Mr. Timothy

by Louis Bayard

  —What on earth?

  At the end of the hallway stands Mary Catherine, wringing the life out of a tea cosy. Surely this is the last thing she was expecting: Mr. Timothy descending with one girl and reemerging with two…George and Mrs. Sharpe nowhere in sight. What an astonishment we must be. I can feel Mary Catherine’s awe wrapping me round, investing me with a new authority. The master of the house.

  —Mary Catherine, this is Inge. I’m afraid she’s been through quite an ordeal, and she’ll require new clothes and a bed and very possibly a meal. Do you think you can arrange all those?

  —Certainly….

  —I should be glad to help, but I’ve an important errand calling me away just now.

  —What sort of—

  —Before I go, I must leave a note for the police. In the increasingly unlikely event that they ever arrive. May I entrust you with that?

  —Of course! But is there—

  —That’s all I have time for just now. If you would please see to Inge? Many thanks.

  It is in Mrs. Sharpe’s study that I find the pen—a shiny steel lozenge—along with an inkwell and a stack of stationery. With Philomela standing close by like a tutelary spirit, I sit down to write:

  Have gone to St. Saviour’s Dock. Come at once.

  I place it in an envelope and convey it directly to Mary Catherine. Then I pull the shawl from Mrs. Sharpe’s piano and wrap it round Philomela and guide her down the hall and out the front door. So deft am I in bustling her along, in fact, that it is only when we are standing on the sidewalk out front that she thinks to protest.

  —Listen to me, Philomela. I’m sending you to my uncle’s for the time being.

  A frown etches its way across her face. She shakes her head.

  —Please don’t argue. I’ve endangered your life enough for one day.

  Bafflement, skepticism, all the usual mélange of emotions work their way across her face and produce the usual fragment of language:

  —No.

  —I promise you’ll be safe.

  —No.

  In a fit of impatience, I grab her by the arm and drag her over to Regent Street, gesticulating like a monkey. In a matter of seconds, a northbound cabman has spotted us, and when he pulls over to the curb, I hand him a piece of scrawling.

  —There’s the address. Please take this young lady there. Directly, if you please.

  I hold open the door, but she balks.

  —Please, Philomela.

  She pulls one end of the shawl over the nape of her neck, tightens the other end round her waist, and, with a queenly disdain, steps away from the cab. And then, from behind me, comes a new voice:

  —Looks like she don’t want to go.

  It is Colin. That poor bruised face of his, bathed in gaslight and hardened over with resolve. Devil take the man who gainsays him.

  —The police, Colin. Where are the police?

  —Ooh well, bloody surprise! Surtees were out of office, just like I guessed, and they’re takin’ their bloody sweet time fetchin’ him, ain’t they? So I told ’em where to meet us, and I come ahead on my own. And if you mean to do me or Filly out of any more Ad-ven-ture, Mr. Timothy, you got another think comin’.

  Gully’s boat is exactly where he left it—in the little watery alcove by the Hungerford Stairs. What a shock it is to see everything still in place: the winch and the grappling iron and the oars in their locks and even Gully’s flask of brandy, resting on one of the benches, awaiting its owner’s return.

  Out of deference, I leave the flask undisturbed, and I take up my usual position by the oars, and as soon as Colin and Philomela have clambered in, I let slip the rope. Just as the pier passes from view, the first speculative drop of snow falls.

  Nothing more than a gauzy shred, caught by the wind and blown back whence it came—but as we pass along, the snow gathers heart. The flakes hiss against the hull and boil along the crest of each new wave. Everything that is theirs to claim, they claim, and when I cast my eyes upwards, even the sky appears to be dissolving into its constituent elements—exfoliating into nothingness.

  And yet what a charm it all has, despite the circumstances. The first snow of the season. Falling on me. Falling on Philomela and Colin and Mrs. Sharpe. On Gully. Falling on all of us, dead and alive.

  —Mr. Timothy?

  —Yes, Colin.

  —You got any sort of…well, like a plan or anythink?

  —Not particularly, no.

