Death at Dawn (5 page)

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 with myself, not quite three days ago, but another lifetime. I slept for a couple of hours then put my head out of the room as another maid was hurrying past and asked for more tea, also writing materials. The pen she brought me was the same crossed nibbed one with its ink-stained holder that I’d used to write that foolish, light-hearted note to my father. It now served to write a very different letter to my brother Tom. I wrote on the top of the wash-stand, with my travelling mantle wrapped round me for a dressing gown.

Are you blaming me? If so, read it again and admit that there is not one lie in it. Accident? Well, murder is an accident to the victim, is it not? And suppose I had written
Dear Tom, Our father has been murdered
… would he have waited tamely in Bombay? No, he would have been home on the next ship and all our sacrifice in parting with him for the sake of his future would have been wasted. Surely there had been enough waste already. And the relatives? That was no lie either. Three or four aunts would have indeed taken me in from cold Duty. I was not bound to write in my letter what I felt – that I should sooner put on pink tights and dance in the opera or ride horses bareback in a
circus than accept the wintery charity of any of them. I should have had to pay dearly for it in endless days of criticism of my father. They’d be all too eager to believe the lie that he had been killed in a duel, hugging it to their hearts under their yellowed flannel chemises. Over the years, I’d dwindle to the grey and dusty poor relative in the corner of the room furthest from the fire, doling out physic in careful teaspoons, combing fleas from the lapdog. Besides, if I went to any of the aunts I’d have no freedom, hardly allowed to walk in the garden without asking permission. They would certainly not permit me to do the only thing in my life that made sense – discover who killed my father and why.

I addressed my letter by his full name, Thomas Fraternity Lane, care of the Company’s offices in London. They should send it on by the first available boat, but it would still be weeks or months before it came into Tom’s hands. I drew the curtains across the window and started to dress myself to take it to the post. The stockings I’d walked in were beyond mending and had to be thrown away. This reminded me that most of my clothes and possessions were in a trunk at Chalke Bissett. When I left them there I had assumed it would be only a matter of days before we’d be sending for it from our new lodgings in London. I unpacked my bag, picked up the pen again and made a list:

At that point, the maid came in for the tray. She looked so tired and was so shy that I couldn’t refrain from tipping her sixpence, which reminded me of the thinness of my purse. I shook the coins out on the bed and counted those too:

This was not inspiriting. I’d have to make my rounds of the jewellers again, this time selling the last thing I had, a gold-mounted cameo ring my father had bought
for me at Naples. I put on the lavender dress, packed the rest of the clothes into my bag and went out to take my letter to the post. The streets were crowded, full of carts and carriages coming and going from the harbour, an Italian playing a barrel organ with a monkey collecting coins in its hat. The tunes were jaunty, but the monkey had a black bow round its neck in concession to our supposed national grief. I kept glancing round, wary of anybody who seemed interested in me.

It was worse when I reached the office and had to stand in a queue behind several others. The fat man’s agent had come looking for me in this place. The only way he could have known to deliver the note to the Heart of Oak was by intercepting the letter to my father I’d left there. I looked at the old clerk, sitting on his high stool with his pen behind his ear and ledger open on the counter in front of him, wondering, ‘Are you in their pay?’ When it came to my turn he blinked at me short-sightedly through his glasses, with no sign of recognition, and accepted my letter.

‘Is there anything poste restante for Mr Thomas Jacques Lane?’ I said, trying to make my voice sound casual. There had been three letters when I first inquired. The clerk blinked again and went over to a bank of pigeonholes. My heart thumped when he took out just one sheet of folded paper. Who’d taken the others?

‘You have his authority to collect this?’

‘Yes. I am his daughter.’

He gave me a doubtful look, asked me to sign the ledger, then handed it over. I hurried out with my prize, looking for a quiet place to read, already puzzled by the feel of it in my hand. It was thick, coarse paper with a smell about it, oddly familiar and comforting. I touched a gloved fingertip to my nose. Hoof oil, memories of stables and warm, well-tended horses. I took refuge in the doorway of a pawnbroker’s shop with boarded-up windows and unfolded it.

