“That’s fantastic,” I told him, as soon as my feet landed on the firm deck. “You can see all the way to France up there.”
“I hope you are sufficiently cooled off from your exertions. Now go down and tell Mr. Beauchamp to stop engines. No, wait! I’ll tell him. You take the wheel.”
“Me, sir?”
“Aye. Try not to crash on any rocks. Captain Beauchamp would not like his ship reduced to kindling.”
“I thought it was your ship, sir,” I said, tentatively taking the wheel.
“I’m still owner, and may do as I like when I’m here, but he’s captain the rest of the time. He runs the fishing fleet here, you see. I can’t allow the Osprey to lie idle. It has to be worked.”
“So he’s the fellow you send checks to every month.”
“Aye. There’s a lot of upkeep on a ship like this. It has to be laid up for the winter, and have the barnacles scraped off the hull. It has to be repainted and polished. Oh, there’s a thousand things done to keep a ship afloat year after year.”
“It must have taken you years of hard work to buy such a unique vessel, sir.”
“Oh, no, lad,” he said. “Won her in a game of chance in Manila one evening. Fan-tan, I believe it was. Extraordinary bit of luck.”
“I thought you hated gambling and all games of chance.”
“Oh, I do. Some people will bet on anything and ruin their families over it. But you know, I haven’t always felt that way. Look, there’s Seaford ahead. Steady as she goes. I’d better go warn Beauchamp.”
Barker called out to Beauchamp, and the ship slowly came to a standstill, rocking as the waves rolled under it. The Guv moved to the bow and released the anchor with a splash, while Beauchamp came up the stairs again and leaned against a railing, whittling a piece of wood with his jackknife. Barker put his foot up the starboard side of the boat and looked out across the water of the Channel.
“Storm’s coming in,” he remarked. “The sky was red this morning before we left London.”
Beauchamp nodded. I could picture the four of them-Barker, Ho, Dummolard, and Beauchamp-in this boat, not saying much for hours at a time, answering any question put to them with grunts. As much as I was enjoying the trip, if they expected me to endure such conditions for long, they would require a press-gang.
A heavy metal object was suddenly dropped into my lap. It was shaped like a truncheon.
“That, Mr. Llewelyn, is a belaying pin. They go in the holes along the side here, and the lines are tied to them.”
“This could cave in a fellow’s skull,” I noted, hefting it.
“Not a sailor’s. They are notoriously thick skulled.”
Behind me, I heard Beauchamp chuckle.
“I shall have to practice, then,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me along. I know I’m just a landsman.”
“Shovels well enough,” Peter Beauchamp remarked. He didn’t look up, concentrating on his carving, which looked like it would eventually become a toy boat. I thought of his brood of children.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
* * *
Dinner that evening at Mrs. Ashleigh’s estate was almost as fine as one of Etienne’s meals, but I was paying more attention to the window behind me. Barker’s prediction of a storm was on the mark. In fact, it became a full gale, the kind that buffets the south coast once or twice a year, although it took hours to develop. Soon the rain began, and was quickly followed by thunder.
The wind blew leaves and branches and lashed rain up along the broad South Downs, after gaining force over the tossing waves of the Channel. Inside the old house, most of the shutters had been fastened closed, but the panes shook. Though it was approaching midnight none of us were asleep amid the racket. A steady tattoo of raindrops beat on the glass, and the old structure groaned against the heavy wind. Sometimes, during a lull between the howling wind gusts we heard the plaintive bleat of a sheep or the neighing of a horse in a stable near the house.
Cyrus Barker was restless, which is never a good sign. We were both by an unshuttered window when we saw Beauchamp with a shotgun broken over his arm. He signaled to us, pointing two fingers at his eyes, and away toward the front of the estate. Then he trotted off.
“They’re coming,” Barker growled.
“How did they find us?” I protested. “Surely they didn’t follow us here.”
“They found us all the same. Get your pistol. We must prepare to repel all boarders.”
Suddenly, there was an exchange of gunfire by the gate. Almost simultaneously, we heard the sound of glass shattering in the conservatory, followed soon by a second crash. Someone had breached the house’s defenses.
Barker and I ran to Mrs. Ashleigh’s room and flung open the door. Inside, I saw her turn quickly. There was a case on her bed, and she held an old-fashioned ball and powder dueling pistol in each hand.
“They have come,” Barker said. “Bolt the door.”
The Guv ran down the stairs to the ground floor, and when he arrived pulled a handful of the sharpened coins he always keeps in his pockets. He threw them down the hallway as men stepped out into it from the other side. There were cries of pain and cursing, but when Barker fired his pistol at them, they scattered. I’d counted at least three.
My employer and I moved down the hall shoulder to shoulder, and when we reached the end, stood back to back. The intruders had vanished.
“You take the left, lad, and I’ll go right,” the Guv said. Before I could suggest that it would be wiser if we stayed together, he was gone. I went into the dining room, where earlier that day I’d been cosseted and cross-examined by the lady of the house. I thought the room was now empty, but as I stepped across to the parlor, I realized it wasn’t. There were too many good places to hide. When I reached the rug, I dropped onto it, looking about as the lightning illuminated the room. I could see something between the legs of the couch, and I fired at it. There was a yelp; and as fast as I could, I pulled myself to my feet, sailed over the couch back, and landed on top of him. We were a tangle of arms and legs, and then I hit him with the butt of my Webley.
My assailant looked more like a farm lad than an Italian assassin. He was stocky and unshaven and couldn’t have been more than my age. Knowing I’d probably get in trouble for it with Mrs. Ashleigh in the morning, I cut the cording of the curtain behind me with my dagger and tied him up good and tight. Then I proceeded cautiously into the conservatory.
19
That was how I managed to find myself stepping over the shattered glass door into a darkened conservatory in the teeth of a Sussex gale. Even now it seems a bucolic place to be set upon by Sicilian assassins, but it was our presence that had brought them there. Like Barker himself, the Sicilians lived by an inviolable code. Having sent him the Black Hand note, and found it ignored, they felt duty bound to go through with the threat.
Less than ten minutes later, I stood in the shattered greenhouse drenched with rain and bleeding freely from the face. At my feet lay the Sicilian intruder I had encountered there, pierced through the heart with a dagger. My dagger. He had sliced open my cheek but, in doing so, had left himself exposed and I had struck as Gallenga had trained me to do. When the opening appeared, I’d thrust a knife into his vitals without thinking and without hesitation. I stood over him, my heart pounding wildly.
“Thomas!” Barker’s rough voice bellowed over the crashing of the storm.
“Here, sir!” I called.
“Are you all right?”
“I think I’ve killed one of them.”
“Stay there,” he called. “I’ll come to you.”