  Other than to stop the world on its axis. But that’s more a job for Atlas, isn’t it? And I am not he.

  All the same, there is something supernatural keeping my arms in motion. Something pumping the blood through my arms and shoulders and making me forget the chapping of my hands and the chattering of my teeth and the lingering fumes of burnt wood in my nostrils.

  Perhaps it is simply the river itself…the winking lights of barges and coasters and dories…the chaff of men’s tongues. A ceaseless highway of goods and humanity, flowing in each direction, with the three of us trundling right along inside it.

  Yes, it all comes back to me now, this feeling of being absorbed into the river’s own rhythm. But there is no giving in tonight, for we are absorbed in another mission entirely, and this mission is already teetering with uncertainty.

  What if we’re too late?

  This is the possibility I cannot shake off. What if the shipment from Ostend has already arrived? What if Griffyn has slipped off in the darkness? What if his men are even now towing their cargo to the bowels of Griffyn Hall?

  What if nothing has changed or will ever change?

  And rather than answer one way or the other, I simply pull harder on the sculls—harder and harder, until my back clenches like a fist and my arms fall almost out of their sockets and my hands burn like firecrackers. And when the rowing fails to distract, I begin naming the bridges as we pass under them: Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark. And then the wharves: Grand Junction, White Friars, Scots, Dowgate. And beyond those, every random landmark I can recall—every shipyard and sailor’s lodging, every custom house Gully ever pointed out to me.

  It has taken me this long to recognise what a good teacher he was, for I know this river! Not in the way a pilot knows it, but in the way a priest knows his breviary—an understanding that precludes any large surprises while, at the same time, absorbing every small surprise, every turn and nuance and whim.

  That is how I come to know—after more than forty minutes of incessant rowing—that the pier up ahead and to starboard is St. Saviour’s Dock. So preordained and miraculous is its appearance that I feel as if I am the first ever to discover it.

  —There!

  Colin, mystified, squints into the night.

  —I don’t see nothink. You certain, Mr. Timothy?

  But of course I’m certain. How many times did Gully draw my attention to it? How many times did he talk of Bermondsey, and Jacob’s Island, and the time he saw a man killed there? And there I sat, taking it all in without even realising it, and here now is my reward: the assurance of St. Saviour’s Dock.

  A promising name that is quickly belied by the reality: a bleak black outcropping of pier, ringed with snow and peopled by a few lone shivering figures—watermen, probably, waiting for the fares that have eluded them all year round.

  I set down my oars, grateful for the reprieve but not yet ready for the labour to follow. The cerebral labour of finding Griffyn and his men amidst all this snow and mist and darkness.

  They cannot have chosen the dock—too many witnesses. Neither can they have wandered too far, if Mrs. Sharpe is to be believed. Clear as a bell, the way she said it: By St. Saviour’s. By St. Saviour’s.

  And what a wealth of ambiguity is contained in that single word. By could be a mile in any direction. We could spend days and nights exploring that by and be no closer to our end.

  The boat, with no one to scull it, spins in slow, wobbly circles. The snowflakes flutter and whirl about us like maddened bees. We pay t
hem as much attention as a statue would, for we are all of us engaged in the same activity: pulling back the curtains of night to find a scattered few of its denizens. Our heads wheel east, west, north, and south. Our eyes squint and expand, cutting this way as the next, as every fibre of our respective beings is assigned to this quixotic search.

  Where are they?

  The more I seek them, the more I am drawn back to the events of last night, to Griffyn Hall. That wall of fog rearing up, and the two of us, Colin and I, crouched by the hedge, waiting for a sign of occupancy or intent, waiting without hope but with a faint underlay of expectancy. And then being rewarded with that flaring match.

  It all comes back with such a rush of immediacy that when I first see the miniature explosion of light in the distance, I mistake it for a memory. Indeed, I am prepared to pass on without giving it another thought, until I see Colin pointing in the same direction and jumping up in the boat, nearly tipping himself out in the process.

