Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [323]
‘If it was in England, now,’ said Fergie, emerging with streaming moustache beside Jerott, ‘ye’d be entitled tae the Admiral’s profits: waifs, flotsam, lagan and deodands, assuming in the first place that the court was willing to accept your definition of a watermill as a seaworthy object. There’s Archie. They’re all past. We can start on the road back, I should think. We’ll need to, to get to the horses while it’s still dark.… Is that Francis?’
‘No, it’s Trembling Sancho,’ said Danny, climbing up the bank. ‘It would be a bloody funny death, being drowned in a watermill. Where is Suo Magnifico?’
‘In the first mill,’ Jerott said. ‘He wanted to take it round the last bend and then set it in line for the bridge. You can see the lights of the bridge if you come up the slope a bit.’
This was true. Straining their eyes from the bowels of the bushes they watched the mill they had just left, a black shape on the slate of the river, give a lurch as someone jumped from it. In a moment, they could see it was Plummer. Guthrie’s grey head was already in midstream, sleek as an otter. Jerott, with the others, walked noiselessly along the bank to greet them. Danny said, ‘If that’s supposed to be a straight line for the bridge, then he hasn’t had much practice in steering watermills. Ours is better placed than his.’
‘More of us to set it on its course,’ Guthrie said. ‘When was he going to jump?’
Lancelot Plummer emerged from the water, hawked, and stood up, his face barred with melted black paint. ‘After he’s set the fuse for the gunpowder,’ he said. ‘Any minute now, I should think.’
‘What?’ said Jerott.
‘He’s madder than the Tsar,’ said Plummer cheerfully. ‘He swam out with the powder on his head, tied under his chin with kissing strings. His phrase, not mine. The idea was that any hackbut shots were likely to be aimed at the second mill, not the one that got away first. He’ll set the fuse when he gets squarely in sight of the bridge and then duck into the river. I left him with the slowmatch in his hand, all lit and ready.’
‘The bloody fool,’ said Guthrie angrily. ‘Hence he wanted to have the first mill to himself. I don’t suppose he is steering it. How could he steer it, if he’s got the match already lit …’
He stopped speaking suddenly. In the dark his eyes met and found Jerott’s. Then he said, ‘If he was going to set the powder off, he should have done it by now. Look how close he is to the bridge.’
Jerott Blyth said something under his breath that no one could hear. Then to Lancelot Plummer he said, very clearly, ‘Tell me something. Did he ask you to light the match?’
‘Yes,’ said Lancelot, surprised. ‘I handed it up to him in the mill. He needed a hand to get aboard because he had to keep the gunpowder dry. Then I came back to you. You remember.’ He looked round at them all. ‘What is it?’
Guthrie said, ‘He needed a hand to get aboard because he was blind. Jerott. Jerott, stop. There is nothing you can do.’
*
The Authie was lower than normal, and the current therefore was a busy one, spinning the mills round and round as well as jarring and tilting them.
It needed a strong stomach to handle the buffeting, and a strong head to keep thinking straight in spite of it. To the six men in the second mill, it had been an experience they were extremely glad to abandon. To the man alone in the first, braced against heaving wood with a burning slow match in his hand, it was a matter of assembling all the senses he had left, in the absence of the vital one just denied him.
Half-way through the work of the evening, the headache had begun to beat through all his senses, tightening into the dizzying whiteness of pain which was part of the most grandiloquent kind of seizure. It had been a gamble with providence, all through the highly satisfactory byplay in the village. The bark of the firing, when even the sound of a cough was hard to put up with, had been the signal for the scintillating distortion, and then the blurring