Authors: Caro Peacock
I refuse even to remember the next half hour. It had nothing to do with my living father. He would have laughed at it. We had our five-pounds-sixteen-and-four-pence-worth of English funeral rites and that is all that can be said. Afterwards the four bearers and two men in gardener’s clothes whom I took to be gravediggers, stood around fidgeting. It seemed that I was required to
tip them. As I handed over some coins, and Reverend Bateman studiously looked the other way, I realised that the thinnest of the bearers was the man from the mortuary. I’d been trying to work up the resolution to go back there with some of the questions I’d been too shocked to ask on the first visit. At least this spared me the journey.
‘Were you there when my father’s body was brought in?’
He gave a reluctant nod.
‘I was as well,’ said one of the others, a fat man in a black tricorne hat with a nose like a fistful of crushed mulberries.
‘Who brought him in?’
They looked at each other.
‘Friends,’ said the thin one.
‘Did they leave their names?’
A double headshake.
‘How many?’
‘Two,’ said the fat one.
‘Or three,’ said the thin one.
‘What did they look like?’
An exchange of glances over my head.
‘English gentlemen,’ said the fat one.
‘Young, old, fair, dark?’
‘Not so very young,’ said the fat one.
‘Not old,’ said the thin one. ‘Not particularly dark or fair that we noticed.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘They said they’d be back soon to make the funeral arrangements.’
‘And did they come back?’
Another double headshake.
‘What day was it that they brought him in?’
‘Three days ago. Saturday,’ the fat one said.
‘Saturday, early in the morning,’ the thin one confirmed.
Behind them, the gravediggers were shovelling the earth over my father’s coffin. It was sandy and slid off their spades with a hissing sound. Reverend Bateman was looking at his watch, annoyed that I should be talking to the men, all the more so because he clearly didn’t understand more than a word or two of French.
‘I have an appointment back in town. I don’t wish to hurry you, but we should be going.’
He clearly expected to escort me back. It was a courtesy of a kind, I suppose, but an unwanted one.
‘Thank you, but I shall stay here for a while. I am grateful to you.’
I offered him my hand. He shook it coldly and walked off. The four bearers nodded to me and followed him. The raw-boned unicorns lumbered their box-like carriage away. Reverend Bateman assumed, of course, that I wanted to be alone at my father’s grave, but I was discovering that grief does not necessarily show itself in the way people expect. I did indeed want to be on my own, but that was because I needed to think about what the bearers had said. Most of it supported the black lie. Two
or three nameless gentlemen arriving with a shot corpse – that might be how things were done after a duel. Either it had happened that way, or the two of them had been well paid to say it did. But wasn’t it odd – even by the standards of duellists – that the supposed friends who brought his body to the morgue didn’t return as promised to make his funeral arrangements?
I began walking to the graveyard gates as I thought about it. I suppose I had my eyes on the ground because when I looked up the figure was quite close, walking towards me. At first I took him for one of the bearers, because he was dressed entirely in black. But no, this man was elderly and a gentleman, although not a wealthy one. His jacket was frayed at the cuffs, his stock clean and neatly folded but of old and threadbare cotton, not stiff linen, and his tall black hat was in need of brushing. A mourner, I thought; probably come to visit his wife’s grave. Indeed, his thin and clean-shaven face was severe, his complexion greyish and ill looking. He might have been sixty or more, but it was hard to tell because grief and illness age people. When he saw me looking at him he hesitated, then raised his hat.
‘Bonjour, madam.’
The accent was so obviously English that I answered, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
He blinked, came forward a few steps and glanced towards the gravediggers.
‘Do you happen to know whom they are burying over there?’ he said.
It was not a bad voice in itself, low and educated. But there was something about the way he said it that made me sure I’d seen him before, and I went cold.
‘Thomas Jacques Lane.’ I tried to say it calmly, just as a piece of information, but saw a change in his eyes. So I added, ‘My father.’
‘Do I then have the honour of addressing Miss Liberty Lane?’
‘You were watching me,’ I said. ‘This morning on the sands, it was you watching me.’
He didn’t deny it, just asked another question.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘As you see, arranging my father’s burial.’
He said nothing. I sensed I’d caught him off balance, and he wasn’t accustomed to that.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘It was you who sent me that note.’
I’d guessed right about his watching me, so this was only a step further.
‘What note?’
He sounded genuinely puzzled.
‘That lying note, telling me he’d been killed in a duel, ordering me to wait at Dover.’
‘I sent you no such note. But if you were at Dover, you should never have left there. Go back. I tell you that as your father’s friend.’
All my misery and shock centred on this black stick of a man.
