Author's Notes: I must shamefully admit that I've never read Pimpernel and Rosemary, nor seen Pimpernel Smith. This is a shocking revelation for my wonderful readers, I'm sure. Never fear, however! I have seen both the 1934 version of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1986 version and read every other book in the series. he purpose of this confession is to assure everyone that I'm not deliberately trying to copy any movie or book on purpose, so anything similar is mere coincidence, I'm afraid!

Don't even ask how many drafts this chapter went through. In one day. I kamikaze wrote a bulk of it that particular day, tweaking it every 10 minutes or so, but despite that, it really wrote itself. I'm still certain there will be oodles of loose ends by the time I finish this, though. Thoughts (re: reviews) are always appreciated.

~BD

The Invisible Savior

Marguerite wasn't certain how much more her overwrought brain could handle. The young woman sitting beside her was beautiful, sweet, and kind; it must have been some cruel jest that her father was Armand Chauvelin.

Yet deep down, Marguerite didn't doubt Fleurette, no matter how much her brain wished to reject the idea. She could only hope and trust that the girl was actually a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, as she claimed, and not secretly working on behalf of her father.

As Marguerite waited for God only knew what to happen next, she thought back to the days before the war, when Chauvelin had visited her salon in Paris. Never had he mentioned that he had been married, or that he had a child. Marguerite had never seen a wedding band on his left hand. Fleurette had explained, briefly, that she had lived with a governess for most of her childhood, as her mother had died in an accident during Fleurette's childhood, and she had only rarely seen her father as she grew up. At the start of the war, Chauvelin had discovered that his only child was helping Jews escape in the south of France, and he had been furious about it. It was then that she discovered her father's true allegiances to Germany, and while he had not arrested her or ever turned her over to the Nazis, the revelation had caused a rift between the two of them that had never been mended. To make matters worse, Chauvelin had never liked Amédé, whom he considered too poor and common for his beautiful little girl, despite the fact that Fleurette and Amédé had been in love since they were teenagers. During 1942, Fleurette had very nearly been captured by the Nazis without her father's knowledge – one of the girls in her village had discovered her secret activities and reported her, and the Scarlet Pimpernel had saved her life. Since then, she had pledged herself to helping him.

The two ladies sat in silence for what seemed like hours, but according to the clock on the wall, only forty-five minutes had dragged by. Marguerite finally rose to her feet and began to pace about, simply for lack of anything better to do, and took to examining objects around the main room of the cottage.

After another ten minutes, the front door banged open and Amédé entered, pale and cold.

"They're coming," he gasped out. "We have but perhaps a minute! I can barely see in this storm, but they are almost here!"

Marguerite froze in terror, but Fleurette was already on her feet and dragging the actress towards the bedroom where she had woken earlier. Once the door was shut, the younger woman threw back a rug on the floor in front of the hearth, and pressed on a certain spot that proved to be a latch. Before Marguerite could question the younger girl, Fleurette had practically forced her down a narrow ladder into the yawning darkness.

"At the bottom and to your left, you will find a torch," Fleurette whispered quickly. "Go to the end of the tunnel, where it branches, and take the right fork. You will soon come to a room on the right side of the tunnel – wait there until someone fetches you. The secret word is rabbit. If they do not say that first, you will know they are not a member of the League."

Marguerite had just opened her mouth to argue, or ask what in God's name she was supposed to do if whoever came for her didn't say the word "rabbit", when the trapdoor closed with a quiet snap and she heard the click of the latch. She was now locked in total blackness and she tried desperately not to panic as she fumbled in fear down the rest of the ladder. Her foot touched the earthen floor of a tunnel and she knelt, groped about in the blackness while praying to God that she didn't touch a rat or a spider or something equally horrible. At last her fingers touched cold metal, and she gripped the torch in her shaking hands and pressed the switch. A dazzling, unnatural light filled the tunnel, revealing bare earthen walls. It was low, but she could stand to her full height within it, and she quickly began making her way down the path as Fleurette had indicated she should.

Eventually she came to the fork Fleurette had mentioned. She took the right fork with building trepidation; what if Chauvelin found the trapdoor? What if some strange person whom she'd never met found her down here and didn't give her the secret word? Would she die within this burrow, and no one ever find her?

