The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (6 page)

Moments after her collapse on the floor of the inn parlor, Alice revived, and of course we helped her to her feet and into a chair. For a time she sat there with her eyes closed, catching her breath and her sensibilities, still clutching the cap. When she opened her eyes again they had a steadier sort of look in them, as if she had returned in spirit as well as body and mind. From inside the cap she drew out a crushed piece of paper, then threw the cap angrily into the corner of the room.

Tubby made straightaway to our table to fetch a flagon of tea and a cup. She drank the tea down gratefully, and then after another moment’s rest, happily took a glass of port. She thanked the both of us, looking somewhat recovered, but in no wise happy.

“We’ve been waiting all day for word of St. Ives,” I said to her anxiously.

“I’ve got all the word there is,” she told us, “and none of it good.”

§

The madness that had possessed her for the past three days had diminished when St. Ives put the asbestos cap upon her head, and had evaporated utterly when she was well clear of Heathfield. Of the madness itself, she recalled that some of it was wonderful, some of it horrifying, but the memory of it was already fading from her mind, as if it had been a waking dream, even now only a memory of a memory.

Some few days previously she and the niece Sydnee had been strolling through the village, where the spring Cuckoo Fair was just then getting underway. The streets were awash with people, with dozens in the costume of St. Richard and with feast booths set up and a great deal of merriment that the weather couldn’t dampen. The legendary cuckoo was on display, looking something like a large pigeon that someone had waxed artistic with. The two of them had stopped to hobnob with the bird, when suddenly, without warning of any sort, although Alice faintly recalls a high-pitched keening in the air, the world, in her words, “tipped sideways.” On the instant the feast day merriment turned to mayhem. She found herself sitting in the road, with the odd certainty that she was the literal embodiment of the Heathfield cuckoo. She remembered chuckling out loud there in the street—not laughing, mind you, but chuckling like a hen on a nest—convinced that her dress was woven of feathers rather than merino wool.

She recalls Sydnee wandering off, snatching at the air as if trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp, and in the days that followed Alice never once saw her niece again, or didn’t know her if she did. Those days might as well have been moments or years, her sense of the passing of time having abdicated. She somehow found her way home to the cottage, where she conversed with hobgoblins and wraiths, although the hobgoblins might simply have been the Tipper and his cronies.

She fell silent for a time after telling us this, and then in a smaller voice said, “I left him there. I simply fled. It was what he wished—what he commanded. And yet it was cowardice on my part. There was a fallen pistol that I might have reached, had I acted instead of standing there stupefied. There was also that horrible man aiming his own pistol at me. He was injured, though. His arm was in a sling. I might have prevailed over him.” She stared into the purple depths of the port. “I fled through the woods, right into the midst of the soldiers at the blockade. I had removed the cap by then, and at first they assumed I was insane, and perhaps I still was, a bit. I told them that a man had been assaulted, because I didn’t know what else to call it, but they were in no haste to venture into Heathfield. I bid them good day and quite coolly walked away into the woods and came here, every step of the way thinking I should turn back, regretting that I had left St. Ives in such peril.”

“By God they would have shot you, too, Alice, if you had,” Tubby told her sensibly. “You must see that. Your value to them was to draw St. Ives into Heathfield. Once you had, you were worth nothing. Jack and I would have been sitting here playing Whist while the two of you disappeared out of existence. But here you are, alive and well,
precisely
because you weren’t rash. Now we three can put our considerable shoulders to the wheel.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “They allowed me to go. They want something, and they believe that I might provide it for them. They wouldn’t have hindered me.”

“Perhaps,” Tubby said. “But in any event you were better out of it. And they wouldn’t have
had
to kill you. They’d simply have had to remove your cap. You couldn’t have prevailed against them. The three of us might, however.”

I half listened to Tubby’s assurances, but I had been shocked to stony silence by Alice’s pronouncements. St. Ives taken? It was almost too much for me to grasp, even though I had feared that very thing. There were indeed three of us, but clearly there was only the one cap, and no time to find the elusive “wheel” that we were to put our shoulders to. I couldn’t abide waiting. I strode to the corner full of bloody-minded thoughts and plucked up the cap, looking out the window toward the edge of the forest, which was dark now. There was no question of the identity of the man with his arm in a sling, nor any question of his being a cold-blooded devil. Alice had described the third man: clearly the Peddler, but at that moment I didn’t much care if he was Beelzebub in a dogcart.

Tubby saw what I was up to with the cap straightaway. “Don’t be unwise, Jack,” he said, taking me by the arm. “Alice has just escaped from that mire of human scum. There’s no sense in your wading back in.”

“There’s but the one cap,” I told him, as if that justified my going alone or at all.

