The Complete Bostock and Harris

by Leon Garfield

  “But what else could I do?” gasped Mr. Brett. “What else could I do?”

  Tizzy only shook her head and, when she was able to speak, all she could say was, “Do you think they’re still there?” and then she was off again.

  At a quarter to ten o’clock, Major Alexander and his son, Adam, cold, wet and ankles awash—for the tide was coming in—retreated from the seashore. “As I suspected,” said the Major with grim satisfaction. “The fellow’s a coward and won’t face me!”

  High on the Downs, near where Adelaide had been found, Ralph Bunnion and his party waited perhaps five minutes longer on account of not wanting to disappoint Sir Walter and to outface a small number of spectators who were beginning to jeer.

  “I knew the swine was craven when I first clapped eyes on him,” grunted the baronet. “All those damned military fellows are the same. Shoot your eyes out with a cannon, but not with a pistol. You have to get too close for that!”

  Then they too left the dueling ground, with Frederick half glad his pistols had not been put to the test.

  “And what the devil happened to that fellow Brett?” said Sir Walter as they walked along.

  “And where was Mr. Brett?” said Adam Alexander to his father as they neared the school.

  But it was not until the thwarted duelists met that they discovered Mr. Brett’s duplicity.

  “I told him that it was to be on the beach by the Old Ship,” said Major Alexander furiously.

  “He told me it was to be on the Downs,” said Ralph Bunnion, equally annoyed.

  “The man’s a damned scoundrel!” said Major Alexander. “He has insulted an affair of honor!”

  Mr. Brett had taken the only advantage possible in being second to both parties. He had arranged for them to meet some three miles apart.

  “I warned you!” snarled the Major, glaring at Dr. Bunnion’s knees. “I told you the man was furtive, underhand and sly!” Then he went off with Ralph and Sir Walter to Ralph’s room where, heedless of gathering parents, the three men of blood and honor drowned their furious disappointment and humiliation in bottomless tankards of claret as red as their unshed blood.

  Mrs. Alexander shrugged her ample shoulders and muttered something in her native tongue. Then her eye fell upon her firebrand son, Adam. She smiled sadly at him, and he, touched, laid his arm around her shoulders. Who knows, she wondered to herself in German, perhaps, in time, I might make something of him?

  Mrs. Bunnion alone still had a good word to say for Mr. Brett; and whenever her husband recalled his treachery, she always defended him warmly and declared she couldn’t believe it of him. Then Dr. Bunnion would smile and say, “What a heart you have, my love. Generous to a fault.”

  As for the headmaster himself, now that all his fears had proved groundless and nothing disagreeable had happened, he was more convinced than ever that nothing was to be gained by facing an unpleasantness but a nasty shock.

  Mr. Raven did not have lunch with the Harrises on that memorable Saturday, even though they pressed him to stay. He had sworn that he’d not break bread with them even if they begged him on bended knees. He did not want their lunch and he scorned their hospitality. He suspected he’d have been asked to eat in the kitchen. Besides, his work there was done. The return of Adelaide he took as a matter of course; he was pleased but not surprised. According to his plan, it had been bound to happen—and happen it had. The greater triumph was what had not happened. There had been no murder. This was indeed a feather in his cap; but alas, not the one he really wanted. Brett had escaped him. At the last minute he must have decided that the inquiry agent had come too close. So Mr. Raven was on his way to Southampton to track his adversary down. He and his boot would be the eternal pursuers, and Mr. Brett and his paramour would be the eternal pursued. To the ends of the earth he’d follow them, with his terrible tap-thump . . . tap-thump . . .

  Had Tizzy and James been aware of this, they might indeed have been chilled; but the ship that took them to the crisp New World was too full of dreaming to let so lame a nightmare in; and the raven had no wings.

