Page 85 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

A hand came round my arm above the elbow. “Move.”

I did not move.

He pulled, and I let my weight go against him. My feet stayed where they were, which is not a thing a man expects. He had to stop and get a better hold or drag me down the deck on my heels.

He swore. He was not a large man and I am not a small woman.

Harcourt turned from the rail. “What is it?”

“She won’t come, sir.”

“No,” he said. “I did not suppose she would.”

He came down the deck himself. “You gain nothing by this.”

“I have gained eleven seconds,” I said. “Would you care to make it twenty?”

Something crossed his face then, and it was not amusement. It was not the cold thing I had seen in the carriage. It was the plain irritation of a man behind his own timetable. I would not have traded it for a diamond.

He put out his hand for my arm. But I turned my shoulder into him with everything I had.

I did not shift him more than a foot. But he was standing on a moving deck with his weight on the wrong leg. He fell back a step and put his hand down on the rail to keep himself upright.

His hat went over the side. It sat on the brown water for a moment, brim up, entirely dry, and then the launch went past it and it was thirty feet astern and going up the river without him.

Both sailors lunged, one for me and one, ridiculously, for the hat. The younger man on my left let go of my elbow altogether.

Four seconds. Five.

Then there were hands on both my arms and my shoulder was wrenched round and it was over.

Harcourt straightened his coat. He did it without hurry, and he was breathing hard. “You continue to disappoint me.”

“Good.”

The two hulls came together. Lines went across and were made fast. Fenders went over. Somebody on the yacht called down a question and somebody on our deck called an answer. A short gangway came down onto our rail and was lashed. The white side of that ship stood up over us and put the whole after deck into shadow.

A sailor came down it and reached for me. I tried to step out of reach, but I was being held fast by two sets of hands.

From somewhere astern, a whistle blew. It came down flat and hard over the water and did not stop. It went on, and on, three times as long as any signal has ever been given on the river Thames, until the man on the gangway turned round with his hand still out, and every head on both vessels came up at once.

Half a mile back, coming down through the anchored shipping at a pace that had two lightermen standing up in their boats to shout at her, was a small gray launch with a bone in her teeth and black smoke lying flat off her funnel.

A man stood right forward, outside the rail, holding the stay. Nobody with the least sense would stand there. But then not every man was Steele.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

A Reckoning

The engineer did not look round at me once in the last half mile. He stood over the machinery with one hand on the regulator and his eyes fixed on the gauge. At the stern, the boatman worked the wheel, threading us through two tiers of anchored shipping at a speed that would have cost any other man his living.

“They’re putting her across,” he yelled over the noise.

“I can see it.”

“We get one pass. If I miss her, I’m four minutes coming round.”