by Jo Beverley
“Yes,” she said tersely.
“The family home, I suspect, or you’d say more about it.” After a pause, he continued. “Now that I think about it, doesn’t your brother have an ‘Honorable’ in front of his name? Squadron Leader the Honorable James Macrae?”
“He does.” Frowning, she pulled up beside the old barn that was used as a hangar. A democratic Canadian might not have much use for the aristocracy.
“So you’re the Honorable Jane Macrae?”
She turned off the engine and set the hand brake. “Lady Jane Macrae, actually.”
“I knew it suited you!” he said with a mixture of amusement and alarm.
“My father is the Earl of Ballister,” Jane explained. “Daughters of earls get to call themselves ‘Lady,’ while sons are merely ‘Honorables’ unless they’re the heir. My oldest brother, Duncan, has the courtesy title of viscount.” She slid from the Morris and retrieved the key to the barn’s padlock from under a rock. “He says it’s useful for getting good tables in restaurants.”
David chuckled as he followed her to the door. “How practical of him. Was your fiancé another sprig from a noble tree?”
“Not at all. Philip’s father is a solicitor in Birmingham. Philip was a bright lad who went to Oxford, where he and Jamie shared rooms.” She smiled wistfully. “I joined them at Oxford a year later. We had such good times.”
The engagement to Philip had been a natural outgrowth of those happy days. They had been friends, then lovers. If they’d had time for a real marriage, they would have dealt well together. She had never doubted that, and she didn’t now.
Jane would never love another man as she’d loved Philip. But David Sinclair was a reminder that there were other men, and other ways to love.
She opened the padlock and they swung the doors open together.
“Splendid!” David beamed at the Fairey Fox, which was painted a very unmilitary shade of sky blue. He began prowling around the aircraft, studying every bolt and surface. “It looks to be in first-class shape.”
“Angus Macrae, who was a flight mechanic in the First World War, looks after the Fox.” Jane rested a hand on a strut. “Keeping the plane ready to fly is sort of a superstition, really. A way of saying that Jamie or Gwynne might come home and take her up at any time. That . . . that they’ll be safe.”
“There’s no shortage of superstitions in cockpits,” David said. “Let’s get her out into the sunshine. Do you need to leave a note explaining why the plane is gone?”
“Good idea.” After helping David pull the plane out, Jane returned to the hangar and found a tablet and a pencil on a desk in the corner. She pondered what to say. Borrowed the Fox to hunt the Holy Grail was a little too provocative. She settled for, Fox needed for urgent mission. Will return as soon as possible. Lady Jane.
She sealed the note in an envelope and wrote, Lady Ballister or Angus Macrae, on the outside and left it lying in the middle of the barn where the airplane usually sat. After collecting two leather flying helmets, she followed David outside. He was checking the movement of the rudder. She wasn’t surprised. A good pilot never took anyone else’s word about an airplane’s readiness.
“Can you fly her?”
“No problem. I learned on a biplane.” He knelt to check the wheels, feeling under the cowlings in case mice had made nests.
Guessing what he was too polite to ask, Jane said, “We’re nowhere near as rich as you might think. The Ballister title is old, but it’s English. In Scotland, the title that really matters is that my father is Macrae of Dunrath—the chief of the clan. Very feudal, and it means he’s responsible for all the Macraes in this area. There were never any enclosures in this valley, and there has never been a Macrae of Dunrath chief who slouched off to live on the French Riviera and wasted the family fortune. So the valley is a happy place to live, but no one here is filthy rich.”
“That’s a good record,” David said as he took off the fuel tank cap to visually check the level. “It’s easy to be virtuous when one is poor and hasn’t many choices. Harder when there is enough money to make decadence an option.”
“How is she fixed for fuel?” she asked. With rationing, petrol could be a problem.
“A full tank. I should think it would be more than enough to fly to Moray Firth and back, this being just a little bit of a country,” he said teasingly.
“Scotland may be small, but we have plenty of history in every square inch,” she said, imperturbable.
“Which is both interesting and burdensome.” He paused in his inspection to look at her seriously. “Do you ever yearn to see a land where the horizons go on forever? Where there are still places where no man has ever walked?”
The link between them was so strong that his words conjured vivid images straight from his mind. Vast prairies, endless forest of dark evergreens, fields of eternal snow . . . “It sounds lovely,” she said, knowing he hadn’t been asking just about scenery.
But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—think beyond the war. As she tied her hair at her nape with a ribbon, she reminded herself that she might not live to see another dawn. She should be in a panic. Since she wasn’t, likely she just didn’t have the imagination to believe in her own end.
David turned his attention to the grassy airstrip. “This looks long enough, though there isn’t much room to spare. Anything I should know?”
Jane gestured at the rugged hills. “Finding enough level land wasn’t easy. This was the only possible spot and it’s barely adequate.”
“If your brother and sister can manage, so can I.” David’s gaze lifted to the sky. “It’s fairly clear now. Do you have enough weather magic to guess if that will last?”
She extended her weather senses. “No major storms anywhere near, though there might be light showers from a cloud or two.” She probed the skies further. “My weather perception is stronger than usual. A result of our energy joining, maybe.”