The tunnel twisted several times before Marguerite found the hollowed out room (if that's what one could call it) in the right side of the tunnel. The tunnel itself extended further onwards and curved at a right degree angle only a few meters ahead. Marguerite swallowed and ducked into the offshoot, fear building in the pit of her stomach. Anyone could approach the room and she would never know it.

Flashing the light about the offshoot, she saw it was a rough shape and there were several blankets on the floor, along with a crate of what turned out to be rations and water. Marguerite settled herself on a couple of blankets and up against the curve of the earth in a corner, then wrapped another blanket about her shivering shoulders before she belatedly thought to turn the torch off, lest the light be seen.

The silence and darkness pressed upon her ears and eyes, eerie and nightmarishly. It was as though she had gone blind. Was she really an actress? Had she ever been at the Cannes Film Festival or in Paris, or anywhere else for that matter? She had tried to save four Jewish families, and now she was being hunted just as they were. Was this what Jews in the war had experienced? This horrible, nagging feeling that, at any second, they would be caught and killed? She choked back a sob. Perhaps she would wake any moment and find it was all just a bad dream... a horrible dream that would melt into nothingless when she came to.

Someone touched her shoulder, and Marguerite closed her eyes tightly and curled up against herself. It was chilly and the blanket around her smelled musty. She had no idea when she had drifted into an uneasy doze, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes at most. In her state of semi-consciousness, she had been dreaming of her teenaged years.

For a few seconds, the memory lingered. It had been a real event, one that she vaguely remembered in her waking hours but hadn't really thought of in years. With some annoyance, she realized the memory had very likely surfaced only due to her previous conversation with Fleurette, about being in love. Marguerite had told the truth - she had never been in love. But once, she had felt the fluttering start of what could have been love, if allowed to grow.

She had been sixteen years old. Back then, she had been performing regularly in one of Paris's theatres as a singer and comedienne, trying desperately to help Armand make ends meet. It was shortly before she had been discovered by a film director and her real acting career had begun. After one performance at the theatre, in which she had been wearing a low-cut, sparkling red dress that always received a lot of catcalls, she had gone backstage to change for the next act, and she had noticed four young men milling around in stylish suits. Likely they had money and had been invited by the manager to meet some of the performers. One stood out more than the others to Marguerite, because he was taller than the others, and quite attractive. She remembered he had dark gold hair. He had been arguing with the other boys, and she'd only caught a snippet of their conversation:

"...just want to meet her."

"She's younger than you, couldn't you tell that when she was on stage?"

"I don't care about that, Tony. She was beautiful."

"Beauty hides a lot of nastiness, you know. And we're only here on holiday! It's not like you could start anything –"

One of the others cut in airily, "She's just a girl, you know. And French at that. There are plenty of girls –"

"Just a girl? Are you out of your mind?" The tall, blonde boy looked incredulous, as though he were seeing his friends for the first time and didn't like their attitudes.

"You don't know anything about her except that she's an actress!"

He shook his head and mused thoughtfully, "No, she looked sad. I could tell. She looked as though she wanted to escape."

"Oh God. He's reading people's emotions again. Why does he do that?" The boy who said this had turned away and thrown his hands up in the air in sheer annoyance, and left the others to it.

Marguerite had paused, eavesdropping out of curiosity. The boy named Tony caught sight of her at that moment and instantly fell silent, and she knew then that they had been talking about her. The taller boy glanced over and she saw his breath catch in his chest. She actually saw his chest contract and his eyes widen, because she was standing so near him and he hadn't been expecting her to be so close by. His eyes were a beautiful shade of sky blue, hopeful and sparkling, and her heart had started to pound furiously against her ribcage. He was very attractive, she'd thought, in a girlish, excited sort of way. His head was slightly cocked to the side, as though studying her – that by doing so he might memorize her and learn all about her.

But how had he known she was sad? She was always so worried that Armand was working himself to death. She was so worried about how they would make the next rent payment, about what was happening in Germany, about how to avoid the drunk men who always seemed to be around when she performed. But how could this young man have seen that in her eyes? She was so careful when she was on stage to smile brilliantly and wink at patrons and laugh and make certain they had a good time, because if she didn't, she wouldn't have a job. And God knew she needed the job... Armand couldn't make ends meet without her help.

