821: One morning . . .
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 16 begins
16
ONE MORNING, when the time was right, Andy woke her with an armload of rolls and said, “My darling, it’s time. Today is the day. Hurry. We have to go while it’s still dark.”
Rosetta gathered the few belongings she had with her, and in a moment she was ready to go. They were led out of the cellar and through a walled garden at the back of the hotel. They moved quickly but didn’t run. Rosetta ate a roll as she hurried through the garden. Her hands shook. It was a cold morning.
At the back of the garden was a shed that was built against the wall. They clambered to the top of this shed, and from the roof of the shed to the top of the wall. They dropped to the other side, and Rosetta lost the rolls. She groped around on the ground in the dark, feeling for them, but Andy put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about them—forget them,” and he pulled her to her feet and tugged her along into a thicket of small trees.
They walked through the thicket in silence for a hundred paces, Rosetta trying not to breathe, and then they emerged in a field, where the long grass was reddening in the early light. Suddenly, they were alone, and Rosetta realized that they were on the other side, as if escaping had required nothing more than a walk in the woods. They dashed across this field to another stand of trees, where night still lingered.
They stood there, gasping, clasping each other in the chilly air, and a voice whispered to them from behind a dark trunk, “It’s a relief to cross that border at last, isn’t it, my friends?”
Andy and Rosetta were terrified by this voice, because they seemed to hear in it a tone at once sarcastic and accusatory, a tone with a bitter bite in it, like the taste of a horse chestnut. The unlucky child who tries one in the mistaken belief that it is the edible chestnut will never forget that taste. Hearing the caustic tone in the voice from the dark made Andy shudder and grimace with the memory of it. He supposed that the unseen speaker with the horse-chestnut tone had recognized them and followed them. Now, he supposed, they would be made to pay for the Bat’s impudence. Letting them cross the border must have been part of a cruel game.
The voice from the dark went on. “Of course,” it said, “you’ve got a few more borders to cross before you breathe free air, a long way to go—and you might not make it.”
“Listen here,” said Andy, “we’ve come through a lot, you know.” He was trying not to seem to be pleading, though he was.
From the darkness came a dismissive snort and then, “We have all come through a lot.”
Andy stiffened and stood straight. He reached into the darkness and grabbed what his hands found, the coat of the invisible man with the insincere tone. Andy pulled the man toward him and tightened his grip in a threatening manner. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but my wife and I have come through a lot, and as you said we still have a long way to go, but if you think you’re going to take us away to some prison or other, you won’t have an easy time of it, I promise you that.”
[to be continued]
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