by Dan Vyleta
What Charlie does do is lie flat on the ground, count the minutes. Crawl back through the bushes, back to the window. Raise his head above the window ledge and take a peek.
Eleanor is sitting on a chair, tears rolling down her cheeks, her skin glowing red from the cold. Other than the sobs that rack her frame, she is not moving at all. Her hands are wrapped around a mug of tea, demurely, in an attitude oddly like prayer. By her side, crouching and hence shorter than her by half a head, is Cruikshank, holding a big pair of scissors and moving them about her torso like a bird picking berries from a thorny shrub. Each sharp little snip cuts a leather belt on Eleanor’s harness. When one side gapes open like a bust valise, the knotty old porter moves around to the other side, facing the window. Charlie is not quick enough to duck and for a full second they stare at each other while the girl sits unmoving, warming her hands on the hot tea.
Then Cruikshank looks away and resumes his labours, and Charlie turns to run into the frozen night.
HEADMASTER
There is something objectionable about Swinburne. It goes beyond his overbearing boorishness; the wheeze of his voice; his massive, hulking, clumsy body, so much like a dead man’s brought back to life. I think it is his eyes, small, too-round eyes, tucked piglike under too many wrinkles. They are fixed on me now, studying me past the rim of the teacup he has lifted to his lips and then forgotten. His thoughts are easy to surmise. He is wondering why I asked him up here, at an unconventional hour, too hard on supper to call for tea. Other questions are churning in him, close to the surface. In the end he cannot help himself: it spills out without subtlety, the thing that bothers him most. It never ceases to surprise one how much like a schoolboy this old man really is, underneath the fire-and-brimstone bluster: a schoolboy in a cassock and a licence to spank. It is little wonder the pupils fear him so.
“It is impossible,” he says. “Out of the question. Absurd.”
I make him wait until I have dunked, bitten off, and chewed my mince pie, brushed crumbs from my lips and chin. The regret in my voice is sweetened by cinnamon and sugar.
“Cruishank tells me the girl spoke the name quite distinctly, and repeated it twice. There cannot be any mistake.”
“Then she is lying!” Swinburne scowls, looks around the room, then at the door that leads to my bedroom. “Is she here?”
“Yes. Sleeping. The poor thing is exhausted. We mustn’t wake her up.”
“Is it true she does not smoke?”
“Oh, she smokes a little. But no more than our sixteen-year-olds. Less than some. It is really quite remarkable. Renfrew ought to be congratulated.”
“Then you do believe her.”
I am amused to see how crushed Swinburne is by this notion: that his favourite pupil should be thought of as a killer. It would be touching if his concern wasn’t born entirely of vanity.
“It really does not matter what I believe. Young Spencer has been named, so he will need to be found and questioned. But there is a larger point to this. Julius is Lady Naylor’s son. He was staying with her when Argyle and Cooper were abducted. It gives the government an excuse to place Lady Naylor under investigation. And her husband, the baron. Officials will be arriving at their house this very night, with a warrant authorising a search.”
I pause, lean forward a little, making sure Swinburne takes note of what I am saying. The man has a thick skull. One has to be emphatic with him.
“You see, we had cause for suspicion before. A letter of Lady Naylor’s was intercepted some weeks ago. She was writing on behalf of the baron, communicating with a scientist on the Continent. As it turns out you know the man in question. I understand he was one of your pupils, what, twenty, thirty years ago?”
Swinburne blanches. “The apostate!”
I do my best not to laugh out loud at the word.
“No more than an errant sheep, surely? Should you not be trying to save him? Return him to the flock? As I understand he was a favourite of yours, once upon a time. You taught him Greek, I believe, at his special request.”
Swinburne’s face is bitter with rancour. “We should never have admitted a foreigner. He fooled me, fooled us all.” He adds, when his slow brain works its way from past to present: “What does the baron want with him?”
“Who can say? The letter was rather cryptic. And we have not been successful in placing a spy in the Naylor household, to provide us with information by other means.”
