She lowered the Finger of Accusation and the hand that it belonged to—but only partway. As she was doing with her other hand, she kept it well away from her skirt. She still had hopes—faint hopes—that she might be able to salvage the garment. Her shoes, of course, were hopeless, and would have to be pitched into the moat. They were a cheap pair she'd bought yesterday from the Tower's saddler, though, not one of her good pairs.
"Look at me! I'm filthy! Just from going in there to set the bacteria monitors." Thankfully, she hadn't actually had to crawl at any point, which had been her other great fear. There was enough room under the staircase for her to move about in a half-crouch. Still, with an area that filthy—not to mention vile; gross; disgusting; nauseating—there was no way she could have managed the chore without bringing traces back out with her. An incredible stench, if nothing else.
The stench was bad enough that Windebank was trying to sidle away. But Rita would have none of it.
"No, you don't! Come here, Sir Francis!" She made an imperious and impatient gesture, waving at him to accompany her toward the stairs. "I want to show you the monitors, so you can make sure—I'm holding you responsible, sir!—that none of these idiots fiddle with them."
"Please, Lady Simpson," he murmured, raising his own hands. That was more in the way of a protective gesture than a protest. Just in case Rita might try to grab him and get his own fancy clothing filthy. "I assure you—"
"No, you don't, buster! Look at them." She'd reached the staircase and stooped over—careful to stay a couple of steps from where the real filth began—and once again pointed the Finger of Accusation. "You can see one of them from here. Not too easily, because it's dark, but you can see it. The other one, you'd have to go inside."
Reluctantly, Windebank followed, staying several steps behind. Now, he lowered his head in a very brief manner and began nodding vigorously. "Yes, yes, I see it."
That was pure nonsense, of course. Windebank couldn't possibly have spotted the package that Rita had affixed to one of the staircase's two main weight-bearing columns, not with that brief a glance. All the more so because Harry Lefferts' demolitions expert Gerd Whazzisname—and wait till she finally met the bastard personally and could give him a piece of her mind; him and Wild-Man Harry both!—had deliberately painted the things to make them hard to see in a dark place.
But it was good enough. She was so aggravated that she had to remind herself that the "bacteria monitors" were nothing of the sort, and she didn't actually want Windebank or anyone else looking at them closely.
"Fine, then," she muttered, coming away from the stairs again. "As I told you, they need to stay in place—undisturbed—for a full week. At that point, I'll have an accurate reading of how bad the situation is. But, in the meantime—station guards if you have to—nobody keeps using the place for an outhouse."
"Yes, Lady Simpson. Certainly. Not a problem."
He just wanted to get rid of her, obviously enough. But Rita was pretty sure she'd accomplished her goal, so she gave him a curt nod and began stalking off toward her quarters in St. Thomas' Tower.
Amazingly, it was done. What she'd labeled "Mission Impossible" when that maniac Lefferts had first proposed it, but would now label otherwise.
Mission Disgusting.
Mission Puke—no, best not dwell on that.
Mission Harry I Will Piss On Your Grave. That had a nice ring to it. She might even crap on the bastard's grave, she was so ticked off.
"See to it," Francis Windebank ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Henry Langscarr, after the obnoxious American woman left. Langscarr served as Windebank's deputy, whenever the constable was not present in the Tower—which was most of the time, these days.
"Yes, Sir Francis. I will have to post guards, though."
Windebank frowned but said nothing. The mercenary companies that now made up most of the Tower's military force were as poorly disciplined as mercenaries usually were. He found it hard to imagine, himself, why any sane man would crawl into that horrid space to defecate when there were perfectly functional latrines not more than a minute's walk from the White Tower. But, surely, they did—giving proof yet again that Pope Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas had been correct in listing Sloth as one of the seven deadly sins.
"What is 'bakeria'?" Langscarr asked, as the two men walked away.
"I have no idea, Sir Henry. The woman's accent is wretched enough when she speaks English. I hate to think how she's mangling Latin. Something to do with disease."