Marty dragged her to a standing position, but her legs buckled. He held her up with his arms wrapped around her.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered into her hair. “Gentle God, don’t leave me.”
Suddenly, her eyes flickered open.
“Marty,” she mumbled. “Marty.”
It was her: he knew her look too well for the European to deceive him.
“You came back,” he said.
They didn’t speak for several minutes, simply held on to each other. When they did talk, she had no taste for retelling what she’d experienced. Marty held his curiosity in check. It was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs.
Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head.
63
So perhaps they had a chance of life after all. Mamoulian was a man, for all his unnatural faculties. He was two hundred years old, perhaps, but what were a few years between friends?
The priority now was to find Papa and warn him of what Mamoulian intended, then plan as best they could against the European’s offensive. If Whitehead wouldn’t help, that was his prerogative. At least Marty would have tried, for old times’ sake. And in the light of the murder of Charmaine and Flynn, Whitehead’s crimes against Marty diminished to sins of discourtesy. He was easily the lesser of two evils.
As to the how of finding Whitehead, the only lead Marty had was the strawberries. It had been Pearl who’d told him that Old Man Whitehead had never let a day go by without strawberries. Not in twenty years, she’d claimed. Wasn’t it possible, then, that he’d continued to indulge himself, even in hiding? It was a slender line of inquiry. But appetite, as Marty had so recently learned, was at the crux of this conundrum.
He tried to persuade Carys to come with him, but she was wrung out to the point of collapse. Her journeys, she said, were over; she’d seen too much for one day. All she wanted now was the sunshine island, and on that point she would not be moved. Reluctantly, Marty left her to her fix, and went off to discuss strawberries with Mr. Halifax of Holborn.
Left alone, Carys found forgetfulness very quickly. The sights she had witnessed in Mamoulian’s head were dismissed to the dim past from which they’d come. The future, if there was to be one, was ignored here, where there was only tranquility. She bathed under a sun of nonsenses, while outside a soft rain began.