A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (29 page)

A
scream rang out, which I recognized as my own, calling Mr. Higganbotham to my aid.

But he did not reply, and in the next instant, I launched myself desperately in the direction of the pistol, reaching with both hands to dislodge it from the man's grip. He was motioning to the landlord, and did not notice my movement for the first split second. He turned his head, and I had just grasped the air, inches from the pistol, when he brought it up and down heavily on my shoulder, sending me spinning to the dirt floor.

The impact stunned me, and I have only the most confused recollection of the next few seconds. There was a struggle of some kind, a short argument in Greek, and as I attempted to rise, a strong hand closed around my arm, jerking me upward.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

The man replied with another jerk, dragging me outside into
the swirl of the wind, where Mr. Higganbotham stood stiff under the pressure of an arm locked about his throat. The arm belonged to a stout, well-muscled man, clean-shaven, whose skin was quite pale except for a few incongruous freckles across the bridge of his nose, and whose hair burst forth from his head in a shock of ginger.

The two men signaled to each other. “What's going on?” I gasped out to Mr. Higganbotham, and my captor shoved the pistol into the small of my back, urging me forward toward the edge of the cliffs.

The other man released his hold on Mr. Higganbotham's neck and prodded the poor man with a large fist. “Get going!” he growled, in a rough American accent, and Mr. Higganbotham stumbled forward to my side.

As we started on in tandem, encouraged by the butt of the pistol, he said to me, somewhat scratchily, “I gather it's an ambush.”

As it happened, I had some experience with ambushes. One can hardly avoid them, as a young and unattached female in a massive household such as that of the Duke of Olympia. Their Graces did their best to protect me, of course, and I soon learned how to protect myself. How to maneuver against the unexpected capture. I developed the instincts of a deer, vigilant and suspicious: vigilant especially against those who laid the more artful snare, the one baited with my particular weakness.

But I had also once been caught, and I learned from this painful entrapment the most valuable lesson of all.

You must not, at first, attempt to break free. You must bide your time. You must lie in wait, just as he has; you must gather
your strength for the moment when his own defenses have softened, and he is not expecting a blow.

When at last you strike back, your engagement must be total.

Of course, I could not explain this principle to Mr. Higganbotham, as we stumbled along the darkening path toward the edge of the cliffs, whipped by the African wind and by the stern commands of our captors. But it didn't matter; he seemed to have accepted his defeat, and went along by my side, rubbing his abused neck from time to time, and clearing his throat of both dust and abrasion. I noticed he was limping, but I could not tell whether this came as a result of some wound, or because of the miles of uneven road over which we had passed today.

“Why, where's the landlord?” I asked suddenly, because I had just realized he was missing.

“Ah, yes. I believe I saw—” He cleared his throat again, for his voice remained raspy, as if he had swallowed a number of sharp pebbles. “Believe I saw him bolt past, just before the spots appeared before my eyes. And then you, with the big fellow and the pistol.”

We spoke in low tones, though the two men were right behind us and could, I suppose, have understood what we said.

“How did it happen?”

“Why, I don't properly know. One moment I was straining to catch up with you, because I didn't like the look of that shed he was hustling you into, and the next moment I had someone's arm about my neck.” He rubbed it again.

“Hey!” said the man with the pistol. “Shut the f—— up, do you hear?”

“Sir!” Mr. Higganbotham exclaimed. “There's no need for that sort of—”

A blow landed on the back of his shoulder; I am not sure which man delivered it.

“—in front of a lady,” Mr. Higganbotham finished, in a sulky mutter.

We rounded the curve of the headland, and the bright sea spread out before us, held in place by a pale and aging sky. By now, I no longer noticed the marine scent of the air, but as we approached the cliffs, the brine began to tickle my nose anew, together with the desert dust. The slow crash of the waves struck against the rocks below, and to the left stretched a gigantic golden beach, nurtured into magnificence by the shelter of the ancient headland.

A hand nudged mine. “Look there,” whispered Mr. Higganbotham.

“Where?”

“The sea.”

I lifted my gaze to the flat horizon, and at first I didn't see anything, except the white-laced heave of the water under the scirocco's hand.

And then an object moved, in tandem with the waves, and I realized it was a ship: a long, graceful craft, perhaps a half mile out to sea, trailing a faint smudge of white smoke from the funnel at the center of its upper deck.

My lips moved.
Isolde,
I said silently.

But what was she doing here, so far from her station on the western side of the island? Right here, at the exact spot where we made our way along the edge of the headland, along a path that now sloped downward, as if to reach the shore itself?

And—my God!—how could we win her attention?

It was the worst kind of agony. I returned my gaze to the path before me, but my eyes kept shifting quietly northward, to the
instrument of our salvation hovering nearby, metal-clad and mighty, so tantalizingly close and yet as far away as the moon.

