Читать книгу Along the Infinite Sea: Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 18

On the launch, I took pity on the man and gave him the bottle of gin, while I steered us around the tip of the Cap d’Antibes and west toward Cannes, where his yacht was apparently moored. He took a grateful swig and tilted his head to the stars. The lantern sat at the bottom of the boat, so as not to be visible from shore.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Stop. You’re not flirting with me, please. You came three millimeters away from death just now.” The draft was cool and salty; it stung my cheeks, or maybe I was only blushing.

“No, I am not flirting. But you are beautiful. A statement of fact.”

I peered into the dark sea, seeking out the distant harbor lights, smaller than stars on the horizon. The water was calm tonight, only a hint of chop. As if God himself were watching over this man.

“Am I allowed to ask your name?” I said.

He hesitated. “Stefan.”

“Stefan. Is that your real name?”

“If you call me Stefan, Mademoiselle, I will answer you.”

“I see. And what sort of trouble gets a nice man shot in the middle of a night like this, so he can’t see a doctor onshore? Argument at the casino? Is the other man perhaps dead?”

“No, it was not an argument in the casino.”

He tilted the bottle back to his lips. I thought, I must keep him talking. He has to keep talking, to stay conscious. “And the other man?”

“Hmm. Do you really wish to know this, Mademoiselle?”

“Oh, priceless. I’m harboring a criminal fugitive.”

“Do not worry about that. You will be handsomely rewarded.”

“I don’t want to be rewarded. I want you to live.”

He didn’t reply, and I glanced back to make sure he hadn’t fainted. I wouldn’t have blamed him, lighter as he was of a pint or two of good red blood. But his eyes were open, each one containing a slim gold reflection of the lantern, and they were trained on me with an expression of profound … something.

I was about to ask him another question, but he spoke first.

“Where did you learn to treat a wound from a gun, Mademoiselle de Créouville?”

“I’ve never even seen a wound from a gun. But the sisters ran a charity hospital, and the men from the village got in regular brawls. Sometimes with knives.”

“The sisters? You are a nun?”

“No. I was at a convent school. I’ve only just escaped. Anyway, they made us all work in the charity hospital, because of Christ tending the feet of the poor. Hold on!” We hit a series of brisk chops, the wake of some unseen vessel plowing through the night sea nearby. Stefan grunted, and when the water calmed and I could relax my attention to the wheel, I glanced back again to see that his face was quite pale.

He spoke, however, without inflection. “You have a knack for it, I think. You did not scream at the blood, as most girls would. As I think most men might.”

“I have a brother. I’ve seen blood before.”

“Ah, the dashing mademoiselle. You tend wounds. You drive a boat fearlessly through the dark. What sort of sister is this for my friend Créouville? He said nothing about you before.”

“He has successfully ignored me for the past half decade, since we were sent back to France after our mother died.”

“I am sorry to hear about this.”

I tightened my hands on the wheel and stared ahead. The pinpricks were growing larger now, more recognizably human. I hardly ever ventured into Cannes, and certainly not by myself, but I’d passed the harbor enough to know its geography. “Where is your ship moored?” I asked.

He muttered something, and I looked back over my shoulder. His eyes were half closed, his back slumped.

“Stefan!” I said sharply.

He made a rolling motion and braced his hand on the side of the launch. His head snapped up. “So sorry. You were saying?”

I couldn’t leave the wheel; I couldn’t check his pulse, his skin, the state of his wound. A sliver of panic penetrated my chest: the unreality of this moment, of the warm salt wind on my face, of the starlight and the man bleeding in the stern of my father’s old wooden launch. Half an hour ago, I had been lying on a garden wall. “Stefan, you’ve got to concentrate,” I said, but I really meant myself. Annabelle, you’ve got to concentrate. “Stefan. Listen to me. You’ve got to stay awake.”

His gaze came to a stop on mine. “Yes. Right you are.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I am bloody miserable, Mademoiselle. My leg hurts like the devil and my head is a little sick. But at least I am bloody miserable with you.”

I faced the water again and turned up the throttle. “Very good. You’re flirting again, that’s a good sign. Now, tell me. Where is your ship moored? This side of the harbor, or the other?”

“Not the harbor. The Île Sainte-Marguerite. The Plateau du Milieu, on the south side, between the islands.”

