A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (32 page)

The path was beginning to flatten and fill with sand. Desma had stopped sobbing, and her dark head was now tucked into the hollow of the duke's shoulder. He was saying something to her, but I couldn't hear the words, and I had no wish to disturb their privacy. I held back a step or two, lengthening the distance between us, and Mr. Higganbotham, who had maintained a petrified silence since the terrible scene inside the cave, grunted as he adjusted his own pace down the uneven track.

“Easy as she goes, now,” Silverton said cheerfully, and then, “Hello! Who's that fellow?”

My head snapped up.

Just ahead, the duke skidded to a stop and made a half turn, as if to shield Desma from sight by the width of his own body. I peered around him to the wide beach beyond, almost expecting to see the familiar shape of my father, seated upon a boulder in the morning sunshine, with his neat black jacket folded over his arm. I don't know whether I dreaded the sight or welcomed it.

But it was not my father who occupied the beach before us.

“Get back,” the duke ordered, depositing Desma on the ground, where the last jagged rocks of the cliff staggered onto the beach. He withdrew the pistol from his waistband and stepped forward to drop one knee in the sand.

Silverton was already brushing past me. In his right hand he gripped the same knife that the American had held against Desma's throat. “Stay here, for God's sake,” he shouted as he went, and I wasn't quite sure whether he directed those words at His Grace or at me, Mr. Higganbotham having already ducked to the
ground next to Desma's crouching body. He continued on, plowing through the sand in his leather shoes and gaiters, a British madman set loose on a foreign beach, toward the four men who approached down the grassy slope from the south.

He's creating a diversion,
I thought, and I opened my mouth to scream
No!

But as I started forward, the duke flung out his hand to stop me. “Take her out of here,” he said. “Not the cave, the road. There's a beach around the other side of the headland. Try to signal the ship, to get a boat out. Higganbotham, go with them. Now!”

“But Silverton!”

“For God's sake! Do it!”

The duke's dark eyes blazed with desperation, as if he were trying to communicate something more: all those things he had not yet told us. That he was prepared to die for this woman. I looked down at Desma, who was already rising from behind the boulder, bracing herself with one hand and pointing her round belly upward for better leverage. The sunshine suited her olive skin and her strong bones, and her dark eyes that had narrowed into crescents, determined and terrified at once. A pair of silver lines tracked down her face, from the inner corners of her eyes, past her nose and mouth.

Next to her, Mr. Higganbotham rose from the ground and dusted the sand from his trousers. “Let's go,” he said.

I took her other hand. “Come along!” I cried, over the gathering shouts from the beach, and I drew her around the boulders, to the rocky slope that hugged the side of the cliff.

“Wait!” said the duke.

I turned.

He stepped toward me and pressed the pistol into my hand.
“There are four bullets left, I believe, if it was fully loaded before. Use them wisely.”

“But then you've got nothing to defend yourself with!”

“Neither will you, without this. Now go.” He pushed my shoulder and turned away.

We had to tug Desma along. She didn't want to leave. Our feet scrabbled in the gravel, for there was no path here, no surface in which to find purchase along the slope of tiny stones that had eroded in their millions from the ridges above.

“Hurry,” I gasped, more to myself than to Desma, who could not understand me. Her hand was warm and strong, and her steps surer than mine, but she kept turning her head to view the scene behind us, causing her feet to falter. Like Orpheus, I thought, and I tried to tug her again, but she cried out and stopped, and I was forced to turn, too.

I saw Silverton first, whether because his furious golden head stood out from the rest, or because I could not help seeing him, any more than you can help seeing your own coat hanging on a peg in a crowded cloakroom. He was fighting two men at once, wielding the knife and his bare fist, and his body moved so fast, like quicksilver, that I could not follow every action: a thrust, a spin, a punch, a kick, all gathered into motion that reminded me of a steel machine pounding the air, while the two men bobbed and ducked fearfully around him. One staggered back as a blow landed on his chin, and Silverton whirled and slashed at the other without a pause.

