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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

He climbed to the driver’s bench, unhooked a lantern from one of the pedestals and made his way through the snow to the gazebo, which had a peaked roof and stood up from the ground a few feet by a set of four wooden steps. He ascended and by his light searched the gazebo’s floor. The place looked fairly new, maybe built in the last few years; the floorboards had received a dusting of snow, but the roof had kept any real accumulation away. He was looking for pieces of coal that might have been caught in the clothing of the constables, but he found none. Dropping to his knees for a closer search, he could find no hatch nor other obvious opening in the gazebo’s floor.

A feeling of panic gnawed at him. If he was wrong about this, all was for naught. He didn’t have much time to spend scrabbling about trying to find a tunnel entrance, if indeed one existed here. But where else would it be? This seemed the most logical place. His light uncovered nothing, no bits of coal … nothing.

An image came to him of the lever that operated the coach’s collapsible steps. A nice invention. Might Samson Lash, being of a mechanical mind, have put that idea to use elsewhere?

Matthew went back down the steps and searched around them. Again, the lantern’s light revealed nothing. He felt along the edges of the steps. Nothing but weather-roughened wood. His sense of panic—and impending doom—flared higher. At the bottom of the steps he got on his knees once more, brushed away as much snow as he could, and felt along the ground level.

At the center, just beneath the lowest step and certainly impossible for anyone who didn’t know it was there to find, was a bolt. He threw it from its latch. Nothing happened. What now?

He put the lantern aside, lodged the pistol in his waistband and used both hands to push the last step upward, thinking that maybe the whole thing collapsed in some way.

There came the rasping of a hidden hinge. The entire set of four steps, hollow within, lifted up. Revealed beneath was a dark cavity from which bloomed the dank odor of old stones. Matthew continued to push the set of steps up until they rested against the gazebo’s floor. He shone the lantern down upon another set of steps, these also of wood—certainly of modern construction instead of Roman—that descended into darkness beyond the light.

He went down.