There is a sudden sharp sound at his back and he spins around, tense as a cat, until he realizes it’s only Boyles stumbling over the gate. He waits for his accomplice to come loping up out of the shadows, then motions for him to stay put. Ned slips off, the brief scare snapping him out of his rapture, suffusing him with blood and adrenalin, his heart turning over like a machine. Five minutes later he locates the coffin — a plain deal box set between a pair of grave markers at the far end of the churchyard. He crouches low and watches for a full sixty seconds or more, the wind hanging in the vacant trees, the cold creeping up his legs, then starts forward.
But then there’s another sound — off to his left — a rippling or snapping like wash on a line. He hesitates, all his instincts shouting watch out, watch out, the cold prodding him on, whispering it’s all right, make the snatch, get warm, stay alive. He takes a tentative step forward. There it is again. Ripple, flap. Something is wrong. Dead wrong. Crouching, he slips off to his left, breath sucked back, heart churning, every muscle strung tight against the bone.
The sound becomes more insistent as he draws closer, its rhythm geared to the rise and fall of the wind. Spooked, he pictures a host of the dead standing silent atop their tombs, cerements rustling in the breeze, skeletal hands reaching out in mute appeal. But no, there must be a rational explanation. . He moves closer, ripple, flap. There: the sound seems to be emanating from the bank of shadow up ahead — a sepulcher, isn’t it? Yes, a sepulcher, oblong, massive, looming over the dark ranks of headstones like the passageway to the underworld. He moves closer still, and is startled to realize that the whole thing seems to be moving, undulating somehow with the slow soft wash of a gentle sea. Too dark to see, he reaches out a hand to touch it — and comes up with a handful of cloth. Strange. Someone has draped the entire thing in black muslin. In Memoriam? Another nob laid to rest?
He doesn’t have time to puzzle over it. The cold speaks to him again and he is about to turn back to his task, satisfied, when another sound, far more arresting, takes hold of him like a clenched fist and freezes every muscle in his body. Faint and muffled, a sound of voices — from inside the tomb! This is too much. For all his recent experience in darkened graveyards he wants to piss his pants, take to his heels, creep back to Blackfriars Bridge and lie down to die of the cold. But then a sudden gust lifts the sheets and a sliver of light cuts the darkness. A new fear comes over him, far more terrible than any thought of ghosts and goblins. His joints tremble with it. He is beginning to understand.
Carefully, carefully, he slips beneath the black sheet and huddles over the stone door that gives onto the tomb. It is ever so slightly ajar. He puts his eye to the opening.
Inside, by the dim glow of an oil lamp, three men in furs are sitting round a coffin, playing cards. Their feet are propped up on iron bed warmers; clouds of suspended breath dog their movements. Ned’s view is partially obstructed by the back of the man nearest him, but when the man sits up to look at his hand Ned realizes with a start that the cardplayer in the far corner is Osprey. Suddenly Osprey throws in his cards. “Hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?” he says to the figure with his back turned.
“Aww, ‘ave a ‘eart, Claude. There ain’t nobody goin’ to be out on a night like this, not the divil nor ‘is dam.”
All the light from the lamp is puddled in Osprey’s eyes until they seem to glow with a preternatural light. He sighs, and casually draws a pistol from the lining of his coat. “I said: hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?”
♦ ♦ ♦
Back at the gate Ned claps one hand over Boyles’ mouth, the other round his shoulder. He leads him from the cemetery and up a side street at a jog. Three blocks later a winded Boyles stops and spins his friend round by the arm. “Wot’s up, Neddy? Where we headed?”
Ned’s face is veiled in shadow. His voice is harsh, nagged at by the cold, muffled in the scarf drawn over his mouth and nose. “Hertford,” he whispers.
“Hertford?” Boyles’ chin drops. “But that’s outside Lunnon, init?”
A light goes on in a window up the street, throwing a pale flicker over Ned’s face. His look is so fierce and bitter Boyles steps back, but Ned grabs hold of his companion’s coat and draws him up close. His voice is clear, unmistakable. “That’s right,” he hisses.
♦ ILLUSORY CHEESES ♦
Ned turned his back on London without a second thought. It was the winter of 1802, and he was thirty-one years old. He was tired. He’d had thirty-one years of creeping through the shit and grime of the streets, thirty-one years of having his knuckles rapped and the ladder jerked out from under him every time he managed to step up a rung. Thirty-one years of torment and degradation, prejudice, abuse, and cruel and unusual punishment, mitigated only by the charity of Barrenboyne and the precious few months he’d had with Fanny. Now, at the end of all those blighted years, all those dark hollow years that had been drawn from him one by one like deeply embedded splinters, he was no better off than when Barrenboyne had first taken him in. He was broke. He had no lodgings, no possessions, no family. As far as friends were concerned, he was taking them all with him, in the flat-headed, pinch-shouldered person of Billy Boyles, drunkard and half-wit. Quiddle was dead, Fanny had vanished, Shem and Liam were up to their ears in fish and scales somewhere on the far side of the river — in any case, he hadn’t seen them in four and a half years. For the rest, they were faceless multitudes, hard as stones, ready to strip the clothes from your back as you lay dying or run you down in the streets with their phaetons and landaus. And if they weren’t strangers, they were sworn enemies. Banks, Mendoza, Brummell, Smirke, Delp — and the most venomous of all, Osprey. Orestes couldn’t have had it worse.
So he was off to Hertford. The country. Like Boyles, Ned had never been out of London, and had no idea what to expect. He had a vague image of great wheels of cheese, slabs of fresh-baked bread slathered with butter and honey, cattle at their cuds, the lazy sizzle of sun showers on a thatched roof. He and Billy could get jobs as fieldhands or shepherds or something. The air would be good for them.
Beyond ail this, another factor entered the equation: Fanny. She’d been born and raised in Hertfordshire, and had served her apprenticeship there as milkmaid to a certain Squire Trelawney. Ned would look up her family.
Perhaps they’d heard from her or knew where she could be found. After four and a half years of scouring the streets, he was at a loss. She wasn’t in London, as best he could determine, and with Osprey dogging him he had no chance of raising the money to go off to the Continent. Brooks’ house had long since been boarded up. Letters went unanswered. It was rumored that he was dead. If so, where was Fanny?
What Ned couldn’t know, as he trudged up the deserted turnpike in the cold vague light of dawn, was that the question no longer held any meaning.
♦ SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS ♦
Fanny Brunch left London early Christmas morning, 1797, in a state of shock. She wouldn’t be back for nearly four years.
It was snowing that morning, trembling little gouts of white spinning down out of the caliginous sky. She hardly noticed. When she finally emerged from the prison it was past five in the morning, and Brooks’ footman was waiting outside the gate. She looked right through him as he handed her into the coach, his touch the touch of a doomed man, flesh, blood, sinew, bone. All the way to Gravesend she watched the trees emerge from the darkness and turn to gibbets, the snow clinging to the naked branches like shreds of flesh, nests of dried leaves suddenly transforming themselves into kicking, writhing human forms. She felt lightheaded, disconnected from her body. There was a smell of meat in her nostrils, nagging and persistent. At one point the smell of it was so strong she had to ask the coachman to pull off to the side of the road so she could be sick in the weeds.