Page 94 of What Angels Fear

He could hear the slap of water beneath him, for the warehouses here, as along so many of the basins and canals lining the river, were built over the water. There would be a trapdoor in the planked floor of the warehouse to give direct access to lighters and barges. A way of entry, perhaps, but one which would give too much of the advantage to the man waiting within. Sebastian needed to find some approach that would give him a visual advantage. He needed to come in from above.

A second set of loading doors opened from the dock to the upper floor, where a stout beam thrusting out from the wall could be used to hoist goods. But the beam was bare now of both winch and pulley, and Sebastian had no rope to climb up to it. A nearby pile of crates virtually blocked the wharf ahead of him, but they were neither near enough to the door, nor high enough to enable him to reach it. He had to find another way in.

Retracing his steps to the front of the warehouse, he scanned the building’s flat roofline. The warehouse beside it was older and larger, but of roughly the same height. Its door, like that of the Prosperity Trading Company, was padlocked.

Sebastian retrieved one of the broken barrels from the alley. Even empty, the iron-banded oak weighed some forty or fifty pounds. Heaving it over his head, he brought the iron edge down on the padlock once, then again, smiling grimly as he felt the lock sheer away from the door, hasp and all.

In the stillness of the fog-shrouded night, the resultant clatter sounded unnaturally loud. Sebastian paused, his breath coming in pants as he listened to the slosh of the incoming tide against the wharfs.

Slipping between the heavy doors, he paused again, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. It was true he could cope better than most men with the darkness of the night. But his eyes still needed some light to see, and the dense fog obliterated all hint of moon and stars, even the reflected lights of the city around them.

He inched his way across a floor crowded with crates and barrels that perfumed the air with the heavy scents of their contents: tea from India, sables from Russia, baled cotton from the Carolinas. A faint glow showed him a central well some eight to ten feet square, faintly lit from above by a grimy skylight and edged along one side by a steep, straight stair.

He climbed the steps in a light-footed rush that brought him to an upper floor crowded, like the one below, with packing cases and bales. Overhead, the skylight showed only as a dark gray square against the black of the ceiling. There would be tools, he knew, kept here on the upper floor by the warehouse crew. Precious minutes ticked by as he searched, first at the top of the steps, then along the unrailed edge.

He found them at last in a wooden crate left near the front wall. Tossing aside hammers, lengths of chain, and a coil of rope, he grasped a small pry bar, which he thrust into the waistband of his breeches. Then, by shifting some of the crates, he was able to climb within an arm’s reach of the skylight.

Set into a large raised wooden frame, the skylight was made up of some half-dozen sections hinged so that they could be raised for ventilation. Feeling along the edge, Sebastian located the clasp of the section above his head and carefully eased it open.

Thick with the smell of sulfur and coal smoke and the scents of the sea, the night swirled in around him. Grasping the edge of the frame, Sebastian levered himself up through the small square opening and onto the roof.

He lay still for a moment, his breath showing white as he listened to the distant boom of fireworks lost in the night. Slowly, he rolled to his feet and crossed the slate expanse to drop lightly down onto the roof of the adjoining warehouse.

Here, the skylight glowed with a faint golden light. But as he inched toward it, he saw that the glass was too clouded and grimy to show more than the vague shapes of the objects below. There was always a chance, he knew, that Wilcox awaited him here on the upper floor. But most men feared the dark, and the source of light from within the building obviously came from the ground floor, site of the warehouse’s two main entrances and the water door.

Slipping the pry bar between the skylight’s frame and base, Sebastian applied a gentle pressure and felt a slight give as the inner catch began to loosen. He tried again, increasing the pressure, and heard the rending timbers whine in protest.

He immediately eased up on the bar, the night air cold against his sweat-dampened face. Sitting back on his heels, he considered his options. Impossible to break the skylight’s frame or shatter the glass without announcing his arrival. But besides the trapdoor leading up from the water, there remained only one other entrance to the warehouse: the dockside doors to the upper floor.

His gaze focused on the crumbling chimney of the fireplace used to warm the warehouse’s small counting office. He stared at it for a moment, then retraced his steps to the adjacent roof. Dropping lightly through the open skylight, he retrieved one of the coils of rope he had seen there, along with a stout length of iron.

