Afterwards the three of us lingered in the sunlit yard.
‘Why should someone strangle him?’ Wintour said with a touch of petulance as if he took the action as a personal affront.
‘I agree – it makes no sense.’ I turned slightly, to include Grantford in the conversation. ‘Soldiers would attack us or call on us to surrender. So would militia. But this?’
‘Skinners, sir?’ Grantford said.
It was possible. The stealth and brutality of the attack certainly suited those predatory irregulars who infested the Debatable Ground on behalf of Congress.
‘Unlikely,’ Wintour said. ‘It’s not as if he can have surprised them. The killer took him unawares.’
‘True. It’s almost as if he wanted to kill Abraham and he seized the chance when it was offered. It’s as if—’
I broke off. But in my mind I followed the thought to its conclusion: it was as if the strangler desired to kill us all for some unknown reason, and was content to pick us off one by one as the opportunity arose. So now all three of us who remained had another reason to be afraid.
‘We must leave,’ I said to Wintour. ‘I insist, Jack. Now.’
‘I need more time.’
‘Safer by night, your honours,’ Grantford said.
‘Exactly!’ Wintour turned towards him, delighted to have an ally of sorts. ‘The corporal’s in the right of it. We shall—’
Three things happened at once.
Grantford grunted and flung himself on the caked earth of the farmyard.
Wintour swore.
The sound of a shot bounced to and fro among the farm buildings.
And I did nothing.
Wintour shouted: ‘Take his other arm.’
His words broke into my stillness. We seized Grantford and dragged him towards the doorway of the patroon’s house. He left behind a trail of blood pooling and puddling in the ruts.
We gained the shelter of the house and laid the corporal on the flagstone floor. His face was the colour of old wax. I knew by the amount of blood he had already lost that the bullet had probably hit an artery. He tried to speak but no words came out, only a spray of blood shot through with bubbles.
The wound was in the neck. I tore off my neckcloth and tried to stop the bleeding. It was fruitless even to try. I pressed his hand and told him he had been a good and faithful friend. I don’t know whether he heard me.
It took him a minute or two to die, though it felt like as many centuries. After his soul had left his body, I stood up slowly, feeling like an old man.
Wintour had positioned himself so he could not be seen from the doorway or the windows. He was laying out his weapons. ‘Is he dead?’ he said without looking at me.
‘Yes.’
‘The bullet was meant for me. If I hadn’t moved—’
‘They mean to kill us all, I think.’
We were both whispering as if our enemies were among us, invisible sprites bent on our destruction. I stared at Grantford’s face, already skull-like and strangely fragile. This was my fault, I thought, I brought the man to his death.
I said, ‘Remember Abraham. There was no need to kill him unless they wanted to. Which suggests they mean to kill us all.’
‘But why?’
I ignored the question. ‘We must get to the horses. It’s our only chance.’
He let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘We need to divert their attention, then.’ He glanced at the stairs. ‘Go up and fire a shot or two from an upper window. That’ll make them keep their heads down. I’ll fetch the horses.’
‘What if I throw something, rather than fire a shot, to see if it flushes them out? It might fool them into thinking there are others of us concealed about the yard. Then we can fire if they show themselves.’
Wintour nodded. I cast around for a moment and gathered a hatful of small pieces of rubble and metal scraps from the wreckage of Froude’s laboratory. I carried my missiles and my pistols up the stairs. The treads groaned under my weight and one gave way altogether. I contrived to save myself only by throwing myself forward. The hat tipped, and at least half the missiles fell to the floor below.
When I reached the upper storey, I crossed to the window embrasure on the front, walking gingerly on the joists. The opening had once been glazed but the glass was gone. Nothing was moving in the farmyard below. I had a view of the range of outbuildings facing me, and also of the dovecote and part of the scullery. But I could not see the enclosure where we had left the horses, nor the gateway that led out of the yard.
I looked down between the joists. Wintour’s face was below, turned up towards me. I raised a piece of rubble to show I was ready. He nodded and lifted a pistol in a sort of salute.
Drawing a deep breath, I lobbed my missile towards the roof of an open shelter directly opposite. It smacked against the shingles near the ridge and clattered down the sloping roof. I heard it land on the caked mud of the yard.
Nothing happened. Wintour was waiting just inside the doorway. I picked up a second missile, this one a delicate tangle of brass clockwork twisted out of shape.
Before I could throw it, there was another shot and a loud hallooing, followed by the sound of hooves. I watched in horror as all four of our horses passed in a panic-stricken canter below me and disappeared in the direction of the parkland beyond the house.
The sound of hooves diminished and died away. I listened to the silence. Beneath me I heard Wintour swearing monotonously as he sifted the debris on the floor. While the horses were fleeing, he had contrived to manoeuvre the old door in front of the doorway. Now he was assembling a miniature arsenal of missiles and other makeshift weapons.
I clambered across the remains of the floor to the head of the narrow stairs. There I stopped abruptly. For the first time, as I faced down the stairs, I saw past the tapering column of the chimneystack to the attic space over the former parlour. Beyond it was the gable wall of the old farmhouse. Piercing it, directly opposite where I stood, was a window.
