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I clicked my tongue against my teeth and the woodman was there, panting lightly and smelling of fresh sweat. He’d been ru
“Who are they?” I murmured.
“Strangers, five or six of them,” he snarled, “with a local boy who knows the woods. They’ll be here in ten minutes. Longer, depending on how many more trees they walk into.” His voice put a twist of vicious pleasure on the last prospect, and it occurred to me that his panting might be due not to exertion, but to fury.
That many strangers at this time of night could only be here for one reason: us. And with Javitz on crutches, and a child as well, this was no place to make a stand.
“We’re ready, let’s get farther back into the woods.”
Goodman did not respond. I put out a hand to his arm, and found it taut and trembling. “Goodman, believe me, I understand how you’re feeling. I really, really want to know who they are. But do we want Estelle in the middle of a potential battleground?”
“T-take her,” he ordered, stammering with fury.
“I wouldn’t make it a mile in these woods.”
He stood, torn between the choices I had given him. It might be nothing. A charabanc of travellers benighted and looking for help. A band of Wordsworth fanatics looking for a host of golden daffodils by moonlight. Even some of Mycroft’s men coming to our assistance-that last made for a lovely thought. But until I knew for certain, we had to treat this as an invasion, and I hated the idea that this damaged man’s generosity of spirit had brought an abrupt loss of his hard-won peace. I felt him wrestle with the decision, then his muscles went slack.
“Very well. I’ll take you out.”
“Thank you,” I said, and let go of him.
But when I bent to take Estelle from Javitz, she woke, and cried aloud at the dark strangeness. I shushed her, pulled her to my chest to muffle her wails, and tried to quiet her with what had worked with this odd child up to now: a rational explanation.
This time, however, she was having none of it. She heard my words but only shook her head at the need to leave, at the arrival of yet another threat, at yet another demand for silence. “No!” she repeated in sleepy fury, until I was forced to contemplate a physical stifling of her noise.
Then she shifted to, “Want my dolly.”
“Your dolly? It’s right-oh.” Books, shoes, the carved menagerie, even the tatty coat she’d become so attached to, but the doll that Goodman had bought for her was left behind in the tangle of bed-clothes.
“I’m so sorry, honey, but-wait, stop-please, just hush!”
“Want Dolly!”
I couldn’t throttle her, couldn’t even threaten her as I might an adult, so what-ah: bribery. “Estelle,” I said in quiet tones, “if I get Dolly for you, do you promise to be quiet? Absolutely quiet?”
Her thumb crept up to her mouth, and she nodded.
I sighed. I doubted Sherlock Holmes had ever faced such a maddening comedy of errors in one of his adventures. “I promise, Estelle, I will get you your dolly.”
“I’ll get it,” Goodman told me.
“Wait,” I said as an idea blossomed. “What if-would you mind awfully taking Estelle and Javitz away now, then coming back for me? It would be enormously helpful to know who these people are.”
“Give me an hour and I’ll hand you their heads.”
It was temporary outrage speaking, not serious proposition-a man who had driven ambulances during the War and who lived in the woods without so much as a shotgun was not about to commit mass homicide.
“Please, Goodman-Robert: Take these two to safety. I will be perfectly safe here until you return.”
Javitz, hearing the decision being made, tried to give me back the revolver. “No,” I said. “You may need it to protect her.”
Putting him in charge of protection may have restored a modicum of his masculine dignity. He put the gun back into his belt, and struggled to his feet.
In thirty seconds, I was alone.
Chapter 33
I tripped once on an unseen obstacle in the clearing, and once inside, gave my hip an agonizing gouge on the unexpected corner of a table. Long minutes later my fingers located the texture of firm stuffing amidst the soft bed-clothes; I stuck the doll in my waistband and turned to go.
A brief flash of light shot across the clearing from the east, the direction we’d come from the first night. I leapt into the bedroom, pulled up the window, and dropped to the ground outside.
The smell of fermentation led me to the apple tree, halfway between the house and the out-building and wide enough to conceal me from a casual inspection. From there I could see something of the meadow, where brief flickers of light drove away all thought of friends or poetry fanatics. The approaching men were experienced, using their lights sparingly as they spread out in near-complete silence around the dark buildings. The circle grew tight, and tighter, until a voice called, “The door’s standing open.”
I could not see that side of the house, but I imagined that two of the men entered in a swift rush, because the sounds of banging were followed by a minute of silence. A torch went on inside. Thirty seconds later, a head stuck out of the bedroom window and a beam played through the orchard, not quite reaching my tree. The head pulled back. A voice reported, “They’re gone.”
Three torches immediately went on, one of them barely ten feet from me, and bounced over the ground as the men went to the front. The lamp went on inside. Wary of others lingering in the dark, I crept forward until I was directly underneath the open window. I could hear their words: five men.
“-paper, it’s open at the obituaries,” said a deep London voice.
“The lamp was still warm,” said another.
“Any sign of the girl?”
Did he mean Estelle, or me? Could Brothers have summoned the means to direct five violent men here, to retrieve the child he was determined to keep?
“There’s two chairs pulled out from the table.”
“Could mean nothing.”
“Is this the kind of food a man on his own would have?” a new voice wondered.
I was startled when the next voice came inches from me: “Someone’s been sleeping on the floor in here.”
“This is the place, all right. Where do you suppose they’ve got to?”
“Ten feet away, they’d disappear,” said the first voice.
“Want to sit and wait?”
“No point, I shouldn’t think. Let’s have a look at that out-house. Then we can leave a little thank-you for the hermit.”
I did not at all care for the sound of that. I backed away from the house to consider my options.
Taken one at a time, I might be able to overcome them, and I would very much like to take at least one of them captive for questioning, but five men together? With at least some of them-I had no doubt-armed?
I am, I should say, very good at throwing things-darts, knives, cricket balls, chunks of stone. People tend to over-look the advantages of an accurate throwing arm, when it comes to weaponry.
No doubt if the men before me had witnessed me grubbing around my feet for large rocks, they would have thought it fu
They made it easier by bunching together and shining all of their torches: I could hardly miss. The phrase shooting fish in a barrel came to mind, as my arm calculated the trajectory required, and let go, launching a couple of the missiles high into the air so as not to betray my position.
Seven fist-sized stones rained down on them; all seven hit flesh. Before they had the sense to shut off their lights and scatter, I saw two of them fall to the ground and one hunch down with his arms around his head. I also saw three handguns, and made haste to step back behind the old apple tree.
In the darkness, I heard groans and curses along with furiously whispered queries and commands. What I did not hear was gunshots. Which told me without a doubt that the men were experienced enough not to blaze into the darkness at an unseen assailant, wasting bullets and giving away their positions.