“Could we hide you with flowers?” Fletcher asked. “Place blooms all around you two? No one’d see your chests move.”
“The flowers would move,” Stone said.
Gemma held her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “I haven’t the first idea how to prevent a person from breathing for an hour or two if that person’s meant to still be alive at the end.”
“Could we build something in the casket itself?” Baz asked. “Like the false bottom in the hearse, we would actually be lying underneath a wood plank or whatever it might be. Then we set the flowers on top of that. Then they would hold still, and we could still breathe.”
All the men looked intrigued by the idea.
Gemma hated to knock the ladder out from under them just when their hopes were climbing to new heights. “We’d never get out of the coffins if we did that. There’d not be room enough to do what we have to do to escape.”
Fletcher’s mouth twisted in an expression of pondering. Stone’s jaw was set, determination in every angle of his face.
“What if we took the plank the flowers are resting on out of the caskets before nailing them closed?” Fletcher suggested. “Then you’d be able to move.”
Again, Gemma shook her head. “Shelves and planks and stuff ain’t ever put inside coffins. If anything is odd at all, mark me, my uncles will notice. They’ll notice, and they’ll spin on it, and they’ll sort it out.”
“Two coffins in a single hearse is out of the ordinary, though,” Fletcher said.
“Oi. It’s uncommon, but it ain’t unheard of. My uncles’ll likely believe it’s a heap of sentimental foolishness. And two coffins abreast in a hearse’ll convince them there’s no means of resurrecting during the journey to the churchyard.”
Stone took up a lead pencil and began sketching something. Gemma very much wanted to know what it was, but she hadn’t the energy for a single step.
Baz must’ve noticed her flagging spirits. He pulled her into a hug.
“I will say,” she said in an exhausted whisper, “I’m grateful that, if this works, you’ll hold me like this all the time.”
“All the time.” Baz kissed the top of her head.
“It’ll be different now than when you first crossed paths with a desperate mot with no one to help her. There’s something to be said for the path a person’s on because he chose it and not because there was no other choice.”
He continued to hold her, his embrace reassuring.
“I think Stone’s onto something,” Fletcher said. He motioned them over.
Baz kept an arm about Gemma’s waist as he walked with her to stand behind the two men.
“That looks like a crinoline,” Gemma said.
“That’s the idea,” Stone said. “They’re strong enough to hold heavy dresses in whatever shape fashion demands, but they’re moveable and ain’t too heavy.”
“They can also be collapsed,” Gemma said. “If we can find a means of securing them in place during the wake, covering us to the shoulders or so, then it’d be easy to unfasten them from whatever’s holding them in place. We could push them down to the foot of the casket once we’re nailed inside. That’d get them out of the way.”
“A blanket can be put over the crinoline and flowers on top of that,” Stone said. “You can be breathing under it, and no one’ll see.”
“The flowers can then be put against the windows in the hearse,” Fletcher said.
It was possible. Difficult and risky and dangerous ... but possible.
“You think Kumar’ll be able to find a double hearse?” Baz asked.
Stone nodded.
“And Dominique worked in carpentry,” Fletcher said. “We can give him your specifications, and he’ll make certain you’ve got a couple pine boxes suited to the task.”
They were really going to do this. Gemma’s heart pounded even as it dropped further and further into her stomach. She looked to Baz once more. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You could just leave Town.”
“The Mastiff and your uncles would still target people who know me, trying to sniff out where I went, believing I could lead them to you.”