Quest for the Secret Keeper (21 page)

Ian knew Adria might attempt to dodge his next question, but he wanted to know, so he said, “But how and why did you two become separated?”

Adria looked again at her hands, still folded in her lap.
“It is because of this portal,” she told him bluntly. “This doorway is the last one we’ve needed to find, and we knew, after discovering all the others, that we could not discover it together.”

“But why?” asked Theo.

Adria sighed. “When my mistress Laodamia charged us with our quest, she told my husband and me that one of us would betray the other and place the Oracles in terrible danger. She said this would occur at the time we discovered the final portal, marked by a green door. She warned me that if she was correct and it was Adrastus who betrayed the cause, then the course of his actions would cause my own death. She added that I must not allow the final box to fall into the wrong hands; the prophecy within must be protected at all costs.”

Ian was confused. Adrastus had spent many years hiding the boxes and protecting their locations, not to mention that he’d also saved Ian’s life in Spain; why would he suddenly betray all his efforts and freely give the last of the boxes over to the enemy?

He asked Adria as much. “I cannot fathom it,” she told him. “My husband is the greatest man I have ever known, pure of heart and intention, and to think that he would betray me and the cause is incomprehensible to me. That is why we are separated. Adrastus has always feared this final prediction. So one night several years ago, just after we’d hidden the second-to-last box and we both knew there was only one portal left to discover, he left me.”

Beside Ian, Theo gasped. “He left you? But why?”

Tears formed in Adria’s eyes but she blinked them away. “He wrote me a note telling me that in order to ensure Laodamia’s words did not happen as predicted, we must separate. He would go on to hide the final box alone and I must stay away.”

“But you haven’t stayed away,” Carl pointed out.

Adria shook her head sadly. “No, Carl. I have not. I swore an oath to Laodamia that I would watch over the boxes and ensure the general did not betray us, and I will not stop looking for him until I have finished my quest.”

But Ian had another concern. “Mistress Adria, you say that you’ve hidden all the boxes save for one, but we’ve only managed to locate three so far. Have we failed already?”

The woman smiled kindly at him. “No, Ian. You have not. And although Adrastus carries with him the last box to be hidden, it is not the last in the sequence to be discovered. We hid them out of order, you see. So it is the last box for us, but likely the fourth or the fifth one for you.”

Ian was shocked by that revelation. “You mean you don’t know what order we’re supposed to find them?”

“No,” said Adria. “I only know the order we were to hide them, and only because when Laodamia gave me the scrolls with her prophecies, she left explicit instructions for which scroll was to be placed in which box and in what sequence they would need to be hidden. The box we hid before this one was located in a cave close to your keep.”

“That was the first box we found!” said Theo.

Adria nodded. “Yes, child. I gathered as much.”

“So where are the other boxes?” asked Carl.

“I cannot tell you that.”

“Why not?” he pressed.

“Because part of your destiny lies in the discovery of each box on your own. To tell you where the boxes are hidden would likely jeopardize your quest, and I’ll not have that.”

Ian noticed that Theo was toying with her crystal necklace. “So we should wait here for Adrastus to come and attempt to use the portal to hide the last box?”

Adria eyed Iyoclease, who was listening very carefully to their discussion. “Yes and no,” she said. “Iyoclease
must
be sent back to his own time in Greece. His appearance here and my own memory of him tell me that he must have slipped through the portal to the present time. It also means that we’ll find a way to send him back.”

The flood of relief clearly showed on Iyoclease’s face. “Thank you, Adria,” he said to her.

But her expression was somewhat melancholy. “We will wait here for my husband and he will open the portal to let you return. We will then hide the final box.”

“But what about us?” Jaaved asked.

“You must also return to your home. The portal near your keep will eventually open and lead you to the next box and all will be in sequence once again.”

“We can’t leave without the earl,” Ian told her, just as a flurry of noise erupted outside. A shout made its way into their shelter.

“We’ve surrendered!” came the anguished cry. “The Germans have conquered France!”

Ian felt a well of remorse knock the breath right out of him. “Oh, no!” whispered Theo.

