Mr. Timothy: A Novel (36 page)

The knife goes round and round, scoring the darkness, but the steel of that blade is nowhere near as hard as Philomela's eyes. Her brown irises have contracted into something black and impermeable--incapable of admitting light--and the breath steams from her nostrils in fierce bursts, and her fingers tighten round the handle of the knife.

And then, gradually, the fingers loosen again, and her breathing subsides. She takes a step back. She lowers the knife to her side. She says softly:

--Nothing.

And which is more remarkable? That she should have come to such a conclusion, or that I should have reached it at roughly the same time? The conclusion, I mean, that killing Lord Griffyn would be an act of purest futility--fatuity, even. You may plunge a dagger through him, drive it straight to the other side...you will find nothing to kill.

Philomela hands the knife to me. Wipes her hands along her flanks. Then, looking back at Lord Griffyn, she murmurs:

--More.

--More what, Philomela?

--
More
.

Helplessly now, she grabs a fistful of bridal gown, shakes it at me.

--More
girls
, you mean?

A long, pained silence. --Where are they, Philomela?

And now comes the mask, woefully familiar, rolling down her face and clouding everything from view, as impenetrable as the fog that hovers just outside the window. And once again, I have the strongest urge to barge through it--drag every last secret into the light--but I feel Colin's chastening hand on my sleeve.

--Time to go, Mr. Timothy.

And he's right--of course he's right--but how much harder it is to let her slip away this time. She has turned her face to the wall now, adopted a maidenly attitude that puts me in mind of the assurances she gave Signor Arpelli:
I am still pure.... I can still be a wife to someone
. Quite an aspiration, that. After tonight, why should she wish to be anyone's wife?

I touch her, lightly, on the back of her head.

--Say good-bye, Philomela. Good-bye forever.

At this, Lord Griffyn, locked for so long in enigmatic silence, finds his tongue again. His voice swells with a rhetorical fervour.

--You put me off, my girl. You put me off, and you know it binds me to you ever tighter.

We turn away, but the voice only rises to new heights of declamation:

--Take pity on your poor knight at arms!
Belle fille sans merci
, release me!

It is, in the end, Colin's decision--or more precisely, his inspiration--to take the uneaten half of pomegranate from Griffyn's dresser and drive it straight into the good lord's mouth until all further speech is impossible.

--May he choke on it, Colin mutters.

--Amen, says Philomela.

Chapter 21

THIS IS OUR PARTING GIFT TO LORD GRIFFYN: we use one of his bedposts as our anchor. The four-poster holds firm as I lower myself down the western face of the building to the ground-floor cornice. Philomela follows right behind me, moving with surprising agility, for all the encumbrances of her bridal gown. Not, perhaps, the best costume for absconding, but it does impart a certain comical air to the proceedings. More comical still: Colin, bounding down the side of the building like an alpine Eros.

Our rope ladder, we soon learn, will not take us all the way to the ground. And so we must leave it dangling and retrace the path that Colin and I took earlier, walking single-file along the stone ledge. The fog is still dense as porridge, so every few feet, I find myself stopping to be sure my companions are still behind me. And as the glimmering ovals of their faces squint back at me, I am tempted to confess the bald truth to them.

I have no notion of how we are to get down.

We can't simply jump down the same way we came up: the stone stair cap that served as our launching point is far too small for landing. Our only hope is to find some other route of descent, one that won't lead us straight back to Rebbeck and his men.

This is the conundrum I am pondering when the branch of an ash tree reaches through the mist and slaps me across the face. Far from being affronted, I grasp the bough with a faintly amorous intent. I press my chest against it, then set a single foot on it. It yields but a few inches.

Nothing to do now but trust it with my full weight. I hear a sharp intake of breath from Philomela as I leave the comfort of the ledge and wrap myself in the tree's embrace. I sway there for some time before finding my equilibrium, but nothing breaks or cracks beneath me, and so as soon as the rocking has ceased, I motion for Philomela to follow. After some deliberation and a suitable arrangement of her dress, she does.

