At the far end of the alley they were out in the sea-scented wind, viewing the broad face of the river from an elevation only a few feet above the water, and out on the rippled expanse white sails and black smokestacks contrasted with the gray sky. Crawford helped Christina over a low wooden fence, which McKee stepped over and Johanna vaulted, and then they followed a set of narrow-gauge coal-wagon tracks that paralleled the shore, toward the northernmost arch of Southwark Bridge twenty yards ahead.
A chorus of shouts broke out in the alley behind them, and Crawford wondered if a broken pulley had dropped a load.
He was about to glance back when, ahead of him, Johanna jumped and nearly pitched off the tracks into a rowboat below.
She caught her balance and threw him a scared look.
“One wasp doesn’t mean—” she began.
Two wasps buzzed between them, and Crawford heard McKee curse behind him.
He looked back at her. “You and Johanna run ahead to the boat,” he said.
More shouting from the alley behind them was audible now over the wind in his face.
As McKee and Johanna sprinted away toward the shadows under the bridge, Crawford held Christina’s elbow and tried to get her to move faster; finally he said, “Excuse me, it’s an emergency,” and picked her up in his arms and began striding between the coal-wagon tracks after his wife and daughter. He had to shake Christina’s lavender-scented black veil away from his hat brim twice before she noticed and tucked it behind her head.
“Wasps,” she said. “It’s my nightmare son, isn’t it?”
“So you said — last night,” agreed Crawford breathlessly. “Can you — look behind?”
She shifted in his arms. “I see men running out of that alley. Some of them are jumping into the river. No sign of … him, yet.”
Crawford’s throat ached with panting, and his knees and hip jabbed him at every jolting step; he hoped he would have enough warning before falling to set Christina down first.
“I miscarried,” she said. “To me he was born dead. But then his … soul? … his insistent soul went on to become the child of Gabriel and Lizzie.”
“He — seems to have been — born dead — there too.”
“That’s true, poor thing.”
The tracks curved sharply away inland to the left, and he stepped out from between them. He had reached the shadow of the bridge, and through stinging, watering eyes he saw Johanna and McKee on the deck of a low canal barge moored under the arching span.
“You — can walk, from here,” he gasped, lowering Christina to the stone pavement.
Together they hobbled to the wide plank that was laid from the embankment masonry to the boat’s gunwale, and McKee helped pull Christina across; when Crawford had limped across too, he lifted the plank and shoved it sideways so that it splashed into the river.
Trelawny’s head was visible in the low cabin hatch, and he clumped the rest of the way up onto the deck.
“What,” he said irritably, “something chasing you?” Then he squinted beyond them and swore. “Get below, quick,” he snapped.
Crawford stole a glance over his shoulder as he hurried Christina to the hatch.
For a moment he nearly jumped into the river along with the dockworkers. Bouncing down the coal-wagon tracks toward the bridge came rushing a figure that at first seemed to be just two very long cartwheeling gray arms, with rippling pennants of white cloth at the wrists; its black-clad torso bumped along behind, with one leg trailing and one twisted up around its neck, the toes of the bare foot holding a parasol over the rolling black head. It seemed to be singing as it flailed and bounced rapidly toward them.
“Get below!” roared Trelawny, and Crawford nodded and hustled Christina to the ladder. “Grab the swords! Do it!”
The cabin belowdecks was nearly as wide as the barge, lit by an open porthole in the starboard bulkhead. Slanted vents at the bow and stern ends of the ceiling were apparently to let fresh air in and stale air out. A stove against the port bulkhead was flanked fore and aft by rows of floor-to-ceiling bunks, and the bow end was blocked by a sleigh so big that Crawford thought two horses must once have been required to pull it.
And a short, stocky man with a drooping mustache stood halfway down the cluttered deck, staring at the newcomers in surprise.
“He’s still got the sleigh!” whispered Johanna. “I used to sleep in it.”
Christina was just blinking around in evident alarm.
The stocky man looked past them at Trelawny, who had pulled the hatch closed and was now scuffling down the ladder.
The man called, angrily, “One, you said! Not … four! Not women!”
Crawford noticed the hilts of two slim rapiers standing in an elephant-foot umbrella stand by the ladder, and he snatched one of them up and held the hilt of the other out toward McKee. She took it with a quick nod.
“Shut up, Abbas,” said Trelawny tightly, striking a match to a lantern bolted to the wall by the ladder. “I’ll — explain.”
Crawford reached up to take off his ludicrous beaver hat, but he saw Trelawny draw a pistol from under his coat — and he realized that this man Abbas was the person the old man intended to kill, to fulfill the conditions Maria’s ghost had described.
Thumping and sliding sounded from the deck overhead, and then someone was pounding at the hatch and a girl’s voice was screaming words Crawford couldn’t catch.
“That’s Rose!” whispered Johanna. “I know her voice!”
Trelawny took an uncertain step toward the ladder. “She follows that thing,” he said; then he shook his head and spat out an obscene monosyllable and turned toward the others, raising the pistol. “Abbas,” he said.
Crawford leaped at him, striking the pistol aside with his free left hand and aiming a punch at Trelawny’s chest with the sword’s basket hilt; but Trelawny tried to block the blow, and the hilt was deflected upward and rebounded at the old man’s face.
The flare and hard bang of the pistol shot flung Trelawny and Crawford apart; Crawford slammed against the port bulkhead, and Trelawny tumbled limp to the starboard-side deck.
Above and behind Crawford the hatch cracked and blew in splinters down the ladder, and a moment later a cloud of wasps swept buzzing and looping into the cabin, followed by two huge gray hands and a gleaming black head that bobbed in the air. One of the hands was missing a finger.
“Where where where?” sang the thing, twisting the eyeless face back and forth on its snakelike neck and sniffing loudly.
The bullet from Trelawny’s deflected gunshot had apparently still whistled very closely past Abbas’s head, and now the man had drawn a revolver of his own.
“Call me here to kill me?” he screamed, and, still screaming but without words now, he rushed forward and began firing indiscriminately as wasps fastened on his face and hands.
The noise of the shots was stunning in the close cabin, and Crawford’s eyes were dazzled by the fast muzzle flashes. But through the smoke and wasps he saw Johanna step into the man’s path, crouching, her knife held low for an upward thrust; Abbas saw her too, and he swung the barrel of his revolver toward her.
Crawford lunged forward, spun her aside with his left hand, and with his right he drove the rapier blade into the man’s belly.
He was face-to-face with Abbas now and their eyes met, both squinting with nearly impersonal exertion; Abbas tilted the gun barrel up, and Crawford caught the wrist with his left hand, then shuffled forward to drive the blade farther in. Liver, he thought crazily, peritoneum, superior mesenteric artery, spinal column.
The gun fired into the ceiling, and Abbas folded, his knees knocking on the deck.