“I shall desire them to bring you a pot directly. And something to eat.”
“They will not expect me to stay here – in this coffin?”
“I can see that would be inconvenient. There is no reason why you should not be lifted out. They will keep a watch on you, after all.”
“It will not be easy for me, or for them, if they do not untie my hands,” I pointed out.
“I do not think untying you will be necessary, Mr Shield. A little inconvenience to you or even to them is neither here nor there.” Mr Iversen picked up the pistol from the table and dragged himself towards the door. He glanced back at me. “Until we meet again,” he said with something of a flourish, a gesture that raised the ghost of a memory deep within my mind.
He dragged himself on to the landing, leaving me alone with the old man in the fading light of an April afternoon. I listened to his hirpling progress along the landing, and his clumping descent of the stairs.
“Sir,” I hissed at the old man. “You cannot sit there and permit this to happen. He intends to kill me. Will you be an accessory to murder?”
There was no answer. He did not stir a muscle.
“Are you Mr Iversen’s father, sir? You would not wish your son to stain his soul with the blood of a fellow human being?”
Apart from my own ragged breathing, I heard nothing. The room was suddenly brighter, for the sun had come out. Motes danced in the air before the window. The arms and rails of the chair were grey with dust. A suspicion grew in my mind and became certainty. The man in brown could help no one.
I waited for relief for well over a quarter of an hour, to judge by the distant chimes of a church clock, while my need for the chamber-pot grew ever more pressing.
At length the door opened and the two men dressed in rusty black entered. They had kidnapped me today; and I believed that they had pursued me yesterday evening, though I had not seen their faces clearly so I could not be completely sure. I wondered whether they had also attacked me on my visit to Queen-street in December. The first man bore the chamber-pot, swinging it nonchalantly as he walked. The other carried a wooden platter on which was the end of a loaf, a wedge of cheese and a mug of small beer. He put the platter on the windowsill, close to the elbow of the man in the brown suit. Both men were clearly used to his silent presence, for they did not give him a second glance.
“Is that a waxwork?” I asked in a voice that trembled.
“You won’t see one of them at old Ma Salmon’s.” The first man put the pot on the table. “That’s Mr Iversen, Senior, sir, at your service.”
They heaved me from the coffin, which was resting on a pair of trestles. They derived a simple and ribald pleasure from my fumbling attempt to use the pot. Fortunately, in a moment they were distracted by something they could see from the window.
“You wouldn’t think she had such white skin,” said one of them.
“It only looks like that because of the cuts,” said the other, jingling a bunch of keys in his pocket. “If you was nearer, you’d see the blemishes, you take my word for it.”
They continued discussing the subject in a detached and knowledgeable manner while I buttoned my flap as best I could with two hands tied. Their remarks were delivered with such an air of assurance that they might have been a pair of critics contemplating a portrait they did not much care for in the Exhibition Room at Somerset House. Still hobbled at the knees, I shuffled a little closer and found that, craning over their shoulders, I could look down into the yard.
There were two women below, one old, one young. The elder was tall, with a curved back like a bow. She was a grey shadow over the other, who was as small as a child, and whose gown and shift had been pulled down from her shoulders so she was naked from the waist upwards. I knew at once that she was not a child because I saw the swell of her hips and the curve of a breast. A moment later, I recognised her as Mary Ann, the dumb woman who lived in the kennel at the back of the yard.
“He did it this morning,” one of the men said. “Wish I’d seen it.”
“Did she faint?”
“Once: but they threw water over her until she woke and then he began again.”
I found it hard to suppress a gasp of horror as I stared at the network of weals on that white back. Mary Ann winced and trembled as the other woman applied what I assumed was a healing ointment to her wounds. The back of her shift was a mass of blood, some rusty, some fresh.
“Stupid bitch,” said the first man. “No better than an animal.”
He rattled the window, a casement, until one leaf of it flew open. He pushed me aside as though I had been a chair and picked up the chamber-pot. The bars were fixed horizontally and there was just space between them to allow the chamber-pot to pass through. He extended it to the full length of his arm and turned it upside down.
