Lavender Morning (44 page)

jerk on the rope twice. If the rope tangles and you need to get it off of you, pull this end. See?” He gave it a firm

jerk and the rope fell away. “I’m going to count, and if you stay longer than fifty-eight seconds, I’m going in after

you. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” she said as she kicked off the big old boots she’d been wearing for two days. Then she pulled

on the cord and let the rope fall to the bridge. The water had receded and the wood was dry, but it still didn’t

look safe.

“What are you doing?” David asked.

“I can’t swim in all these clothes. Do you mind if I strip down?”

“I don’t even know how to answer that,” he said in a whisper, then stepped back to watch her unbutton her

shirt, then slip out of it. She was wearing the peach-colored teddy that she’d had on when he undressed her the

first night—and he’d never seen anything more beautiful than she.

She dropped the old shirt on the bridge, then went to her belt, but the horse began to act up and Edi started

to go to him.

“Shut up!” David said to the horse, and it instantly became still.

Smiling, Edi unfastened her belt buckle and let the trousers fall to the bridge.

“They were wrong,” David whispered.

“About what?” Edi asked.

“Your legs. They have to be
four
feet long.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never measured them. Would you tie the rope around me?”

“Yes,” he said, but he took his time, looking at every inch of her while he slowly walked toward her.

He put the rope around her waist, tied the end to the side of the bridge, then nodded toward the other rope

in the back of the buggy. “What’s that for?”

“If there’s anything still in the car, I’m going to get it out.”

“Meaning your suitcase?”

“Yes, my own clothes,” she said, as she glanced down at the big trousers he wore. “Did you bring anything

that would fit without the brace?”

“Yes, but I don’t want you to bother with getting it. If you can find the Allen wrench, fine, if not, then

nothing else is important. You understand me?”

“You’re going to make a great father,” she said, “but I already have one. I think if the car is hidden, then the

water is deep enough for a dive, don’t you?”

“No!” David half shouted. “We’ll go to the edge and you can walk in. You don’t know—” He broke off

because she climbed onto the railing and did a perfect swan dive into the river. He held his breath as he waited

for her to come up and every terror went through his head. Had she hit bottom? Was she unconscious? He was

halfway over the railing when she came up.

“It’s cold!” she said.

“What did you think it would be? Tropical?” he said, doing his best to hide his fear. “Are you all right?”

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3/16/2010 hat did you think it would be? Tropical?” he said, doing his best t

Jude Deveraux - Lavender Morning.htmlo hide his fear. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. It feels great. I’m going to wash my hair. Throw me that soap off the seat, will you?”

“Soap!” he said, mumbling. He just wanted her to get this done and get out of there. With his leg held stiffly,

he half ran, half hobbled to the buggy and got a bar of soap off the seat, then tossed it to her. “Good catch,” he

said.

“I was the best batter on my school baseball team,” she said. “I could hit the ball just ten feet and still

outrun them all.” She was soaping her hair while treading water. Turning, she looked at the car, then swam to it

and climbed on top.

“Look at me,” she yelled.

“Yeah, look at you.” She had on a clinging teddy that was wet and transparent, and she was standing on

top of an upside-down car that couldn’t be seen above the water. She looked like she was standing on the

water. “My kingdom for a camera,” he whispered, but he had none.

“Be careful on that thing,” he called. “The bottom of a car isn’t as smooth as a mattress.”

She kept rubbing her hair with the soap, then threw the bar back to him. To his shame, he missed it and had

to chase it across the bridge. When he looked back, she was gone, and for a moment his heart seemed to stop

beating.

He waited what seemed to be minutes but there was no sign of her. He gave a tug on the rope, but she

didn’t tug back, and she hadn’t released it. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. “I knew it. I should have

stopped her. I should have forced her to—”

“To what?” she said and she was below him, her hand on a pillar of the bridge.

“Forced you not to do this.”

“I’d like to have seen you try,” she said in a suggestive way. “Can you reach my hand?”

David got down on his stomach and reached down until he touched her hand—and she passed him the

Allen wrench. He clasped it tightly, then rolled onto his back and for a moment held it to his chest. Such a little

thing, but so very important.

“I got it,” he said, “so now you can come up.” But when he looked, she was already gone. With lightning

speed, David unbuckled his trousers and pushed them off, then he gave one last look of hatred to the steel brace

and began loosening screws. For the sake of comfort, all the screws were recessed so the protruding heads

wouldn’t chafe a person’s skin, but that made it necessary to use an unusual tool to remove the cage.

Half of the screws were too tight from water and rust, and one of them broke as he twisted. But with

David’s determination and just plain anger—not to mention the desire he had for Miss Edilean Harcourt—he

kept working.

He broke blisters and made some new cuts as he wrenched the thing off his leg, but he managed to tear it

away from his skin, then he threw it toward the far end of the bridge.

When he was free of it, he had trouble standing, but he made it. He had to bend his knee half a dozen times

before it began working again. His leg was a mess, with blisters and bloody patches and bits of cloth stuck to

raw places, but to him it looked great. “I’m out of it,” he yelled as he looked back at the river, but Edi didn’t

answer him.

He unbuttoned his shirt, threw it on the bridge, climbed on the rail, and dove in.

“What took you so long?” she asked as she swam into his arms.

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T
HAT’S IT,” DAVID Aldredge said.

“What do you mean that that’s it?” Joce asked.

“That’s all the story Edi wrote, or at least it’s all that I have. Alex McDowell left the papers to me in his

will, and I don’t know if that’s all he had, or if Edi wrote more and it was lost. At the end, Alex was pretty bad.”

“Bad?” Jocelyn asked. “What do you mean?”

“Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t remember who he was, much less anything about a story sent to him many years

ago. However…” Dr. Dave paused, as though for a drumroll, “I found something interesting just a few years

ago. You know how it is, boring day, playing on the Internet, and I typed in Dr. Jellie’s name.

“This is an excerpt from a series of books about World War II. As far as I know, it’s the only place Dr.

Jellicoe’s name is mentioned. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Yes, please,” said both Luke and Jocelyn.

Dr. Sebastian Jellicoe’s contributions to WWII were never acknowledged during his lifetime, or even

afterward. Anyone who met him didn’t come away talking about his great brain or how he could look at a

scrambled-up jumble of words and tell at a glance what it said. What people always remembered about him

was his great storytelling. He could go to the grocery and come back with a story worthy of being published.

For myself, at the time a young and eager student wanting to learn at the feet of a master, the story I

remember best was about the young couple who probably saved his life. It was near D-day in 1944, and Dr.

Jellie told that he was sitting by his fire on a cold, rainy night, half asleep in his chair, when he heard the noise

of a horse and a man shouting curse words. He said that for a moment he was so befuddled that he thought it

was Father Christmas and the fat man had just collided with his roof.

Instead, it was two tall, strikingly good-looking young Americans, and they’d come tearing across the

countryside in the middle of the night in the ancient racing carriage of his old, grumpy neighbor named Hamish.

Dr. Jellie said the man couldn’t get along with anyone and as a result he was left alone. It was told around the

village that he’d once been a driver of carriages in races and that he’d won nearly everything until an accident

made him quit. He retired to his father’s farm and spent the rest of his life complaining to his long-suffering

wife and children.

But on that cold, drizzly night, here came one of Hamish’s buggies being pulled by a horse nearly as old

as Hamish, and driven by a girl so tall and beautiful that Dr. Jellie said he thought maybe he’d died and was

about to enter Heaven. She looked like Boadicea riding into battle.

In the back of the buggy was a young man who was taller than she was, just as handsome, but a man

who obviously hated carriage riding as much as he adored the young woman.

“You certainly paid me back,” he said to her when he got down and after he’d lost his dinner in the

bushes.

“I don’t like your driving and you don’t like mine. We’re even,” she said as she smiled at Dr. Jellie and

introduced herself as Eddie, and he was David. Over the years Dr. Jellie had forgotten their last names and

I’ve often wondered who they were and what happened to them.

He invited them into his house to have some tea. Young David followed him inside the house, but Eddie,

like the good horsewoman she was, put the horse and buggy in the barn first. When she came in, her dark

hair was wet, her clothes stuck to her, and both men stared at her, speechless, for a while.

She was the one to break the silence. “Here, I have this for you.” She then handed him a copy of
Time

magazine that was a few weeks old.

“And what am I to do with it?” Dr. Jellie asked.

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“There’s a message in it from General Austin,” she said. “I’m his secretary.”

“Ol’ Bulldog Austin. My goodness but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You mean no one’s shot him by

now?”

“Everybody wants to,” David said, “but no one’s done it yet.”

“I think you should look at the message,” Eddie encouraged. “I think it’s important. You’re to go back

to London with us.”

“Am I?”

“It seems that someone knows what you’re doing for the war effort,” David said.

“Oh, everyone knows that. Mrs. Pettigrew delivers the envelopes with my lunch. They’re all marked

Top Secret.”

David and Eddie looked at each other with their mouths open.

“But—” David began.

“I thought—”

Dr. Jellie looked at the
Time
magazine. “I’ve seen this issue. Is it the one Aggie took? Are you two the

Americans who were searching for it?”

“We had no idea you were so close,” Eddie said. “But we couldn’t have come anyway because we

didn’t have the magazine and we needed it. I really must insist that you look at it. I think that what’s in there is

very important.”

“Oh poppycock!” he said. “They never mark anything that’s valuable as important. Those envelopes

that say Top Secret on them? Seed catalogs. It’s the letters from my daughter that hold the secrets.”

“Your daughter works in London?” David asked.

“I don’t have a daughter.”

“Oh,” Eddie said.

In the next second, Dr. Jellie threw the magazine on the fire, and both David and Eddie jumped. “Only

thing it’s good for,” he said. “I’m sure everyone in the village has seen it by now. You two caused quite a stir,

what with missing the bridge and putting your car in the river.”

“We did
not
—” David began, but stopped as he stared at the magazine burning in the fire. “I’m afraid

we’ve come here for nothing,” he said, but as the words came out, he gave a look at beautiful young Eddie

that nearly set the house ablaze.

“Did Austin give either of you anything else?” Dr. Jellie asked.

“Nothing to me,” Eddie said. “He gave me a map which I don’t think was accurate, and a packet of

money. I left them back at Hamish’s farm. Should I go get them?”

Just then a clap of thunder came, and Dr. Jellie said, “No, dear, I think it can wait.” He looked at David.

“What about you? Did you receive any paper?”

“No. Austin had a steel brace put on my leg that was like a medieval torture and he—”

“But no paper?”

David shook his head. “Except for the invitation, there was nothing.”

“Let me see it,” Dr. Jellie said.

“What invitation?” Eddie asked David.

“To a dance where you wore an electric blue gown.”

“The Officers’ Ball,” Eddie said, “but that wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Those invitations go

out to a lot of people directly from the printer.” She watched as David got his wallet out of his back pocket

and removed the envelope. It didn’t appear to have even been wet, but she knew it must have been

underwater.

“How in the world did you keep that dry?” she asked him.

“You take care of things that are important to you,” Dr. Jellie said as he looked at David, smiling.

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