‘There was only one person in the world who had
the right to give orders to me, and he’s lying over there. And you, sir, are lying too – only far less honourably.’
I was glad to see a twitch of the tight skin over his cheekbones that might have been anger, but he mastered it.
‘How have I lied to you?’
‘Did you not write me that note? My father would never in his life have fought a duel, and anybody who knew him must know that.’
He looked at me, frowning as if I were some problem in arithmetic proving more difficult than expected.
‘There has clearly been some misunderstanding. I wrote you no note.’
‘Who are you? What do you know about my father’s death?’
He stared at me, still frowning. I was aware of somebody shouting a little way off, but did not give it much attention.
‘I think it would be best,’ he said at last, ‘if you permitted me to escort you back to Dover. You surely have relatives who –’
‘Why don’t you answer my questions?’
‘They will be answered. Only for the while I must appeal to you to have patience. In times of danger, patience and steadfastness are the best counsel.’
‘How dare you sermonise me. I have a right to know –’
Two men were coming towards us along the path
from the cemetery gates. A four-horse coach was waiting there, but it didn’t look like a funeral coach and neither of them had the air of mourners. One was dressed in what looked like a military uniform – buff breeches and highly polished boots, jacket in royal blue, frogged with gold braid – although it was no uniform I recognised. The other appeared to be a coachman and had brought his driving whip with him. The man in black seemed too absorbed in the problem I presented to hear their heavy footsteps on the gravel path.
‘Is this man bothering you, missy?’
The hail from the man in the blue jacket was loud and cheerful, with tones of hunting fields in the shires. I thought he was probably some English traveller who had happened to be driving past. His hearty chivalry was an annoying interruption and I was preparing, as politely as could be managed, to tell him not to interfere, but there was no time. The man in black spun round.
‘You!’
‘Introduce me to the lady.’
‘I’ll see you in hell first.’
Both the words and the cold fury were so unexpected from the man in black that I just stood there, blinking and staring. Unfortunately, that gave the hearty man his chance.
‘Such language before a lady. Don’t worry, missy, you come with us and we’ll see you safe.’
He stepped forward and actually put a hand on my sleeve.
‘On no account go with him,’ the man in black shouted.
I shook off the hand. It came back instantly, more heavily.
‘Oh, but we really must insist.’
Laughter as well as hunting-field heartiness in the voice. I tried to grab my arm back, but the fingers tightened painfully.
‘Let her go at once,’ said the man in black.
He advanced towards us, apparently intent on attacking the hearty man, who must have been around thirty years younger and three or four stone heavier. It would be an unequal contest, but at least it should give me a chance to pull away and run. But the hearty man didn’t slacken his hold on my arm. He jerked his chin towards the coachman, who immediately grabbed the man in black, left arm round his windpipe like a fairground wrestler, and lifted his feet off the ground. The man fought back more effectively than I’d expected, driving the heel of his shoe hard into the coachman’s knee. The coachman howled and dropped him and the whip. The man in black got up and took a step towards us, seemingly still intent on tearing me free from the hearty man. But the coachman didn’t give him a second chance. He grabbed the man by his jacket and twirled him round. As he spun, the coachman landed a punch like a kick from a carthorse on the side of his bony
temple. The man in black fell straight as a plank. He must have been unconscious before he hit the gravel path because he just lay there, eyes closed, face several shades more grey.
‘I hope you haven’t gone and killed him,’ the hearty man said to the coachman, still keeping a tight hold on my arm.
‘Let me go at once,’ I said.
I’m sure there were many more appropriate emotions I should have been feeling, but the main one was annoyance that my man should have been silenced before I extracted any answers from him. At this point, I still regarded the hearty man as a rough but well-intentioned meddler and simply wanted him to go away.
‘Oh, we can’t leave a young English lady at the mercy of ruffians in a foreign country. We’ll see you safely back to your friends.’
He assumed, I supposed, that I had a party waiting for me back in town. More to make him release his grip on my arm than anything, I accepted.
‘Well, you may take me back to the centre of town if you insist. My friends are at Quillac’s.’
I named the first hotel that came into my head.
‘Are they now? Well, let’s escort you back to them.’
He let go of my arm and bowed politely for me to go first. The coachman picked up his whip.
‘What about him?’ I said, looking down at the man in black. His eyes were still closed but the white shirt over his narrow chest was stirred by shallow breaths.
‘He’ll live. Or if he doesn’t, at least he’s in the right place.’