It is this new freight that begins to tax the tree's capacity. The branch rocks more violently this time and sags quite noticeably where Philomela is straddling it. It's clear I will have to find another perch or risk having the branch give way altogether beneath Colin's weight.

Fortunately, my feet, bobbing in the dark, find a heavy, knobbed beam, just a yard below the one on which I'm sitting, and as I shift my weight to that lower branch, my boot glances off yet another one, another yard below. In short order, I have descended a good fathom, but then my feet, searching for the next rung down, find only vapour.

Nothing else for it. Against all the tenets of our respective upbringings, we must leap before we look.

That, at any rate, is the intention that slides me off the lowermost branch and suspends me over the grey void. But the intention soon vanishes...leaving behind nothing but cold, hard panic.

Above me: the spectral form of Philomela, unsnagging her dress from an outcropping of bark. Just above her: the descending outlines of Colin's feet.

And below me: freedom. Or nothing at all.

I can't say how long a time I hang there. Long enough, in any event, that I begin to experience a certain upswelling of shame, which is strangely exacerbated by the arrival of one of Lord Griffyn's peacocks.

The bird, disturbed in its roosting, has wandered down the branch and squatted by my right hand, from which position it glares at me with a pestilential rage and pecks an angry circle round my knuckles. The plumage has been retired for the night; all the bird's colour and force are distilled in its glinting eyes, which, even through the fog, resonate with the plainchant of Griffyn Hall:

Nothing. Nothing.

It must be the simple desire to escape that sound that at last pries my fingers loose. I drop. I drop without a thought or care or hope, without a sound, and the earth rushes pell-mell to meet me, and it is over sooner than I could have imagined, I am flat on my stomach, my face daubed with frost and leaf-paste, my hands twitching by my side. Everything, everything still in working order.

Philomela is considerably more graceful in her dismount. Only the complications of her dress keep her from staying upright, and even as she lands on her backside, there is an almost musical element of surprise to her.

We both of us jump to our feet and stare up into the canopy of fog, waiting for Colin. A half minute passes, another half minute...no Colin.

And then, from some upper region, comes his stifled cry, and shortly thereafter his body, plummeting to earth. A transformed body: arms aflail, hair bristling with feathers.

Lord Griffyn's peacock, outraged by our presence, has exacted its revenge by fastening itself to Colin's head. These are no longer the overtures of a lover but the predations of a schoolyard bully, and as the boy struggles to free himself, the bird points its beak towards the sky and issues a squawk of triumph. A rallying cry, as it turns out, for within seconds, the rest of the platoon has arrived, and the air is exploding with blues and purples and greens, and our ears ring with screeches and flapping wings rising to an ungodly crescendo, and now the portico stirs with sounds of its own--
human
sounds--and there is no time for cogitation, nothing to do but tear the peacock from Colin's head...watch the tufts of his hair fly free...and hurl the creature at the rest of the colony like a cannonball scattering a horde of infidels.

I grab Colin's and Philomela's hands and sprint for the yew hedge. The birds, howling with fury, rush after us, and from the front of the house comes an unmistakable cry:

--A lantern!

No hope of eluding them this time. We must simply outrun them. Squeeze through the hedge and back to the safety of our cab before they have mobilised their forces.

But in our brief absence, the hedge has become unutterably foreign. Only after an endless interval of searching does Colin find our original path, now even less passable than before. The branches claw with a vengeance this time, and a stream of robust Italian oaths pours from Philomela's mouth as she drags her dress through the brambles. By the time we get to the other side, the dress has been slashed nearly in half--nothing below the waist but petticoats and dangling shreds of silk--and as she pauses to survey the wreckage, an almost tactile relief emanates from her. She has shed her charmed skin.

