Читать книгу Death at Dawn: A Liberty Lane Thriller - Caro Peacock, Caro Peacock - Страница 8

CHAPTER FIVE

There was a smell about the man inside the carriage. An elderly smell of stale port wine, snuff and candlewax. My nose took exception to it even as my eyes were still trying to adapt themselves to the half-darkness. The man who called himself Harry Trumper had arranged things so that he and I were sitting side by side with our backs to the horses, the other man facing us with a whole seat to himself. As my sight cleared, I could see that he needed it. It was not so much that he was corpulent – though indeed he was that – more that his unwieldy body spread out like a great toad’s, with not enough in the way of bone or sinew to control its bulk. His face was like a suet pudding, pale and shiny, with two mean raisins for eyes, topped with a knitted grey travelling cap. The eyes were staring at me over a tight little mouth. He seemed not to like what he saw.

‘Miss Lane, may I introduce …’

Before Trumper could finish, the fat man held up a hand to stop him. The hand bulged in its white silk glove like a small pudding in a cloth.

‘Were you not told to stay at Dover?’

He rumbled the words at me as if they’d been hauled from the depths of his stomach.

‘The note,’ I said. ‘Did you write it, then?’

‘I wrote you no note.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

By my side, Trumper burbled something about not accusing a gentleman of lying. I turned on him.

‘You said you knew my father. What happened to him?’

‘He took something that didn’t belong to him,’ Trumper said.

I think I’d have hit him, only another rumble from the fat man distracted me.

‘I said I wrote you no note. That is true, but if it matters to you, the note was written on my instructions. As soon as I knew of your father’s misfortune, I sent a man back to England with the sole purpose of finding you and saving you unnecessary distress.’

But there was no concern for anybody’s distress in the eyes that watched my face unblinkingly.

‘He hated duels,’ I said. ‘He’d never in his life have fought a duel.’

‘Sometimes a man has no choice,’ Trumper said.

The fat man paid no attention to him, his eyes still on me.

‘That is beside the point. Tell me, did your father communicate with you at all when he was in Paris or Dover?’

Why I answered his question instead of asking my own, I don’t know, unless those eyes and that voice had a kind of mesmeric force.

‘He wrote me a letter from Paris to say he was coming home.’

There was no reason not to tell him. Even talking about my father seemed a way of fighting them. Trumper sat up, feet to the floor, face turned greedily to mine. The fat man leaned forward.

‘What did your father say in this letter?’

I was more cautious now.

‘He said he’d enjoyed meeting some friends in Paris, but was looking forward to being back in England.’

‘Gentlemen friends or women friends?’ said Trumper, eager as a terrier at a rat hole.

The fat man looked at him with some contempt, but let him take over the questioning.

‘Gentlemen friends,’ I said.

‘Did he mention any women?’

The eagerness of Trumper’s question, practically panting with his tongue hanging out, made me feel that my father’s memory was being dirtied. In defence of him, I told the truth.

‘He mentioned that he’d met an unfortunate woman who needed his charity.’

And realised, from the look on Trumper’s face and a shifting in the fat man’s weight that made the carriage tilt sidewards, that I’d made a mistake.

‘Did he mention a name?’ Trumper said.

‘No.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Or any more about her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did he propose to do about her?’

His letter had implied quite clearly that he was bringing her back to London with him.

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was only a casual mention of her.’

‘She’s lying.’ The fat man growled it without particular enmity, as if he expected people to lie. ‘He was bringing her back to England with him, wasn’t he, miss?’

‘It seems you know more than I do, so why do you ask me?’

‘He abducted her from Paris. We know that, so you need not trouble yourself to lie about it.’

‘My father would not take away any woman against her will.’

‘Did he write to you from Calais?’

‘No. That letter from Paris was his last.’

‘Are you carrying it with you?’

‘No!’

From the fat man’s stare, I expected him to order Trumper to search me there and then, and shrank back in the corner of the seat.

‘Did he tell you to meet the woman at Dover?’

‘No, of course not. I was waiting to meet him, only he didn’t even know it.’

‘Do you know where he lodged in Calais?’

It heartened me that their inquiries round Calais must have been as fruitless as mine.