The manager grabbed her shoulder at that precise moment. "Zut alors, what are you doing? Get dressed for the next act, damn it!" he'd barked angrily, and Marguerite had jolted and hurried to change, apologizing to her boss as she went. But when the burly man bustled off to yell at another actor, she'd looked over her shoulder once more at the young, blonde man, and she'd given him a small, sincere smile. She just did see him raise his hand, as though stretching it out to try and stop her...she just did see his foot move forward, as though he might run after her...before his friends grabbed him by the shoulders to haul him out, and she'd moved behind the set changes towards her dressing room before she got fired.

She had never seen him again. But she'd daydreamed about him for months, it seemed. Other boys and men flirted with her, but none looked at her the way that one had. Perhaps he had remained in her subconscious all this time because he was the only man she had ever had a real, girlish crush on. It was easy to dream about someone when you could make up anything you wanted about them. In her mind, he was a wealthy, gentlemanly, kind young man who would lavish her with affection and love, and she would return it willingly. In slight desperation, she had looked for him over the next two weeks in her audience, but the stage lights always got in the way of seeing people properly, and he never came backstage again. She knew, deep down, that he must have returned home, because his friends had said they were only on holiday, and a little piece of her heart broke away. But it didn't stop her from dreaming that he might come back and take her away from the hardness of her life – that mysterious young man who had seen into her soul as no one else had ever done before or since.

Marguerite opened her eyes, remembering her current reality with a wave of dread, and she forcibly pushed the memory back into the recesses of her mind. It was useless to dwell on something that had happened fifteen years prior. More importantly, who had come for her now?

To her horror, the hulking outline of a man crouched beside her, lit from behind by a lantern. She realized seconds too late exactly who it was, but before she could shout in alarm and draw away, Giselbert snapped, "Lapin!"

Half-surprised he hadn't said it in German, she jerked into a sitting position and shoved him away with a strength she didn't quite realize she possessed. Caught off guard, he toppled and fell back onto his palms, and she snarled, "Do you always have this infuriating habit of scaring people to death? And I still don't trust you, even if you know the French word for rabbit! Why are you here?"

He picked himself up off of the dirt floor and sat back on his knees. "You really think I'm German?" He sounded irritated.

"What am I supposed to think?" she demanded. Good God, but why the hell did he have to come for her? Wasn't there anyone else in this mysterious League that could have been sent instead of him? Waspishly, she added, "Besides, I thought you were supposed to die in an avalanche!"

"Oh, and you would have loved that, I'm sure." His anger seemed to match hers.

Scowling at him, she snapped, "Mores the pity. You might have everyone else believing you're innocent, or that you work for the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but I still don't trust you."

His eyes flickered at her, an eerie shade of icy blue in the lantern light. "How do you know I'm not the Scarlet Pimpernel?"

Marguerite didn't even hesitate to toss aside such a ludicrous idea. "Because you aren't English." With that, she stood up and brushed herself off. "And he certainly doesn't go around telling people who he is."

"I didn't realize you knew him so well!" was the sarcastic response.

She added sharply, "I also know he doesn't have a swastika tattooed on his wrist!" Despite her revulsion of this man, she grabbed his hand and held it up. The little symbol stood out weirdly in the lantern light – a black mark that made her recoil in revulsion. She had seen it before she had blacked out in Chauvelin's cabin, when Giselbert had been torturing her.

"How do you know that isn't a fake? That I drew it on with a pen?"

She hesitated at this, but after a couple of seconds, she realized he was only trying to argue with her just for the sake of doing so, and she snarled, "You look Aryan!"

"A convenient trait, I assure you, but not all who look Aryan were German! I didn't believe you were actually stupid enough to believe something so asinine!" Giselbert stood up as well, but he was much too tall for the small underground room, and so had to hunch over like an old man. "And by the way, no one else is going to come for you. So if you want to get out of here, I suggest you follow me. If you want to stay here for the rest of your life like a rabbit in a burrow, then don't. I could really care less what you wish to do."

She clenched her fists in indignation. "And where in God's name are we going, if I do decide to follow you?"

