I had little memory afterwards of passing with my captors through the wood or scrambling down the jagged slickness of the rocks onto the beach – it blended into one long, nightmarish descent where I was scraped by branches, cut by rocks, and finally hit the shingle with a bruised knee and the taste of my own blood upon my tongue. It wasn’t serious. I’d bitten through my lip to keep from crying out when I had whacked my knee, but still the pain of it was real, and my lip swelled so much that when we’d found the entrance to the cave and stumbled in and Creed had set the shuttered lantern that he’d carried from Trelowarth House in place on top of one wide barrel, opening its sides to let the light spill out, the man named Hewitt looked at me with pity and discomfort.
I felt pity for him, too, because I knew he couldn’t come to my defence the way he might have liked to. Both of us had seen what the result of that would be. I drew the stiff edges of Peter’s jacket tighter round my throat against the penetrating dampness of the cave and turned away from Hewitt’s gaze.
The constable was watching us. Without a word he took a long look round the shadowed cave and said, ‘This is a most agreeable arrangement. Have the Butlers used it long?’ He aimed the question straight at Hewitt, but it was the boy who answered.
‘Why, they’ve always used it, sir. ’Tis common knowledge in the village. I was shown it by my father, years ago.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Creed took his pistol from his belt, examining its workings with an attitude of unconcern, but I could see his underlying tenseness. He looked not unlike a predator prepared to spring, and I was sure the people of Polgelly would be made to feel the depth of his displeasure with them. Taking out the knife he had just used to kill a man he turned its point to make some small adjustment to the flintlock mechanism of his gun.
And that’s when I remembered.
It was over there, I thought, just there, between the barrels to my left, that Daniel’s own dropped dagger had been lying on the floor the last time I’d seen it.
If I picked it up I knew I would be changing what was meant to happen, but then I’d already changed things once tonight by being here. A man lay dead because of me, because he’d tried to help me, and however that one act had changed the future it was done, and there was nothing I could do to change it back. All I could do was try to stay alive myself, and if I had a weapon I’d be bettering my odds.
The challenge was to find a way to get from where I stood to where I thought the dagger lay. I was deciding how to do it when my thoughts were interrupted by a noise approaching steadily outside the cave: the heavy crunch of footsteps over shingle.
Creed held one hand up to warn the men to silence, and aimed his pistol at the entrance as a second sound rose up now with the shifting steps – the sound of someone whistling a careless tune I recognised.
My heart dropped. Jack.
And then in almost sickening slow motion all the things I’d seen and heard tonight slid into place like pieces of a puzzle, and I knew then why the Beacon had been lit. I could hear again the boy’s voice telling Creed what he had overheard the one man tell the other as they left the Spaniard’s Rest: that he’d be happy when the day was over, for a year of King George on the throne was not a thing that should be celebrated.
God, I thought, that must be it. In my time the Polgelly folk had marked a royal jubilee by lighting up the Beacon, so it made sense the people here would do the same. Uncaring fate had brought me back on the first anniversary of King George’s rule, the same day when, according to the note in Jack’s unfinished memoirs, Jack ‘did chance to fall afoul of the lawmen of Polgelly, and while fleeing from their constable was killed by one sure pistol shot.’
I knew what was about to happen. Knew because the constable was with me, and the men who walked around us were the ‘lawmen of Polgelly’, and the night was not yet over.
Jack would die, because I’d read it on a printed page and printed pages weren’t meant to be changed. Like in the lines I’d quoted on the ship to Daniel from the Rubaiyat, The Moving Finger had already written what must be.
But then I thought of Daniel telling Fergal, ‘He’s my brother,’ and God help me, I just couldn’t stand there silently and watch another man be killed.
As Jack was stepping through the opening into the cave, I made a sudden lunge against the constable and shouted, ‘Jack, get out! Warn Daniel! Run!’
The pistol’s deafening report in that confined space drowned my words and I could not be sure he heard them, and a second after that I couldn’t see him for the powder smoke that seared my throat and stung my eyes and drifted like a white cloud through the cave, but as it cleared I saw the place where Jack had stood was empty.
The constable’s shot had gone wide. Several feet away the boy took an unsteady step and stared at me with wonder and bewilderment, and then he touched a hand to the new spreading stain upon his chest and stumbled once again, and fell.
Creed’s eyes, much closer, had held wonder too at first, but by the time I met them they were freezing over into something terrifying. With the gun still in his hand he swept his arm out savagely and struck me full across my face. I felt the pain against my cheekbone and the trickling warmth of blood start down the bruised skin of my temple, but although I staggered back I didn’t shame myself by falling down.
When Hewitt made a move as though to protest, Creed stopped him with the cold reminder, ‘This is none of your affair. Nor yours,’ he told the other man, behind. ‘Now go, the pair of you, and bring Jack Butler back.’