It took a few seconds of complete flabbergastedness before Aubrey and George regained enough control of their bodies to sprint to the rear of the vehicle. Caroline and Sophie – in anonymous Holmland garments – looked down at them, smiling and sceptical.
George roared with laughter and seized Sophie by the waist. He lifted her bodily over the backboard, then whirled her away. She laughed with him as they spun up the middle of the road.
Aubrey was caught open-mouthed. He knew that by now he should have held out his hand, bending at the knee, to help Caroline down. Then he should have gazed into her eyes and said something that was witty, disarming and thoroughly heartfelt. After that, he would have batted away her half-formed thanks and endeared himself to her in every possible way.
He mentally rehearsed the swoop and stoop, but then became aware that Caroline was regarding him coolly. ‘Aubrey,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you.’
He found a grin dragging his mouth upward. It was an acceptable start. After her unexpectedly emotional departure the last time he’d seen her, he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her say: ‘Please forget what happened. It was an unfortunate lapse. I’ve come to my senses now, so never speak of it again.’
‘Hello, Caroline,’ he said and he flailed for something to add. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’
He closed his eyes for an instant, then he went to apologise for a greeting entirely devoid of panache – and George and Sophie nearly crashed into him on their final madcap swing.
Sophie laughed again. ‘Aubrey,’ she said, still making the first syllable of his name sound like ‘Ow’. ‘Madame Zelinka and Hugo found us in Fisherberg and brought us here.’
Von Stralick strolled along the side of the lorry, Madame Zelinka at his side. They were both smiling: him broadly, her less so, as was her way. ‘Perhaps we should discuss this somewhere else?’ the Holmlander said.
‘We can’t go far,’ Aubrey said, ‘not unless we want to run into a Holmland special unit disguised as Albionite infantry.’
Von Stralick raised an eyebrow. ‘You have much to share with us.’
Caroline leaped down from the back of the lorry, landing lightly. Aubrey broke out in a very different sort of sweat when she steadied herself by taking hold of his shoulder. He enjoyed the sensation while part of his brain – a needlessly analytical part – insisted that he’d never seen Caroline need to steady herself before.
‘Hugo, shouldn’t we back the lorry in beside this boulder?’ she asked and then her fingers brushed away something from the nape of Aubrey’s neck. He nearly fainted on the spot.
In minutes, it was done. Even better, the lorry was disguised with branches torn from nearby trees, which allowed them all to sit under the canvas in the rear. A shaded lantern helped them share provisions. They sat facing each other on the benches with the food spread out on an ammunition box between them: smoked salmon, bread, pastries and milk that von Stralick had thoughtfully packed in Fisherberg. George and Sophie were next to each other, as were Madame Zelinka and von Stralick. Aubrey couldn’t help but notice that Caroline sat next to Madame Zelinka, on the opposite side of the lorry from where he was. He ran through a thousand possible explanations for that, until he was quite giddy, then gave up and just enjoyed the fact that she was there.
After Aubrey and George explained the situation in Korsur and were greeted with expressions of puzzlement and concern, von Stralick recounted what had happened after the separation at Dr Tremaine’s retreat.
‘When we left you on the cliff top,’ he said, ‘we were fortunate that the Holmland troops were most foolish. Zelinka’s people created havoc in the dark. Once the soldiers were lured from their transports, it was an easy thing to slip through the convoy and steal the rearmost lorry.’
‘After disabling the others, of course,’ Madame Zelinka added. She was holding von Stralick’s hand. ‘They faced a long walk down the mountainside.’
‘I wanted to come straight to Korsur, to find you,’ von Stralick said, ‘but Zelinka insisted on going to Fisherberg.’
Her face was unreadable. ‘I had business there.’
Von Stralick studied her for a moment with a mixture of exasperation and tenderness. ‘She took all of her people and told me to wait at a house in Castermine, just outside the middle of the city.’ He shook a finger at her. ‘I thought it was one of your Enlightened houses, whatever you call them, but it belonged to the Albion Security Directorate.’
‘We were there,’ Caroline said. All through the narrative of von Stralick and Madame Zelinka, she had been disconcerting Aubrey even more than usual by managing to make a Holmland farm worker’s ensemble look attractive, despite the way the jacket was scrunched up by a sharply pulled-in belt. Or – he swallowed when he contemplated this – perhaps because of this arrangement.
He was snapped out of his ponderings about intelligence operative couture by Caroline’s amused expression. ‘Aubrey? Did you hear anything we’ve just said?’
‘All of it. Every single word. Something about a house.’