He tossed her a heavy overcoat and looped a scarf around her neck; she grabbed it before he could entertain the idea of strangling her. He merely rolled his eyes and said coldly, "To the other end of this tunnel."

"Oh, that's immensely reassuring and helpful," she grumbled cynically.

He ignored her and picked up the lantern. Unwillingly, Marguerite followed him out of the small room and into the tunnel, noting that he moved towards the sharp, ninety-degree angle she had seen earlier.

A sudden thought occurred to her, and she asked, "Why couldn't one of those other men come for me? Denys or Tony, I think their names were?"

"Because they were assigned to do something else, I expect," was the evasive, acidic reply.

They rounded the corner and she realized the tunnel sloped downwards and became taller and narrower. Her foot slipped and she grasped at the rough wall to keep her balance. Giselbert did not turn to check that she was still standing or even ask if she needed assistance, the great lout. She thought again about her memory from when she was sixteen; how kind the young blonde man had seemed, how he had seen into her soul even from a distance. She wondered if he and his friends had survived the war. Had he been drafted? He would have been the appropriate age. What a sad thought. She hoped he hadn't been killed.

Without thinking, she mused quietly, mostly to herself, "I knew of a Tony, once."

"Really? Oh, and I'm certain there's only one in the entire world! Tony is such an unusual name, after all."

It took everything she had not to hit him. Instead, she gritted her teeth, inhaled sharply, and said, "If you don't like me anymore than I like you, why on earth did you not persuade this elusive Scarlet Pimpernel to send someone else to get me out of here?"

Giselbert half turned and scowled at her. "Because it is our job to obey his orders. It is not our job to complain. We swore our lives to him, and will do what he asks, regardless of how much we dislike the task."

She scowled back at him, but after a short, tense stalemate, he turned forward again, and they resumed their trudging walk. A minute or so went by before she whispered, again to herself, "...what would have happened if they had come back? If I had spoken to them?"

"Oh, damn it! What are you talking about now?" Giselbert demanded in exasperation.

Annoyed that she had said more of her inner thoughts aloud, she reluctantly explained, if only at an attempt of conversation: "Years ago, when I worked in a theatre in Paris, a young man named Tony came backstage with his friends one night. I didn't get a chance to speak to them. Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I had. It doesn't matter, though. It was just a memory that came to me before you woke me."

Her guide said nothing to this, and they fell back into an uneasy, tense silence.

Marguerite sighed heavily after another fifteen minutes of following him. It would obviously do no good to talk to him, and she was getting sentimental, which was almost just as bad. She would have to forget her girlish memories if she wanted to escape from this hell alive. She couldn't change anything in the past, after all. She forced herself to push her emotions down and lock them away, and she continued trudging after Giselbert – around corners and twists and turns, until finally, after an hour or so, the path turned upwards, widened into a small squared shape, and came to an abrupt halt. She glanced up into the ceiling of the tunnel and saw a trapdoor by the light of the lantern.

Giselbert stopped, but to her surprise, he merely sat down on the floor and stretched his long legs out. He was tall, and his dirty, worn boots nearly touched the opposite wall.

Marguerite hesitated, but he didn't seem to desire to give her an indication of what they were doing. So after a few seconds, she gingerly sat down on the hard packed earth as well, but opposite of him so she wouldn't have to sit beside him, and crossed her arms.

Trying to keep the bite out of her voice as much as possible, she asked, "Now what?"

"Now," he shrugged, "we wait for the signal."

"Oh? A signal? What, will they drop a rabbit through the trapdoor?"

At her sarcasm, Giselbert regarded her mutinously, his eyes narrowed in dislike. "No. But it shouldn't be long, mademoiselle."

There was something intensely infuriating about the way he said the word, and Marguerite bristled, digging her fingernails into her arms. It reminded her of the way Blakeney said French words: all wrong. The thought of Blakeney on top of Giselbert was nearly too much for her to contemplate while dealing with the situation at hand; she almost lashed out again, desperate to push Giselbert's buttons and piss him off, but prudence won the battle in her head and she swallowed her retort. He might well kill her if she pushed him too far. She certainly wouldn't put it past him.

