The snowmobile was coming closer, the roar of its engine penetrating the empty church. And then it stopped outside.
Eleanor Ames looked fixedly at Michael, as if trying to think through a confoundingly difficult puzzle—just as he was doing. He could only imagine all the questions in her mind, all the factors she was trying to balance out. The lives—not only her own—that she was trying to save, or protect.
“Hello?” Lawson called out. “Anybody home?” His footsteps echoed on the stone floor.
Eleanor’s fingers worried the ratty blanket.
Michael, for fear of saying the wrong thing, said nothing more.
“Hey, Michael, I know you’re in here somewhere!” Lawson called out, strolling toward the altar. “We’ve got to get rolling.”
Eleanor’s expression was filled with anguish…and an exhaustion Michael had seen only once before, on the face of a man who had spent the entire night single-handedly trying to save his house from a wildfire in the Cascades. To no avail.
She coughed, but she was too weary to lift a hand to cover her mouth.
“Can you tell me something?” she said, in a voice filled with defeat and resignation.
“Of course. Anything.”
Lawson was close enough that Michael could hear the squelching of his boots just outside the door.
“What year is this?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
December 16, 11:30 a.m.
THE WIND, when Sinclair left, had been low, but it was coming up fast. He had guided the dogs down through the ramshackle buildings of the whaling station—past the blacksmith’s shop, where dozens of harpoons, some as long as the lance he had carried into battle, were still mounted in racks against the wall—and toward the northwest, where he could see a low ridge of ice, obscuring anything beyond. He doubted he would find anything on the other side, but what choice did he have? Surrender himself, and Eleanor, to the ministrations of those from whom they had narrowly made their escape? Sinclair trusted no one…and never would again.
Even, sad to say, his own beloved. He’d locked Eleanor in the rectory before leaving because, in her present weakened state, he did not know what she would do; he feared that when she awoke, she might succumb to some sudden impulse and attempt to do away with herself. How precisely that could be done, he wasn’t sure. He knew that their corruption, despite its awful price, afforded them protection from maladies that would kill anyone else—cholera, dysentery, the mysterious Crimea fever…even a hundred years, or however long it had been, imprisoned at the bottom of the sea. But whatever devilish mechanism fueled their endless life could not, he suspected, withstand corporeal destruction. He glanced down at the back of his torn boot, where the dog had ripped at his calf. The wound beneath had stopped bleeding, it had even healed over, but in some indefinable way it was not living flesh. It was a patch, a scab, a plaster—something helping to hold together a walking, talking, breathing skeleton. He could break, it seemed, but he could not wither.
Not at all in keeping with the brigade’s motto, he reflected wryly. It was neither death, nor was it glory. Instead, it was a sort of way station, reminding him of the idle days the Light Brigade had been forced to endure in the Crimea.
For weeks, they had done nothing but wait about, observing the infantry actions from their standing mounts, held in reserve, constantly, for a decisive moment that never seemed to come. Under the direction of Lords Lucan and Cardigan—two men, brothers-in-law, who despised each other thoroughly—the 17th Lancers had been shifted from one remote outpost to another, always held in check lest they be spent too soon. Sinclair, like many of the others, had begun to feel that they were becoming an object of derision among the other troops—the fancy horse soldiers, in their plumes and pelisses, their gold braid and their bright cherry trousers, munching on hard-boiled eggs and biscuits—while their compatriots did the dirty work of storming the redoubts. When, at one critical juncture, the Russian cavalry had been allowed to escape in total disarray without being pursued and annihilated, Sergeant Hatch, barely recovered from his bout with the malaria, had broken his pipe in disgust and thrown the pieces into the dirt.
“Is it a gilded invitation they’re waiting for?” he snarled, while reining in his impatient horse and throwing a dark look up at the heights, where the Commander in Chief, the elderly, one-armed Lord Raglan, could be seen with his telescope, surrounded by aides. “They won’t get a better one than that.”