Hell bay, p.25
Hell Bay, page 25
“Does he even have eyes behind those spectacles of his? I thought perhaps the glass was painted over.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
As if he heard us, Barker turned in his chair on the other side of the room and regarded us. I nodded as if to say we were leaving for a moment, and he nodded in return. We left the library and climbed the stair.
“I hope this is not a scheme to get us away from the others,” I said.
“You had your one offer, Mr. Llewelyn, and you turned it down. You will not get a second. A gentleman would not have brought up the subject.”
I stopped and bowed. “You are correct, Miss Burrell. I apologize.”
“Thank you.”
Barker had taught me that when caught out upon a question of manners, always be the first to apologize.
We went to her room, and I waited outside while she applied powder. As a man I knew that this was a euphemism and she could be doing any of a number of things, but women must be allowed their alchemical secrets. After what seemed like half an hour, she came out looking just as she had when she left though somewhat refreshed.
We went downstairs again into the hall. I was leading her toward the library when I stepped on something glittery underfoot. Someone had dropped a necklace, I thought to myself. Then I saw it was glass. Shattered window glass. Just then the wind whistled sharply overhead.
I stopped and looked up. There was a row of high ornamental windows, and one of the panes must have fallen out. That is what my mind was telling me anyway. But then there was a flash of lightning and it illuminated a form crouched at the window high above us. An arm protruded through the aperture, and there was a pistol in his hand.
Simultaneously I pulled her back out of harm’s way with my left arm while reaching for my Webley with the other.
“Oh,” Olivia said, as if she had thought of something. There was a red spot between her eyebrows. She sagged, sliding off my arm.
Vaguely, I remember pointing the revolver overhead and pulling the trigger again and again. Barker tells me I was roaring at the top of my lungs, but I do not recall. I was consumed with rage. The feelings of recrimination would occur later.
This was my fault. Had I been a second faster, she might have lived. If I had trained more diligently, if I had practiced shooting more often, if I had been just a little more professional, Olivia Burrell would probably be married now with children and grandchildren. Instead, she had died a virgin, just as she had feared. I had promised her I would protect her and I had broken that vow. To this day, I have not forgiven myself.
There was screaming and I was being jostled about, but I felt as if I were enveloped in cotton wadding. Someone took the empty pistol from my hand. I had been squeezing the empty chamber continuously as if it would change what had happened.
The shadow at the window was gone. I turned and ran out into the storm. The wind and rain buffeted me as I left the shelter of the house. I ran out into the rain and looked back, searching for someone on the roof. I was not thinking clearly. I was in a rage.
He was nowhere to be found, but I kept running around the front of the house hoping to see him. The alternative was to go inside, and if I did that I would look at her. I would look and I dared not. Eventually, I was as soaked through as anyone has ever been. There was nothing left to do but go inside.
Leaving puddles on the marble floor, I looked down at the body of Olivia Burrell. She had a look of faint disapproval on her face, as if I had made another boneheaded decision, which I suppose I had.
We were standing about looking at her the way one does at a dead body. Somehow the fact that she was female made moving her properly more important. Paul and Percy had been bundled away somehow, but moving her body required more respect. Partridge came out with a blanket and covered her completely.
Suddenly, we heard a scream from upstairs. My nerves were quaking and I nearly jumped from my skin. I was about to run up the staircase when Barker seized my shoulder and stopped me.
“Philippa is informing her mother of Miss Burrell’s death,” he explained.
“I think this may be the worst day of my life.”
“It is not over yet, lad. Are you soaked through?”
“To the bone.”
“Good. I have an assignment for you. Look over here.”
He led me to a puddle of water made by the rain coming in the window.
“What do you see?”
“A puddle of rainwater, sir,” I said, trying to hold my patience.
“And what else?”
“There is blood in it.”
“Aye. You shot him, lad. Wounded him, at least.”
“That’s good,” I said, though I did not feel it at the moment.
“That is very good, Thomas. I want you to go out and raise the flag on the pole.”
