When the Devil Drives (22 page)

I knew that I should soak my cloak in water and wrap it round my head, but the pump was at the heart of the fire, so no hope of that. I unlatched the other door and started up the staircase, the wooden treads rough under bare feet, forcing myself back into the smoke. Thank the gods, it wasn't as thick as on my back staircase, though bad enough. When I came to the first landing, the door of the parlour opened suddenly into my face so that I stumbled backwards. I yelled again. The person who had come out of the room grabbed my arm and saved me from falling.

‘Is that you, Liberty?' Tom Huckerby's voice.

‘What's happening?' I said.

‘I'd come up to find you.'

‘Mrs Martley. She's upstairs.'

He told me to go back downstairs and wait, but I followed him at a run through the parlour. Some cinders of our fire were still glowing and giving a faint light, with the silhouette of the cat, standing with arched back on the rug. She came towards me, miaowing.

‘Out, out.'

I tried to nudge her with my foot towards the stairs, then ran on and up the next stairs behind Tom towards the attic bedroom.

‘Who's there?' Mrs Martley, dozily belligerent.

‘There's a fire downstairs,' I said. ‘Come on.'

‘Is that a man with you?'

‘Yes. Come on.'

‘Tell him to wait outside while I light the candle and get on my clothes.'

‘There's no time for that,' I shrieked it at her. ‘For heaven's sake, just come.'

‘In my nightdress? I'd catch my death.' But her feet padded heavily to the floor. I reached for her arm in the dark and dragged her upright.

‘You'll catch it all the sooner if you stay here.'

Some heavy garment was on a chair by her bed, dressing gown possibly. I scooped it up with my free hand and flung it at her. Tom took her other arm and we hustled her sideways through the doorway. People were shouting down in the yard now, men's voices mostly.

‘What have you done now?' she said to me.

If the four horsemen of the Apocalypse arrived in Abel Yard, I believe Mrs Martley would blame me. We dragged her downstairs, ignoring her bleatings about slippers. In the parlour, the cat came bounding towards us.

‘We can't leave Mippy,' she said.

I flung the creature over my shoulder, willing her to hold tight with all her eighteen claws and we went on through the parlour. The smoke was thicker now and we all started coughing. Mrs Martley jibbed on the top step.

‘We can't . . .'

Tom pulled, I pushed and she went sliding down the staircase. The cat was slipping, holding on with front claws only, so I unpinned her from my shoulder and threw her down the stairs as well. Probably neither of them would ever forgive me. By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, somebody had picked up Mrs Martley. She was making wild whooping sounds. Mrs Grindley and Mrs Colley, the cowman's wife, were trying to comfort her. Near them, Mr Colley and Mr Gindley were holding a small figure that was struggling wildly and filling the air with a string of obscenities, audible above the shouts of the men and the clank and thump of buckets on cobbles. For a moment I thought they'd managed to lay hands on the fire raiser, until I recognized the voice.

‘It's all right, Tabby. I'm here.'

The obscenities stopped.

‘She's a wildcat,' Mr Grindley said. ‘Scratched my face.'

‘They wouldn't let me come in and get you,' Tabby said.

‘Talking of cats . . .' I said.

‘She's safe over here,' Mrs Colley said. ‘Trust a cat.'

All round us, men were rushing and shouting. Two bucket chains had been set up, one from the pump at the far end of the yard, the other longer one through the gateway and out to a pump in Adam's Mews. Black silhouettes swayed through smoke clouds, passing buckets from hand to hand. Not just buckets either. From the shapes, there was a hip bath in there and some half gallon ale jugs. Nobody in the yard or the mews was rich enough to afford fire insurance, so we couldn't look for help from one of the hand-propelled or horse-drawn fire engines. Because of this, our ramshackle community had its own way of tackling fires. By daylight, those swaying, coughing figures would be stable lads from the mews, apprentices, even some of the ragged boys who slept rough in doorways and loved excitement even when there was no profit in it for them. The two men at the end of the chain flung bucketful after bucketful at the seat of the fire under the stairs. The black and orange heart of it was stubborn, but at least it wasn't gaining ground. The
huff huff
sound had faded to a frustrated growl. At last, the black clouds began to die away and wisps of white steam came up instead. Faint cheers broke out among the chorus of coughing, but the buckets kept coming until the fire was out.

