Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Eight

Ellie’s pulse didn’t settle back to normal until she had dressed.

The room she had been assigned was spacious, with whitewashed walls and a comfortable bed covered with a worn quilt. A mosquito net hung over the canopy frame, ready to be drawn around in the night, as the windows were obviously meant to stay open for ventilation. There was no insulation, nor any fireplace or parlor stove—but then, such things wouldn’t be needed here on the shore of the Caribbean.

Ellie put another pin in her still-damp hair. She further calmed herself by running through the mental list she had built of everything she needed to acquire for her expedition: scissors, mason line, stakes, mosquito netting, hammock, canteen…

And a guide, of course. She was still desperately in need of one of those.

A pair of simple French doors opened onto the veranda. Ellie stepped through them, drawn outside by the warm air and the smell of living things from the garden below.

Her room was on the upper floor of the hotel’s wing. The high walkway on which she stood granted her a lovely view over the abundant sprawl of the yard, which was framed by a high wooden fence. Beyond that barrier, she could see the rooftops of more houses. They grew lower and more humble the further they were from the waterfront.

Against the horizon, Ellie could just make out the misty gray haze of the mountains. The soft, distant line of them hadn’t been visible earlier in the day when the light had been higher. They looked very far away, lying as they did across miles of flat, tangled swamp—but they were here. They were real, and somewhere within them lay the destination marked on her map.

The thought was both thrilling and desperately intimidating.

Ellie’s hand rose to the medallion. The artifact could still be part of an elaborate hoax—but if it wasn’t, then somewhere out among those distant peaks, an extraordinary secret awaited discovery.

Her reverie was interrupted by the chirp of bright, feminine voices carrying across the air from below. They were speaking Spanish.

She moved to where the veranda ended at the frame of the original house and peered down. The voices were coming from a small area separated from the rest of the garden by a high wooden privacy fence. The space backed onto the hotel’s kitchen.

Ellie thought of the rose-scented soap in her bath that afternoon. Adding it to the tub certainly hadn’t been the notion of a sixteen-year-old boy—nor did she imagine that Mr. Linares would have thought of it.

The bubbles spoke of a woman’s touch.

A spark of inspiration made Ellie’s pulse jump. She wasn’t a fool. She knew that a lady traveling alone could be vulnerable to rascals. She considered herself to be a person of reasonably good judgment… but no one would know the worth of the various men in the colony as well as a local woman.

Quietly, Ellie slipped down the stairs that led from the veranda to the ground floor. Stepping into the garden, she followed a slender dirt path toward the privacy fence.

A gap in the barrier opened at the end nearest to the house, half-hidden by a stand of young thatch palms. Ellie squeezed herself past the stiff fronds and risked a peek around the corner.

The little yard was obviously a space meant for work rather than for show. Most of the ground was packed earth, except at the fringes where green things came stubbornly springing up.

A fragrant flowering vine meandered cheerfully along the inside of the fence. A few heavy pots of herbs flourished by the steps that led into the kitchen.

A big vat of steaming water squatted in the center of the space. A girl of perhaps sixteen stood by it with her skirts tucked up to expose her shins. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy bun, and her elegant eyebrows were angled crossly. She jammed a polished wooden pole into the vat with a mulish expression on her face.

An older woman sat in the first of a pair of wooden chairs positioned nearby. Her feet were plopped comfortably on a stool as she sipped a glass of something that looked refreshing. Her brightly colored skirt had also been pulled up to expose the lower portion of her legs, but this appeared to have been done for ventilation rather than for work. Her hair was streaked with threads of silver above a markedly lovely face. There was an obvious similarity between her sun-warmed features and those of the girl standing next to the vat.

“Con más fuerza,” the older woman ordered, waving a hand at her daughter.

The teenager flashed her a murderous look before whacking at the contents of the vat with her stick more forcefully.

The woman with her feet up had to be the wife that Mr. Linares, the hotel proprietor, had mentioned when Ellie checked in. Ellie felt a flash of guilt at disturbing the lady in a place where she was obviously not expecting any guests. She attempted to creep back to the path, but the heel of her boot slipped, spinning out a little tumble of pebbles.

Mrs. Linares sat up in her chair, suddenly alert.

“Hoo deh?” she called out in Kriol.

Steeling herself against the now-unavoidable embarrassment, Ellie poked her head back around the fence.

“I, er… My apologies. I was just… ah, looking for the…” She cleared her throat, giving up. “I was snooping.”

Mrs. Linares’s face cracked into a smile. Her eyes twinkled.

“Were you? There is nothing like a good snoop, but I am afraid all you have turned up is two ladies doing laundry.”

“Más bien a una,” the teenager at the vat muttered under her breath.

Mrs. Linares took another sip of her drink, giving it a little slurp. “Pound it, Rosalita. You are washing, not making soup.” She winked at Ellie. “This is the part you guests are not supposed to see.”

“I’m terribly sorry for interrupting you,” Ellie replied.