As I have said, the door and window openings facing the mansion had been blocked up, and by a bricklayer who knew what he was about. But this window in the gable had been left as it was; even its glass was intact.
I walked down to it and rubbed at the dusty pane of the single casement. The window looked over the roof of a former milking parlour that abutted on the parlour end of the house. It did not have a view of the mansion or indeed of anything very much except the blank wall of the byre beyond the milking parlour, which was presumably the reason that nobody had bothered to block it.
The window was large enough to permit an agile man to climb through it. The roof was little more than a yard below the level of the sill. It sloped down towards the overgrown paddock that lay between the farmyard and the kitchen wing of the house.
I scrambled back to the stairs and descended. Wintour had stopped assembling ammunition. He was standing in a brown study near the old fireplace, staring down at an object in his hand.
‘Jack,’ I whispered. ‘Quickly – I believe there is another way to escape.’
He looked up. ‘Eh? What?’
I crossed the floor, took him by the arm and pushed him back so the chimney breast afforded us some cover.
‘There’s an unblocked window upstairs. We can get through it and out of this house on the side away from the yard. Towards the mansion.’
He blinked. ‘Oh – yes.’
His eyes dropped back to the object in his hand. It was a piece of rubble the size of an apple. It was irregularly shaped and brownish in colour.
‘What is it?’ I said.
He put it in my hand. My first impression was that it was surprisingly heavy. I thought it was probably a piece of bog iron or something of that nature.
‘Turn it over,’ he said. ‘Look at it.’
‘We have no time for—’
‘Do it, Edward.’
I obeyed him. The object looked much the same on the other side, apart from a small, freshly goug
ed scratch. I wondered whether it had been one of the missiles I had dropped from my hat when I stumbled on the stairs. Beneath the patina of grime was a faint metallic sheen. I turned it in my hand to allow the light to play upon it.
‘Well?’ I said.
He smiled at me and for an instant the years dropped away from his face and he looked as young and as carefree as the boy in the double portrait of himself and his slave.
‘It’s gold,’ he said.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Fortune smiled on us, though not for long enough.
I had achieved more than I had known with my desperate rummaging. While I was filling my hat with impromptu missiles, I had been close to a sort of alcove beyond the kitchen fireplace. This was where the iron stove had stood with its flue pipe running into the main chimney. The stove was still there, as I have said, but lying askew and on its side. In its fall, it had crushed a small wooden chest made of mahogany reinforced with brass. The wreckage had been either beneath the stove or concealed between it and the wall behind.
There was no time for questions or explanations. Wintour desired me to help him prise the stove away from what was left of the chest. With two of us and the assistance of a broken rafter as a lever, it was the work of a moment. That done, I kept watch while he picked through the remains. The chest had contained a number of drawers, some of which were lined with velvet, which he examined with particular attention.
All this time, I waited for our enemies to attack. But nothing happened. I knew they must be readying their forces. My senses were so overwrought that I fancied I heard sounds when perhaps there were none. While I listened and watched I tried to assemble a few items that might be useful to us in our flight, though I was too distracted to achieve as much as I should have done.
In another part of my mind, which the stress of the moment had goaded to a furious activity, a thought formed: So that’s Jack’s box of curiosities. A jumble of broken wood, metal and stone. Was that all? Was it for this that Abraham and Grantford had lost their lives?
At last he was done. We climbed the stairs, our eyes constantly on the doorway to the yard, and made our way down the length of the attic to the window in the gable wall. Wintour had a foolish great grin on his face. He carried a leather satchel on a strap over his shoulder.
He kept a pistol trained on the barricaded doorway below while I tried to open the window. The wood had warped and at first the casement was immovable. But it yielded to gentle pressure and opened with a screech that set my nerves fluttering like a nervous girl’s.
We scrambled through it and on to the sloping roof below. From our new vantage point, we saw the blackened ruins of the mansion less than a hundred yards distant. As we moved down the roof, a lizard slid away from us with incredible speed and slipped into a crack under a shingle.
Neither of us spoke. Near the end of the roof slope, Wintour turned on his belly, wriggled over the edge and dropped feet first to the ground beneath. I imitated him but landed clumsily: off-balance, I sprawled on the ground. He pulled me to my feet. In a moment we were running across the paddock, forcing our way through the waist-high tangle of weeds and long grass.
We reached the ruins. From here we had a view across the shallow valley to the woods on the further slope. I gripped Wintour’s arm and pointed. To the left – at the opposite end of the valley from the lake – a party of horsemen moved steadily towards the house. There were at least a dozen of them but they were too far away for us to see them clearly. I guessed that they were following the line of the carriage drive to the mansion. The wind was behind us so we could not hear the sound of their hooves.
‘Reinforcements,’ I said. ‘Militia?’
‘Or even regulars. If only we had a glass. Quick – over here.’
