Endless Time

by Frances Burke

  He turned to Karen. ‘I have this minute arrived from London. Lafitte’s ship lies off the coast nearby and I intend to follow Antony to warn him. I do not ask you to pardon the unpardonable. But you may believe that I shall suffer for my treachery all the rest of my life. I know now that Amanda was not meant for me, and I have forfeited Antony’s friendship, and yours …’

  Sybilla pulled the trigger.

  The explosion echoed in the room, and a puff of acrid smoke caught in Karen’s throat. She saw Charles stagger back. He looked down at the crimson flower blooming on his shirt-front, such a small flower with a black hole at its centre. Then he looked at Sybilla.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You would have warned him.’ She watched dispassionately as his knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

  Karen flung herself down beside him, already tearing at her petticoat. ‘Don’t move, Charles. I’ll put on a pressure bandage to stop the bleeding. You’ll be all right.’ Her fingers flew, fashioning pad and bandage as she spoke. ‘Tell me how to reach him, Charles.’ Her voice shook with the effort of remaining calm. She could see his eyes glazing over. He would be unconscious at any minute. She wanted to shake him. ‘For God’s sake, Charles! Tell me!’

  He stared over her shoulder, his eyes widening into a look of sick horror. Karen turned.

  Sybilla was advancing upon her, half-crouched, her lips drawn back in a wild-cat snarl. The wet tangle of hair added to her look of savagery, and her eyes were half-closed in concentration. She placed each foot carefully, stepping with feline grace. She held Karen’s own palette knife, its blade glinting in the lamplight.

  Karen sprang up, tripping on her torn petticoat, then righting herself. She started to back away. Sybilla followed, stalking her prey.

  Silence. The slurring sound of slippers on boards. The quickened breathing of hunter and hunted. A moan from the injured man as Sybilla stepped on his hand. An indrawn breath as Karen slipped in a puddle of turpentine, and as quickly recovered. A hiss as Sybilla came forward in a rush and met the cushion flung at her. But the gap was slowly closing.

  Karen had backed up to the end wall where her unused canvases were stacked. She picked up one of the smaller ones and threw it. Sybilla easily ducked aside. Then Karen was struck with an idea. Clutching several thicknesses of stretched canvas across her chest, she flung herself forward, seeking to catch the blade and entangle it. Sybilla gave way angrily.

  If she could just drive her into a corner, Karen prayed. If she could put that knife out of action, then she could disable Sybilla easily. It was months since she’d practiced, but she hadn’t forgotten how. It was a matter of balance and speed, not brawn, and Sybilla’s greater height and strength would not matter.

  Sybilla changed tactics. Whirling about, she raced for the other end of the room, picked up the model’s chair and toppled it in Karen’s path. She went over it as if chopped off at the knees, crashing into the canvases and ripping them from their frames. Whimpering from the pain in her shins, she looked up to see Sybilla coming at her, the knife angled to drive straight down. In her mind she already felt it plunge into her body, the soft skin and muscle tearing away, the blood pouring out in a sticky red tide, taking her life with it.

  Paralyzed by the vision, she left her move almost too late. Sybilla herself supplied the motivating force to get her back up on her knees, then to her feet, shaky, but erect. Sybilla, who could not resist the last chance to taunt her victim.

  Sure of her victory, she stopped when only a few feet away, waiting, enjoying Karen’s panic. ‘There is no escape. You will die very soon.’ She panted the words, and Karen realised she was waiting to get back her breath, as well as torment her. ‘How does it feel to be the rabbit trapped at the end of the burrow? Does your heart shake in your breast? Do your limbs tremble, and your mind refuse to obey your will? Tell me, little rabbit.’

  ‘I’d rather be a rabbit than a stoat.’ Karen stumbled, rather than ran, for the door, feeling as uncoordinated as a newborn foal. Her ankle turned under her and she fell, rolling swiftly aside and landing up against the table leg. She dragged herself up and behind its feeble barrier. Sybilla came in a rush, her skirts flying behind her, a fury bent on revenge.