So transfixed was I by this electrifying spectacle that I did not, in those first few seconds, notice how the other men had disposed themselves, until Desma clutched at my arm and cried out.

The duke had emerged from the boulders and was now running, unarmed, toward the combatants at the top of the beach.
One of the men had detached himself from the others and stepped deliberately in the duke's direction. He raised his arm, and a puff of white smoke exploded from the barrel, a single instant before the air shattered in an almighty bang, and I flinched and ducked, turning my body in a kind of instinct to shield Desma, though she was not the object of the bullet.

The duke staggered, spun, and dropped to his knees in the sand.

At the instant of his falling, Desma screamed and started forward, and in that brief space of time I hesitated, because I did not know my own duty. Did I come to the aid of the Duke of Olympia, as the dowager duchess herself had charged me, or did I protect this woman and her unborn child, for whose innocent sakes he meant to lay down his life?

As I hovered, as the seconds stretched out into an eon of indecision, I experienced the strangest sensation. The effect is almost impossible to describe. It was as if I had acquired a separate being, which flew to a point of vantage perhaps fifty feet above my own head, from which I could see my surroundings in three hundred and sixty perfectly simultaneous degrees of arc, in addition to the scene presently visible from my two earthbound eyes.

I saw the Duke of Olympia pick himself up, lower his head, and rush again at his approaching attacker.

I saw the knife fly out of Lord Silverton's hand, flashing in the sunshine as it tumbled end over end through the air.

I saw the fourth man (pistol in hand) charge up the stony slope toward the three of us—Desma and Mr. Higganbotham and me—who were still turned toward the Duke of Olympia and quite unprepared for his arrival.

I saw a boat, manned by six sturdy sailors and an eager coxswain whom I knew to be Mr. Brown, pulling hard for shore at a
distance about halfway between the
Isolde
's place of anchor and the outermost point of the beach on which we stood.

I gathered all these pieces of information together and realized, in helpless despair, that it wouldn't do. That the attackers would reach us long before the boat breached the sand; that, furthermore, we had not the smallest chance of holding out against them until our friends arrived.

I wanted to call out to my own figure, standing in the sand, and warn her of the armed villain scattering the rocks nearby, but the throat of this second all-seeing Truelove, floating above the beach, was frozen shut. She had no voice. She could only watch as the real living Truelove heard the approaching man at last, turned in shock, and lifted the pistol.

The bullet struck the man's shoulder and made him grunt, but it did not halt his progress. Desma now turned—the duke was down in the sand by now, wrestling with the third man and stained with blood—and stumbled back in shock, falling to the ground. She picked up a fistful of gravel and flung it toward our attacker. Mr. Higganbotham, recovering from his shock, did the same. The tiny stones struck the attacker on the side of his face, and he swore loudly, losing his footing for a brief instant.

But by now the first two men had broken free of Silverton's furious attack, and charged up the slope in their companion's wake. Silverton followed them at a run, but he was favoring one leg, and he clutched his left arm, bracing it against his side at a stiff angle. I fired again and missed—the sun was directly in my eyes—and then the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

The gun had not been fully loaded, after all.

I bent down and picked up a rock. I threw it with all the strength in my slender arm, and it struck the man's temple, knocking him
sideways, but again he recovered, like a child's toy that bounces back upward every time it is batted down.

The other Truelove, observing this scene from above, beat her helpless arms against the air and noticed, for the first time, that another man had accompanied the four aggressors to the beach this morning. Until now, his huge body had been obscured by the combat with Lord Silverton, for he was bound by the arms and hobbled at the ankles, and had been tossed in the sand when the fighting began.

But he was not helpless, as the floating Truelove was. He was crawling on the sand, though his shirt was bloody, and his head appeared to have been badly injured. As I watched the progress of the
Isolde
's boat, and Silverton staggering up behind the men who attacked us, and the first man reaching us while the earthbound Truelove beat him with the butt of her pistol, I also saw the prisoner's object, a few final feet away.

