Mr. Timothy: A Novel (45 page)

A promising name that is quickly belied by the reality: a bleak black outcropping of pier, ringed with snow and peopled by a few lone shivering figures--watermen, probably, waiting for the fares that have eluded them all year round.

I set down my oars, grateful for the reprieve but not yet ready for the labour to follow. The
cerebral
labour of finding Griffyn and his men amidst all this snow and mist and darkness.

They cannot have chosen the dock--too many witnesses. Neither can they have wandered too far, if Mrs. Sharpe is to be believed. Clear as a bell, the way she said it: By St. Saviour's.
By
St. Saviour's.

And what a wealth of ambiguity is contained in that single word.
By
could be a mile in any direction. We could spend days and nights exploring that
by
and be no closer to our end.

The boat, with no one to scull it, spins in slow, wobbly circles. The snowflakes flutter and whirl about us like maddened bees. We pay them as much attention as a statue would, for we are all of us engaged in the same activity: pulling back the curtains of night to find a scattered few of its denizens. Our heads wheel east, west, north, and south. Our eyes squint and expand, cutting this way as the next, as every fibre of our respective beings is assigned to this quixotic search.

Where are they?

The more I seek them, the more I am drawn back to the events of last night, to Griffyn Hall. That wall of fog rearing up, and the two of us, Colin and I, crouched by the hedge, waiting for a sign of occupancy or intent, waiting without hope but with a faint underlay of expectancy. And then being rewarded with that flaring match.

It all comes back with such a rush of immediacy that when I first see the miniature explosion of light in the distance, I mistake it for a memory. Indeed, I am prepared to pass on without giving it another thought, until I see Colin pointing in the same direction and jumping up in the boat, nearly tipping himself out in the process.

By then, the light has already vanished. Reconstructing it in my mind, I see once again the quick inflammatory burst, swelling and then shrinking down to a tiny point and then disappearing. The very flame a match would make.

And by the time I have reached that conclusion, I have already snatched up the oars, and I am rowing harder than ever--Atlas, indeed--and we are coursing through the water, fast as a steamboat, and the pumping of my arms is matched only by the pumping of my heart, and my eyes have sprung open to their farthest compass, the better to fix the sector from which that mysterious light emanated.

And then comes another light. Flaring up out of nothing and, just as quickly, disappearing.

A pair of them. A pair of smokers.

Oh, yes, I fully acknowledge there might be any number of explanations for two such lights. There might be any number of people capable of making them. But this is all we have been given; this is what we will take.

Rowing now in a perfect fury, I propel us through the water in a clean, hard line, staying parallel to the shore and steering solely by the memory of those two lights--navigating by them the way mariners use stars. The rowing is even more exacting now. Every muscle in my arms and shoulders and legs shouts in protest. My knee lodges the largest objection of all. Winter has gnawed it down to a prickly stump, and there is nothing to do but row beyond the pain and keep rowing until I can be sure we have passed the vicinity in question. Only then do I ease up on the sculls. Only then do I turn us on an angle and begin the more delicate work of bringing us to shore.

Another ten minutes go by before the shoreline presents itself, and still more time before I can find a margin wide enough to take us. The tide has risen in the last hour, and as I leap out of the boat and drag it to land, the tide keeps dragging us back. It takes all my doing, and all Colin's doing, to bring the boat to a halt on the narrow spit of gravel.

With my muscles still howling and gnashing, I permit myself a swig of Gully's brandy...then another...and it turns out to be just the tonic: a ring of reassurance.

--Mr. Timothy! Pull the bricks out your arse! Already Colin is stalking back down the shoreline, and Philomela and I are making haste to follow. Keeping up with him is a little easier than it was last night, for there is no knapsack to drag me down. Just my oilskin cap and my sodden pea coat, into which I have inserted the one item I would never have thought to call upon: George's revolver.

My hand closes round it now. Hard and beaded with melted snow and strangely warm, as though it had been firing itself in my absence. Its touch gives me no comfort; it only recalls me to how far out of my element I have come.

