Illyrian Summer, page 2
Her face flamed, but she answered coldly, “You’re referring to my visit to the amphitheater at Pula. I would have been quite safe. I think I usually have enough sense not to rush into dangers from which I have to be rescued.”
It was a pleasant relief to meet Daniel again on board. If sometimes she was irritated by his flirtatious attentions, at least he never made her feel the insignificant speck of feminine triviality that Adam did.
It took all the beauty of the long day’s sailing down the coast and between the islands to soothe her ruffled temper of the early morning, and she reflected contentedly that Melanie’s arrival would probably divert Adam for the next few days. If he was on holiday from his steel plant in the interior of the country, sooner or later he would have to return, and Sarah would be delighted to wave him goodbye.
But then Sarah found herself in his company once more. On arrival in Dubrovnik Edmund told her, “Adam Thorne is taking me and one of the camera team on a preliminary trip round the countryside so that I can choose the best spots. You’d better come and take notes.”
Adam drove the car, and for a time the road ran parallel with the coast and was reasonably good, but when he turned inland the surface became rougher and more dusty. Frequent stops were made so that Ricardo, the cameraman, could take experimental shots with a small cinecamera, and Sarah noted down details of scenery and lighting for Edmund’s benefit. When Adam drove over a particularly rough stretch of road, she wondered how she would eventually decipher some of her shaky shorthand outlines, and prudently she wrote out notes in longhand before she could forget what Edmund had said.
On the homeward journey Adam stopped at a junction. “What do you want to do, Edmund? We can go left and across the river and onto a better road that will take us to Trebinje and then down to Dubrovnik. Or we can go right and down a rather rough piece close to the mountain and so back to the road by the coast, the way we came this morning.”
Edmund decided on the wilder stretch, since he was interested in main roads only from the point of getting his heavy equipment along them.
“I’ll drive for a while,” he offered. “You’ve been at it all day.”
Ricardo changed to sit in the back with Sarah, and Adam sat next to Edmund to direct the latter if necessary.
The road became even rougher, and now the surface seemed to consist of large stones with soft dust in between, so that the car rocked perilously as a wheel sank into the sand.
Suddenly Sarah heard Adam shout and the next moment felt the car shudder, tilt alarmingly, remain poised for a second before it gathered momentum, and then it seemed that she was being dizzily thrown about inside a box.
When at last everything stopped moving, the cushion she was lying on gave a muffled groan and she discovered that she was sitting on top of Ricardo.
“O mama mia!” he gasped as she tried to move.
Then she saw that she and Ricardo were wedged into the wreckage of what had been the back seats.
“Sarah! Are you all right?” A voice penetrated her muzziness.
“Yes, Edmund, I think so. I don’t know.”
A strong hand grasped hers and pulled her through the opening where a car door had been. Now she saw that the hand belonged to Adam.
“No bones broken?” His tone was so abrupt that she was not sure whether he was asking a question or telling her the fact. In any case she had no time to answer, for he was now helping Ricardo out of the debris.
“Edmund?” she queried. “What happened?”
“He’s all right,” Adam replied tersely.
She noticed that his bare arm was bleeding and his shirt and trousers blood splattered. “Your arm!” she exclaimed.
“It’s nothing.”
“How did we crash?” she asked.
“I think the steering failed,” Adam answered, “and coming down on that bend we went into the boulders on the side and toppled over the edge.”
He rose from his kneeling position. “Not very far down the mountainside, fortunately.”
She glanced up toward the road they had left. Not very far! Well, on one’s two feet, slithering about twenty yards down a slope might be only trifling, but in a car it was different. Adam seemed to dismiss the event as though it were an everyday occurrence to crawl out of a wrecked vehicle.
Sarah still felt muzzy and the men’s conversation after they consulted the map only dimly registered. She rubbed her knee, which had begun to hurt intolerably.
“Sarah, d’you think you can walk ten miles along rough roads?” asked Edmund.
