Velvet Lightning (9 page)

“What was his name?” Falcon asked slowly.

“Well, he was a senator, actually. Senator Sheridan.” Victoria gasped softly. “Isn’t that—”

“One of the names on the list. Yes.” Falcon looked at her, frowning, his green eyes remote. “Now, I find that to be just too damned coincidental.”

Blankly Jesse said, “What are you talking about? What list?”

Falcon looked back at him, still frowning. “Jesse, you said the senator was wild to find Tyrone. Wild in what way?”

“Nervous, jumpy. Very intense and insistent.” Jesse began to look worried. “What the hell’s going on?”

Victoria spoke first, perhaps answering her brother's question but looking at her husband. “Leon was . . . afraid, you said. He didn’t want you looking into this Camelot. The other men on that list might be just as afraid. Maybe even more so. Afraid of what you might be able to uncover. Afraid of what Captain Tyrone might tell you.”

“And if they are,” Falcon said, picking up her train of thought, “one of them might well attempt to get to Tyrone before I do. But for what? To try and bribe him to keep quiet? Or to shut him up permanently?”

“God,” Jesse whispered, staring at them. He might not have understood fully what they were talking about, but it was clear there was danger to Marc Tyrone. Jesse went white. “I told him. It seemed more than reasonable. Important, really. So of course I told him where Marc was.”

“We have to warn him,” Victoria said.

Falcon looked at Jesse. “A telegram?”

“No. No, there's no— It's an island, and there's no way to reach it except by ship!”

“What about Sheridan? Has he gone yet?”

Jesse sucked in breath. “Christ, I helped him. I booked passage for him that day, even persuaded the captain to detour by Port Elizabeth and drop him off. He’s had two days; he must be halfway there by now.”

Falcon swore bitterly. Then, grim, he said, “We’ll just have to take the fastest ship we can find. Jesse, where, exactly, is this Port Elizabeth?”

There was a moment’s silence while Jesse stared at him. And then the younger man said slowly, “I’m going with you.”

“Jesse—”

“Look,” Jesse said flatly, “nothing out there in the harbor is heading south until tomorrow afternoon, and there’s no way you could catch Sheridan if you waited that long. But there is a ship out there with a chance of catching him—the second fastest ship in Tyrone’s fleet.
My
ship.
The Robyn
. We can leave today, on the afternoon tide. And even if we can’t catch Sheridan, we’ll damned well be running up his stern by the time he gets to Port Elizabeth.”

The Robyn
, like her sister ship
The Raven
, was a clipper built for speed. She was two hundred feet long, and her three tall masts held numerous sails. She could, Jesse told them proudly, do twenty knots when she was pushed; he intended to push her.

Falcon and Victoria stayed out of his way. Within the few hours before they could sail it became obvious that however distressed or uncertain he was on land, Jesse was utterly and completely comfortable with a deck beneath his feet. And he handled the many details of an unexpected departure briskly and without hesitation, recalling a crew on liberty, stocking the ship for a journey, and coolly summoning one of Tyrone's attorneys to handle the necessary business matters until either Jesse or Tyrone returned to New York.

“Will he like that?” Falcon asked curiously when the lawyer had received his orders and gone.

“Marc?” Jesse grinned. “No. He doesn’t trust lawyers. Even his own.
Especially
his own.”

“Then aren’t you taking a bit of a risk by, ah, dumping his business matters into the lawyer’s lap?” Jesse’s grin turned savage. “Serves him right, dammit. Next time, maybe he won’t be so quick to saddle me with a mess.”

Falcon watched the younger man step aside to deal with a minor crisis among the crew, reflecting that Jesse was badly worried. But then, so was he. In his life at various times, Falcon had been both hunter and hunted; he knew what it was like to have ene-mies stalking him the way Tyrone’s were stalking. . . . He wondered suddenly if Tyrone thought of him like that, as an enemy, and found the thought disturbing.

