Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (33 page)

 
          
“The
bride on her wedding day,” Lady Beatrice said firmly, “must not see her
intended until the actual moment of the ceremony.”

 
          
John
Michael Mercer humbly accepted this pronouncement. “I left my tie in there, is
all,” he said.

 
          
“A
servant will get it for you.” Lady Beatrice patted Mercer’s arm, to get him
walking away from the door to the chamber in which—Lady Beatrice was not
entirely
unworldly—the bride and her
intended had spent the prenuptial night. As they walked down the sunlit
corridor she said, “I understand you’re nervous.”

 
          
“Yeah,
I am.” Mercer seemed surprised by the idea. “Not much has scared me in my life,
Lady Beatrice,” he said, as they walked along, “and I don’t say that to be
boastful. It’s just the truth. I guess I have a high imagination threshold or
something. But
this.
This is
different.”

 
          
They
came to the end of the corridor, where a broad window overlooked the south lawn
and the sea. A great gleaming green and white striped tent had been erected
there, full of white chairs and round white tables on a carpet of green
Astroturf to protect the real lawn. Green and white pennons fluttered in the
breeze from the peak of the tent and from poles flanking its four broad
entrance ways. Long tables extended in an L from two comers of the tent,
suggesting an enclosure without confinement. White linen cloths were spread on
the tables, their hems swaying in the breeze, and at the moment down there Lady
Beatrice’s staff busily distributed dishes and cups and glasses and silver on
those long white expanses. The food awaited in the caterer’s trucks —Cadet
Catering—parked down on the road, and when the time came, the household staff
would carry everything in through the gatehouse and up the gravel road to the
reception, saving the caterer’s men from having to step on the property.
(Galling for those three catering employees who had been suborned by the
Weekly Galaxy.)

 
          
The
early guests had already arrived, surprised and delighted, the men in
lightweight jackets, the women in any number of fanciful costumes, all light
and airy and flirting with the breeze. Old friends called cheerfully to one
another across the lawns, their voices rising like birdsong in the clear air.
Today, the civilians among them—the relatives of the bride and groom, the old
friends from school days—looked as glamorous and beautiful and happy and
eternally young as the showbiz folk.

 
          
A
few of the guests had arrived in their own boats, which stood offshore in a
cheerful gossipy little fleet, nodding companionably together, their own banners
snapping in the breeze, their bright- work polished for the occasion, while
their fresh-painted dinghies, having carried those guests ashore, now waited
all in a row on the beach below the bluff, like a hitherto unknown Monet.

 
          
The
whole panorama, spread out below them, was a scene from a medieval romance, and
Lady Beatrice nodded at it in satisfaction. “This
is
different,” she agreed. “Getting married is unlike anything else
you will ever do.”

 
          
“I
guess it is.”

 
          
“But
do you know why it is?” Resting her hand on his arm, Lady Beatrice said, “It’s
because, for the first time in your life, you’re taking another person
seriously. And that means, for the first time, you’re taking yourself
seriously.” Looking up at him, she saw the reminiscent grin that flickered on
his lips, and she said, “You’re remembering those other girls, aren’t you?”

 
          
He
looked guilty, sheepish, but nevertheless pleased with himself. “I guess I am,”
he said.

 
          
“Do
think about them,” she told him.
“And remember, with them, you acted as though
you
were nothing but a toy.”

 
          
“I
did?” He thought about that, not totally pleased, but accepting it. “Maybe so,”
he said. “Maybe so.”

 
          
“Today,”
she said, “you become a real boy.”

           
He laughed, and said, “This is my
first time, you know. Felicia’s too.”

           
“Oh, I could see that.” Lady
Beatrice pointed a bony leathery finger at Mercer, saying, “And the last.”

 
          
“We’ll
give it our best shot. I know that much.”

 
          
He
looked out at the day, the tent, the people, the sea, the few small white
clouds in the blue sky. “One thing,” he said. “We’re sure getting a great start
for it.”

 
          
In
the dry-earth yard of Rudy’s
Riding
Academy
, near the inland border of Tisbury, Sara
and Jack stood side by side, watching Don Grove pass by on top of a large black
horse. The horse cantered a bit, made cheerful by activity and good weather,
and Don bounced madly atop it, head dangerously flopping about. “I think,” he
cried, clutching to saddle, bridle, mane, his own knees, “I think this one’s
broken!”

 
          
“Maybe
it’s got a flat,” Jack suggested.

 
          
All
around them, other Galaxians were mounting up, with more or less success. Bob
Sangster, smilingly at ease atop a big-chested roan, looked amazingly like a
train robber, while Chauncey Chapperell, virtually crossing the ankles of his
long legs beneath the belly of the modest gray he’d been assigned, looked more
than ever like a transient from some other star cluster.

