They took the tourists out from Wey Mouth, from the beaches and the harbour there, fishing for sole and lobster and sharks sometimes when the season was right, the little basking sharks that did no harm to anyone but made good sport. It was a fishing boat that was coming in, and the boy on her had caught his arm in a winch and made the land somehow. Margaret pushed through the crowd wriggling and shoving, sickness coming already and dark shadows at the edges of her sight, not able to stop; she saw the mess, tendon and bone showing in spikes and the man, reddened, holding himself with a hideous dignity, and didn’t know what to do.
The car drove churning onto the beach, throwing sand, stopped for its driver to vault the door and come shouldering into the crowd. He must have taken Margaret for a midwife or something, her throat was too dry to tell him he was wrong. She found herself in the back seat of the motor, squeezing the tourniquet, propping the injured man, seeing the blood run rich and soak into the upholstery. Just out of town a little station run by a half dozen Adhelmians served as the nearest thing to a hospital; the driver pulled in there and she sat while the boy was carried through the door and wondered whether to be sick then or later. After a time she got out, not really conscious of what she was doing, and started to walk. Sarah was forgotten; she was in a desolate mood where she seemed to see all humanity as bags of skin waiting to be burst and die in pain, herself a woman trapped in a fragile body, bleeding in childbirth, bleeding in coition. She was very shocked, and felt like death.
The beach she reached finally seemed to stretch for miles. She followed the cliffs above it, walking from headland to headland, seeing the vistas of white and blue, sparklings of salt spray in the wind, aimless and objectless. She got to the sea by a sandy slither, thought she might bathe then remembered instead she had something to do and was formally sick behind a stand of gorse. Then she sat on a rock that hurt her behind and brooded, picking pebbles from round her feet and flicking them at the water, seeing the sun burn off the sea in skeins and dancing loops of light. The voice when it came hardly penetrated her consciousness; the stranger had to shout again. ‘Hi…!’
He was heavy and bearded, red-faced and not used to being ignored. Margaret
turned, and regarded him despondently.
‘What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’
She shrugged. Her shoulders indicated ‘Sea…’ and ‘Throwing pebbles in it…’
‘Just come up here, will you?’
Another shrug. You come down…
He did, with a crashing and a rattle. ‘Fine bloody dance you’ve led me…’ He pulled up her chin insolently with a thick-fingered hand. ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Pretty good…’ Her eyes burned at him. Then, ‘Is he dead?’ She asked the question listlessly; the moment of anger had passed, leaving her drained out and flat.
The stranger laughed. ‘Not him, plebeian bastard… Blood poisoning might sort him out but I shouldn’t think so. They generally live ‘What did they do?’ A husk of interest in her voice.
The Norman - for they were speaking, almost unconsciously on Margaret’s part, Norman French - shrugged. ‘Nothing to it. Over in a flash. Pantryman’s cleaver, pot of tar. You leave the vein sutures sticking out, pull ’em through when they rot…’
She rolled her lips, squaring the corners. His hand was on her again instantly. She knocked it off. ‘Just leave me alone…’
A tussling. ‘You’re a good-looking little bit,’ he said. ‘Where d’you hail from then,
haven’t seen you about…’
She swung a fist at him. ‘Fils deprêtre…’
He reacted as if she’d stabbed him with a bayonet. He flung her away, stood over
her; for a moment she thought she was in for a beating, then he turned away in disgust.
‘That,’ he said, ‘wasn’t smart…’ Sand had got in his eye; he knuckled it furiously, swearing, then started to climb back up the cliff. Halfway to the top he turned and shouted. ‘You’re scared…’
Silence.
‘You’re a little prig…’
No reaction.
‘It’s a bloody long walk back…’
Margaret got up, nostrils pinched with fury, and followed him to the car.
It sat seething faintly, straps across the bonnet vibrating, seeming to hunch between its widespread wheels. He handed her in - the door was about five inches deep - got in himself, released the brakes, and shoved at what she supposed was the regulator. The Bentley gathered speed with a vicious thrusting, in a silence that was nearly eerie, trailed by the faintest wisp of steam.
Margaret was rigid, sunwarmed leather under her thighs, wondering why she’d never been able to resist a dare, whether it was something in her that couldn’t grow up. The driver looped away from the coast and turned east again. The rutted roads were unkind to the motor; he leaned across one and shouted something about ‘Do two hundred on macadam,’ then relapsed into silence. Margaret realised more fully what she’d known before, that he came from no ordinary stock. Technically steam cars were permissible; but only the wealthiest dare own them, could in fact afford them. Petroleum Veto had long been tacitly recognised as a bid to restrict the mobility of the working classes.
Passing through Wey Mouth she thought of old Sarah still scraping about looking for her charge, driving the local peelers crazy no doubt by this time. She yelled to stop but the driver ignored her; only the sidelong gliding of his eye, bright and bad-tempered, showed he had heard. Outside the town the rain came. Margaret had seen it building up for some time; the storm clouds ahead, dusty yellow and grey, piling against the midsummer blue of the sky. She yelped as the first drops hit her, slashing over the tiny windscreen. He bellowed back. ‘Didn’t bring the bloody hood…’
A mile further on he lost steam and condescended to stop under a huge oak but by then she was so wet she didn’t care anyway. She was glad when he drove on, away from the booming of the branches. Corvesgeat showed on the horizon, a cluster of towers like fangs of stone. The rain was easing. They passed through the village the focus of a yapping herd of dogs; the Bentley’s burners hit them in the ultrasonic, drove them wild. Her driver crossed the square and swung into the castle, under the portcullis of the outer barbican.
The gatekeeper saluted as the car bounced past. A fair had camped in the outer bailey; Margaret saw golden dragons, caryatids rainwet and erotic against grey stone. Show engines stood about, only slightly more ornate than the Lady Margaret herself. The Bentley thumped across the grass, blasting folks from her path with her twin brass horns. At the Martyr’s Gate the portculli were grounded to keep the people from the upper baileys and the precincts of the donjon; Margaret saw steam jet from the high stone as the winches raised the iron trellises for the car. Then they were through, sidling up a slope that looked one in one, the bonnet higher than their heads. The Bentley docked finally in a stone garage set below the soaring walls of the keep.
Above them, dizzyingly far off, floated banners; the oriflamme, ancient and spectacular, flown only on Saints’ days and holidays, the bright blue of Rome, the swallow-tailed Union flag of Great Britain. The leopards and fleurs-de-lis of the owners of Purbeck were absent, so His Lordship was not in residence. Margaret caught glimpses of the flags and the high walls, sunlit now, through roofless passages as she scurried behind her captor, one wrist gripped in his paw, too breathless to argue any more.