It was a moment before she realised that she was the one screaming the loudest. The next thing she knew was that suddenly there was an awful lot of water in the boat.
Paul Nash had splashed his oar back into the water.
“Everybody bale for your lives!”
Apart from the two tin mugs that Henrietta and Pedro had been employing there was nothing for it but to cup hands and do what could be done as the craft wallowed down river, slowing a little as it passed into deeper waters between the half-flooded darkling woods on the mudbanks to either side.
Nobody looked outside of the boat.
Melody tore off her head cloth, breathed a sigh of relief as it immediately proved a more effective way of getting water over the side. Needless to say, she was soon soaking wet, as were the others. For an age their frantic efforts seemed to make no difference and then, ever so slowly, the level of water began to fall. When the water only wetted their knees, they began to sigh heartfelt sighs of relief.
“That’s enough. Everybody as quiet as a mouse, please!”
Instinctively, the two women tried to make themselves invisible beneath the gunwales, sheltering Pedro between them, meanwhile Albert Stanton picked up the rudder oar.
As the boat swung slowly around a bend in the broadening river the city of Salamanca reared high above the passing banks: darkly to the south, brightly, magisterially proudly to the north.
They drifted under another bridge.
Something clunked against the planking.
“Just a branch from a tree,” Paul Nash said reassuringly. “There’s a lot of debris in the river at this time of year.”
A drizzle of rain was falling.
Melody imagined she heard a car driving across the bridge above her, and in the distance the ringing of bells. She had lived in Salamanca for a month or so as a girl; her parents had dragged her around endless churches and museums. The only thing she still remembered, vividly, was putting her young hand in the yawning cracks – crevices by any other name – in the walls of the great cathedral, the legacy of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
“Hang on!”
The boat crunched into something so solid, so unyielding that it could only have been the footings of a bridge. There was a brief, horribly loud scraping noise which seemed to the occupants of the wildly rocking boat like a cat’s claws raking glass, and then they were drifting onwards.
“Sorry about that,” Paul Nash guffawed, “our dinghy decided it wanted to shoot the narrowest arch.”
Melody sat up.
She stared at the lights of the city.
The last day had been exhausting but otherwise without particular terrors. Perhaps, that it only seemed that way because they were all so inured to things; aware, as never before, of their frailty and of exactly how tenuous human existence could be and often was. She knew she was already a changed woman and suspected Henrietta was no different; that neither of them could or would lead the lives they had planned back in new England. It was as if they had lived one life up until that night at Chinchón, and another, totally other life thereafter. There was no going back, no becoming again the women they had been before that fateful night when the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s arms men had spirited them away from the clutches of the Inquisition.
She wondered if Alonso was still alive.
She thought about him a lot…
She also fretted about the fate which might have befallen the people she had met at the Embassy in Madrid.
But mostly, she thought about Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome thirty-nine-year-old castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas; the mysterious, beguiling courtier-diplomat-cavalryman-spy whom it seemed had been aligned to the losing faction – the Queen’s, or one of the other losing factions, she did not know which clause applied – that night around a month ago.
Alonso…
Paul Nash had brought his oar inboard.
The boat was gliding, carrying them where it might.
The loom of Salamanca’s lights glistened dully off the gun metal of the silenced automatic pistol cradled in his hands as he surveyed the northern bank of the river.
The city seemed to be sliding past interminably slowly.
“Try and steer us closer to the bank, Albert,” Nash suggested.
The Manhattan Globe man grunted an acknowledgement and leaned on his oar.
Melody tried to make herself small in the three inches of water lapping around in the bottom of the boat. Henrietta was mouthing a prayer. She blinked at Melody.
The women tried to lift Pedro out of the water, keep him warm with their bodies. The boy was shivering.
Paul Nash seemed to be reading their thoughts.
Although, actually, he was simply two or three steps ahead of them; as indeed, he had been all along.
“Once we’re past the city we’ll look for somewhere to go ashore. Send the boat on down-stream. We need to find somewhere to dry out and warm up. After tonight we walk until we drop.”
Melody would have argued.
She was too tired.
From memory, she thought that west of Salamanca the Tormes cut through increasingly jagged valleys and canyons as it fell off the great plateau of central Spain to join the Douro at, or near the Portuguese border. Salamanca was about forty or fifty miles from the border…
Time passed, the city lights dimmed and contrary to his promise, clearly a thing said to raise their spirits, Paul Nash made no attempt to put the boat aground. In the end Melody must have drifted into a fitful sleep.
Or more likely, just passed out.
Chapter 25
Tuesday 11th April
Little Inagua, West Indies
Abe had waited until the disorganised Mauser-armed skirmish line – with twelve-inch bayonets fixed and glinting in the night – had walked, or rather, stumbled past him. There were too few sailors in the search line, there was too far between each man for easy or in any sense effective communication, and in any event, as they moved forward – with understandable caution and a natural lack of enthusiasm – the men’s spacing became ever more irregular. Nobody seemed to be setting the pace, let alone checking the integrity of the line and there were soon exaggerated dog-legs in the formation.
Nevertheless, one man had almost trodden on Abe as he lay motionless in the undergrowth.
Abe had silently risen to his feet, walked two paces, and then a third, and brained the poor fellow with the flat of his hatchet. He had used the ‘flat’ of the axe blade because he wanted to avoid covering the man’s kit and weapons in blood. If he had stopped to think about that he would have realised how ‘cold’ that was; but he did not. Stop to think about it, that was. The man had gone down on his face, thereafter it had been the work of a moment to snap his neck, much in the fashion Tsiokwaris had taught him all those years ago to finish off a wounded, downed deer.
He had pulled off the man’s jacket, struggled into it. It was a size or two too small. However, sartorial elegance was secondary; right now, he just needed to looked vaguely like all the other Dominican sailors on Little Inagua.
He had picked up the dead man’s Mauser.
A bullet in the chamber…
There were two more five-round clipper strips in his waist pouch to add to the four rounds in Abe’s tattered trousers’ back pocket.
Then he carried on moving into the interior with the others, gradually falling behind the majority before, judging he was far enough away from where he had left Ted Forrest, he ducked down and waited.
It was about fifteen minutes before somebody realised a man was missing. The idiots only sent two men back to find him. Not together, or working as a team, you understand but as two individuals quartering the ground as they saw fit. Abe shot one by the loom of the searchlights continuously playing across two to three miles of the southern coast of the island. Any man who put his head above the bushes at the wrong moment was visible for hundreds of yards in every direction.