She must not give up hope. Intellectually, she knew that. But when she idly catalogued her body’s reactions, she wondered if it had not already happened, and her mind was simply not yet ready to admit it. Her shoulders slumped, her face felt slack, and her very bones were beginning to chill under her wet clothes. She felt, in fact, very much the way Captain Hollys looked.
Her eyes narrowed, and the salt drying in her eyelashes stung.
“Captain Hollys,” she said, “what is your opinion, upon hearing our various options? Which course of action seems to offer the greatest chance of our survival?”
It took a moment for his gaze to connect with hers. “None of them,” he finally replied. “I still cannot fathom why or how you are here. Of all the foolish things I believed you capable of, Claire, this tops them all.”
“They are trying to save our lives, ye great numpty,” Jake snapped, with no regard whatever for Ian’s rank or position. “Though I don’t know why she should bother, since you’re not the least bit interested in the effort.”
“Shut up, you young scamp,” Ian said, but he didn’t sound very convincing.
Claire widened her eyes at Jake as if to say, What on earth is wrong with him?
But he only shrugged. “It takes some of them this way,” he said, as if she had asked the question aloud. “I suppose they can’t believe that one human being can treat another the way the Ministry treats the people it captures. It sets a man adrift, like.”
Captain Hollys was certainly adrift. “If we are to survive, then we all must be fully in our senses,” she said. “And that includes me. I apologize, Jake, for burdening you with my brief loss of hope.”
She had never thought to see that rapscallion’s half-smile again, and to see it now brought another flood of salt to her eyes. She blinked it away.
“That’s all right, Lady. The captain’s been in command of others for so long that I suspect having no say in his destiny is a new state of affairs for him.”
Andrew stirred from a contemplation even deeper than Claire’s had been. “Now, now. No need for personal remarks.”
But something in Jake’s deliberate tone told Claire there was more going on here than personal remarks. This was a cue for her—and one she had better pick up, for Jake had already made it clear it was only a matter of minutes before the Ministry men came down to find out what had gone amiss with their errant bell.
“Yes,” she said now. “I am certainly familiar enough with the captain’s air of command. Some women find it attractive, I suppose.”
“You didn’t,” Ian murmured.
“I enjoy and appreciate a man in control of his emotions and his environment, as might any woman. It is when he attempts to control mine that I object.”
Ian glanced at Andrew, who had left off thinking and was now staring at her in some consternation. Claire stifled a niggle of guilt and promised herself she would explain it all to him later, when they got out of this.
“You’ve got your hands full,” Ian observed to Andrew, and then lapsed back into apathy.
Andrew’s gaze came fully into the present. “I am lucky that I do,” he retorted. “For if I were all you had to depend on, you might be in trouble. You place far too little value on the abilities of women, sir.”
“On the contrary,” Ian said with a sigh of annoyance at being made to converse. “I value them a great deal. They just don’t seem to value me.”
“I find that hard to believe, given the swath you cut through the debutantes of London. Oh, yes,” Claire told him archly, “we all read the society columns.”
Ian gave a snort. “Silly girls and desperate bluestockings. Not one of them was as fine as you.”
“I say,” Andrew began, but Claire cut him off.
“I suppose it was much easier to carry a torch for me than to risk actually becoming acquainted with a young lady—to see into her heart and realize her good qualities?”
“No time,” Ian muttered. “Estate needs looking after and none of them seemed capable.”
“Ian Hollys, I am ashamed of you,” Claire exclaimed. “If you want someone to look after your estate, hire a housekeeper. But if you want a worthy partner to share the sky with you, to be your helpmeet when you need care, and to care for and protect in your turn, anyone with an ounce of sense knows that you must raise your eyes to someone who is worthy. Someone to whom you matter.”
He shifted under the lash of her tone, making the harness twist and turn, and sloshing his pale bare feet in the water. “A lot you know about it. Where am I going to find a woman like that?”
“I can think of two right off the bat,” Andrew said, clearly realizing what they were up to. “Though from the look of you now, they might not be quite so convinced about your abilities as a protector.”
“Who?” he demanded.
“For goodness sake, Ian, are you blind?” Claire said with an air of throwing up her hands. “Have you not seen how—” She stopped herself just in time, belatedly realizing that perhaps Alice might not wish her to reveal the deepest secrets of her heart—secrets that she might not even have admitted to herself but that had been clearly visible to the loving eye of a friend.
“Seen how what?” A spark had come back into Ian’s eyes, and his spine had regained a little of its iron—enough, at least, to make his harness increasingly uncomfortable.
Good. Her ruse was working.
“Seen how Gloria looks at you and hangs all over you, of course,” Andrew said. “My stars, man, while it started as a blind to distract her father, I think the girl quite believes it.”
“Gloria?” Ian said, quite as though he had been thinking of someone else.
Well, let him. If he had awakened to the fact that there might be two women in the world who could stand beside him without shame, then all the better.
“Enough of this hanging about feeling sorry for yourself,” Jake said impatiently. “We are running out of—” A brilliant flash of light made him flinch so badly that he bumped into Claire’s harness, setting them both swinging.
