“No problem,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll do the battling.” She poked her head back out the window. “We accept on a condition of our own. No dueling pistols. Each side shall contribute exactly one representative, who will be armed with the sword of his choice.”
“We’ll cut off your head!” called out one of the soldiers.
“Then tomorrow afternoon, at five o’clock—” Reddington began.
“Tomorrow?” Stephen choked. “We don’t even get a few days to prepare?”
“—Densmore will bleed,” Reddington finished. “When he loses the duel, the castle is mine.”
“Not Densmore,” Elizabeth shouted back. “His representative: me.”
“You?” Reddington sputtered. “A woman cannot possibly hold her own against—”
“Then you should have no objection to an easy win.I’llbe ready. Send your best contender.”
“You haven’t a chance in hell,” Reddington said with a confident smirk. He shot another musket ball into the air. “Tomorrow, your head will roll!”
Stephen winced at the musket blast. Those were definitely real guns. Which meant, tomorrow, Elizabeth would face down a real soldier, with a real sword.
A delegate who might really believe it his duty to divest her of her head.
Elizabeth grinned at him. “I can’t wait.”
“Did you not hear the part about your impending decapitation?”
She snorted. “They’ll never get close enough.”
“I won’t risk your neck.” Stephen turned to the open window and yelled, “One more condition: The duel is to the disarming, not to the death!”
It was not until he awoke at midnight in a cold sweat that Stephen realized Reddington had not given his word.
20
The next morning, Elizabeth continued her hunt for clues by poring through the books she’d borrowed from the castle library. In less than an hour, she finished the children’s books without gaining any useful insight. She was left with a collection of legends and an illustrated volume of medieval art. After breaking her fast with toast and marmalade, she decided to start with the compendium of art. Illustrations were faster to skim than text.
Nonetheless, she almost missed it.
There in the final third of the book, on the bottom left-hand corner of the page, was a unicorn. Not just any unicorn, but an ugly, furry beast so grotesque that it would be easy to miss the short, spiraling horn protruding from its hairy forehead.
In fact, Elizabethhadmissed the horn the first time she saw the creature: on a fading tapestry somewhere here in this castle.
“Shite. Where did I see this beast before?” She tossed the book aside and reached for her journal, frantically flipping through the pages. “Was it the nursery? No, that would be too easy.”
Unlike Adrian and Marjorie, Elizabeth was no artist, so she hadn’t sketched the interiors of the rooms she’d searched, much less drawn replicas of associated wall hangings. She had, however, taken pains to jot down anything of note, and a wooly half-bison, half-goat hybrid certainly made the cut.
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed its horn the first time. Then again, why would she have thought the faded dye on an eight-hundred-year-old tapestry had anything to do with Miss Oak’s future orphanage?
“Here!” She jabbed her finger at a scribble on the page, then hurried out of her room to find the wall hanging.
The room was empty now, save for the hideous old tapestry. After a second glance at the legend Arminia had made on Miss Oak’s map—
“Ha!” Elizabeth chortled in understanding. “I had to read the ‘legend’! Iknewyou would have given your sister extra clues.”
This room, one floor below what had once been the current earl’s nursery, had once been used as Densmore’s schoolroom, before he’d been sent off to Eton.
She strode up to the enormous, floor-to-ceiling tapestry but did not touch it. As decrepit as the thing was, it was liable to crumble on contact, and then there would be no clue to follow. In fact, artist or not, she’d be better off sketching what she could before the sun bleached the dyes away completely. Philippa probably had ten copies of medieval art books in her personal library and would be able to compare the illustrations for clues.
Once Elizabeth completed her sketch, she sent up a small prayer to whoever might listen. “Please don’t fall apart in my hands,” she whispered as she slid a tentative finger between the cold stone wall and the edge of the tapestry.
