Dori only just contained her gasp, expecting the rope to slide through his hands until the friction of it caused him to release it and collapse onto the jagged debris below. Her heart pounded in her chest.
“What happened?” Jeremy demanded, likely having felt the jerk on the rope in his hands even though it was also looped around a stone pillar.
She waved a hand behind her, putting him off, not wanting to take her eyes from the man dangling below her even for a moment. Constantine looked up at her, his face red, his mouth pulled in a wide grimace as he tried to work the rope in a spiral around his left leg. His eyes met hers.
“Come on,” she encouraged.
He began to climb. Hand over hand, so slowly that Dori feared she would go mad. After what seemed like an hour, he was so close to the window that Dori could have reached out and touched his topmost hand. But she daren’t, knowing that she hadn’t any strength to lend him.
“Almost there,” she said quietly instead and backed down one rung on the ladder, her legs shaking, the ladder trembling.
He was breathing forcefully through his nostrils when he threw his right forearm over the thick window ledge. His left followed and he heaved his chest onto the stone casing with a growling shout, lying there for a moment. Dori knew what desperate strength he had mustered would leave his muscles wobbly soon, throwing him off balance.
“Don’t stop now, Constantine,” she said and backed down another rung. She had a moment’s mad fear that the ghosts buried inside the keep would suddenly decide to claim ownership of the man struggling to escape, and she would see Constantine’s arms slide back into the blackness before hearing his body hit the stones.
“Come along!” she insisted. “It’s getting dark and . . . and I’m hungry. And my feet pain me.” Her voice was shrill, demanding. She sounded the same as she had so many times with her father, making a fool of herself in her desperation to extricate him from whatever trap was laid in his path.
She saw Constantine’s head appear as he raised himself up onto the ledge with his hands. Dori backed down another step as he drew his right knee into the opening and then dropped his foot along the outside of the wall, straddling the sill and leaning his back and head against the stone casement with his eyes closed and his chest heaving.
Dori let her breath out of her mouth in a long, low whoosh, and when he rolled his head against the stones to open his eyes and look down at her she couldn’t help her relieved smile.
Constantine Gerard looked at her thoughtfully, the corner of his mouth twitching upward in a bemused, weary grin, and it flustered Dori unreasonably.
She felt her eyebrows draw together. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea to go in there.”
“That you did.” He looked beyond her and lifted his hand, Dori assumed to Jeremy, but she didn’t trust her own balance at this point to turn to make certain.
She looked down at her own skirts falling through the rungs and carefully began stepping down the ladder, one slow rung at a time, grateful that her downward-directed gaze would hide the tears prickling in her eyes.
* * *
Jeremy acted as though nothing untoward had gone on the past hour as he wound the rope around his arm and walked alongside Constantine, and for that he was doubly grateful to the man. Erasmus expressed his usual enthusiasm, nearly taking Constantine’s legs from beneath him a second time that day.
“I’ve brought the things you asked for, milord,” he said, motioning behind him and then glancing twice at the empty ward. He turned back to Constantine with an irritated expression. “I suppose you know where she’s gone?”
Constantine hadn’t noticed Theodora leaving either, but she was so small and dark in the rapidly approaching dusk that he really wasn’t surprised.
“I do,” he admitted. “Although I’m surprised Erasmus didn’t think to follow at her heels. You have my thanks.”
“The lady probably kicked at him or some other such cruelty,” the man said. “Any matter, it was my pleasure, milord. I should be able to lay hand to more when you have need. Perhaps even going to the village at Thurston Hold for what I can’t procure here.” The man waggled his eyebrows as he met Constantine’s gaze.
Constantine nodded, grateful for Jeremy’s willingness to be of assistance; the man’s cooperation had already helped save Constantine from almost certain injury.
Although he knew there was one even more deserving of his gratitude than the girthful villager before him.
“I’d best be getting back before I’m missed,” Jeremy said, tossing the large coils of rope behind a fallen stone before moving the ladder to the weeds nearby. “With so few of us in the village, anyone’s absence is noticed. I’m in the wood most fair days, if you have need of me before I return.”
Constantine grasped Jeremy’s hand and then gave Erasmus a rub behind his ears before watching the pair disappear through the wall into the dusk. Then he turned toward the low tumble of stones and limped across the long grass toward the hidden door.
It took him a little longer than usual to reach the lower level of the corridor where the oratory was located, but he felt a queer sense of peace and welcome at the open door and the light shining from within—someone waiting for him. It was an odd feeling he hadn’t experienced in years. Even odder that the feeling would have been prompted by the presence of Theodora Rosemont.
He stepped to the doorway and waited, watching her as she unpacked the bundle Jeremy had brought with eagerness clear on her face. The glance she gave him upon noticing his arrival didn’t cause her enthusiasm to fade as had typically been the case since their meeting, and that made Constantine glad. She’d said she was hungry after all.
“A pot!” she said with a half smile. “And a portion of oats! Oh, my mouth does water at even the feel of them in my hand. There’s a roast of venison as well. And what’s this?” She pulled up a long length of muddy-colored cloth and shook it out over the floor in front of her. “An apron?” She turned to lay it on the bench before swinging her faded cloak from her shoulders. Then she slipped the apron over her head.
The thing was a tent on her slight frame, and when she looped the strings crossed over each other and around her middle twice, Constantine couldn’t help his breath of laughter.
Theodora turned toward him with her arms out, looking down with satisfaction at her new, humble garment. “It’s quite sturdy, isn’t it?” she said. “And there’s even a bit of embroidery here at the bottom.” She looked up at him. “I doubt anyone would take me for a missing lady in it. But then again, I’m not supposed to be missing, am I? I might not look quite as dead in it any matter.”
