“And you think she’ll help us to escape?”
“Oh, no, not at all. But I don’t think she’d let us face a firing squad if we were caught trying to escape.”
“That may be,” I acknowledged, “but I’m not going to count on it too heavily. It would be so easy to shoot first and tell her afterward.”
John went to the Window and twisted his arms through the bars, to shake them. I remembered reading somewhere that it was a trick prisoners developed. The bars were solid.
“The walls are fairly thin,” I suggested.
“Only on the side toward the Countess’ room. It would do us no good to get in there. The other side is stone—look.”
It was true. Stone, roughly cemented over. A month’s job at the least, to dig through that without proper tools, and we had no idea where we’d be if we did get through. “The wall into the hall is thinner than that,” John went on, “but it wouldn’t be much good to us. They’d find any hole we dug in it before it was big enough to get through. This may have been a cellar or a barracks before they made it into—guest rooms. There’s probably a guard in the hall, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“That leaves the ceiling or the floor, or the bars. The ceiling is too high to reach, so let’s try the floor. We want to go down, anyway, so let’s start. Besides, the boards are wide and old.”
“And fastened together with nice little wooden pegs instead of nails.”