The Prisoners of Wyvern Castle

The women rescue the men from the dungeon: now what?

Morpeth was fretting, and had been doing so for hours. Rupert wished he would stop, or at least fret in silence. Instead, he repeated a litany, always the same, starting with the excuses he should have given the King, passing through all the things he should have noticed (or that Umbra should have pointed out to him), and ending with speculations about the time and manner of his death, before beginning again with the excuses.

Umbra, who remained unaccountably cheerful, ignored him after the first round, and recommended Rupert do likewise. But Rupert was afraid that several hours in a dungeon with Morpeth would achieve what the weeks alone before his wedding could not: drive him mad.

He resorted to imagining the fingering and bow movements for the concerto he and Madeline were currently learning. Deep inside his own thoughts, rehearsing a particularly tricky passage, a sound outside caught his attention.

"Quiet." The peremptory order stopped Morpeth mid-complaint. Rupert sank to his knees beside the door, pressing his ear against it. It had been made from one massive piece of oak, but over the years, it had dried and twisted slightly, leaving a sliver of gap between door and frame where sound from without carried more or less clearly, at least to ears as acute as Rupert's.

In some part of his brain, he registered Morpeth asking questions and Umbra silencing him in a manner nearly as abrupt as Rupert's. All Rupert's attention was on the conversation outside.

"Miss Tyler?" he asked no one in particular. "What is she doing here?"

"Good girl!" Umbra remarked, unsurprised.

"She is giving the guards something to eat and drink," Rupert reported. "They are being lewd. I hope she knows what she is about."

"Trust her for that," Umbra said, but with an undertone of concern that suggested he was not as confident as he wished Rupert to think.

But the guards' crass remarks were already becoming more slurred, less forceful, and they soon ceased entirely, replaced by snoring that was crass in quite a different fashion.

"I think she has given them something to make them sleep," Rupert said.

"Probably some of Lord Wyvern's opium." Umbra suggested.

"You expected this?" Morpeth was inclined to be indignant.

"I expected Miss T would do something. I did not know what."

Rupert was still listening. "Miss Tyler is talking to someone. I cannot hear the reply, but she does not sound distressed."

In the next moment, he straightened, beaming. "It is my wife!"

They all heard the key turn in the lock, and Madeline was first through the door when it opened, walking into Rupert's waiting arms, clutching him as if they had been separated for weeks, rather than hours.

"Madeline," he murmured into her hair.

"If you would move out of the doorway, my lord, my lady..."

Rupert shifted sideways at Miss Tyler's voice, but did not let go of his wife, nor she of him, ignoring the movements of the others in and out of the cell, until her presence in his arms eased the hard knot of tension of which he had not even been aware.

"Would you give the gun to Umbra now, please, countess?" Miss Tyler asked. Ah. That must be the hard object his wife was holding clutched in the hand pressed into his back. It disappeared.

"A gun, Madeline?" Rupert asked.

"I am glad I did not have to shoot it," Madeline confided. "I learned to fire a gun to train the dogs, but I have never killed anything."