‘No. Not at any of the big hotels, I know that much.’

‘So do we,’ Trumper said, rather wearily.

The horses were moving at a fast trot now, the well-sprung carriage almost floating along. There was something I hadn’t noticed until then, with the shock and the questioning.

‘This isn’t the way back to Calais.’

‘It’s a better road,’ Trumper said.

I didn’t know enough about the area to contradict him, but I edged forward in my seat, trying to see out of the window. We were stirring up such clouds of dust that I couldn’t make out much more than the outlines of bushes. A look passed between the two men. Trumper pulled down the window and shouted something to the coachman that I couldn’t hear above the sound of wheels and hooves. The whip cracked and the rhythm of our journey changed as four powerful horses stretched out in a canter. I’d never travelled so fast before. Trumper hastily shut the window as a cloud of white dust blew up round us. I reached for the door handle. I don’t know whether I’d have been capable of flinging myself out at such a speed, but there was no chance to tell, because Trumper’s heavy hand clamped mine and forced it down on my lap.

‘Sit still. We’re not doing you any harm.’

‘Please take me back to Calais at once.’

‘You must understand …’ Trumper said. He had both of my hands now and was trying so hard to keep them held down that he was pressing them between my thighs. When I struggled it made things worse. The sweat was running down his forehead. He kept glancing over at the fat man, as if for approval, but the suety face watched impassively.

‘We are only trying to protect you,’ Trumper pleaded. ‘You saw what happened back in the graveyard. You wouldn’t stay in Dover as you were told, so all we intend is to take you somewhere safe until the trouble your father’s stirred up settles down again.’

‘Take me where?’

‘There’s a nice little house by a lake, very friendly and ladylike, good healthy air. It will set you up nicely.’

He sounded like some wheedling hotelier. I laughed at him.

‘The truth is, you’re kidnapping me.’

‘No. Concern for your safety, that’s all. I’m sure your father would have wanted it.’

‘My family will miss me. My brother will come after you.’

‘Your brother’s in India. You have no close family.’

This growl from the fat man froze me, both from the bleak truth of it and the fact that this creature knew so much about me. For a while I could do nothing but try to keep back the tears. I suppose Trumper must have felt me relax because he let go of my hands and sat back, though keeping so close to me that I was practically wedged in the corner of the carriage. The horses flew on, sixteen hooves thudding like war drums on the dry road, harness chains jingling crazed carillons. Several times the whip cracked and the coachman shouted, I supposed to warn slower conveyances out of our way. Dust stung my eyes, at least giving me an excuse for tears. Trumper started coughing but the other man seemed unaffected. Then –

‘What the hell …?’

We’d stopped so abruptly that Trumper and I were propelled off our seats and on to the fat man. It was like being flung into a loathsome bolster. Above the unclean smell of it, and Trumper’s curses from floor level, I was aware of things going on outside – loud whinnying, whip cracks and the coachman’s voice, high with alarm, yelling at the horses. The carriage started bouncing and jerked forward several times. Trumper had been trying to claw his way up by hanging on to my skirt. This sent him back to the floor again, but since he still had a handful of skirt, it dragged me down with him. My face was level with the fat man’s belly, a vast bulge of pale breeches, like a sail with the wind behind it.

There are better uses for your head than employing it as a bludgeon.

My father’s voice from fifteen years back, on the occasion of a schoolroom quarrel when I’d butted my brother and caused his nose to bleed. I thought, Well, I’m sorry, Father, but even you are not always right, closed my eyes, drew my head back, and used all my strength to propel it like a cannonball towards the bulging belly.

There is no arrangement of letters that will reproduce the sound that resulted, as if an elephant had trodden on a gargantuan and ill-tuned set of bagpipes. The smell of foul air expelled was worse. The combination must have disconcerted Trumper because he made no attempt to stop me as I stood up and grasped the door handle. From the squawk he made, I may have trampled his hand in the process. As the door began to open I let my weight fall on it and tumbled out into the road. A pain in my elbow, dust in clouds round me, then the front wheel of the carriage travelling backwards, so close that it almost ran over my hand. I rolled sideways. Something in the dust cloud. Legs. A whole mobile grove of short pink legs. Much shouting all round me and other sounds, grunting sounds. A questing pink snout touched my cheek, quite gently, and a familiar farmyard smell filled the air, pleasanter than the one inside the coach. A herd of pigs. By some dispensation of Providence, the flying carriage had met with the one obstacle that couldn’t be whipped or bullied aside. Many horses fear pigs and, judging by the way the lead horse was rearing and whinnying, he was of that persuasion.