“Gardy-loo,” he cried, and he and his friend bellowed with laughter.
I was now too far back in the room to see down into the yard; and I was glad. I forced myself to pick at the bread and cheese, knowing that I needed nourishment, for I had eaten nothing since the sandwich Mr Harmwell had given me. The men stayed by the window, hooting with mirth. Gradually their laughter subsided, and I gathered the women had spoiled their sport by taking shelter in the kennel.
It had gradually been borne in upon me that both of them were very drunk. The smell of spirits filled the room, slicing through the unwholesome blend of other odours. Men such as these might always be a little drunk; but their behaviour now was clearly a long way from habitual tipsiness. One of them lowered his breeches, lifted his coat-tails and placed his posterior on the windowsill, no doubt hoping that the women below would be looking at him. But as one grew more boisterous, the other became quieter, and the colour gradually drained from his face, which was scarred with the pox. At length he murmured some excuse and bolted from the room. His colleague dragged me to the window, upsetting my beer in his hurry, and lashed my bound hands to one of the bars with a length of rope.
“Now don’t run away, my pretty,” he said hoarsely. “I got an errand to run, but I won’t be a minute. You tell me if the ladies come back, eh?”
He clapped me across the shoulders in the most good-humoured manner imaginable and left the room, slamming the door behind him and turning the key in the lock. I waited for a moment. The yard below was empty. The door of the kennel was closed. Blank walls of smoke-stained brick reared like cliffs on every side. The man had spoken of an errand, and I thought it likely he had gone to fetch more gin, perhaps from the establishment across the road where I had waited yesterday evening.
I flexed my hands. The knots that held my wrists tied together were as firm as ever. But this latest knot, fastening the cord which passed between my wrists and round the bar of the window, was a more slapdash affair. For a start, the position was wrong, for the cord had not been drawn tight, allowing my hands at least a limited mobility. In the second place, the knot itself was far from impregnable. I contrived to curve one hand round until the fingers had a grip on part of the knot, while I tugged at another part with my teeth. With my ears straining to hear the sound of footsteps outside the door, I worried away at the coarse, tarred cord, which chafed my skin like glass-paper. The precious minutes slid away. At last the knot loosened; and a moment later I pulled my hands away from the bar.
My wrists were still bound together, so tightly that the flow of the blood was impeded, and held with a knot that I found impossible to undo with my teeth. My legs were still tied at the knees, with the knot beyond my reach at the back. I was able to move only with painful slowness, shuffling and hopping with noisy inefficiency across the floor, an inch or two at a time.
It took me an age to reach the door. I tried the handle and confirmed it was locked. I bent my head down to the keyhole and saw that my captor had withdrawn the key so there was no possibility of my pushing it through the door and somehow retrieving it from the floor of the landing. It was a stout door, too, reinforced with iron, wh
ich made me wonder whether Iversen used it as his strong-room.
I hobbled over to the window and looked out. Mary Ann had emerged from the kennel and was now huddled in the doorway with a smouldering clay pipe in her hand. The casement was still slightly ajar. I heard footsteps immediately below, which meant I dared not call out to her.
I glanced about me. There was no fireplace in the room. Apart from the two chairs, the trestles, the coffin and a large iron-bound chest, there was no furniture. My eyes came at last to the body of Mr Iversen, Senior. He sat with his legs slightly apart, his yellow, sunken face towards the window, and his gloved hands resting on his thighs. The fabric of his coat was riddled with moth-holes and both the man and his coat were covered with a fine, feathery powdering of dust. The coat was undone, revealing the waistcoat beneath. My eyes lingered on the old man’s left-hand waistcoat pocket. The stub of a pencil protruded from it.
I eased the pencil gently from the pocket. There was still a point on it, albeit a blunt one. I looked wildly round the room for something to write on. My eyes returned at last to the corpse. I touched a corner of his hat gently with my finger. It did not move. I took a grip with both hands and lifted it, hoping I might find a label attached to the band. The wig rose a few inches and then parted company with the hat and fell back on to the bald skull, sending up a puff of dust. The movement dislodged a few yellow flakes which drifted down to Mr Iversen Senior’s shoulders.