“It’s no trouble. Was there anything you needed?” Mrs. Linares asked.

There most certainly was, and Ellie’s first impressions of this comfortable, confident woman made her feel certain that Mrs. Linares could provide it—but she had no idea how to broach the subject without it seeming abrupt.

Her eyes lit on the glass in Mrs. Linares’s hand.

“Is that lemonade?” she asked.

“Limeade,” Mrs. Linares replied. “Would you like me to have some sent up to your room?”

Ellie’s hopes crumpled a bit.

“Yes. I… suppose that would be appropriate,” she conceded.

Mrs. Linares looked amused.

“Or you are welcome to join me here, if you would prefer to watch Rosalita do the laundry while you drink it,” she offered with a gracious wave to the other weatherbeaten wooden chair.

“Would you mind that terribly?” Ellie replied, perking up.

“Tito!” Mrs. Linares shouted with impressive volume.

A young boy with messy hair appeared in the door to the kitchen.

“?Qué, Mamá?” he demanded. He startled a bit at the sight of Ellie. “?Qué hace esta bakra aquí?”

“The bakra is having limeade with me. Bring her a glass. Con más azúcar!” she shouted after him as he darted away.

“What is a bakra?” Ellie asked as she took the seat beside her.

“It’s a Belize word for fancy white people. A little rude, if I am honest,” Mrs. Linares said conspiratorially. “Tito will hear about that later.”

The boy in question came hopping down the stairs with a limeade in his hand. He handed the glass to Ellie with a neat little bow.

“Your drink, ma’am,” he said with perfect courtesy after a slightly nervous look at his mother.

Mrs. Linares dismissed him with a regal wave of her hand. He pounded inelegantly up the steps.

Ellie took a sip of the limeade. It was tart and delicious. She settled back in the chair as the teenager continued to poke halfheartedly at the laundry.

“You must forgive me if I am being too forward… but then, you did invade my yard,” Mrs. Linares said playfully. “But I think perhaps you are Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby who joined us earlier this morning, yes?”

“I am,” Ellie replied. She hoped that her response to her outrageous alias didn’t sound as awkward as it felt.

“It was not such a hard guess,” Mrs. Linares admitted. “You are the only woman staying here at the moment other than the sister of some missionary—but she is always in her room, and her face looks like someone just fed her a lemon.”

Mrs. Linares shaped her lips into an illustratively disapproving pucker. Rosalita snorted by the tub.

“We get all sorts, as your people would say,” Mrs. Linares concluded.

“Yes,” Ellie agreed tentatively. “I believe I ran into another—er, guest?—earlier this afternoon. I must say, he was alarmingly pushy.”

Mrs. Linares’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Did one of my guests behave in a way not fitting for a gentleman?” she demanded.

“Oh—not like that,” Ellie quickly corrected. “It was all the knife-waving and kicking down doors.”

“Kicking down doors?” Mrs. Linares echoed. Her voice rose with alarm.

“Well, admittedly, it had something to do with the snake…” Ellie hedged carefully.

Mrs. Linares let out an exasperated sigh as she slumped back against her chair and put her fingers to the bridge of her nose.

“Let me guess. The knife was like this?” She held up her hands roughly two feet apart.

“That’s right,” Ellie carefully agreed.

“Tall fellow? Beautiful eyes? No shoes?”

“Yes!” Ellie confirmed.

“That is Adam Bates,” Mrs. Linares said flatly. “Those are his pants.”

She nodded toward the end of Rosalita’s pole, which the girl had lifted out from the tub. A pair of khaki trousers were suspended from the end of it.

They looked familiar.

“He is a barbarian, but he is harmless,” Mrs. Linares continued. “They would not have made him assistant surveyor general for the colony if he were actually crazy.”

Ellie nearly choked on a sip of limeade. “I’m sorry… did you say assistant surveyor general?”

“Hard to believe, I know,” Mrs. Linares confirmed wryly. “But he is actually very good at it. Before he came—oh, five or six years ago?—everything was a disaster. The surveyor general, he has no interest in going out into the bush, so he just sits in his office and hires whoever comes through the door to do the work for him. But they were all a bunch of grifters. Then Mr. Bates arrived and sorted it all out. He does most of the work himself—and now the others must get proper training and be certified. And he has fixed up all the maps so people actually know where they are going.”

Ellie was familiar with the job description. An assistant surveyor general would be responsible for plotting property lines and roads, charting land grants… and expanding the maps of the colony’s territories into its as-yet-unexplored regions.

With a silent, dawning horror, Ellie absorbed that the knife-wielding maniac was likely the single person in British Honduras with the most knowledge of the very places she needed to go.

No, Ellie thought furiously. Absolutely not. There had to be a better option.

But she wouldn’t find it if she didn’t ask. Ellie quickly mulled over her impression of Mrs. Linares. The woman seemed friendly, honest, and straightforward.

“That reminds me of something I was hoping to ask you about,” Ellie said carefully.

