As I walked, I turned over in my mind what had passed in Brewer-street. My thoughts had the misleading limpidity that so often accompanies fatigue. Mr Noak had been remarkably frank, I believed: which might be due to the strength of his fanatical desire to avenge his son’s death, to his despair of making progress, to old age and the consequent decay of his intellectual faculties, or to any combination of these. Alternatively, every word, every hypothesis, every apparent confidence, had been carefully planned for the purpose of achieving an unknown end.
This evening’s events were only the latest in a long series. From start to finish in this sorry business, I had been led by the nose – by Henry Frant, Stephen Carswall and now Mr Noak; by Flora Carswall and even, perhaps, by Sophie – though my partiality for her struggled to persuade me that she had been as much a victim as myself. It was undeniable that I had come very close to falling in with Mr Noak’s proposal since it appeared to accord so well with my own wishes. But among all the drawbacks to the plan was this: I could not rid myself of the knowledge that if anyone had a motive for murdering Mr Frant, it was Mr Noak himself.
I stopped to lean against a railing. In some part of my mind I became aware that a set of footsteps behind me had also stopped. A moment later I moved on, and so too did the footsteps. I repeated the experiment and obtained the same result. London is a busy city but at night it contains pockets of silence so profound that one may hear a pin drop on the pavement. The footsteps should have put me instantly on the alert. But my body was too weary, and my mind too full of other anxious thoughts, for the possible significance of the footsteps to register as a cause for alarm.
Mr Noak’s grand scheme to confound his enemies had come to this: he wanted me to spy on Sophie, and through her on Mr Carswall. Mrs Kerridge, it had appeared, was happy to oblige Mr Harmwell with information upon occasion, and she had reported my meeting with her mistress at the burying ground that afternoon. Noak had also learned from her the real reason for my departure from Monkshill-park. From this, and from his own observations, he had inferred quite correctly that I had a tenderness for Sophie Frant. He had made a further deduction at an earlier stage of my acquaintance with Mr Carswall that I had been employed by him for confidential business. That was why he had set Harmwell to follow me on the occasion of my going to Queen-street that first time, in search of the man who was either David Poe or Henry Frant. It had been fortunate for me that he had done so – Mr Harmwell had been my rescuer when Iversen’s hired bullies assaulted me, and now Noak wanted me to pay a price for it.
So tonight Noak had dangled the hope of reward in front of me: if I could turn Sophie into his spy, he had hinted, I might hope to win Sophie for myself. Were Carswall disgraced, she would have no one else to turn to. Noak promised me that, if all went well, he would put me in the way of earning a competence so that I might support her. But the promises were vague and I had no guarantee that he would fulfil them. I thought he would have promised me anything if I could have ensured the downfall of Stephen Carswall and discovered the identity of the man in Wellington-terrace. In the end, I did not trust the American, which was why I had not told him of the finger I had been encouraged to find at the tooth-puller’s, or of today’s discovery that the tooth-puller was among Mr Iversen’s customers.
With immense effort of will, I abandoned the support of the railing and staggered down the Strand. Movement had become a form of torture. Worse than the woes of my body, however, was the despair that depressed my spirits. Noak’s offer had given me the possibility of regaining Sophie. It had been as alluring a temptation as any I had ever faced. I might have justified succumbing to it, too, on the grounds that it might save Sophie from Mr Carswall, whom I knew to be the worst of men.
I heard the footsteps behind me, slow and dragging like an echo of my own. Nemesis pursued me and knew she need not hurry.
The stumbling block was this: in the past six or seven months, I had learnt too well the lesson of what it felt like to be manipulated by others, to have no more control over one’s destiny than Mr Punch in his puppet show. Were I to accede to Mr Noak’s proposal, I would seek to make Sophie my puppet. In agreeing to marry Mr Carswall, she had made a perfectly rational choice. He was rich and she was poor. He was old and she was young, which at least had the advantage that the marriage was unlikely to be a long one. On her side it could not be a love match. On his, I doubted that the emotions that made him desire her had much to do with love as it is generally understood; for a desire to possess, to be a person’s master, is not love. But each would gain by the arrangement. Marriages have been happy without love before now, but not without money. As Flora Carswall had pointed out, love in a cottage didn’t pay the bills. You cannot eat and drink love; you cannot wear it, and it will not provide for your children.
