“Percy!” I exclaimed, as Bill clambered last over the stile. “You’re sending us to stay with Sir Percy Pelham!”
The words had scarcely escaped my lips when Sir Perceval Pelham confirmed my guess by climbing out of the helicopter. Sir Percy and Bill’s father were old friends, and Bill had known Sir Percy all his life. He was a huge man, tall and broad-shouldered rather than fat, and although he was in his late fifties, his boundless joie de vivre made him seem years younger. His voice boomed, his step bounced, and his passion for big boys’ toys made him extremely popular with the twins. In many ways he was their contemporary.
He was also unspeakably wealthy. Sir Percy had inherited a packet from his father, and he’d multiplied it a hundredfold through clever investments in oil, pharmaceuticals, and various engineering projects all over the world. If anyone could provide my sons and me with first-class protection while Bill was in London, it would be Sir Percy.
The boys let out joyful whoops as the big man approached the stile, pushing his fluffy white hair back from his ruddy forehead and grinning from ear to ear. His copilot, a self-effacing, slender young man named Atkinson, helped Ivan Anton’s men load our suitcases into the cargo hold, then came forward to say hello.
“Hullo, Sir Percy! Hullo, Atkinson!” the twins called. “Will you be our pilot, Sir Percy? Can we ride up front with you?”
“You’ll ride in the back with me,” I stated firmly, and gave Sir Percy a meaningful stare.
“Of course I’ll fly the chopper, chaps,” he boomed. “Get the best man for the job, I always say. And you’ll most certainly ride in the back. Need you to navigate. Vital job, you know. Wouldn’t want to come down in the great Namibian Desert by accident, would we?” He squatted and put a hand on each twin’s shoulder. “Love to pop in on the ponies and have a tramp round your woods, old things, but time’s pressing. Be good fellows, now, and give your papa a proper farewell.”
I had to press my hand to my mouth to keep my chin from trembling when Bill knelt to say good-bye to the twins. I could hear the forced cheerfulness in his voice as he told them he’d see them again very soon, and the boys seemed to hear it, too.
“Don’t be scared, Daddy,” said Rob, patting his father’s back consolingly. “Sir Percy will look after us.”
Will nodded his agreement. “If the bad man comes near us, Sir Percy will
eat
him.”
“With mustard and vinegar,” Sir Percy declared. “Run along, now, chaps. Atkinson will get you settled in your seats.” He waited until the twins were some distance away, then addressed Bill with unaccustomed sobriety. “Out of the mouths of babes, eh? They’re right, you know. You’ve nothing to worry about. Your family’s mine for the duration. Defend ’em with my life, if need be.”
“I know you will, Percy.” Bill gripped the big man’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it. I’ve always wanted to whisk a beautiful woman north of the border. We won’t, alas, have time to stop at Gretna Green, which is just as well, since the woman in question is already quite happily married.” Sir Percy winked at me, grabbed my carry-on bag, and headed for the helicopter.
“Gretna Green,” I said reflectively. “Is Percy taking us to Scotland?”
“My lips are sealed,” said Bill.
We turned to face each other. Bill looked suddenly awkward, as if he didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Well . . .” he began.
“Look,” I broke in hurriedly, “I know what we said last night about not clinging to each other like a pair of needy idiots when it came time to say good-bye, but I don’t think it would hurt a thing if we clung like a husband and wife who are fairly fond of each other, do you? Just for a minute?”
“Just for a minute,” said Bill, and pulled me into his arms.
The minute lasted a bit longer than the regulation sixty seconds, and I left Bill’s shirtfront slightly damper than it had been, but only slightly. After a quick kiss and a wobbly smile, I turned and ran for the helicopter, afraid that if I slowed down, I’d break down.
Sir Percy welcomed me aboard, tucked my jacket into an overhead compartment, and seated me across the aisle from the twins, who were already in shirtsleeves, strapped in their seats, and raring to go. Sir Percy had thoughtfully provided them with child-size headsets so they could communicate with him and Atkinson during the flight. He helped me to don a grown-up set and showed me how to use it, then gave me a double thumbs-up and disappeared into the cockpit.
The entire cabin vibrated when the rotors began to turn, and my stomach plummeted when we shot straight up into the air. I gripped the armrests and took several deliberate breaths, willing my breakfast to stay put, while I glued my nose to the window to watch Bill until we swooped north and he vanished, hidden by the high hedge.
