Batman 4 - Batman & Robin (11 page)

And he wasn’t the only one.

Dick looked at Bruce. Bruce shrugged. Together, they mouthed the word “uncle?”

Barbara Wilson felt as if she were in a fairy tale as her hosts gave her the Grand Tour of Wayne Manor.

Only in her dreams had she seen anyplace like it. It was so big, so stately, so majestic it almost didn’t seem real.

The garden was especially magnificent, taking advantage as it did of the brightest and most vivid autumn hues. As she strolled through it, Barbara felt an impulse to take her “uncle’s” arm in her own.

“The wisteria bushes are marvelous,” she observed. “Fantastic color. Quite a surprise so late in the year.”

Alfred grunted softly in agreement. “As are you, my dear.”

Barbara laughed. “More of a shock, I suspect. How long has it been since we saw each other last?”

“Since my last visit to England?” The butler thought for a moment. “Two years,” he concluded.

“Two years, three months, four days,” she said. “Roughly.”

Alfred turned to his employer. “Barbara isn’t really my niece, sir. She’s Margaret Clark’s daughter.”

Bruce nodded. “Of course.” He seemed to regard Barbara with new respect. Or was it merely curiosity? “You know, Alfred still keeps your mother’s photograph in his room.”

Dick cleared his throat. “Anybody want to tell us kids in the cheap seats who Margaret Clark is?”

Alfred turned to Dick. “Ah, yes. I don’t suppose you would know that, would you?” He paused reflectively. “Margaret and I fell in love while I was visiting Metropolis a very long time ago. But when I realized the difference in our ages was unfair to her . . .”

Barbara finished the sentence. “Uncle Alfred returned to Gotham. Much to Mother’s dismay, I might add.”

“Eventually,” said Alfred, “she married a young physician. I wouldn’t imagine she was unhappy with the turn of events.”

“Alfred’s main squeeze,” Dick remarked devilishly, as they approached the stables. “Is she here?”

The young woman felt herself reddening. Her “uncle” was blushing as well, she noticed.

“Don’t tell me,” Dick sighed. “I’m about to scrape the bottom of my shoe off my tongue.”

Recovering, Barbara smiled sympathetically. “My parents were killed in an auto accident ten years ago. Alfred has been supporting me ever since.”

Bruce seemed surprised. “You have?” he asked.

The butler shrugged. “Secrets
are
a virtual prerequisite in this house, don’t you think?”

Barbara didn’t understand the reference. But then, every family had its little quirks. As friendly as this one appeared, she was sure it was no exception to the rule.

“At any rate,” she said, “I’m on break from—”

“Oxbridge Academy,” Bruce said. “Alfred’s alma mater.”

She looked at him. “Their new computer sciences division, yes. But how on earth did you know that?”

“I recognized the accent,” he told her.

She looked at him askance. “The . . . accent?” As far as she could tell, she hadn’t picked one up.

“All right,” Bruce conceded, a youngster caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. He pointed to a school crest on her sweater. “It says so on your patch.”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “I should have known.”

By then, they had come to the garage. An ebony-colored motorcycle stood out front. Barbara couldn’t help grinning at the sight of it. It was so streamlined, so rich-looking as it caught the sunlight.

“What is it?” she asked, coming close enough to run her fingers along its chassis. “It’s beautiful.”

“You can say that again,” Dick muttered.

Barbara turned to him—and saw he wasn’t looking at the motorcycle. He was looking at
her.

She tried not to giggle as he waxed serious to conceal his embarrassment.

“It’s, er, a competition racer I’ve been fixing up,” he said. “A vintage Black Knight. Maybe one day I’ll show you how to ride.”

“You most certainly will
not,”
Alfred interjected.

“Thank you anyway,” said Barbara, waving away the suggestion, “but to be honest, those things frighten me.”

“Well,” Bruce remarked, “riding lessons or not, I hope you’ll stay with us while you’re here in the States.”

“Actually,” said Alfred, “there’s a lovely inn just down the—”

“All this luxury really isn’t my style,” the young woman confessed, hoping her interruption didn’t seem rude to her uncle. “But . . .” She eyed the bike. “The truth is I’d actually
love
to stay.”

“Then it’s settled,” Bruce declared hospitably.

Alfred frowned. “Oh, but, sir, so much goes on—”

“Don’t be silly,” Bruce told him. “After all, Alfred, she’s family.”

Barbara smiled. She was family, all right—though not
his.