“And there’s no telling how many of the villains are at work. St. Ives sees things far more clearly than either of us. Now that the prey has fallen into the trap, they’ll almost certainly return to Beachy Head. The battle of Heathfield was lost, although thank God Alice was not. Your visiting the scene of the battle can’t come to anything useful. At best it’s a mere delay. We’ll do what St. Ives asked and take the battle to them, by heaven. It wasn’t but half an hour ago that you were telling me the same thing. Listen to yourself if you won’t listen to me, but listen to yourself sober, for God’s sake, and not drunk on anger.”

There was of course a great deal of sense in what he said, although I still couldn’t see more than a red glimmer of it. But then Alice prevailed upon me to read the message on the folded piece of foolscap that she had found in the cap—apparently the first of the two messages that St. Ives had written out that morning, for the nib of the pen was still sharp.

“Dearest Alice…” it began, and what followed was the plea of a man whose hopes were defeated. His first concern, you see, was to put things right between the two of them. But Alice’s tears as we silently read the note made it clear that she had no idea that things had gone wrong, no earthly notion of the Professor’s misery, the ebbing of his hope, as if he believed that love was as shifting and transitory as the tides. What strange things we convince ourselves of when the shadows descend upon us!

In short, the first part of the note, written hastily in the darkness of the early morning hours, is none of our business here.

“Follow the track east into the sun,” the message read. “Across the road and some two miles farther on, you’ll find the coal pits, which Tubby Frobisher tells us consumes a considerable acreage. It’s his invaluable knowledge of the area that I depend on here. The path that skirts the pits will come out of the forest directly behind the Old Coach Inn, Blackboys, where Tubby and Jack will be waiting. If I’m taken, my guess is that it’ll be to Beachy Head. Narbondo’s goal is ransom, not murder, although murder might follow the ransom, as it often does. If you’re reading this, then I’m no longer the captain of my fate. Adieu, Alice.”

That was the long and the short of it, although the “adieu” was preceded by another profession of his love, as if the first wasn’t convincing. There was an irony at work here. Alice had been driven mad by the machinations of a human monster, and St. Ives had rushed impetuously into danger to rescue her. Now their roles were reversed, and it was Alice’s turn to play the hero, for she wouldn’t be talked into returning home to Chingford under any circumstances, despite both Tubby and I bringing the cannons of logic to bear upon her flank, so to speak. Alice had a single contentious desire, and that was to find St. Ives and to bring him out of bondage alive.

The mention of the fortified emerald brought up more questions than it answered, so we left Alice to read the note that John Gunther had brought to us that morning, and set out down the hallway to fetch our bags. In a little over an hour there was a southward-bound mail coach that would take us on into Dicker, and the three of us were determined to be on it. We would spend the night at Tubby’s uncle’s house, find Alice some suitable accoutrements, and lay out our plan. However it fell out, the three of us would not go quite so impetuously into the environs of Beachy Head as St. Ives had gone into Heathfield.

It took but a moment to ready ourselves for the trip south. The coach sat in the yard, the coachman eating his supper inside. We had forty minutes of waiting, and were determined not to stand idle. There was no telling what we would find at Beachy Head or along the way, but it might easily be further outbreaks of madness, in which case we wanted for asbestos caps, which meant paying the Tipper’s residence a visit. Tubby insisted that with a little luck we might manage to burn his shack to the ground, but Alice wasn’t keen on the idea of gambling away the higher stakes by engaging in irrelevant pleasures, nor was she keen on remaining at the inn while Tubby and I went off on the errand. The Tipper wouldn’t be there, we assumed. Surely he wouldn’t be so brazen as to return to Blackboys, knowing that Alice had escaped and that the two of us waited at the inn.

We went out then, the night blessedly dry and with a shred of moonlight. In the stable we found our young friend helping the coach horses to bags of oats. He leapt up like a jack-in-the-box when he saw us and asked could he be of service. Perhaps Tubby
had
given him a half crown, for he was singularly anxious to oblige us. We asked merely that he describe the Tipper’s shack, which he did with particular care.

“It’s a low hovel of a place,” he said, “that sits alone at the bottom of the road near the forest. There’s a pile of old trash you’ll see alongside, and the door is half a-hanging. One of the great rusty hinges is broke-like, and the top of the door is fixed with a hook and eye. It’s a lazy man’s dodge, and a bloke could find his way in easy enough by setting a pry bar into the gap or knocking out that hook.”

“I see that you’re a sharp one, Mr. Gunther,” Tubby said, giving him a wink. “Will you do us another service now?” The boy replied that he would, anything we required, all the time goggling at Alice. “Don’t mention at all that we’ve been round talking to you,” Tubby told him. “And if anything out of the way happens at the Tipper’s shack tonight, perhaps you’d be good enough to know nothing at all about it or about the three of us either.”