I could not signal. Anything I did would bring instant retribution from our captors, and—worse—would reveal the ship's proximity, and possibly even our relation to it. We might be dead before a boat could even be readied for our rescue.

I could only hope that someone's glass was trained upon this shore. That the
Isolde
's appearance here was not a coincidence.

The path was now barely that. We were forced into single file as the track narrowed to perhaps twenty-four inches, along the throat of the old man embodied in the rocks, while the sea washed his collar fifty or more feet below. The spray stung the tender skin of my cheek and fell upon my lips. I licked them and tasted salt, and I realized I was horribly thirsty.

I walked in front, measuring my steps carefully, for the trail was strewn with small rocks. I no longer looked out to sea; the traverse demanded my full attention. To my left, the cliff dropped vertiginously away. I had been clutching the medallion in my pocket, but now I released the talisman and lifted my right palm to steady myself against the rock face as we descended.

“Where are we going?” I shouted back boldly, over my shoulder, because the two men could not possibly do any worse to us.

“I said, shut the f——up!”

I planted my feet and made a half turn. “I refuse to go any farther—”

But the blast of a pistol cut off my words, shattering the rock nearby. A spray of tiny shrapnel stung the back of my neck.

“Next time,” the man said, “I'll be aiming at your f——ing head. Or his.”

“I say—!” began Mr. Higganbotham, shocked.

“Just another fifty feet,” said the other man. “You'll see it.”

My ears rang; my body shook. The sting at my neck turned into a trickle that traveled down my collar. I turned, almost unable to breathe, and moved my wobbling legs another step, and another, though my head swam and my vision had reduced to a narrow tunnel.

“You're bleeding,” said Mr. Higganbotham.

“I'm all right.” A little courage returned to me as I uttered the words.

The path made a slight turn inward, revealing a wider section, flat and overhung by a large ledge that I realized must be the man's nose. As we reached this shelter, an opening became visible in the rock face beneath the ledge, rather like a nostril.

“Here we are,” said the man with the pistol. “In we go.”

“In
here
?”

“You heard me, didn't you? Or are you deaf? Get going.” He waved the pistol.

I looked at Mr. Higganbotham's pale face, and again at the pistol. I hardly dared glance at the faces of the men who drove us, but then I didn't need to; their hard glares bore down upon us, filled with a will and determination I could not begin to comprehend.

The caves,
the landlord had said.
The caves of the legend.
But surely a myth of three thousand years' distance had no power to lure men into murder. What was the inducement? Was there perhaps a treasure of some kind hidden inside?

“I don't understand—” I began.

“For f——'s sake!” he roared. “You don't need to
understand
! Just go in the f——ing cave, and shut your mouth.”

“Just tell me one thing,” I whispered. “Tell me whether Lord Silverton is inside. Tell me if he's alive.”

His aimed the pistol at the crown of Mr. Higganbotham's head. “
Go!
”

I turned and ducked into the cave.

I sensed a third presence in the cave well before the pulse of Mr. Higganbotham's breathing had lapsed into somnolence, but I said nothing. The poor man had been subject to shocks enough today.

In fact, our prison was rather more comfortable than I might have expected from an opening in a cliff face, miles from any civilized encampment. Mr. Higganbotham presently snored beneath a pair of thick woolen blankets, and two more lay across my own shoulders, as I stared into the blackness and listened to the distant percussion of the sea. The floor was covered with straw, reasonably clean, and we had eaten bread and drunk water. I had even been allowed a moment of relief, in a private crevice of rock that seemed perfectly designed for such an emergency.

So my pulse soon returned to a semblance of its ordinary rhythm, and I lay on my makeshift couch counting its beats while I waited for Mr. Higganbotham to enter the deepest chasm of his sleep. I had no personal inclination for slumber. Each time I closed my eyes, the unaccountable ache swelled in my breast, as if some foreign person had taken advantage of this vulnerability to slip inside my skin, to wriggle herself inside me like fingers into a glove, transferring her own urgency into mine. My hands turned cold and trembled, and my lips moved in the shape of someone's name—Silverton, perhaps?—and I opened my eyes again and thought,
I must find him.

I must find him.

“I don't mean to say I told you so,” began Her Majesty.

“But you will, nonetheless.”

“Did I not warn you against this expedition, from its very inception? Did I not caution you at every turn? And still you would not heed me. Oh, no. Sensible Miss Truelove knows best, doesn't she? She can manage herself perfectly, all on her own. Clever girl.”

I turned my head in the direction of the voice. At the corner of the chamber hovered a faint glow, in the center of which I could just make out the outline of her small and queenly figure. “I must beg you to whisper,” I said.