By now, the snow is falling full force, half blinding us with each sweep of our eyelashes, and yet one might think it had never existed to behold the prospect before us. The riverbanks, the waggons, the warehouses, the windows of the provisioners' shops--everything is coated in a blackness so thick that any snowflake is swallowed entire. All the colliers on the Thames, all the chimneys of London, the entire sum of England's industrial furnaces could have disgorged their burdens of soot right here and still not have attained to quite this degree of pitch.

And these smells! Glue and leather and dog droppings and the nauseating trace of strawberry jam, blurring into an indefinable, illimitable scent of rot. But if Colin notices any of it, he is in no way put off. He pushes past each building, pushes through the wind and snow...until at last he stops and thrusts his shoulders back and, without a word, points into the near distance.

Standing there by an abandoned custom house are two men, dressed in the manner of coal heavers. Their voices, unimpeded, fly towards us.

--Any bloody day.

--Extra wages, I
don't
think.

--Stow that, will you?

--Stow it yourself.

No different, in speech or appearance, from any pair of labourers you might find along the southern end of the river or along the Docks. No different but for this: they are holding their lanterns to landward. Shielding their light from the view of passing boats.

A detail, that is all. And rising out of it, an intuition, or else just a fond hope, that these two coal heavers are something other: the men who were keeping vigil with Rebbeck on the portico of Griffyn Hall.

But there is no means of positively identifying them. We cannot draw any closer without alerting them to our presence, and we cannot gain another angle on them without either plunging into the icy river or heading southwards into realms unknown.

And then I notice a rather striking particularity about the building next to which the men are standing: although it has been propped up in divers places by enormous crutches, the impromptu surgery has done nothing to keep the rear half of the roof from slipping away-- dropping clean off the framing. This displaced sheet of tar and shingle now forms a crude embankment between the ground and the upper story, and it is up this embankment that Colin and Philomela and I, without another word, now scramble.
The detached roof holds firm beneath our feet, and within a minute, we are standing where the roof once stood, crawling along naked ceiling joists and peering down into the custom house. A tableau of arrested domesticity: one small oaken table; two chairs pushed back; a plate of cabbage, still recognisable; a single black stocking wound round a newel post.

--Look.

Colin taps me on the arm and points to the clearing below: a cramped, desolate courtyard stretching from the custom house to an abandoned mill just to the south. Against that mill's sluice gate, a broad front of Thames water has crested, creating a small inlet--fifteen feet wide and perhaps eight feet deep--entirely invisible to passing vessels. Some farsighted soul has even built a tiny dock projecting halfway across the inlet. And fate itself has so thoroughly emptied the surrounding space that the only remaining occupants are discarded pails and the strewn skeletons of dead cats. I feel, against my better nature, a tingle of admiration. Griffyn's men have found perhaps the one place on the riverfront where they may come and go unobserved.

The two coal heavers below don't seem particularly to relish their privacy. The snow has grizzled their caps; white epaulets have gathered on their shoulders. The only concession they make to the cold, though, is to bury their hands in their pockets and mutter a mild oath or two under their breath. One of them--fearful, perhaps, of being declared insubordinate--casts a quick backwards look and then, reassured, returns to his original post. But in that fleeting moment, I have time to follow the line of his eye to its logical end, to see a waggon with a quiescent horse...and two additional figures stationed by the custom-house door.

Of the two, Miss Binny is the more easily recognised. Her towering figure, her black cloak, as ill fitting as the dress it conceals...these I would know in any setting. In her mouth, shockingly enough, is a cigarette, whose lit end allows me to trace the wide, amiable curve of her mouth, as she puffs prodigiously and exchanges inaudible small talk with the smoker on her left.

This latter personage remains clothed in shadow until one of the coal heavers' lanterns accidentally swings his way, revealing the blunt features of that well-known face. Last night's frock coat has been discarded in favour of the customary work attire, and the bowler has once again been wrenched into place, although it is not quite able to conceal the swath of white bandage that has been wrapped round Rebbeck's crown. Neither is his air of studied leisure able to hide the asymmetry of his stance: he is clearly favouring one leg, a fact that affords me no small amount of satisfaction. He stands there now, in the falling snow, like the occupant of an opera box, waiting with barely suppressed boredom for the musical onslaught to begin.