  By then, the light has already vanished. Reconstructing it in my mind, I see once again the quick inflammatory burst, swelling and then shrinking down to a tiny point and then disappearing. The very flame a match would make.

  And by the time I have reached that conclusion, I have already snatched up the oars, and I am rowing harder than ever—Atlas, indeed—and we are coursing through the water, fast as a steamboat, and the pumping of my arms is matched only by the pumping of my heart, and my eyes have sprung open to their farthest compass, the better to fix the sector from which that mysterious light emanated.

  And then comes another light. Flaring up out of nothing and, just as quickly, disappearing.

  A pair of them. A pair of smokers.

  Oh, yes, I fully acknowledge there might be any number of explanations for two such lights. There might be any number of people capable of making them. But this is all we have been given; this is what we will take.

  Rowing now in a perfect fury, I propel us through the water in a clean, hard line, staying parallel to the shore and steering solely by the memory of those two lights—navigating by them the way mariners use stars. The rowing is even more exacting now. Every muscle in my arms and shoulders and legs shouts in protest. My knee lodges the largest objection of all. Winter has gnawed it down to a prickly stump, and there is nothing to do but row beyond the pain and keep rowing until I can be sure we have passed the vicinity in question. Only then do I ease up on the sculls. Only then do I turn us on an angle and begin the more delicate work of bringing us to shore.

  Another ten minutes go by before the shoreline presents itself, and still more time before I can find a margin wide enough to take us. The tide has risen in the last hour, and as I leap out of the boat and drag it to land, the tide keeps dragging us back. It takes all my doing, and all Colin’s doing, to bring the boat to a halt on the narrow spit of gravel.

  With my muscles still howling and gnashing, I permit myself a swig of Gully’s brandy…then another…and it turns out to be just the tonic: a ring of reassurance.

  —Mr. Timothy! Pull the bricks out your arse!

  Already Colin is stalking back down the shoreline, and Philomela and I are making haste to follow. Keeping up with him is a little easier than it was last night, for there is no knapsack to drag me down. Just my oilskin cap and my sodden pea coat, into which I have inserted the one item I would never have thought to call upon: George’s revolver.

  My hand closes round it now. Hard and beaded with melted snow and strangely warm, as though it had been firing itself in my absence. Its touch gives me no comfort; it only recalls me to how far out of my element I have come.

  By now, the snow is falling full force, half blinding us with each sweep of our eyelashes, and yet one might think it had never existed to behold the prospect before us. The riverbanks, the waggons, the warehouses, the windows of the provisioners’ shops—everything is coated in a blackness so thick that any snowflake is swallowed entire. All the colliers on the Thames, all the chimneys of London, the entire sum of England’s industrial furnaces could have disgorged their burdens of soot right here and still not have attained to quite this degree of pitch.

  And these smells! Glue and leather and dog droppings and the nauseating trace of strawberry jam, blurring into an indefinable, illimitable scent of rot. But if Colin notices any of it, he is in no way put off. He pushes past each building, pushes through the wind and snow…until at last he stops and thrusts his shoulders back and, without a word, points into the near distance.

  Standing there by an abandoned custom house are two men, dressed in the manner of coal heavers. Their voices, unimpeded, fly towards us.

  —Any bloody day.

  —Extra wages, I don’t think.

  —Stow that, will you?

  —Stow it yourself.

  No different, in speech or appearance, from any pair of labourers you might find along the southern end of the river or along the Docks. No different but for this: they are holding their lanterns to landward. Shielding their light from the view of passing boats.

  A detail, that is all. And rising out of it, an intuition, or else just a fond hope, that these two coal heavers are something other: the men who were keeping vigil with Rebbeck on the portico of Griffyn Hall.

  But there is no means of positively identifying them. We cannot draw any closer without alerting them to our presence, and we cannot gain another angle on them without either plunging into the icy river or heading southwards into realms unknown.

  And then I notice a rather striking particularity about the building next to which the men are standing: although it has been propped up in divers places by enormous crutches, the impromptu surgery has done nothing to keep the rear half of the roof from slipping away—dropping clean off the framing. This displaced sheet of tar and shingle now forms a crude embankment between the ground and the upper story, and it is up this embankment that Colin and Philomela and I, without another word, now scramble.