Instead, she asked coldly, "Just how did you come to work for Chauvelin, Herr Giselbert?"

"I don't work for Chauvelin and I never did. My orders," he snarled through gritted teeth, as though he wished to hit her as much as she wished to hit him, "were to earn Chauvelin's trust so that he would hire me! In doing so, I would be near enough to save you when it became necessary!"

"So the Scarlet Pimpernel expected me to get captured? And this mysterious person, whom I have never met, decided that it was better to allow me to be captured, rather than forewarn me so that I could flee France?"

She dearly hoped he would hear the furious edge in her voice. She was getting angrier by the second. How dare this unknown Scarlet Pimpernel play with her life like this!

But Giselbert surprised her.

"And just where would you go that Chauvelin and his army of spies would not find you?" His smile was grim and twisted; it made her shudder. "He has ex-Nazis completely at his disposal, all over the world. The Scarlet Pimpernel knows that."

To her dismay, she could not deny that Giselbert had made an excellent point. Where indeed? she thought despairingly. Where on earth could she go that Chauvelin would not find her? The same small voice in her mind answered flatly: Nowhere.

She swallowed, and whispered, "Does the Scarlet Pimpernel, whomever he may be, intend to kill Chauvelin? That would certainly solve problems for both myself and him."

"Devil if I know." Giselbert looked as though he could care less. "He doesn't reveal nearly half of his plans to any of us."

Andrew had said the same thing, she recalled, back in the cabin with Chauvelin. It made sense, she supposed. A mastermind never let slip what aces he had up his sleeve. Perhaps by allowing her to get captured, then rescued, he would push Chauvelin too far and Chauvelin would end up digging his own grave, so to speak. Perhaps he would kill himself in the process; maybe in madness, he would slip and hang himself. Though Marguerite had no idea how, and there was so much she didn't know, that it was impossible to speculate.

Giselbert shifted and readjusted his position, and she found her eyes drawn to his face, despite the fact that she had been trying hard not to look directly at him during their time together. He was certainly ugly. It was his nose and his chin, she thought with annoyance. Neither made him attractive. His chin was too wide and his nose too long; it made his appearance foreboding and disgusting. His hair was dirty and his eyes cold and unfeeling.

She wished, minutes later, that she had a watch so she could pass the time by staring at it, instead. She didn't want him to catch her looking at him, so she took to staring at the earthen walls in the light of the lantern. But this was incredibly boring, too. She wondered how long they would have to remain here, hidden in this tunnel, before something happened.

She just started running her lines in her head for The Invisible Savior, for lack of anything better to do, when quite unexpectedly, she heard footsteps approaching above her. Her heart leapt to her throat. There were five odd taps on the trapdoor from the other side – a code of sorts – and Giselbert stood up heavily. Marguerite followed his lead nervously, watching as he reached up to the door.

But before his knuckles struck the wood, he met her eyes and said baldly, "Tony – the one you remember? He was arguing with his friend that night at the theatre. His friend was head over heels for you, but Tony thought you were too young. And the stage manager wouldn't let you meet them because you had to change for the next act, didn't you?"

Marguerite's brain jammed; Giselbert's knuckles struck the door once and it opened, and before she could grab his coat collar and snatch him down to her level to demand how the hell he knew of her memory, he had grasped her firmly about the waist and lifted her bodily up into the hole, as though she weighed no more than a kitten.

Someone else's arms grasped her and pulled her the rest of way out, and when her feet touched the floor she looked to see who had helped her. A man with dark brown hair grinned down at her, all perfectly at ease and friendly. He looked somewhat boyish in his easy smile, but he had to be in his thirties.

"Marguerite St. Just, I presume?" He kissed her fingertips in a gentlemanly gesture. "It is an honor. My name is Lord Anthony Dewhurst, and I am a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. My friends call me –"

"Tony," she gasped.

Surely not – surely it wasn't the same man! She was clearly overwrought from trying to escape from Chauvelin! What the devil was going on?

Lord Dewhurst looked rather surprised, but Marguerite whirled around, half-expecting Giselbert to have vanished into thin air. However, to her surprise, he was hoisting himself up into the room as gracefully as a gymnast, and he sat down on the edge of the trapdoor.