I glanced inside the hat and discovered that it had been wedged on to the head with scraps of paper. All were brittle, some had crumbled, but a few were still whole. I picked out the largest fragment and gently unfolded it. It was a receipted bill, attesting to the fact that Francis Corker, a butcher, had received the sum of seventeen shillings and three pence three farthings from Mr Adolphus Iversen on the 9th of June 1807. The other side of the receipt was blank.
I smoothed out the paper on the windowsill, holding down one corner with the platter and most of one side with what was left of the cheese. I would not have believed it possible to write with one’s hands tied, but desperation is a fine teacher. Letter by letter, word by word, I scrawled this message:
If the bearer takes this to Mr Noak or his clerk the Negro Harmwell they will receive the sum of £5. They lodge in Brewer-st, north side, second house west from Gt Pultney-st. I am held captive at Iversen’s, Queen-street, Seven Dials.
I pushed the window as wide as it would go. Mary Ann still sat smoking, her face turned away from the house. I heard voices below, though whether from the yard near the house or through an open window or door I could not tell; in any case, I dared not call out to attract her attention. I tried waving my bound arms from side to side, standing as close as I could to the window, in the hope that the movement would register at the edge of her vision. Then, to my horror, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and approaching along the landing.
I had nothing to lose. I pushed my arms through the bars and let the note flutter from my fingers. As I did so, Mary Ann turned her head, perhaps attracted by a burst of laughter or a sudden movement from the door to the back kitchen. As she turned, she saw me and her eyes widened. The paper fluttered from my fingers and her eyes followed its fall.
The key turned in the lock. The door burst open. The man who had left me tied to the window shouldered his way into the room. His bloodshot eyes roved swiftly over the room, taking in the changes that had occurred since his departure. He lurched across the floor and gave me a backhanded blow that sent me sprawling across the coffin.
“Get back in there, you God-damned swab.” The words were harsh but he spoke in a whisper, as if he were afraid of being overheard, that his dereliction of duty might be discovered. “In there, I say.”
He bent down and manhandled me back into the coffin, cramming me in so I lay awkwardly on my side. He pushed my head down, catching my nose on the wood, and the blood began to flow. I heard him scurrying around the room in his heavy boots. I raised myself on an elbow. He restored the wig and the hat on to the corpse’s head, sending up another cloud of dust as he did so. He did not notice the pencil. He looked out of the window, but saw nothing there to cause him anxiety.
As he turned away, however, he knocked against the outstretched left leg of the corpse. The blow dislodged the dead man’s gloved hand from his thigh. There was an audible crackling sound, like tearing cloth. It was not much of a movement, but enough for the hand to hang down below the seat of the chair.
One would expect an embalmed body to be rigid. It was only some time later that I realised the significance of the movement, of the fact that it was possible when so little force had been brought to bear. The rigidity of the limb in question had already been broken. The first time, it had not been an accident.
At first, my captor did not realise what he had done. He felt the blow, of course, and turned back, looking askance at Mr Iversen, Senior as though he suspected the old man of hitting him.
The glove was slipping downwards. It was clearly much larger than the hand – perhaps the latter had shrunk – and it fell to the ground, leaving the hand beneath exposed. I saw yellowing, waxy skin, long nails, and spots of what looked like ink on the fingers. In some corner of my mind, some corner that remained remote from my present anxieties, I knew I had observed something very similar to that hand before. Then, my vision clearing, I saw with the kind of clarity which is almost like a physical pain that the top joints of the forefinger were missing. All at once I remembered the tavern in Charlotte-street, and the contents of Mr Poe’s satchel on the scrubbed table top, and the maid’s gasp of shock.
A rare specimen of digitus mortuus praecisus, lent me by the professor himself. Except that now it was no longer quite so rare.
78
That night the men who had brought me to Queen-street re-enacted the grim charade of the morning, this time under the supervision of Mr Iversen. His presence miraculously sobered them. As they were about to nail the lid, he waved them away from the coffin, and peered down at me.