“I can try,” she said.
“More than trying is necessary,” Adam pointed out. “We can’t abandon you halfway.”
“I know that,” she snapped. “All right, I can walk.”
She saw that he was still trying to stem the blood from the cut on his arm.
“I have a small towel you could use as a bandage,” she offered, and struggled to her feet to get it, but her knee gave way immediately and she collapsed with a cry of pain.
Adam turned toward her.
“It’s only my knee. Bruised, I expect.” Sarah desperately wanted to make light of any injuries while Adam was present.
He and Edmund hoisted her to her feet.
“I can’t put my weight on it,” she gasped as the knee again buckled under her.
Adam knelt down and his fingers gently probed her knee joint. “It may be nothing worse than a bad wrench,” he commented. “Have you had trouble with it before?”
“Of course not!” Indignation swept over her. Did he think that she had been half-crippled before she came on this jaunt?
Edmund’s arm supported Sarah and he looked at Adam. “This means a change of plan if Sarah can’t walk. We shall have to find some sort of transport and get it here.”
Tears sprang into her eyes, but she blinked them angrily away. This was no time to play the pathetically helpless feminine hindrance, especially in Adam’s presence.
Adam stood up. “Then two of us will walk to the next village and see what we can find. Ricardo, you’d better come with me, and Edmund will stay with Sarah.”
The slight-figured Italian looked dismayed. “To walk on such roads! How far? Sixteen kilometers? It will kill me. I have never walked such distance in my life.”
Adam grinned unfeelingly. “Then it’ll be a new experience for you.”
“No, no,” protested Ricardo. “You will walk so fast that I shall only delay you. Edmund is stronger. He will go and I will stay here with Sarah.”
“You will not!” snapped Adam. “Besides, I might need your help with the languages. I have only a slight knowledge of Serbo-Croatian and my Italian is very poor.”
After he and Ricardo had set off, Edmund suggested, “We must keep our ears open in case a car or truck comes along. Or even an oxcart. Then we might catch up with the other two before they get to the village.”
Sarah agreed. “How long do you think it will take them to walk there?”
Edmund was thoughtful. “Most of three hours, I should think, if the road is rough all the way.”
Darkness fell. Sarah must have dozed, for presently she became aware of voices and a lantern light shining in her face.
“Are you all right, Sarah?”
The light illumined Adam’s face.
She uncurled from her cramped position. “Yes. Are we going now?”
“Soon, I telephoned the hotel to send out a car to fetch us,” he answered. “It should be here any minute. In fact, I thought it would overtake me on my way back from the village.”
“You mean you walked all those miles there—and back?” she queried. “That was twenty miles, you said.”
“I didn’t pick up a pair of wings on the way and fly.”
“What about Ricardo?”
Adam smiled. “Oh. I left him in the village nursing his blistered feet. Perhaps it was unkind of me to take him. I brought some food back with me. I couldn’t get much in the village at that time of night, but there’s bread and meat and some fruit.” He unpacked the contents of a small basket.
Having eaten nothing since midday, Sarah was almost ravenous.
The two men took turns to keep watch on the road, but when more than an hour had elapsed without any sign of a car, Adam became uneasy. He scrambled down the slope to join Sarah and Edmund.
“Either they’ve sent the car up the wrong road, although I gave exact directions, or else they haven’t bothered to send anything at all.” Adam said angrily.
“What do we do now?” queried Edmund. “Wait for daylight. I suppose, and hope for the best?”
“Hope alone won’t get us back to Dubrovnik,” Adam retorted testily. “Fortunately, I made provisional plans in case anything went wrong. A man in the village has an oxcart, and Ricardo has instructions that if nothing arrives to pick him up by four o’clock, then he’ll send the oxcart to us. We couldn’t expect anyone to send out a pair of oxen in the dark along these roads, but I hope Ricardo will remember.”
