The Blood Royal(137)
She dropped Lily’s arm and edged a few paces further on to the bridge. She put her hands on the parapet, leaning dangerously forward to stare into the river.
Lily sidled after her. She recognized suicidal despair in the girl’s voice and at last realized why she’d been brought here. Many people killed themselves quietly, dying alone in holes and corners all over London, hugging their unbearable sorrows to their breast. But some – those who seemed to bear a grudge against society – preferred to go with a flourish, screaming out their hatred … or their guilt. Lily knew with a chilling certainty that she’d been chosen, lured on to the bridge, to hear the last words, to witness such a death.
‘I’ve stood here before, you know. Many times. Never quite having the courage … and always stopped by the same thought. Do you suppose, Lily, that if one were to jump, and … natural impulses changed one’s mind at the last moment, one could swim to the bank from here?’
Lily prepared to share her suffering and her speculation. She looked down into the water and shuddered. ‘It’s possible,’ she lied. ‘You might survive. But of course it would depend on the strength of the undertow and the swimming skill of the jumper. Only a strong swimmer would make it. You’d have to be very certain that you really wanted to die and weren’t just calling attention to your own sorrow.’ She remembered with a stab of pity that the moody girl at her side was the survivor of rape, slavery and goodness only knew what other horrors. Horrors which, if Sandilands and his psychiatrist had it right, had affected her mind with the destructive force of unremitting shelling.
Alert to the slightest hint of a suicidal move, Lily closed in on Anna. She assessed her chances of preventing a determined dive off the bridge as poor. The girl was taller and stronger; her arms appeared well muscled from weeks of hotel work. And she was as tense as a bowstring.
Lily scanned the bridge. She needed help. This would be a good moment to catch sight of the police patrolman approaching. Not a sign of him. A few tourists wandered from side to side at the far end, chirruping and pointing. Too slow to react … useless.
Talk. Calm reason. Understanding. That was her best – her only – tool.
‘You’ve been half in love with easeful Death? I can understand that. Very well. Let the past go then, Anna,’ Lily said. ‘But I’m wondering whether you have the same disregard for the future. You have a future. Have you had a chance to consider the offer I left with the princess? Is that what you’re doing here? You’ve chased after me to thank me for handing you a new life and an old friendship?’ She was trying for a lighter note in a conversation whose sense she could barely grasp.
‘Nonsense! You haven’t seen it at all, have you? This letter, purportedly from a friend in California, is an elaborate charade! You want to be rid of me.’ Her laughter was sharp and scathing. ‘Who but the English, sensing a threat to their Establishment, would hold back their secret police killers and send in a single girl armed with a few sheets of paper? This is a parlour game – an entertaining piece of whimsy!’
She took Sam Scrivener’s page of meticulous work from her pocket, tore it in two and threw it after the bag into the river. She leaned far over to watch the pieces swirl and dance on the dark surface, drawing a cry of concern from Lily.
‘May I expect to see the tickets for the Hirondelle follow?’ she asked, reaching out to take Anna’s arm. She was beginning to lose patience with this haughty girl but she would never allow her to jump. She persevered. ‘It would be a pity not to see the western ocean. We have a poet I think you must like – a man who died young … no older than we are, Anna. Keats had never set eyes on the Pacific … was never likely to have the chance … but he wrote four lines which would make anyone yearn to do that.’
She murmured them, careful not to allow emotion to take over.
‘… like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
‘It’s all about eagerness to seize the next experience, to watch the next horizon come into view … the elation of discovery.’
‘Ah, that was you, the line of verse? You have strange skills for a policewoman. The tickets? Entirely appropriate and welcome. Those I shall keep and use. But not for the reason you ascribe to me. Do you think I could be deceived by a clumsy lie? Fools! What an irony. There will be no wild surmise for me on the heights … no Russian welcoming committee on the quay.’