I reached the entrance into Gaunt-court. There was no gas illumination here, of course, only the fitful glow of the oil lamp on the corner. Nothing had changed, I told myself, since Sophie had given me my congé this afternoon.
At the head of the steps up to the front door of number 3 I stopped and, supporting myself on the railing, turned to look back down the court. I heard in the distance a carriage passing along the Strand, the clop of hooves, the jingle of harness and the rattle of wheels on the roadway. I did not hear the sound of footsteps. At some point in the last few minutes, they had stopped. I told myself that London is a city full of dramas played out every night, and there was no reason in the world to believe that these footsteps had belonged to my little tragi-comedy. But now the footsteps had stopped I felt inexplicably uneasy.
Ayez peur, I murmured to myself, ayez peur.
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The following morning I left the house in search of coffee. I was unwashed and unshaven. I had slept late and my mind was still fogged with sleep.
A small, closed carriage, painted black and rather the worse for wear, was standing at the corner by the lamp-stand. As I drew near, the door opened and a swarthy man dressed in shabby black clothes leaned out and asked me the quickest way to Covent Garden.
Simultaneously, a second man, also in black, came round the back of the carriage and seized my arm. The first man grabbed my lapels. Between them, they pulled and pushed me into the carriage. The second man followed me in, shutting the door behind him. The carriage moved off with a jerk.
With three of us inside, there was barely room to move, let alone to struggle. The blinds were down and there was scarcely any light. The first man had his arm round my neck, drawing my head back. I felt the prick of a knife at my throat.
“Stay still, cully,” he murmured. “Stay still or we’ve got a nasty accident on our hands.”
As the carriage rattled and bumped through streets filled with the noise of a London morning, a ritual was acted out inside it. I use the word ritual with care. My captors knew so precisely what they were doing that there was a negligent, familiar ease about their movements. The second man tied my wrists in front of me, inserted a filthy rag in my mouth, and finally lashed my knees together.
By now I was huddled in the corner of the seat, still with the tip of a knife at my throat. Neither man spoke. The confined space was filled with the sound of our breathing and the smell of our bodies. I tried without success to bring my mind to grapple with my situation; but fear inhibits rational thought. Over and over again I cursed my own folly at remaining in the house at Gaunt-court, and not seeking refuge under another name and in another city. Once again, and in far more brutal circumstances than before, I had become a mere cypher in my own life.
We came to a halt again. I felt and heard our driver jumping down from the box, the sound of voices and of heavy gates being unbarred and drawn back. Then the horses began to move again. At that moment my head was roughly seized and a bandage placed over my eyes. The carriage door opened. A current of fresh air swept inside. One of my companions jumped down. Between them they dragged me out of the carriage. In a moment I found myself in the open air with a man on either sid
e to hold my arms.
Owing to the bonds around my knees, I could not walk. Grunting and swearing, the men dragged me across cobbles, my boots bumping up and down, and pulled me into a place that smelled strongly of sawdust and varnish. It was at this point that my nightmare entered a still more terrible phase. Without warning my feet were lifted away from the ground and I felt myself hoisted aloft on strong arms, my body moving from the vertical to the horizontal. I was raised and then lowered. There was a glancing blow to the back of my head. It was followed by a laugh, expressive of unforced merriment and wholly unexpected in that grim setting.
“The cove’s too long,” someone said. “Have to cut off the feet again.”
“No,” said another man. “Take his boots off – that should do it.”