We took temporary cover in a building beyond the servants’ privies and the laundry. It faced away from the house and into a small yard of its own, which opened on to an overgrown vegetable patch. The fire had done little damage here, though the roof was tarred clapperboard and the walls no more than roughly trimmed logs with the chinks between them plugged with mud. Wintour wrinkled his nose as we went in, a tiny, unthinking expression of distaste.
It was the first time I had been inside the quarters set aside for slaves. We lingered only long enough to catch our breath and decide on our next step. It was fortunate that Wintour knew the ground so well. He took me through a back door and led me by a path that zigzagged up the slope behind the ruins. Trees and overgrown hedgerows gave us a modicum of cover. The slope grew steadily steeper and became almost a cliff. The pasture gave way to a hanger of trees and bushes just beneath the ridge of the valley.
This was a tract of virgin forest. The path petered out entirely. The trees grew closely together, many of them to a great height, their branches and roots entwining. A variety of stones, coated with lichens and mosses, were dotted among them.
Even for men on foot, the going was difficult. It would have been impossible with a horse for the woods were so cramped and crowded, and the gradient so steep. It was very quiet and gloomy. The dense green canopy of branches dropped over us like a cloak.
A terrible weariness came over me. For days on end, my faculties had been strung up to an unnatural pitch. Now, though our peril was as great as ever, they were in desperate need of rest.
‘Should we not hide and wait for nightfall?’ I asked.
Wintour looked back at me. ‘We cannot stop for a moment,’ he said.
‘But surely, under cover of darkness—?’
‘No. Soon they will have the dogs out.’
We struggled on. Still in the wood, we passed over the ridge and followed the course of a stream to the bed of another valley. We crossed and recrossed the stream to confuse the scent; sometimes we waded through the water for a hundred yards or more. As we travelled up the valley, the forest gradually diminished. Our route now took us across rough pastureland studded with bushes and stunted trees.
We were walking towards the east. I felt the sun on my back and saw our long black shadows gliding ahead of us.
As time went on, my weariness changed its form and became a dull ache. I followed where Jack Wintour led; it was as though an invisible thread attached me to him and drew me along in his wake. I moved as if in a dream, planting one foot in front of the other while my mind floated free, as powerless to control its destiny as a clump of thistledown in a breeze.
We saw no one. When at last Wintour called a halt, we quenched our thirst in a pool at the foot of rocky outcrop. I had thrown into my bag several of the peaches that poor Grantford had picked in the orchard where Froude and his grandchild lay. We shared them one by one as the shadows of evening were falling. We had no other food.
‘We shall reach the road soon,’ Wintour said.
‘Which road?’
‘The one we crossed this morning. Then we shall come to another stream and then to the wasteland.’
‘You think we should return by the way we came?’ I asked.
‘For some of the way at least.’
‘Do you trust the Tippets?’
He stared blankly at me. ‘Of course. They’re our people.’
‘We need food, Jack. And intelligence – they may know something of the enemy’s movements.’
He drew himself up, very much the high-and-mighty gentleman, and stared down his long nose at me. ‘We cannot put their lives at risk.’
I burst out laughing, which was ill-mannered of me. But he looked so ridiculous, a veritable Don Quixote. His clothes were filthy and disreputable; he had not been shaved for over a week. We were a pair of vagabonds, he and I, and he was talking to me as if he were a peer of the realm with a rent roll of six thousand a year.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘I’m so weary that I scarcely know what I’m doing or saying.’
His face remained stern. ‘I accept your apology, Edward.’
I forced back another laugh. ‘Thank you. But my point remains: we must approac
h the Tippets.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now, especially – the whole country is roused up against us.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Chapter Fifty-Five
It was the last day of July so the evenings were still long and light. It hardly seemed possible that it had been only that morning when our party had left the abandoned cabin where we had spent the night. So much had happened. And two of us were now dead.
When we reached the Tippets’ hut there was a wavering tendril of smoke rising from their cooking fire. We took our time and lay at a distance in the shelter of some bushes, watching and waiting. Occasionally we saw the woman or the child moving between the doorway of the hut and the fire, which was at the side of the cabin under a lean-to roof. We saw no one else.
They appeared to be quite unaware that they were being watched. We were too far away to make out their faces. But it seemed to me that their weariness was obvious in every movement they made.
After about half an hour, Wintour whispered that he would make a slow circuit of the hut and, if there were no sign of danger, approach the Tippets. I was to remain where I was and be ready to intervene in case of trouble.
Before he left, he unslung the leather satchel he carried over his shoulder. ‘Keep this safe for me, will you?’ he said with an air of indifference that would not have deceived a child.
I waited as the light slowly faded. Hunger gnawed at my belly. My body ached with weariness. The satchel was heavy and, by the feel of it, I guessed it contained several pieces of ore. I had no temptation to open it, not then: our present danger smothered my curiosity.
Sometimes I fancied I saw Wintour or traces of his movements but I was rarely sure. He once told me that he had spent much of his youth stalking game of one sort or another; and, now that he had become the quarry, the same skills served him well.
At last I saw him plainly, walking quickly across the open ground towards the Tippets’ hut. He reached it, glanced over his shoulder and slipped through the doorway into the darkness within.
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