Will and Rob, who’d thoroughly enjoyed our rapid ascent, began calling out familiar sights as we swept over them: Anscombe Manor, the Pym sisters’ house, St. George’s Church, Hodge Farm. Each place-name brought a neighbor’s face to mind, and a host of memories. I thought of how snugly my family fit into the tight-knit tapestry of everyday life in our tiny English village, and my anger at Abaddon surged. With a few malicious keystrokes, he’d robbed us of our home, our village, our place in the world. Using fear as a weapon, he’d torn our family apart and turned us into fleeing refugees. If I ever got my hands on him, I told myself, I wouldn’t need a flamethrower. My rage alone would burn him to a crisp.
“Snacks in the overhead for anyone who’s peckish!” Sir Percy’s voice roared in my headset. “Special treats for junior airmen!”
I’d lost all interest in food, but the boys were perpetually hungry, so I retrieved two bright red plastic boxes from the overhead compartment. I was afraid that the special treats would be sugary concoctions guaranteed to send my overexcited five-year-olds into orbit, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the boxes contained bananas, nuts, carrot sticks, peanut butter crackers, and small bottles of juice. The special treats turned out to be inedible: two pairs of small but powerful binoculars, two large boxes of crayons, and two sketch pads. The sight of the crayons warmed my heart. Sir Percy might be a busy man, with many irons in many fires, but he’d somehow managed to remember the twins’ love of drawing.
I left the boys happily munching, peering, and coloring, and returned to my seat to watch the countryside slide by beneath us. I knew that Sir Percy owned at least two estates in Scotland and tried for a while to figure out which one he was taking us to, but the helicopter changed directions so often that I soon gave up. It was as if Sir Percy were taking evasive action in order to elude our enemy. I wondered if the maneuvers were necessary—a chilling thought—or if they were just Sir Percy’s idea of fun.
“Percy?” I said, pushing a button that I hoped would exclude the twins from our conversation.
“At your service,” Sir Percy boomed back.
“Can the boys hear us?” I asked.
“Not if they’re wearing their headphones,” he replied. “Unless you start shouting, of course, and even then you’d need the lungs of an opera singer to get through to them. The headsets are designed to keep noise to a minimum.What’s on your mind, old thing?”
“Are we being followed? By something other than a flock of geese?” I added hastily, to preempt a humorous reply.
“Not as far as I can tell,” said Sir Percy, “but one never knows. Better safe than sorry, I always say.”
I doubted that he’d ever said such a thing in his life. The Percy Pelham
I
knew drove fast cars, flew jets, scaled mountains, and raced yachts on stormy seas. He’d almost always rather be sorry than safe, but it was possible that he’d curbed his addiction to risk-taking for our sakes.
“How soon will we land?” I asked.
“Impatient, are we?” Sir Percy returned.
“Not impatient,” I said, “just curious. Bill wouldn’t tell me where we’re going because he was afraid I’d tell someone else, but there’s no one to tell up here, so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you told me. Go ahead, Percy, spill the beans.”
“Not for a thousand gold sovereigns,” he responded stoutly. “It would spoil the surprise. You like surprises, don’t you, Lori?”
“Not as much as I used to,” I said. “I’ve had a few too many of them in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Courage, my dear,” Sir Percy said bracingly. “You’ve one hundred and twenty channels of music and other entertainment to choose from. Avail yourself of them. It’ll do you good to relax.”
“If you insist,” I said, and after checking in with the boys, who were absorbed in making highly detailed drawings of fantastic helicopters, I followed Sir Percy’s advice. Although it felt a bit like fiddling while Rome burned, I pushed buttons on the headset controls until I heard an actor reading
The Wind in the Willows,
settled back in my capacious seat, and confounded my own prediction by falling instantaneously into a deep and mercifully untroubled sleep.
Four
W
hen I awoke, we were flying low over the sea. It had to be the sea, because even the largest lakes in the United Kingdom didn’t stretch out to the horizon in endless, rolling swells, but whether it was the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean, I couldn’t tell.
