Chapter 32
Chapter
Thirty-Two
A Reckoning
The engineer did not look round at me once in the last half mile.
He stood over the machinery with one hand on the regulator and his eyes fixed on the gauge.
At the stern, the boatman worked the wheel, threading us through two tiers of anchored shipping at a speed that would have cost any other man his living.
“They’re putting her across,” he yelled over the noise.
“I can see it.”
“We get one pass. If I miss her, I’m four minutes coming round.”
“Then do not miss.”
Ahead, the black launch lay alongside the white yacht, fenders wedged between their hulls. A short gangway joined the two vessels.
Rosalynd stood at the foot of it, her wrists bound, a man gripping each arm.
“Take us alongside,” I said.
The engineer glanced at me.
“Ram her. Amidships. Put every man on that deck on his back.”
His hand came off the regulator.
“Your lady is standing on her, Guv’nor.”
I looked at Rosalynd. Bound. At the rail. With nothing between her and the river. For two seconds, perhaps three, I considered the odds that she would survive what I had just ordered. “Her quarter,” I said. “Glancing blow. Break the gangway and put us alongside.”
“That I’ll do.”
And then I climbed over the rail.
At the last possible moment, the boatman swung us toward the black launch. The engineer cut the steam.
We struck her after quarter at an angle.
Our bow scraped hard along her side. The fenders burst. Her rail went in a shower of splinters, and the force of the blow threw the launch violently sideways.
Men went down the length of the deck. A revolver skated across the boards and disappeared over the side.
The gangway twisted between the two vessels. One end tore free from the yacht and dropped into the water. The hulls pulled apart, then came together again, grinding against one another.
And then something else gave way.
The little boat hanging from the davits swung wildly. One of its ropes snapped. The boat dropped stern-first onto the deck.
The man who had been holding Rosalynd went down beneath it. Rosalynd did not.
She had thrown herself flat the instant the vessels struck. She rolled clear with her bound hands over her head, moving as though she had known exactly what was coming.
Because she had.
I looked back at Finch. “Stay here.”
“Your Grace—”
“You have been shot. That is an order.”
His mouth shut.
The two launches ground together beneath me. I let go of the stay, caught what remained of the black launch’s rail, and hauled myself aboard.
The deck came up at me harder than I had allowed for and my knee took most of it. A pistol went off somewhere to my right. The ball went past my ear and into the yacht’s white side.
Finch came over behind me, landed badly, but stayed upright.
“Left of you!”
I turned with it. A man came out from the wheelhouse door at me with a revolver already up. I fired first. He sat down against the housing and did not get up.
The next one came at me with a length of broken rail in both hands and swung it at my head. I went under it and put my shoulder into his chest. He went back into what remained of the rail and over into the river.
After that the deck came apart entirely.
Finch had got himself into the angle of the housing where nothing could come at his left side. He was firing across his body with his right, slowly, one shot at a time, and hitting what he fired at.
Our boatman came over the rail after us with a boat hook and used it in the manner of a man who has settled arguments on the water for forty years.
Somewhere forward two of Harcourt’s men threw their weapons down before anybody had asked them to.
None of it had my attention.
Rosalynd had got as far as her knees by the cabin door. A man had her by the back of the collar and was hauling her toward the yacht’s side. He had not looked up long enough to notice that there was no longer anything to haul her across.
I took him in four strides. He heard me at the last of them and came round with the revolver rising. I had his wrist in my left hand before it came level. His shot ended up into the rigging of the yacht. I hit him, once. Something in his face gave under it, and he went down and stayed there.
“Rosalynd.”
She came up onto her feet with her bound hands and her hair down and river water and blood on the shoulder of her gown. “You came.”
“I came.” I allowed myself a moment to lay my hand against her cheek.
And then I got the knife out of my boot and cut the rope off her wrists.
Her hands were the color of a bruise. She made no sound at all while the blood came back into them, which had to hurt. I minded more than if she had screamed.
From behind me, Harcourt said, “She was expecting you.”
I turned.
He stood on the far side of the black launch, beside the gap where the gangway had been. The white hull of the yacht rose behind him, close enough to touch, but with four feet of dirty water between the vessels.
He stood straight-backed with his coat open and his hair gone loose in the wind, and there was not a thing wrong with him. Fifty. A hard, well-made, unhurried fifty. And down his cheek, from the bone to the jaw, three healing lines.
“You have lost,” I said.
“No.” He said it without any heat whatever. “I have run out of time. They are not the same, Your Grace, though I would not expect the distinction to interest you.”
“Officers from the Thames Division are coming down the river. Your wharf is being taken now. There is a case gone to Scotland Yard this afternoon with every account you have kept in it.”
“I know.”
He looked past me, across the wrecked deck and over the shattered rail of our launch, where Mercer stood looking back at him without any expression at all.
“Twenty years,” Harcourt said.
Mercer said nothing whatever. He did not need to. Whatever passed between those two across the water was theirs. It was finished, and both of them knew the terms of it.
Then Harcourt turned back. His eyes went past me to Rosalynd, and the expression in them changed.
“You were the only one,” he said to her.
His arm came up.
Not toward me.
Toward her.
With a revolver at the end of it.
I pushed her into the housing and put my body between her and the bullet that would end her life.
But the shot did not come from him. It came from out over the water.
I turned to find Harcourt standing exactly where he had been, the revolver still raised and his finger still on the trigger. He looked down at his coat, blooming red, with the expression of a man who had been handed a card he did not expect.
The revolver slipped from his hand and struck the deck. He went down against the black launch’s rail, slowly, in stages, and sat there.
Forty feet off our quarter, on the fore deck of a Thames Division launch that had come up out of the smoke of the reach without any of us marking it, Chief Inspector Graves stood at the rail with his arm out, the pistol still level, and his face perfectly white.
“Police!” somebody was roaring, and then a great many of them were roaring it. “Throw them down! Throw them down and stand where you are!”
It ended the way those things end, which is to say all at once and stupidly. Revolvers hit the planks. Hands went up all along the deck. Somebody forward began explaining that he was only the engineer, at length, to nobody.
Constables came over both rails and across a plank they ran out between the hulls. A young one got down beside Harcourt and put a folded handkerchief against his coat.
I crossed to him and went down on one knee on the wet boards.
I had seen enough to know the look of a man with a quarter of an hour left, and he had a good deal less than that.
There was a red edge on every breath he took.
He had not put his hand to the wound, which told me he understood his position better than the boy with the handkerchief did.
He was looking at Rosalynd who had come up behind me. She did not come closer but simply looked at him with her ruined hands held against her and gave him nothing at all.
“You were the only one,” he said again.
“I never wished to be.”
Something crossed his face that might, in another man, have been affection.
I asked him the only question I had left. I put it to him plainly, because there was no time for anything else. “What is your name?”
He turned his head half an inch and looked at me, and there was a great deal in it. Amusement, chiefly. The amusement of a man who had been asked for the one thing he still owned.
He held my eyes and did not answer.
That is how he did it, in the end. Not with a speech. He lay against the rail of his own launch with a policeman kneeling over him and a duke asking him his name. He did not say a word. He simply kept his mouth shut and let the whole of it go into the river with him.
It took him another minute or two.
I stayed where I was until it was finished. So did Rosalynd. Neither of us said anything further.
And the constable went on pressing the handkerchief even after there was no point to it.