The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter (25 page)

Then a brick crashed through the galley porthole, broken glass shattering onto the floor. Other crashes sounded in the sleeping cabins. A torch lunged forward. I could just see the arm that held it. It reached through the ruined porthole and flailed around, holding the flame to the cotton drapes, which caught quickly. Fire started to lick up the wall. My hand shaking I tapped a measure of powder into the pan and cocked the hammer. Just as I was about to pull the trigger, I saw my attacker’s face. It was Sal. I rushed forwards and pushed the gun barrel into his chest. He dropped the torch and lurched back. Dropping my aim, I fired into his leg.

This time I forgot to close my eyes and saw the muzzle flash. But the gun was outside the window and the shot not as loud. There was no deafness to deaden Sal’s scream of pain.

The sleeve of my nightgown had caught fire. I leapt back, plunging my arm into the nearest bucket, dousing it in cold water. The same bucket I threw at the burning curtains.

The floor was wet. I slipped as I ran to my brother’s sleeping cabin. A torch guttered harmlessly in the middle of the floor. But in my own cabin the flames had caught in the bedclothes. Two buckets doused it, but smoke had made the air noxious. I coughed and retched, each inhalation bringing more foulness into my lungs. Eyes streaming, I pressed two handfuls of my soaked nightgown over my nose and mouth.

Outside were shouts and running feet, distant but closing fast. I heard the barking of a large hound.

“Thieves! Thieves!” called one voice.

“Murderers!” called another.

The hue and cry had started. Other canal folk moored further along the cut were coming to my aid. I groped my way to the rear hatch, unbolted it and crawled out onto the crutch, gasping for clean air. My bare feet slipped on the wet deck.

The old man from the coal boat was first to my side, followed a step behind by his eldest son. The boy saw me and instantly averted his eyes. The old man threw a coat over my shoulders. I looked down at myself. The soaking had rendered my nightgown transparent.

Mr Simmonds arrived next, clutching an old and dangerous looking musket.

I wrapped the coat around me and tried to stand, but slipped again.

“Where is he?” my landlord shouted. “The thief, show me where!”

I gestured vaguely into the night.

The coal man’s wife hurried up, a candle lantern in her hand. She looked me up and down, then turned to her son and her husband. “Bandages. Be quick! The girl is shot.”

I looked down and saw that the deck was not wet with water but with blood, which seeped from cuts in the soles of my feet.

“It was glass,” I said. “Broken glass. I must have...”

“But we heard shots.”

“That was...” I stopped myself before the truth came out. “That was my brother.”

“Is he safe?”

“He gave chase,” I said.

A murmur of approval went around the small crowd who had gathered on the towpath.

“Good for him,” said the coal boat man. “And good for you also, Elizabeth.”

“Don’t you Elizabeth her!” scolded his wife. “Get the bandages!”

At which he hurried off.

“How do you feel?” she asked

“I don’t know.” I thought about the broken glass and the smoke and the water damage to my few possessions. More than likely there would be holes in the galley wall from the lead shot. “Angry,” I said at last. “Angry and resolved.”

Chapter 30

A good trick may make you rich. But a risky trick will make you famous. If it goes wrong.

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

When I fled at the age of fourteen, the Duke of Northampton’s men-at-arms in hot pursuit, I thought I was running towards freedom. Wading the river, hungry and half frozen to death, I crossed into the Republic and out of his reach.

But an exile is never free.

Always the Kingdom was in my mind – its vivid colours and spontaneity, its people driven more by emotion than logic. Forsaking such things may seem of no significance compared to the life of degradation I had escaped. But I could never escape my yearning for the gaudy exuberance of the place I had left behind.

It is ironic then, that on the very day I most clearly felt my love for my new home in the Republic, when its careful seemliness had reached out and gathered me in, I should also understand that the Kingdom was about to claim me once more.

The community of the cut felt more like a family that night than it ever had. They enfolded me in their care and protection. I assured them that my attackers would not return so soon, but they set up a rota all the same, taking turns to watch until the sky paled.