This in big, disorderly writing and a signature like duck tracks in mud:
Amos Legge
. I couldn’t help laughing because it was so far from what I’d been expecting. Certainly not from one of my father’s friends, yet hardly from an enemy either. Neither the man in black nor the one who called himself Trumper would write like that. I went back to the office, paid tuppence for the use of inkwell, pen and paper, and left a note for Mr Amos Legge, saying that I was Mr Lane’s daughter and I’d be grateful if he would call on me at the Heart of Oak. I strolled back to the inn taking a round-about route by way of the seafront. As I passed a baker’s shop, the smell of fresh bread reminded me that I was hungry and had eaten nothing since the tartine on the
other side of the Channel. I stood in the queue behind a line of messenger boys and kitchen maids and paid a penny for a small white loaf, then, with a sudden craving for sweet things, four pence more for two almond tartlets topped with crisp brown sugar. I carried them back to the Heart of Oak, intending to picnic on them in my room and spare the expense of having a meal sent up.

As bad luck would have it, the landlord was in the hall. His little eyes went straight to my paper parcel, calculating profit lost.

‘How long are you planning to stay here – madam?’

The moment’s pause before ‘madam’ just stopped short of being insulting.

‘Tonight at least, possibly longer.’

‘We like payment on account from ladies and gentlemen without proper luggage.’

In other words, I was not respectable and he expected me to bilk him. Biting back my anger, telling myself that I couldn’t afford to make more enemies, I parted with a sovereign, salving my pride by demanding a receipt. As he went away, grumbling, to write it, the door from the street opened.

‘’Scuse me for troubling you, ma’am, but be there a Miss Lane staying ’ere?’

I stared. The door-frame of the Heart of Oak was high and wide, but he filled it, six and a half feet tall at least with shoulders in proportion. His hair was the
shiny light-brown colour of good hay, topped with a felt hat which looked as if it might have doubled as a polisher, his eyes blue as speedwells. The clean tarry smell of hoof oil wafted off him.

‘You must be Amos Legge,’ I said, marvelling. Then, ‘I am Mr Lane’s daughter.’

He grinned, good white teeth against the brown of his face.

‘I thought you was when I see’d you back there, only I didn’t like to make myself familiar, look. You do resemble ’im.’ E be here then?’

For an instant, seeing and feeling the cheerfulness of him, I was back in a safer world and I think I smiled back at him. Then it hit me that the world had changed and he didn’t know it.

‘I think we had better go in here,’ I said, indicating the snug.

His grin faded but he followed me, stuffing the felt hat into his pocket, dipping his head to get through the lower doorway of the snug. I left the door open to the hall, otherwise the landlord would have put the worst interpretation on it.

‘Had you known my father long?’ I asked him.

His speech might be slow but his mind wasn’t. He’d already caught a whiff of something wrong.

‘Nobbut ten days or so, miss, when he helped me out of a bit of a ruckus in Paris. We was to go on to Dover and wait for ’im ’ere. Yesterday morning we got in.’

‘We?’

I’d put my parcel of bread and cakes down on the table and the wrapping had fallen open. Unconsciously, his big brown hands went to the loaf and tore it in half. It would have been unforgivably impolite, except he did it naturally as a bird eats seed. He chewed, swallowed.

‘Rancie and me.’

‘Rancie?’

‘That’s right. Is ’e not here yet, then?’

He ate another piece of loaf.

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

His eyes went blank with shock, as if somebody had hit him. He shook his head from side to side, like an ox troubled by flies.

‘When ’e said goodbye to me and Rancie, he was as healthy as any man you’d ever see. Was it the fever, miss?’

‘He was shot,’ I said.

He blinked. Amazingly, his blue eyes were awash with tears.

‘Oh, the poor gentleman. Those damned thieving frogs … Excuse me, ma’am, but you can’t trust them, whatever they say. He should’ve come back with Rancie and me. I’d ’ave seen ’im safe.’

‘I don’t know that he was shot by a Frenchman.’ I’d decided to trust him. I had to trust somebody, and he was as unlike Trumper or the man in black as any person could be. ‘The fact is, there’s some mystery
about it, and I need to find out everything I can about what happened to my father over the past week or ten days.’