“Pray do not disturb yourself,” he said. “It is only for an hour or so. Try to rest, eh? To sleep, Mr Shield: perchance to dream, eh?”
He gave a signal, and the men nailed the coffin lid, the hammer blows pounding through me like artillery fire. They took me down the stairs and loaded the coffin on to the conveyance, presumably the one that had brought me here, waiting in the street. We drove away, moving much more quickly at this time of night, despite the darkness. At first I heard the noise of the streets, albeit very faintly, and once I distinguished the cry of a watchman calling the hour. Gradually these sounds died away, and we picked up speed.
We had two horses, I thought, and to judge by the smoothness of the ride we were travelling on a turnpike road. This suggested they were taking me either north or west because to go east or south would have meant a longer, slower journey through the streets. Sometimes the rumbling of wagons penetrated my wooden prison, and I guessed they formed part of the night-time caravans bringing food and fuel into the ever-hungry belly of the metropolis.
That journey was a form of death, a foretaste of hell. My wrists and knees were still bound; and I had been gagged again and wedged in place with my hat and boots. To be deprived of sight, of movement, of the power of action, even of grounds for hope – all this is to be reduced to a state that is very nearly that of non-existence. As I jolted along in that coffin there were times when I would have given anything, even Sophie, even my own life, to be transformed into an inanimate object like a sack of potatoes or a heap of rocks, to be incapable of feeling and fearing.
My discomfort grew worse when we left the turnpike road and jounced along rutted lanes with many sharp bends, as fast as the driver dared. At one point our conveyance lurched violently to the left and came to a sudden halt that set the unsecured coffin sliding forwards and sideways until it, too, came to a stop with an impact which left me more bruised than ever. I guessed that our nearside wheels had fallen into the ditch along the side of the ro
ad. I prayed that we had broken a wheel or an axle – anything to increase my chance of rescue. Alas, a few minutes later we were on our way again.
The first indication I had that we were nearing our journey’s end came when the surface beneath the wheels changed to hard, bone-shaking cobbles. We slowed, swung to the right and stopped. The cessation of movement should have been a relief to me: instead it increased my awareness of my plight. However I tried, I could not make out what was going on around me. I grew colder and colder. My body was racked with spasms of cramp.
Desperate for air, for light, I hammered on the lid of the coffin, on the roof of my tiny cell. A memory came to my mind, of lying wounded in the dark, crushed by the weight of a dead horse, on the field of Waterloo: and I screamed as past and present glided like lovers into an indissoluble embrace. Panic was a creature in the coffin with me, an old ghost who would smother me if I let him. I fought him, forcing myself to breathe more slowly, to unclench my muscles.
There came a muffled crash, which sent a tremor through my wooden world. The coffin was dragged out of the vehicle. I heard crashes and bangs. Nausea rose in my gorge. The coffin pitched forward. I plunged feet first down a steep slope and came to rest, still at an angle, with a jolt that was worse than any I had previously experienced. But I had no time to recover, for the coffin moved again, twisting round and then descending with another shattering blow to a horizontal position.
A crowbar dug into the join between lid and coffin. The nails rose from the wood. I saw the first glimmer of light I had seen for hours. It came from a pair of flickering tallow candles yet to me, for a moment, those candles were brighter than a pair of suns. By their light, I made out two huge shadows looming over the coffin, which had been placed on the floor. Above me was a lattice-work of joists and floorboards. There was a deafening clatter as the lid was cast aside.
I tried to sit up and found my limbs would not answer. A man laughed, and the familiar smell of gin assailed my nostrils. I managed to pull myself up so my head at least was out of the coffin. I was in what seemed to be a low cellar with walls of brick. I recognised my captors as Mr Iversen’s men, each with a candle in his hand. One of them stooped and picked up the crowbar. The other pulled out the gag. Then, ignoring me, they scuttled like black beetles up a steep flight of open wooden stairs to a trap-door.
The American Boy Page 42