Monstrous Regiment

never a crowbar when you want one.
    There were a couple of sacks of ancient, dry, and dusty flour in the storeroom. It smelled bad. There was a thing with a funnel and a handle and some mysterious screws. * There were a couple of rolling pins, a lettuce strainer, some ladles…and there were forks. Lots of small forks. Polly felt let down. It was ridiculous to expect that someone imprisoning people in some ad hoc cell would leave in all the ingredients to effect an escape but, nevertheless, she felt that some universal rule had been broken. They had nothing better than a club, really. The toasting forks might prick, the lettuce strainer might pack a punch, and the rolling pins were at least a traditional female weapon, but all you could do with the thing with a funnel and a handle and mysterious screws was baffle people.
    The door opened. Armed men came in to act as protection for a couple of women, carrying blankets and firewood. They scurried in with their eyes cast down, deposited their burdens, and almost ran out.
    Polly strode over to the guard who seemed to be in charge, and he backed away. A huge keyring jingled on his belt.
    “You knock next time, all right?” she said.
    He grinned nervously. “Yeah, right,” he said. “They said we weren’t to talk to you…”
    “Really?”
    The jailer glanced around. “But we reckon you’re doing bloody well, for girls,” he said conspiratorially.
    “So that means you won’t shoot at us when we break out?” said Polly sweetly.
    The grin faded. “Don’t try it,” said the jailer.
    “What a big bunch of keys you have there, sir,” said Tonker, and the man’s hand flew to his belt.
    “You just stay in here,” he said. “Things are bad enough already. You stay here!”
    He slammed the door. A moment later they heard something heavy being pushed up against it.
    “Well, now we have a fire, at least,” said Blouse.
    “Er…”
    This was from Lofty. She volunteered a word so seldom that the rest turned to look at her, and she stopped in embarrassment.
    “Yes, Lofty?” said Polly.
    “Er…I know how to get the door open,” muttered Lofty. “So it stays open, I mean.”
    Had it been anyone else, someone would have laughed. But words from Lofty had obviously been turned over for some time before utterance.
    “Er…good,” said Blouse. “Well done.”
    “I’ve been thinking about it,” said Lofty.
    “Good.”
    “It will work.”
    “Just what we need, then!” said Blouse, like a man trying against all the odds to keep cheerful.
    Lofty looked up at the big sooty beams that ran across the room.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “But there’ll still be guards outside,” said Polly.
    “No,” said Lofty. “There won’t.”
    “There won’t?”
    “They’ll have gone away.”
    Lofty stopped, with the air of one who’d said everything that needed to be said.
    Tonker walked over and took her arm.
    “We’ll just have a little chat, shall we?” she said and led the girl to the other side of the room. There was some whispered conversation. Lofty spent most of it staring at the floor, and then Tonker came back.
    “We will need the bags of flour from the storeroom, and the rope from the well,” she said. “And one of those .. . what are those big round things that cover dishes? With a knob on?”
    “Dish covers?” said Shufti.
    “And a candle,” Tonker went on. “And a lot of barrels. And a lot of water.”
    “And what will all this do?” said Blouse.
    “Make a big bang,” said Tonker. “Tilda knows about fire, believe me. And flour dust explodes!”
    “When you say she knows…” Polly began uncertainly.
    “I mean every place she worked at burned down,” said Tonker.

    They rolled the empty barrels to the middle of the room and filled them with water from the pump. Under Lofty’s monosyllabic direction, using the rope from the well, they hauled three leaking, dusty flour sacks up as high as possible, so that they twisted gently over the space between the barrels and the door.
    “Ah,” said Polly, standing back. “I think I understand. A flour mill on the other side of town blew up two years ago.”
    “Yes,” said Tonker. “That was Tilda.”
    “What?”
    “They’d been beating her. And worse. And the thing about Tilda is, she just watches and thinks and somewhere in there it all comes together. Then it goes bang.”
    “But two people died!”
    “The man and his wife. Yes. But I heard that other girls sent there never came back