“What was that?” she whispered, blinking away the dazzled spots in front of her eyes. “Are they coming for us with lights?”
A line of bubbles zipped past outside the bell, like the tail of a falling star, and another flash seared their eyes from the depths below.
“Did you see that?” Andrew cried.
“I can’t see anything.” Jake rubbed his salt-encrusted lids. “It’s not the Ministry men, I’ll tell you that much.”
Flash!
“We are under attack,” Ian said with conviction. “We must get out of here at once before we are struck.”
“No, that’s just it!” Feverishly, Andrew began to pull at Claire’s buckles, then his own. “Those are my Short-Range Dazzling Incendiaries!”
“Yours, sir?” Jake said blankly. “What if one of them hits us?”
“There is no charge—they are simply for distraction.” He had Claire out of her harness now, and treading water. With one tug of Ian’s last buckle, he dumped him unceremoniously into the water as well. “And for getting one’s attention. It means that Lizzie and Tigg are directly above us in Athena. It means we are saved!”
Before he even finished speaking, Claire’s mind had calculated the angle of the incendiaries’ descent and triangulated Athena’s approximate position. But then, when another incendiary zipped through the water and detonated, she realized something else.
“They are moving away!” she cried. “They are clearly searching for us—quickly, we must get their attention!”
“Take the rucksack and surface,” Andrew told her. “Now!”
“I am not leaving you!”
Jake grabbed her hand and yanked on it to get her attention. “The air hose. Go outside and disconnect it, and aim it at the surface. We’ll have one minute of air after you do.”
Andrew clapped the breathing globe upon her head, hooked up its hose, and thrust her under the lip of the diving bell. It
only took a couple of kicks before she landed on the top of it, and a few seconds more to disconnect the air hose.
The thing came alive in her hands like a very angry python, writhing and blowing huge bubbles of oxygen every which way. She flung her body upon it and wrestled it into submission, finally using her own weight to point it up toward the surface.
How many seconds of her companions’ air had she lost? How long would it take before someone on the ship observed the boiling of the water? Would they understand its significance?
Someone banged on the glass and she let go of the hose. It whipped away from her and wrapped itself around the cable on which the bell ascended and descended. By the time she had swum to the base of the bell, all three men had come out from under it, and she saw at once what they intended.
They had only one choice, after all.
And only one chance.
Andrew clasped her to himself, and Ian wrapped his arms around both of them. Jake grabbed Andrew’s waist and pressed himself to his back, and then Claire released the cord on the rucksack.
They rose toward the surface like an unwieldy comet, trailing bubbles behind them.
Torn between watching where she was going and terror lest they attract a kraken, Claire glanced frantically in every direction. The green of the water grew lighter … its quality changed as sunlight penetrated … wavering light surrounded them like a nimbus …
And they exploded from the water into the warmth of the Venetian day.
*
“Tigg—Claude—what is that?” Lizzie had opened the viewing port and hung halfway out of it, scanning the waterways with every ounce of concentration she possessed. Every time she launched one of the walnut-sized bombs Mr. Andrew had left with them, she waited at least a minute, in case by some miracle somebody under the water could respond. “Look, there, to the west of that great fancy church.”
Tigg spun the wheel to come about, and Athena tilted into the turn.
“It’s a bloody great kraken again, is what it is,” Claude told them grimly, from his position on the other side of the gondola. “Remember? All that boiling about and the poor devil shooting up out of it?”
Hardly had the words left his lips than something exploded out of the depths like a waterspout. Something with eight legs, but oddly disciplined. There was no kicking here, no frantic near-death movements that would draw the kraken, simply a smooth, last-ditch flight into the air.
And, since the laws of physics again dictated that what went up must come down, they began to fall back toward the water. Four heads—one in a glass breathing globe—turned desperately toward Athena.
Lizzie shrieked so loudly she was sure even the fish could hear her. “Tigg! It’s the Lady! And Mr. Andrew and the captain and Jake!”
“Get back to the basket!” Tigg shouted. “We’ve got to get them out of there before a kraken comes!”
Claude pounded behind her as she practically flew down the corridor to the hatch in the stern where the rescue basket lay ready and waiting. “What can I do?” he shouted.
“Winch me down—I’ll throw Incendiaries to distract the kraken.” For it was not a matter of if they came—it was when.
He grasped the handle and Lizzie scrambled into the basket, her pockets full of the little bombs Mr. Andrew had made—bless Mr. Andrew’s inventive mind, to make something so useful! The wind caught the basket and swung it out like a pendulum as Tigg completed the turn that brought the ship about and positioned it above the roiling water, where it was clear the four figures were doing their level best not to splash while they struggled to stay afloat.
Down—down—oh, please let her be in time—
In the clear water two hundred feet away, a shadow swam up from the depths and began to move toward the little group at a speed at which no ordinary creature should be able to travel.
“No!” Lizzie screamed, yanked the pin from a bomb, and threw it as hard as she could. Even from up here she could see the flash under the water, and the kraken halted, temporarily disoriented, its tentacles waving as it backed away. “Claude, faster!”
