Unfortunately, there was a hitch in the plan.
Ned was up before dawn one morning, past the slumbering porter and out the door. Quiddle had given him a suit of ragged clothes, and the suppurating slash in his leg had transformed itself into a long thin scar the color of calfs liver. He made his way to Great George Street, slowly, painfully, the cold stiffening his leg, the thought of Fanny spurring him on. He pictured the expression on her face when she saw him there at the door, remembered the careful white precision of her teeth, the cool slip of her arms, the way she laughed and made it sound like a symphony. But as he turned into Great George Street, he felt that something was wrong. There was Brooks’ house, imposing with its portico, Palladian windows and steep-pitched roof, but it looked closed up— as if — as if the occupants had gone out of town.
It couldn’t be. Ned bolted across the street, the pain an irrelevance, clumsily leaped the palings and found himself in the still, leaf-spattered yard. There was no sound from the house, no sign of life. No servants, delivery boys, gardeners. Surreptitious, a shadow among shadows, he peered through the shutters and saw the furniture draped in cloth coverings, the dark squares on the walls where the pictures had once hung, the cold soot-blackened hearth. Later, out on the street, he made some casual inquiries. After a rebuff or two he came across a loquacious housemaid walking a pair of Gordon setters. “Oh yes,” she said, “bless me if I can say wot’s moved ‘im to it, but Mr. Brooks ‘as gone off to It’ly and Greece for a spell. At least that’s ‘ow the gossip ‘as it.”
Ned’s stomach contracted. Hope was out of reach, he knew it, felt it slipping away like a leaf in a windstorm. The question was on his lips — Fanny, what of Fanny? — but he didn’t know how to phrase it.
The maid was picking thoughtfully at a mole on her chin. “They say ‘ee’s took ‘is trollop with ‘im too. . Oh don’t look so mortified, goldilocks — it was common knowledge up and down the block. A scandal it was, a reg’lar scandal. Keepin’ a woman and ‘im a bachelor. Ha! I could tell you a thing or two about these society people, believe you me.”
The dogs were pissing, sniffing, nosing one another in the rear. Ned became aware of a sudden chill in the air. He shuddered along the length of his body, as if the cold had stabbed him in the base of the spine, then turned and wandered off, the woman shouting something at his back. Up the block he found a sheltered spot to sit down and think it out. Fanny was gone. Indefinitely. Delp suddenly loomed in his mind. If Ned wasn’t back at the hospital when the doctor walked through those doors there would be hell to pay. Literally. He’d turn the hounds loose in a second, the bastard. Then what?
Ned sat there, chilled through, watching the pigeons scrabble in the gutter. After awhile he picked himself up wearily and started down the street. For St. Bartholomew’s.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Come on,” Quiddle hisses, “let’s get it over with.” And then he disappears behind the wall, the brief sharp clatter of the shovels like a hole poked through the night.
Reluctantly, Ned slides out of the cart, flapping his arms to keep warm. There is the scent of freshly turned earth on the air, and something else too — something like the smell of wet leaves or earthworms drowned in a rainstorm. The absolute blackness of the night is appalling. Ned shuffles around a minute, squinting into the gloom and fighting an impulse to whistle. The skin around his eyes and ears seems to have shrunk, tugging back at his hairline as if it were elastic. Good God, he thinks, and then he’s up and over the wall.
There had been a funeral in the Islington churchyard earlier that day. A family of four. Murder/suicide. In despair over a life of rags and potatoes, the Mrs. had seasoned her spouse’s porridge with arsenic trioxide and then smothered the children as they lay sleeping on their shuck mattresses. She kept a vigil over the bodies until dawn, and then forced the blade of a wood saw over her wrists, time and again, until she lay down beside them and bled to death. Delp had read about it in the morning paper.
If anything, it’s even darker on the far side of the wall. What now? Ned wonders, when Quiddle’s voice suddenly leaps out of the void at him—“Pssst: over here”—and he finds himself diving for the shrubbery, rattled to the bone, a stray branch whipping at his face, the crush of dead weed, and then that terrible stillness again. Lying there in the dark, feeling foolish, he begins to feel more strongly than ever that there are better ways of spending a cold winter’s night. His inner eye briefly flashes on white arms, sleeping dogs, mugs of ale and wild leaping extravagant fires. But to the business at hand: slowly, cautiously, as if a thousand eyes were on him, he rises to his feet and is startled half out of his wits by the shovel thrust into his hands. “Knock off your fooling and let’s get on with it,” Quiddle rasps, and then they’re moving, Ned concentrating on the vague glint of baldness at the back of Quiddle’s head as they make their way between pale headstones and looming dark monuments, crucified Christs and wingspread angels of death.
“Horace,” Ned whispers, “this is ridiculous. It’s ghoulish, unchristian, against all the laws of God and man. Couldn’t we tell Delp we got lost and never found the place?”
The bald spot moves on, dipping here, bobbing there. Quiddle’s only response is a sort of chuckle, so low and throaty it would frighten a hyena.
Then all at once they’re stopping, Quiddle down on one knee it seems, scratching about in the half-frozen earth. “This is it,” he says, his voice wrestling with nerves, susurrus and a tendency to crack into falsetto. “Try not to make too much noise with the shovel.”
Ned tries not to. He gingeriy slips the spade into the pool of blackness at his feet, feeling for soft earth. Quiddle is beside him, shoveling stealthily — Ned can hear the whisper and whine of his shovel and the accelerated chuff-chuff-chuff of his breathing. They work in silence for a long while, dipping deeper for their loads, Quiddle periodically kneeling to strike a match and check their progress. Finally, with a dull thud, Ned’s shovel makes contact with something solid. “That’ll be it,” Quiddle whispers, digging harder now, sweeping along the length of the coffin with the edge of his shovel.
Ned has stopped digging. At the first touch of metal and wood an involuntary shudder galvanized his body, as if the handle of the spade were a lightning rod and the rough planks charged with electricity. He stands there, looking into nothing, temples pounding, throat dry, listening to Quiddle’s knife as it pries at the lid of the coffin, thinking what next, what next, and waiting with a dumb stricken revulsion for his companion to light the next match. He can see them already, the poisoned husband, the smothered children, the mutilated wife sitting up in her bloody shroud and shrieking out with a wild desperate laugh.
But wait: is he hearing things? A rustling in the bushes at the base of the wall? Muffled footsteps? The walking dead? “Horace: what was that?”
Quiddle, breathing hard, forces back the lid of the coffin, wood splintering with a groan of protest: eeeeeeeee. “What was what?”
“That sound. Out there.”