"How the hell did you know that?" Marguerite snarled at him, ignoring the man named Tony or a moment. "That memory?"

"Lucky guess," he said darkly, his eyes narrowing at her.

"It was not a lucky guess, damn it! How do you know about that night?"

Instead of answering her, Giselbert looked pointedly at Tony from his perch on the edge of the trapdoor. "You'd best to as the chief says, and get her out of here," he said. "Chauvelin won't go any easy on anyone, even Fleurette, and I need to get back to her to make sure she's safe."

"The entrance to that tunnel is well concealed, though," Tony answered, his brow knitting slightly in thought. "Chauvelin shouldn't find it. He didn't during the war, leastways."

Giselbert answered grimly, "He's completely unbalanced. He would have let me rape Mademoiselle St. Just if I had really been a Nazi."

"You very nearly did!" Marguerite shoved him, nearly knocking him back into the tunnel.

He caught himself and grabbed her arm, snatching her down to his level. She almost lost her balance, and had to grab his shoulder to keep from falling into the hole. He snarled, "I did not nearly rape you. All I did was unbutton a few buttons, and even that was unwillingly!"

Well. That was new. No one had ever hinted that they didn't find her attractive, or that they weren't interested in her. It rather stung, even though she hated him so much.

She yanked her hand out of his grasp, straightened up, and said loftily, "Well, I hope you got a good look, because you certainly won't ever see any of it ever again."

She turned around before he could respond, but in doing so, it was to find the man named Tony pinching the bridge of his nose, as though he had a terrible headache.

"Both of you," Tony said sharply, though his eyes were closed in irritation, "Can't you argue about this later? When we're all out of danger?"

"No, we can't." Marguerite suddenly felt like a snake. Ignoring Tony again, she swirled on the balls of her feet to face Giselbert once more. "I want to know how you know about that memory, you infuriating German spy!"

Giselbert's face reddened and he got to his feet at lightening speed, hauling himself out of the trapdoor and slamming it shut. He looked quite ready to start arguing with her. Her eyes flashed – she was going to enjoy this; she just knew it. She hadn't had a good verbal fight in a long time, and she was more than ready to put him in his place.

"What memory?" Tony asked, cutting Giselbert off before he could start yelling at Marguerite.

"When I was sixteen," she answered hotly, "I was working at a theatre in Paris. Several men came backstage and one of them wanted to meet me, but his friend – a young man named Tony – wouldn't let him. I haven't ever told anyone that memory, not even my brother! But this man," she pointed at the monster next to her, "somehow knows about it! Which means he must have been there that night! He must have been one of the men in the group, or he wouldn't have known what happened! I find it odd that he would remember it after all these years, on top of everything else!"

Tony's eyes had widened during her tirade, and now he looked as though he had absolutely no idea what to say.

Marguerite demanded, "So then? Were you the Tony there that night?"

"What? Me? Uh..." He was completely unnerved; he looked over her head at Giselbert, and Marguerite wondered how much angrier she would get before this entire adventure was over. However, before she could scream at both of them, Tony quickly went on, "There are a lot of Tonys in the world, Madame. I can't possibly be the only one who has ever visited a theatre in Paris!"

She scowled towards Giselbert and asked, "Who are you, anyways?"

"Dietrich Giselbert, a member of the League of the –"

"Then you are German?"

He didn't answer that; he merely glared at her.

"If you aren't German, then just what is your name and nationality?"

To her horror, he composed himself, his expression becoming blank. And in perfect British – grating, irritating, proper British! – he said maddeningly, "I speak several languages fluently, Madame, so you'll just have to guess."

A wave of fury washed over her at his insolence. She actually raised her hand to strike him, and to make matters infinitely worse, he started laughing. It was a full, loud laugh that obliterated her thoughts completely. Instinctively, she struck him. Her hand made a fast, sharp contact with his cheek and nose, and the resounding slap shut him up; in fact, for a split second he looked positively shocked that she had actually hit him.

Tony made some sort of strangled yelp and moved forward, but to Marguerite's horror, the crack of her hand connecting with his face was followed by two additional sounds.

Two dull thumps.

Her eyes jerked to the source, which were now lying on the floor.