I looked to the left, where a few lights clustered atop the thin line between black water and blacker sky. There wasn’t much on Sainte-Marguerite, only forest and the old Fort Royal. But a ship moored in the protected channel between Sainte-Marguerite and the Île Saint-Honorat—and many did moor there; it was a popular spot in the summer—would not be visible from the mainland.

“Hold on,” I said, and I began a sweeping turn to the left, to round the eastern point of the island. The launch angled obediently, and Stefan caught himself on the edge. The lantern slid across the deck. He stuck out his foot to stop its progress just as the boat hit a chop and heeled. Stefan swore.

“All right?” I said.

“Yes, damn it.”

I could tell from the bite in his words—or rather the lack of bite, the dissonance of the words themselves from the tone in which he said them—that he was slipping again, that he was fighting the black curtain. We had to reach this ship of his, the faster the better, and yet the faster we went the harder we hit the current. And I could not see properly. I was guided only by the pinprick lights and my own instinct for this stretch of coast.

“Just hurry,” said Stefan, blurry now, and I curled around the point and straightened out, so that the Plateau de Milieu lay before me, studded with perhaps a dozen boats tugging softly at their moorings. I glanced back at Stefan to see how he had weathered the turn.

“The western end,” he told me, gripping the side of the boat hard with his left hand while his right held the wadded-up white shirt against his wound. Someone had sacrificed his dinner jacket over Stefan’s shoulders, to protect that bare and bloody chest from the salt draft and the possibility of shock, and I thought I saw a few dark specks on the sleek white wool. But that was always the problem about blood. It traveled easily, like a germ, infecting its surroundings with messy promiscuity. I turned to face the sleeping vessels ahead, an impossible obstacle course of boats and mooring lines, and I thought, We have got to get that tourniquet off soon, or they will have to remove the leg.

But at least I could see a little better now, in the glow of the boat lights, and I pushed the throttle higher. The old engine opened its throat and roared. A curse floated out across the water behind us, as I zigzagged delicately around the mooring lines.

“I see you are an expert,” said Stefan. “This is reassuring.”

“Which one is yours?”

“You can’t see it yet. Just a moment.” We rounded another boat, a pretty sloop of perhaps fifty feet, and the rest of the passage opened out before us, nearly empty. Stefan said, with effort: “To the right, the last one.”

“What, the great big one?” I pointed.

“Yes, Mademoiselle. The great big one.”

I opened the throttle as far as it could go. We skipped across the water like a smooth, round stone, like when Charles and I were children and left to ourselves, and we would take the boat as fast as it could go and scream with joy in the briny wind, because when you were a child you didn’t know that boats sometimes crashed and people sometimes drowned. That vital young men were shot and sometimes bled to death.

Stefan’s yacht rose up rapidly before us, lit by a series of lights along the bow and the glow of a few portholes. It was long and elegant, a sweet beauty of a ship. The sides were painted black as far as the final row of portholes, where the white took over, like a wide neat collar around the rim, like a nun’s wimple. I saw the name Isolde painted on the bow. “Ahoy!” I called out, when we were fifty feet away. “Isolde ahoy!”

“They are likely asleep,” said Stefan.

I pulled back the throttle and brought the boat around. We bobbed on the water, sawing in our own wake, while I rummaged in the compartment under the wheel and brought out a small revolver.

“God in heaven,” said Stefan.

“I hope it’s loaded,” I said, and I pointed the barrel out to sea and fired.

The sound echoed off the water and the metal side of the boat. A light flashed on in one of the portholes, and a voice called out something outraged in German.

I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Isolde ahoy!”

“Ja, ja!”

“I have your owner! I have—oh, damn.”

The boat pitched. I grabbed the wheel. Behind me, Stefan was moving, and I hissed at him to sit down, he was going to kill himself.

But he ignored me and waved the bloodstained white shirt above his head. He brought the other hand to his mouth and yelled out a few choice German words, words I didn’t understand but comprehended perfectly, and then he crashed back down in his seat as if the final drops of life had been wrung out of him.

“Stefan!” I exclaimed. The boat was driving against the side of the ship; I steered frantically and let out the throttle a notch.

A figure appeared at the railing above, and an instant later a rope ladder unfurled down the curving side of the ship. I glanced at the slumping Stefan, whose eyes were closed, whose knee rested in a puddle of dark blood, and then back at the impossible swinging ladder, and I yelled frantically upward that someone had better get down here on the fucking double, because Stefan was about to die.