“Wait here with her,” the associate directed tersely, and ducked out the door.
Immediately, the baron turned to Hattie and indicated Dimitry. “Have you indeed married this man?”
Hattie stared at them both with icy disdain. “I have never seen him before in my life, and you are a fool to believe that other fool.”
More crashing noises could be heard, and distracted, the baron stepped to the chamber’s doorway to peer up the entry hall. With a swift movement, Dimitry was upon him, knocking his head with a quick crack into the stone doorway. As the man slumped, Dimitry instructed her, “Turn aside, Hattie.”
As she obeyed, she heard a grisly cracking sound that she could easily interpret as the breaking of the man’s neck. Dimitry then gave a soft command in his own language and to Hattie’s astonishment, the guard whom he had supposedly shot scrambled to his feet and departed swiftly out the door, leaping nimbly over the minister’s body.
“Come, Hattie.” Dimitry hoisted the dead baron over his shoulder. “Fetch the lantern.”
Although she had many, many questions, Hattie held her tongue and lifted the lantern to light the way to the rear burial chamber. “Quickly,” he urged in a quiet tone as he hurried into the room, bent over to avoid scraping the doorway lintel. “We will hide you in the sarcophagus, and I will return later to retrieve you.” He then suited word to action and strained to shove the lid aside on the stone sarcophagus.
Aghast, Hattie felt it was time to make her feelings known. “You cannot mean to stuff me in there with him.”
“There is no time to argue—I will see to it the lid is not sealed so that you will have air to breathe and you will not be as fearful.”
So; at least he remembered her dread of enclosed spaces. There was nothing for it—she would do as she was told. She watched him unceremoniously dump the body into the receptacle, then he lifted her by the waist to set her inside, on top of the lifeless baron. “I have hidden the sword within; do not hurt yourself on it.”
Hattie was having trouble keeping track of all the variables. “You are stealing the sword?”
Despite the exigent circumstance, she could see that he smiled, as though at a private joke. “I know a man who deserves it more than Napoleon.”
Reminded, she told him, “I have Bing’s pistol.”
He met her eyes, his own very serious. “You must not kill the other man—Drummond’s associate. I need information from him.”
She nodded, rather flattered that he believed her capable of successfully shooting someone in the first place. While he gently pressed down on her shoulders, she swallowed hard and obligingly lay back; trying to assure herself that after everything she’d been through, surely she could manage an hour or so in a stone sarcophagus. Dimitry shoved the lid back, leaving it misaligned so that it didn’t close completely. She heard his footsteps quickly recede, and Hattie was left in the pitch darkness atop the still-warm body of a dead man.
Straining her ears, she listened for a few moments but could hear nothing. Small surprise, the walls in these tombs were typically five or six feet thick; composed of limestone. She began tapping one of her feet on the end of the stone enclosure. There were twenty-six tombs discovered thus far—more or less. Her breathing sounded unnaturally loud in the silence. The Great Seti’s tomb had not yet been found and perhaps it was not nearby, since this tomb was a false one; there was no god-king’s daughter, after all. Instead, the queens and princesses were in the Valley of the Queens, several miles away. It had been sheer foolishness to believe that the ancients would make an exception for a mere female and construct her tomb where only the god-like pharaohs were allowed—the Blackhouses liked their little joke.
Hattie wondered how many minutes had gone by—the body beneath her was beginning to grow cool. Bing must be worried, although nothing seemed to discomfit Bing. And Dimitry was someone else—someone other than the someone else she already believed him to be. It was dizzying—truly; one needed a playbill to keep track of all these tangled identities, the associate included. Dimitry should be careful not to talk in his sleep although of course, she’d be the only one listening—that is, if they managed to survive this and go home to the place of priests and icons and dogs and horses.
Wriggling, she lifted her knees to her chest and placed her feet on the bottom of the sarcophagus lid. Pushing as hard as she could, she moved it aside enough so that she could squeeze out. Cannot do it another moment, she thought in a panic. Sorry, Dimitry.
Breathing in the musty air, she tried to calm down and get her bearings; it was inky black and impossible to see her hand in front of her face. She carefully crawled out of the sarcophagus and once on her feet, leaned in to carefully feel around until she seized upon the stupid sword; it was probably best to keep it with her, so that the prisoner never got his hands on it—one needn’t be superstitious to err on the side of caution. She debated for a moment whether she should search the dead baron for any additional weapons. No—she decided; cannot do that, either.