Through the lattice of the hedge comes the now-familiar nimbus of the lantern, growing larger and larger, and alongside the light, a voice--Rebbeck's voice--shouting:

--Fetch the carriage!

No need to hear more. We're running: Colin in the lead; Philomela, barefooted, right behind; and me, as usual, trailing a yard or two back. We scale the wrought-iron fence and dash down the street, whipping the fog before us. As our feet echo against the pavement stones, a new litany resounds in my head:

Let Adolphus be there. Let Adolphus be there.

At first he is nothing but a bit of effulgence in the fog. Only when we draw nearer does the shape of a lantern resolve from the gloom...then a hand...and finally the doom-laden features of our cabman himself, regarding us as the confirmation of every dark prediction he has ever entertained.

I call up to him:

--Put out your lantern!

--What's he goin' on about?

--Your lantern! Snuff your lantern!

It is as loud as I dare speak, but as soon as the three of us have clambered inside and pulled the door shut after us, Adolphus obliges us by summarily expunging the light.

I rap on the roof of the cab and call up to him:

--No words now.

Some reflexive grumbling, to be sure, but in the end, Adolphus does hold his tongue and leaves us to crouch there in the darkness of the cab, a welter of arms and knees and rocking hearts.

We need not wait long. First comes the sound of a carriage--a forest-green brougham with salmon filigree, if I recall correctly--hurtling past in the darkness, the flash of lantern sweeping from side to side. This is followed by a pilgrimage of ambulatory light, coursing down the far side of Portland Place: lanterns and candles, bobbing in the miasma. The scraping of boots, the muttering of men, and rising above it all, in raspy descant, the tones of Miss Charlotte Binny:

--They can't have got far. Not in this weather.

Beside me, Philomela stiffens, and a part of me, too, freezes over at the sound of the missionary's voice. Better to say it calls me back to a true understanding of our position. In our haste to elude our pursuers, we have allowed ourselves to be encircled. To the north stands the impassable citadel of Griffyn Hall. To the south, a search party, busily combing the avenue, no doubt waylaying each vehicle and pedestrian in turn. How long before the noose closes round us?

We have, as I see it, but one weapon: surprise. And we have but one chance, which is to do the very thing they least expect us to do.

Opening the door, I creep round to the back of the cab and incline my head towards the driver's box.

--Adolphus, can you hear me?

--As if I got any choice. --I want you to light your lantern again.

--Oh, it's on with the lantern, is it? Off again next minute. No consistency, no principle....

--Adolphus, do be quiet a moment. I am going to entrust you with a task, and if you repay my trust, I will place enough money in your palm to buy your own damned horse, do you hear?

Adolphus says nothing. Leaves it to the horse to nod assent in a snort of steam.

--We are going to part company with you now.

--Well, that's a--

--But only for a short time. In the meantime, I want you to drive up the street. Northwards.

--North.

--In a hundred yards or so, you will pass a place called Griffyn Hall.

--Griff--

--You shall know it by the cluster of men in front. Amongst those men will be two police officers.

--Christ! Oh, Christ!

--You needn't worry, Adolphus, so long as you follow my directions to the letter. As you pass, they will almost certainly hail you. They will ask you if you have seen anyone. Specifically, three people answering to our general description.

--Go on.

--You will tell them you have seen no one of the sort. You will tell them, quite truthfully, you have been off duty for the last two hours and are now wending your way home. Do you understand?

--Hmff.

--Repeat after me, then.

--Off duty. Wendin' home.

--Very good. Now, they may insist on looking inside the carriage. Allow them, by all means. A single glance should be enough to persuade them you are telling the truth, and in that event, they should have no choice but to let you pass.

--No choice.

--That accomplished, you are to make directly for the next intersection, is that clear? That is where we will be waiting for you.

--Waiting.

--You needn't fear, Adolphus. If you keep your head about you, you'll be a richer man in ten minutes, and we'll all be in our beds within the hour. Just give us a moment to gather our belongings, then off you go.