Graves tumbled back in from the street. “Not a carriage or a chair to be had.” He saw that Clode was on his knees, fastening a cloak around Jonathan’s neck. The young man looked up. “How far away is it?” he asked.
Graves ran a hand through his hair. “Three, four miles perhaps. It depends if we go through the streets or into the fields.”
Miss Chase was tying a bundle together over her arm, tightening the knot as she spoke.
“Streets. We may be seen, but we’ll be better able to hide. Susan, are you ready?”
The little girl was pale, but steady enough on her feet. She nodded.
Miss Chase took her by the shoulders. “Whatever happens, you must never let go of my hand, do you understand?”
She nodded again.
Graves touched Clode on the elbow and pulled him to one side. “Are you armed?”
The young man shook his head. “All I have is a penknife.”
“Go into the kitchen and get a couple of good knives. The servants will lock the house after us and take refuge with the neighbors.” Graves put a hand on the other man’s shoulder, gripped hard. “Come on, we have waited too long as it is.”
The little party stumbled out into the dark. The black of the sky was stained orange in places by the various fires. People hurried past them, bundles of shadow and fear, their faces gleaming with sweat where the trembling lights of torches caught them, like passersby in the tricks of Caravaggio. Graves urged them on. The familiar streets, the uneven way beneath their feet as known to them as their own hands, seemed to have been caught and transformed with the powers of nightmare. Jonathan had tripped before they got past their first neighbor’s front door; Graves turned to see him being lifted into Clode’s arms. He hung around the young man’s neck, struggling to find comfort, his hands clasped under Clode’s dark hair.
Graves looked about him. There were too many faces-he could not tell friend from fiend in this dark. He plowed forward, aware of Miss Chase and Susan in step behind him, Clode at the rear, one hand supporting Jonathan, the other tucked ready in his waistcoat. Graves could tell he had his fingers on the handle of a carving knife, for his own hand was folded around its twin.
They turned down through Soho. Every square seemed alight with hungry flames and drunken laughter. A man staggered backward almost into his arms; he stank of brandy and soot. Graves shoved him aside.
There was a scream to his right. He spun round to see a young woman, her hair loose and wild, a baby in her arms, screaming up at the roof of a shabby building opposite which flexed and billowed with orange flame.
“Oh God! Where am I to go! Where am I to go?” she screamed as two men, their blue cockades still visible in the glow, poured out of the house. One pushed her hard in the chest, so she sprawled on the pavement.
“Back to Rome, whore!” he said, then turned to laugh with his companion. The woman folded her arms around the baby in her lap and rocked from side to side.
Susan ripped her hand from Miss Chase’s grip and ran to the woman’s side. She pushed her little purse into her hands.
“Take this! Find somewhere safe.”
The woman looked up and crossed herself, sobbing as she spoke.
“Bless you, miss! But have you a place?”
“Yes, in Earl’s Court. But we should all leave here.”
“Susan, for the love of God, get up!” shouted Miss Chase.
The woman nodded. “I shall,” she vowed. “I’ll never come back here again.”
Miss Chase dragged the girl up. “Susan, now! Do not let go of me again!”
Susan trotted beside her to where the two men were waiting, watching the crowd.
“She had a baby, Miss Chase!” she panted.
Graves was looking around into the darkness.
“Very well, Susan,” he said. “Now come on.” He saw Clode start. “What?”
“Nothing-I don’t know. Let’s move.”
Crowther pushed open the door to his home a little after midnight, lit the candle he found waiting for him and carried it into the study. His own letter was waiting for him. He read, holding the page by its edge as if he was nervous the poison might leak out over his fingers, then laid it gently down on the tabletop. Drawing fresh paper toward him he began to write, recording his observations of each body as he would if studying them for his own interest, or laying them out for his colleagues to ponder over. Then, sharpening his pen once more, he began to write down each thing they knew about the inhabitants and history of Thornleigh Hall, tried to watch his words grow like a spider’s web, turn the points of contact between people and events into a mesh, a form. He knew what he believed, that Wicksteed was the center of it, but all he seemed to do was glower in the middle of it and refuse to be touched by the strands that swung around him. Just the bottle, and the scrap of embroidery, each so explainable, grazed him, but Patience was gone.
