In the Name of A Woman: A Romance
9781465669940
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The cry, faint but strenuous, in a woman’s voice, rang out on the heavy hot night air, and told me that one of those abominable deeds that were so rife in the lawless Bulgarian capital was in progress, and I hastened forward in angry perplexity trying to locate the sound. I knew what it meant. I had been strolling late through the hot, close streets between the Park and the Cathedral, when a woman closely hooded had hurried past me, dogged by a couple of skulking, scuttling spies, and I had turned to follow them. Across the broad Cathedral Square I had lost sight of them, and, taking at random one of the streets on the opposite side of the square, I was walking and listening for some sound to guide me in their direction. “Help!” came the cry again, this time close to me from behind a pair of large wooden gates, one of which stood ajar. I pushed it open and crossed the courtyard before a large house, loosening as I ran the blade of the sword-stick I carried. The house was in darkness in the front, and as I dashed round to the back the cry was uttered for the third time, while I caught the sounds of struggling. There was a light in one of the lower rooms, the long casement window of which stood partly open, and the beams came straggling in a thin line between some nearly closed curtains. With a spring I caught the ledge, and, drawing up my head level with the window, looked in. What I saw told me that my worst fears were being realised. The woman who had passed me in the street was struggling with frantic effort to hold the door of the room against someone who was fighting to get in. Her cloak was off, and her head and face uncovered. She was a tall, lithe, strenuous creature, obviously of great strength and determination, and the whiteness of the face, now set and resolute, was thrown up into the strongest contrast by a mass of bright red hair, some of which the fierceness of the struggle had loosened. She was striving and straining with enormous energy, despite the fact that she was bleeding badly from a wound somewhere in the shoulder or upper arm. As I glanced in, she turned her head in my direction with the look of a tigress at bay; and I guessed that she was calculating the possibilities of escape by means of the window. But the momentary relaxation of her resistance gave the men a better chance, and, to my horror, I saw one of them get his arm in and slash and thrust at her with his knife. She answered with a greater effort of her own, however, and succeeded in jamming the man’s arm between the door and the lintel, making him cry out with an oath that reached me. But so unequal a struggle could only end in one way, and that very speedily unless I intervened; so I scrambled on to the window ledge, and with a cry leapt into the room. At the noise of my appearance, mistaking me no doubt for a third ruffian come to attack her, the woman’s courage gave out; she uttered a cry of despair and rushed away to a corner of the room. She released the door so suddenly that the two men came staggering and blundering into the room, almost falling, and I recognised them as the two rascals I had seen following her. “Have no fear, madame; I am here to help you,” I said, and, before the two ruffians had recovered from the surprise of my appearance, I was upon them. One could not stop his rush till he was close to me, and, having him at this disadvantage, I crashed my fist into his face with a tremendous blow, knocking him down with such force that his head fell with a heavy thud against the floor, and his dagger flew out of his hand and spun clattering across the room almost to the feet of the woman.
