‘They’ll think we’re going to take a rest now. Run, my love, let’s keep going.’
Their strength was beginning to run out. Sometimes Lady Lucy stumbled. Powerscourt stopped briefly several times to hold on to his side. ‘Stitch,’ he said ruefully to Lady Lucy. Powerscourt was wondering again about the police chief. He had mentioned that he was looking for the de Courcy family. He had mentioned that he was looking for a forger. He had, he thought, implied that the two might be linked in some way. Surely that must be the cause of this Corsican violence. But had the policeman himself ordered it? Was he part of the conspiracy with the forger? Had the policeman told somebody else? Had the policeman telegraphed to brother Edmund in London, keeper perhaps of the forger and his secrets? Was that what caused the assassination attempt, here on the slopes beneath Aregno with the impossible blues of the Corsican sea washing away at the beach? Somebody could have killed Christopher Montague in his flat behind the Brompton Oratory because he was about to reveal the existence of the forger. Were Powerscourt and Lady Lucy to be further victims? Nobody, absolutely nobody, Powerscourt felt certain, would investigate closely the deaths of two strangers on this island. Shooting accident. Very regrettable. The man must have had the sun in his eyes. Very regrettable. Soon forgotten. Maybe the de Courcy women would put flowers on their graves.
Lady Lucy was praying for her children. Then they could see salvation. A couple of hundred yards ahead, on the far side of a group of comforting trees, was the railway line, the beach and, on their left, the little town of Algajola with its train station. Powerscourt outlined the final plan of campaign under the trees.
‘We’ll do it as we did before,’ he said. ‘You go first. Lie low in those bamboos on the far side of the railway line. I’ll keep you covered. Then you do the same for me.’
Lady Lucy seemed to have acquired a last reserve of strength. She shot over the railway line and zigzagged her way into the bamboo. No shots ran out from the mountainside. In the distance she heard a siren. Maybe a rescue party was on the way. Powerscourt took a long series of deep breaths. He could see Lady Lucy standing on something to get a better view. There was another hoot from the siren. Three hundred yards away he could just see the little Corsican train approaching before it vanished behind a headland. He started running. Lady Lucy could see a man and a rifle peeping out from an abandoned farmhouse up the hillside. She took very careful aim at the farmhouse. The man disappeared. Powerscourt was fifty yards short of the railway line. Lady Lucy saw a glint from the late afternoon sun on the rifle, now peeping out from the other side of the farmhouse. The train was at the end of the beach now, chugging sedately towards its next stop.
There was a shout from Powerscourt. His boot was caught in one of the sleepers on the railway line. He waved helplessly at Lady Lucy. The train was now a hundred yards away, tons and tons of doom heading unstoppably towards Powerscourt. Lady Lucy shot out from her bamboos, firing one desperate shot at the farmhouse up the hill. She reached Powerscourt in what seemed like seconds. She could see a terrified train driver, his brakes now full on, staring helplessly at the disaster ahead. Lady Lucy reached down in the middle of the line. She pulled Powerscourt’s boot off. She saw from out of the corner of her eye that the train driver had closed his eyes. He was praying out loud.
‘Jump, Francis, jump!’ Powerscourt dived full length to the side of the driver’s cab, only a few feet away. Lady Lucy sprang back the other way. One further shot came down from the mountain slopes. It passed over the train and made a slight plop as it fell into the peaceful waters of Algajola Bay. Fifty yards on the train stopped. Lady Lucy ran in front of it and held Francis in her arms. ‘Thank you, Lucy,’ he said. ‘You’ve saved my life. Again.’ He held her very tight.
Less than a minute later they were inside the train. Powerscourt went to thank the driver, still shaking at his controls. Lady Lucy sank back on to a hard wooden seat on the side furthest away from the mountains. Powerscourt flopped down beside her. He looked at the ruins of Lady Lucy’s clothes, her dress badly torn, a hole where one of her knees had been. The blood by her wrist had dried now, a dark stain running up her left arm. There was a scratch mark on her face, where one of the bamboos had caught her on the desperate dash to the railway line. Powerscourt was still clutching his left boot, miraculously undamaged by the passage of the Bastia to Calvi rail service above it. His clothes, so immaculate in Mrs de Courcy’s drawing room an hour before, were almost rags. His right trouser leg had a hole in the middle, a trickle of blood still running down it from a cut on the granite rocks. His left hand was dark, bruised from his fall in front of the train.
They smiled at each other. Powerscourt thought how beautiful Lucy looked, her blue eyes sparkling in the light off the sea.
‘I think I found an omen, Francis.’ She smiled across at him, Powerscourt shifting uncomfortably on his wooden billet. ‘I saw it in one of the shops in Calvi yesterday and I forgot to tell you.’
‘What is this omen, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt, scowling at the blood on his knee.
‘It’s the motto of Calvi. Do you know what it is?’
‘I’m afraid to say, Lucy, that up until now it has passed me by.’
Lady Lucy paused for the memories.
‘It’s Semper Fidelis, Francis. Forever Faithful.’
Forever Faithful, Semper Fidelis, last words in a letter to Powerscourt from a young man who committed suicide in Sandringham Woods in one of his earlier investigations into the strange death of Prince Eddy, eldest son of the Prince of Wales. Forever Faithful, Semper Fidelis, words Powerscourt had used to express his own loyalty to the dead man’s memory as he searched for the truth. Forever Faithful, Semper Fidelis, words spoken by Francis and Lucy to each other on the deck of a great liner as they sailed to their honeymoon in America.
Powerscourt smiled. He took Lady Lucy’s bloodstained hand into his own and pressed it very tight.
‘Forever faithful, Lucy. Semper Fidelis.’
Lady Lucy had tears in her eyes.
‘Semper Fidelis, Francis. Forever faithful.’
18
Lord Francis Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were sitting in a corner of their hotel bar, Powerscourt facing the entrance, his right hand never straying far from his pocket. They were in clean clothes after an alarming encounter with the local plumbing. The bathroom was a few feet away down the corridor, an enormous bath in dark wood panelling, rusty pipes running up the wall. When the hot tap was turned on, there was at first a distant rumble, like thunder in the mountains. Then the rumble faded to be replaced by a ferocious rattling of machinery. The pipes began to tremble, then to dance to some strange Corsican rhythm, shuddering against the wall, beating against each other. The performance was accompanied by a barrage of steam so great that it was almost impossible to see across the room. But the water was hot, the metal symphony gradually subsided, their aching limbs were soothed by the heat.
‘I never knew you could shoot like that, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, sipping very slowly at a glass of local white wine.
‘My grandfather taught me,’ said Lady Lucy, remembering a day long ago in the hills behind her grandfather’s house. ‘It was in Scotland. Everybody else had gone on a fishing expedition. The two of us were alone in the house.
‘“I’ve taught all my male grandchildren to shoot,” my grandfather said suddenly after lunch. “Think I’d better teach you as well.” So he took me into the hills with some kind of ancient archery board and a couple of pistols. I had to keep on trying until I could hit the centre of the board. “If you end up in India,” my grandfather said, “married to an army colonel or the Viceroy or somebody like that, you never know when you mightn’t need to shoot straight.”’