Crowther looked up and his eye rested on the dried black hand that stood, fingers pointing casually downward, on the top of his preparation cabinet. It was black with resin, but the veins and arteries which had fed it in life, the muscles that had given it motion, were highlighted in blue and yellow wax. If those muscles contracted, the fist would clench. He stretched his own hands for a moment, then began to read again what he had written. Where did he have to press, what motion to make, so that the spider would leap up in a fury, dance and hang himself on his own threads.
The streets were quieter here, and giving way to fields along the King’s New Road to Kensington. Daniel had lost feeling in the arm that supported Jonathan’s weight; he mechanically followed the shapes in front of him and counted his steps. He thought of Mrs. Westerman and Miss Trench at Caveley. He wondered what they would think, seeing him now, carrying the heir to all that wealth and pomp in his arms, covered in soot and dirty from the road. He hoped they would think well of him. He missed a step and landed hard. The jolt shook Jonathan out of the doze he had drifted in for the last half hour. He stirred against Clode’s neck, adjusted his grip. Clode had grown up without younger siblings, so this sensation of a child’s arms clasped in such complete trust around his shoulders was new to him. He began to envy men with children of their own. Jonathan mumbled something to him.
“What is it, Jon? I did not hear you.”
“I said have you seen Thornleigh?”
Clode smiled in the darkness. “I have. I’ve not been inside, though.”
“Are there horses?”
“Lots.”
The small boy sighed contentedly, then suddenly his body stiffened and he cried out, “There!”
Clode spun round, pulling the knife free from his waistcoat. He heard Graves running back toward them. Jonathan scrambled down to the ground, but kept at his side under the shelter of Clode’s free arm.
“What was it, Jonathan?”
“I saw him, I’m sure! That end of the street where the lamp is.”
The noise of the riots was muffled and distant; when a shutter caught in the breeze and knocked against its frame the noise was like a rifle shot. Graves lifted his hand to his mouth.
“Show yourself if you dare!” he cried.
The lamp continued to swing slightly, but nothing else in the street moved.
Graves leaned toward Clode and whispered, “Go ahead with the others. I’ll wait here to see we are not followed and come after.”
Daniel did not take his eyes from the patch of street in front of him but shook his head.
“No. You know these roads best and besides, we should not split the guard. If we are being followed and he slips past you, I do not like the odds of Miss Chase and I against this man and his friend.”
Graves hesitated. Miss Chase stepped up to them, put her free hand lightly on his arm.
“He is right, Graves. And let us go by the busier routes. This is too isolated a place.”
Her touch acted on Graves like a charm. He nodded. Clode lifted Jonathan into his arms again, and smiled at him.
; “You are our lookout, my boy. Keep your eyes open and sing out if you see anything more.”
The boy looked a little white, and tightened his grip, but nodded.
In the distance they heard one of the great bells beginning to peal the hour. Graves put his knife back into his waistcoat and turned toward Knight’s Bridge.
“One o’clock. Come then, and let us hurry.”
2
Harriet heard the clock in the hall mark out one with a brassy chime. It had been foolish to try and sleep; her mind had just chased itself in circles for an hour. She swung her legs to the floor and picked up her dressing gown with a sigh. Harriet had never known sleeplessness at sea. Whatever her worries or griefs, the motion of the ship had always let her rest. She would still wake now expecting to hear the speaking strain of the timbers around her, the movement of the air.
Crossing the room, she lit the candle on her dressing table and sat in front of the mirror as the wick caught and the flame steadied, and stared at herself a moment. She looked well in the candlelight. Her friends had told her that a life on the sea would age and blemish her skin, but she had, as yet, hardly any suggestion of lines about the eyes and mouth; she only began to look old when her sister sat by her. Rachel looked almost dewy with youth, as if she were still forming, budding.