Swinburne seems unmoved by the idea of spies infiltrating the bosom of the families that rule the land. All he wants to know is: “How hard can it be?”
I shrug. “They have a good butler. Attentive chap.”
“Surely you could have bribed a chambermaid.”
“We would not dream of trusting anyone quite so common.” I ignore Swinburne’s wince. It is said his mother was a tanner’s daughter. There are words in his vocabulary that make the other teachers blush. “In any case, we will know more soon. The warrant was sent by special courier. The Crown is taking an interest, you see.”
At the mention of the Crown, Swinburne grows ponderous. Again it is almost comically easy to follow his train of thought.
What does fat Mr. Trout have to do with the Crown?
It nearly breaks his thick little head to puzzle it out.
“Headmaster Trout,” he ventures at last, almost shyly, “is it true that you used to be some sort of magistrate?”
“A justice of the peace.”
“A witchfinder, is what Master Barlow once told me, when he was in his cups. An inquisitor of crime.” He uses the words without reproach.
I laugh, pat my stomach. “Merely a servant of the state. I was more slender then.”
I think I have done enough to ensure that Swinburne will pass on whatever information his wooden skull can retain to his patron. He has long been the Tory Party’s ears within the school, just as Renfrew is the Liberals’. There is an interest, on the side of the Crown, in keeping the factions in balance.
“Now, if you will excuse me.”
“Of course, Headmaster.”
It is only now when he rises to leave that the thought occurs to Swinburne that he should have inquired about the victim of the assault, whatever his feelings about the man. It behoves him, as a Christian. Nonetheless, it comes out rather coarsely.
“Is Renfrew dead then?”
“Not at all. On the contrary, there is hope yet that he may live, though if he does he will be much changed. The surgeon had to remove several feet of his intestines. An Oxford man, he is, one of Renfrew’s party. I had him fetched.”
Swinburne frowns, wets his lips with the thick-veined tip of his tongue, lowers his voice to the whisper of insinuation.
“It’s unnatural. By rights he should be dead.”
“You are a suspicious man, Swinburne. We have no reason to believe that the man used any techniques or technologies he acquired illegally. And no reason to inquire. Surely you are pleased Dr. Renfrew is still with us.”
As I see the old churchman to the door, I catch a whiff of his breath. Atop the rotting smell of his dentures there sits another, cleaner smell, almost medicinal and carrying the sweetness of turpentine. My guess is that he never leaves his chambers without a sweet tucked into the pocket of his mouth. I wonder briefly how he justifies his consumption theologically. But then I realise that a man like Swinburne does not bother with justifications. Churchmen and teachers are allowed to use sweets. Other men are not.
For him, it is as simple as that.
ф
The girl is asleep when I enter the bedroom. There are some marks on the pillow and the bed-sheet, but they are light and grey, bad dreams become manifest. It would be churlish to call them sins. Slowly, not wishing to wake her, I lower myself onto the chair next to her, and tuck the duvet back up to her chin. She mutters something, and—still asleep—her little hand comes up to her chest and performs an odd, turning movement, as if she were placing her heart into a loosely formed fist and gi
ving it a twist. It is a disturbing gesture, made by a mind that is disturbed. One can only guess at what the girl must have witnessed.
I did not enter Renfrew’s cottage until after he had been removed from the premises. Cruikshank had found him, he and the two stable hands he had roused in response to the girl’s warning. He’d armed them with stout clubs, he told me, and himself with an axe. They had found the door unlocked.
All three of the men had walked through Renfrew’s blood. That’s the first thing I saw coming to the cottage, bloody footprints leading away from the front door, growing fainter with every step until only their heels and bootnails showed pink upon the path from cottage to school. It had been snowing through much of the night. No other prints showed in the blanket of white.