By then, all of us not on the bucket chains were shivering in the early morning drizzle, the sky still dark. Mrs Grindley had taken Mrs Martley upstairs to her own rooms above the workshop and come down to look for me.

‘I've put the kettle on.'

‘Tabby and I will come in a minute,' I said. ‘I want to see how much damage has been done. Besides, all my clothes are upstairs.'

‘You can't go up there,' she said. ‘It might start again.'

Somebody had lit a couple of lamps, showing that the fire had been pretty well confined to the understairs area. Unfortunately, the bottom part of the flight of stairs to my room and office had disappeared entirely, but it looked as if the other staircase next to it might be intact. Still, it might be wise to wait until daylight before investigating.

‘They were determined to get us, one way or the other,' said a voice from out of the darkness.

Tom Huckerby stepped forward into the lamplight, face as black as a coal miner's, teeth showing white. After rescuing Mrs Martley, he'd joined one of the bucket chains.

‘Who were?' I said.

‘The bastards who started it. Three of them.'

‘You saw them?'

He nodded towards the blackened cavern under where the stairs had been. ‘I was sleeping in there.'

‘Oh god. You could have been—'

‘Lucky I don't sleep heavily. I heard something and went out. Couldn't see who they were. I smelt the tar and saw flames. Then one of them shouted something and another one swung the bucket and threw it straight in, where we'd left our piles of papers.'

‘Bucket?'

‘Tar bucket. There it is, see.'

He kicked something at out feet. It clanked on the cobbles: a metal bucket with holes pierced in the side, rust-coloured from the fire. The heat still throbbing from the metal scorched my bare foot. The anger burning off Tom Huckerby was as fierce.

‘I reckon what woke me was the scrape of the flint when they lit it,' Tom said. ‘The cowardly, hireling bastards.'

Usually, he wouldn't have sworn in my presence, but he was beyond thinking of that.

‘Hirelings?' I said.

‘Government hirelings. Our masters couldn't silence my press any other way, so they decided to burn it out. Lead type won't have survived this. God help me, I'd like to melt it all over again and pour it down the greasy, greedy gobs of those criminals at Westminster.'

I didn't argue. There might even be some consolation for Tom in thinking that this had been directed against him. But I doubted if
The Unbound Briton
was considered such a danger to the authorities that they'd go to these lengths to silence it. There were many papers like it, some of them much more vitriolic in their criticisms of the government and the royal family, and as far as I knew, none had been the victims of arson. In my mind was the stone man pacing across the cobbles and his voice: ‘
I believe you will regret this.
' Ten hours or so after he'd left, the men with the bucket of pitch had arrived.

‘They'll pay,' Tom said. ‘God knows, they'll pay.'

‘Yes, they'll pay,' I said.

But I said it with less confidence than Tom, wondering who would pay, and how and when.

FOURTEEN

A
s soon as it was light, I went to assess the damage. The space under the stairs – or where the stairs had been – was no more than a blackened cavern with the skeleton of the printing press. Tom Huckerby was gone, probably trying to beg or borrow a replacement. The heat had cracked the cast-iron shaft of the pump so it would need replacing. More expense. Up the other staircase to the parlour, the news was better. The stairs had survived undamaged, and although the parlour floor and furniture were covered by a thin coating of greasy soot, a few hours of mopping and sponging would make the place habitable. It was only when I went through the small door to my office and sitting room that the worst of the damage hit me. The overlay of soot in both rooms looked inches thick and the smell of smoke and tar hung over everything. My daybed, the glass mermaid hanging in the window, my books and writing things, were black and sticky to the touch.

