Authors: Mel Keegan
Jim took a swig from the dark glass bottle. The ale was flat and strong. “You took a look at the water level, out towards the beck?”
“I did.” Toby took the bottle from him and also drank. “She’s still rising, but not as fast. I give us till late tonight at this rate, and then the whole yard, stable and coach house with it, will be under.” He craned back his neck and peered into the rafters. “Not even Charlie would be simple enough to shove the prize into a crate or a keg and just leave it where you can see it from the door! But, I’m thinking … how about
under
one of the big trunks back there?”
“Or would he have packed the prize into a smaller bag,” Jim mused, “and buried it inside an ocean of rank pickled onions?” He made a face. “There’s a pry-bar here somewhere.”
“You’ll take the onions? Damn! Then, I’ll take the rafters,” Toby offered. “You don’t want to be up there, Jim.” He had seen the ladder leaning against the wall in the back.
The work was as filthy as before, and much more aromatic. One barrel was half full of pickled walnuts that had fermented long ago and reeked to high heaven. The onions looked like hundred year old eggs floating in a lake of tar, and Jim wrapped his nose and mouth in a scarf as he probed to the bottom, raking around in search of a bag, a box, anything.
“Nothing,” he told Toby as the other man shinned back down the ladder. “Give me a hand with these barrels – the stink would make a pig lose his dinner! Damnation, I’ve
got
to get rid of these.”
“They must have been here since Nell Chegwidden owned the place … and they were a good bet.” Toby sneezed repeatedly on the dust he had raised in the rafters. His clothes and hair wore a fine film of it, and he brushed himself down as he surveyed onions, walnuts, forgotten potatoes that had turned into wizened clusters of black roots.
One barrel held contents
so
rotten as to be utterly unidentifiable. The crates contained a rare assortment of nails, broken china, little glass window squares, oakum, discarded tools, oddments of clothing set aside to be ripped for rags. Jim vaguely remembered sweeping the clutter together and stowing it, in the weeks after Charlie passed away. One by one trunks, crates and barrels were resealed, and he glanced up into the dimness high overhead. “No sign, I suppose, that Charlie was every up there?”
“No sign,” Toby said dryly, “that anything human has
ever
been up there! There’s twenty years of pigeon dung on everything, and you can’t see through the dust on the cobwebs. I startled a dozen wicked-looking spiders, to get into the corners.”
“Shite.”
Jim sighed in annoyance.
“
Under
the barrels, then?”
“Under.”
Toby was frowning at the floor and seeing exactly what Jim saw – a lot of very coarse mortar which had been laid down before either of them was born, and had not been disturbed since. “If Charlie was able to get a pick through this floor,” Toby said resignedly, “he’d have to park something big, heavy, dirty, stinking, on top of it, to cover up the work. He’d be thinking
,
nobody’s going to be interested in pickled walnuts and rusted nails.” He pushed up his sleeves. “How’s the leg? Can you help me manhandle them aside?”
The leg was aching, and Jim knew better than Toby would ever guess how close to the end of his endurance he was. He had done more work in the last day than he had done in months, and he knew he would pay the price for it. The thought of a generous swig of laudanum had begun to taunt him, but he took a deep breath, physically shoved the pain aside. “I can help,” he said quietly, “but this is the last for me, today and maybe tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Toby took a grip on one edge of the first barrel, tipped it toward him and began to roll it sideways to expose the floor underneath. “You think I can’t see you limping on that leg – and you think I don’t care? You do me ill, Jim, if you believe I’ll watch you in pain and not fret.”
It was so long since anyone had cared, Jim was almost discomfited. He felt a flush of embarrassment as he shouldered in beside Toby and worked with him to move the entire load. Every time they shifted a barrel or crate, they peered at the same old mortar; and when they moved the last one it was Toby’s turn to whisper fluent curses.
“Not the floor, then. Damnit, Charlie, you old rascal! You left me a good one to solve, didn’t you?” He glanced sidelong at Jim, and dropped both long arms around him. “You need to take the weight off the leg.”
