Free Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal by Francis Selwyn Page A

banner streamed somewhere over the falls 'God bless the Prince of Wales!' It seemed tawdry-after the grandeur of Mr Blackwell's Bengal Lights. Verity watched the young man bid a pleasant good-night to his elders and enter the neat white cottage. Then Verity himself took the first watch. He marched smartly three paces forward from the door and came to attention with a ceremonial precision, though he was in private clothes and there was no one to see him. With equal exactitude he planted his feet 'at ease', his hands folded behind him. His pink jowls were set and his black eyes narrowed as he scanned the darkness ahead of him, with scowling suspicion, promising damnation to the Queen's enemies.
    He was relieved by the Canadian guard at 2 am, but at first light he woke and crept out almost furtively to look again at the majesty of the great falls. His swelling emotion was marred by only one regret. This was Bella. To have had her with him, and to have stood before such grandeur, side by side, would, he imagined, have been a foretaste of standing before the greatest throne of all.
    By the afternoon, he had resumed his duties as bodyguard, drab and inconspicuous among the elegantly-suited members of the official party and the peacock splendour of the royal equerries Major Teesdale and Colonel Grey, resplendent in scarlet and gold with the white plumes of the British General Staff. The Prince and his followers had ranged themselves on a graceful little suspension-bridge, a web of white-painted iron which seemed thin and delicate as a net. The bridge was almost two miles below the falls, above a splendid ravine between whose cliffs the rapids of Niagara roared and surged in their narrower channel. Dark pine trees stretched like a forest on either side but in the gorge below the little bridge the blue water formed its menacing whirlpools.
    It was a place of fascination and of horror. The victims of the falls, suicides or accidents, were borne to the great whirlpool below the bridge. Their bodies were, bizarrely, stripped naked by the current but rarely damaged otherwise. Forced down by the thrust of the current, the naked corpses, as well as fragments of trees and rock, would be whirled round for months together before a shift in the river's flow released them at last into the calm waters of Lake Ontario. Verity shuddered at the thought of the horror beneath his feet as he stood at a distance on the little suspension-bridge and awaited the pleasure of the rest of the party.
    Their eyes were all on the slack rope which hung between the two cliffs of the rapids, just upstream from the bridge. Like so many other visitors to the place, they had come to satisfy a morbid excitement by seeing Blondin walk. Verity was 'not particular' to see it, as he had confessed to the Canadian sergeant with whom he shared guard duties, but now that he was on the bridge he found that he could not take his eyes off the slack rope.
    From the American side of the gorge there appeared a slightly built man, modest and serious in his demeanour, dressed in woollen fleshings and wearing what looked like a leather kilt, as though from a sense of decorum. On either bank the crowds waited expectantly.
    Blondin approached the rope, which was stretched almost directly above the sickening vortex of the whirlpool. He slid his slippered foot along the cord, as though testing its surface. Then, with arms held waveringly outward, he moved forward with neat, gliding steps. The slackness of the rope meant that he was walking down an incline which appeared perilously steep. Verity glanced at the whirlpool and the grisly dance of the dead within its spiralling waters. If Blondin should fall, he thought, nothing would save him in the rapids and the downward suction. It was not the death which horrified him most of all but the long moment of agony, while the hapless victim and the onlookers gazed mutely at one another.
    When he looked up again, the acrobat was almost at the