In the squalid little hallway, the same three sets of footprints were visible on the floorboards, along with a fourth, wearing narrow riding boots and attended by a large-pawed dog. Near the door to the living room, one of the stable hands had dropped his club. He had not stooped to pick it up.
Beyond this point, the prints no longer showed. Indeed, one had to squint to make out the shadow of blood upon the blackened floorboards. It was as though a great fire had raged in the room, a fire that consumed only people and left the furnishings untouched. There had been two centres to the fire: the first an armchair, whose worn leather was covered in an oily layer of Soot, a finger deep; the second on the floor, two steps away, where a body had written a sickle of deepest black into the dark flooring. The blood had pooled there and mixed with the Soot; it formed a sort of treacle, stringy to the touch.
When people burn to death, their bodies fold into themselves, into the posture of unborn children: the knees tucked up to the chest, the fists raised high in front of the face like pugilists taking cover, the skin a black tissue above bone. It was tempting to ascribe this position to the man who had lain there on the floor, bleeding from an abdominal wound which, Cruikshank assures me, “had his innerds pokin’ through.” I have rarely seen him this upset.
I made, during my initial visit, only the most perfunctory search of the doctor’s private papers. There were a number of incriminating manuscripts, suggesting research into illegal matters, as well as a wealth of foreign correspondence, which I made sure to take along lest they fall into the wrong hands. It was only on a second visit, some hours later, that I found, tucked inside a handsome portable desk of mahogany and rosewood, a very interesting if incomplete report pertaining to Charlie Cooper, and discovered a room upstairs whose bed frame was fitted with leather manacles at either side.
One need not have been a justice of the peace to string these facts together to a narrative of sorts and endow it with a plot. All the same Cruikshank insists that the girl came to his door alone; that he looked outside and found no other tracks leading up to his home. I suppose he has a soft spot for Cooper and imagines he is doing him a favour. When we lie from sympathy, I have found, the Smoke seems fit to spare us. It is the sort of fact that keeps Swinburne up at night; runs counter to his view of things.
The girl mutters something, deep in her sleep, and summons me back from my reverie. I bend my ear down to her lips until my cheek nearly touches her nose. She makes me wait for several minutes until she speaks again, and I stand there, awkward, my fundament pushed back for balance and bending double at the waist, looking for wisdom from the mouth of babes. When it comes, the word that travels across the gap of air is fragile, foreign, unexpected.
“Asch-en-stedt.”
I wonder what it was about living with Renfrew that made her snoop around his private papers, and what it was she did to punish herself for so obvious a sin.
ф
A noise runs through my chambers. I know at once what it is, and yet I have never heard it before, not here, in my rooms, atop the kingdom that is my school. It cuts me to the marrow. It is a noise that must not exist. There it comes again, the shrill bleating of a bell. It jerks me upright, sees me race to the door. I lock her in, the girl, just as the third ring sounds; am by the custom-built cupboard at the fourth. It takes me three more rings to find the key; insert it (how clumsy my fingers are, how sweaty my palm!), turn it, and open the cupboard door. The ringing only stops when I take the receiver off the hook.
“Hullo,” I say, unsure of the procedure. “Samuel Trout here.” And then, blustery in my confusion, whispering hoarsely into the funnel jutting out of the wooden box: “This had better be an emergency!”
The voice that answers is so immediate, it seems to stand in the room with me. Its words pour out from the shell of the receiver straight into my ear; they have a crackle to them, as though someone were talking to you in a storm. I listen carefully, find myself nodding, before realising that it is sound that is transmitted, not motion.
When I hang up, I lock the cupboard very carefully, place the key in my pocketbook, and change into my travelling clothes. Half an hour later sees me leave the school in our fastest trap. In my carpetbag, clutched against the soft of my chest, are thirty pounds sterling, two changes of undergarments, my razor, my hairbrush, ten illegal cigarettes, and a box of sweets.
The Colt I wear in its holster. It rides high up my flank, the butt turned outward, like a doorknob growing out of the hollow of my armpit. Outside, the land lies dark under a sickle moon.