 
          
All
in all, sixteen staffers and stringers had been dragooned into the
Galaxy
Dragoons. Hung about with cameras,
dressed in bulky clothing meant to absorb falls, blows and birdshot, riding
their steeds with lesser or greater grace, they looked mostly like the remnants
of a defeated punitive expedition making its way back through the Khy- ber
Pass. But when Sara was efficiently aboard a small and frisky pinto mare, she
cantered over to where Jack sat stolidly atop a big chestnut gelding and said,
with excited eyes, “Look at them! Our cavalry!”

 
          
“I
see them,” Jack agreed.

 
          
Sara
seemed not to notice his lack of enthusiasm. “They won’t get away from us this
time!” she cried, with a fierce rallying wave of her arm.

 
          
“No,
they won’t,” said Jack.

 
          
The
Galaxy
attack was three-pronged,
being by land, by sea and by air. While those with the slightest pretense to
equitation formed their posse in Rudy’s Riding Academy, a group led by Boy
Cartwright and featuring Louis B. Urbiton and Harry Razza and every other
Galaxian who could be made to look reasonably appropriate in formal wear (or
who could simply
not
be safely placed
atop a moving animal) had been garbed in formal wear and ferried out to the
Princess Pat
, waiting now in Vineyard
Haven Harbor. As the nuptial hour neared, the
Princess Pat
would ease on down the roads, past West Chop and
Lake
Tashmoo
and Makonikey Head and Lambert’s Cove and
so on down the coastline to slip itself as unobtrusively as possible in among
the ships already in attendance below Lady Beatrice’s casde. If the plan
worked, these uninvited guests would slide ashore and mingle, snapping
surreptiuous pix with the tiny cameras concealed on their persons.

 
          
At
the same time, Ida Gavin was boarding the helicopter at the airport, at the
head of a troop of photographers augmented by several freelancers borrowed for
the moment from other segments of the press currendy on the island. It was a
big transporter helicopter, with side doors that opened wide, and half a dozen
photographers would be able to shoot at once from each side of the ship, some
lying prone, some kneeling above them, some leaning out from the comers of the
openings.

 
          
By
land, by sea and by air. One way or another,
Massa
would get his wedding album.

 
          
The
wedding began beautifully. The Reverend Alfred Wimms Hookey, a bit bewildered
by the change in venue, and privately feeling just the teeniest bit guilty at
having agreed to speak to those newspaper people, nevertheless represented in
excellent fashion both the local and the transcendent authorities whose
invocation and approval were at the heart of the ceremony. The bride was so beautiful,
so ethereal, so radiant and so nearly translucent one looked behind her for
wings, and the groom had become for today a true gentle giant, courtly but
strong. The guests, the weather, the setting, all rose to the occasion, and
Lady Beatrice, in lavender lace, moved through it all like TinkerbelTs
grandmother, discreet camera ever snapping and snapping and snapping.

 
          
The
Princess Pat
eased in among the
waiting yachts. Well-dressed but indefinably scruffy people started over its
offshore side, out of sight of the wedding guests on the bluff, clambering down
into the
Princess Pats
two small
motor-driven dinghies.

 
          
Jakes,
with two of his mates down in the gatehouse, looked out past the caterer’s vans
and the caterer’s men and on down the road. “Looks like horses coming,” he
said.

 
          
“Dearly
beloved,” the Reverend Alfred Wimms Hookey began, and the rest of his opening
statement became increasingly hard to hear as a hum began somewhere eastward,
rapidly increased to a
roar,
and
proved, when the startled bride and groom and reverend and guests all looked
upward, to be a huge black helicopter, with many mechanical faces dangling from
it on both sides.

 
          
“Go
on!” Lady Beatrice cried to the reverend, waving her camera at him. “Go on! Go
on! Speak up, and get on with it!” And, while Reverend Hookey shakenly nodded
and tried to recapture his equilibrium and his place in the proceedings, Lady
Beatrice called to one of the servants waiting back by the tables, “Benson!
Stop
that thing!” “Mum!” cried Benson,
with a kind of salute, and he moved off at a run for the casde.

 
          
Offshore,
crew members of one of the waiting yachts, people who had chosen to stay aboard
and take care of some necessary maintenance during the actual ceremony, looked
out and saw the two dinghies rounding the prow of the
Princess Pat,
headed toward shore. “What the fuck’s
that?”
one of them asked, and another
answered, “Reporters!” Don Grove, having fallen twice from his steed in the
early going and having become determined to make up for those lapses once he’d
figured out how to stay on top of the goddamn hairy creature, was the first
Galaxian to gallop through the entrance beside the gatehouse, and so was the
one to discover the rope Jakes and his mates had just put across there, higher
than a horse’s head but not higher than a man’s torso. While Don, suddenly
alone up there, did a number of interesting and seemingly impossible things in
midair, his mount hurried on to the party without him.

 
          
In
his efforts to stop from following Don into disaster, Bob Sangster so confused
and bedeviled both himself
and
his
horse that the beast stopped dead, turned on a dime, and went back where it had
come from while Bob sailed over its head and continued on through the gatehouse
entrance alone, traveling several feet over Lady Beatrice’s property before
touching any of it; with, as it happened, his nose.

