The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(169)
“No, Emma, save yourself, you must . . .”
“As you yourself said: now isn’t the time—and I don’t intend to argue. I’m staying here with you. Nothing you say will make me change my mind.”
The dying Murray stroked her hair with an increasingly limp, trembling hand.
“I’m the most exasperating man on the planet with whom to survive a Martian invasion, but it’s all right to die with me?”
“My good manners prevent me from answering that, Mr. Gilmore, and my honesty from lying. Draw your own conclusions,” she replied with a catch in her voice.
Murray gave her a smile of infinite tenderness, and their lips met, his great paws sliding down the curve of her back, too weak to embrace her. We all looked away respectfully, moved by the scene. Unfortunately, there was no time for anything more: the monsters’ thundering footsteps were drawing closer and closer. This time it wouldn’t be the celebrated author or Inspector Clayton who interrupted their embrace.
“Inspector Clayton,” we heard Murray say, his voice scarcely more than a rasping, urgent hiss as he separated his lips from those of the girl, who clung to him sobbing. “Don’t get the wrong idea, but I’m going to ask for your hand.”
The inspector smiled for the first time since I had met him. He swiftly unscrewed his artificial limb and gave it to Murray.
“Press this when you think the time is right,” he explained, pointing to a button inside.
“Count on me, Inspector,” Murray assured him with forced enthusiasm. He then bade us farewell, casting a feeble glance over the group before resting his gaze on Shackleton. “Take care of them, Captain. I know you’ll get them out of here alive.”
Shackleton nodded with an air of pained composure.
“I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your letter, Gilliam,” Wells apologized. “If I received it now, I assure you I would.”
Murray smiled at him, astonished. “Thank you, George.”
Wells stepped toward Murray and, with an abruptness that startled us, proffered his hand.
“It’s been a pleasure to know you, Gilliam,” he blurted out, in the tone of one who feels ridiculous when showing his emotions.
Gilliam shook his hand, relieved perhaps that his own anguished expression allowed him to conceal how moved he was by Wells’s unexpected show of compassion. Then he turned once more to Emma in a final attempt to persuade her.
“Now go, my love, please. Live . . .”
“Not without you,” the girl replied with anguished defiance.
“You won’t have to, Emma,” Murray assured her, stroking her hair with a trembling hand, controlled now by the strings of death. “I promise you, you won’t be alone, because somehow I’ll come back. I did it once, and I’ll do it again, my love. I’ll come back to you. You’ll feel me embrace you, smile at you, watch over you each moment of your life . . .”
But his words only made Emma clasp the dying man even more tightly. Murray gave us an imploring look. He had done his best, but there was nothing more he could say to persuade her to flee with us. We all looked at one another, none of us daring to step forward and prise her away from him. Clayton glanced toward the end of the tunnel, where the monsters were bearing down on us. I suppose he must have figured that we had another two to three minutes at least. To our surprise, he knelt beside the couple.
“Miss Harlow,” he said gently, “allow me to say that isn’t just a metaphor. As you know, my department deals with all those things that defy reason, and so you have to believe me when I tell you that in some cases what Mr. Murray says is true. There have been loves so powerful they have even transcended death.”
Emma turned and looked straight at the inspector in silence. Then she said, “If you’d ever been in love yourself you’d know this gives me no comfort, Inspector. And so, with all due respect, go to Hell.”
For a few moments, the inspector gazed at her with an expression of sorrow and pain, an almost human expression I would never have expected from a man like Clayton. I didn’t know whether he’d been telling the truth, whether he actually knew of loves that had transcended the frontiers of death, or had simply said the only thing he could think of to convince the girl to flee with us, a beautiful lie to save her life. Be that as it may, it clearly made no impression on Emma. Finally, Clayton stood up and gazed at Murray, as though asking permission to resort to force. But Murray shook his head with a smile of resigned defeat and clasped the girl to him with the last of his strength. At this, there was nothing more to say. Then, as if we were no longer there, Murray began whispering something in his beloved’s ear in a lilting voice, like a lullaby, and although we couldn’t make out his words, we all saw how the girl’s sobs suddenly stopped. Her head still resting on his chest, Emma smiled as Murray kept whispering to her, calmly nestling in his embrace, lost in thought, oblivious to the closeness of death hurtling toward us, like a little girl smiling blissfully as she listens to a fairy tale. Because, from the snatches I could overhear, Murray was telling her a children’s story, one I didn’t know, about colored balloons floating through galaxies made of vanilla meringue, of orange herons and men with forked tails.
Clayton gave a solemn nod, as though this were the end of a story written by him.
“We have to go now,” he said suddenly. “We should be as far away as possible when the bomb goes off.”