Adria turned to Ian, her expression sober. “You and your party must flee Paris before the Germans arrive.”

“But the earl!” he protested.

“Leave it to me,” she said, and hurried out the door.

Adria arrived back with the earl leaning heavily on her. Océanne and Madame Lafitte were arguing with her that the earl should have been left where he was at the hospital.

Upon seeing their patriarch, Ian and Carl rushed forward to take the grave-looking man from her and ease him over to a mattress they had wrestled from the wreckage of their flat.

Their patriarch’s complexion was gray and he seemed much thinner than he’d been only a few days earlier. He lay back on the mattress with a sigh, and Theo brought forward a blanket to cover him.

Behind him, Adria said, “Enough!” in a voice that brokered no argument. Madame Lafitte and Océanne fell silent at once, but the tension in the shop remained. “The first place the Germans will go will be the hospitals,” Adria said into the silence that followed. “They’ll be looking for wounded soldiers and rounding them up. They will also be making a record of everyone there, and I hardly think the Earl of Kent would escape their notice.”

Madame Lafitte hurried over to the earl’s side and tucked the blanket around him. “Even so,” she said. “He should not be moved for several more days!”

Adria eyed the earl and then all of them one by one. Ian agreed with Madame Lafitte. It was clear that the earl was still too weak and too injured to attempt to leave Paris. “We’ll stay here until he’s better,” he told Adria. “We’ll hide until he’s well enough to travel and then we’ll sneak out of Paris.”

With a long sigh Adria nodded. “Very well, Ian,” she said. “We’ll wait until he’s better.”

It didn’t take long for the Germans to arrive. Ian and Carl saw them first, when they went to collect some food for the group. The Germans paraded through the capital of France as if they’d always owned it, and the sight was enough to crush Ian’s spirit.

Once the Germans began patrolling the streets, Adria hardly allowed them out of doors, reasoning that it was only a matter of time before the Germans began looking for subverts and people whom they felt were a threat to their cause.

“Your travel documents were lost during the air raid,” she said to Ian, Carl, and Theo, “which will not make them suspect you initially, but they will want you to replace your identification papers with the French government immediately. As you have no former proof of your identity within the official record books here in France, you will all be identified as potential spies and turned over to the German authorities at once.”

Ian felt their situation was quite desperate and without much hope—especially for the earl. If the Germans discovered
that he was the Earl of Kent, well, Ian couldn’t imagine what the Nazis would do to his beloved patriarch.

All around the city, large red flags with black crooked crosses were hung. Rumors abounded that Adolf Hitler himself would be making an appearance, and Ian shivered at the thought of having the hated Führer so close by.

Each time he and Carl went out for food and supplies, Ian could see the intense anxiety on the local civilian faces. Everywhere he looked he found the haunted eyes and anxious posture of Parisians who were terrified of the Germans crawling all over their homeland.

He had heard the rumors of German brutality in the other cities they had conquered, and he shivered at the thought of it continuing here.

Two days after the Nazis paraded down the Champs-Élysées, Ian and Carl came back to the shop after an early-morning food run to find the earl lying on his mattress and Madame Lafitte busy fussing over him, attempting to get the earl to drink some soup. “Hastings,” she said with a laugh, “it does not taste like day-old smelly stockings!”

“I beg your pardon, my lady, but it smells exactly like them,” replied the earl with a grin.

When the earl saw them in the doorway, he quickly cleared his throat and sat up with a grunt. “Hello,” he said. “What news have you to share?”

“The streets are overrun with Germans,” Ian said. “They’re everywhere, my lord.”

Behind him the door opened and Adria stepped through too. “The city is surrounded,” she announced.

Madame Lafitte lost all hint of merriment and turned starkly pale. “Oh, my,” she whispered. “How will Leopold ever get back to us?”

The earl had not yet shared the news that her husband had been captured by the Germans in Belgium, and he’d strictly forbidden Ian, Carl, Theo, and Jaaved from saying anything about it. “We must find a way out of the city,” he said gravely.

“I know of a way out,” Adria said confidently. “There are tunnels that run under Paris. Ancient tunnels which have dozens of unseen exit points, well away from the major roadways where the Germans are likely to look for anyone attempting to escape notice.”