My boots were roughly removed. I was now lying on my back, with my elbows, the crown of my head and the soles of my stockinged feet touching hard surfaces. A heavy object fell on my leg. I twitched involuntarily. Something else fell beside it and then the third item. I stretched down my bound hands and made out the shape of a boot-heel.
“Hey, lad,” said the voice of the first man. “There’s air holes. You can breathe. Not very big holes, though. If you was stupid enough to make a row, you’d need more air, and you couldn’t get it, could you? So keep quiet as a mouse.”
At first I could not understand him, for there was plenty of air, albeit laden with the scents of sawdust and varnish and an underlying tang of horse manure. Then I heard a great clatter a few inches above my head and sensed a sudden enclosing, a diminution of the light. All at once, a terrible racket broke out about me. My ears filled with the sound of hammering, so close that the nails might have been driven into me. There must have been two or three of them wielding hammers, and in that confined space, which acted like a drum, it seemed like a multitude. They were nailing me up in a box no larger than a coffin.
All at once, the terrible truth burst over me. I recalled what I knew of the dimensions of the box, and put them together with the black carriage and the rusty black clothes of the two men. I realised that the box was not like a coffin: it was a coffin.
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I was to be buried alive. I had no doubt of it whatsoever. I faced the prospect of a lingering and horrible death.
My captors transferred me to another conveyance, probably a closed cart. We drove for what seemed like hours but might have been as many minutes. Time means very little without a way of measuring it.
I tried to struggle – of course I did. Yet the dimensions of the coffin, the presence of my boots and hat with me, the shortage of air, and above all the tightness of my bonds made it almost impossible for me to move at all. All I could manage was the faintest of whimpers from my parched throat and an ineffectual knocking of my elbows against the sides of my prison. I doubt if the sounds I made could have been heard by anyone sitting directly on the other side of the coffin, let alone by those in the street.
My intellectual faculties were equally paralysed. I wish I could say that I faced what lay before me with calmness. In the abstract, it is perfectly true that if you cannot avoid death, you might as well look it in the eye. But the needs of the moment swamped such lofty considerations. To continue to breathe – to continue to live – nothing else mattered.
We came to another halt. I half felt, half heard a great clatter and then a jolt. There was a knocking on the roof of my little prison. Someone laughed, a high sound with an edge of hysteria. The coffin swayed and bumped and banged. It tilted violently to a sharp angle. This, together with a series of irregular thuds, told me that we were mounting a flight of stairs. The coffin levelled out and a few paces later I heard a man’s voice, but could not make out the words.
The coffin groaned and screeched: someone was raising the lid. Currents of air flowed around me. The tip of the crowbar came so far inside that it grazed my scalp. I felt a burst of intense happiness.
“Remove the gag,” said a man whose voice was familiar. “Then the blindfold.”
I retched when they pulled the rag from my parched mouth. I tried and failed to say the word “water”. A hand gripped my hair and pulled up my head. Fingers tugged at the knot of the blindfold. Light flooded into my eyes, so bright that I moaned with the shock of it. I could see nothing but whiteness. I closed my eyes.
“Give him a drink,” said the voice. “Then leave us.”
A hand cradled the back of my head. A container made of metal rattled against my teeth. Suddenly there was water everywhere, flooding down my face, finding its way between my cravat and my neck, filling my mouth and trickling down my throat and making me gag. The mug withdrew.
“More,” I croaked. “More.”
The mug returned. I was so weak that I could not satisfy my thirst.
“Leave us,” the man commanded.
I heard footsteps – two sets, I fancy – on a bare floor and the sound of a door opening and closing. There was water on my lashes, and I did not know whether it came from the metal cup or from my tears. My eyes were still screwed shut against the light. Slowly I opened them. All I could see was a sagging ceiling, fissured with cracks, with the lathes exposed on one side where the plaster had crumbled away.
“Sit up,” said the voice.