He grinned wickedly as he drained a little fuel from the tank to check that it was clean. “A pity there isn’t time to see if we could strengthen it further.”
She laughed, but she was very aware of the passing minutes. She tossed him one of the leather helmets and donned the other herself. “Are we ready?”
“Checked and all clear.” He swung into the cockpit and moved the throttle back and forth. As he put on the helmet, he asked, “Can you pull the prop for me?”
Jane nodded, having done that many times for Jamie and Gwynne. David engaged the engine, she yanked the prop, and the Fox leapt into roaring life.
She scrambled up into the observer’s seat, again glad she’d worn trousers and sensible shoes. As she settled into her seat and put on her headphones, David’s voice sounded in her ears. “Pilot to observer. All secure?”
“All secure. Do you need me to navigate?”
“No need. I’ll follow the Grail. It burns in my brain like a bonfire at midnight.” He pulled the Fox into a turn and taxied to the head of the runway.
“Are we going to succeed, David?” she asked, needing reassurance.
“We will.” He laughed. “And now, a-hunting we shall go!”
Chapter 4
David pulled back on the stick and roared into the sky, laughing with the exhilaration of flight. Life didn’t get any better than this. He had a sweet, responsive airplane under his hands and the most beautiful girl in the world sitting behind him. He didn’t even have to worry about Messerschmitts. Yes, they were heading into black peril, but if he died today, it would be for a good reason and in the best of company.
He frowned, his mood darkening. Though he’d long since accepted that he wasn’t likely to see his thirtieth birthday, the thought of Jane dying made his blood run cold.
Equally grim was the thought of the Grail’s purity being tainted by the Nazis. The safety of Lady Jane and the chalice meant more than his own unremarkable life.
They reached cruising altitude and he made a quiet pilot’s bargain with God. My life
for hers and for the Grail. Asking for his own survival as well seemed greedy.
He swung north and east, climbing just enough to skim over the rugged hills, since he’d rather not show up on local radar screens. The Moray Firth wasn’t much more than an hour away by air, and the Grail was calling him like a siren.
Once he had a good feel for his aircraft, he began to wonder what would happen when they caught up with their quarry. An SS colonel was bad enough. One who could wield black magic was beyond David’s imagination.
But his partner was a white magician of great power. Speaking into the intercom, he asked, “Jane, do you have any idea what we’ll find when we catch up to Krieger?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she replied, her voice calm through the crackles of the intercom. “From my one brief contact with his mind, I know that he’s very strong, very focused and jubilant about the fact that he has the chalice in his possession. He was positively gloating. He’s supremely confident that he’ll be successful. Perhaps he will prove to be careless.”
“Do you think he noticed when you studied him earlier, or were you knocked over just from getting close?”
“He noticed,” she said dryly. “That’s why he slammed back with so much force. Perhaps he was expecting some kind of magical attack, since the Grail is too valuable not to be protected. I thought I could get a reading on him without being noticed. It was not my finest hour.”
“Might help us if he thinks he shot down his only pursuers.”
“I hope that’s what he thinks. The longer he believes he’s safe, the better our chances.”
David checked his mental map of Scotland to see how far the chalice was from the coast. “We should catch up with him just before he reaches the firth. Then what?”
Jane’s sigh came over the intercom. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“He’ll probably have some kind of firearm,” David said. “Probably a pistol.”
“Yes, and that’s dangerous. But his magical abilities are much more so. I’m working on a shield that should deflect some of his power.” After a pause, she said with determined cheer, “We have one great advantage. You can draw directly on the power of the Grail, and I can reach it through you. That should even the odds magically. As to the physical confrontation—how are you at hand-to-hand combat?”
He thought back to fights with his big brothers. Being the youngest meant having to fight well and smart if he didn’t want to be thumped regularly. “Not bad. If I can disarm him and you can shield us from the worst of his black magic, I can handle a fistfight.” His eyes narrowed as he gazed at the horizon. “Is that Moray Firth ahead?”
“Indeed it is. Has Krieger reached the shore . . . ?” She caught her breath. “Look out; deadly winds coming!”
Even before she finished speaking, a gale blasted from the north-west and slammed into the biplane with the force of an avalanche. The Fox spun out of control, tumbling sickeningly toward the mountains below.
David fought the bucking aircraft, feeling like a sparrow struck by the hand of God. Or like when he’d been shot down and had to bail out over the Channel. He gritted his teeth. No parachutes on this flight, so it was regain control or die.
And he was damned well not going to die before retrieving the sacred chalice.
If Jane had had the breath, she would have screamed as they plunged toward the ground with terrifying speed. She regained a modicum of control along with her breath and stayed silent. David didn’t need distractions.
He managed to pull the Fox out of its dive, but they were treacherously low and the plane was still being knocked about like a shuttlecock. “We can’t stay aloft in this,” he said, his voice calm. “Look for a landing place.”
She scanned the rough green hills. Too steep, too many boulders, too many trees . . . “There! Ahead, two o’clock. I think that will do.”
