‘And you can leave me? You can let me go?’
‘You no longer need me, my child — you have stayed with me all these years because you thought I needed you — and now Meechail here will look after you. You know that.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was more muffled than ever. ‘He is very kind.’
Jansci caught her by the shoulders, held her at arm’s length and looked at her.
‘For the daughter of Major-General Illyurin, you’re a very silly girl. Do you not know, my dear, that if it were not for you, Meechail would not be returning to the west?’
She turned and stared at Reynolds, and he could see that her eyes were shining in the starlight with unshed tears. ‘Is — is this true?’
‘It’s true.’ Reynolds smiled faintly. ‘A long argument, but I lost it. He won’t have me at any price.’
‘I’m sorry. I did not know.’ The life had gone out of her voice. ‘This is the end of it, then.’
‘No, my dear, only the beginning.’ Jansci caught her close and held her as her body shook with dry soundless sobs, looked over her shoulder and nodded at Reynolds and Sandor. Reynolds nodded in return, shook the scarred misshapen hand in silence, murmured his good-bye to the Cossack, parted the tall reeds and went down to the ditch, followed by Sandor, who held one end of the Cossack’s whip while Reynolds held the other and moved out gingerly on the ice. On the second step it broke under his weight and he was standing on the muddy bottom, covered to the thighs in the freezing water, but he ignored the numbing cold of it, broke the ice in front of him and pulled himself up on to the far bank. Austria, he said to himself, this is Austria, but the word meant nothing to him.
Something splashed into the water behind him and he turned to see Sandor forging his way through the water and broken ice, carrying Dr Jennings high in his arms, and as soon as Reynolds had him safely on top of the bank, Sandor waded back to the Hungarian side, gently took the girl away from Jansci and carried her in turn across the ditch. For a moment she clung to him almost desperately as if she were terrified of breaking the last contact with the life she was leaving behind her, then Reynolds stooped down and raised her on to the bank beside him.
‘Do not forget what I told you, Dr Jennings,’ Jansci called softly. He and the Cossack had come through the reeds and were standing on the far bank. ‘We are walking a long dark road, but we do not want to walk it for ever more.’
‘I will not forget.’ Jennings was shaking with cold. ‘I will never forget.’
‘It is good.’ Jansci bowed his white bandaged head in a barely perceptible token of farewell. ‘God be with you. Dowidzenia.’
‘Dowidzenia,’ Reynolds echoed. Dowidzenia — till we meet again. He turned, caught Julia and Dr Jennings by the arms and led them, the shivering old man and the silently crying girl, up the gentle slope to the field and the freedom that lay beyond. At the top he turned, just for a moment, and he could see the three men walking slowly away across the Hungarian marshes, never once looking back, and by and by they were lost to sight behind the tall reeds and he knew that he would never see them again.
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.