Bernard Cornwell - Thrillers 04 by Stormchild

Author:Stormchild [Stormchild]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-02-05T16:31:31+00:00

making another of the pathetic grizzling sounds.

I raised a hand to stroke her hair, but she immediately flinched away and made another terrified noise. “I’m not going to hit you,” I said, “it’s all right,” and I put my hand very gently on her shoulder and pulled her toward me, and, after a moment’s initial resistance, she fell against me and began to sob with huge racking heaves of her thin shoulders. I stroked her long hair, which was sticky with seawater, and kept asking for her name, but she made no response and I began to suspect that she spoke no English, and then, more alarmingly, I feared that she had somehow lost her tongue or vocal chords and could only make the pathetic glottal noises that intermittently punctuated her sobs.

I stroked and soothed her for a full ten minutes before she startled me by suddenly finding her voice. And when she did manage to speak, she did so with an abrupt and astonishing clarity. “Berenice,” she said. “My name’s Berenice.”

“Berenice.” I repeated the name, then remembered that Jackie Potten’s friend had been called Berenice Tetterman, and I softly pushed the girl away from me so that I could look into her bruised eyes. “You’re Berenice Tetterman,” I said, “and you come from Kalamazoo in Michigan. I know your friend, Jackie. She’s been looking for you. So has your mother.”

My words only provoked another flood of tears, but mixed in with the sobs were enough words to confirm that our tattered fugitive was indeed Berenice Tetterman. She told me how guilty she felt about everything, and how she thought her

mother might be dead, so I kept repeating that everything was all right now, that she was safe and her mother was alive. Berenice clung with dirty, chipped nails to my sweater, her face buried somewhere in my chest, and slowly, slowly calmed again. She even managed to blurt out a question that seemed immensely important to her. “Are either of you ill?”

“No, of course we’re not,” I said in the tone one would use to dismiss a child’s ridiculous fantasy of gremlins under the bed or ogres in the night garden.

She pulled away to look into my face. “You promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said very solemnly, “we’re both quite well.”

“Because he says that people are dying everywhere. He says the AIDS virus is like the Black Death.” Berenice’s eyes had widened into terror as she spoke, and then she began to cry once more, but this time without the awful animal intensity that had made her earlier sobbing so distressing. These new tears were ones of exhaustion and sadness, but no longer of despair.

David dropped down the companionway. “All quiet outside,” he reported.

“I can’t believe they’ll find us in this cove,” I said, “but I reckon we should keep watch through the night, don’t you?”

He nodded. “I’ll keep watch until midnight, you until four, then me again?”

“Sure.” I was stroking Berenice Tetterman’s tangled and salt-ridden hair.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.