Mervyn banged his fist on the table. “She can’t marry you. She’s already married to me!”
“She can divorce you.”
“On what grounds?”
“You don’t need grounds in Nevada.”
Mervyn turned his angry eyes on Diana. “You’re not going to Nevada. You’re coming back to Manchester with me.”
She looked at Mark. He smiled gently at her. “You don’t have to obey anyone,” he said. “Do what
Mervyn said: “Get your coat on.”
In his blundering way, Mervyn had given Diana back her sense of proportion. She now saw her fear of the flight and her anxieties about living in America as minor worries by comparison with the all-important question: Who did she want to live with? She loved Mark, and Mark loved her, and all other considerations were marginal. A tremendous sense of relief came over her as she made her decision and announced it to the two men who loved her. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Mervyn,” she said. “I’m going with Mark.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nancy Lenehan enjoyed a minute of jubilation as she looked down from Mervyn Lovesey’s Tiger Moth and saw the Pan American Clipper floating majestically on the calm water of the Shannon estuary.
The odds had been against her, but she had caught up with her brother and foiled at least part of his plan. You’ve got to get up very early in the morning to outsmart Nancy Lenehan, she thought, in a rare moment of self- congratulation.
Peter was going to have the shock of his life when he saw her.
As the little yellow plane circled, and Mervyn searched for a place to land, Nancy began to feel tense about the forthcoming confrontation with her brother. She still found it hard to believe that he had deceived and betrayed her with such complete ruthlessness. How could he? As children they had been bathed together. She had put Band-Aids on his knees, told him how babies were made, and always given him a chew of her gum. She had kept his secrets and told him her own. After they grew up she had nursed his ego, never letting him be embarrassed because she was so much smarter even though she was a girl.
All their lives she had taken care of him. And when Pa died she had allowed Peter to become chairman of the company. That had cost her dearly. Not only had she suppressed her own ambition to make way for him: at the same time she had stifled a budding romance; for Nat Ridgeway, Pa’s deputy, had resigned when Peter took charge. Whether anything would have come of that romance, she would never know, for Ridgeway had since married.
Her friend and lawyer, Mac MacBride, had advised her not to let Peter be chairman, but she had gone against his counsel, and her own best interests, because she knew how wounded Peter would be that people thought he was not fit to fill his father’s shoes. When she remembered all she had done for him, and then thought of how he had tried to cheat her and lie to her, she wanted to weep with resentment and rage.
She was desperately impatient to find him and stand in front of him and look into his eyes. She wanted to know how he would act and what he would say to her.
She was also eager to join battle. Her catching up with Peter was only the first step. She had to get on the plane. That might be straightforward; but if the Clipper was full, she would have to try to buy someone else’s seat, or use her charm on the captain, or even bribe her way on board. When she got to Boston, she had to persuade the minority shareholders, her aunt Tilly and her father’s old lawyer, Danny Riley, to refuse to sell their holdings to Nat Ridgeway. She felt she could do that, but Peter would not give up without a fight, and Nat Ridgeway was a formidable opponent.
Mervyn brought the plane down on a farm track at the edge of the little village. In an uncharacteristic display of good manners, he helped Nancy get out and climb down onto the ground. As she set foot on Irish soil for the second time she thought of her father who, although he talked constantly of the old country, never actually went there. She felt that was sad. He would have been pleased to know that his children had made it to Ireland. But it would have broken his heart to know how the company that had been his life had been run down by his son. Better that he was not here to see that.
Mervyn roped the plane down. Nancy was relieved to leave it behind. Pretty though it was, it had almost killed her. She still shivered every time she remembered flying toward that cliff. She did not intend to get into a small plane again for the rest of her life.
They walked briskly into the village, following a horse-drawn wagon loaded with potatoes. Nancy could tell that Mervyn, too, was feeling a mixture of triumph and apprehension. Like her, he had been deceived and betrayed, and had refused to take it lying down; and like her, he got great satisfaction from defying the expectations of those who had plotted against him. But for both of them the real challenge was still ahead.
A single street led through Foynes. Halfway along it they met a group of well-dressed people who could only be Clipper passengers: they looked as if they had wandered onto the wrong set at a film studio. Mervyn approached them and said: “I’m looking for Mrs. Diana Lovesey—I believe she’s a passenger on the Clipper.”
“She sure is!” said one of the women; and Nancy recognized the movie star Lulu Bell. There was a note in her voice that suggested she did not like Mrs. Lovesey. Once again Nancy wondered what Mervyn’s wife was like. Lulu Bell went on. “Mrs. Lovesey and her—companion?—went into a bar just along the street here.”
Nancy said: “Could you direct me to the ticket office?”
“If I ever get cast as a tour guide, I won’t need to rehearse!” said Lulu, and the passengers with her laughed. “The airline building is at the far end of the street, past the railroad station, opposite the harbor.”
Nancy thanked her and walked on. Mervyn had already started out, and she had to run to catch up with him. However, he stopped suddenly when he caught sight of two men strolling up the street, deep in conversation. Nancy looked curiously at the men, wondering why they had stopped Mervyn in his tracks. One was a silver-haired swell in a black suit with a dove gray waistcoat, obviously a passenger from the Clipper. The other was a scarecrow of a man, tall and bony, with hair so short he almost looked bald, and the expression of someone who has just woken up from a nightmare. Mervyn went up to the scarecrow and said: “You’re Professor Hartmann, aren’t you?”
The man’s reaction was quite shocking. He jumped back a pace and held up his hands defensively, as if he thought he was about to be attacked.
His companion said: “It’s all right, Carl.”
Mervyn said: “I’d be honored to shake your hand, sir.”
Hartmann dropped his arms, although he still looked wary. He shook hands.
Nancy was surprised at Mervyn’s behavior. She would have said that Mervyn Lovesey thought nobody in the world was his superior, yet here he was acting like a schoolboy asking a baseball star for his autograph.
Mervyn said: “I’m glad to see you got out. We feared the worst, you know, when you disappeared. By the way, my name is Mervyn Lovesey.”
Hartmann said: “This is my friend Baron Gabon, who helped me to escape.”
Mervyn shook hands with Gabon, then said: “I won’t intrude anymore. Bon voyage, gentlemen.”
Hartmann must be something very special, Nancy thought, to have distracted Mervyn, even for a few moments, from his single-minded pursuit of his wife. As they walked on through the village she asked: “So who’s he?”
“Professor Carl Hartmann, the greatest physicist in the world,” Mervyn replied. “He’s been working on splitting the atom. He got into trouble with the Nazis for his political views, and everyone thought he was dead.”
“How do you know about him?”
“I did physics at university. I thought of becoming a research scientist, but I haven’t the patience for it. I still keep up with developments, though. It so happens there have been some amazing discoveries in the field over the last ten years.”
“Such as?”
