The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  Margot had already rounded the first pillar, testing windows as she went and finding them all locked. Coman followed, chest pressed to the wall, hands sliding out either side of him like a clinging spider, cheek flat to stone, nodding and smiling encouragement at his child as if this was just the normal way of things. I mimicked his gait, fingers digging into grit, trying to slow my breathing as behind me the door gave another resounding crack and foot followed fist through the bending, breaking panels. The rain glued my hair to my face, pricked the tops of my eyes, but the idea of moving my hands from their insect scramble against the stone was absurd. Ahead I heard a sudden crack of glass as Margot, giving up on an open window, smashed the next one she found, sweeping broken shards with the rim of her bag in a crystal snowfall, and ducking in through the remains head-first, falling into a tangle of curtain, coffee table and potpourri. Vhairi, smaller, lighter, crawled in easily, caught by her mother’s hands, then Coman, and by the time I tumbled like a clown through the shattered remains of glass and torn velvet, Margot was fumbling her way across the darkened room for the door.

  We had come into another bedroom, less magnificently appointed than Margot’s own, the smell of dry flowers just about overwhelming the stench of damp. I felt glass tear at my hands and trousers as I crawled upright, staggered after Margot and Coman as, carefully, she unlocked the bedroom door and eased it open a crack. The muggy yellow light of the corridor slithered through the gap, illuminating the thinnest line of her face, and for a moment she was a woman growing old; paler, more bones and less delight than I remembered, and none of us were as young as we had been. Her child stared at me in confusion, not understanding whether I was friend or foe, what she was meant to think.

  Then, with a deep breath, Margot opened the door all the way, pulled herself straight as an umbrella and, with all the dignity of a busy woman not about to be disturbed, stepped out into the corridor, daughter in hand, marching for the stairs without a care in the world.

  Not thirty feet away, our pursuers were barrelling through the broken remains of the grand suite’s front door, and for a moment, as Coman and I stepped out after her, I thought we might almost get away with it. Then a man turned, saw the four of us and called out, “Hey!” not having the initiative to think of anything more exacting to say.

  Margot burst into a run, and we followed, as the same men who’d climbed on to the hotel lintel to follow us turned round and now charged down the corridor in our wake. I didn’t see if they had weapons. I just knew there were more of them than there were of us, and that they had orders, and intentions, and even if they carried nothing more dangerous than a fountain pen, they could hurt me a damn sight more than I could probably hurt them, so I ran.

  The stairs down were hard, singing stone, grudgingly installed in the event that guests were too frightened of an elevator to dare catch a ride. A maid carrying a tray for delivery squeaked as we swept by, pressing herself flat into the wall; then screamed and cursed and dropped the tray spectacularly as our pursuers tumbled past her, swinging themselves round every curve with all the gusto gravity allowed. For a moment it was a question of sheer speed, of who was willing to hurl themselves more recklessly into the chase, or whose concentration broke first, causing them to trip over their own feet, miss their grip on the banister as they bent into a curve. Then Margot was at the bottom, Vhairi nearly falling over with the speed of her mother’s run and chain-like grip, and as she yanked open the brass-padded door, a man came up before her, and she barely even broke momentum as she smacked her handbag up and into the soft plateau beneath his chin, staggering him backwards and squeezing past and into the warmer light of the lobby. Coman, moving like a cat, slammed both palms into the man’s chest, knocking him against the wall. His head cracked, his eyes bulged, he slipped down as Coman danced by, and for a moment I was a doctor again and felt the instinct to stop, to check his skull, but Margot was halfway across the lobby, revelling now in her speed, people scattering, indignant and amazed, from her path, and at my back were men with some very specific instructions that beat through the rushing of my blood and into my brain, so I ignored the fallen man and kept on running. Margot’s bodyguard, absurd in yellow and blue, leapt to his feet as we passed, and was the first man to die, tumbling without thought into our pursuers, buying us a few seconds of giddy, confident time, before a knife came down between his shoulder blades and he expired on the hotel floor, having never really given much thought to what he’d do if he actually had to do anything in this job of his.

