“Climb up!” she repeated, urgency in her voice, as various sounds of cracking stone came from the walls and ceiling. Another large chunk fell, to Matthew’s right. White dust powdered the air. It was time to get out of here, and quickly.
The first reach was the most dangerous. He had to let go of the cutlass and grip the edge of a splintered plank. Then he started up using similar hand-and-foot holds that were precarious at best. When he got near enough to Minx she leaned down and grasped his outstretched hand, and pulled him up into the warped corridor.
“The bag of gold,” Matthew told her. She already had gone to her room to get the forged orders for the release of the Nightflyer, complete with the professor’s octopus stamp, but it was doubtful such a paper would be needed today. The staircase was still intact, though the ceiling was falling to pieces, and on the second floor Matthew took a moment to enter his room—its floor crooked and the left wall partially collapsed—and retrieve the moneybag, which he shoved into his shirt. He realized then that the room to the left of his, though it had a balcony the same as his own, was not really a room and had been empty, according to the map he’d been given. The collapsed wall revealed another staircase curving down. It had to be, he realized, the stairway to Professor Fell’s domain. Not by happenstance had Matthew been given the quarters next to it.
He entered the corridor again, where Minx waited. Without hesitation he kicked the next door in. It swung open easily, for the quake had already sprung its lock.
“What is this?” she asked.
“You should go out to the wagon,” he told her. “Keep anyone else from taking it. I’m going down this way.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“Him,” he said, and she understood.
“I’ll wait only for a short while. Falco might have taken the ship out already.”
“If he has, he has. We’ll find another way off.”
She nodded and peered into the dark staircase. “Good fortune,” she said, and then she turned and went her own path.
Matthew couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to go down those steps either, into that darkness, but it had to be done.
He descended. A few torches had been set into the walls, but they were all extinguished. The staircase shook beneath his feet and stone dust rained from above. The castle was dying, perhaps to join the rest of Somers Town in its underwater sleep. Fate, it seemed, had caught up with Fell’s uneasy paradise. Still Matthew descended, past the first floor and into the castle’s guts. Or bowels, as might be more proper. The staircase curved to the left, the risers cut from rough stone. He came upon two torches still burning, and he paused to take one of them from its socket. Then, his confidence made more solid by the light, he continued on his downward trek.
A gate of black iron was set at the bottom of the stairs, but it was unlocked. Matthew pushed through and winced as the hinges squealed. Another torch burned from a wall in the narrow corridor ahead, and Matthew followed its illumination. Above his head there were nearly human groans as stone shifted against stone; even here, at this depth, the castle had been mortally wounded. Deep cracks grooved the walls and floor. Matthew walked on, pace after careful pace. He came to a branch in the corridor and decided to follow the straighter route. It led him to the wooden slab of a door that hung crooked on its hinges. He pulled it open and found a spacious white-walled sitting room and a candelabra with three tapers still burning atop a writing desk. The ceiling, riddled with cracks, was painted pale blue in emulation of the island’s sky. The furniture was tasteful, expensive, and also painted white with gold trim. Matthew went through another doorway and found a bedroom with a large, canopied white bed. His attention was drawn to what hung on a number of pegs on the wall next to that bed: the tricorn hats Professor Fell had worn on his visits to Matthew’s room, a white wig the same as worn by the castle’s servants, and a battered straw hat that might have been the topper for any of the island’s farmers.
He felt time was short, but he had to open and search a chest of drawers in the bedroom. He discovered in the drawers not only the elegant suits Fell had worn as well as the opaque cowl and the flesh-colored cloth gloves, but the sea-blue uniform of a servant. Also there were regular breeches with patched knees and white shirts that appeared worn and in need of stitching. All would have fit a slender man a few inches taller than Matthew. In addition, there were the shoes: two pair polished and gentlemanly, one pair scuffed and dirt-crusted.
He began to believe that Professor Fell at times dressed as a servant to move about the house and as a regular native to move about the island. Which begged the question…was Fell a native himself? A man of color? And perhaps Templeton…his son…had been harassed and beaten to death on a London street partly because his skin was cream-colored, and darker than that of the average English boy? There was a reason, Matthew realized, why Temple’s portrait had been done in colored glass.
But the real question was…where was Professor Fell now?
The deep noise of grinding stones told Matthew he had to find a way out of here, or retrace his path to the staircase. He went through the doorway out into the corridor again, his torch held before him, and started back the way he’d come. He was not very far along when he caught sight of another torch coming toward him, and a giant figure in white robes and a white turban illuminated in the yellow light.
Sirki stopped. They faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet.
“Hello, young sir,” said the East Indian giant, and the light he held made the diamonds in his front teeth sparkle.
“Hello,” Matthew said, his voice echoing back and forth between the walls.
“We have suffered quite a mishap here. Quite an explosion, up at the far point of the island. Do you know anything about that?”
“I felt it, of course.”
“Of course. I see your stockings are very dirty. Muddy, perhaps? Did you get through that swamp all by yourself, Matthew?” Sirki waved a hand in his direction. “No, I don’t believe you did. Who helped you? It’s not only me asking. The professor would like to know. When that blast happened, his first thought was of you. And of course you were not in your room. Neither was Miss Cutter in hers. Now…why would she have helped you?”
“She likes me,” Matthew said.
“Oh. Yes. Well, then.” Sirki withdrew the sawtoothed blade from its sheath in his robes and walked forward a few steps. Matthew retreated the same number. “The professor,” said Sirki, “has left this place. He instructed me to find you, and when I went to your room I found that the stairway was revealed. You had to come down here, didn’t you? I am also instructed to tell you…that your services are no longer needed, and unfortunately Professor Fell will be unable to pay you your three thousand pounds.”
“I thought he might wind up withdrawing that offer.”
“Hm. He asked me to tell you that he will not be very much damaged by this little incident. Certainly he would not have wished this, but he has many irons in the fire.” Sirki inspected the brutal edge of his blade. “He is sorrowful for you, though. That you chose to hurt him out of your…how did he put it?…your blind stupidity. Ah, Matthew!” He advanced a few steps nearer, and again Matthew retreated. The hideous weapon gleamed with reflected torchlight. “To have come so far and be on the verge of such greatness…and then to fall back again, as dirty as the swamp.”