  Karen swept frantic hands over the table top, seeking a weapon. Paints, brushes, water jar. She picked up the jar and threw it, and missed. Sybilla came on. She was very close. Behind Karen was the window and a sheer drop to the terrace; before her the knife hovered, only inches away.

  Remember your training. Remember how it was. Karen flashed back to the hot, stuffy room with its canvas mats and smell of sweat; the pain of aching muscles and the satisfying ‘thud’ as an opponent fell. She remembered why she’d spent so many hours learning self defense. It was to pull herself out of the ‘victim’ class in society, to give her back the self-esteem eroded by Humphrey and others. It was for precisely this moment.

  Clutching her head, she leaned sideways, sagging, about to fall. The knife flashed up. In a blur of speed, Karen’s arm shot out, striking Sybilla’s wrist with terrific impact, sending the blade arcing through the air and half-way across the room. Sybilla screeched and gave way. Karen lunged and grabbed her skirt, twisting it about her legs. Trapped, Sybilla grasped two handfuls of her opponent’s hair, leaving her own body exposed. Karen drove her fist hard into the solar plexus, at the same time tripping Sybilla’s feet from under her.

  Sybilla’s grip slackened. Her mouth opened wide as the breath was driven from her body. Bent double, she fell backwards, slamming into the table, bringing it down with her. Paints, brushes, paraphernalia of all kinds scattered everywhere. The easel fell with a crash, gouging splinters into the floor. Glass shattered and flew like barbed arrows to lie embedded in the wrecked canvas. Crystal shards from the broken lamp layered Sybilla’s skirts, and burning oil ignited her turpentine-soaked hair. She flared like a torch.

  Sybilla screamed horribly. Her face ringed in flame, she stagger to her feet, beating at her head with hands already blistered from the heat.

  Horror-stricken, Karen saw only the fire she dreaded so much. Thrust instantly back into the burning tower, she was once again hunted up the spiral stairs, through air thick with smoke, on feet that bled – falling, struggling erect, the skin torn from arms and elbows, her lungs aching for the blessed relief of cool fresh air – agonized with the knowledge that she and her baby were doomed.

  ‘Help me! In the name of God…!’ Sybilla’s voice strangled in a throat raw with screaming. Her clothes wrapped her in a flaming shroud as she fell forward at Karen’s feet.

  Karen could not see her. She had come to the top of the tower and thrown Chloe to safety. Now she heard the voice of the fire as it reached out for her, its dragon’s breath enveloping her, sucking the flesh from her bones. The terrible screaming in her head was the echo of her own voice as she fell into the inferno. Or was it Sybilla?

  Caught up in Jenny’s agony of the past, she scarcely heard the horrified exclamations as servants crowded through the open door. She looked with unseeing eyes at the mound of blackened flesh and scorched cloth at her feet, her mind an echoing chamber scoured empty by remembered pain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  She huddled under the piled furs, not even the tip of her nose showing, and wondered whether she would ever be warm again. Siberia couldn’t possibly be worse than this frozen landscape. She didn’t know which she liked least, the silent, enclosing forests, with only the hiss of the sled runners and the occasional crack of a bough giving way under the weight of snow, or the equally silent open spaces, humped with great boulders of granite, like gigantic snowballs.

  It was worse when the silence of the tingling frosty air was broken by the howl of wolves. She’d never heard a more frightening sound. It ran up the nerves of her spine like an electric shock, leaving her shivering in the most abject terror. She’d thought she could face anything for Antony – anything at all. But wolves! The sturdy little horses that pulled her lifted thei
r heads to listen, but the driver kept them going. It would be fatal to be caught by darkness before reaching the next staging post.

  Karen felt as if she’d been travelling for weeks, although it was just ten days since she’d left the Manor in haste, clutching a valise, a bag of golden guineas, a pistol and Charles’ intaglio ring. Poor Charles. If he did recover, and at the time of her leaving this was still in doubt, he would never be the same. Diminished in his own eyes, as well as those of the people had had betrayed, something had gone out of him.