  The detached roof holds firm beneath our feet, and within a minute, we are standing where the roof once stood, crawling along naked ceiling joists and peering down into the custom house. A tableau of arrested domesticity: one small oaken table; two chairs pushed back; a plate of cabbage, still recognisable; a single black stocking wound round a newel post.

  —Look.

  Colin taps me on the arm and points to the clearing below: a cramped, desolate courtyard stretching from the custom house to an abandoned mill just to the south. Against that mill’s sluice gate, a broad front of Thames water has crested, creating a small inlet—fifteen feet wide and perhaps eight feet deep—entirely invisible to passing vessels. Some farsighted soul has even built a tiny dock projecting halfway across the inlet. And fate itself has so thoroughly emptied the surrounding space that the only remaining occupants are discarded pails and the strewn skeletons of dead cats. I feel, against my better nature, a tingle of admiration. Griffyn’s men have found perhaps the one place on the riverfront where they may come and go unobserved.

  The two coal heavers below don’t seem particularly to relish their privacy. The snow has grizzled their caps; white epaulets have gathered on their shoulders. The only concession they make to the cold, though, is to bury their hands in their pockets and mutter a mild oath or two under their breath. One of them—fearful, perhaps, of being declared insubordinate—casts a quick backwards look and then, reassured, returns to his original post. But in that fleeting moment, I have time to follow the line of his eye to its logical end, to see a waggon with a quiescent horse…and two additional figures stationed by the custom-house door.

  Of the two, Miss Binny is the more easily recognised. Her towering figure, her black cloak, as ill fitting as the dress it conceals…these I would know in any setting. In her mouth, shockingly enough, is a cigarette, whose lit end allows me to trace the wide, amiable curve of her mouth, as she puffs prodigiously and exchanges inaudible small talk with the smoker on her left.

  This latter personage remains clothed in s
hadow until one of the coal heavers’ lanterns accidentally swings his way, revealing the blunt features of that well-known face. Last night’s frock coat has been discarded in favour of the customary work attire, and the bowler has once again been wrenched into place, although it is not quite able to conceal the swath of white bandage that has been wrapped round Rebbeck’s crown. Neither is his air of studied leisure able to hide the asymmetry of his stance: he is clearly favouring one leg, a fact that affords me no small amount of satisfaction. He stands there now, in the falling snow, like the occupant of an opera box, waiting with barely suppressed boredom for the musical onslaught to begin.

  We are all of us waiting—for what, I have only some small idea. Still, I cannot help but note the tics of annoyance that take hold of Rebbeck each time he consults his watch. They’re behind schedule, I think. They should have been done and gone some time ago. And the longer they are put off, surely, the more brightly Providence will shine on my cause. God willing, the police have already been to Mrs. Sharpe’s. God willing, they are even now wending their way downriver….

  Or else no one is coming. No one at all.

  —Looooo….

  A long, lowing cry, rising out of the east. The sound jerks Rebbeck’s head upwind, draws a relieved smile across Miss Binny’s taut features, and spurs the two men into attitudes of expectancy, as they swing their lanterns, for the first time, towards the river.

  In the sweep of light, I can just make out the charcoal outlines of a boat, propelled by two men, washing towards us on a torrent of speckled, febrile water. So much frothing and hissing that the vessel itself has the quality of an afterthought, rocking in the river’s troughs even as it steers a steady course for the dock. It is a homely vessel, smaller than a barge, larger than a dory…unexceptional in every way, right down to its contents.

  Boxes.

  Ten boxes, to be precise. Phosphorescent with snow and arrayed in staggered tiers.

  Tonight does not mark the first time these boxes have been brought to this pier, judging by the practiced ease, the air of rote with which the pilots and heavers go about their work. One casts the rope, one catches it, one slips it over the piling—and within minutes, the boat has been hauled in and secured, and all four men are hefting the boxes out of the hold and laying them in a neat row by the bank of the stream.