I pushed the snout aside and stood up. The coachman was standing on the ground, trying to pull the horse down with one hand, threshing the butt of his whip at a milling mass of pigs and French peasantry, shouting obscenities. I took one look, turned and ran into the bushes beside the road. More shouting behind me, Trumper’s voice from the direction of the coach, yelling to me to come back. I ran, following animal tracks through the bushes, with no sense of direction except getting as far away as I could. After some time I stopped, heart beating, expecting to hear the bushes rustling behind me and Trumper bursting through.

‘Miss Lane. Come back, Miss Lane.’

His voice, but sounding breathless and mercifully coming from a long way off. I judged he must still be on the road, so I struck off as far as the tracks would let me at right angles to it. It was hard going in my heeled shoes so I took them off and went stocking-footed. After a while I came on to a wider track, probably one used by farm carts, with a ditch and bank on either side. I scrambled up the bank and saw, not far away, the sun glinting on blue sea. From there, it was a matter of two or three miles to the shore, with Calais a little way in the distance.

I thought a lot as I walked along the shore towards the town, none of it much to the purpose, and chiefly about how strange it was when pieces of time refused to join together any more to make a past or future. I realise that is not expressed with philosophic elegance, in the way of my father’s friends, but then I’m no philosopher. A few days ago I had a future which might have been vague in some of its details but flowed in quite an orderly way from my life up to then. I also possessed twenty-two years of a past which – although not entirely orderly – accounted for how I had come to be at a particular place and time. But since that message had arrived at the inn at Dover, I’d been as far removed from my past as if it existed in a half-forgotten dream. As for my future, I simply did not possess one. Futures are made up of small expectations – tonight I shall sleep in my own bed, tomorrow we shall have cold beef for supper and I’ll sew new ribbons on my bonnet, on Friday the cat will probably have her kittens. I had no expectations, not the smallest. I didn’t know where or when I would sleep or eat or what I would do, not then or for the rest of my life.

I walked along, noticing how large the feet of gulls look when they wheel overhead, how far the fishermen have to walk over the sand to dig for worms when the tide goes out, how the white bladder campion flowers earlier on the French side of the Channel than on the cliffs back home. It was only when I came to the first of the houses that I remembered I was supposed to be a rational being and that, if a future was necessary, I had better set about stringing one together. Small things first. I sat down on the grass at the edge of the shingle and examined the state of my feet. Stocking soles were worn away, several toes sticking through. I put my shoes back on, twisting what was left of the stocking feet round so that the holes were more or less hidden. The bottom of my skirt was draggled with bits of straw and dried seaweed, but a good brushing with my hand dealt with that. My hair, from the feel of it, had reverted to its primitive state of tangled curls, but since there was no remedy for that until I regained comb and mirror, all I could do was push as much of it as possible under my bonnet.

All the time I was tidying myself up, my mind was running over the events in the carriage and coming back to one question. Who was this woman they wanted so much? In my father’s letter, she’d been not much more than a passing reference, an object of charity. If she was so important, or so beautiful, that she could be the cause of all this, why hadn’t he given me some notion of it? But I had to tear my mind away from her and decide what I was going to do with myself. I reasoned it out this way. My father, without meaning to, had bequeathed me two sets of enemies, one represented by the thin man in black, the other by so-called Trumper and the fat man. The second set hated the first set so much that they were prepared to commit murder – since for all I knew the man in black might have died from the blow to his head. Both sides had wanted me to stay at Dover. Now the man in black wanted me to go back there, while Trumper and the fat man were planning to carry me off to some unknown destination by a lake. Geneva? Como? Or perhaps they had in mind the mythical waters of Acheron, from which travellers do not return. Stay in France or return to England? I feared the fat man and Trumper more than the man in black, though I hated all of them equally. If I stayed in France, they might capture me again. Quite probably they were looking for me already. So Dover seemed the safer option, and as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.

