"His life or mine," he told
himself, as he groped his way into a lane as steep, dank, and black as the
sides of a well.
For some twenty yards he stumbled in an air thick with offal and garlic. He
heard steps ahead, the boots of the doomed magistrate and the slipshod
pattens of the woman. Then. they stopped; his quarry seemed to be ascending
a stair on the right. It was a wretched tenement of wood, two hundred years
old, once a garden house attached to the Savoy palace. Lovel scrambled up
some rickety steps and found himself on the rotten planks of a long
passage, which was lit by a small window giving to the west. He heard the
sound of a man slipping at the other end, and something like an oath. Then
a door slammed violently, and the place shook. After that it was quiet.
Where was the bloody fight that Godfrey had been brought to settle?
It was very dark there; the window in the passage was only a square of
misty grey. Lovel felt eerie, a strange mood for an assassin. Magistrate
and woman seemed to have been spirited away.
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