“Are you well enough to travel?” Theo asked the earl. Ian could see that his color had returned, and although he was still in some amount of pain and a bit weaker than before, his condition had greatly improved in just a few short days.

“Almost ready, Theo,” he assured her. “I’ll be quite well enough in a day or two. As long as Madame Lafitte doesn’t force this awful concoction on me.”

Madame Lafitte’s smile returned a bit. “Oh, Hastings. You exasperating man!”

“When should we leave?” Carl asked, looking to Adria again.

Adria eyed the earl carefully, as if assessing his condition. “As soon as the earl is ready to travel,” she said. “I will lead your group through the tunnels at midnight and leave you at the edge of the city. If you travel by night and stay
away from the main roads, you should be able to reach Le Havre. If your boat is swift and you leave the harbor under the cover of darkness, you will likely escape detection.”

At that moment Iyoclease and Jaaved came into the shop. Ian realized belatedly that they had not been there when he and the others had returned.

“We’ve been scouting the city,” Jaaved told them. “The German guard is everywhere, and they’re putting up posters announcing a nightly curfew and requiring all French citizens to report to the German registration stations to have their identification papers recorded. Anyone caught without proper identification after Friday will be brought before a tribunal and imprisoned.”

“It is as I suspected,” Adria told them. “We must get you out of the city tomorrow.”

T
he next morning, as Ian and Carl were returning from the market with enough food and supplies to see them to Le Havre, Theo came dashing over to them. “Thank heavens you’re back!” she said, waiting only as long as it took for Ian to set his sack of food down to throw her arms around him.

Ian smiled and ruffled her hair. “It’s a bit tricky with so many Germans about, but we managed, Theo.”

When he looked at the other faces in the room, however, he knew immediately that all was not well. “What’s happened?” he asked to no one in particular.

“The earl has come down with a fever,” Madame Lafitte said.

“I’m fine,” the earl said, his voice weak and strained. And then he began to cough and his whole face flushed red. He clutched at his ribs and Ian knew he must be in terrible pain.

They all waited for the spasm to pass, and when it did,
the earl was left spent and wheezing. “He needs medicine,” Adria said. “There is an apothecary not far from here. I will go.”

But Ian stepped in front of her, knowing he should be the one to take the risk. “Let me,” he said. “Tell me where it is and what to get and I’ll go.” Adria eyed him with surprise, so Ian explained, “We can’t risk anything happening to you, Mistress Adria. You’re the only one who can lead the others out of the city. If something happened to you, we’d not last the day.”

“We can’t lose you either, Ian,” Carl said, stepping up to volunteer. “I’ll go.”

Ian knew it was just like his friend to step into the face of danger and take the risk from everyone else.

“All right,” Adria said. Moving over to her satchel, she retrieved a scrap of paper and scribbled both a map and the address of the apothecary along with the name of the medicine to get. “Pierre will know exactly what to give you,” she said. “And give him a few of these for his trouble.”

Adria dropped three small gold coins into Carl’s hand and he stared at them in wonder. “Gaw,” he said. “All that for the medicine?”

Adria smiled at him. “No, young man, all that to seal his lips about who came to visit and what they were asking for.”

Carl tucked the coins into his pocket and moved to the door. When he went outside, however, Theo looked urgently at Ian and whispered, “Go with him!”

Ian was puzzled. “You think he won’t find it?”

Theo’s fingers went to her crystal. “He’ll need you,” was all she said.

Ian knew enough about Theo’s gift not to question it, so he put his cap back on and hurried out the door. “Carl! Wait for me!”

The friends traveled stealthily through the city, using alleyways and side streets as much as possible. They reached the apothecary without incident and waited for two patrons to leave before going inside. “Are you Pierre?” Carl asked the weathered-looking man behind the counter.

“Yes,” he said. “Who are you?”

“We’re friends of Adria,” Carl told him, fishing the paper from his pocket. “Mistress Adria said you’d know what this is?” For emphasis he pointed to the word scribbled across the top of the paper.