We are all of us waiting--for what, I have only some small idea. Still, I cannot help but note the tics of annoyance that take hold of Rebbeck each time he consults his watch.
They're behind schedule
, I think. They should have been done and gone some time ago. And the longer they are put off, surely, the more brightly Providence will shine on my cause. God willing, the police have already been to Mrs. Sharpe's. God willing, they are even now wending their way downriver....

Or else no one is coming. No one at all.

--Looooo.... A long, lowing cry, rising out of the east. The sound jerks Rebbeck's head upwind, draws a relieved smile across Miss Binny's taut features, and spurs the two men into attitudes of expectancy, as they swing their lanterns, for the first time, towards the river.

In the sweep of light, I can just make out the charcoal outlines of a boat, propelled by two men, washing towards us on a torrent of speckled, febrile water. So much frothing and hissing that the vessel itself has the quality of an afterthought, rocking in the river's troughs even as it steers a steady course for the dock. It is a homely vessel, smaller than a barge, larger than a dory...unexceptional in every way, right down to its contents.

Boxes.

Ten boxes, to be precise. Phosphorescent with snow and arrayed in staggered tiers.

Tonight does not mark the first time these boxes have been brought to this pier, judging by the practiced ease, the air of rote with which the pilots and heavers go about their work. One casts the rope, one catches it, one slips it over the piling--and within minutes, the boat has been hauled in and secured, and all four men are hefting the boxes out of the hold and laying them in a neat row by the bank of the stream.

Pairing off, they proceed to carry the boxes to the waiting waggon. The footing is slippery, but the work is quick and methodical, and scarcely a sound escapes from either the men or their cargo. For all anyone might say else, these really are pedestals from Ostend.

From my chimney perch, I see Miss Binny rap twice on the custom-house door. And then, after a yawning interval, the door swings open, and into the courtyard strides Lord Frederick Griffyn.

In his raglan-sleeved Inverness cape and his resplendent square-toed button boots...the rosegold ring squeezed defiantly onto his finger...he is the model of gentility under pressure. With a dreamy half grin, he steps into the center of the courtyard, careful not to meet anyone's eye, almost bashful as each eye turns to meet his. He points to the rearmost box, which has yet to be placed in the waggon, and in a softly inflected voice, says:

--That one.

The two men tasked with carrying the box lower it slowly to the ground. They look at each other, then at Rebbeck.

Still pointing, His Lordship says:

--Open it, if you please.

But the two men are too baffled to carry out the command, and so it falls to Rebbeck to stride forward, undo the latch, and pry open the lid.

By my side, I see Philomela shrink away, cast her eyes eastward. But Colin and I, in spite of ourselves, cannot help but look.

Even with our bird's-eye view, though, we see at first only inky absence, until Lord Griffyn, availing himself of Miss Binny's lantern, steps forward and, sweeping his arm round, bathes the box in an umber light. And now everything is plain to behold.
A small girl with long, limp, whitish hair and an even whiter face. She is pale enough to qualify as a corpse, but the lantern light has already pricked her eyes open, and as the night aromas rush in, she unleashes a huge wave of air, as if she had been holding her breath all the way from Belgium. She raises her head and then, under the combined scrutiny of all these onlookers, lowers it again, and as she sinks back, I can hear the faint echo of bilge water splashing against the box's inner walls.

Followed by another, even fainter echo: Colin's awestruck whisper.

--Holy Christ....

Griffyn is now standing directly above the box, peeling off his gloves. With his right hand, he reaches down to caress the girl's cold, ashen face. Then, obscurely satisfied, he snaps his fingers twice. The men gather round once again, and in the ensuing flurry, we catch a glimpse of that small flaxen head, turned all the way to one side, as though it might press itself into the wood's grain. And then the perforated lid is once again shut, and the box is hoisted onto the waggon bed, squeezed into the niche left by its mates.