His reverie was broken by the sound of the boy down by the river, who had now woken up and was on the move. He had backed away from the bank to a distance of twenty yards or so. He started calling out with a low “Whooooooo!” then launched himself at the river’s edge, running faster and faster. Raising his voice to a high-pitched shout, he leapt from the bank, formed a bomb in midair and splashed in the water. Almost immediately he shot to the surface, screaming with laughter at the freezing cold, and thrashed his way back to the bank. Naked as the day, he danced up and down, laughing and shouting at the dreadful pleasure of the cold water and the warm summer air.
“Nice to be young, eh?” said Cadbury. It was impossible not to share in the boy’s delight. And then with astonishment he saw how true this was. Jennifer Plunkett was smiling, her face transformed like a painting of a holy saint. Jennifer Plunkett was in love. As soon as she was aware of Cadbury looking at her, she vanished in an instant from whatever paradise the boy had taken her to. She looked at Cadbury, blinked like a hawk or a feral cat and then turned back to the river, her expression now utterly void.
“What do you think Kitty the Hare wants with him?” she said.
“No idea,” said Cadbury. “But nothing good. It’s a pity,” he added, quite sincerely. “He seems such a happy little chap.” He regretted saying this as soon as it was out, but he was still unnerved at what he’d witnessed. It was like seeing a snake blush. That’ll teach you, thought Cadbury, to think you know what’s going on in other people. Full of wonder at this strange turn of events, he sat down and laid his back again against the mulberry tree.
As it turned out, it didn’t take long to find out. He appeared to Jennifer Plunkett to be asleep, but Cadbury had far too much nous not to be thrashing out this unforeseen development. He kept his not-quite closed eyes on Jennifer’s back and drew his Mott knife and hid it, hand around the hilt, under his right thigh, the one farthest away from her. For fully thirty minutes he watched her motionless back while time and again he could hear the boy’s repeated “Whooo!” and the splash and the scream of laughter. And then she turned and moved toward him, again without the least fuss, knife in hand, and began the killing blow. He blocked it with his left and stabbed upward with the Mott knife in his right. He marveled at her speed even as they rolled around in the dried-up autumn leaves that covered the forest floor. Back and forth, back and forth they rolled in their dreadful clutch, only the two of them hearing the hot low rasp of each other’s breath and the rustle of dead leaves as, almost lip to lip, they stared into each other’s eyes. And slowly his greater strength began to tell. She wriggled and squirmed and writhed with all her sinewy might, but Cadbury had her pinned and she was done. But Jennifer had one more weapon beyond her hatred and her rage that she could call on: her dreadful love. How could she give him up and die? And with a heave she slipped to one side, unbalanced Cadbury, wrenched free of his left hand’s grasp and was up and haring down the hill to her darling boy.
“Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!” she cried. The boy looked up as he climbed naked onto the mossy riverbank. Openmouthed, he gawped at the screaming harpy racing desperately down the hill and calling his name over and over: “Thomas Cale! Thomas Cale!”
In a life cursed with many extraordinary sights, this was one of the strangest of them alclass="underline" a wild-faced sexless thing was shouting his name, waving a knife and rushing toward him with a dreadful madness in its eyes. Astonished, he ran for his clothes, fumbled for his sword, dropped it, picked it up again and raised it to strike as she was almost upon him, shouting wildly. Then he heard a sharp buzz, and a hollow thud like the slap of a man’s hand on a horse’s flank. Jennifer gave a sharp cough and went flying head over arse past the terrified Cale and hit the trunk of a sawtooth oak with a wallop.
Cale legged it behind a tree, his heart thumping and fluttering like a just-trapped bird. At once he started looking for an escape. Surrounding the tree there was a rough arc of cover-free ground varying between forty to sixty yards in width. He looked at the body. He could see now it was a woman, and she was lying crumpled against the base of a tree with her backside in the air and to one side. She had what looked like a three-ounce arrow in her back, the tip just emerging from her chest. Her nose was bleeding, a single drop falling to the ground every three or four seconds. It would have been no easy shot, hitting a moving target like that, but neither was it exceptional. She’d been running away from the direction of the arrow, whereas if he went now, immediately, he would be running across the line of fire. From a standing start it would take five or six seconds to reach cover. Enough for one shot, not more, and it would have to be a fine one. But then maybe he was as good as Kleist. Kleist could make a shot like that three times out of four.
“Hey! Sonny Jim!”
About two hundred yards and dead ahead, thought Cale.
“What do you want?”
“How about ‘thank you’?”
“Thank you. Now why don’t you piss off?”
“You ungrateful little shit, I just saved your life.”
Was he moving? It sounded like it.
“Who are you?”
“Your guardian angel, mate, that’s who I am. She was a very bad girl, that one, a very bad girl.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to cut your throat, mate. That’s what she did for a living.”
“Why?”
“No idea, mate. Vipond sent me to keep an eye on you and his ne’er-do-well brother.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“No reason. Don’t care, anyway. I just don’t want you coming after me. I wouldn’t want to have to put one in you, not after all the trouble I’ve taken to keep you alive. So you just stay there for the next fifteen minutes, and during that period of patience I’ll be on my way and no harm done. All right?”
Cale thought about this: make a run for it, follow him, catch him, beat the truth out of him. Or along the way get an arrow in his back. He sounded, this man, as if he knew what he was up to. Anyway, there was an alternative.
“All right. Fifteen minutes.”
“Word of honor?”
“What?”
“Never mind. How about that ‘thank you,’ then?”
And with that both Cadbury and Cale were on the move. Cadbury was yomping it back into the deepest part of the forest, and Cale, using the tree as a screen, had slipped into the river and was carefully swimming along its edge and away.
Three hours later Cale and IdrisPukke were back by the river examining the body of the dead woman under the cover of a cloud of trees. They had spent two hours searching for any sign of Cale’s alleged savior but had found nothing. IdrisPukke frisked the body and quickly discovered three knives, two garrotes, a thumbscrew, a knuckle duster and, in her mouth, alongside the left gum, a flexible inch-long blade wrapped in silk.
“Whatever she was up to,” said IdrisPukke, “she wasn’t trying to sell you clothes pegs.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Your savior? Sounds plausible. I don’t know about whether I believe him, exactly. But let’s face it, if he’d wanted to kill you, he could have done it at any time during the last month. Still-it stinks.”