“It’s a good cupper, lass,” said the man with a grin. “Put my grog ration in it for you.”
“Thank you so much,” she said, taking another wonderful swallow as he headed back up on deck.
Her head felt thick and frozen as she looked down absently at her hands, which were still wrapped around the warm china mug. Blood was dripping from the rim onto the woolen blanket.
Removing her right hand from the mug, she saw that her fingers and palm were badly shredded from clutching the splintered framework of the wrecked fuselage. She heard the compartment door bang open, and Sam came back in carrying a handful of gauze bandages and a tube of sulfa ointment. She couldn’t help smiling up at him.
“You did well, Liza,” he said, unwrapping a gauze bandage.
“I tried, Sam,” she said.
“They think Wainwright is going to make it,” he said, squeezing some ointment onto the palm and fingers of her right hand.
“Thank God,” said Liza.
“You saved his life…. You’ve saved a hell of a lot of lives,” said Taggart, gently wrapping the bandages over the raw areas and taping them into place.
The warm cabin smelled strongly of the captain’s aromatic pipe tobacco. It reminded her of the blend her father had often smoked in his book-lined study. It smelled like home.
“Things got a little complicated at the end, Sam,” she said as he started on her other hand.
“Yeah, I figured,” he said. “What happened to Ainsley?”
The last image of him trying to swim away from her on his prosthetic leg flickered in her mind, and she felt a sudden stab of sorrow.
“He didn’t make it,” she said, keeping her voice steady as Taggart finished taping the second dressing. Dropping the extra bandages on the captain’s chart table, he came around behind her and began to massage her aching shoulders through the blanket. She felt the soreness and pain slowly ebbing away.
“You have found another important calling,” said Liza gratefully.
“I also have a lot of questions,” said Taggart.
“I think I have most of the answers,” she said.
Liza was about to tell him what had happened to Joss and J.P. when he said, “Those deaths can wait until we’re ashore. Did you see Ainsley drown?”
As was so often the case, he had divined what she was going to say.
“I’ll tell the Royal Navy to call off its search if you saw him die,” he said.
She could still hear Nicholas nonchalantly humming the song as he struggled to stay afloat long enough to disappear from her view. He had not wanted her to see him die.
“He drowned,” she said, feeling a final shiver of regret.
“Good,” he came right back.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Nicholas once more. He was standing in the snow outside the Savoy on the first night they had dinner together. The first night they had danced to Glenn Miller in the little piano bar upstairs.
“Liza?” Taggart said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yes?”
“Did you care for him?”
“Do you mean did I love him?” she asked.
He nodded.
The bulkhead next to her shoulder heeled over as the boat changed course before speeding up again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He nodded again.
“You shouldn’t have tried to take him and that other bastard alone,” he said. “I would never have forgiven myself if you hadn’t made it through.”
“I think it’s time you began forgiving yourself for a lot of things,” said Liza.
“Yeah … maybe,” he said. “Someday.”
“What happens to us now?” she asked, as he eased her head back down to the pillows.
“I don’t know,” he said. “When we tell them what happened, the King will probably call his security chief, Colonel Gaines, and he will call the King’s retainer in the House of Lords, and he will call Churchill, and when they’re all through, Lord Nicholas Ainsley will have died a hero’s death fighting against the Axis forces of evil.”
“And after that?”
“They will hopefully have something useful for us to do.”
“Yes,” she said. “I hope so.”
“Try to get some rest now,” he said, turning out the light over her bunk.
After he left her, Liza lay in the darkness in a state of languorous torpor, wrapped tightly in the cocoon of the warm woolen blankets. She fell asleep to the steady, reassuring drone of the boat’s powerful engines.
She was back in the sea again, although it was no longer the violent maelstrom in which she had fought to survive. She had left the raging surface behind and was descending through its dark, tranquil depths, falling deeper and deeper into the silent abyss. On and on she slid into the unfathomable void. Time and space had long ceased to have meaning when her feet finally touched the soft, yielding ocean floor.
Making a slow, easy pirouette, she began to search for a sign of life in the blackness. When she had come almost full-circle, she suddenly sensed a faint gleam of light in the distance. She slowly glided toward it, till she saw that the shimmering glow was emanating from a silver candelabra, suspended high above her in the darkness. It yielded one small cone of light directly beneath it.
She could now hear an orchestra playing, although the music was distorted by the horrific depth of the sea. Beneath the cone of light, a figure was slowly moving in and out of the shadows.
It was Nicholas. He was dancing alone, leisurely moving with exquisite grace to the orchestra’s sad, disembodied requiem in a macabre minuet that would last for eternity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert J. Mrazek is a former congressman from Long Island, New York. While in Washington, D.C., he authored successful efforts to preserve Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and to save the Manassas Civil War Battlefield from being bulldozed into a shopping mall. Since his retirement from Congress, he has served on the boards of many organizations, including ten years as chair of the Alaska Wilderness League. He divides his time between upstate New York and Maine.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Stonewall’s Gold (1999)
Unholy Fire (2003)
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