I picked up the volume of Shelley's poetry that had been a present from my father, near to tears. When I opened it at random, at least the words inside were still legible. ‘To defy power that seems omnipotent/ To forgive wrongs darker than death or night . . .' Well, I had no intention of forgiving this wrong. I'd been thinking about it for hours, over endless cups of tea in the Grindleys' parlour, and was certain that this had been directed at me, with Tom's press as an accidental casualty.

‘Oh, all your lovely clothes.' Tabby's voice, from the doorway behind me. The clothes hanging from pegs were ruined beyond cleaning, including the new green velvet. I opened the lid of the chest where my other good clothes were kept. Relief there, at least. The close-fitting wooden lid, designed to thwart moths, had kept out most of the soot as well. I dressed in my blue merino, not caring much about how I looked. Anger at what had been done to us was driving away tiredness from a sleepless night.

‘I'd like to kill him, I would,' Tabby said.

‘Who?'

‘The one you was talking to yesterday. That Codling.'

‘You think he did it?'

‘Course. Even if he wasn't there himself, he paid them to do it.'

‘Why?'

‘Because you smoked him out. He knew that when you asked the girl those questions. From the look on his face, he'd have liked to kill you then and there only he didn't have the nerve.'

It made sense of a kind. Although I doubted that Codling was capable of planning or paying for such drastic revenge, he was obviously taking his orders and his money from somebody. If he'd reported back to his masters when he left the tea gardens, there'd have been time for them to organize the arson gang.

I went down to the parlour, found some writing paper and an inkwell and wrote a note to Mr Clyde with Mrs Martley's scratchy pen. ‘Miss Lane presents her compliments to Mr Clyde and requires to see him as a matter of urgency. She will be at 4 Grosvenor Street from midday onwards.'

I marked it urgent and told Tabby to deliver it into Suzette's hand. Once she was gone, I sorted out some clothes for Mrs Martley and took them across to the Grindleys.

‘I'm taking you to stay with the Suters for a few days,' I said to her. ‘We'll have everything clean by the time you get back.'

For once she was too weary to argue, only telling me to remember to feed the cat. I knew Daniel and Jenny would be glad of her help with the baby. I walked with her over to their home in Bloomsbury, glad to be breathing air that smelt only of horse dung and of smoke untainted by tar.

Mr Clyde arrived at ten minutes past midday. He was neatly dressed in tones of grey, with light shoes and no overcoat. Either he'd been somewhere in the building or had arrived by coach.

‘What's happened?'

‘There was a fire where I live. Some men threw in a tar bucket. We could all have been killed.'

He stared at me, then sat down heavily on the armchair opposite. ‘My god. Why?'

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me.'

He seemed genuinely shocked, his eyes not leaving my face. As calmly as I could, I told him about the visit of stone man.

‘Do you recognize him from the description?' I asked.

He shook his head.

‘He accused me of associating with women of no reputation,' I said. ‘Did he mean the contessa?'

I thought Miss Blade was a more likely candidate, but had decided not to tell Mr Clyde about that episode.

‘You suspect that this man was some kind of emissary from official circles, trying to stop the contessa causing any more embarrassment?'

‘It's one possibility,' I said.

‘But if so, that would put us all on the same side, wouldn't it?' he said. ‘So why should he threaten you?'

‘I don't know, but I think there are things I'm not being told.'

‘Perhaps you should have played his game, accepted the bribe and found out what he wanted.'

‘He wanted to know who my associates were,' I said. ‘You surely didn't want me to name you.'

He stood up and walked over to the window. ‘Believe me, Miss Lane, I know nothing that makes sense of this. In any event, the contessa is no longer a threat to the authorities. She's left London.'

‘Where's she gone?'

He smiled for the first time. ‘I don't know. Not exactly.'

‘You mean, you took my advice and had her kidnapped?' I was amazed, having meant it at least half in joke.

‘Kidnap's a harsh word. Let's say she was persuaded to leave London.'

‘Was she angry?'