  Running into the street, into the pouring rain, slipping between carriages and the occasional creaking, popping, belching car with lanterns turned low to a glistening cobbled floor; running through the place where I was out of air and into a different body, where suddenly it seemed I had enough breath almost to laugh, and was flying. Ahead, Margot was sprinting, Vhairi at her side, skirts flapping wildly, laces loose and hair spun free of every pin and ladylike accoutrement; for a moment she was a girl again running along the cliffs, before her daughter’s ghost followed her, before she had to run for ever.

  Then a carriage swerved out into the street ahead of us, a long, low thing from which six men tumbled out, late to the business of the evening, determined to make their mark. With men in front and men behind, Margot turned without a thought for the other side of the street, looking for an alley; couldn’t find one, stopped for a moment, panting for breath, still smiling a strange, delighted smile, then made a choice and stepped out in front of a cart that sometimes carried tallow and is now returning from a delivery, the wood slick and slippery with congealed white animal fat turned to black slime by years of neglect, the whole thing glistening like hot ice. The driver pulled his plodding horse to a halt with a cry and a curse, and Margot had the gun out of her bag, and was still smiling, still bursting with the sheer exhilaration of being alive, until she felt her daughter’s horror at her back, the dismay and terror of her child at the sight of her mother ready to kill a man, and hesitated. Coman did not, scrambled up into the driver’s seat as the man hurled himself into the road, and then Margot was swinging Vhairi between them and clambering up behind to form a wall around their child. “Get in!” she hollered, as Coman snapped the reins and the cart begins to trot towards the bundle of men scrambling after us from the hotel door. I jogged along beside and managed to flop chest-down onto the back of the cart, slipping and sliding in grease, legs kicking out wildly behind me as I wriggled along like a worm, and then Coman slapped the reins again and the horse very reluctantly, whinnying and whimpering at the indignity of it, broke into the nearest thing it could muster to a gallop.

  It was not much of a gallop. The horse was too old and too tired, too used to city traffic to muster any speed. But it was heavy, scared, and by the time it hit the first of our pursuers, a man too slow or too dumb to get out of its way, it had a great mass of momentum and the man went down beneath it with a crack of bones that doesn’t even make the beast pause.

  The others hurled themselves to the sides. One man, running full tilt, managed to grab my ankle, and I kicked out with my other foot, smacking him in the hand once, twice, before giving up on that idea and smacking him in the face. He let go, his weight half dragging me out as he fell, sliding on grease. Another man managed to get one foot up on the driver’s side of the cart, only to receive the full force of Margot’s handbag, delivered in a great swooping circle to the side of his face. His grip weakened, and she hit him again, and as he fell, she pulled her bag close to her chest and brandished the revolver, this time holding it high and firing a shot into the sky as her daughter screamed at the retort. Coman snarled at the horse, whipped it into a spit-flecked spin at the corner of the street, swung it round into the wider avenue, and nearly fell off his perch as he hauled back to prevent us tunnelling straight into the back of a mule-dragged scrap wagon.

  The stop was hard enough to send me spinning sideways into the low walls of the cart, groggy and confused, filthy and bleeding from a do
zen tiny glass cuts across my arms and shins. Peeking up from my falling place, I saw the New York traffic, a locked-up mass of cargo, carriages, omnibuses and pedestrians, cursing and grumbling at each other as the rain washed away the piles of animal shit and the last vestiges of human civility. There was no pushing through it, and now our pursuers were on top of us again, hopping over their fallen comrades.