It looked to be a... a nose? And... well, she couldn't make out the second object, not at all. Her eyes flashed back to Giselbert, but the trouble was, he was no longer Giselbert.

He was...

Oh God.

For a few seconds, she merely stared at him, her jaw slack, unable to speak.

Slowly, his right hand moved up and touched his real nose, rubbing it a bit. He sighed, his hand slid to his real chin, and he said thoughtfully, "I suppose next time I should use more paste, eh? I forgot that kind doesn't hold well in the cold. Should have remembered that from the winter of '43."

A small, furious noise escaped her throat; she couldn't articulate absolutely anything. In fact, to be perfectly honest, what she really wanted to do was to hit him again.

Behind her, Tony muttered, "I remembered from the winter of '43, for God's sake. Why the hell didn't you? Blasted cold and all hell breaking loose, and John nearly executed by a German firing squad because that stupid paste didn't hold properly! Why the devil do you even have any of it left?"

"Do be quiet a minute, Tony. You can reminisce about the winter of '43 later, after I've thought of a new plan."

Marguerite opened her mouth to start yelling in fury, but Tony touched her shoulder before she could begin. He shook his head quickly at her, his expression pleading for her to remain calm – an emotion she did not remotely feel. She bit her tongue, trying to decide which question out of the hundreds in her head she wanted to demand first, but she certainly didn't control her temper.

However, it was best she did hold her tongue, for not more than a few seconds passed before she heard another soft muffled thump, and the three of them instantly looked down at the trapdoor, upon which Blakeney was standing. The door shifted slightly, as though someone were trying to push it upwards and enter the room. Blakeney looked positively alarmed; he motioned quickly to Tony, who had already left Marguerite's side and darted into a second room. There was another muffled thump from the trapdoor. Blakeney did not move, for he was keeping it shut merely by standing on top of it, and Marguerite heard a voice from within the tunnel. It was a quiet voice, and she couldn't make out what it said, but it couldn't possibly be good.

Within seconds, Tony had returned with two other men. The three of them lifted a dresser, which had been against one of the walls, and moved it over to the trapdoor, more quietly than Marguerite thought possible. They shifted it on top of the door, and as soon as it was in place, Blakeney stepped away and grabbed Marguerite by the shoulder, guiding her towards another door that led outside.

Marguerite was about to ask what the hell was going on, and why the Scarlet Pimpernel had ever inducted Blakeney into the League, when someone fired a gun. Blakeney clapped his hand over her mouth before she could scream, and continued pushing her out of the room. Another two gunshots followed; when she glanced behind her, she realized whoever was in the tunnel was shooting upwards, hoping to shatter the wood.

Then she was outside in the cold with Blakeney and Tony on either side of her, and the two other gentlemen behind them, and Blakeney was leading her to a car. It was still snowing, but not nearly as it had been a few hours earlier, and the snow wasn't as deep here as it had been outside the cabin where Chauvelin had held her prisoner with Andrew.

Blakeney threw the passenger door open, pushed her inside, and slammed it shut, even as several more gunshots were heard. Tony had moved to open the driver's door, but Blakeney reached him before he could get inside, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out.

"No, I'll take her! Change of plans! Get back to Fleurette – make certain she's all right! Take the long way!"

"But –"

"Now!"

Tony did not hesitate a second time, but vanished into the woods to Marguerite's left.

The other two men were at Blakeney's side as he got into the car and turned the key.

"Denys, Galveston, get to the checkpoint eight and wait for my orders. Take the Chemin de Vieux Bois; Chauvelin should follow me instead of you, but watch out for his guards – he had two, both German!"

The other two men were already hurrying into the woods as well, following Tony's tracks. The one named Denys was brushing away the footsteps as he went, using an old broom. Marguerite briefly wondered where on earth he had gotten it when she felt the car jerk into motion and she grabbed the seat to keep from being slung into the window.

She looked at her driver, and finally she managed to stammer, "But Chauvelin will see our tracks and know exactly where to follow us!"

"That's the idea," Blakeney answered, giving her a roguish grin.

A sudden thought occurred to her, and she pressed her hand to her mouth. "It's you, isn't it?"

"This isn't how I wanted you to find out," he admitted grudgingly. "But yes."