Harriet turned the little key in the drawer below the mirror and pulled out the last of her husband’s letters. It had arrived almost two months ago, and she could not yet begin to expect another. She smoothed down the pages and smiled at his familiar writing. She let her fingertips rest on the paper, and it seemed to her it was almost like touching his hand. The letter began with frustrations and bargaining to reequip in Gibraltar, the problems that inevitably followed the victories there. He had found a man on his crew who, although a drinker and inclined to be a fighter too when drunk, had formed an alliance with the daughter of the quartermaster and proved a hard bargainer for the ship. Of the ship herself, the turn of speed the new copper sheathing gave her, he could not say enough. The last lines were a swift farewell. Some of his friends were heading back to the Channel Fleet while he left for the Leeward Isles, and the opportunity to send back mail was not to be missed.
Her husband had ended with words meant only for her, a simple enough declaration of his love, his trust and commands to kiss the children for him. He always lifted those last lines to his lips, he told her, when the ink was dry, and now she did the same; she could swear the paper smelled of salt and cold winds.
She set it down again with a smile, and looked past her reflection into the black countryside around her. Strange. He loved the sea like a mistress, but she knew his heart was here; that though he had spent only months here since Caveley was his, the place was his home, the core of him. It called to him across oceans. Of course, she was here, and his children, but it was more than that. The stones and soil had sung to him, for him, when they had driven up the carriageway in a borrowed chaise. She had not seen such joy in his face since the day she had agreed to become his wife. She loved her home too, of course, but the affection she felt for the place was only a weak reflection of the fierce love he held for it. He would be able to walk around the house and grounds in his mind with a more exact eye than she; when he slept his mind always took him here.
Her own heart was on the sea still, and she hungered for it. The horrors she had seen there could wake her in the night, but they only bound her more tightly to the ship and the crew. She knew she was still their figure-head, their presiding angel, however many years she was pulled away from them, but she longed to feel those smooth timbers under her hand, hear the whistles and shouts, see the dizzying openness of the water. She remembered the surge in her blood at battle, the politics of harbor and stores, the thick black coffee their steward served them when the bells called out for the day to begin.
An owl called out over the forest, and pictures in her mind of wind and water were swept away by the image of Brook as she had first seen him, the look of faint surprise and disapproval on his face, the obscenity of the wound in his neck. She imagined him alive, standing in the dark, the figure emerging behind him with Hugh’s knife in his hand. She played the scene through behind her eyes as she watched the darkness. Thought of Hugh’s scarred face emerging from the gloom, then Wicksteed’s. Did Wicksteed have the courage to kill a man? What could make him a murderer?
Huddled against the children in the darkness, Verity Chase heard the sound of a sob suppressed and looked down. Susan was crying. She knew the girl did not want it known; she was being as brave as she could for her guardians, for her little brother. Verity pulled her more tightly to her side, letting her fingers press into the girl’s shoulder. She hoped to give courage, resolve, but she was not sure she had any left herself to give. Her eyes stung with sleeplessness and fear in the gloom. Ashes from various fires had found their way past her hood to her pale skin and caught on her eyelashes. Her face seemed to have been crying gray, sooty tears. She looked up to where Clode was propped against the side wall of a shuttered coaching inn next to her. Jonathan lay curled on his cloak at the man’s feet. Daniel smiled at her-sad, serious. She found herself thinking that, shaved and cleaned, he probably still looked little more than a boy himself. At the moment he looked more like a woodcut of a highwayman. So much the better. There was a footstep and Graves approached.
“We are very close to Hunter’s now. It’s not ideal. I can see where the house is from the end of the road here-there are lights burning, it’s perhaps half a mile. But it’s open ground. If Jonathan is right and that man is still following, it is the perfect time for him to make his attack.”