We walked along the path to the carriage at the gates, the hearty man almost treading on my heels, the coachman’s heavy steps close behind him. It was an expensive travelling carriage, newly lacquered, the kind of thing that a gentleman might order for a long journey on the Continent. Perhaps they’d left in a hurry because there was an oval frame with gold leaves round it painted on the door, ready for a coat of arms to go inside, but it had been left blank. The team were four powerful dark bays, finely matched. There was a boy standing at the horses’ heads dressed in gaiters and corduroy jacket, not livery. The coachman climbed up on the box at the front and the boy pulled down the steps to let us in. The hearty man gave an over-elaborate bow, suggesting I should go first.
‘You might at least introduce yourself,’ I said. In truth, I was still reluctant and wanted to gain time.
‘I apologise. Harry Trumper, at your service.’
I didn’t quite believe him. It was said like a man in a play.
‘My name is Liberty Lane.’
‘We knew that, didn’t we?’
He was talking to somebody inside the coach.
‘How?’
‘We knew your father.’
It seemed unlikely that my clever, unconventional
father would have wasted time with this young squire. As for the man inside, I could only make him out in profile. It was curiosity that took me up the three steps to the inside of the coach. The man who called himself Harry Trumper followed. The boy folded up the steps, closed the door and – judging by the jolt – took up his place outside on the back. The harness clinked, the coachman said ‘hoy hoy’ to the horses, and we were away.
There was a smell about the man inside the carriage. An elderly smell of stale port wine, snuff and candlewax. My nose took exception to it even as my eyes were still trying to adapt themselves to the half-darkness. The man who called himself Harry Trumper had arranged things so that he and I were sitting side by side with our backs to the horses, the other man facing us with a whole seat to himself. As my sight cleared, I could see that he needed it. It was not so much that he was corpulent – though indeed he was that – more that his unwieldy body spread out like a great toad’s, with not enough in the way of bone or sinew to control its bulk. His face was like a suet pudding, pale and shiny, with two mean raisins for eyes, topped with a knitted grey travelling cap. The eyes were staring at me over a tight little mouth. He seemed not to like what he saw.
‘Miss Lane, may I introduce …’
Before Trumper could finish, the fat man held up a hand to stop him. The hand bulged in its white silk glove like a small pudding in a cloth.
‘Were you not told to stay at Dover?’
He rumbled the words at me as if they’d been hauled from the depths of his stomach.
‘The note,’ I said. ‘Did you write it, then?’
‘I wrote you no note.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
By my side, Trumper burbled something about not accusing a gentleman of lying. I turned on him.
‘You said you knew my father. What happened to him?’
‘He took something that didn’t belong to him,’ Trumper said.
I think I’d have hit him, only another rumble from the fat man distracted me.
‘I said I wrote you no note. That is true, but if it matters to you, the note was written on my instructions. As soon as I knew of your father’s misfortune, I sent a man back to England with the sole purpose of finding you and saving you unnecessary distress.’
But there was no concern for anybody’s distress in the eyes that watched my face unblinkingly.
‘He hated duels,’ I said. ‘He’d never in his life have fought a duel.’
‘Sometimes a man has no choice,’ Trumper said.
The fat man paid no attention to him, his eyes still on me.
‘That is beside the point. Tell me, did your father communicate with you at all when he was in Paris or Dover?’
Why I answered his question instead of asking my own, I don’t know, unless those eyes and that voice had a kind of mesmeric force.
‘He wrote me a letter from Paris to say he was coming home.’
There was no reason not to tell him. Even talking about my father seemed a way of fighting them. Trumper sat up, feet to the floor, face turned greedily to mine. The fat man leaned forward.
‘What did your father say in this letter?’
I was more cautious now.
‘He said he’d enjoyed meeting some friends in Paris, but was looking forward to being back in England.’
‘Gentlemen friends or women friends?’ said Trumper, eager as a terrier at a rat hole.
The fat man looked at him with some contempt, but let him take over the questioning.
‘Gentlemen friends,’ I said.
‘Did he mention any women?’
The eagerness of Trumper’s question, practically panting with his tongue hanging out, made me feel that my father’s memory was being dirtied. In defence of him, I told the truth.
‘He mentioned that he’d met an unfortunate woman who needed his charity.’
And realised, from the look on Trumper’s face and a
shifting in the fat man’s weight that made the carriage tilt sidewards, that I’d made a mistake.
‘Did he mention a name?’ Trumper said.
‘No.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Or any more about her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did he propose to do about her?’
His letter had implied quite clearly that he was bringing her back to London with him.
‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was only a casual mention of her.’
‘She’s lying.’ The fat man growled it without particular enmity, as if he expected people to lie. ‘He was bringing her back to England with him, wasn’t he, miss?’