  But back to that tremendous Saturday once more. One small mishap marred the general rejoicing in the homes of the Bostocks and the Harrises. Mrs. Bostock, returning unexpectedly from the Harrises, came upon her son attempting to dry out her quilt that had vanished mysteriously on the previous day and now appeared even more mysteriously. Despite Bostock’s protests, she snatched it from him, and then she recoiled. It stank of fish, gin, babies and a very powerful odor that seemed to be compounded of brandy and burned cake. And so, Mrs. Bostock remembered, did the infant Adelaide.

  She communicated this interesting fact to her husband who at once passed it on to Dr. Harris. The two fathers stared at each other. They grew very pale. Then, basely acting on suspicion alone, Captain Bostock thrashed Bostock with an old belaying pin he kept as a souvenir; but Dr. Harris, who was a more cultured man altogether, smote Harris with a volume of Harvey’s Circulation of the Blood.

  “Violence,” said Harris the younger bitterly. “Personal violence. And only on suspicion, too.”

  “My pa said it was natural justice,” mumbled Bostock, whose thicker feelings had not been so outraged.

  “Justice? What’s that? There ain’t no such thing as justice, Bosty. It—it’s just the calling card of brute force. Mark my words, Bosty; beware of the man who says he’s just. He’s the one who’s out to get you if he can!”

  Deeply impressed, Bostock nodded, and the two friends thereupon made a solemn pact to steer clear of justice in all its forms.

  At the school Adam Alexander filled the vacancy created by the elopement of Mr. Brett, so Major Alexander’s schemes at last bore a somewhat mottled fruit. Whether there was any justice in this or not is neither here nor there. It happened in accordance with the way of the world which is chiefly concerned with convenience.

  The Night of the Comet

  Chapter One

  LOVE TURNS men into angels and women into devils. Take Cassidy, of Cassidy & O’Rourke, Slaters, Thatchers, General Roofers and Sundries. He was a liar, a rogue, and so light-fingered it was a wonder that, while he slept, his hands didn’t rise to the ceiling of their own accord. Whenever there was a night without a moon, suspicion naturally fell on Cassidy.

  Yet there he sat, in the back of the cart, as good as gold and singing of Molly Malone and her wheelbarrow, and cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o! While O’Rourke did all the work.

  It was early on the Wednesday after Easter and four days before the comet. The sun was as bright as knives.

  “There’s somethin’ in the air, O’Rourke!” said Cassidy suddenly, with a sniff like a gale going backwards.

  “Fish,” said O’Rourke. “Stinking fish.”

  Cassidy shook his head. He sniffed again and went as pale as it was possible for one of his complexion, which had something of brick, something of slate, and a good deal of the weather about it.

  “ ’Tis the place!” he whispered. “I feel it in me bones, O’Rourke. What’s the name on the signpost? For pity’s sake, tell me, O’Rourke!”

  It wasn’t that Cassidy was hard of seeing. Far from it. In the old days he could have picked out a silver sixpence in a farmer’s fist fifty yards off. It was just that he traveled propped among bundles and sacks with his face pointing backwards, so it would have been a great effort for him to sit up and turn around.

  “Brighton,” read out O’Rourke, a long, bony, melancholy man, with hands and feet the size of spades.

  “Brighton!” repeated Cassidy with a sigh, as if that one word encompassed all the hopes of journey’s end.

  A year and a day they’d been going, in their old green cart with a pony that looked as if it had come through a storm of dapples and never been wiped down.

  They’d jerked and jingled down every street of every town and village from Liverpool all the way around to here and now. They’d stared up into every window and knocked on every door, looking and looking f
or a girl by the name of Mary Flatley, who’d made an honest man of Cassidy by the contrary means of stealing away with his heart.

  She’d gone from Dublin one fine day (that was the blackest in Cassidy’s life), with bag and baggage and left not a word behind, except, “Tell that smarmy villain Cassidy I’m gone to England to make me fortune and get a husband who’ll not gawp and drool at everythin’ in skirts! Tell him I’m done with him—the dirty philanderin’ rogue!”

  She must have loved him dearly to have had such a devil of a temper where he was concerned.

  “In Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty,” sang Cassidy, regardless of the fact that such a state of affairs had been his downfall.