“Oh?” Mrs. Linares turned a sharp and curious gaze on her.

“I am actually trying to find a reliable guide to the interior. To the mountains, specifically,” Ellie explained.

“What do you want to go there for?” Rosalita blurted from her place by the tub.

Mrs. Linares arched a fine black eyebrow thoughtfully.

“Rosalita is being a bit abrupt,” the older woman chided with a pointed glare at her daughter.

Rosalita dropped the trousers back into the laundry vat with a wet thwap and began pounding at them again with the stick.

“But she is not wrong,” Mrs. Linares continued. “Even those who live here in the colony don’t go into the bush unless they are scouting for one of the logging companies or looking for a land grant—and nobody wants a land grant in the mountains. There’s nothing out there but monkeys and bugs.”

“I know it sounds a bit daft, but it’s really quite important,” Ellie pressed. “I need to find a guide who knows the land and who won’t try to take advantage of a woman traveling alone.”

Mrs. Linares exchanged a troubled look with her daughter.

“I am not sure that is such a simple thing to find,” she said. “I can think of two I might trust not to rob you or leave you out there, but neither of them would agree to do it for a woman—especially a bakra woman.”

“What about Mr. Bates?” Rosalita suggested, resting on her pole.

Ellie froze in her chair.

“He knows the territory better than anyone, and he is honest,” Mrs. Linares conceded, oblivious to Ellie’s reaction. “He thinks better of women than most… but I think even he would stop at bringing one into the back country. And anyway, he has his own duties to attend to.”

Ellie let her head fall against the chair, absorbing this with quiet frustration.

She didn’t doubt Mrs. Linares’ assessment. As proprietors of the hotel, she and her husband would be deeply connected with the community here. She likely knew as well as anyone what the options available to Ellie were, and it sounded as though none of them were good.

Of course, Ellie’s task couldn’t be as simple as Constance had made it sound back in London. Nothing was ever that easy for a woman trying to blaze her own path in the world.

Perhaps Ellie should just return to England and give the map to the men of the Royal Geographical Society. Surely, that was better than letting it languish uninvestigated… or fall into the hands of the thug who was almost certainly on her trail.

Ellie clenched her hands on the arms of the chair. She could not give up that easily—not after she had already come so far.

“The two men you said were trustworthy. Could you make arrangements for me to meet with them?” she asked.

“I can,” Mrs. Linares replied carefully. “Though I would hate to see you waste your time.”

Ellie took a grim sip of her limeade. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a waste of time. After all, she had more than just money to offer. She was carrying the key to a possible legend in her corset. Whoever joined her on this expedition would have the chance to be part of making history. Surely there was value in that—perhaps enough value, even, to outweigh the handicap of her gender.

“Thank you,” Ellie said as she set down her glass and rose. “You’ve been most kind. Please enjoy the rest of your evening. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

“It is no trouble at all. Good evening to you as well,” Mrs. Linares said, eyeing Ellie thoughtfully.

Ellie gave Rosalita a nod as well and slipped back out through the gap in the fence.

Evening was settling over the garden, painting it in deeper layers of shadow. Birds chirped and fluttered through the branches of the calabash trees.

Ellie picked her way back up the path to the guest wing, slapping at a mosquito that buzzed by her ear. Her boots thudded gently on the wooden steps as she climbed back onto the lower level veranda—and spotted at a familiar figure reclined in a rocking chair with his still-bare feet propped up on the railing.

It was the maniac from the washroom—Assistant Surveyor General Adam Bates. He had, at least, donned a clean shirt and trousers.

He was smoking a cigar. The stink of it wafted over to where she was standing. Ellie brushed at the air to chase it away.

“That’s a terrible habit, you know,” she pointed out.

Bates glanced over at her and raised a skeptical eyebrow. He placed the cigar to his lips and puffed serenely on it before blowing out a long stream of smoke.

“It’s a very relaxing terrible habit,” he countered. “Goes very nicely with this terribly habitual whiskey.”

Ellie shifted her gaze to his feet.

“Still in need of shoes, I see,” she commented.

He pointed with the cigar, and she saw a pair of abominably muddy boots tumbled beside his chair.

“Waiting for those to dry out,” he replied. “Easier to knock the sludge off.”

“You might try stockings in the meantime,” Ellie retorted.

He wiggled his toes gratuitously.

“It’s good to air them out after a trek,” he said. “Keeps the stink down.”

“Right. Well, then. Have a delightful evening.” Ellie pivoted on her heel, stalking away.

“Sweet dreams, Princess,” he called back in reply.

At the sound of that abominable word—Princess—she momentarily halted, a violent urge shuddering through her. Ellie controlled it, instead lifting her skirt and walking neatly up the stairs.

No, she thought firmly as she crossed the upper veranda to her room—that was one option she would not be pursuing. She would rather face down a live crocodile than ask Adam Bates to guide her into the interior.

Surely her circumstances could never become that desperate.