Lammas Night by Katherine Kurtz Page B

arrival at the tower, but mist continued to draw a shifting grey curtain over everything but the harbor itself. From the breakwater, nearly two miles out, all the way to the vast, curving Admiralty Pier embracing the southern edge, the four-square-mile basin of Dover’s port seethed with ghost-vague vessels of all sorts and sizes, military and civilian. Beyond the breakwater, only sometimes visible, the unflagging procession of ships coming to and from the port moved in a ceaseless, silent ballet. Very low, just at the threshold of hearing, the blasts of the big guns shelling Dunkirk rattled the windows with manmade thunder.
    Closer in, pattern and planning became less apparent but no less efficient. Along Admiralty Pier, where Graham could never remember seeing more than six or eight cross-Channel steamers in peacetime, he now counted more than twenty vessels of various kinds, from destroyers and packet steamers to torpedo boats, fishing smacks, and minesweepers like the Lydd —some of them tied up two and three abreast when there was no other space. Arriving ships nosed up to the crowded piers only long enough to disgorge antlike masses of soldiers, who swarmed along the docks to be swallowed up by waiting trains and coaches and whisked away to safety. When the ships were empty, tugs nudged them out to an oil tanker moored in the center of the harbor to take on fuel for yet another run.
    Collingwood finally rang back around eight to say that the Lydd was expected sometime after ten. Graham relaxed a little, and William seemed to take the news with his usual nonchalance.
    But by nine, the renewed drizzle beating against the windowpanes became so oppressive that neither of them could bear to wait out the remaining hour there. Soon Wells was driving them down Castle Hill in the rear-seat splendor of the royal Rolls, gliding unchallenged past sentry posts and gradually into the port facility itself. The rumble of trains and the urgent din of the bells on departing ambulances mingled with the whistles and hoots of the tugs and the whooping of incoming destroyers, all of it overlaid by the murmur of massed human voices, surging and receding.
    They had to wait for nearly ten minutes while a train laden with troops pulled out of the staging area close by the pier, and another backed into position from a siding. Another time, they gave way to a procession of ambulances. Beyond, a hospital train waited while teams of stretcher-bearers and other medical personnel efficiently guided the wounded and injured aboard at the far end.
    Eventually, Wells eased them to within two hundred yards of the landward end of the pier and parked between two ambulances—as close as even a royal duke might get despite the assistance of the regimental sergeant-major of Guards, who had jumped up on their running board for escort when he recognized the car’s chief occupant. Graham glanced at the prince with a roguish grin as Denton came to open his door.
    â€œI fear we’ve brought the wrong car if you wanted to keep a low profile,” he said as bystanders began to notice car and escort and cast surreptitious glances into the car’s interior. “They aren’t fooled by the uniform.”
    William shrugged and gave a casual wave and a smile to a pretty Red Cross volunteer who had done a startled double-take as she passed.
    â€œWell, it worked better up at HQ, but I daresay you’re right. Why don’t I play prince for a while and inspire the troops while you and Denny see about the Lydd ? No sense all four of us traipsing out to the pier, is there? I suspect my presence might be a liability in such close quarters.”
    With a chuckle, Graham stepped out into the drizzle and slammed the door, buttoning up his mac as he and Denton began making their way through the crowd, heading toward the pier. When he glanced back a minute later, William was shaking hands with an ambulance crew and chatting with the pretty