  Hands grabbed at my ankles, dragging me towards the pavement. I caught a finger’s grip around a handle at the back of the pallet and for a moment was suspended, legs one way, arms another, pulled like a tightrope between my pursuers and escape. Then my fingers gave way and I flopped, belly-first, onto the cobbles, breath smacked out, head ringing, hands a scraped and bloody mess as my pursuers continued to drag me backwards. Someone had caught Coman round the waist and was trying to lift him from his seat, throw him like a sack of flour to the earth. He punched at one man’s head, wriggled and kicked like a suffocating squid as they clawed at him, and then a gunshot.

  Margot, of course. I didn’t feel the thoughts of the man she killed. He hadn’t realised it would happen. In all the confusion, he had somehow not quite associated the woman with the gun, nor ever imagined that a lady could pull the trigger. He did not see his death, and thus he did not fear it, and thus his heart was of little notice to me. But Vhairi’s was. The child’s heart shattered with the man’s skull as her mother shot him point-blank in the face. She had never seen death, never thought of it as a concept, could not understand, but still faintly knew that only villains killed, and that her mother could not be a villain.

  Margot must have felt it too. She loved her child; she saw her child’s world break apart. She would defend Vhairi above all else, and so, tears pricking her eyes, she rose and turned, putting another bullet in the arm of a man grappling with Coman, who for an instant didn’t realise what had happened until he suddenly couldn’t hold on any more, at which point awareness came with waves of agony so potent they turned his stomach through his throat.

  I have never been in a fight that wasn’t defined by chaos. Smooth coordination is born of relentless drilling, and even then I have listened to the hearts of men who broke from the line when they thought they would be brave; who played dead in the grasslands of the veld, or turned their coat and begged to be fed by their enemies. I have met the proudest warriors of the Zulu bull who trained their whole lives with the stabbing spear, the cowhide shield and the Martini–Henry rifle and who, at the moment of truth, realised that they didn’t want to die the slow death of their bleeding kin. I have met proud soldiers of the Mahdi, fallen samurai and warrior monks from the cloud-lost mountains, and in my experience, nothing prepares you for an unexpected fight quite as much as experience of wildfire and a stiff shot of brandy.

  Like the running beast, this final gunshot at last sent the street into panic. Bewildered passers-by, drivers, herders, amblers and fine folks out for the night who had watched our little brawl now scattered in every direction, their sudden terror sweeping over me hard enough to knock out the breath that I had barely begun to regain. Cabbies hurled themselves from their seats; horses bucked and pushed and staggered against each other, trying to break free; a dog barked and heaved at its leash, a man fell to the ground dead, another screamed in agony as Coman kicked him in his wounded arm and leapt free, and all things broke apart.

  For my part, fallen to the floor, groggy and bewildered, I was suddenly of far less note to my would-be assailants, who variously ducked for cover behind car and carriage, pressed their backs into doorways and red-brick walls. Margot leapt down from her perch, fired another shot into the air, entirely oblivious to the corpse cooling by her ankles, hollered, “Vhairi!” and gestured towards the rapidly emptying street ahead. Coman nodded, scooping his child round the waist and carrying her like a rolled-up canvas; broke into a run, sprinting for the throng of scattering people and braying animals, the criss-cross pattern of turned-again vehicles wedged tight together. Margot saw me as I crawled to my feet, snapped, “Run!” and without waiting to see if I obeyed her command, hitched her skirts in one hand and set off.

  I followed, every second expecting someone to grab me from behind. No one did. Leaping over the crawling shape of a passing gentleman who’d been too befuddled by the noise and confusion to work out which way was safety and which was danger, I swung round the side of a stalled brewer’s cart, ducked past a screaming, kicking horse the bucking, twisting mess of stalled vehicles that lined the street. Margot was ahead, gun glinting in one hand; Coman close behind. I skidded in a splatter of filthy puddle past an elderly woman in a fox hat, who screamed and beat at me with her umbrella as I passed; then turned sharply as Margot did, heading now up a sideways street lined with drugstore, grocery, milliner, barber and purveyor of suspicious bloody meats, heading west. In a moment I realised her destination, saw the flash of sparks from beneath the high tracks of the elevated train, heard metal on metal, and a second later, heard the gunshot.

