Death at Dawn: A Liberty Lane Thriller. Caro Peacock
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wanted so much? In my father’s letter, she’d been not much more than a passing reference, an object of charity. If she was so important, or so beautiful, that she could be the cause of all this, why hadn’t he given me some notion of it? But I had to tear my mind away from her and decide what I was going to do with myself. I reasoned it out this way. My father, without meaning to, had bequeathed me two sets of enemies, one represented by the thin man in black, the other by so-called Trumper and the fat man. The second set hated the first set so much that they were prepared to commit murder – since for all I knew the man in black might have died from the blow to his head. Both sides had wanted me to stay at Dover. Now the man in black wanted me to go back there, while Trumper and the fat man were planning to carry me off to some unknown destination by a lake. Geneva? Como? Or perhaps they had in mind the mythical waters of Acheron, from which travellers do not return. Stay in France or return to England? I feared the fat man and Trumper more than the man in black, though I hated all of them equally. If I stayed in France, they might capture me again. Quite probably they were looking for me already. So Dover seemed the safer option, and as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.
Footsore and hungry, I started towards the harbour to inquire among the fishing boats, thinking my enemies would be less likely to find me there than in the crowds coming and going around the steam packet landing place. Then, when I’d gone halfway, I told myself I was being a fool. Among the fishing boats and obviously not a fisherman’s wife or daughter I might as well carry a banner marked Foreigner. If Trumper came looking for me, he’d find me in minutes. If there was any safety for me, it was in numbers. I turned back for the centre of town, queued at a kiosk and milked my small purse almost to its limits to buy a ticket to Dover on the steam packet.
The quay was already reassuringly crowded with fellow passengers, most of them English. There was a wine merchant with a retinue of porters, clucking over his boxes and barrels, several families with children and screaming babies, even a troupe of Gypsy dancers and jugglers who were collecting a few francs by entertaining the crowd. There was no sign of Trumper or the fat man. I bought a tartine and a cup of strong coffee from a man who’d set up a stall near the gangplank and found a refuge on the edge of the harbour wall, behind packing cases that looked as if they hadn’t been moved for some time.
I sat with my back to a bollard until puffs of steam came out of the funnel of the packet and a shrill whistle blew. That was the signal for the carriages with the richer passengers to set out from the hotels. I watched from the shelter of the packing cases as three of them arrived in a line, with liveried footmen at the back and hotel carts with piles of trunks and boxes following. Still no sign of Trumper’s coach. The gentry from the carriages went on board, fashionably dressed and obviously proud of themselves for surviving their tours of Europe. Their servants followed, arms full of blankets, sunshades, shawls, umbrellas and large china bowls in case the sea turned impolite in mid-Channel.
I was on the point of leaving my hiding place when another carriage came rattling up in a hurry, drawn by two greys, with a hotel’s initials on the door. A tall, dark-haired young man was first out. I recognised him as the brother of the girl who’d been kind to me at the hotel. She followed him out, in a different Parisian hat and a travelling cloak of sky-blue merino, the sun glinting on her bright hair, and they crossed the wharf towards the gangplank. I dodged back out of sight, not wanting her to notice me again after my weakness in the hotel. The man I took to be their father had stopped to say something to the coachman – nothing grateful, judging by the expression on his face as he followed them over the cobbles. I waited until the three of them had disappeared on board, then, as the steam whistle blew a last long blast, pushed into the middle of a final rush of people – one of the families with a crying baby, a porter with a trunk on his back, a juggler with his sack of clubs over his shoulder.
Most of the fashionable passengers had gone below. I made my way to the stern and stood by the rail, watching sandy water churning between us and the quay. Ashore, the carriages that had brought passengers were manoeuvring round each other to go back to the hotels. The little crowd that had watched the steam packet depart was drifting away. A man in a royal-blue jacket was walking slowly towards the town, head bent and hands in his pockets. My heart pounded like a steam engine. There was no mistaking, in that air of a person who’d be more at home with a pack of hounds at his feet, the man who called himself Harry Trumper. I got myself as quickly as I could to the far rail. When the first shock had passed, I marvelled at my luck. Trumper had got there in time after all and only my embarrassed wish not to be seen by the girl had saved me. Without meaning to, she’d done me another kindness.
I stayed on a bench at the stern for most of the crossing. The smoke from the funnel blew back over it, dropping a rain of ash and smuts, but it was worth the smuts to know that none of the fashionable passengers would walk there. Strangely, though, one came quite close. It was towards the end of the crossing, dark by then, with some travellers standing at the rails to watch as the lamplit windows round Dover harbour came closer. A woman in a travelling cloak walked slowly in my direction, though not seeing me. Her head was bent and she seemed thoughtful or dejected. Then a shower of red sparks came out of the funnel and a man called from behind her.
‘Be careful, Celia.’
‘I’m quite all right, Stephen. Why can’t you leave me alone?’
A voice with an attractive lisp. In spite of her protest to her brother, she turned obediently, still without seeing me. When she was safely gone I whispered into the darkness, ‘Thank you, Celia.’
We’d slowed down for some reason towards the end of the journey, so the packet didn’t tie up at Dover until the dark hours of the morning. Tired passengers filed down the gangplank into a circle of light cast by oil lamps round the landing stage. A two-horse carriage was waiting for Celia and her family. It whirled away as soon as they were inside, so they must have left servants to bring on the luggage.
With no reason to hurry, I disembarked with the last group of passengers, ordinary people with no carriages to meet them. Beyond the circle of light was a shadowed area of piled-up packing cases and huge casks. I felt as wary as a cat in a strange yard, half expecting Trumper or the fat man to step out and accost me, not quite believing I’d managed to leave them on the far side of the Channel. I walked along the dark seafront, listening for footsteps behind me but hearing nothing. There were very few people about, even the taverns were closed. When I turned into a side street, a few sailors were lying senseless on the doorsteps and my shoe soles slipped in the pools of last night’s indulgence. An old woman, so bent that her chin almost touched the pavement, scavenged for rags in the gutter, disturbing a great rat that ran across the pavement in front of me into a patch of lamplight from a window. It was holding a piece of black crepe in its teeth. The old woman made a grab for it but missed and the rat darted on, trailing its prize, a mourning band from a hat or sleeve. The lamplight fell on the arm of one of the horizontal sailors, and I saw that he too was wearing a mourning band.
‘Has somebody died?’ I asked the rag woman.
I had to stoop down to hear her reply, from toothless gums, ‘The king.’
She was adding something else, hard to make out. Itty icky? I made sense of it at the third try.
‘Oh yes, so it’s Little Vicky.’
William’s niece, Victoria Alexandrina, a round-faced girl of eighteen, now Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and a large part of the globe besides. So a reign had ended and another begun while I’d been in Calais. It seemed less important than the coldness of my toes through the stocking holes.
I walked, sat on the sea wall then walked again, until it was around six in the morning and I could show myself at the Heart of Oak. It had a new black bow on the door knocker.
‘You again,’ the landlord said, bleary eyed.
I collected my bag that I’d left in his keeping, secured my cheap side room again and requested a pot of tea, carried up by the same maid who’d brought me water to wash my hair on that Sunday morning, when I’d been so pleased