“I ain’t heard nothing,” he said, making a key-turning motion in front of his lips. “I hate the bloody Tipper. Nothing but cuffs and curses from the likes of him, and him a bleeding midget, begging your lady’s pardon.”

“And don’t let the mail coach go on without us,” Tubby said, giving him another half crown, which he accepted gleefully, it apparently being his lucky day.

With that we left our bags in his care and went along down the High Street in a singular hurry, but silent as phantoms, past two blocks of miners’ cottages, with more set behind them in rows. The village was quiet on the damp Sabbath evening, people staying indoors, which was to the good if Alice had some sort of mischief on her mind. She has as much pluck as does St. Ives, although she is, if I might say it, far easier to look at than the Professor, who is growing tolerably craggy as the years pass. Alice has what might be called a natural beauty, which strikes you even if she’s just come in out of a storm or from mucking about in the garden. She’s moderately tall, very fit, with eyes that are just a little bit piercing, as if she sees things, you included, particularly clearly. Her dark hair is perhaps her best feature—perpetually a little wild and refusing to stay pinned down, something like the woman herself. I write all this in the interests of literary accuracy, of course. My own betrothed, Dorothy Keeble, a beauty of a different stamp, would tell you the same about Alice, who has become her great good friend.

The Tipper’s hovel sat conveniently alone, a good distance below the rest of the village, partway down a grassy decline: our good luck, for we wouldn’t be easily heard or seen. It was just as the boy had described it, right down to the junk pile and the badly hung door with its makeshift hinge, which you could see easily enough in the moonlight that shone on the front wall. We were crossing the last patch of ground when we saw a glim of light inside the hovel, right along the edge of a curtain, as if someone had opened the slide on a dark lantern to see what he was about.

“
Here’s
a bit of luck,” whispered Tubby. “He’s sneaked back after his swag, I’ll warrant, before clearing out. I’ll just see to the front door, and you two go around to the back, eh? He’ll have a bolt-hole. No doubt he’ll make for the woods.”

We set out without a moment to spare across the wet grass, thankful for the curtains on the window, which would hide us as well as they would hide the Tipper, if it was him mucking around inside. Tubby of course carried his blackthorn stick with him, but I had no sort of weapon, and neither did Alice. There in the weedy trash, however, lay a serendipitous length of rusted pipe, which I snatched up in passing. Despite my rough treatment aboard the train, the idea of similarly bashing anyone with a length of pipe didn’t much appeal to me, although the idea of the Tipper slipping away from us appealed even less, and I was determined to do the useful thing.

We had scarcely taken up our position outside the rear door when there was the crash of the front door coming down, a shout from Tubby, and the sound of running feet. I raised the length of pipe and was moving forward when the door flew open and the Tipper hurled himself down the several wooden steps, wearing a slouch hat and carrying a canvas bag. He was clearly intent upon making for the safety of the woods, which would have been easy enough if it were only Tubby in pursuit. I stepped in front of him, however, crouching down, drawing back the piece of pipe like a cricket bat. He endeavored to slow himself, but gravity had helped impel him down the steps, and now the hillside was doing the same. He rushed at me headlong, swinging the canvas bag and slamming me on the shoulder with it, knocking me sideways. I swung my piece of pipe as I fell, clipping him neatly on the back of the leg behind the knee. The bag flew out of his hands, sailing away toward Alice as he sprawled forward. Alice picked the bag up, and the thing was done.

Tubby came out then, puffing and blowing like a whale. “Looks like a pawnbroker’s shop inside,” he said.

Miraculously, despite his tumble, the Tipper still wore his slouch hat, which Tubby plucked from his head now, cuffing him twice across the face with it. “You’re in the presence of a lady, you goddamned rascal,” he said, and then he sailed the hat away down the hill, where it settled over the top of a moonlit stone. The Tipper looked at us hatefully, a human bomb about to detonate.

Alice tugged open the drawstrings of the bag and peered inside, reaching in and pulling out two of the asbestos caps and tossing them to me. “Sydnee’s silver,” she said, taking another look. “Tableware and candelabra.” She reached inside and drew out a clasp purse, which she snapped open. “Jewelry—Sydnee’s jewelry—and a good lot of coin. Here’s my broach, too, and my necklace….”

“You
crawling
piece of filth,” Tubby said to the Tipper, raising the blackthorn stick menacingly. The Tipper cringed away, certain that he was about to be pummeled, but Alice sensibly shook her head at Tubby.

“Into the house with him,” she said, “quickly.”

