35

35

O NCE AGAIN, THE DINGHY passed through the rustling weeds along the banks of the Hudson and into the hidden passageway, Constance silently dipping the oars. The lantern hung in the bow cast a dim light down the stone passageway as the boat eased forward, until finally the landing came into view. She steadied the boat against the stone quay, tied the painter to the bronze ring, and unloaded an oilskin duffel of fresh supplies. She stepped out herself and, slinging the bag over her shoulders, opened the hidden doorway and crept along the tunnel beyond, until she had passed under the Boston Post Road and entered the sub-basement of the Riverside Drive mansion.

Constance made her way to the blind she had chosen as a hiding place and set down her duffel. As she sank onto the crude cot, covered with a mattress of straw and canvas ticking, she had to force herself not to close her eyes. She hadn't had a moment to think, or muse, since the night before.

She contemplated the small stone chamber that, almost two centuries earlier, had been the treasure room of the privateer king whose stronghold had been replaced, years earlier, by Leng's mansion. The chamber, and most of the surrounding passages, had been carved out of the natural bedrock. The half dozen gold ducats and scattering of crude gemstones remaining in the cracks and corners led her to assume the pirate had vacated his lair in a hurry.

She'd intended to return here the night before, under cover of darkness, directly after the meeting with Diogenes and Aloysius. But she had been significantly delayed, and dawn was breaking by the time she exited the house in the Tenderloin district. Nevertheless, she'd put the day to good use. First, she'd stopped at a purveyor of gently used women's clothing—well made, simple, but out of fashion—and used a dressing room there to change into a new outfit, leaving her brothel-style dress behind. She'd walked a mile along back alleyways before hailing a cab, which she directed to her town house on Fifth Avenue. She entered to the amazement of Féline, Gosnold, and the servants. This unexpected arrival, she hoped, would further confuse Leng and his spies regarding her comings and goings.

Once she had settled the household's nerves with a combination of half-truths and lies, she retired with Féline to her private study. The young Frenchwoman was recovering well from her injuries, but she, like the others, was distressed by the current state of the house. Constance had no time to waste in commiseration; there were vital affairs to settle and little time to do it.

She explained her plans to Féline. The private secretary was aghast and pleaded with Constance to change her mind. Ultimately, however, she was forced to concede the logic behind her mistress's intentions. Constance then sent her out to summon the lawyer with whom she had already done business. He arrived; Constance explained what she wanted, then overrode his protestations at the legal irregularity with the help of an extra-large fee. She waited while he drew up the paperwork, then reviewed and signed it, with Féline as witness. Lastly, she took Féline aside for a few final words, and they embraced.

By this time, it was dark. Constance donned black, close-fitting clothes, took up a small traveling satchel, and slipped out a basement window into the dim alleyway behind the house as quietly and invisibly as a cat.

She had made a show of her arrival, but she intended for her departure to remain unseen. Flitting westward from alley to alley, she ultimately gained the Hudson River and the shoreline weeds where she had hidden her dinghy. She rowed up the river, once again with the tide, to the pirate's secret entrance.

Now, in the silent stone chamber, she gazed meditatively at the tallow candle whose guttering light illuminated her washbasin, the unopened satchel, a whetstone, and a dog-eared copy of the poems of Catullus. It was odd: when she'd returned to the past of her childhood, she had expected to be confronted by long-forgotten memories. What she had not anticipated were the specific things that would trigger them. This cheap candle, for instance—its gray-black smoke, coiling toward a small vent in the ceiling, just now resurrected a ghostly image of her mother, sprinkling salt on a candle precisely like this one in order to extend its burn time. It was the most ephemeral of memories, thin as gossamer and just as fragile.

Constance shook it away. Now was not the time to indulge in reminiscence. She rose up and, lighting a taper from the dying flame, moved out of the chamber into a clammy stone tunnel.

Leng had owned the mansion for only five years, but he was already filling the basement with a collection of weapons, torture devices, anatomical relics, poisons, chemical compounds, and other items of interest to his criminally curious mind and dark ambitions. She was in possession of a vital fact: in her world, at least, Leng would not discover the secret entrance to these caverns below the mansion's basement complex for another thirty years. Constance, however, already knew them well. On her first arrival underneath the mansion, she had searched the basement and sub-basement with methodical precision, comparing this with her own memory of how it looked in her own present day, and within thirty-six hours she had learned, or refreshed her recollection, of all its secrets. Leng was already busy in the basement, setting up his collections and labs, and she had to be exceedingly careful to leave no trace whatsoever in those spaces. But she could spy on him through certain peepholes and masonry cracks, from the spaces between and inside the walls that honeycombed the rambling structure.

Her first effort had been to find Binky, but it quickly became clear (and was no surprise) that she was no longer in the house. Tracing where she had been taken was now Aloysius's task. Constance was ready to move on to the next stage of her own plan: the one thing, she'd told the two brothers, that she would achieve—no matter what.

Quickly and stealthily, she made her way past false walls and up secret staircases through the basement and to the main floor, then up a narrow flight of disused back stairs and through a doorway whose outlines were hidden in the wallpaper. She tiptoed between beams, joists, and small piles of nogging, until she came to the inside wall of Leng's library. There was a tiny hole five feet above the ground, hidden by a minuscule flap of loose plaster in the deepest shadows. She lifted the flap and looked through… to see the man himself, enjoying a glass of postprandial port.

She allowed herself only a split-second glimpse; she knew the doctor was not someone to take even the slightest chances with. But it was enough. That hateful image would carry her through the days of work that lay ahead.

" Te post me, satanas ," she whispered as she secured the tiny flap. Then she turned and slipped away, back down into the darkness, ready to prepare a beverage of her own.