“Agreed,” said Hudson, “but I’m hoping the strengths of one will help the other survive.” More like hoping Julian Devane could keep Matthew from being killed … unless Devane had already killed him, and climbing up to this parapet to sweep the canvas covering off the tripod and glass and keep watch every day for hour upon hour was a useless—

“Coach comin’!” shouted the second guard, McBray, a small slim man who had murdered his mother-in-law.

Hudson instinctively looked to the northwest, but the road to Adderlane remained empty. He turned his face toward the southeast …

… and there it was … still in the distance, over two miles away …

Hudson redirected the glass and put his eye to it.

“Coach comin’!” McBray shouted again, in case the men who manned other sections of the ramparts had failed to hear his booming bawl as it swept across the village.

Hudson made out that it was a strange-looking vehicle … huge … resembling more of a ship than a coach … pulled by four giant horses … and who was that up at the reins? Coat and cap, the face a smear, still indistinct …

“He’s come to looksee again,” Gravelling said, and Hudson knew he must mean Professor Fell.

Hudson kept his eye to the glass. The team was walking; obviously they had already travelled a distance today and the driver was not pushing them. A little closer, and closer still … and then Hudson could make out the driver’s face.

He hadn’t realized how strained he was, waiting for this moment. He hadn’t realized, in his sleepless nights of reaching for a bottle in the little cottage Fell had given him, that he had thought Matthew would never return from this suicidal mission, that the boy was dead either by Devane’s hand or some other equally as foul, that Berry was lost, that all was lost. He’d thought it impossible that Matthew should come back, and many times he’d entertained the idea of stealing a horse and taking out on the road to Adderlane, but the idea of leaving Berry in the clutches of Frederick and Pamela Nash prevented it.

Therefore he was unprepared for the rush of emotion that hit him like a moving brick wall.

Hudson Greathouse staggered. No blow from a human fist had ever stunned him as did the sight of Matthew Corbett driving that huge coach in toward Y Beautiful Bedd, nor had any drink of knee-dropping liquor ever burst the brilliance of a sun more brightly in his soul.

“God’s truth!” Gravelling marvelled. “Is that them?”