I asked him whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.
“Oh, dear no, miss,” he said. “This is a London particular.”
I had never heard of such a thing.
“A fog, miss,” said the young gentleman.
“Oh, indeed!” said I.
CHARLES DICKENS, BLEAK HOUSE (1853)
THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY
It is hard to say when exactly it starts. Thomas is tired, busy with his fatigue and his wound, his thoughts about Charlie. He is lying in the corner of the train wagon, the squawk of chickens by his ear. Two steps from him the door to the wagon remains wide open. A savage wind whips at them whenever they gather speed, then relents when the train labours up a hill. There are other men in the wagon, other vagrants, a group of two and a third, a solitary man. Livia is sitting far from them, her knees tucked into her chest. It is only later that Thomas realises that she is trying to hide her breasts.
The men sniff her out all the same. It begins without rancour, witless banter about what a pretty boy she is, how creamy her skin.
“Short for ’is age,” one man ventures, shouting against the wind. “A little scrawny. But nice ’ealthy thighs.” When she gets up to shift closer to Thomas, his mate calls after her: “Don’t you worry, pet, we’re just having a bit of fun.” The little Smoke that wafts over from them is playful and oddly inclusive, as though inviting them to join their game.
It is the solitary man who changes the equation. He climbed on later, hours into their journey, running alongside the train at the steepest side of a hill. This man is not interested in Livia. It’s lunch he wants. The chickens are packed into two massive crates, sturdy enough to discourage thievery but perforated at the side to let in air. All one sees of them is a mass of feathers; the occasional blood-red beak sticking out of a perforation; a dozen unblinking eyes. They are packed in willy-nilly, literally stacked on top of each other, are restless, squawking, fighting for floor space and air. The man has hooked two fingers through one of the holes. His face is weather-beaten, the creases caked with Soot. Light, deep-set eyes. It is as though their colour has run.
He catches something, pulls back his arms, holds a chicken foot hooked between his fingers. The man continues tugging until pale pink cartilage broadens to a wedge of fine white feather. Then he gets stuck: the hole just isn’t big enough.
At first Thomas thinks the man means to cut off the leg. But it appears he has no knife. Rather he just continues pulling, his dark face growing darker with the effort. A riot of chicken squawks plays chorus to his effort.
When the blood starts
flowing, the man starts smoking, and when his Smoke reaches the other two men, all that is dark in them rises up like a dog called to its master. Again they turn to Livia, and again they begin teasing her, but there is a different quality now to their taunts, something dangerous and needy, and the language soon grows coarse.
“Won’t you come over here, pet?” one of them keeps saying. “We’ve got things to show you.”
“That your sweetheart there?” the other one jumps in. “Looks in real bad shape, ’e does. No joy cuddlin’ the sick.”
Livia looks over at Thomas. It is a closed, a haughty look. It must mean she is scared. She does not ask him for his help. But Thomas is already on his feet. The Smoke wafting through the carriage helps him, gives him strength. He breathes it in with a sense of recognition; watches his body exhale a fine blue mist in response. All the same he is careful not to inhale too much. He must not get too angry to think.
“Ah, look at the pup! Chival’russ, ’e is, a proper little knight. Forgot ’is armer though, didn’t ’e?”
“Nah,” says his mate, “he’s got his lass there to protect him. What you say, bonny lad? Sit yourself down again and we’ll help you break her in.”
Thomas ignores them, steadies himself against Livia’s shoulders. From the corner of one eye he is aware of the third man, plucking feathers off a bloody lump of chicken. Ahead, the land shifts from flat to the slight incline of a hill. Livia’s ear is right in front of him, its outside clean, the inside glowing black with coal dust. Her body is shaking under his hands, or perhaps he is shaking and passing it on into her slender frame. He whispers to her.
“I’m too weak to fight them,” he whispers. “But if we stay here, I must.”
Her eye flicks back momentarily. It communicates a question.