  “I first set me eyes on sweet Molly Malone!”

  While O’Rourke, who was strong on Sundries, boomed, “Tiles and slates! Chairs to mend! Pots, kettles, and pans!”

  The cart turned down a little street of flint-cobbled houses that sparkled like trinket boxes in the sun. Cassidy gazed up at the windows, but O’Rourke stared down at the ground.

  Such was his nature. He was a gloomy man, whose very name sounded like a raven’s croak: O’Rourke! O’Rourke!

  Every night, while Cassidy slept, he went around the graveyards with a lantern, reading the tombstones in the hope of not finding Mary Flatley under one of them.

  Many was the sexton and late-night walker who’d seen the bony figure glimmering among the inscriptions and mournfully shaking his head.

  “Are you looking for somebody in particular?”

  “That I am. And may the flowers I’ll lay on her grave not show their ugly faces above the ground till after me dying day!”

  It would have killed Cassidy if he’d known what O’Rourke was up to, but somebody had to do it. For how could Mary Flatley turn out to be alive if nobody had made sure she wasn’t dead?

  They stopped at the first house. Cassidy smartened himself up and went around to the side, while the two brass buttons on the back of his old green coat kept a sharp watch on O’Rourke in case he decamped.

  Not that O’Rourke would really have left him, even though he’d sworn that, one of these fine days, Cassidy would come back and there in the street waiting for him would be no cart and no O’Rourke.

  Cassidy knocked, and a maid, armed with a coal shovel, opened the door.

  “No hawkers!” said she, pointing to a notice Cassidy might have seen for himself if he’d had eyes in his head.

  “And quite right, too! But on me honor, I’ve never dealt in hawks in me life, the terrible, sharp-eyed things! Have ye a hole in yer roof or a chair that needs mendin’, me darlin’ with the cherry lips and blackberry eyes?”

  Cassidy had kissed the Blarney stone, all right, but by the squashed-in look of his nose, it must have been more of a collision than a kiss. There was none of your cheap good looks about Cassidy.

  “Be off with you, you no-good Irish loafer!” said the maid, brandishing the coal shovel and preparing to shut the door, preferably with some portion of Cassidy in it. How was she to know that Cassidy was an angel now?

  “Are ye acquainted,” asked Cassidy hopefully, “with a lass by the name o’ Mary Flatley? She’s black hair and green eyes and a look on her that would bring Dublin Castle tumblin’ down. Mary Flatley—though she might be wed to another, and I pray to God that she ain’t, for she’s been gone a year and a day, so she’ll be just after eighteen!”

  But the door had slammed long before he’d finished, so it was to the hardhearted wood he called out, “If ye should happen to see her, just say that Cassidy’s come!”

  He went back to the cart, and O’Rourke, who undertook all expressions of a gloomy nature, sighed. Nobody could have expected Cassidy to have done it for himself.

  They applied at the next house, but with no more success, and so on all the way down the street. At last they came to a well-appointed residence with a pair of anchors propped up on either side of the front door, which seemed to declare that the owner would go no more a-sailing and had dropped those articles for good and all in a neat green harbor with a gravel path leading up to the front door.

  Cassidy cleaned his nails on his teeth and went around to the side. He knocked, and a female, all sails set, came to the door on a gust of freshly ironed linen. Cassidy took a step back. He felt she could have blown him clean out of the water.

  “D’ye need yer roof mendin’, ma’am?”

  “I’ll ask the master.”

  She shut the door and went away. Cassidy tried the door, but it was only from force of habit. The female came back.

  “The master says there’s two tiles off at the back. He’ll give you five shillings to make it all shipshape and Bristol-fashion. But no thieving, mind! The master’s a magistrate, so watch out!”

  “Me thieve from you, ma’am?” said Cassidy, who could no more keep from courtesy than a cat from cream. “Why, ’tis me own heart ye’ll be thievin’ from me! But tell me, are ye acquainted with—”

  The door was shut before he could so much as say “Mary.”

  He went back to the cart and told O’Rourke.