Sarah admired Adam’s resourcefulness, but she was miserably aware that these plans had been made especially for her benefit. But for her injured knee, she could have walked with the others last night down to the village.
“I’m sorry I’ve become a drag on the expedition,” she murmured.
In the dark she could not see Adam’s face, but several moments elapsed before he answered, “It couldn’t be helped. Just bad luck.”
With the approach of dawn, a slight wind sprang up and she began to shiver but she would die of cold rather than complain in Adam’s hearing. Yet without any admission on her part he put his jacket over her shoulders. True, it was only a lightweight linen, but his gesture counted more than any additional warmth. “Thank you, Adam,” she said quietly, and for the first time noticed how they had slipped so easily into Christian names. But for tonight’s rough adventure, they might have continued with “Mr. Thorne” and “Miss Catherall” for quite a time.
When the horizon and mountains were outlined in the faint early light, she clambered out of the car and stretched her aching limbs.
“Could we go to meet the oxcart, do you think?” she suggested to the two men. “With some help I might be able to walk part of the way to meet it, if not the whole ten miles.”
“If Ricardo has let me down and is still sleeping soundly,” Adam replied grimly, “you have no guarantee that you won’t have to walk the whole ten miles.”
Sarah quailed under his merciless logic. She held on to the car. Even to put the toe of her damaged leg to the ground was agony. She could hardly expect the men to carry her.
“No,” she said, white-faced and trembling. “Forget it. We’d better wait.”
She sat down on the hard stony ground and let her mind dwell on wishful fantasies. A nearby stream so that she could put a cold compress on her swollen knee ... a magic piece of camping equipment that would provide hot coffee ... the dream of a bathful of hot, scented water...
When she opened her eyes again, the men were collecting all their belongings that had not been irrevocably damaged.
“The carriage waits, milady!” Edmund shouted to her.
The two men carried her to the road as the cart approached, drawn by a pair of creamy-fawn oxen like outsize Jersey cows. She was hoisted on top of sacks of grain, and Edmund and Adam clambered in after her.
The oxcart owner encouraged his animals with strange high-pitched cries and the cart lurched off.
She calculated that ox miles per hour were about the same as a normal walking pace, and she wondered how she would sustain about three hours’ jolting.
Adam leaned toward hen “How much Serbo-Croatian do you know?” he demanded.
“Only a few words. ‘Please,’ ‘thank you,’ a few numbers and so on.”
“Then now’s your chance to learn some more.”
Sarah opened her mouth to protest. What school-masterish mentality the man had that he chose this inappropriate time for a language lesson!
From a sheaf of papers and booklets he extracted a small phrase book and a dictionary. “Now, let us discuss the weather,” he instructed. “It is a fine, sunny morning.”
He made her repeat phrases and questions, corrected her pronunciation and showed her how the words were spelled.
She was astonished when the plodding oxen reached the outskirts of the village, and only then did she realize how much trouble Adam had taken to make her forget her pain.
Ricardo greeted the party with the news that a car had just arrived from Dubrovnik, thanks to his further telephone messages. “They sent one last night,” he explained, “but the fool went to the wrong village and when nobody arrived he went back to Dubrovnik. Thought it was a false alarm.”
Sarah was taken to an inn, where she was glad of the chance to wash and tidy herself. Her green linen dress was soiled and crumpled, but at least she could brush her hair and put on fresh lipstick.
While Sarah gratefully drank coffee and ate buttered rolls, the innkeeper’s wife applied a heavenly cold compress to her knee and skillfully bandaged it.
“Thank you. That is very kind of you.” Sarah thanked the woman in her newly acquired phrases.
Half the village, it seemed, turned out to wave farewell to the party.
“They ought to have the flags out in Dubrovnik for us,” Edmund muttered.
But on arrival at the hotel, it seemed that criticisms and reproaches took the place of any welcoming celebrations.