  It didn’t come from Margot; that was the surprising thing.

  It took me a moment to process this fact, but having understood it, the conclusion seemed fairly banal and inevitable.

  Another shot, and this time the lamp post to my left rang like a cathedral bell as the bullet slammed into metal, a fresh crater in the black iron. I kept running, then slithered to the ground in a sheet of rainwater as Margot turned and shot back, firing quickly, twice, three times from her little revolver, blindly towards our pursuers.

  On the third shot, the gun clicked, and with a curse and a snarl she dropped it into her handbag and now, bent double, charged like a bull down the middle of the street, swerving between the confused, rattling traffic, heading for the train. I scampered after, flinched as another bullet smacked into the wooden side of a cab at my right, nearly fell as a second shot bounced in a busy wave just behind my feet. I could hear the jingle-jingle-jingle of the police bell in the distance, saw faces peering out of windows, felt the momentary panic of a father cradling his son in the shadow of a doorway, heard the scream of a woman ahead as she realised what was coming straight for her, saw her freeze like a startled owl as we passed, too locked in her own dread to think, to move, to get to shelter.

  Another shot, and I thought perhaps a splinter of something had caught me in the waist, because an angry bee stung me. I kept running. Four steps, five steps, and perhaps I realised I had been hit with something more than a splinter, because the pain was a sudden tearing up into the hollows of my ears and down to the soft skin between my toes. Six steps, seven steps, and I became aware of the heat of the blood running out of my side, the soft warmth of it soothing through the cold of the rain and the sticky panting of exertion.

  On the eighth step I fell, and that was confusing, because I hadn’t planned on falling and couldn’t see the reason for it.

  I tried to stand, and my legs kicked loosely, and wanted to obey, and didn’t, and seemed as confused by this as I was.

  I heard Margot calling my name, but from the wet ground all I could see were feet moving between wheels and stamping horses’ hooves. I think Coman caught her by the arm and pulled her away. I think she was still calling my name as he did, but it was unclear. Langa was coming, he was coming, but still too far away that I couldn’t be sure if she loved me, or if she cared that I was down. There was too much noise to get a clear sense of it, though I stretched out a hand towards her and willed her to hear my love more clearly than I could sniff out hers.

  Maybe she heard it. Maybe not. I can’t imagine the ghost of her dead daughter was any nearer than the boy I had let burn.

  Only one truth mattered, and I couldn’t really resent it, even then. Margot loved her daughter far more than she loved me, and that was entirely fair, all things considered.

  Then another shot rang, and she staggered. She didn’t fall, Coman caught her before she could, but her face was grey and her daughter screamed. She hadn’t screamed all this time, a good girl, a quiet child. Margot hobbled a pace, and
her left leg buckled, then she hobbled a step more, and Coman held her round the waist and slung her over his shoulder like an old carpet, and took his daughter by the hand, and they ran.

  They ran into the rain, still pursued by men firing, clattering through water and stone, and I couldn’t see if they got away. Couldn’t taste the truth of it. I lay on my back and looked into the gently growing dawn sky, a wet slosh of yellows and greys pushing back against the purple of the night, and heard footsteps moving around me, and couldn’t judge whether they were close or far, and didn’t really care.

  It occurred to me that dying would be convenient, at this juncture. As long as the bullet had missed my stomach and hit something usefully rich with blood, such as liver or spleen, I could bleed out in a matter of minutes. I wouldn’t be able to betray anyone more than I already had, and need not suffer a slow, lingering demise. The thought was almost comforting, and I was briefly astonished at how quickly my priorities had shifted from the desire to live to the urge to die hastily. Perhaps Ritte had been right all along: at the end, we barter with what little we have to give.

  Then a man was standing above me, and tutting, and he said, “Someone get the doctor,” and for a laughable moment I tried to explain that I was a doctor, and really all this wasn’t necessary at all, before the blood loss hit me and the darkness took my sight.