The coal boatman’s wife washed and bandaged my feet. Then I was put to bed alongside two of her daughters, squeezed in top to toe, our bedroll laid out next to a pot-bellied stove. With my mind full of new understandings, I thought I would stay awake until dawn. But once the candle was snuffed, I quickly fell into a dreamless sleep. When I woke in the morning, the coal boatman’s daughters pressed up for warmth on either side, it was with a calmness and clarity of thought I had not felt since I first met the Duchess of Bletchley.

The Sleepless Man did not try to hide. Rather, he sat in plain sight some fifty yards distant, a fishing rod resting over his knee, a red and yellow float bobbing on the rippled surface of the canal. He did not turn his head to look, but I knew he watched me. I knew he would not try to take a knife to me in unforgiving daylight. He was gaoler rather than executioner, for the time being. He was a sentry left to police my house arrest. But the moment he saw me try to run, I had no doubt his role would change.

Therefore, I went about my business unhurried. When the dairyman’s boy rang his bell on the lane, I climbed the path from the cut, swinging a tin jug in my hand, returning with it full a few minutes later. The morning being free of rain, I draped the soaked linen and blankets over
Bessie
’s roof to dry. One does not lay out washing when preparing an escape.

Then I was up the path again, observed in everything I did.

“I shall be going away,” I told Mr Simmonds in a lowered voice.

“So soon?” said his wife, who stood next to him in the hallway. “You need to recuperate, Elizabeth. Your poor feet must have time to mend. And what of your brother?”

“He’s out chasing the villains still.”

She wrung her hands in front of her chest. “So brave. So brave.”

Such was the transformation in her attitude towards me, I began to think I had missed an opportunity and should have hired actors to stage an assault on
Bessie
years before.

“And what of your boat?” Mr Simmonds asked. “She’s not weatherproof. The portholes want for glazing.”

“Your boathouse is empty,” I said.

He scratched his head. “Ordinarily I charge...”

“But you shall not this time, Mr Simmonds,” cut in his wife.

“You would have my gratitude,” I said.

“The poor girl has had such a turn of misfortune.”

“It’s more for
Bessie
’s safety than for the rain,” I said. “I fear the men who did this might return.”

This last point seemed to convince Mr Simmonds. “Very well,” he said.

In the second after they had turned to lead me from the house, I snatched a china dog of which I knew Mrs Simmonds to be particularly fond, and, feeling a twinge of guilt, slipped it into the folds of my coat.

I watched Mr Simmonds and his man leaning back as they hauled the ropes, guiding my beloved
Bessie
into the narrow safety of the boathouse. My sodden bedding still lay on the roof. From his place on the canal bank, the Sleepless Man watched also, a slight tension in his posture as the oak doors swung closed.

“One foot longer and she wouldn’t have fit,” said Mr Simmonds, slotting the lock in place. “She’s a fine boat, though. I saw her that time she ran London to Nottingham. Her paddles churned the water white. Broke the record by almost an hour. Never dreamed she’d be moored in my boathouse! Have you thought to get the engine working? She’d be a sight.”

“It may be that someone will come looking while I’m gone,” I said. “A man with a credit notice trying to seize her. I’d be glad if you could keep the boathouse locked.”

It was noon when I finally walked the path to where the Sleepless Man sat fishing. He did not look up until I stopped next to him.

“Hello,” he said.

“Are you here as warning to drive me away or as a watchman to make sure I stay put?”

“I’ll kill you if you try to run.”

“And if I stay?”

He turned back to stare at his float. The silence grew in the space between us.

“The fishing is clever,” I said, at last. “Working men respect it. And I can’t prove that you were one of my attackers. Not without telling them things I don’t care to admit.” I crouched down and opened his catch bag to look inside. “Nothing biting?”

“Where’s your brother hiding?” he asked.

I closed the bag and stood. “He watches over me.”

“Keep your nose out of men’s business, little girl,” he said.

“You’d be surprised what I consider my business!”

“The kitchen and the bedroom,” he said. “That’s where you belong.”

