3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
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to see out of the window. We were stirring up such clouds of dust that I couldn’t make out much more than the outlines of bushes. A look passed between the two men. Trumper pulled down the window and shouted something to the coachman that I couldn’t hear above the sound of wheels and hooves. The whip cracked and the rhythm of our journey changed as four powerful horses stretched out in a canter. I’d never travelled so fast before. Trumper hastily shut the window as a cloud of white dust blew up round us. I reached for the door handle. I don’t know whether I’d have been capable of flinging myself out at such a speed, but there was no chance to tell, because Trumper’s heavy hand clamped mine and forced it down on my lap.
‘Sit still. We’re not doing you any harm.’
‘Please take me back to Calais at once.’
‘You must understand …’ Trumper said. He had both of my hands now and was trying so hard to keep them held down that he was pressing them between my thighs. When I struggled it made things worse. The sweat was running down his forehead. He kept glancing over at the fat man, as if for approval, but the suety face watched impassively.
‘We are only trying to protect you,’ Trumper pleaded. ‘You saw what happened back in the graveyard. You wouldn’t stay in Dover as you were told, so all we intend is to take you somewhere safe until the trouble your father’s stirred up settles down again.’
‘Take me where?’
‘There’s a nice little house by a lake, very friendly and ladylike, good healthy air. It will set you up nicely.’
He sounded like some wheedling hotelier. I laughed at him.
‘The truth is, you’re kidnapping me.’
‘No. Concern for your safety, that’s all. I’m sure your father would have wanted it.’
‘My family will miss me. My brother will come after you.’
‘Your brother’s in India. You have no close family.’
This growl from the fat man froze me, both from the bleak truth of it and the fact that this creature knew so much about me. For a while I could do nothing but try to keep back the tears. I suppose Trumper must have felt me relax because he let go of my hands and sat back, though keeping so close to me that I was practically wedged in the corner of the carriage. The horses flew on, sixteen hooves thudding like war drums on the dry road, harness chains jingling crazed carillons. Several times the whip cracked and the coachman shouted, I supposed to warn slower conveyances out of our way. Dust stung my eyes, at least giving me an excuse for tears. Trumper started coughing but the other man seemed unaffected. Then –
‘What the hell …?’
We’d stopped so abruptly that Trumper and I were propelled off our seats and on to the fat man. It was like being flung into a loathsome bolster. Above the unclean smell of it, and Trumper’s curses from floor level, I was aware of things going on outside – loud whinnying, whip cracks and the coachman’s voice, high with alarm, yelling at the horses. The carriage started bouncing and jerked forward several times. Trumper had been trying to claw his way up by hanging on to my skirt. This sent him back to the floor again, but since he still had a handful of skirt, it dragged me down with him. My face was level with the fat man’s belly, a vast bulge of pale breeches, like a sail with the wind behind it.
There are better uses for your head than employing it as a bludgeon.
My father’s voice from fifteen years back, on the occasion of a schoolroom quarrel when I’d butted my brother and caused his nose to bleed. I thought, Well, I’m sorry, Father, but even you are not always right, closed my eyes, drew my head back, and used all my strength to propel it like a cannonball towards the bulging belly.
There is no arrangement of letters that will reproduce the sound that resulted, as if an elephant had trodden on a gargantuan and ill-tuned set of bagpipes. The smell of foul air expelled was worse. The combination must have disconcerted Trumper because he made no attempt to stop me as I stood up and grasped the door handle. From the squawk he made, I may have trampled his hand in the process. As the door began to open I let my weight fall on it and tumbled out into the road. A pain in my elbow, dust in clouds round me, then the front wheel of the carriage travelling backwards, so close that it almost ran over my hand. I rolled sideways. Something in the dust cloud. Legs. A whole mobile grove of short pink legs. Much shouting all round me and other sounds, grunting sounds. A questing pink snout touched my cheek, quite gently, and a familiar farmyard smell filled the air, pleasanter than the one inside the coach. A herd of pigs. By some dispensation of Providence, the flying carriage had met with the one obstacle that couldn’t be whipped or bullied aside. Many horses fear pigs and, judging by the way the lead horse was rearing and whinnying, he was of that persuasion.
I pushed the snout aside and stood up. The coachman was standing on the ground, trying to pull the horse down with one hand, threshing the butt of his whip at a milling mass of pigs and French peasantry, shouting obscenities. I took one look, turned and ran into the bushes beside the road. More shouting behind me, Trumper’s voice from the direction of the coach, yelling to me to come back. I ran, following animal tracks through the bushes, with no sense of direction except getting as far away as I could. After some time I stopped, heart beating, expecting to hear the bushes rustling behind me and Trumper bursting through.
‘Miss Lane. Come back, Miss Lane.’
His voice, but sounding breathless and mercifully coming from a long way off. I judged he must still be on the road, so I struck off as far as the tracks would let me at right angles to it. It was hard going in my heeled shoes so I took them off and went stocking-footed. After a while I came on to a wider track, probably one used by farm carts, with a ditch and bank on either side. I scrambled up the bank and saw, not far away, the sun glinting on blue sea. From there, it was a matter of two or three miles to the shore, with Calais a little way in the distance.
I thought a lot as I walked along the shore towards the town, none of it much to the purpose, and chiefly about how strange it was when pieces of time refused to join together any more to make a past or future. I realise that is not expressed with philosophic elegance, in the way of my father’s friends, but then I’m no philosopher. A few days ago I had a future which might have been vague in some of its details but flowed in quite an orderly way from my life up to then. I also possessed twenty-two years of a past which – although not entirely orderly – accounted for how I had come to be at a particular place and time. But since that message had arrived at the inn at Dover, I’d been as far removed from my past as if it existed in a half-forgotten dream. As for my future, I simply did not possess one. Futures are made up of small expectations – tonight I shall sleep in my own bed, tomorrow we shall have cold beef for supper and I’ll sew new ribbons on my bonnet, on Friday the cat will probably have her kittens. I had no expectations, not the smallest. I didn’t know where or when I would sleep or eat or what I would do, not then or for the rest of my life.
I walked along, noticing how large the feet of gulls look when they wheel overhead, how far the fishermen have to walk over the sand to dig for worms when the tide goes out, how the white bladder campion flowers earlier on the French side of the Channel than on the cliffs back home. It was only when I came to the first of the houses that I remembered I was supposed to be a rational being and that, if a future was necessary, I had better set about stringing one together. Small things first. I sat down on the grass at the edge of the shingle and examined the state of my feet. Stocking soles were worn away, several toes sticking through. I put my shoes back on, twisting what was left of the stocking feet round so that the holes were more or less hidden. The bottom of my skirt was draggled with bits of straw and dried seaweed, but a good brushing with my hand dealt with that. My hair, from the feel of it, had reverted to its primitive state of tangled curls, but since there was no remedy for that until I regained comb and mirror, all I could do was push as much of it as possible under my bonnet.
All the time I was tidying myself up, my mind was running over the events in the carriage and coming back to one question. Who was this woman they wanted so much? In my father’s letter, she’d been not much more than a passing reference, an object of charity. If she