Chapter 50
50
‘Oh, thank God!’ Charlotte breathed, trying to stop her hands from shaking. Her nerves were already shot to pieces, but the sight of Comet and Tristan sent her senses into overdrive. How had he ended up here, when his Audi was in a rhyne a mile away? And why the hell did it have to be in the most dangerous part of the site that she, or rather Comet, had found him?
‘Tristan?’ she said softly. ‘Tristan? Can you hear me?’
The figure thirty feet away on the gantry that was curving away from her in the gentle swirl of the circular dome didn’t respond, although, she reasoned, he must have heard her shouting for Comet, who was now nosing Tristan’s huddled form in concern and mild annoyance that he couldn’t raise even a pat from him.
Charlotte’s heart sank. She knew she was going to have to make her way over to Tristan, and try to rouse him, try to get him off this blasted platform. The floor underfoot was spongy and damp, neither great signifiers of the safety of the wooden boards. The handrail that ran around the platform was in varying stages of rust, the white paint having flaked off almost entirely and, as Charlotte put out a hand to grip it, terrifyingly unstable. She rapidly withdrew her hand again. The rail up the stairs had felt more secure, but it would be safer not to trust it now she was at the top.
‘Come on,’ she said to herself. She had no idea if the platform would take the combined weight of two people, but what choice did she have? Thea was unreachable at the moment, and in the absence of Tristan’s sister she might be the only person who could talk Tristan down off the ledge.
Step by step, testing the rotten floor before she put her full weight on it, she carefully began to close the gap between herself and Tristan. Her legs were trembling from the adrenaline that was coursing through her body, and she found herself counting each breath as she inhaled and exhaled. She’d been terrified when she’d done a high ropes challenge on a friend’s hen weekend at Longleat: this felt infinitely scarier, thirty feet in the air without the aid of a safety harness and a hard hat. Trying to push those thoughts away, she continued moving, hoping with each step that Tristan would raise his head and acknowledge her presence. With every passing second, she grew more and more concerned for him.
‘Tristan,’ she said softly. ‘Tristan, can you hear me?’
Still nothing. Charlotte moved a couple more steps forward. She was now only about twelve feet away from the huddled figure in the alcove. Another clap of thunder warned her the storm wasn’t abating any time soon. As the lightning swiftly followed, she took a few deep breaths to stop herself from hyperventilating. Having a panic attack right now would be the icing on the proverbial cake.
‘I’m coming towards you,’ she said gently, hoping that the sound of her voice might elicit some kind of response from Tristan, whose head was still buried in his knees. ‘If you can hear me, try to let me know.’
No response. She was about eight feet from him now. Edging closer, she jumped as her phone rang. Scrabbling to answer it, seeing it was Thea, she prayed the reception, and her battery, would hold out so she could tell Tristan’s sister that she’d found him.
‘I’m with him,’ she said as Thea began to speak. ‘We’re at the observatory. Yes, please, as soon as you can.’ She glanced at Tristan, who still showed no signs of having heard her. ‘He’s, er, he doesn’t seem to be in a good way. No, not hurt, but we’re inside the observatory on the viewing platform.’
Charlotte ended the call, hoping Thea had picked up enough of what she’d said to make her way back to Observatory Field. She was so busy trying to put her torch back on that she didn’t notice the appallingly rotten board she’d stepped on. As her foot went through with a sloppy, crashing groan of aged timber, she screamed. Her phone dropped out of her hand, bounced and tumbled to the ground floor of the observatory, its light extinguishing as it smashed apart on the concrete floor thirty feet beneath.
Comet gave a surprised and concerned bark, and Charlotte called out in fear. Her heart was hammering in her chest as she found herself with one foot dangling beneath the platform, the other knee forced into a bend only inches from the rest of the rotten board. Tears of pure terror streamed down her cheeks as she tried to pull herself back up, but she was too afraid to put too much weight on the boards around her, which had been weakened by the collapse of the one she’d stepped on.
‘Tristan!’ she yelled again. ‘For Christ’s sake, help me!’
For a long, agonising moment that to Charlotte felt like years, he remained still and uncommunicative. This is it, she thought. I’m going to break my neck falling from this bloody gantry, and my name will be added to the tragedy of the observatory, just in time for it all to be knocked down. Why the fuck hadn’t she just stayed put at Nightshade Cottage? Why had she come out here on some godforsaken heroic journey just to find a man who could do what he wanted? This was not how she wanted it to end. If Tristan needed to be here, that was his business, not hers. Why hadn’t she just waited for him to come back to her in his own time? This had been a fool’s errand, and one that now seemed to be the stupidest, most dangerous errand of her life.
And then, as Tristan finally raised his head from his knees and, as the lightning flared once more, her eyes, in that split second of illumination, locked with his and she knew exactly why she’d done it. It had been stealing up on her, like the quiet emergence of Arcturus in the velvet darkness of the summer night sky, and, like Orion, the brighter companion, it had come to guide her home. ‘I love you!’ she yelled across the eight-foot gap between them. ‘I bloody love you, Tristan Ashcombe, and if you don’t come and get me out of this hole, I’m never going to be able to tell you that again!’