Victoria came to his side then, slipping a hand into his and looking at him gravely. “What will you do if Captain Tyrone has the gold?” she asked him.

Falcon wasn’t surprised by the question. The longer he and Victoria were together, the closer they seemed to grow; she had read his face if not his thoughts themselves. "I don’t know, sweet,” he said finally, troubled by his own uncertainty. "I really don’t know.”

"Is this Camelot more important?”

"It may be. It may well be. Somehow, they’re connected, I know that. I feel it. And I think . . .”

"What?”

Slowly he said, "I think the gold may turn out to be the least important part of the story, because I believe there was, originally, no connection. I think Tyrone himself became the connection.”

"Deliberately?” she asked.

He frowned. "I—there’s a sense of irony.” He looked at Victoria almost blindly, as if his gaze were turned inward, searching feelings, instincts.

She tried to help him focus. "In what way?”

“Illusion,” he said, and his eyes narrowed. "Yes, that’s it. Illusion. What you think you see is wrong; it’s what you're led to see.”

"What we see? You mean someone has led us to look at the entire thing wrongly?”

"Yes, I think so. Parts of it anyway. But which parts? There are two separate threads, the gold and this Camelot. Tyrone, somehow, for some reason, is holding them both.”

Victoria waited, watching him intently. After a moment his eyes cleared and he looked at her wryly. ‘‘Damn. It's gone. I thought I had something, but it's gone.”

"You don't have all the pieces yet,” she reminded him. "There are some only Captain Tyrone can provide.”

"Yes. But will he?”

The Robyn
sailed out of New York Harbor in midafternoon, heading south. She was slightly more than two days behind a slower packet on the same course. There wasn’t a great deal of wind, but
The Robyn’s
many sails unfurled and snatched all she could get. Her heading was directly east for a time, then southeast, and finally due south. Her narrow, streamlined keel cut through the water neatly, her crew was experienced, and her captain canny. She began to make up lost ground, as though someone had whispered to her of the importance of this race.

Or perhaps she heard whispers of another kind; perhaps she heard the call of her sister ship.

If so, she responded. Against all reason,
The Robyn
was breaking her own speed records.

5

Port Elizabeth

T
he scream woke him from a deep sleep. It was a shriek of terror, of agony, and even as Tyrone sat up and threw back the covers, he realized that it wasn’t a human cry. He dressed quickly in trousers and a shirt left unbuttoned, thrusting his feet into boots, then headed downstairs. The house was silent, unaware, and he knew that only he had been awakened.

He paused in his study long enough to get his pistol out of the desk drawer where he kept it, then slipped out of the house. The night was queerly silent. He stood for a moment listening, then went around to the stables in back of the house. His stables were completely enclosed, rather like an old- fashioned barn, and were built sturdily of stone to withstand the often violent storms off the Atlantic.

The main door to the stables was flung open.

Tyrone cocked the pistol and held it ready as he moved silently closer. He kept half a dozen horses here, and he could hear the soft stamping and blowing of nervous animals. But nothing else. Carefully, he edged through the doorway, flattening himself against an inner wall. And he listened.

His eyes quickly grew accustomed to the darkness, and he found he could see quite well. Ten stalls, the last four at the other end empty, their doors latched open. He moved slowly down the wide hallway, stopping finally before the only other opened stall. The chestnut gelding, his favorite carriage horse, was gone.

Tyrone stood frowning. Not the most valuable of his horses, and not the most beautiful. Hardly a target for theft, he would have thought. And it had to be that, because the stable doors held bolts made of iron, sturdy things the horses couldn’t even reach, let alone unfasten. But it didn’t make sense. The scream he had heard, shrill with terror, wasn’t a sound that a horse would make while being led quietly from a barn.

He suddenly felt cold. He turned and left the stables, securely fastening the big door. Then, without pausing, his pistol still held ready, he walked southwest, away from the house. This was the end of the island that was built up from the sea, a jagged forty- foot cliff rising from a narrow ribbon of sand. Tyrone had built his house here partly for that reason, because his land was inaccessible from the sea.