Silverton's knife.

The man grabbed my battering pistol and threw it away. He swung his fist and hit me in the jaw, hard enough that I staggered back and fell into the rocks, while the other two men pounded up the slope, and the fourth man struggled in the sand with the Duke of Olympia, fighting for possession of the gun.

But the prisoner had now crossed the last few feet of sand and maneuvered his body around to grasp the knife in one hand and saw, thread by thread, at the rope that secured his wrists.

I watched the progress of this fascinating operation closely, at the same time as I fought and kicked and scratched at the man who had now held me to the ground with his booted foot and pointed a gun at my head.

Perhaps I had some notion what my other self observed from
the air, for I remember thinking,
I must hold him off somehow, I must prolong this struggle to its last possible second.

But I knew I was too late. I had failed, for one of the men—I had lost count of them, in my earthbound mind—had taken hold of a shrieking Desma, and now held the barrel of his gun directly at her temple.

A cry of despair split the air in two, just as the prisoner sawed apart the last filament of rope, and freed his hands.

“Drop the gun, motherf——r,” called out the man who held Desma, in a loud and carrying voice.

Across the beach, the Duke of Olympia, who had succeeded in wresting the pistol from the hand of his opponent, stood with his legs apart and howled again at the injustice of his predicament: having fought so hard, against impossible odds, and so nearly won. The left shoulder of his white shirt was dark with blood.

Fifty yards away, the prisoner applied the knife to the rope that hobbled his feet. It had been secured at a circumference just wide enough to allow him to shamble along with his jailers, and by the stiffness of his movements, he seemed to have been shambling for many miles already. How he had done so, bearing such terrible and disfiguring injuries, I could only imagine. But he was young and strong—his strength rippled from his giant frame, and from the wide muscles that animated him—and perhaps that had served him well.

Silverton had stopped, too, but unlike the others, his attention had fallen on me. My heart, already sick, seemed to wither in my breast. His face was bruised and cut, and something was wrong with his left shoulder, which emerged from its socket at an unnatural angle. His trousers were dirty and slashed, and a
stream of blood came down his right calf to stain the sand below. He watched me steadily, from those eyes I had once thought too blue, as if he were trying to communicate something vital.

His latest plan, perhaps.

“Let her go, Anserrat,” growled the Duke of Olympia, in a low and restrained voice that was nonetheless perfectly audible to us, a hundred feet away.

The man holding Desma shook his head and spoke in the same flat American voice as the others, except tilted at the vowels by an accent that suggested some corner of the Levant. “Where's Tom? What happened in there?”

“Mr. Henderson is dead,” said the duke. “Let her go.”

“
Dead?
Sh——.” Anserrat glanced upward at the cave and squinted his eyes. The barrel of the gun pressed hard against Desma's temple, forming a round impression on her skin.

“You see? There's no point. Just let her go.”

Anserrat returned his attention to the duke. “What do you mean? No f——king point. This is not just about Tom, man. It's all of us. Don't play dumb. You know what we want.”

“I haven't the slightest idea, any more than I did in Knossos. You're mistaken about me. I'm just a scholar.”

“Do you not understand I will f——ing
kill
her?”

“Then I will kill
you
with my bare hands, and you'll still not have what you want from me, because I don't have it.”

“Yes, you
do
!” Anserrat paused, and his tone grew calmer. “I know you do. I've got proof.”

“Proof of
what
? I haven't done anything!”

And this Anserrat, whoever he was, actually smiled—
smiled!—
just as if he were not holding a gun to the head of a helpless and visibly expectant woman, as if he knew the secret of the universe.

“Don't you get it? It's not what you've
done
, b——ch. It's what you
will
do.”

Down the beach, the prisoner had cut through the rope binding his ankles, and now rose to a towering height.

“You're mad,” I said, and my captor tightened his arm against my ribs, nudged the gun against my head, and told me to shut the f—— up.