‘It seems you know more than I do, so why do you ask me?’
‘He abducted her from Paris. We know that, so you need not trouble yourself to lie about it.’
‘My father would not take away any woman against her will.’
‘Did he write to you from Calais?’
‘No. That letter from Paris was his last.’
‘Are you carrying it with you?’
‘No!’
From the fat man’s stare, I expected him to order Trumper to search me there and then, and shrank back in the corner of the seat.
‘Did he tell you to meet the woman at Dover?’
‘No, of course not. I was waiting to meet him, only he didn’t even know it.’
‘Do you know where he lodged in Calais?’
It heartened me that their inquiries round Calais must have been as fruitless as mine.
‘No. Not at any of the big hotels, I know that much.’
‘So do we,’ Trumper said, rather wearily.
The horses were moving at a fast trot now, the well-sprung carriage almost floating along. There was something I hadn’t noticed until then, with the shock and the questioning.
‘This isn’t the way back to Calais.’
‘It’s a better road,’ Trumper said.
I didn’t know enough about the area to contradict him, but I edged forward in my seat, trying to see out of the window. We were stirring up such clouds of dust that I couldn’t make out much more than the outlines of bushes. A look passed between the two men. Trumper pulled down the window and shouted something to the coachman that I couldn’t hear above the sound of wheels and hooves. The whip cracked and the rhythm of our journey changed as four powerful horses stretched out in a canter. I’d never travelled so fast before. Trumper hastily shut the window as a cloud of white dust blew up round us. I reached for the door handle. I don’t know whether I’d have been capable of flinging myself out at such a speed, but there was no chance to tell, because Trumper’s heavy hand clamped mine and forced it down on my lap.
‘Sit still. We’re not doing you any harm.’
‘Please take me back to Calais at once.’
‘You must understand …’ Trumper said. He had both of my hands now and was trying so hard to keep them held down that he was pressing them between my thighs. When I struggled it made things worse. The sweat was running down his forehead. He kept glancing over at the fat man, as if for approval, but the suety face watched impassively.
‘We are only trying to protect you,’ Trumper pleaded. ‘You saw what happened back in the graveyard. You wouldn’t stay in Dover as you were told, so all we intend is to take you somewhere safe until the trouble your father’s stirred up settles down again.’
‘Take me where?’
‘There’s a nice little house by a lake, very friendly and ladylike, good healthy air. It will set you up nicely.’
He sounded like some wheedling hotelier. I laughed at him.
‘The truth is, you’re kidnapping me.’
‘No. Concern for your safety, that’s all. I’m sure your father would have wanted it.’
‘My family will miss me. My brother will come after you.’
‘Your brother’s in India. You have no close family.’
This growl from the fat man froze me, both from the bleak truth of it and the fact that this creature knew so much about me. For a while I could do nothing but try to keep back the tears. I suppose Trumper must have
felt me relax because he let go of my hands and sat back, though keeping so close to me that I was practically wedged in the corner of the carriage. The horses flew on, sixteen hooves thudding like war drums on the dry road, harness chains jingling crazed carillons. Several times the whip cracked and the coachman shouted, I supposed to warn slower conveyances out of our way. Dust stung my eyes, at least giving me an excuse for tears. Trumper started coughing but the other man seemed unaffected. Then –
‘What the hell …?’
We’d stopped so abruptly that Trumper and I were propelled off our seats and on to the fat man. It was like being flung into a loathsome bolster. Above the unclean smell of it, and Trumper’s curses from floor level, I was aware of things going on outside – loud whinnying, whip cracks and the coachman’s voice, high with alarm, yelling at the horses. The carriage started bouncing and jerked forward several times. Trumper had been trying to claw his way up by hanging on to my skirt. This sent him back to the floor again, but since he still had a handful of skirt, it dragged me down with him. My face was level with the fat man’s belly, a vast bulge of pale breeches, like a sail with the wind behind it.
There are better uses for your head than employing
it as a bludgeon
.
My father’s voice from fifteen years back, on the occasion of a schoolroom quarrel when I’d butted my brother
and caused his nose to bleed. I thought, Well, I’m sorry, Father, but even you are not always right, closed my eyes, drew my head back, and used all my strength to propel it like a cannonball towards the bulging belly.