He was conscious, again, of the relentless passage of time. Lashing one end of the rope to the chimney, Sebastian wound the other end around his waist and lowered himself carefully over the warehouse’s back wall, the rough planks of the dock some twenty feet below lost in the mists swirling in from the water. Straightening his legs as a brace, he levered away from the wall and walked crabwise down the rough stone until he came to the double doors that gave access to the upper floor. A stout lintel ran just below the door, forming a ledge against which he was able to brace his weight while he applied subtle pressure to the doors. The panels gave for about an inch, then stopped. These doors, too, were secured from the inside by a bar.

Shifting his weight, Sebastian retrieved the pry bar from his waistband and thrust its end between the two doors, wedging them open far enough that he was able to slip the length of iron rod in beneath the pivot bar and lever it up. He felt it catch for a moment, then drop away with a clatter that had him cursing silently into the night.

The near door swung open to a gentle nudge that drew no shriek of protest from the hinges. He eased himself inside, deftly closing the doors behind him against any sliver of light or sudden draft of cold air that might betray his presence... if the clatter of the falling bar hadn’t already done that.

The atmosphere here was redolent with the warm, exotic scent of coffee. Surrounded by towering stacks of bulging burlap bags, Sebastian crept toward the golden pool of light that was the central opening. The well was large, some eight to ten feet across, and configured much like that of the adjoining warehouse, with a straight flight of stairs running up one side. He could see a huge overhead beam to which was mounted a stout pulley wound with a thick rope. One end of the rope ran down, diagonally, out of Sebastian’s line of vision, but the other hung straight and tautly weighted. As he watched, it quivered slightly, as if the weight suspended from it had moved.

With a sick sense of dread clawing at his guts, Sebastian crept toward the unrailed edge of the well to where he could look down upon the scene Martin Wilcox had prepared for him.

A triangle of three lanterns were clustered together, their light shuttered so that they threw only a narrow, concentrated beam that illuminated the area directly before them while leaving the rest of the warehouse shrouded in darkness. And in that shaft of light, Wilcox had hung Kat.

Her wrists were bound together, and it was from these that she hung suspended from the great overhead pulley, her fingers twisting around to grasp painfully at the rope in an attempt to relieve the strain on her arms and shoulders. As he watched, she pivoted slowly, swinging around so that he could see the fear and the pain in her eyes, her lips drawn back in a harsh rictus around the gag that held her mouth ajar. Her ankles had been tied, too, with more rope wound around her legs, pinning the torn cloth of her velvet riding habit tightly against her.

She hung suspended some three or four feet above where the floor should have been, except that Wilcox had positioned her directly above the trapdoor to the basin and the trapdoor was now open. Through it, Sebastian could see the shimmering blackness of lapping waves as the tide rose with the night.

It was a diabolical trap, delicately baited. Whether Sebastian had entered the warehouse through one of the two ground-floor entrances, or whether he came up through the trapdoor or down the stairs, he could not reach Kat without being caught in the light. Yet because of the way the lanterns were set up, Wilcox kept for himself the protective cover of darkness. He also controlled the rope by which Kat Boleyn hung suspended. The only way Sebastian could free her would be to cut her loose. Yet, bound as she was, even if he were to plunge with her into the dark icy waters below, she would in all probability drown before he could get her to shore.

There was only one move Sebastian could make. He acted swiftly, calculating the position of the lamps and the distance to the rope. Quietly hefting one of the large bags of coffee beans, he eased it over to the edge of the well. He was just stepping back when a board creaked, betrayingly, beneath his foot.

He froze, but the damage was already done. Martin Wilcox’s amused voice came from out of the darkness below. “You may as well show yourself, Devlin. I know you’re there.”

There was a pause, during which Sebastian shrugged off his coat and clenched Tom’s knife between his teeth. Into the silence, Wilcox said, “Let me rephrase that. If you don’t come down, now, your whore here goes in the river. You hear that, Devlin? All I need do is cut the rope, and she’s fish bait.”

Sebastian gave the coffee sack a hard shove that carried it over the edge of the central well to plummet straight down on the triangle of lamps below.

It landed with a shattering crash that plunged the warehouse into darkness just as Sebastian leapt from the well’s edge.

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