About thirty feet from the cliff's edge he had put up a barbed wire fence to safeguard his stock; all the horses had been loose in this small pasture from time to time, and none had ever even ventured close to the fence, perhaps sensing the sheer drop. Tyrone stood at the fence and studied it for a moment, seeing even in the faint light that the three strands of wicked wire had been neatly cut.

He walked on to the cliff’s edge. The sandy ground here had been churned violently. He bent to pick up a heavy stick and felt sick when he realized that one end of it was wet with blood. He no longer had to look, but did anyway. He stepped closer to the edge and gazed down. The big, dark hump was clearly visible against the pale sand, and very still.

The chestnut hadn’t had a chance.

It wasn’t Tyrone’s way to turn to others with his problems, and he didn’t now. In the morning he told Reuben about the horse, making it sound like an accident. He himself had smoothed the telltale evidence of an animal beaten into leaping to its death, had taken away the bloodstained stick. If Reuben thought it unlikely that a horse raised on the island would have been so incautious, he didn’t comment, but merely obeyed Tyrone’s orders and repaired the fence.

The tide had come in by morning, and the chestnut’s carcass was carried out to sea.

Tyrone brooded over the matter all morning. It wasn’t only losing a favorite horse that disturbed him, but how that horse had been taken from him. The violence of the act, the sheer cruelty of beating an animal bloody, of killing it in that manner, sickened him.

Reluctantly he had asked Tully about her patient, but she had been certain. The man slept deeply now, and she would have heard if he’d gotten up during the night. And the violent stage was past, she reminded him; they hadn’t had trouble like that for more than two years.

Relieved, Tyrone accepted the assurances. But relief was short-lived. If not the sick man in his own house, then who? Who on the island could commit such an act? Aside from everything else, his property was isolated, miles from anyone else. Who had come there in the night, by stealth, intending to kill a poor beast after putting it through agony?

He remembered, suddenly, Lettia Symington’s little dog. Drowned? It seemed odd now that he thought about it for a dog to have accidentally drowned in the narrow, shallow stream that ran a couple of miles through the center of the island. Killed deliberately like his horse?

After lunch he hitched a muscled bay mare to the buggy and drove her into town. He stopped first at the harbor and went out to
The Raven
, questioning the mate, Lyle, about the other men. All had been on board during the night, Lyle reported, mystified.

Deep in thought, Tyrone drove on into town. He stopped at the mercantile and went in.

“Good afternoon, Captain,” Mr. Abernathy said cheerfully. Except for Tyrone, the store was empty of customers.

“Abernathy.”

“How can I help you?”

Tyrone leaned against the counter and drew out a long, thin cigar, lighting it slowly. After a moment he said, “You mentioned the other day about Mrs. Symington’s dog being killed. Have there been any other animals killed recently?”

Abernathy looked puzzled but frowned in thought. “How recent might you mean, Captain?”

“In the last few months, say.”

“Well, aside from the little dog, I can’t think—No, wait. About six months ago Dr. Scott lost that old hack of his. The animal must have stepped in a hole in its pasture; broke a leg and had to be put down. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” Tyrone said slowly. “That's what I mean. Do you recall anything else?”

The storekeeper leaned on the counter, his eyes distant and thoughtful. “Last summer,” he said, “Mrs. Jessop’s hound turned up missing. Everybody figured it went off and died; it was old. And just before that Miss Lander’s yellow tomcat was found dead.”

Tyrone hesitated, then asked, “Did any of those people, aside from Mrs. Symington, claim their animals had been killed deliberately?”

Abernathy’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “No. No, I can’t remember that they did.”

Two dogs, a cat, and now two horses killed within the past six or eight months. Tyrone wondered if it meant anything at all. “All right. Thanks, Abernathy.” He was halfway to the door when the storekeeper’s quiet voice stopped him.