When Sarah had bathed and dressed and had her knee attended to by the doctor, she sat on the terrace, and her first visitor was Daniel.
“I was worried out of my wits about you,” he complained after the first solicitous inquiries about her leg.
“I don’t suppose you missed me,” she answered, smiling up at him.
“Of course I missed you! How was I to know you’d go chasing off with Edmund and that Thorne chap, especially when we’d planned to have a day together?”
“I left you a message,” Sarah protested.
“I don’t know how to take you, Sarah. One minute I think we’re getting along fine. The next you’ve gone all distant.”
“But we do get along fine,” she asserted.
He bent toward her, and his gray green eyes searched her face. “You’re not playing me off against that Thorne fellow, are you?”
“Mr. Thorne would think that very funny.”
“Melanie wasn’t very happy about Adam, either,” Daniel remarked. “She had expected him to be here last night.”
Sarah remained silent, staring beyond the balcony at the boats dotting the bay. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, “but it was Adam and Edmund who arranged the trip, not I.”
Daniel left her, and Sarah had decided that perhaps it was time she went to bed, but just then Adam Thorne came out to the terrace.
He frowned at her. “Why aren’t you resting your knee?” he demanded.
“But I am resting it, stuck out here in front of me,” she insisted. “I shall be mad if I lose my chances of going places while we’re here,” she exclaimed irritably.
“Impatience will do no good at all,” he said with mock sententiousness.
She laughed. “Easy enough for you to preach. It isn’t your knee that’s damaged.”
“It would it have pleased you better if it were?”
“Well, no. You were not to blame.”
“Thank you,” he answered dryly. “What was the verdict from the doctor?”
“Only a wrench. Just the cartilage pulled, not the kneecap broken. In a month or so I should be able to walk quite normally, I expect.” She spoke with heavy sarcasm.
A smile played around his mouth. “You take your setbacks hard, don’t you?”
“Blame my youth and immaturity for that!”
The evening had grown dark, and perhaps the dimness gave her the courage to answer him so pertly. The bay was spangled with lights and the vine-covered terrace lit by small lanterns that only intensified the shadows.
He broke the silence. “I’m leaving tomorrow or the next day. My holiday is almost finished and I have to go back to Krasnograd. My job is on the construction of buildings. These are nearly finished, but I have to stay until some of the machinery is installed.”
“Where is this place?” asked Sarah. “Is it far from here?”
“Something more than three hundred miles, I suppose,” Adam said. “Rather a slow, long-winded journey, but that can’t be helped. A new main road is being started to link Krasnograd with the coast a little farther south of here, and that will be a tremendous improvement.”
In some ways Sarah was not distressed at the prospect of Adam’s departure. Since that first meeting in the amphitheater at Pula he had been a disturbing influence, making her feel uncertain of herself.
When Daniel heard next day that Adam was leaving, he made no bones about his pleasure. “Best thing he could do!” was Daniel’s verdict. “I’ve never liked him from the first. He won’t be here to butt in on us or take you on dubious jaunts up into the mountains.”
Sarah smiled and nodded absentmindedly. She was reflecting that Adam, for all his brusqueness, had occasionally shown his kinder and more solicitous side. But her opinion of him scarcely mattered; it was unlikely that she would ever see him again.
CHAPTER TWO
Sarah was able to return the following day to her work with Edmund’s unit. The American director, Chester Kernick, had been working on his portion of the film before Edmund arrived. Now the two directors had to dovetail their work before moving the generators and cameras elsewhere, and they hoped this would be the final day in the center of Dubrovnik. The city authorities had generously provided facilities for bringing in the heavy generators and Chester and Edmund were anxious not to outstay their welcome in a walled city where ordinarily no wheeled traffic was allowed.
“You could hardly keep our presence here in the town a secret, could you?” Sarah observed to Radmilla. “Wherever we go, there are the generators humming and throbbing away and miles of cables just waiting to be tripped over.”