  He had done his best to prepare her for what lay ahead, and her own cautious enquiries at the little cottage at Seven Rock Point had brought her to Jean Lafitte. He’d been willing enough to help, at sight of the money and the ring – a duplicate of the one Antony wore on his journeys as an introduction to those who would help an Englishman. It was quite a network, so she was assured; and after the past few days’ experience, she had to agree.

  Lafitte’s ship, a small brigantine with the odd name, Initiative, was an instance. She carried flags of many nations, any one of which could be run up at a moment’s notice. Lafitte also possessed an astonishing array of ship’s papers, allowing him to change allegiance as often as he wished, including a pass which requested any British vessel to render him assistance upon request. Since he also held a duplicate, suitably amended, in French and signed by Napoleon’s own Minister of War, the smuggler found no trouble at all in negotiating the waters of the Channel.

  Except for the winds. These he could not control. Fortunately for Karen’s purpose, they had blown in the right direction, from the west until off Calais, and then more from the south-west. But they were gales, harrying the little ship so that she bucketed up and down the great crests, her decks constantly swept by sheets of foaming grey water. Karen, closeted below for safety, had been sick enough to want to die.

  When they finally battled in Leith, sheltered by the calmer waters of the Firth of Forth, she’d staggered ashore more than half dead. Had her journey not been so important she doubted whether she could have returned to the ship. However, Lafitte’s cure for sea-sickness (after the event) - several glasses of brisk bottled porter - worked surprisingly well. She had little memory of going aboard and setting sail under the protection of a British gunboat escorting a fleet of small vessels through the North Sea and past a hostile Denmark to Gothenburg.

  The temperature dropped hourly. She’d found she could not stay on deck for more than a few minutes at a time, with the air so frosty on any exposed skin and chilling her lungs with each breath. Not even her heavy fur-lined cloak could keep her warm on those ice-filmed decks. She could have cursed her bulky skirts, wishing she might dress like a man, or as a woman of the twenty-first century.

  The crossing remained uneventful until ice floes southbound from the Arctic began to thicken, bumping the sides of the vessel with increasing force. She noted that Lafitte kept his ship well within the cluster of the little fleet, letting the iron-hulled gun-boat lead the way; and she saw why when at last Gothenburg rose on the horizon, a white city against a white sky on a white sea. Up ahead the water had turned to a sheet of ice, a mass of floes melded together by fallen snow and instantly frozen solid.

  Standing at the bow-rail, shivering inside her furs, Karen stared across the impenetrable ice and wondered if they dared try to break through.

  Lafitte appeared at her side, smiling at her expression. ‘There is a way, Madame. We have not come such a distance only to be defeated by nature.’ He pointed to a rowing boat moving in the distance. ‘Those are men out there with crowbars, breaking up the floes, keeping the channel free for us.’

  ‘But how can they possibly break through? It must be inches thick, at least.’

  ‘Not in the channel. They do it every day, so that the ice does not have a chance to gain a firm hold. But when a great storm comes and they cannot do the work, then the channel will be closed.’

  As they watched the gun-boat moved ahead, using its strengthened bows to crash a path through the weakened ice, working its way towards the toiling men. Lafitte excused himself to see to the delicate operation of threading his ship’s passage. But Karen stayed at the rail to watch, her discomfort forgotten in the spectacle presented by the fleet, following each other like ducklings through the slushy sea that already threatened to enclose them.

  When they had docked and it was time to leave the Initiative, and Lafitte, she could with honesty thank him for his care for her.

  His freebooter’s smile had a cynical edge. ‘You did not trust me to bring you safely to Sweden, but I have proved myself, I believe.’

  Karen admitted it. ‘I was wrong. You have been a wonderful escort, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Antony will be grateful to you.’ Never once during the journey had she allowed herself any doubts. She would reach Antony in time to warn him. She had to. The messenger Lord Edward sent to London would warn the Government that their plans were in jeopardy, but not in time to help her husband. Her journey was necessary. However, she could not deny her suspicions that Lafitte could be trusted only so far as it suited him, and he’d been shrewd enough to see this.