  “A magistrate’s house? No good will come of it, Cassidy.”

  “But it’s the one, Mr. O’Rourke! It’s the house!”

  “How d’ye know that?”

  “I feel it in me bones!”

  “I’m warnin’ ye, Cassidy.”

  “And I’m tellin’ ye, O’Rourke. She’s here!”

  They took a pair of ladders off the cart and carried them around to the back, where a moldy old ginger cat fled at their approach and took refuge in an apple tree.

  O’Rourke lashed the ladders together, and, when raised, they reached about two feet below the eaves. Cassidy began to mount. O’Rourke had no head for heights and consequently was always full of admiration for Cassidy’s daring.

  At every window Cassidy paused for a glimpse of the girl who’d have brought Dublin Castle tumbling down, while, below, O’Rourke prayed she’d not turn out to be high up, as the sudden sight of her would surely have done the same for Cassidy.

  As Cassidy climbed, he leaned from side to side to take in a window almost out of reach. Sometimes he clung to the ladder with only one hand, so that, in his long green coat, he looked like a tottery caterpillar waving at the edge of a leaf.

  From time to time he’d nod and raise a courteous finger to his head in recognition of having been caught looking in by somebody looking out.

  In a lower parlor he saw the master of the house, a fine-looking old gentleman with seafaring eyes. Himself was sitting in a high-backed chair, and his poor gouty foot, all in a winding-sheet of bandaging and looking like the Raising of Lazarus, was sitting in another.

  Cassidy saluted him, and the old gentleman scowled and made several upward jerking movements with his stick. Cassidy continued and at intervals saw and was seen by the tremendous female who’d answered the door and who seemed to be floating upward inside the house, like a wandering balloon.

  He saw the lady of the house, a fine figure of a woman, who came to her window and asked him what the devil he was doing. Cassidy said he’d been on his way to mend the roof when suddenly he thought he’d gone too high and seen an angel, which was her ladyship’s self.

  The last window under the roof was all over stars, not on account of its altitude but because there was hardly an inch of it that wasn’t cracked.

  Cassidy looked in. He saw, seated at a table, not so much a broth of a boy but more of a stew, as he was on the thick and lumpish side. He was deeply engaged in trying to insert a small ship into a large bottle.

  There was a card lying on the table, and Cassidy, by twisting his head almost off at the neck, was able to read it. Covered all over with hearts and arrows, it said: “FOR MARY.”

  Cassidy nearly fell with the shock of it. He recovered himself and tapped on the window, and a piece of glass fell out.

  The boy looked up and, in his sudden fright, thrust the ship against the neck of the bot
tle with such force that the ship was instantly destroyed.

  Cassidy said through the narrow triangle of air, “If that’s for Mary Flatley, I’ll trouble ye not to lay eyes on her again and tell her that Cassidy’s come!”

  The boy stared at the star-crossed face at the window and then at the shipwreck in his hands.

  “It was for Mary Harris. And you’ve broke my window and I’ll get the blame.”

  “So it’s another Mary altogether!” cried Cassidy, unable to believe that there were two of them. “Heaven be praised, as we’ve both had a near escape!”

  They stared at each other: the one mournful, though his Mary lived but two streets away, and the other beaming all over his face, though his Mary might have been anywhere from Brighton all the way around to Newcastle. Thus the two lovers met in midair.

  “And is her hair as black as a raven’s wing?” inquired Cassidy professionally, resting his elbow on the sill and cupping his chin in his palm, so that O’Rourke, down below, felt like shaking him off the ladder to remind him that he ought to be going up it.

  “It’s a sort of brown,” said the boy. “I think.”

  “And are her eyes full of a green fire so bright that all the world goes dark when she sinks her lashes and puts it out?”

  “No,” said the boy. “They’re a sort of brown, too. With speckles.”

  “That’s a shame!” cried Cassidy. “But maybe she’ll be able to see well enough without ’em one day!”

  “Speckles,” said the boy defensively. “Not spectacles.”

  A ship’s bell clanged somewhere in the house. Four times.