“What in heaven’s name do you find amusing?” I gasped. I was not out of breath because of carrying Clow—the dead plumber seemed to be hollow he was so light—but simply due to the walking.
“Us,” said Caroline. “Can you imagine how we appear—me all doubled over like a hunchback, you in your bright yellow apron, both of us turning our heads like mishandled marionettes.…”
“I fail to see the humour,” I said when we got Clow to his temporary destination and as I set his upper half down gently—far more gently than the circumstances warranted, I am sure—next to the pit.
“You will someday, Wilkie,” said Caroline, brushing her hands together when she had released her share of the burden. “You take care of everything here. I will go pack the picnic things.” Before walking back, she looked out towards the water and then back and up at the tower. “This actually could be a pleasant place to picnic. Oh—do not forget the bag in your portfolio and the rings, watch, coins, pistol.…”
Despite my greater experience at all this (or what felt like it), I would have forgotten—and tumbled Clow into the pit with rings, a gold necklace and locket I would soon find (with a woman’s picture in it, but not Caroline’s), as well as his watch and many coins, all of which would have been very difficult or impossible to find in the quick-lime in a week or two when I returned—had it not been for her reminder. As it was, the metal objects, including Hatchery’s now emptied and impotent pistol (for which I had no nostalgia whatsoever), were in the burlap bag in a minute and Clow was out of sight under the surface of the quick-lime two minutes after that.
I tossed the metal rod that I’d kept there in the weeds for so long into the marsh and walked back to the erstwhile picnic site. “What are you doing now?” I asked, my voice sounding odd. I could not catch my breath, as though we were climbing to some place high in the Alps rather than standing in a churchyard at sea level.
“Finding and fitting all the pieces of the plate he broke. That was a nice plate.”
“Oh, for God’s sa…” I stopped as I heard voices raised in the direction of the highway. It was an open carriage going by on the road. A man, a woman, and two children were laughing and pointing towards the pink clouds where the sun had set, in the opposite direction from the Cathedral and graveyard. Their heads and gazes did not turn back in our direction as I watched.
“You need to do something with this,” said Caroline and handed me the stained, blackened, and still internally smouldering pillow.
It was my turn to laugh then, but I resisted the impulse, since I was not sure that I could stop once begun.
“And for heaven’s sake, Wilkie,” she said, “take off that bright apron!”
I did so, carrying the pillow and my leather lawyer’s portmanteau holding the coins and other items back to the quick-lime pit. There was no sight of Clow in the pit itself. I had learned through my experiments with various dog carcasses that even with the bloating and putrefaction of decay adding to the dead body’s buoyancy, once pressed far enough beneath the surface, anything deep in the thick lime tended to stay beneath the surface until raked out.
But what to do with the pillow? The quick-lime presumably would eat it away in a day or two, just as it had the various items of clothing I had tested here—buttons and belts (minus their brass buckles) and braces and laces and boot soles were the stubbornest of objects—but would the pillow stay submerged? And I had already tossed away the iron rod and had little wish to wade into the muck and reeds to retrieve it.
In the end I threw the brown embroidered thing as far out towards the sea as I could fling it. Were this in one of my sensationalist novels—or in Dickens’s—I am sure that it would have been a major clue and the key to my (and Caroline’s) undoing. Some more-clever version of Inspector Bucket or Sergeant Cuff or even of Dick Datchery, Detective, would find us out, and during Caroline’s and my walk up the thirteen steps to the gallows, each of us would be thinking, That d— ned pillow! (Although I would never ascribe such language to a woman.)
But as it was, the miserable pillow—barely visible in the failing light, since the bright moon was yet to rise—merely arced far out over the reeds and cattails and then disappeared into the marsh and muck there.
Remembering who had given me the embroidered nightmare as a gift, I did finally smile as I thought, This may be Martha R—’s greatest contribution to my future happiness.
Caroline was ready, the shards of her broken plate all retrieved and packed away in her picnic hamper, and we left the graveyard together. We would catch the same 9.30 express to London but we would not sit together—or even in the same carriage. Not yet.
“Are all your things packed and shipped?” I asked softly as we walked through the narrow old streets of Rochester towards the lights of the station.
She nodded.
“No need to go back?”
“None.”
“Three weeks,” I said. “And I have Mrs G—’s address at the little hotel near Vauxhall Gardens where she will be staying.”
“But no contact until the three weeks are up,” whispered Caroline as we came out onto a busier street. “Do you really believe that I shall be able to move back in by the first of September?”
“I am absolutely certain of it, my dear,” I said. And I was.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Ashort while ago as I write this, Dear Reader, a little after sunrise, just after I switched off the light next to the easy chair in which I rest, I wrote the following note to Frank Beard—“I am dying—come if you can.”
I didn’t believe I was actually dying when I wrote that, but I do feel worse now and may well begin that final dying any minute, and a good writer plans ahead. I may not have the energy to write the note later, you see, so I shall keep it on hand. I have not sent it yet, but since Caroline is elsewhere today, I may ask Marian or Harriet soon to send it along to Frank, who is as ancient and weary and worn-out as I. But he does not have far to come. I can see his home through my bedroom window here.
At this point you may well be asking—When are you writing this?
For the first time in our long voyage together, Dear Reader, I shall answer that question.
I am finishing this long manuscript to you in the third week of September of the year 1889. I was very ill this past summer—but still working towards finishing these memoirs—and then, as autumn approached, I was feeling much better. I wrote this note to Frederick Lehmann on September 3—
I have fallen asleep and the doctor forbids the waking of me. Sleep is my cure, he says, and he is really hopeful of me. Don’t notice the blots, my dressing gown sleeve is too large, but my hand is still steady. Goodbye for the present, dear old friend; we may really hope for healthier days.
But the week after I wrote that, I came down with a respiratory infection on top of my other ailments and I can tell that dear old Frank Beard—although he has not said so to my face—has given up hope for me.
I trust you will notice but forgive the same blots in the last chapters of this manuscript I have set aside for you. My dressing gown sleeve truly is too large and, to be honest with you in a way I hesitate to be with Frederick or Frank or Caroline or Harriet or Marian or William Charles, my eyesight and coordination are not what they once were.