Pamela Isley—or rather, the woman who had
been
Pamela Isley—stood in the lee of the plane from which she had just disembarked, on the starlit tarmac of Gotham Airport. She was dressed all in black, her newly unique coloration obscured by a widow’s veil.

Luggage handlers scurried all around her. She watched them remove an immense black coffin from the plane’s cargo hold.

“Be careful,” Pamela said. “He’s always been a little touchy.”

The foreman grunted with the magnitude of his effort. “Right. Whatever you say, lady.”

She overheard him speak to one of his fellow handlers as they wrestled the coffin onto their truck.

“What did she feed this guy?
Lead
?”

“He’s always been touchy,” echoed the other handler. “Uh-huh. Like he’s gonna sit up and complain about it.”

Suddenly, a giant fist came crashing through the coffin lid, splintering it into fragments. And in its wake, a hulking, leather-clad form emerged. A rather terrifying apparition under the circumstances, Pamela imagined.

It was Bane, of course, in full costume, his Venom-injector pack strapped to his back. As Pamela looked on through her veil, he waded in among the baggage handlers.

“Geez Louise!” cried one of them, backing off in fear, his eyes as wide as airplane wheels.

But he wasn’t quick enough to elude Bane. Reaching out, the giant grabbed him and began swinging him like a baseball bat, sending the other handlers flying in every direction. Every time he made contact, there was a thud of bone hitting bone.

Pamela smiled. She had never realized how satisfying a little death and destruction could be.

A
s he dressed for bed, Alfred glanced at the photograph on the other side of the room. It stood there in a wooden frame in a place of honor on his dresser, just as it had every day and night for more than three decades.

Crossing the room, he picked it up and gazed at it and remembered. Oh, the things he remembered.

The insistence with which the rain had begun pounding on the wide, gray streets of Metropolis, hissing like an angry serpent. The remarkable scarcity of taxicabs just minutes after the downpour began. The way he’d spotted one and made for it like a bandit.

As luck would have it, a young lady had arrived at the cab door at the same time as he. And her eyes—so dark, so expressive—had looked up into his. Without thinking, Alfred had suggested they share the ride. Perhaps with just as little thought, spurred by the inclemency of the weather, she had agreed to the proposition.

It was only afterward that they’d discussed their respective destinations. He had been headed for the city’s premier department store, she for the theater—where she enjoyed a minor part in a popular musical.

“Oh?” he’d said. “My mother was an actress. In fact, I dabbled in the West End establishments once myself.”

Her delight in that discovery had led to an invitation. A ticket for the evening’s performance, impossible to come by otherwise. And just like that, their two destinations had become one, the prospect of visiting Dacy’s no longer quite so tempting to him.

After the performance was over, he’d told her how much he enjoyed her contribution, small as it was. It had been no more than the truth. She had potential, it had seemed to his practiced eye. And if she remained there in Metropolis, with its abundance of high-profile productions, it had a chance of being realized.

After that it was dinner for two at Balducci’s, where the waiters were kind enough to give them a secluded table, though they must have wondered what such a lovely young woman saw in a middle-aged gentleman like himself. And they’d talked of this and that, though words were hardly the only things that passed between them.

Why hadn’t he remained in the theater? she wondered.

He spoke of his father and his father’s father, manservants through and through, and the footsteps in which he had eventually followed. And he spoke of his employers, the Waynes, though she hadn’t heard of them.

He had smiled and assured her that she
would
have heard of them, if she had lived in Gotham rather than Metropolis.

Eventually, even their very patient hosts had expressed a desire to go home. Alfred had imagined that the evening, wonderful as it was, had come to an end.

But it was not so.

Taking his hand, Margaret had led him across town in the direction of the West River. And there he had glimpsed a strange and wondrous structure looming on the river-bank. A gaudy contraption of yellow-painted metal.

A tram support, of all things. As they got closer, he had seen its twin on the opposite shore. And between them, yellow cable cars trundling in either direction, reflected in the swirling currents of the river.

Long before they set foot in their private cable car and swung out high into the clean, clear night, long before he looked down into the dark, glistening water or peered ahead at the lights of Queensland Park . . . before all that, Alfred knew he had fallen in love with her.

What was worse, she had seemed to know it. And worse still, she had fallen for him with equal intensity.

He should never have let it go that far. He knew that even then. But he had. And
she
had. And despite the way things had turned out, he refused to regret one incandescent moment of it.

With a deep sigh, Alfred replaced the photograph on his dresser and turned to his workstation. He was tempted to use it as he had used it the last several nights. But he was too tired, too hollowed out from his ordeals during the day.

Better to go to sleep, he told himself, and start fresh in the morning.