Trying to cheer me up now.
'—so my advice to you is move nice and slowly. Let him hit you where he's been taught to hit you.
Then you'll just have a sore chest next morning, take my word for it.'
What—no dissatisfied clients? Obviously not.
As he stepped out on to the side of the road Mosby realised that nice and slowly was the only way he was going to be able to move. Under his red shirt the bullet-proof vest weighed a ton, or seemed to, and Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
he was already sweating… Though maybe that was just good honest fear.
But Billy Bullitt was no youngster, so that didn't matter too much. With his combat hat pulled well down and his tinted glasses—and the target shirt—he would do well enough at a distance.
He was already used to the two physical symptoms he had noticed, the dry mouth and the tightness of his calf muscles. He had experienced them from the moment of getting up. The cup of hot tea had hardly moistened his mouth and the exercise of behaving normally, of walking to the bathroom and then down to breakfast as though it was any other morning of his life, hadn't eased the muscles.
Nothing wrong with his stomach, though. It was true that condemned men could eat a hearty breakfast, going to their deaths with a bacon-and-egg cliche inside them.
It was Shirley who hadn't eaten.
Strange that Shirley didn't matter any more either. Or perhaps it was simply the recognition that he didn't matter to Shirley.
But that wasn't quite true any more, to be honest—and honesty was one of the real luxuries still left.
'Come to bed, honey.'
No doubt about the invitation, the first ever of its kind: big soft Camelot bed and little soft Shirley, both inviting him to enjoy the present and forget the future.
'Just got to clean my teeth, that's all.'
Shirley fulfilling—ready to fulfil—the ancient night-before-the-battle-role, so that even if the good guys lost there'd be another generation of good guys to take up the quarrel in the future.
Future was another ugly word.
This would be the first time, and there always had to be a first time for everything. Even dying. Mark up another cliche.
And that made this first time unlucky, as though nothing would more surely ready him for death than the taking of this opportunity which the possibility of death was giving him.
'I think I'd better get all the sleep I can.'
The gentlest way he could think of saying it.
'You don't have to, Mose.'
Logical answer. He didn't have to do anything difficult next morning, just walk a little way up a hill, nice and slow. And either way, he could have all the sleep he wanted after that.
'I know. And the thought is very much appreciated. Is there any chance of being given a rain-check?'
She smiled at that: Mosby Sheldon III running true to form to the last.
'Of course. One rain-check issued.' 'I won't forget—I warn you.' 'Neither will I.'
But now he was already forgetting the softness and the perfume. They were part of the past and the future. Now there was only the present, and the hill in front of him, rising up steeply.
Foot by foot he went up. The camera man was trudging on his left and the two other men a couple of yards to his right. Not a very big crew, three.
The turf under his feet was soft and springy now. Further back it had been trampled by cows and was sprinkled with big, round crusted pats of dung. There were flowers growing in it, yellow buttercups and white ox-eye daisies. He reached down and picked a daisy for luck, realising as he did so that he had moved too quickly. For an instant his back tingled with fear.
And there were birds sweeping over the hillside, skimming and diving like fighter-planes searching for targets over a battlefield. Major Davies would have known what sort of birds they were—or would he?
Anthony Price - Our man in camelot
Davies was the odd man out who had been bugging him. Even in the middle of the night, when he had woken up to find Shirley breathing softly beside him, the unsettled question of Davies had come between them, like a ghost.
They had checked out Davies so thoroughly before he had flown to Israel, and he had been clean. And they had checked him out thoroughly after his death, and but for that one letter from old James Barkham, the bookseller, he had been clean again. Indeed, if that letter hadn't popped through the letterbox slit, then the thing would never have been started. Without that there had been nothing left to connect Major Davies, the bird-watcher, with Major Davies, the expert on Arthurian history, the Badon-hunter.
So it had been deliberate… He heard a car on the road below him, and turned slowly and deliberately to face it.
Distance; a little over three hundred yards maybe.
He closed his eyes behind the tinted glasses and waited.
The car began to decelerate, presumably as it came towards where they had parked their vehicle half on the