A glance at my wristwatch told me that I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. Will and Rob, who were now engaged in drawing fantastic whales, sharks, and octopi, looked up from their sketch pads and bobbed their heads cheerfully at me. I switched my headset back to intercom mode—cutting off, with some regret, a dramatic recitation of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”—and asked them if Sir Percy had said anything about our destination while I slept, but Percy broke in before they could reply.
“Lori, Lori, Lori,” he said sorrowfully. “Pumping your sons for information? For shame. For no good purpose, either. I promised your dear husband that I’d keep our destination secret, and secret it shall remain. For a few minutes longer, at any rate.”
“A few minutes,” I echoed thoughtfully. It was the closest thing to a hint I’d heard since he’d mentioned Gretna Green, though admittedly it wasn’t a very helpful one. If we were only a few minutes from our destination, it had to be on a coast, but since Great Britain was an island, there were a lot of coasts to choose from. Sighing, I peered through the window and tried once more to figure out where Sir Percy was taking us.
The sky was a pale, misty blue, but the sea was dazzling, a wrinkled sheet of aquamarine slashed with silver shards of sunlight. I spotted a small fishing boat floating among the glittering waves below us and an enormous oil tanker far out at sea, plowing steadily onward. It wasn’t until Will shouted “Land, ho!” that I looked away from the tanker and saw that we were approaching a small island.
“Erinskil,” Sir Percy announced through the headphones. “The jewel of the Scottish isles and my little home-away-from-home. Yours, too, until it’s time for you to leave.”
“The Scottish isles!” I exclaimed. “How wonderful!”
“I’m glad you approve,” said Sir Percy.
If I craned my neck to look through the windows on the twins’ side of the cabin, I could see a series of larger islands in the distance, but it was difficult to tell how far they were from Erinskil. If I squinted, I could just make out an even larger body of land beyond the islands.
“Is the west coast of Scotland off there to our right?” I asked.
“It is,” Sir Percy answered, and continued in the singsong voice of a well-practiced tour guide, “the golden isle of Erinskil lies forty miles west of the Scottish mainland, thirty-two miles from the nearest neighboring island. Fewer than two hundred souls live on Erinskil, spread comfortably over twenty square miles of occasionally arable land. The ferry visits our pleasant shores once a week, but tourists seldom come to call, thanks to our somewhat primitive landing facilities. An ideal retreat for those seeking peace and privacy, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would,” I agreed wholeheartedly. Sir Percy’s solution to our security problem was, to my mind, nothing short of masterful. I’d sleep much better while Abaddon was on the loose, knowing that the twins and I were protected by such a formidable moat.
“Shall I give you an aerial tour?” Sir Percy inquired.
“Yes, please,” I said eagerly. I’d been to a good many places in Great Britain, both before and after I’d chosen to live there. I’d traveled from Lands End to John o’ Groats, from Wookey Hole’s depths to Mount Snowdon’s summit, but I’d never set sail for the fabled Western Isles of Scotland. Although I would have preferred to visit them under less stressful circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling a tingle of excitement at the prospect of finally experiencing island life firsthand.
“Look, Mummy!” Rob’s voice piped in my headphones. “Windmills!”
Erinskil was longer than it was wide, like an oval platter with a badly chipped rim, pointing north. As we flew over its southwestern tip, I saw a forest of windmills planted on a towering headland. They were modern windmills with long, graceful propellers clearly designed to generate power, but their bases were surprisingly stumpy.
“Why are the windmills so short?” I asked Sir Percy.
“Because they’re perched atop three-hundred-foot cliffs,” he replied, “in a spot where the wind hasn’t stopped blowing since Adam first met Eve. If they were taller, the winter gales would knock ’em over. It’d be dashed inconvenient to be without electricity from September through March, don’t you think?”
“Winter lasts from September through March up here?” I said incredulously.
“We’re not in the Bahamas, Lori,” Sir Percy pointed out. “Even now, in the latter days of April, Erinskil’s no place for the fainthearted.”
“I guess not,” I conceded, and continued to peer downward while Sir Percy flew in a series of S curves that allowed us to view the island from coast to coast.
Erinskil’s long central valley was surrounded by a necklace of steep hills. Along the coasts, foaming waves unfurled on white-sand beaches or crashed with a flourish against tall, craggy cliffs. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds rose in swirling clouds from the cliffs as we passed, their beaks open nearly as wide as their wings as they objected raucously to our intrusion.