The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [61]
It was then that the idea hit me, a mad flash of derring-do that I immediately squelched, shocked at myself. This isn’t a game, Russell, I told myself in disgust. Do what you were told, then go back to the caravan.
But the thought had lodged itself like a thorn, and I could not help picking at it while I squatted motionless and attentive in the tree, my eyes open and my mind worrying at this crazy thought, examining it, turning it around, pushing it away, finding it persistent and unwilling to be discarded.
What if I did not wait for Holmes to effect the rescue tomorrow?
Madness. To take a child’s life into my own absurdly inexperienced hands—I shook my head as if to discourage an irritating fly and settled myself more firmly into my post of observer. My assigned post. My vi-tal and agreed-to post. The chorus of voices was growing, soaring in almost-audible song, outside the village now and starting up the road.
In a minute now the men inside would hear...I shifted, to keep a closer eye on the lit room.
In a moment the niggling idea had returned, stronger, surer. How else could we do it, if not through the dark window with a distraction out in front? There was no point in a direct show of force; a hostage with a gun to her head is even more a hostage than when in a quiet room in bed. And how could Holmes hope to reach her but across these narrow branches? Holmes, approaching sixty and becoming just the least bit hesitant about risking his bones, would have to balance his greater weight and height on the same branch—and in the few days left us before the deadline (How terribly appropriate that word sounded.), while the five men inside were becoming increasingly wrought up, to say nothing of being on their guards for a second un-usual happenstance such as the one that was fast approaching on the road.
Madness. Lunacy. I couldn’t possibly carry it off, couldn’t even carry her off, out the window, across the branch, down the tree and away, not if she fought me, which she would. Even a “self-contained, intelligent” child might well panic at being snatched from her bed by a strange woman with lampblack smeared on her face and carried off a second time into the night.
My mind veered wildly between obedient caution and reckless in-sanity, between a sensible preparation for future action and the hard knowledge that we might never have the chance to use it, between carrying out Holmes’ direct orders and seizing what even common sense told me might be the only chance offered us, and I wished to God that Holmes might miraculously appear beneath my feet and take the choice from me.
They were Christmas carols, I decided with the portion of my mind that was not paralysed with indecision. Somehow me Da’ had raised a drunken mob in this tiny place, had summoned thick voices in song, and was driving them down the lane with the goad of his mad fiddle— a magnificent Welsh chorus, singing Christmas carols, in English, in an infinitesimal Welsh village, on a warm August night. Suddenly nothing seemed impossible, and as if the thought had loosed the house from stasis there was movement within.
A shadow moved across the slice of yellow light before me. I hung precariously out and was rewarded by the sight of a man’s back. He was in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat, with a dark knitted cap that covered his head down to his wide shoulders, and he was standing at the open door next to the head of Jessica’s bed. He leant out into the hallway, paused (Was that a man’s voice, shouting something unintelligible above the growing tumult?), opened the door wider, and went through it.
Had it not been for the vision of the broad back going through the door, I should never have done it, never have moved towards the dark window. Even as I moved, even as I looped the silk rope over an over-head branch with muscles and mind freed so blessedly (insanely!) from indecision, a small part still offered to be sensible, made a bargain with the fates that were controlling this night that, if the window did not