Page 87 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

The next one came at me with a length of broken rail in both hands and swung it at my head. I went under it and put my shoulder into his chest. He went back into what remained of the rail and over into the river.

After that the deck came apart entirely.

Finch had got himself into the angle of the housing where nothing could come at his left side. He was firing across his body with his right, slowly, one shot at a time, and hitting what he fired at.

Our boatman came over the rail after us with a boat hook and used it in the manner of a man who has settled arguments on the water for forty years.

Somewhere forward two of Harcourt’s men threw their weapons down before anybody had asked them to.

None of it had my attention.

Rosalynd had got as far as her knees by the cabin door. A man had her by the back of the collar and was hauling her toward the yacht’s side. He had not looked up long enough to notice that there was no longer anything to haul her across.

I took him in four strides. He heard me at the last of them and came round with the revolver rising. I had his wrist in my left hand before it came level. His shot ended up into the rigging of the yacht. I hit him, once. Something in his face gave under it, and he went down and stayed there.

“Rosalynd.”

She came up onto her feet with her bound hands and her hair down and river water and blood on the shoulder of her gown. “You came.”

“I came.” I allowed myself a moment to lay my hand against her cheek. And then I got the knife out of my boot and cut the rope off her wrists. Her hands were the color of a bruise. She made no sound at all while the blood came back into them, which had to hurt. I minded more than if she had screamed.

From behind me, Harcourt said, “She was expecting you.”

I turned.

He stood on the far side of the black launch, beside the gap where the gangway had been. The white hull of the yacht rose behind him, close enough to touch, but with four feet of dirty water between the vessels.

He stood straight-backed with his coat open and his hair gone loose in the wind, and there was not a thing wrong with him. Fifty. A hard, well-made, unhurried fifty. And down his cheek, from the bone to the jaw, three healing lines.

“You have lost,” I said.

“No.” He said it without any heat whatever. “I have run out of time. They are not the same, Your Grace, though I would not expect the distinction to interest you.”

“Officers from the Thames Division are coming down the river. Your wharf is being taken now. There is a case gone to Scotland Yard this afternoon with every account you have kept in it.”

“I know.”

He looked past me, across the wrecked deck and over the shattered rail of our launch, where Mercer stood looking back at him without any expression at all.

“Twenty years,” Harcourt said.

Mercer said nothing whatever. He did not need to. Whatever passed between those two across the water was theirs. It was finished, and both of them knew the terms of it.

Then Harcourt turned back. His eyes went past me to Rosalynd, and the expression in them changed.

“You were the only one,” he said to her.

His arm came up.

Not toward me.

Toward her.

With a revolver at the end of it.

I pushed her into the housing and put my body between her and the bullet that would end her life.

But the shot did not come from him. It came from out over the water.