He turned the biplane and headed in that direction. The wind shook the Fox like a bird in a terrier’s mouth as he aimed for the short stretch of flat land between two hills. She heard David murmuring to himself, “Steady, steady, come on, Foxie girl, we can do it. We can do it. . . .”
The biplane’s wheels touched down on the rough green turf. The craft bounced like a tennis ball, but David managed to keep it from flipping or crunching over on the right wings.
White-knuckled, Jane held her breath. They were approaching a straggly clump of trees at the end of the level stretch with terrifying swiftness.
The Fox shuddered to a stop just before the propeller gouged bark. David exhaled roughly. “Jane, are you all right?”
“That was entirely too exciting,” she said unsteadily. “You certainly can fly. But, of course, I knew that.”
The wind wasn’t quite as bad on the ground, but it was rocking the biplane, and the sky had darkened to near dusk toward the north. “Where the devil did this storm come from?” David said as he climbed to the ground, then offered a hand to help her down from the observer’s seat. “Was it beyond the range you can sense when you looked at the weather earlier?”
As Jane stepped onto the ground, she muttered a few words under her breath that would ruin David’s belief that she was a lady if he heard. “Krieger’s a weather mage,” she said grimly. “I didn’t realize that from my brief touch of his mind last night. He’s pulled together several minor weather systems to create a storm fierce enough to send everyone inside.”
“The skies are getting dark enough to let him rendezvous with his U-boat without having to wait until tonight.” David glanced up at the black clouds whipping across the sky. “He’s within a few miles of the firth. If we can’t fly, we’ll never get there in time to stop him. Do you have enough weather-working ability to send this storm away?”
“Not even close.” Rain began pounding down, and Jane ducked back into the limited shelter of the wings. “My father or Duncan might be able to dissipate it, but they’re in London. I wonder. . . .”
She closed her eyes and took his hand as she tried to cobble together a solution. David caught his breath as she drew Grail power through him.
Link this to that, add energy. Yes. The rain and wind faded away around them and the Fox. Yet when she opened her eyes, nearby trees still lashed and rain still fell.
David stared at the water pounding down a yard away. “What are you doing?”
“I’m combining my modest weather ability with my rather stronger talent for shielding, and I’m fueling it with Grail power drawn through you,” Jane explained. “The result is a bubble of calm air around the Fox. Wind and rain go around rather than striking us.”
He whistled softly. “Can you maintain this while we’re flying?” “I hope so. Visualize white Grail energy flowing from me to you.” As energy poured in from him, she imagined stability around them and the biplane. When it felt secure, she cautiously released his hand. The clear space remained. She sighed with relief. “It’s working. Do you have enough room to take off again?”
“If I landed, I can take off.” He frowned at their emergency airstrip. “But we’d better do it now, before the ground gets too soft from the rain.”
Turning the muddy biplane was more work than when they’d brought the aircraft out from its hangar, but they managed the task in record time. David climbed into the cockpit and Jane started the propeller.
After she scrambled into her seat, David revved the engine up until the plane seemed ready to fly into pieces. Then he drove the Fox down the impromptu runway like a scalded ferret. Jane screwed her eyes shut until they were airborne.
“We cleared those boulders at the end of the strip by a good two feet,” David said cheerfully as he banked the biplane to return to their previous heading. “Looks like your bubble of calm air is holding despite our airspeed.”
“It’s the Grail power enhancing my basic abilities,” she said. “Now that I’ve designed and set my spell, it doesn’t take much energy to maintain it. It should last until I get so tired I run out of magic. Which sho
uldn’t happen anytime soon.” She hoped.
They leveled off and David opened the throttle to full speed. Though the sky was black and rain slashed through the air all around them, the biplane handled as if this were a windless spring day.
They closed the distance to the firth rapidly. As they started to descend, David said, “Krieger is almost to the water, and we’re going to land practically on top of him. Think he knows he’s being chased?”
Jane cautiously felt around the dark vortex of the sorcerer’s energy. “Probably not yet because of my shielding. He might not know until he actually sees us.”
“There’s a nice flat area to land on, but it seems to be a bluff, with the sea below.”
“There are a lot of cliffs around Moray Firth. Krieger probably has a boat waiting at the foot of a cliff, where it won’t be seen.” The SS colonel wasn’t in sight, so Jane concentrated hard on locating him. “He’s either going down a cliff path, or he’s on the beach below by the boat.”
“The chalice is being carried down the path,” David said. “I can feel it as clearly as you feel Krieger. Hang on. As soon as I land, I’m going after him at full speed, before he can get his boat off.”
Success or disaster in the next few minutes, and Krieger was surely better armed, and well practiced at violence. “There should be some tools stored in a little compartment on the right side of the cockpit,” Jane said, amazed at how calm she sounded. “A screwdriver might make a weapon. Better than nothing.”
“Good idea. Hang on now.”
The landing on the clifftop was easy compared to their emergency stop, though David had to dodge a pair of frantic sheep that leapt out of hiding. As soon as the Fox rolled to a stop, he vaulted out of the plane, a medium-size screwdriver in hand. “I think I’ll keep my helmet on,” he said, his voice pitched to cut through the howling wind. “Can you maintain the still air around the plane? Otherwise, it will blow off the cliff.”