I hooked my bound hands round the rim of the coffin and eventually managed to bring myself into a sitting position. The first thing I saw was a great, grey mass of hair below a black velvet skull cap, like a hanging judge’s. I lowered my eyes to the face, which was on the level of my own. Recognition flooded into me with a sense of inevitability.
“Mr Iversen,” I said. “Why have you brought me here?”
“You will be more comfortable in a moment.” He leaned forward in his wheeled chair and studied my face. “Wriggle your limbs as far as you are able. Now lean back a little, now forward. Does that not feel better? Now, more water?”
I drank greedily this time. Mr Iversen refilled the mug from a jug on the table beside his chair. The cripple was attired as he had been before, in a black, flowing robe embroidered with necromantic symbols in faded yellow thread. His crutches were propped against the bottom of the coffin. On the table was a pocket pistol.
My eyes travelled on, and I discovered we were not alone. Seated by the window with his back to us was another figure in a dusty suit of brown clothes and an old-fashioned three-cornered hat.
“You’re a fool,” my host observed in a friendly tone. “You shouldn’t have come back. You should have gone far, far away. Seven Dials is not a safe place for the inquisitive. I tried to give you the hint on your last visit. Still, one cannot expect old heads on young shoulders, I suppose.”
“A hint?” Anger spurted through me. “You call those bullies of yours a hint? What do you want of me, sir?”
“The truth. Why did you come back here yesterday?”
All my words might win me was a kinder way of dying. I was tired of the lies, so I told him the truth. “I came back because of that bird of yours.” I saw understanding leap into his eyes. “The one that says ayez peur.”
“That damned fowl.” Iversen’s fingertips tapped the butt of the pistol. “I put up with it for the sake of the customers, but I could stand it no more. I hoped I had seen and heard the last of it.”
“I’ve drawn up a memorandum,” I said. “It covers all the circumstances of this business, including my visits to Queen-street, since I first met Mr Henry Frant.”
“Ah yes. And you’ve had it witnessed by a brace of attorneys and sent a copy to the Lord Chancellor. Come, Mr Shield, don’t play the fool. You would have gone to the magistrates long before this if you had intended something like that.”
He was in the right of it. I had indeed begun to write such a memorandum on my last evening at Monkshill-park. But it lay unfinished in my room at Gaunt-court.
“No,” Iversen went on. “I do not believe it for a moment. Not that it matters. We shall soon have the truth out of you.”
Neither of us spoke for a
moment. The room was heavy with a strange, sweet odour. I looked at the two figures before me, Iversen seated beside the coffin, and the old man in an elbow chair by the barred window. I heard as if at a great distance the sound of the world going about its business. There were noises in the house, too, feet on the stairs, a tapping from below and a woman singing a lullaby. There was life around me, and it was full of wonders, a sweet thing that I could not bear to part with.
“Sir,” I said to the man in brown. “I appeal to you. I beg you, help me.”
The old man did not reply. He gave no sign he had heard me.
“His mind is on other things,” Iversen said.
I turned back to him. “If you wish me to answer your questions with any coherence, sir, you would find me in a better condition to do so if I had something to eat. And I would be obliged if I might use the necessary house.”
Iversen laughed, exposing a set of false teeth made of bone or perhaps ivory, and clearly expensive; they reminded me of the tooth-puller and curious possibilities stirred once more in my mind. “You shall have your creature comforts, Mr Shield.” He levered himself to the edge of his chair, thrust himself upwards by exerting pressure on the arms and in one, practised movement seized a crutch and placed it under his right shoulder. For a moment he stood there, swaying slightly, gripping the side of the coffin with his free hand, with an expression of triumph on his face. He was a big man and he loomed over me like a mountain. “But first I must relieve you of the contents of your pockets.”
His big hands worked deftly and rapidly through my clothes. He removed my pocketbook, my purse, my penknife and the red-spotted handkerchief which the boys had given me on the eve of my departure from Monkshill. He gave each item a brief examination and then dropped it in the pocket of his robe. At last he was satisfied.
The American Boy Page 41