We looked at the roses. Beautiful roses, in a sunken garden, to protect them from the cold winds of the mountains. Countess Katerina broke off a lovely peach-colored bud and put it in John’s buttonhole; she took less time when she did it for me.
“Do you grow roses in America?” she asked.
I laughed. “Yes,” I confessed, “in fact, at the last formal dinner I went to before I came away the conversation was so horticultural you might easily have supposed it a gardener’s convention.”
She looked a little puzzled at that until John explained the nature of a convention. “In Alaria,” she said, “there are not many rose gardens. This is the finest in the country. I ’ad an English aunt, the wife of my uncle. She made this garden, with brick walls around it, like England. We do not use many bricks ’ere. There is so much stone. But she would ’ave it, and I like it. Every year there is a man in London who sends us new flowers. They are so nice.” She pulled a small red one, “See—’ow sweet it smells?” She poked it at John’s nose, then at mine. From the house there was a shout, then a bell began to ring, like an old-fashioned fire-bell. There was more shouting in a different tone. Countess Katerina turned and ran back without a word.
“Our friend from the room upstairs has been missed,” I said.
“She’s a swell girl,” John said by way of answer.
“Don’t be a fool,” I protested, “everybody is busy hunting that chap who dropped the plaster on us. If we look around we may find a way out while they are looking for him.”
“It seems a mean advantage to take of her,” John began, but he blushed as he caught my look, and said, “Oh, all right. Yes, of course, I suppose we must. Come along, then, quietly, and let’s see what we can find.”
We walked up the five steps from the rose garden, and tried to be as casually inconspicuous as possible. A car snorted and pop-popped to our right, and then the motor started and it drove away, cut-out open, roaring like a plane. A second followed in a moment. Two men shouted. Another appeared above us on the roof of the old tower, his head just showing above the battlements. Some electrical instrument up there began making a fizzy noise like a radio, but as there were no aerials visible I decided it must be a daytime version of the heliograph. A radio would be too public for these people, and a telephone too easily put out of order.
The manor was really a collection of buildings strung together after the fashion of northern New England farm houses, but these were less geometric. They had been built to conform to the shape of the hill rather than with any studied plan. The wall which circled the whole was high enough to keep off marauders, but not high enough for any defense against determined attack. The house itself was a maze of walls and gateways constituting, so far as we were concerned, an inner series of barriers against escape. Thus the garage, to the right of the place we stood when the two cars went out, was only a few feet from us, but in order to reach it we turned in the opposite direction, through an opening in a low stable, passed an enclosed yard full of chickens and ducks, with a pond in the center, and a movable pen containing two sheep busily engaged in cropping the lawn, through another gateway with a crude wooden gate, into another yard with a cow, past the cow, and there, on our left, was the garage, and in it, at the back, stood a third car. I walked forward a few steps to a spot where I could see the outer gate. A sentry was walking back and forth on the inside, but the gate itself was open. I nodded to John, who immediately climbed in. Behind us, in the garden, the Countess called, anxiously. “Quick,” John whispered, “they’ve missed us.” I jumped in behind the wheel. The key was in the lock. I slipped into high, and let out the clutch very slowly as I stepped on the gas with the other foot. The car moved, and began to creep forward almost noiselessly. Before the sentry saw us we had reached him. He jumped aside just in time to save himself, and we were through the forbidden gate. The road sloped suddenly downward, then to the right in a sharp curve. Just as we rounded it two shots rang out behind us.