“When?”
“Right now, lad. You could not possibly get any wetter.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was no small matter what Cyrus Barker was asking. I have watched grown men run from the assassin’s withering fire. This request was tantamount to a death sentence. He was out there, wounded, though we knew not how badly. The Guv was pointing out that any attempt now would be unexpected. I would be screened in some manner by the rain, and there was a chance that the killer might already be dying or badly injured. Brought together, an attempt tonight to raise the flag seemed like the best opportunity to leave this accursed island.
The obvious question occurred to me, but I did not voice it: what made me a perfect candidate for this mission? My employer expected me to run through the woods on the heels of an assassin. Let him go, then, if he was so sanguine about our chances.
I was courting someone now. That had to make some difference. Unlike Barker, who seemed as if he had all the time in the world to marry Philippa Ashleigh, I wanted to marry soon. It seemed unfair that he was sending me to my doom.
“What about the flag?” I asked. “He destroyed it. I saw it in tatters.”
“Miss Anstruther’s maroon dress will suffice. You are resourceful, and I’m sure your knowledge of women’s fashion will show you how to hook it to the pole.”
He had saddled me with a totally erroneous expertise on the subject of women. If I know anything, it is my lack of knowledge on the subject. He developed some queer notions, sometimes.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Unless you think the matter too dangerous.”
I knew him rather well by then. He wasn’t offering a way out. He was twisting the knife. Was I up to the challenge? Was I brave enough to see it through?
“Of course not.”
“Because if you feel it is still dangerous, just speak out.”
“I will do it, sir. Where is the dress?”
“It is folded it up there by the hat rack.”
I hated when he did that. He had maneuvered both of us in such a way that he was trying to talk me out of it and I was insisting.
“As you said, I’m drenched anyway.”
“No sense both of us getting wet.”
That was it then. It was decided between us. I was going out to my death. There was no sense in both of us getting killed.
I crossed to the front door and opened it, looking out at the steady downpour. I hadn’t heard before that the Scillys were subject to monsoons. Curtains of water cascaded down upon the lawn.
A minute before I was hot with anger, charging about and waving a pistol. Now I was cold, shivering, and sober as a judge. My will lay in a secure box at Cox & Co. in Whitehall Street beside our offices. I hadn’t had the chance to change it since our understanding.
“If Mrs. Cowan should want any of my effects, I should like her to have them,” I said.
“Oh, you do talk rot,” he responded, and shoving the dress into my chest, pushed me out the door and shut it.
Within seconds the rain was pouring off my chin and working through my scalp. It was warm but sharp, coming down so hard it was like being poked with needlelike fingers.
I ran out into the storm, carrying the ridiculous red dress, which quickly became sodden and heavy, draping across my legs, hindering what I was trying to do. You work for a man for six years and then one day he hands you a death sentence. I recalled the Llewelyn luck: everything bad that can happen to one probably shall, and yet one will not die from it, as that would end the torment too quickly.
I ran, looking up into the roiling clouds overhead, spangled with lightning, and it must have been that I was overwrought or a trick of the light. I swore I saw Olivia Burrell’s face and form projecting grandly against the storm like some fierce goddess. The rain was running into my eyes, however, and I didn’t have time for fanciful images. Like it or not, the entire fate of the remaining few party guests had been placed in my hands.
My hair was plastered to my head and my clothing was like a wet tourniquet wrapped around my body. I had never seen such a storm in my life. It was as if the entire ocean were breaking over that one little island. Perhaps it wasn’t I that was meant to drown, but the assassin, who was going against nature by killing so many of his own kind. I reckon it must have been around eight o’clock, and the sun would normally just be setting, but now everything was black on black. I could not see beyond the closest torrent of rain. I only guessed where the flagpole was from having seen it before at midday. If not for the flagpole I might have gone over the cliff, since the wall that encircled most of the island ended before this section of rocky coastline.