  ‘’Tis an honour to serve Milord Antony. He has risked his own life for mine, and I would do no less for him, and his. Once, when we were boarded by renegade Frenchmen who took us for mere freebooters, he cut down one who would have taken me from behind. And there have been other times.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not think that he will be far ahead. The winds would not have favored him when he set sail. But you must leave Gothenburg at dawn. At this time of the year there are not above six hours of daylight, and ‘tis not safe to travel after dark.’

  ‘The roads are poor?’

  ‘The roads are buried under two feet of frost. Whatever your destination, you will have to go by sled. MacGregor will arrange that. Horses are available at staging posts every ten miles, but they must be ordered in advance so that they can be fetched in by the peasants. MacGregor will also exchange your money for rix-dollars.’ He cocked his head to one side and added slyly, ‘There are other dangers for night travelers who lose their way – wolves, even bears.’

  Karen shuddered. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll follow your advice.’

  Carrying her valise, Lafitte accompanied her through the icy streets to the house of a merchant, Ian MacGregor, just one more link in Antony’s chain of British supporters.

  Plodding through ankle-deep snow, Karen’s cursory inspection showed a town that could be pretty – in summer. Just now Gothenburg seemed to be built of ice bricks. All the buildings had been white plastered so that they merged into the landscape. There wasn’t even a broken skyline because the roofs were flat and concealed. Silent, unreal, everything about the city seemed to have frozen solid, including the canal. Karen quickly lost interest in her surroundings as she felt ice water trickling in her boots. Her breath came out in cloudy puffs, like steam from a little locomotive, and the ground seemed to strike up beneath her skirts through her very inadequate underwear. All she wanted was to get indoors to a fire.

  As soon as he’d seen her inside MacGregor’s house, Lafitte returned to extract his ship from the ice and head for home. Karen felt a little forlorn, standing in the hall, rubbing her chilled fingers and waiting for her host. She wished Lafitte had waited to introduce her. But the ring was her pass-key, and the Scotsman, a somewhat dour merchant of grandfatherly years, seemed kind enough. He took her to the drawing room and introduced her to his plump, motherly little wife, provided her with a cup of very weak tea. This was followed by a huge dinner in the company of his noisy extended family and, later, in the privacy of his book-room, news of Antony and his ultimate destination.

  It seemed that he had passed through the city no more than twenty-four hours earlier on the way to his rendezvous outside of Orebro, about twenty-five miles distant.

  ‘Only twenty-five miles!’

  MacGregor’s jaw quivered in what might have been a grin. ‘ The Swedish mile is verra long, ma’am.
More than six times the length of the English measurement. Ye should make the journey within three to four days, if the Lord sends good weather. I ha’ procured a passport from the Provincial Governor, without which ye cann’a travel, nor so much as hire staging horses; and since there are no public vehicles such as in England, I shall provide one for ye.’

  He would not let her express her gratitude. However, his carefully correct manner loosened a little, and she began to see him not just as the plain-dealing merchant he was, but also the schoolboy yearning to be involved in adventure and high romance. As he spoke it became clear that, to him, helping Antony was a way of satisfying that yearning.

  When questioned regarding the possibility of pursuit, he grew thoughtful. Nae, he had not come upon any damned Frenchies daring to show their faces in his city. Mind, there had been a party of somewhat inquisitive Englishmen at the inn where he had dined this past day. They also had been going north, to Stockholm, on government matters.

  Of what like was there men? Well now, their spokesman appeared a gentleman of address, well versed in the ties between his country and Sweden. He had actually claimed kinship with the Earl of Roth, and let fall the information that his lordship’s son was visiting the Swedish Court as a representative of the British Crown.

  Karen’s strangled cry brought him up short.

  ‘Why, ma’am, ‘tis no great matter. I dinna blather his lordship’s affairs about with every comer. This man had no real knowledge of your husband’s plans. Nor did he offer to show the credentials that every member of our band must carry.’ From the fob at his waist he detached a small flat locket of gold, opening it to display a wax seal imprinted with the mark of the intaglio ring, the head of a man.

  Karen looked down at the ring she wore on her thumb. A perfect match. The fine ruby was cared with the head of Perseus, one of a pair once owned by the great Lorenzo de Medici, a noted connoisseur of such artworks.