Footsore and hungry, I started towards the harbour to inquire among the fishing boats, thinking my enemies would be less likely to find me there than in the crowds coming and going around the steam packet landing place. Then, when I’d gone halfway, I told myself I was being a fool. Among the fishing boats and obviously not a fisherman’s wife or daughter I might as well carry a banner marked Foreigner. If Trumper came looking for me, he’d find me in minutes. If there was any safety for me, it was in numbers. I turned back for the centre of town, queued at a kiosk and milked my small purse almost to its limits to buy a ticket to Dover on the steam packet.

The quay was already reassuringly crowded with fellow passengers, most of them English. There was a wine merchant with a retinue of porters, clucking over his boxes and barrels, several families with children and screaming babies, even a troupe of Gypsy dancers and jugglers who were collecting a few francs by entertaining the crowd. There was no sign of Trumper or the fat man. I bought a tartine and a cup of strong coffee from a man who’d set up a stall near the gangplank and found a refuge on the edge of the harbour wall, behind packing cases that looked as if they hadn’t been moved for some time.

I sat with my back to a bollard until puffs of steam came out of the funnel of the packet and a shrill whistle blew. That was the signal for the carriages with the richer passengers to set out from the hotels. I watched from the shelter of the packing cases as three of them arrived in a line, with liveried footmen at the back and hotel carts with piles of trunks and boxes following. Still no sign of Trumper’s coach. The gentry from the carriages went on board, fashionably dressed and obviously proud of themselves for surviving their tours of Europe. Their servants followed, arms full of blankets, sunshades, shawls, umbrellas and large china bowls in case the sea turned impolite in mid-Channel.

I was on the point of leaving my hiding place when another carriage came rattling up in a hurry, drawn by two greys, with a hotel’s initials on the door. A tall, dark-haired young man was first out. I recognised him as the brother of the girl who’d been kind to me at the hotel. She followed him out, in a different Parisian hat and a travelling cloak of sky-blue merino, the sun glinting on her bright hair, and they crossed the wharf towards the gangplank. I dodged back out of sight, not wanting her to notice me again after my weakness in the hotel. The man I took to be their father had stopped to say something to the coachman – nothing grateful, judging by the expression on his face as he followed them over the cobbles. I waited until the three of them had disappeared on board, then, as the steam whistle blew a last long blast, pushed into the middle of a final rush of people – one of the families with a crying baby, a porter with a trunk on his back, a juggler with his sack of clubs over his shoulder.

Most of the fashionable passengers had gone below. I made my way to the stern and stood by the rail, watching sandy water churning between us and the quay. Ashore, the carriages that had brought passengers were manoeuvring round each other to go back to the hotels. The little crowd that had watched the steam packet depart was drifting away. A man in a royal-blue jacket was walking slowly towards the town, head bent and hands in his pockets. My heart pounded like a steam engine. There was no mistaking, in that air of a person who’d be more at home with a pack of hounds at his feet, the man who called himself Harry Trumper. I got myself as quickly as I could to the far rail. When the first shock had passed, I marvelled at my luck. Trumper had got there in time after all and only my embarrassed wish not to be seen by the girl had saved me. Without meaning to, she’d done me another kindness.

I stayed on a bench at the stern for most of the crossing. The smoke from the funnel blew back over it, dropping a rain of ash and smuts, but it was worth the smuts to know that none of the fashionable passengers would walk there. Strangely, though, one came quite close. It was towards the end of the crossing, dark by then, with some travellers standing at the rails to watch as the lamplit windows round Dover harbour came closer. A woman in a travelling cloak walked slowly in my direction, though not seeing me. Her head was bent and she seemed thoughtful or dejected. Then a shower of red sparks came out of the funnel and a man called from behind her.

‘Be careful, Celia.’

‘I’m quite all right, Stephen. Why can’t you leave me alone?’

A voice with an attractive lisp. In spite of her protest to her brother, she turned obediently, still without seeing me. When she was safely gone I whispered into the darkness, ‘Thank you, Celia.’