As I tried to tie the dress to the pole, the wind buffeting me to and fro. The wind from the west was powerful enough to knock me off my feet. One would prepare for a wall of wind coming in one direction and suddenly it would come from another direction.
I had grown up with gales but Gwent is a buttoned-down place. The rain battered our slate roofs, rolled down our brick walls, and disappeared into the drains of our cobblestoned streets. Here it had full sway. We were on an island and it could come from any direction, sometimes two at once. It attacked like a bird of prey, slashing you with its talons, pecking at your face with its beak. It did not help that there were but a few inches of soil before one met rock. The gale dragged you off your feet.
I saw things in the storm. A horse’s oats bag flew about, opening and closing its maw as if it were alive. I ducked as it came at my head. I was pelted with small rocks, sticks, and debris. Whether it was from our island or someplace else was anyone’s guess.
Logic told me that the easiest way to attach a dress to a flagpole was by the sleeves. The fabric fought me as I tied it into a knot, but after a brief struggle I managed a knot that no wind or rain could untie. Then I worked on the second sleeve. The wind took the bottom of the dress and began worrying it the way a dog does a trouser leg. Then something struck the flagpole loudly, setting it quivering, just whizzing by my cheek. I knew better than to think it was a mere rock or even an arrow.
I gauged from what direction it came and took what shelter there was behind the pole. I wasn’t foolish enough to think a grown man, even a small one like myself, could shelter behind a pole no more than six inches in circumference. Looking for what direction he was shooting from was probably a useless endeavor, but then some might say my entire existence up to that point had been one long useless endeavor.
When lightning flashed, I finally saw him propped behind the beginning of the wall, using it to lean his rifle on. Idly I wondered if he still had one of those expanding bullets which would blow my head clean off my shoulders. If one cannot have a remarkable life, at least one might have a spectacular death, someone once said. It might have been me, come to think of it. Typical Tommy Llewelyn: he’s on the verge of shuffling the mortal coil, and he’s thinking up epigrams. I sucked in my breath, hoping to give the smallest target, just as another bullet struck the pole.
He wouldn’t miss twice, even under these conditions. He was playing with me the way a terrier plays with a cornered rat. He had me right where he wanted me now. There wasn’t anything to hide behind within ten feet, and he was an excellent shot. I imagine he was lining up his sight, taking his time, perhaps savoring the moment. The anticipation is sometimes more satisfying than the win itself. He was waiting for me to make a mistake, and so I obliged him.
The low shelter we had built days before was still a dozen feet away. If I did manage to get to it and lie down flat, he could not easily shoot me through the thick board. Once I thought it, it seemed the only alternative. Safety lay there and it certainly didn’t here. And so I stepped out, preparing to run no more than five steps. That was where I stood when the bullet pierced the muscle of my bicep and passed through. I jumped back, and as I did there was a loud pop from the direction of the crude shelter. Looking back, I was just in time to see the form of the assassin clap his hands to his head and fall backward over the cliff.
Cyrus Barker stood in a glistening slicker and lowered the rifle, which still smoked from being fired. Bait, I told myself. He sent me out as bait, and all it cost me was an arm. Just that. Barker still had two, after all. The pain was intense, there were black spots moving around in front of my eyes. I’d been shot. I worry about it happening every morning I woke up, except on Sundays. Now it had finally happened. I could stop worrying now.
“How are ye, lad?” Barker rumbled.
“It passed right through my arm. I’m bleeding.”
He came over to where I stood, pulling something from his pocket. It was his handkerchief, which he used to tie a tourniquet around my upper arm. Then together we walked to the edge of the cliff. It seemed impossible for a man to survive such a fall.
“I can’t see the bottom,” I called out over the wail of the storm.
“Nor I, Thomas!”