In an unwise moment I latched onto the Tipper’s coat, twisting it in my fist and yanking him to his feet. More quickly than I could follow, he snatched a dirk from a scabbard in his boot and took a swipe at my arm, tearing through the sleeve of my coat. I felt the blade slice through skin, a sharp pain, and a wash of warm blood on my forearm. In my surprise I let go of the handful of coat and reeled back, sitting down hard. The Tipper lurched away toward the woods again, running like a hare. Tubby swarmed past me in pursuit, but it was an uneven race, and by the time I had joined in, gripping my bleeding arm, the Tipper had already disappeared into the shadow of the forest.

Tubby returned, looking immensely unhappy. I could do nothing but apologize, although of course there was no point in it. None of us had seen the dirk, after all, and it might have gone even worse for one of us if things had fallen out differently. “I’m all right,” I said, when I saw Alice’s anxiety. I pressed my coat and shirtsleeve hard against the wound and gave her my best smile.

In we went without another word. The Tipper’s lantern was still lit, sitting where it had sat when Tubby pried open the door, which hung out across the threshold now, aslant the bottom hinge. The place was littered with stolen goods—porcelain objects, bric-a-brac, paintings, furs and other garments. The Tipper had been a busy little thief. How he intended to flee with the goods I can’t say, unless he had a cart waiting somewhere. Perhaps he had returned merely to take out the coin and the jewelry and meant to leave the rest. We didn’t have time to puzzle it out, for we couldn’t brook any delay. Our mail coach would soon be standing idle on our account, and we had an aversion to calling attention to ourselves and even more of being left behind.

We dressed the wound on my arm with gin and with a silk scarf as a bandage and went out through the back door again, shutting it after us, Alice carrying the canvas bag. I felt first rate, I can tell you, despite my sliced-up arm. We had put our hands on the swag and had two more caps into the bargain, should we need them. We hadn’t ended the Tipper’s depredations, but we’d taken some of the wind out of his sails—real progress, it seemed to me, and the whole job hadn’t taken a half hour.

The coach waited in the yard, the horses stamping and whinnying, the wind out of the south with the faint smell of salt on it. John Gunther stood with our luggage looking anxious. When he saw us he hurried across, holding out what appeared to be a stiffish envelope. Alice took it from him.

“A man give this to me directly you went down to the Tipper’s,” the boy said. “He was an ugly article, with a head like the moon.”

“Dressed in brown tweed?” I asked him.

“That’s the one.”

“The Peddler!” I said to Tubby as Alice slipped a largish photograph out of the envelope, tilting it toward the gas lamp to see it clearly. Something came over her face then, and it seemed to me that she went as pale as she had been when she had walked into the inn an hour ago. She steadied herself and handed me the photograph, which reeked of chemicals. It was of Langdon St. Ives, lying in a wooden coffin. At first I thought he was dead, and I simply couldn’t breathe, but he was not. He was evidently mad, his eyes opened unnaturally wide, as if he were staring at some descending horror. His forearms were raised, his hands half closed so that they appeared to be claws. At the bottom of the photograph, in a scrawl of grease pen, were the words, “Belle Tout Light. Eleven in the morning. Bring the stone.”

The meaning was clear. They hadn’t sent the message with Alice when they allowed her to flee from Heathfield, because they intended to underscore the demand with the photograph, which was a hellish obscenity. They had made a tolerably quick business of it—anticipated our movements, too, as we stumbled about imagining ourselves to be acting, when in fact we had inevitably been acted upon.

I tipped the photograph into the flame of the gas lamp until it blazed, burning down to my fingers before I dropped it to the cobbles of the courtyard and ground it beneath my heel. My recently elevated mood had vanished. I regretted letting the Tipper get the better of me. I regretted Tubby’s having prevented me from going into Heathfield alone. I regretted not having been at the Inn when the Peddler delivered the photograph. The night was suddenly a hailstorm of regrets. I told myself that I might yet see the whole crowd of villains hanging from gibbets, but it was cold comfort.

Alice very calmly asked John Gunther if he would do us one final service. She even managed to smile at the boy, who was staring at my bloody coat sleeve now, apprehension in his eyes. After our departure, Alice told him, he was to fetch the constable and say that he had been out taking the air when he’d seen someone coming out through the Tipper’s door, which was broken from its hinges, and making away downhill. She put another coin into the boy’s hand, and he nodded reassuringly. The three of us turned to the coach, as impatient as the coachman to be on our way. Our business in Blackboys was at an end. The authorities would find the leftover swag before anyone else thought to loot the place. When sanity returned to Heathfield, as it perhaps already had, the Tipper’s victims might at least recover what they’d lost.

The three of us climbed into the empty coach, which swayed as if on heavy seas as Tubby hoisted himself aboard. The driver hied-up the horses and away we went down the road toward Dicker, rattling and creaking along. The moon was high in the sky now, and the forest trees along the roadside shone with a silver aura, the wind just brisk enough to move the branches.