I turned and stalked back along the path, past the boathouse and up to the coal barge where I had slept the night before.

The Sleepless Man did not know he was their target. The coal boatman and his sons approached along the towpath. Five more young men of the cut converged from the other side, each carrying some weapon – staves and axe handles for the most part. Mr Simmonds appeared at the top of the embankment, the musket clutched to his chest. Then the Sleepless Man understood. But too late. He scrambled to his feet but they were on him.

I hauled my travelling case out of the boathouse and started to make my way up the path away from the cut.

“You! Stand where you are!” ordered the coal boatman.

“What’s this about?” came the Sleepless Man’s reply.

“You sir, are a thief!”

“You accuse me?”

The voices grew fainter as I clipped briskly across the courtyard towards the road.

“Search him boys.”

“No– I’ve not–. I’ve never seen them before!”

“Strange fish you’ve been catching!”

I was too far by then to hear whether the Sleepless Man started to offer an explanation for the presence in his catch bag of the china dog from the Simmonds’ house and a small painted milk jug that had until recently adorned the top of the coal boat. Either way, he was not allowed to finish. He cried out in pain as the beating began.

A rattling omnibus carried me down Melton Road through the sprawling suburbs of North Leicester. Though a shroud of mist hung low, turning the houses grey, yet I seemed to see every brick in vivid colour. A reluctant Republican I may have been, yet now as I headed towards the border, perhaps never to return, the details were suddenly precious to me.

My fate, together with that of Mr Orville and Harry Timpson had become inextricably tangled with a mysterious machine. I had seen through too many illusions to give credence to the claims made for it. Yet it had persuaded the great impresario.

I pondered the question of how a box could draw with light. In my mind I pictured a moth-hole in a curtain, through which the bright sunlight streamed into a smoke filled room. Such an arrangement could make a line to appear suspended in the air. Perhaps Mr Orville’s machine simply captured and reflected the sun. But if so, why did they believe it could unlock the secrets of alchemy? Could light burn into the essence of one element and transmute it into another? Or was this simply part of some greater illusion that Harry Timpson had designed? One final mystery. A grand display to puzzle great minds of the future and give immortality to his name and legend.

The only things I knew for certain were that Timpson was willing to sacrifice everything on this quest and that he now perceived me as an obstacle. The Sleepless Man had been left to keep me out of mischief’s way until Timpson had the box in his possession. But once he had disposed of Orville and secured his heart’s desire, I would simply be a person who knew too much. To stay on the North Leicester Wharf would be to wait for the spectres of death and financial ruin to battle it out for control of my fate.

I had never much liked waiting.

Crossing the border is easy but to do so unseen is impossible, as both sides teem with private intelligence gatherers. The trick is to cross anonymously.

At the official border post one must present identification and possibly a permit of residence. Lists of comings and goings are drawn up by the border guards on both sides then handed over to the constabulary and the secret services of the two countries, who file them away in warehouses of similar paperwork. Ask to see the lists and you will be told that the information is confidential. Unless you have perfected the art of passing money in a handshake.

Crossing at Gallowtree Gate would be like sending a pigeon to the Duke of Northampton informing him that I was on my way back to a place within his reach. Therefore I headed for the Leicester Backs, with its warren of illegal crossing points.

Showing a callous disregard for my reputation, the taxi driver dropped me short of my destination, saying he would not risk his steamcar in that den of iniquity. Thus I was forced to haul my case the last two hundred yards on foot, enduring glances that were by turns accusatory and licentious from the rowdy girls and respectable gentlemen.

Not all crossing points are equal. Some emerge in alleyways so dark and overhung by roofs on either side, that robbery or worse is likely. Some are controlled by fierce gangs. Others are too safe in that they pass behind police houses. Whichever route you choose, payment is required – though different amounts.

I had selected the Odeon Passageway for my crossing. Not the cheapest route, but one of superior quality according to those who knew. It exited the Republic via the back of a tattoo artist’s parlour on Cank Street. Not the sort of shop a lady should frequent according to Republican morals. But I was walking though The Backs anyway and thought I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.