The line sang out as the winch got away from him and Lizzie dropped like a stone. She screamed his name to no avail … the basket hit the surface as though it were flagged pavement … and she was flung out and into the water, directly into the kraken’s path.
26
Claire tore the now useless breathing globe from her head and struggled out of the spent rucksack. “Lizzie!” she shrieked. Had she been knocked unconscious? Had she broken something in the fall?
There was no time to lose.
Claire had not grown up on the Cornish coast without learning how to swim, thanks to lessons from the second footman about which her mother had never been told. She blessed that footman now as she stroked evenly through the choppy water to where she could just see Lizzie’s sleek wet head.
“Lizzie!”
She could feel the danger rising up through the water—feel it, like electricity in her legs and arms, the way a lightning storm made the hair rise on the back of her neck. She had no clear idea how she was going to protect her girl from the kraken, only that she must try, even if she died herself in the attempt.
The basket was rising drunkenly, seawater pouring out of it as it swung in the air, as Athena came about again. With no one in it to provide a weight, getting it close enough to save one of them would be a matter of sheer luck. “Andrew!” she shouted over her shoulder. “The basket!” But he and Ian and Jake were already ahead of her, surfacing and reaching for the webbing of rope on the bottom.
She plunged face-first through a wave and came up next to Lizzie.
Who was floating on her back in a boiling calm—the kind that meant something very large was coming up from beneath.
“Lizzie—dear Lord help us—you must swim!”
Lizzie turned her head at an odd angle, her arm drawn in protectively across her chest. “It’s all right, Lady.”
“I will not let you die!”
“It’s too late for that. I did something to my arm—I can’t swim. You need to get in the basket while I distract it.”
“Distract it!” Fear and love swamped her. “You will not!” Tears fell, warming and then chilling her cheeks, as the waves’ agitation increased. “Come, I will pass my arm around your chest and—”
The first of the tentacles rose, curling and testing the air, as big around as Claire’s leg. She couldn’t help herself—she screamed.
“Lady, please—leave me—save yourself—”
“Stay away from my girl!” Claire shrieked at the monster as it rose and rose, and now she felt something wrap around her leg, and her arm, and a tentacle slid lovingly between their bodies to encircle Lizzie’s waist. “No! You can’t have her! You can’t!”
And now the creature’s head breached the surface, exposing a black, fathomless eye.
It examined its prey.
A shudder seemed to pass through its gelid flesh—a subtle movement that Claire could feel even in the extremity wrapped around her calf.
Lizzie drew in a breath. “Why, hullo,” she said.
“Lizzie—dear girl, please—try—” But Lizzie did not seem to hear Claire’s frantic, tearful whisper.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” she said to the creature, as though delighted to have met an old acquaintance on the street. “If you plan to eat me, I hope you will make it quick, and let the Lady here go.”
“Why are you talking to this creature?” Claire hissed.
“It knows me,” she said simply. “It’s the one Tigg and I rescued the night of the Minister’s ball. My, how big you’ve grown in such a short time,” she told it.
Though she was nearly in shock with fear and cold, Claire could see an opportunity when it rose up in front of her. Slowly, she reached down and detached the unresisting tentacle from her calf. It clung briefly to her hand before sliding away. The second one unwrapped itself from around her arm, and then the one arou
nd Lizzie’s waist loosened.
“So we are even, then,” Lizzie said with approval. “Thank you.” She leaned on Claire, who was treading water as best she could with one arm while she cradled Lizzie’s head against her shoulder. “You might think about leaving,” she advised it. “This is not a very healthy place for your kind. I recommend the West Indies.”
A sound that vibrated in Claire’s very bones seemed to issue from the beast, resonating through the water, and then it sank slowly beneath the waves. The foam closed over the last of the tentacles—Claire had the impression of something moving very fast and very powerfully beneath her—
—and they were alone.
*
The creature’s spell faded abruptly and pain rushed in like an explosion in Lizzie’s brain. She cried out, spots dancing around the edges of her vision.
“I’m sorry, darling,” the Lady said, half sobbing, as Jake and Captain Hollys reached down to take her. “It is going to hurt.”
It did.
Dreadfully.
Like nothing ever had before in her life.
Lizzie fell into the bottom of the basket, retching and weeping, hardly even aware of Mr. Malvern heaving the Lady in and then climbing in himself. The Lady flung herself next to her with Mr. Malvern’s shirt and wadded it up under her head. Far above, Lizzie’s dazed eyes could see the underside of Athena and the long filament of the rope as they were winched with agonizing slowness into the air.
Claude had let the basket go, and she had fallen into the water and broken her arm … or her shoulder … or something. He would likely be as sore as she by this time tomorrow from the effort of winching up five people in a wet basket.
A crack like a tree branch breaking sounded in the distance.
The Lady gasped. “Andrew—what was that?”
“Claire, keep your head down.”
“I see them,” came Jake’s grim voice. “Four degrees off Athena’s stern.”
“Are we under attack?” the Lady squeaked. “Can nothing go right in this godforsaken place?”
A Lady of Integrity Page 20