Louise Allen Historical Collection Read Free

long since she had seen it that it felt more alien than Spain. But it was where her sisters were and she had to find them.
    More passengers. Forget the grim officer and focus on this group. In front was precisely the sort of person she had been hoping for: a well-dressed Spanish or Portuguese lady with three—no, four—children and a maid with her arms full of the fifth, a squalling baby. Meg fixed a respectful smile on her lips and stepped forwards to approach the harassed woman.
    ‘Whee!’ A small boy rushed past her, following his hoop as it bounced and clattered over the cobbles. How good to see a child happy and safe after so much death and destruction.
    ‘José! Mind that lady—come back here!’ The woman’s voice was shrill with an edge of exhaustion. She would welcome help, surely?
    ‘
Signora
, excuse me, but may I be of assistance?’ Meg asked in Spanish. ‘I see you have a number of children and I—’
    ‘José!’
There was a splash. Meg spun round to see no child, only the hoop teetering, then falling to the ground by the edge of the quay.
    She picked up her skirts and ran. There might be a boat… She looked over the edge at the brown swirling water fifteen feet below her and realised that not only was there no boat, but that the tide was flooding out, the level was falling by the second and there were no steps down. She couldn’t swim in this, no one could. A small head bobbed up, then vanished again. She ran along the edge, trying to keep up with the child in the water. Where was everyone? Where was her pitiful French when she needed it to call for help?
    Then a dark figure brushed past and launched into a long, flat dive that took him slicing into the river just behind the boy.
‘Aidez-moi!’
Meg shouted as men began to run to the edge of the quay.
‘Une corde! Vite!’
    He had him. She was panting with the effort of keeping up, the need to somehow breathe for all three of them. The black head turned as the man struck out for the quay, the child in his grasp. But he was slowing, hardly making any way against the ebbing tide. It was the darkly sinister officer, she realised. With his bandaged leg, the heavy, painful limp, it was a miracle he could swim at all. Ahead she saw an iron ladder disappearing down the stone face of the quay and measured the angles with her eye. Would he make it to there? Could he make it to the edge at all?
    The breath rasped raw in his throat; his right leg had gone from burning pain to a leaden numbness that dragged him down. Ross shifted his grip around the child’s chest and fought the muddy current, angling towards the sheer cliff of the quayside. Diving in with his boots on didn’t help. And only one leg was obeying him anyway.
    The boy struggled. ‘Keep still,’ he snapped in Spanish. He wasn’t going to let this brat drown if he could help it. He’d seen too much death—caused too much death: he couldn’t face another. Not another child.
    Then the sheer weed-slimed granite wall was in front of him without a single handhold up the towering face except perhaps… ‘Boy!’ The child stirred, coughed. ‘See that metal ring?’ They bumped hard against the stone, the water playing spitefully with them as he tried to keep station under the rusty remains of a mooring ring. It was big, large enough to push the boy’s head and shoulders through.
    ‘Si.’
The brat had pluck. He was white with terror, clinging with choking force to Ross’s neck, but he looked up.
    ‘Let go and reach for it.’ He boosted the child up, the force of the lunge pushing him completely under the surface once, twice, and then the weight was gone. He surfaced, spewing water, and saw the boy half through the ring, wriggling into it like a terrified monkey. ‘Hold on!’ The child managed to nod, his little face screwed up with determination as he clung to the rusty metal.
    But something was very wrong. Ross’s vision was blurring, his shoulders burned as though his muscles and