Keeping the Castle - By Patrice Kindl Page 0,65

may have allowed my emotion to appear in my voice.

“Doesn’t much matter, does it?” Then he bent his gaze once again on Miss Vincy.

“Well? Are you ready or not?” he said, and his tone was so savage that we gathered our shawls and bonnets and climbed into the coach in a meek silence.

19

SO BRIEF WAS OUR drive that we scarce had time to settle ourselves, trade puzzled looks, and consider how to debate the matter, before we jerked to a halt, the carriage door was wrenched open and Mr. Fredericks was handing me out into the side yard of the castle.

He was still not looking at me.

I caught his sleeve in a firm grip.

“Mr. Fredericks, I pray you,” I said earnestly. “Can you not see that you are frightening me? What is amiss between you and Lord Boring? And how does it affect me, or the ones I love? For I can see that it does,” I added, when he made as if to wave this away.

“I assure you—” he began, but I interrupted him.

“Whatever it is that you are about to assure me of will not do. Come, Mr. Fredericks, we have become friends, I hope, over these past weeks. Please pay me the compliment of treating me as a rational being, as you always have done.”

The sky, overcast and storm-tossed since dawn, darkened abruptly to a greenish gray. The horses tossed their heads and nickered uneasily. With a suddenness that made it seem as though someone above us on one of the castle parapets had upended a barrel of water over our heads, it began to rain very hard indeed. Mr. Fredericks uttered an outraged sputter as rivulets of water coursed down his neck.

“What the deuce do you mean by keeping us standing here in this downpour, madam?” he demanded. As if cued by his exclamation, a flash of lightning flickered on the horizon, followed almost immediately afterwards by a deafening roll of thunder. The moat, already high, was now at flood stage.

“I mean to get the answer to my question, sir,” I replied, much relieved to hear him relapse into his usual tone of familiar incivility, “and I will, even tho’ the waters of the North Sea rise up and drown us where we stand.”

Audibly grinding his teeth he said, “Oh, very well. I only learned of his betrothal to that long drink of vinegar, Miss Charity Winthrop, this morning. I told him it was a disgrace, when—”

C-r-r-ack! Bang-bang-crash!

Simultaneous with this stupendous noise, a white-hot finger of fire leapt from a cloud to that easternmost castle’s turret, which overhung the cliff. I clapped my hands to my ears, thus losing my grip on Mr. Fredericks’s sleeve. He took the opportunity to steer me towards the castle gate.

“Get inside!” he said, raising his voice over the boom of thunder. “You’ll be fried like a sausage on a stick if you don’t get under cover.”

“So will you and Miss Vincy,” I retorted. “You can’t keep driving in a storm like this. You must put the carriage in the stables and wait it out.”

“We’ll be—”

Our quarreling was interrupted by a dreadful grating, rending sound. We turned in unison, and saw.

The waters of the moat had, as Mr. Fredericks had predicted, burst through their restraining walls and now poured in two fountains down the cliff face towards the sea. The land that jutted out over the sea and held up the east wing of the castle began to move. From a solid mass it liquefied, resolving itself into thousands of rocks and clods of earth which abruptly . . . disappeared. We heard a noise like a roaring waterfall as it fell, then a great crash as it hit the beach below. After an interval, a cloud of airborne dirt mushroomed up, to hover over the castle and rain mud down upon us.

A good third of the castle’s eastern wing hung over the abyss, unsupported.

Someone was screaming. I turned to my companion with a word of reproach on my lips.

“Good Gad!” he said, his face white (tho’ liberally bespattered with filth) in the lurid light. “Stop that squawking, Miss Crawley,” he added. “Haven’t our eardrums been insulted enough already?”

I, squawking? I, I—I opened and closed my mouth several times in rapid succession, but nothing came out.

C-r-r-r-ack!

“There she goes,” said Mr. Fredericks softly.

I shifted my gaze from his visage back to the castle.

“No!”

A dark line had appeared on the castle walls where it hung out over the cliff, running from top to