‘We’d completed our Fisherberg mission. Or, at least, as much as we could for the present. We were waiting to slip out of the city.’
‘Which is the opportunity I provided,’ von Stralick said. ‘Although they hesitated when I told them I was going to Korsur to try to find you.’
‘Hesitated?’ George said.
‘A fraction of a second, I think it was. Possibly less.’
‘Do not tease, Hugo,’ Madame Zelinka growled.
‘I cannot help it, my dear. It amuses me so.’
‘Since it amuses you so, then I think we need to go and inspect the motor of this vehicle. I think it was developing a problem.’
‘A problem?’ Von Stralick lifted an eyebrow. ‘Ah, a problem. I understand, my dear. After you.’
Madame Zelinka led a chuckling von Stralick into the darkness.
George coughed into his hand. ‘This might be a good time to show Sophie the lie of the land. I thought I spotted a ridge not far away that could provide a useful outlook over Korsur.’
Sophie had her hands together in her lap as she sat on the bench. Her hair was bright under a black bonnet. ‘Taking note of surroundings is an important function of the field operative.’
‘You’re a quick learner, my gem,’ George said. ‘A few days of Directorate training and you’re reminding me of things I’ve already forgotten.’
Hand in hand, they slipped into the night, leaving Aubrey and Caroline alone.
She tugged at a loose bit of hair. ‘A neat spell, the illusory body on the road.’
‘A variation on something I’d been fiddling with for ages.’
‘Clever, and useful. You need to perfect it.’
‘I’ll add it to the list. I think that makes item number eighty-four.’
Aubrey leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees and rubbed his hands together. The last few weeks had been difficult. Imagining what was happening in Albion and having to deal with the very real prospect of von Stralick’s dying, while suffering considerable deprivation himself, had almost used up his resources. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said softly.
Caroline adjusted her hat, a loose, practical item, perfectly suited to general farm work. ‘It’s good that von Stralick came along when he did. It saved a great deal of trouble.’
‘Getting out of Fisherberg?’
She fixed him with an inscrutable look, one that he’d be quite happy to spend hours unscruting. ‘Aubrey, if he hadn’t have come along I would have had to find you by myself, and I had no idea where you were.’
Aubrey repeated Caroline’s words in his mind and finally accepted that she’d said what he thought she’d said. No matter how he tried to doubt or misunderstand them, he couldn’t. ‘Thank you,’ he said eventually, smiling a little. ‘I’m over… over…’
‘Overjoyed? Overcome? Overthrown?’
‘Overwhelmed. Quite, quite overwhelmed. I hadn’t dared to hope.’
‘Hope what?’
‘Hope all sorts of things.’
Caroline’s lips twitched at this. Then she shuffled across and sat next to him for a moment, looking at him closely. Aubrey’s heart forgot how to beat for a moment and when it started it lurched along in fits and starts, mostly at the gallop. The air in the back of the lorry seemed thinner. Or thicker. Or something. And had time started playing up as well?
Caroline rose. She studied him for a moment before sitting on his knee.
He wasn’t quite sure exactly how it happened. If pressed, he would have asked for three or four hundred pages to write a description of the series of impossibly graceful bendings and movements that ended up with her perched there with one hand on his shoulder. He didn’t understand – and he was sure that it defied physics – how Caroline could be so light on that tiny patch of his leg, and yet so weighty in the way her presence affected him. Her gaze, for instance, probably clocked in at about fifty or sixty tons, to judge from the effect it was having on him.
He never wanted to move. Never, ever, ever. Let the heat death of the universe come along and he’d be quite happy to still have Caroline Hepworth sitting just like that, on his knee, looking at him without speaking. The tiny light of the shaded lantern was irrelevant. He saw everything, every infinitesimal detail, as if it were the brightest of bright middays.
It was so perfect, so hoped for, that Aubrey knew that it couldn’t last. He glanced around.
‘What are you doing?’ Caroline asked very, very softly.
‘Looking for whoever is going to interrupt us.’
‘That’s a pessimistic outlook.’
‘Wars, especially, have a habit of ignoring the lives of people.’
‘If you follow that through, it suggests living for the moment is best.’
‘Live without planning? Without dreams? That sounds rather limited.’
‘And that sounds rather like Aubrey.’
A light touch on the back of his hand and strong fingers intertwined with his. He swallowed as a ball of heat ignited in his chest.
I do believe things might work out well.
‘I have a plan,’ he croaked.
‘I’m sure you do. But let me tell you about what Sophie and I have been up to, first.’