I heard him before I saw him. More precisely, I heard a gunshot when he put down the injured horse. His first attempt didn’t do the job, so I heard the loud crack of it, and then the animal’s muted whimpering turned into a terrified, high-pitched scream, which it sustained for the entirety of the two minutes it took Angus to reload. I remember thinking it was strange that a brute animal’s howl of pain and terror could sound so familiar and so human, and I thought of poor Violet and her children, who never got a chance to scream. The noise ceased only when the constable shot the horse a second time.
Then, Angus’s flinty black eyes and round red nose appeared in the splintered doorframe of the stagecoach. He looked ashen and somewhat discombobulated, but he gurgled with relief when he saw I was alive. “You seem to have encountered a nasty bit of business, Lord Byron,” he said.
“I hope it is evident to you that I did not kill Dingle,” I said, jangling my shackles and showing him that I was still bound to the bench. “I have been indisposed since I last saw you in Cambridge, and have, since, endured some injury. What are you doing here?”
“I patrol the highways most nights,” Angus said. “Someone has to keep the lookout for road agents and bandits.” He proudly brandished the musket he’d used to kill the horse, and I wondered if he could have used that to shoot Dingle off the side of the carriage. He’d have needed preternatural luck to make a shot like that; and even the luckiest man alive couldn’t have done it twice. But somebody had shot both Dingle and the driver, a feat of marksmanship that seemed beyond the capacity of any human skill.
A musket’s barrel is quite a bit wider than its bullet, a necessity for fast reloading through the muzzle. As a result, the ball has a tendency to bounce around in the tube on the way out, which makes it impossible to control the direction of the shot with any degree of finesse. Muskets are effective when a lot of them are fired simultaneously in the general direction of a large group of enemies, but a single musketeer facing a single enemy would make himself an immeasurably greater threat by affixing his bayonet, or simply drawing his saber.
I didn’t think Angus could have killed both men with only two shots, or even with twenty. Maybe he could have if he were a vampire; some of my texts said the undead possessed monstrous strength and extraordinary reflexes.
“Ever find any road agents?” I asked the constable.
“No,” he said. “They strike sometimes on the highways around Cambridge, but I’ve never arrived at the scene of a robbery in time to apprehend the bastards.”
“What will you do if you find them?” I asked.
“Kill them,” he said. “I’ll kill every last one.” This was a ridiculous proposition, and if I’d been in my usual state of boozy levity, I might have laughed right in Angus’s thick, earnest face. But there was something distinctly unfunny about his tone, a strain or a hitch, as if he was trying to flatten some swell of emotion.
“You think road agents waylaid this carriage?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t reckon so,” Angus said. “Little profit to be had from robbing jailers or prisoners. And when I found the bodies up the road, nobody seemed to have rummaged them. I think the gunman is the killer from Cambridge.”
He began to climb down into the wreck, but I shooed him off with a roll of my shoulder. “It’s no use. I’m chained in here quite securely, and I’ve no idea where the keys went.”
“I’ve got them,” he said. “Had to dig them out of Mr. Dingle’s waistcoat pocket, but I knew you might be trapped someplace.”
He worked the key in the heavy iron padlock, and I was free. With his assistance, I climbed out of the overturned vehicle, and sprawled my body out upon the grass.
“Are you in much pain?” Angus asked.
“I can only hope that no one has confiscated my laudanum,” I said.
“It’s good to see you’ve maintained your humor.”
“I’ve got no other solace in these dire circumstances.”
“Well, it could have been a good deal worse for you, I daresay,” said Angus. “This carriage is only tipped on its side. If it had collided with something at speed, like a tree or a house, it would have been smashed to bits. You’re lucky the horse broke free of the harness when its leg went, or else it would have got tangled in the wheels.”
“From inside, it seemed as though the stage rolled end over end before it stopped,” I said.
“It didn’t. There are no gouges in the earth to indicate such, nor is there dirt or grass on the roof of the vehicle.”
He reached down with his meaty hand and pulled me to my feet.
“You can see the track here, where the stage veered off the road,” he said, pointing to the thick wheel-ruts that the carriage had cut into the earth. “The carriage just sort of ran into the grass, bounced around a bit, lost speed, and fell over. Laid you down quite gentle, I’d say.”
“It certainly didn’t feel gentle.”
“Well, you just rest for a bit and get your bearings. After I found the driver, I hired a boy from the first farmhouse I saw to ride back to Cambridge and fetch Mr. Knifing. He should be along shortly to examine the bodies. Hopefully he’ll arrive in a stagecoach. I don’t suspect you’re fit to walk back to town, nor would you want to sit horseback in your condition.”
I didn’t really care one way or the other about Knifing or the bodies right then, though I was possessed by a rather fearsome desire to be carried to my bed, where I could ensconce myself snugly with my bear and consume lots of drugs. “Have you got any whisky?” I asked. The fine red webbing etched upon Angus’s face gave me reason to hope he might.
“I’ve been known to carry a little nip to gird meself against the wind,” he said, confirming my suspicions. He handed me a dented flask, and I drank from it without even bothering to wipe his spittle off the mouth of it. It was cheap stuff, and it tasted like the wormy grain it was made of and the old, rotten barrels it was fermented in. But I could barely taste it, as my nostrils were filled, anyway, with the stink of blood; the horse’s or maybe my own. And sometimes, a man needs a drink.
Chapter 33
If solitude succeed to grief,
Release from pain is slight relief;
The vacant bosom’s wilderness
Might thank the pang that made it less.
We loathe what none are left to share:
Even bliss-’t were woe alone to bear;
The heart once left thus desolate
Must fly at last for ease-to hate.
“Do you suppose that, just before he died, Mr. Dingle’s life passed before his eyes, and he realized, in that ultimate moment, what a terrible bore he was?” I asked Angus.
“Who can say what any of us will see, afore we pass beyond that threshold.”
“At least his departure was interesting.”
Angus chuckled. “That it was, though I don’t know that he appreciated it.”
“Of course he wouldn’t,” I said. “He lacked refined sensibilities.”
“Not all of us have the time or the resources to devote ourselves to being interesting or refined, you know,” Angus said. He pushed out his stout chest as he spoke.
“I apologize. I meant you no offense.”
“If I may ask, what passed through your mind, Lord Byron, as the stagecoach crashed? Did you regret your sins?”
“Only the ones I hadn’t yet got around to committing,” I said, and I drank again and peered at Angus over the lip of the flask. “What brings a man to volunteer himself as a constable, and to spend his evenings patrolling country roads, hunting for bandits?”
Angus took the whisky back from me and swallowed some of it. “What are those creatures called that you collect books about?”
I supposed my archive of dark lore was no longer much of a secret. “Vampires,” I said.