Page 59 of The Housebreaker's Assistant
“Lord Fabian,” Greer said, sinking to a crouch in front of the bed, evidently of the same mind as Penny. “Are you well?”
It seemed a silly thing to ask, but Lord Fabian responded. He made a keening sound that had the hair on the back of Penny’s neck standing up, nodded loosely, then shook his head, then said, “I do not feel well at all.”
“But at least he’s responding to you,” Penny pointed out.
Greer nodded once curtly. “We have to get you out of here,” he told the young man. “I need you to gather your wits about you enough to help us help you to escape.”
Lord Fabian nodded a few more times, but the gesture became disjointed and meaningless.
Below them, Penny could hear the thump and rattle of activity in the castle. It was too much to hope that anyone might come up to the tower to rescue them, though. More likely, Dalhurst and Hammond were marshalling their forces to come take them. That or they were preparing to burn the castle down with them inside.
“We have to move,” he told Greer warningly. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
“I know,” Greer sighed tightly. He winced, then slapped Lord Fabian’s face lightly in an attempt to bring the man to his senses. “Lord Fabian,” he said, managing to sound kind even in the midst of his seriousness. “My lord, we have to flee. And the only way out of here is through the window.”
Penny’s brow shot up. Did Greer actually think they stood a chance of carrying Lord Fabian to freedom through a tower window? In his current state? Naked?
Then again, they had no other choice.
“You’re stronger than I am,” Penny said, leaping up from the bed and striding across to the room’s single window. “You’ll have to carry him.”
He poked his head and shoulders out through the billowing curtains and looked down.
Immediately, his stomach churned and swirled. It was much farther to the ground from the tower room than the window they’d climbed in through. So high that it was obvious why Dalhurst hadn’t cared that the window was open. A crumbled and potentially jagged part of the old castle wall stretched out directly below, and beyond that was the deep trough of the dried-up moat.
But beyond that were the dunes that marked the edge of the beach, and just past that, Penny spotted the boat that held their cases and stood waiting for them.
“If we can make it out the window and down to the beach, we might just stand a chance,” he said, then pulled back into the room and turned to glance at Greer and Lord Fabian.
What he saw did not fill him with confidence. Greer had walked Lord Fabian to the washstand in the corner of the room, where he was splashing the man’s face with water. Lord Fabian sputtered and twisted his head this way and that, like a kitten being played with. It might have been sweet under other circumstances, but they did not need a kitten at the moment, they needed a man in full possession of his faculties who would be able to climb three stories down a tower wall, cross obstacles, and make it to a waiting boat.
“Is it helping?” Penny asked, striding across the room to join them.
Somewhere below, shouts rang out and more footfalls followed.
“Whether it’s helping or not, we need to move,” Greer said, meeting Penny’s eyes as if the connection forged between themcould carry them through the impossibilities ahead of them on its own.
Penny nodded. “I think you’re going to have to carry him,” he said. “Or at least have him attached to you in some way.”
“You’re right,” Greer sighed, then rubbed a hand over his face. “It’ll have to be the bedsheets.”
“I can walk, I can walk,” Lord Fabian slurred, attempting to prove himself by swaying precariously back toward the bed.
“That may be, my lord,” Penny said, ripping the bed apart to get to the sheets, “but you’re going to need help.”
They all needed help, as far as Penny could see. Whatever Dalhurst was doing below, it could catch up with them at any moment. Lord Fabian was as good as a boulder they needed to carry to safety. And while Penny prided himself on being nimble and capable of surmounting any obstacle placed in his way, he wasn’t certain if that included scaling castle walls in the middle of the night. At least it wasn’t raining.
“Help me fasten some sort of harness,” he said, approaching Greer and the naked young man.
Greer nodded and assisted Penny in winding the sheets around Lord Fabian’s body. What they were doing was utter madness and it had a high probability of failing and killing them all, but they had no choice but to fling themselves fully into all efforts to escape.
Chapter Eighteen
Greer prepared himself to die. He didn’t see any way that he and Penny would be able to rescue Lord Fabian from the tower and make it to their waiting boat. Even if they were lucky enough to reach the boat, he was not as confident in the abilities of two Londoners to row a nearly insensible man to safety, then to find their way to a train station so that they could flee to London.
Everything beyond the tower was too far into the future for him to concern himself with in the moment, however. He could only manage one step to freedom at a time.
“Is he secure?” he asked Penny once the two of them finished wrapping sheets around Lord Fabian.
