CHAPTER 67
It sounded easy, turning around to face the wall, but faced with the logistics of actually doing it on a four-inch ledge forty feet in the air, it suddenly seemed impossible. He began by turning his left foot, pivoting on his heel till he got his foot pointing toward the corner, all the while keeping his left palm flat to the wall. He was still gripping the metal edge of the window frame with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. There wasn’t much to hold so it was more a stabilizing influence than something that gave him real purchase. If he started to fall, he would not be able to stop.
Next he started to rotate his hips counterclockwise very slowly, keeping flush to the wall. As his shoulders began to follow the movement, rolling around to his left, he felt his arm twist along its length. His right shoulder was leaning out now, well over the ledge, and he felt the sickening sensation of the ground swimming up to meet him. His injured shoulder groaned, then shrieked with pain.
You can’t do it.
He unwound back to his former position, spine to the wall, and caught his breath. He waited, counting silently to ten. Then began the process again.
This time, when he reached the point where his left shoulder was against the wall, he began to walk the fingers of his left hand in toward his body. He had to get his arm between his side and the turret. That meant creating a space between his body and the house that was wide enough to pass his arm through.
In other words, you have to lean away from the house.
He had started to sweat. He could feel the skin of his face cold in the wind. He took a deep breath, then counted down from three.
Two.
One.
He let go of the window, swung his aching right arm through the empty air as he leaned out and pulled his left arm through. He pivoted onto his toes, his right hand reaching for the corner as his left stabbed blindly for the window frame.
For a terrible moment he thought he’d missed it. There was just nothing there. Then his slashing, desperate fingers found that edge of metal trim and he seized it like Dumbo’s feather.
Except that Dumbo didn’t really need his feather, did he? So it’s a bad analogy. Because without your feather, you’re a stain on the flagstone forty feet below.
Always helpful.
Still, he almost laughed. His face was mashed against the chill stone and he was still balanced precariously on a four-inch ledge, but it seemed like a triumph. A second later he began to inch toward the corner, which meant letting go of the window.
He suspected that holding on was not really helping his actual balance much at all. It was in his mind, that sense of stability through contact. Letting go wouldn’t make that much difference.
Okay, Dumbo, let’s see it . . .
He got a grip on the corner with his right hand, and that helped. As he started to negotiate his way around, he was struck again by the rightness of what he had done. There was no way he could have done this with his back to the wall. Once around he could see his goal, a glorious ten feet away: the roof, tiled with ancient mossy slate and a row of chimneys. He was nearly there. Then—surely—he’d find that missing drainpipe. Or maybe some Romeo and Juliet-style ivy that, if old enough, would be as good as a ladder . . .
There was a bang from below.
Thomas winced, and the wobble nearly killed him. He stilled himself, then looked down. He was right over the front door. The steward had just come out through it and slammed it shut. If Thomas fell now, he’d land right on him.
He froze. Then, gripped by an urgent thought, he looked down the drive for the steward’s car. If it was facing the house, the steward would turn toward the turret to get in and Thomas would be caught.
There was a dark blue Jaguar parked nose first against the front wall of the house.
Knowing he had only seconds before the steward would see him from the driver’s seat, Thomas moved quickly—recklessly—along the edge. He launched himself onto the steeply raked slates and scrabbled up without looking back. As he reached the apex of the roof where the cluster of chimneys were and slung one leg over, a fragment of stone, dislodged by his crawling, skittered down the roof, bounced off the gutter, and pinged off the windshield of the car below.
Thomas threw himself over the top and hugged the slates, shrinking down behind the first brick chimneystack with its clay-colored smoke pot. But he was not the first to take refuge up there today. With a great croaking squall, a crow rose up, flapping madly, its black beak and talons scything the air, its whirling feathers in Thomas’s face as it took off.
Thomas shrank away, face into his chest in case the bird came at him. Below, the steward looked from the stone that had clicked off his windshield, up to where the crow wheeled overhead, and shouted “Get out of it!”
Then, with Thomas crouched gargoyle-like above him, he was in the Jag and driving away.