There is no arrangement of letters that will reproduce the sound that resulted, as if an elephant had trodden on a gargantuan and ill-tuned set of bagpipes. The smell of foul air expelled was worse. The combination must have disconcerted Trumper because he made no attempt to stop me as I stood up and grasped the door handle. From the squawk he made, I may have trampled his hand in the process. As the door began to open I let my weight fall on it and tumbled out into the road. A pain in my elbow, dust in clouds round me, then the front wheel of the carriage travelling backwards, so close that it almost ran over my hand. I rolled sideways. Something in the dust cloud. Legs. A whole mobile grove of short pink legs. Much shouting all round me and other sounds, grunting sounds. A questing pink snout touched my cheek, quite gently, and a familiar farmyard smell filled the air, pleasanter than the one inside the coach. A herd of pigs. By some dispensation of Providence, the flying carriage had met with the one obstacle that couldn’t be whipped or bullied aside. Many horses fear pigs and, judging by the way the lead horse was rearing and whinnying, he was of that persuasion.
I pushed the snout aside and stood up. The coachman was standing on the ground, trying to pull the horse
down with one hand, threshing the butt of his whip at a milling mass of pigs and French peasantry, shouting obscenities. I took one look, turned and ran into the bushes beside the road. More shouting behind me, Trumper’s voice from the direction of the coach, yelling to me to come back. I ran, following animal tracks through the bushes, with no sense of direction except getting as far away as I could. After some time I stopped, heart beating, expecting to hear the bushes rustling behind me and Trumper bursting through.
‘Miss Lane. Come back, Miss Lane.’
His voice, but sounding breathless and mercifully coming from a long way off. I judged he must still be on the road, so I struck off as far as the tracks would let me at right angles to it. It was hard going in my heeled shoes so I took them off and went stocking-footed. After a while I came on to a wider track, probably one used by farm carts, with a ditch and bank on either side. I scrambled up the bank and saw, not far away, the sun glinting on blue sea. From there, it was a matter of two or three miles to the shore, with Calais a little way in the distance.
I thought a lot as I walked along the shore towards the town, none of it much to the purpose, and chiefly about how strange it was when pieces of time refused to join together any more to make a past or future. I realise that is not expressed with philosophic elegance, in the way of my father’s friends, but then I’m no philosopher.
A few days ago I had a future which might have been vague in some of its details but flowed in quite an orderly way from my life up to then. I also possessed twenty-two years of a past which – although not entirely orderly – accounted for how I had come to be at a particular place and time. But since that message had arrived at the inn at Dover, I’d been as far removed from my past as if it existed in a half-forgotten dream. As for my future, I simply did not possess one. Futures are made up of small expectations – tonight I shall sleep in my own bed, tomorrow we shall have cold beef for supper and I’ll sew new ribbons on my bonnet, on Friday the cat will probably have her kittens. I had no expectations, not the smallest. I didn’t know where or when I would sleep or eat or what I would do, not then or for the rest of my life.
I walked along, noticing how large the feet of gulls look when they wheel overhead, how far the fishermen have to walk over the sand to dig for worms when the tide goes out, how the white bladder campion flowers earlier on the French side of the Channel than on the cliffs back home. It was only when I came to the first of the houses that I remembered I was supposed to be a rational being and that, if a future was necessary, I had better set about stringing one together. Small things first. I sat down on the grass at the edge of the shingle and examined the state of my feet. Stocking soles were worn away, several toes sticking through. I put my shoes back on, twisting what was left of the stocking feet
round so that the holes were more or less hidden. The bottom of my skirt was draggled with bits of straw and dried seaweed, but a good brushing with my hand dealt with that. My hair, from the feel of it, had reverted to its primitive state of tangled curls, but since there was no remedy for that until I regained comb and mirror, all I could do was push as much of it as possible under my bonnet.
All the time I was tidying myself up, my mind was running over the events in the carriage and coming back to one question. Who was this woman they wanted so much? In my father’s letter, she’d been not much more than a passing reference, an object of charity. If she was so important, or so beautiful, that she could be the cause of all this, why hadn’t he given me some notion of it? But I had to tear my mind away from her and decide what I was going to do with myself. I reasoned it out this way. My father, without meaning to, had bequeathed me two sets of enemies, one represented by the thin man in black, the other by so-called Trumper and the fat man. The second set hated the first set so much that they were prepared to commit murder – since for all I knew the man in black might have died from the blow to his head. Both sides had wanted me to stay at Dover. Now the man in black wanted me to go back there, while Trumper and the fat man were planning to carry me off to some unknown destination by a lake. Geneva? Como? Or perhaps they had in mind the mythical waters of Acheron, from which travellers do not return. Stay
in France or return to England? I feared the fat man and Trumper more than the man in black, though I hated all of them equally. If I stayed in France, they might capture me again. Quite probably they were looking for me already. So Dover seemed the safer option, and as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.