Free The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead by David Wake Page B

sleep.

Chapter V
    Miss Deering-Dolittle
    It was a while before Earnestine realised that the tapping was real. It was dark, pitch black, and quiet except for the tap-tap . She got up, her bare feet protruding from the chemise she was using as a nightdress. The wooden floor was cold.
    “Yes?”
    “Fräulein?”
    “Yes.”
    She kicked a chair as she felt her way to the door.
    “I have food and currency.”
    It was one of the Austro–Hungarians: perhaps the small one.
    Earnestine shifted the desk and opened the door, blinking against tiredness as well as the dark. It was Metzger, bent low, as if he was hiding, and more like a dormouse than ever. He had a basket of food and a shoulder bag.
    “If you go down the valley, there is a road, twenty kilometres, no more.”
    “You can’t possibly be asking a young lady like myself to travel alone.”
    “But Fräulein–”
    “Fräulein nothing.”
    He glanced left and right: “May I come in to discuss this.”
    “I beg your pardon!”
    Her loud voice made him start and check the corridor again.
    “I leave them here,” he said, and he put them down on a cupboard opposite the door before he stole away.
    Ridiculous, Earnestine thought, that one of her kidnappers would bring an escape kit. Fleeing was obviously not something she could contemplate and any attempt had barely crossed her mind. It made her quite cross, so much so that it took her three attempts to strike the match that she’d palmed from the hotel’s reception. The candle took, casting its light over the room. She dressed quickly, double knotting the laces of her boots, and then slipped out. She bent low and checked the corridor and then straightened when she realised she was copying Metzger’s furtive movements. She added his bread, beef, knackwursts and cheese to the bag supplementing the rolls and the apple she’d purloined from dinner.
    Down the corridor she went.
    She hazarded that the reception was most likely guarded by the old hotelier and the Austro–Hungarian soldiers, so she’d already singled out a window with a balcony at the far end as the most promising exit.
    It was locked.
    The fish knife that she’d wiped on her napkin before tucking into her boot was just the thing to jimmy it open.
    The air outside was fresh and cold. Distant mountains, darker against the dark sky, were visible, but everything was lit by moonlight rather than a hint of an approaching dawn. Earnestine took the few steps across the balcony to the railing.
    Ah, the hotel was built on a slope and this had added an extra storey to the drop at the back.
    “Are you going to fly?”
    Earnestine stiffened and turned.
    Kroll was standing in the doorway. He opened his dark lantern’s hinged door and threw a band of light across Earnestine’s face. She was forced to squint and look away.
    “You shouldn’t survive that.”
    “It’s ‘couldn’t survive that’,” Earnestine corrected.
    “Ja.”
    “Would you like some sausage?” she said holding out her basket.
    “I shall wait for breakfast.”
    “Very wise. I’ll bid you goodnight then.”
    “Goodnight.”
    She went past the big man and then down the corridor again. When she reached her door, another opened suddenly. She and Pieter were only a few yards apart, he in his loose shirt and britches and she in her tidy clothes.
    “Good night,” she said.
    “Good night,” he replied.
    Before she closed her door, she saw another shadow, low and creeping at the far end of the corridor, move.
    She leant against the door listening, but there were too many good–nights in German for her to hazard another attempt tonight. Best thing to do, she thought, was get a good night’s sleep.
    Miss Georgina
    The bedroom that Georgina had slept in for the whole term seemed an alien place and it was no longer a blessed peace to find herself alone there. Her room-mates, formerly so irritating, were keenly absent. The other beds in the shared room were empty, because the occupants were