Susan whimpered, and as quickly bit her lip. Graves dropped to his heels beside her.
“My love, I’m sorry to scare you. I’m an idiot.”
Susan shook her head quickly. “No. I’m sorry. I do not mean to be frightened.”
Miss Chase squeezed her shoulder again. “We are all frightened, Susan. That’s just good sense.” She looked between the two men. “What shall we do?”
Graves stood again. “We’ll have to make a run for it. Miss Chase, could you carry Jonathan that far?”
She nodded.
“Very well. As soon as we come into the open, head right. And run. If the gates are locked you will have to climb them. Whatever happens, do not wait in the road.”
“Of course.”
It was hard for Graves, searching out the edges of her face in the darkness, not to declare his love then and there. He swallowed. “Clode and I will follow and stop anyone passing us. Are we ready?”
Clode was placing Jonathan in Miss Chase’s arms. Susan had taken her bundle from her, and tied it around her waist. They nodded.
“Very well then. Let’s go.”
3
They reached the corner and without a word Miss Chase turned and plunged off into the darkness, one arm supporting Jonathan, her free hand in Susan’s. Clode and Graves began walking backward behind them. The little light of the new moon caught on the tips of the blades they carried. The footsteps began to fade behind them, for one joyful moment the night was suddenly still, and Daniel thought they might have been wrong-that the paranoia conjured by the riots and their own fear might have deluded them, and the boy-that all was well … then there was a shout and two dark shapes reared up along the track.
Clode sprang at the man nearest him. In that moment all his tiredness disappeared; he became something other than himself. He felt the man stumble under his weight, then the world spun as the man’s fist slammed into his jaw and his head snapped back. He had his hand on the man’s shirt, and while the night exploded with pain that seemed to shatter his bones, he would not let go. He struck back with his free hand, using the fist clasped around the handle of his knife to strike at the place in the darkness where he guessed the man’s face would be. He connected, and felt the crunch of bone. The man yelled and reared under him, striking him hard in the side. The blow loosened his grip and the knife skitter
ed on the roadside. The man swung Clode onto his back, and sat over his chest. Time began to slow. Clode saw the man reach into his pocket for his own knife. He was about to be killed by a shadow, his mind informed him gently. His blood beat through his hands, he scrabbled to gather the dirt of the road and threw it into the man’s face. The shadow winced and reared back slightly. It was enough for Clode to reach his right hand back, to where he felt rather than saw the pale glint of his own blade. He heard the roar of the giant on his belly, saw the man raise himself, the point of his blade held high and angled straight for Clode’s heart. His fingers brushed the wooden handle, he reached, every muscle and bone singing poison with the effort, then felt it, held it, and pulled it toward him. As the man fell on him, his eyes went dark for a second. Then he opened them again. His chest was warm, but he felt no pain there. He struggled out from under the man’s bulk and staggered to his feet, putting a hand to his chest. He could feel the blood on him, but knew it was not his own. He turned the body at his feet over with his boot. The bulk shifted and sprawled on its back. The eyes were open and empty. His knife was buried deep in the massive chest. He bent down and pulled it free. Then turned, looking for Graves.
Graves saw Clode pull the man to the ground on his left. He jumped right and managed to connect with the thin figure trying to dart past him, and pushed him off balance. The man fell on his knees, but before Graves could launch himself on top of him, he had scrambled to his feet again and turned to face him. The moon sighed enough light forward for him to see the yellow face under the peak of his hat.
“You again,” the man said.
Graves stood in front of him. “Indeed.”
The yellow face cracked with laughter. “If that’s how you want to play it, boy.”
He suddenly danced forward. Graves swiped at him with his right hand. The man giggled, and before Graves could even register his movement, he had closed with him, pinning his knife arm to his side and catching his left wrist with the same hand. The embrace of an impatient lover. Graves felt the bitter warmth of his breath on his face. He pulled, but the grip was vice-like. The man spoke, softly. Like a disappointed father to a child.
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