“Ned!” she hisses. “You’ll wake the house.”
She’s right. Sixty or seventy limp strands of ivy droop round him, and he hasn’t got a foot off the ground yet. He brushes the leaves from his face, steps back a pace or two and demands an explanation — what’s gone wrong?
She tells it as quickly as she can, her voice pitched low. It was her lack of sleep that gave her away. Lady B. commented on her sluggishness, the slowness of her smile — was she getting enough to eat? Feeling ill? Then Sir Joseph caught her dozing in the library, feather duster in hand. He asked her if she wasn’t staying up late, giggling with the other girls and reading those scandalous novels by Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. She denied it. But then the next evening she nodded off while serving at table and scalded his Lordship with the hare soup. Lady B. ordered her from the room. Later, she was called into the parlor for a full-scale interrogation. No, there was no man in her life, she asserted tearfully. No assignations. Please ma’am, what you must think of me! It’s just that she was restless at night, homesick for the country, and had taken to sitting in the garden till all hours, listening to the crickets and the nightingale. She didn’t know there was any harm in it. Lady B. looked like an executioner with indigestion. She called Fanny’s behavior “irregular” and prescribed a week in the kitchen, fixing vegetables and trimming meats. That ought to tire you out, dear, she said, and then ordered Alice to go round and lock the doors.
Ned cursed at the thought of it. Fanny in the kitchen. A prisoner. “All right,” he said. “We’ll fix her. Tomorrow night, two a.m., I’ll be here with a ladder. You can come stay at my place till Saturday, and then we’ll catch the boat for Holland.”
“Ned,” she whispered, her voice soft as a featherbed. “I love you.”
He was about to give her the standard lovers’ reply, con gusto, when all at once the pug started yapping somewhere in the darkened house, yapping as if its tail had been yanked out by the roots. The shutters closed with a click. Ned took to his feet but there was someone at the back door with a lantern — Bount or Sir Joseph — and now the pug was out the door, flying across the lawn like a puff of hair in a gale, a shrill insistent yip-yipping at his heels. There was a flash and the sound of a gunshot, then he was over the wall and gone.
♦ ♦ ♦
Ned slipped through the dark side streets and back alleys with the slow grace and intuitive assurance of a cat. The streets were unlighted and dangerous at this hour, haunted by footpads, cutpurses, drunks and murderers. Ned kept a low profile. Dodging in and out of shadows, keeping to the base of walls, cutting through yards where possible, he scrupulously avoided all human contact as he made his way back to Southwark. He’d had a close shave back in the garden — if old Sir Jos hadn’t been such a rotten shot, who knows? Anyway, it was a bad sign. They could be waiting for him tomorrow night when he came round with the ladder. He wondered if he should borrow Liam’s rusted harquebus.
When he finally turned up Bear Lane, nearly an hour later, he was beat. An afternoon of peddling fish eggs and a long and frustrating night in Sir Joseph’s garden had taken their toll. He would sleep till dark, see about a coach, a ladder and maybe a pistol, then go and fetch his Fanny. The thought exhilarated him as he mounted the steps to his room: tomorrow night he’d have her beside him — in his bed — secure, safe and private. No more sneaking about in the dark, no more abbreviated lovemaking, no more wet grass and thorny hedges. There was a stirring in his trousers as he turned the key and stepped into the room.
He didn’t even bother to light the taper. Just shrugged out of his jacket, tore off the false beard and flung himself down on the bed. But wait — what was this? There was someone in his bed! His first glancing thought was of Fanny, but then a far more likely and chilling explanation came to him. .
At that moment a match flared on the far side of the room and illuminated the ruddy acromegalic features of Smirke — then the taper took hold and the room rushed with light. Ned shrank back. The room, he saw, was crowded. Twit and Jutta Jim were leaning against the chest of drawers; Mendoza sat on the washstand beside the angelic young prig who’d held his jacket for him on a day Ned would prefer to forget. Then there was Smirke. Towering, round-shouldered, grinning a tiny expectant grin like a black bear in heat. In the bed, snoring soundly, was Boyles.
“Well, well, Ned,” Twit began in his reedy nasal tones, “what a pleasure and a surprise it is to see you again.”
Mendoza was slapping a stocking full of sand against the base of the washstand: thwack. . thwack. . thwack. .
“Yes, a real pleasure. But why you didn’t invite us over sooner, I’ll never know. We could have capitalized on your miraculous ascension from the dead. The Papists would have eaten it up.” His voice dropped to a snarl. “The thieves they hung alongside Christ should have been so lucky.”
“I’ll fookin’ tear yer face off,” Smirke rumbled.
It was then that Ned noticed the iron strongbox. It was sitting on the table, the lock ravaged, lid twisted back on its hinges. Empty. “What have you done with my money, you bastards?” Ned was on his feet. Boyles, very drunk, sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes.
“Let’s call it compensation for the yoomiliation wot ye’ve cost us, ye scum,” Mendoza hissed.
“Neddy!” Boyles had hold of his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to tell ‘em — they forced it out o’ me.”
Ned felt the rage rising in him. There would be no elopement now, damn them, and he was going to take a beating. A savage beating. Suddenly he snatched up the iron box, flung it in the face of the young prig and broke for the door. Mendoza was there. The blackjack caught him across the cheekbone, twice in quick succession — and then it was Smirke’s turn.
Smirke hit him as he was rebounding from Mendoza’s blow. The first punch staggered him; the force of the second drove him back toward the window, Smirke in pursuit, arms flailing, another blow and another, and then he was going down, reeling back into someone — Twit? — there was the sound of splintering glass and a cry followed by a sort of hopeless, unbelieving, enraged shriek — the sound a pig makes when the sticking knife pierces its throat.
Ned was on the floor in a sea of glass. Smirke and Mendoza were hanging out the window. The young prig sat in the corner, wiping the blood from his cheek and sniveling. “I’m scarred,” he whimpered. “I’m scarred.” Then Mendoza’s voice, shaken. “Sweet Jesus, ‘ee’s stuck ‘imself.”
Ned staggered to his feet and took a look. Twit lay contorted below, impaled on the iron pickets. A crowd was gathering. Two men bent over him with a torch. “ ‘Ee’s dead,” one of them said.
Mendoza’s face was ashen. Suddenly he had hold of Ned’s arm. “It’s murder then,” he shouted. “Call out the watch.”
♦ A SHOT IN THE DARK ♦
For a moment there is nothing, no sound at all, the black of the forest and the slow drip of the rain. The dark is so absolute and impenetrable, so much an absence, he might as well be blind. This is what it’s like to live in a cave, he thinks, to live without fire and candlewax, this is what it’s like when you reach the seventh circle of hell. And then it begins again: a branch displaced, the tentative footfall, the low soughing snarl like a tocsin: I am afraid but I will kill.
In the leaves and mold, Mungo frantically casts about for a rock or treebranch, a bit of root, the jawbone of an ass, anything he could lift up to his face when the growling thing comes at him in a rush of tooth and claw. The loam beneath his fingers is rich and saturated, like coffee grounds or the black muck at the bottom of a grave; wormlike things slip through his fingers, a spider runs up his arm. But there, he has something, a stick certainly — no, it’s thicker and heavier, the size of a club. He tugs to dislodge it, but it seems to be stuck. And now all of a sudden the snarling grows more animated, as if his reaching for the stick were a provocation. Coming closer, warning, threatening, cursing, the hot breath of it, the spitting and hissing. He jerks at the stick for his very life, in a fever, the snarling thing nearly beside him now, growls turned to roars, bloodstarved, maddened, raaaaaaaaoowwwwwwww!