.
“We have to go!” He bent his head to shout in Harriette’s ear. His cane in one hand, her in the other, he desperately hoped he wouldn’t fall.
“I’m not allowed in here!” The veil puffed out before her face as she shouted back.
Ren laughed aloud: Harriette, who had never to his knowledge given a fig for convention, was shocked to violate custom on this most solemn occasion.
“Besides, I have to make sure?—”
“The vicar will see to it.” Already the men of their procession had slammed the iron gate shut, clamping the teeth of the large padlock just before the tide of the mob reached them. Arms and hands reached through the iron bars, some shaking their fists.
“Back, ye ruffians!” Mr. Demant shouted, betraying in his anger a marked West Country accent beneath the gentlemanly speech he’d affected before. “This is a funeral, ye rotten curs!”
“To th’ prison!” Voices in the sprawling mob shouted above the melee, and other throats took up the cry. “Th’ prison! Free the pris’ners!”
The mob melted away, the cries, shouts, and sounds of accompanying damage moving along the high stone wall lining the churchyard as the men, and no doubt women, rushed along it to the prison on the east side of the church.
“Should we help them?” Harriette crouched within the curve of his arm as they huddled against the inside of the wall.
With some doing she lifted the long black veil over her face and settled it to drape from the back of her head.
Her face revealed, she watched the small group gathered about the open grave some distance away in the churchyard. Ren watched her.
“Help who?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “The vicar knows his business, the mob is about theirs, and the prisoners would no doubt welcome being broken out.”
Harriette lingered, her eyes on the group about the grave, and Ren did not have the heart to rush her.
Around them he heard the mob at work, the commotion made more frightening by the dark and not knowing what all the crashing sounds entailed.
They were curiously sheltered, hiding in the churchyard, but they couldn’t stay.
Across the churchyard the vicar mumbled a few quick words above the cut in the ground.
Ren wondered if the Duchess of Lowenburg had her own grave or if she was obliged to share her final resting place with bones just below or other corpses brought in that week.
He’d seen small village churchyards with dirt nearly piled to the tops of their walls, so much had been added over the centuries as generations of parishioners required sacred ground.
The vicar sprinkled a few drops of holy water above the hole.
Men stood aside with torches as a few hands reached out and slid the coffin from the bier.
With the touch of an unseen clasp, the bottom of the coffin hinged open and its contents dropped into the waiting earth.
The coffin bottom was shut and returned to the bier, men set to work with shovels replacing the turned soil, and in a few moments the business was done.
Mr. Demant dispensed their wages to the hired men, and they scattered.
Ren wondered how many would put aside their black hats and cloaks and join the noisy crowd currently descending on the prison.
On the thought, an alarm bell went up, along with shouts of “Fire! Fire!” The vicar grabbed the skirts of his cassock and scampered to the rear door of the church, escaping inside.
“A reusable coffin,” Harriette remarked. “How thrifty of Mrs. Demant.”
“Rhette,” Ren urged her, “we must get out of here.”
“But where?”
He tugged her along the stone wall lining the churchyard.
The square tower of the church reared above them, the tall windows with their pointed arches reflecting the light of burning fires, the spires of the roof thrusting up into the night.
A small arched door in the east wall let them out into a narrow alley.
“Leg Square is a stone’s throw from here,” Ren whispered, taking Harriette’s hand as much to hold himself upright as to support her. “We’ll go to the Manor.” How they would get in, he hadn’t yet a notion.
Harriette didn’t argue. She didn’t demur or doubt him, nor even give him a skeptical look, not that the night shadows allowed him to properly see her face.
She put her hand in his with complete trust and followed him through the narrow twisting alley, between a set of buildings, dark and shuttered and quiet, and into Leg Square.
The short street, not a proper square at all, was equally dark and quiet, the eerie quiet of living things holding their breath.
A short distance away the mob swarmed the prison, and at any moment a group could break away and enter the square, where the grand houses stood awaiting the wrath of the disaffected.
The Manor House would be safe behind the Blinder Wall, Ren hoped.
But they would only be safe if they could get inside.
“The key?” Harriette panted as they stumbled and slithered along the Blinder Wall to the back side, where the wooden door on its iron hinges sat firmly shut with its iron lock.
“Er, that. The key is hanging near the kitchen entrance, I understand. Usual place. On the other—other side,” he clarified, as Harriette gave him a blank look.
“Then how are we to get in?”
“Well, you see, I haven’t thought that through.”
His marvelous Harriette gave him a calm, level look.
He comprehended in that instant how utterly unique she was.
Most genteel ladies of his acquaintance would have collapsed sobbing against the Blinder Wall at this point.
They would have gone into hysterics, blaming him not just for misplacing the key but for the riot, the general state of affairs in Shepton Mallet, and everything else that was wrong with the world.
They would have thrown themselves on the mercy of any passing stranger just to be shot of him, and he would be obliged to follow like an idiot, and above that, he would be forced to endure the silent treatment for days, if not longer.
Harriette looked about with thoughtful deliberation. She tipped back her head, and he formed the word No just as she said, quite matter-of-factly, “I suppose I will climb the tree.”
“No,” he said anyway.
“Oh, you intend to climb it instead? Very well, I shall hold your cane.”
She said this without heat, as if the argument were merely an exercise. The wall was half again as high as she was, but the bird cherry in the back corner of the lot, growing wild and untended, had stretched its branches over the wall. She could reach them if she had a leg up.
“You could h-h-hurt yourself,” Ren said.
“I did all right at Renwick House, didn’t I? Here, help me move this wheelbarrow.”
By some cursed luck there was indeed an unused wheelbarrow leaning against the wall.
Harriette helped him position it against the tree, then she fell to the business of disrobing.
First she looped her long black veil around her arm, unpinned her hat, and handed it to Ren.
When she started untying the strings of her cape, he found his voice.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Well, I can’t climb a tree in full dress, can I?” she answered. “Learned that last time. Here, hold this.”
She handed him the black velvet cape, neatly folded, and then, to his astonishment, started working at the front of her gown. “Now what?” he asked, his voice strangled.
He wasn’t concerned about impropriety. It was nearly pitch black where they stood in the shadows.
The only light came from a lamp lit in an upper room across the way and the orange glow of the fire in Market Square.
Every so often, from the direction of the prison, where there emanated shouts, clanging noises, and the sound of walls being beat upon, a flare of torchlight leapt into the sky like some macabre spirit.
This night, Ren thought in a daze, was so far the strangest night of his existence.
Every sense seemed heightened, every image sharp and clear.
He would never forget it, not least because Harriette was undressing, just as he had fantasized her doing all the times in her studio that she had undressed him.