Twisted Root - Anne Perry [163]
Gower gestured toward the river. “Steps!” he shouted, bending a moment and gasping to catch his breath. He gestured with a wild swing of his arm. Then he straightened up and began running again, a couple of strides ahead of Pitt.
Pitt could see a ferry coming toward the shore, the boatman pulling easily at the oars. He would get to the steps a moment or two after Wrexham—in fact Pitt and Gower would corner him nicely. Perhaps they could get the ferry to take them up to the Pool of London. He ached to sit down even for that short while.
Wrexham reached the steps and ran down them, disappearing as if he had slipped into a hole. Pitt felt an upsurge of victory. The ferry was still twenty yards from the spot where the steps would meet the water.
Gower let out a yell of triumph, waving his hand high.
They reached the top of the steps just as the ferry pulled away, Wrexham sitting in the stern. They were close enough to see the smile on his face as he half swiveled on the seat to gaze at them. Then he faced forward, speaking to the ferryman and pointing to the farther shore.
Pitt raced down the steps. His feet slithered on the wet stones. He waved his arms at the other ferry, the one they had seen. “Here! Hurry!” he shouted.
Gower shouted also, his voice high and desperate.
The ferryman increased his speed, throwing his full weight behind his oars, and in a matter of seconds had swung around next to the pier.
“Get in, gents,” he said cheerfully. “Where to?”
“After that boat there,” Gower gasped, choking on his own breath and pointing to the other ferry. “An extra half crown in it for you if you catch up with him before he gets up Horseferry Stairs.”
Pitt landed in the boat behind him and immediately sat down so they could get under way. “He’s not going to Horseferry,” he pointed out. “He’s going straight across. Look!”
“Lavender Dock?” Gower scowled, sitting in the seat beside Pitt.
“What the hell for?”
“Shortest way across,” Pitt replied. “Get up to Rotherhithe Street and away.”
“Where to?”
“Nearest train station, probably. Or he might double back. Best place to get lost is among other people.”
They were pulling well away from the dock now and slowly catching up with the other ferry.
There were fewer ships moored here, and they could make their way almost straight across. A string of barges was still fifty yards downstream, moving slowly against the tide. The wind off the water was colder. Without thinking what he was doing, Pitt hunched up and pulled his collar higher around his neck. It seemed like hours since he and Gower had burst into the brickyard and seen Wrexham crouched over West’s blood-soaked body, but it was probably little more than ninety minutes. Their source of information about whatever plot West had known of was gone with his death.
He thought back to his last interview with Narraway, sitting in the office with the hot sunlight streaming through the window onto the piles of books and papers on the desk. Narraway’s face had been intensely serious under its graying mane of hair, his eyes almost black. He had spoken of the gravity of the situation, the rise of the passion to reform Europe’s old imperialism, violently if necessary. It was no longer a matter of a few sticks of dynamite, an assassination here and there. Rather, there were whispers of full governments overthrown by force.
“Some things need changing,” Narraway had said with a wry bitterness. “No one but a fool would deny that there is injustice. But this would result in anarchy. God alone knows how wide this spreads, at least as far as France, Germany, and Italy, and by the sounds of it here in England as well.”
Pitt had stared at him, seeing a sadness in the man he had never before imagined.
“This is a different breed, Pitt, and the tide of victory is with them now. But the violence . . .” Narraway had shaken his head, as if awakening himself. “We don’t change that way in Britain, we evolve slowly.