 
          
Forced
to bellow over the howl of the helicopter, now hovering directly above the
wedding group, its rotors creating too strong a wind for comfort down below,
Reverend Hookey did his best to inform the assembled guests just why they had
all been gathered here.

 
          
“Over
the wall!” shouted Jack to the surviving members of his cavalry. Caught up in
the action, forgetting his recent doubts, free for now of the curse of
ambiguity that had descended upon him, he spurred his gelding on and jumped a
horse over a wall for the first time in his life, thereby learning why it’s
generally considered a difficult thing to do. While the gelding trotted on up
the slope without him, Jack rolled to the booted feet of Jakes, who looked down
on him without kindliness.

 
          
The
wind of the helicopter rotors tore off ladies’ hats, strained the moorings of
the tent, knocked over pennons and flipped from one of the tables its load of
linen cloth and china dinnerware, while the roar of its engine caused the
wedding guests to cower and hunch as though beaten by giant cat-o’-nine-tails.
Tears started in Felicia’s eyes as her veil was ripped from her head, but
Mercer held her close and Reverend Hookey kept shrieking out the words of the
service.

 
          
The
dinghies of the
Princess Pat
all at
once found themselves amid a swirl of boats. Fast boats roared at them and
then, at the last possible instant, veered off, slewing away, creating great
wakes that threatened to swamp them. Larger boats bore down, forcing them to
turn away from shore. “Avast!” cried the
Princess
Pat
crew members steering the dinghies. “Belay!” they cried, and other
nautical terms, none of which did any good. The dinghies shipped water. The
Galaxians’ feet got wet.

 
          
Jack’s
cavalry, unhorsed, fled before Jakes and his club-brandishing mates, and fled
even faster before Jakes’s fang-brandishing dogs. Jack and Sara, on the
property but on foot, scampered up the slope from the gatehouse, not directly
toward the casde—there were too many defenders in that direction—but at an
angle that would lead them through ornamental trees up toward the clearing
inland of the house and just higher, overlooking the entire wedding scene.

 
          
Benson
extended an over-and-under shotgun from an attic window,
boomed
twice, and turned the helicopter’s windshield into an opaque
shower curtain. The startled pilot, leaning out to look around this sudden
expanse of pebbled glass, caught a glimpse of Benson rapidly reloading, and
cried,
“Oh,
no! No more wars for me!”
He swung the stick, and the helicopter veered up and away, with many a shriek
from his photographer cargo.

 
          
One
dinghy made it back to the
Princess Pat.
The
other sank, in seven feet of water. Those from the swamped dinghy who swam back
to their home yacht were not further bothered, while those who swam for shore
were intercepted, hooked out of the water, thrashed severely, and dumped back
into the sea next to their yacht.

 
          
Ida
screamed at the helicopter pilot to return to the wedding, but he flatly
refused. Navigating by keeping his head outside in his own wind, he ran up the
coast till he came to a bit of flat empty beach, where he set down and ordered
everybody off his ship. “Make me,” Ida said, with an icy glare. He considered
that idea, shrugged, said, “You fly the fucker, then,” deplaned, and went
slogging off through the sand, while a dozen cameras clicked away behind him,
recording the moment.

 
          
“We
have to get through!” Sara cried, totally committed to this quest. Panting in
desperation, she struggled upslope past the ornamental trees, Jack hurrying in
her wake, the both of them forced again and again to turn aside, every time
they tried to move closer to the wedding party, by stalking retainers armed
with shotguns and large sticks.

 
          
“I
do!” announced John Michael Mercer, in a loud and ringing voice, no longer
overpowered by the roar from above.

 
          
On
the slope inland from the house, Sara slipped and almost fell, but Jack grabbed
her around the waist. Holding her, he looked down at the wedding party. “Look,”
he said.

 
          
The
air attack had been routed. The naval invasion had been driven back into the
sea. The cavalry had been unhorsed, muddied, cudgeled and bitten, and now
riderless horses grazed peacefully here and there in the middle distance,
adding to the bucolic beauty of the scene, while their former riders continued
to leg it back across open country toward
North Road
.

 
          
“I
do!” said Felicia Mercer, nee Nelson, smiling through her tears.

 
          
“I
see them,” snarled Sara, answering Jack, staring down at the couple hand in
hand before the minister. The bride was disheveled, her veil and train tom, her
bridesmaids all in a heap like a pile of discarded bouquets, the wedding guests
stunned and tattered, the reception tables upended, tent listing, Astroturf tom
and bleeding mud. Sara glared, breast heaving, eyes still flashing with the heat
of the battle. “They beat us, the bastards!” she cried.

 
          
John
Michael Mercer kissed his bride. The wedding guests cheered.

 
          
Jack
felt Sara’s tense body quiver within the curve of his arm. “Bastards,” she
muttered. “Bastards. Bastards.”