He turned and picked up the rifle lying on the wall. I recognized it as the missing Sharps that must have belonged to His Lordship. The Guv reached into the breech, and pulled out the spent cartridge. He handed it to me, as if by doing so he had returned the bullet to its origin, as if that made it all better. My arm would eventually heal and all would return to the way it should be. Funny thing about that cartridge. I still have it. It is sitting here on my desk as I write. My arm healed a long time ago, the only sign of what had happened being a slight twinge when the weather changes. The shell became a memento, a souvenir. Had that been on my employer’s mind when he pulled it from the breech of the rifle and handed the hot metal to me? I rather hoped not. I wouldn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right.
Barker came over to me. His dark hair was plastered around his spectacles and his mustache was in tatters. Without warning me, he raised my arm. I cried out in pain. He looked at the rusty stains.
“Passed clean through,” he said. He kneaded my injured arm with his thick fingers, feeling the tibia bone inside. The examination was by touch, as if he were blind. In the teeth of the gale with dark spectacles on his face, I’m certain it was close to it. “It’ll heal well enough.”
Barker in his early training had worked for a bonesetter in Canton named Wong. I do not know how much or how little he knew about medicine, but I assumed what he did know was little more than Chinese folk remedies. I would have preferred Dr. Anstruther’s opinion.
Barker picked up a rucksack by the wall and began going through it. He pulled out a few papers and read them hungrily before the rain drenched them. They were identity papers in what I took to be Spanish.
“Captain Nigel Pelham of the Venezuelan Army,” he said.
“Kerry’s friend!” I cried. “Do you think they were working together?”
“Almost certainly.”
“What does—” I began, but suddenly there was a loud booming sound from somewhere. It wasn’t the rumble of thunder that we had experienced for half an hour, nor the crack of a rifle. It was deeper, more profound, like the explosion that had ended Kerry’s life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Now what?” I demanded as the sound reverberated across the rocky beach.
Barker turned, his bluntly chiseled features facing west.
“Philippa!” he bellowed. Then he began to run toward the house.
I followed behind. The thought that Philippa might be in danger had not occurred to me, but it was true: no one was safe on this island.
One would think that after an hour of this, the storm would abate. Far from it, in fact. It was getting stronger. The sky was growing darker and darker, and it was becoming more difficult to see anything beyond arm’s reach. Odd shapes came out of the gloom, requiring inspection with the fingers to ascertain whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. A stone swan became a sea serpent, a potted larch an ogre.
Barker saw neither of these things, of course, and it would have been no matter to him if he did. He was running as fast as his sodden limbs could carry him. My hose squelched in my shoes and I was miserable, but that didn’t matter a jot. Philippa was in danger and we had to save her. A world without her now seemed impossible to me, so I could only imagine how Barker felt about her.
Something large and shaggy rose out of the gloom ahead of us. Barker shot past. Just as I came near a peal of lightning tore open the sky. I saw an eye the size of a tennis ball. It was the Percheron, Apollo, bolted from his stable. He neighed at me and shook his drenched mane as if he still found me responsible for his injury. Then I saw something that made me ignore the horse altogether.
In the middle of the drive, the old cannon stood, its barrel split open in long curls. Smoke rose from it in a desultory haze, as if in collusion with the rain. I came up behind it and sighted down its busted barrel. The big, stout door that had repelled the killer for all those days was torn asunder, like the Holy of Holies. Inside there was debris, and a broken beam on the hall floor. From where I stood in the rain, I looked in upon the lobby lit by candles and lamps. It was almost indecent, like seeing a woman’s ankles on a tram.
Barker hadn’t stopped, of course. His limbs were longer and his lady friend was in danger. He doesn’t get these impressions that I do. He saw a horse, a cannon, and a hole. He accepted their meaning immediately. Someone had harnessed the horse to the cannon and wielded it here in the rain. Only I puzzled on how it was done. Cannons generally require dry conditions to fire. Perhaps he had loaded it earlier with the powder he had made and one of the cannonballs stacked by its wheel. A fresh fuse and a macintosh over everything might have done the trick. The metal had shattered. Finally, it had fulfilled its purpose after nearly a hundred years. The cannon had been built to attack a Frenchman, and now it had led a killer to his representative, Henri Gascoigne.