It was true, and Jim did not argue. He took the dusty kiss Toby was offering, and dropped his buttocks onto a leather-bound trunk which creaked beneath his weight. “Loose bricking in some part of the walls?”
“Possibly.
Probably.”
Toby flexed his back and shoulders, which were obviously aching. “We’re not going to find it, Jim, not in here, not in the time we have left. Can you hear
that
?”
Now he mentioned it, Jim was absently aware of the gurgle of running water, and he hoisted himself back to his feet with an oath. Toby was at the door, where a sheet of water, inches deep now, rippled on the stones flagging the yard; and beyond the yard, the water stretched on toward the beach. The coarse bushes marking the head of the dunes and following the path seemed to be standing in a lake that moved perceptibly with the waves breaking seventy yards further out.
To Jim’s shrewd eye, the tavern had just less than three feet of vertical space left before they would be getting their feet wet indoors. He had always known a moment must come when their priorities changed, and this was it.
“It’s time we got the tavern secured,” he said bitterly. “We need to get food and firewood and rugs up off the floor, get the good furniture upstairs. Can you handle it? I’m going to trowel a pail of mortar around the trapdoor to the cellar, while I’ve still got the chance.”
“Old fashioned oilskins and mortar,” Toby remembered. “I saw the gear not ten minutes ago. Now, where was it?”
Four sacks of mortar were stacked behind the ladder, and a roll of cracked old oilskins, tied with frayed rope, lay with them. They had been used before, for just this purpose. While Toby carried them back to the kitchen, Jim hunted for the broad pail and the big trowel he used to mix the mortar. He found them soon enough, but even then he realized they had probably left it too late to save the cellar. Even with the fire blazing in the kitchen, the mortar would take six or eight hours to dry. They were cutting it too fine, and they both knew it.
“Last chance to get out and go home, Edith,” Toby told the old woman as they let the dogs out for a constitutional.
The front door of The Raven stood wide open to a strange view – as if the sea washed almost up to the door, with just a scant few yards of gravel and pebbles between the granite step and the lap of the water.
“I can get you out to Budleigh,” Jim suggested, “if you want to stay at the church.
It’s
set too high to flood … though the graveyard surely will.”
She gave an animated shudder. “When I were a lass, it rained ten days one March, put the whole churchyard underwater. The boxes washed right outta the ground. Any poor sod who’d been buried in the last ten month were
floatin
’ away, an’ ’
alf
the ’
eadstones
sagged after that, so they looked drunk as a gaggle o’ lords.”
“So, you don’t want to go to the church,” Jim concluded.
“An’ me
cottage’ll
be up to its
windersills
,” she said disgustedly. “It goes under even afore yon path does.”
“What about going to your grandson’s house?” Jim was watching the dogs paw at the water. Bess took a lap at it and whined. It was likely closer to salt than fresh, and fifty privies would have overflowed into it, back up the course of the beck. “I can see the boat – you see her there, Toby? She’s still upside down, and she’s hung herself in the bushes, but we can
flop
her over between us.”
“
Flop
’er over an’ go
where
?” Mrs. Clitheroe demanded. “Thee thinks Exmouth’s
gunna
be any better? Me
grandson’ll
be bailing out ’is
parlor
, an’ that stupid cow of a wife of ’is, she’ll be weeping an’ wailing, some bilge water about the end o’ the world.
Nay, lad.
I’ll say where I
be
.”
She made an excellent point, and Toby gave Jim an almost amused look. “I think we’ll be settling in for the duration. A day or three till the beck stops running,
then
it’ll be all hands on deck with every mop and broom you possess.”
“We’ve done it before,” Jim admitted, resigned to repeating a process that would be just a little less tedious with Toby in residence. “I want to get a lot of firewood upstairs – and food. You can always put a pan on the hob in any of the bedchambers. Keep a decent fire going, wait it out. It’ll take as long as it takes.” He turned his back to the odd view of a world comprised almost entirely of water, and was already deciding which furniture to move, and which of the firewood Toby had cut just days before was the driest and best. “If you want to get a start, I’ll mix enough mortar to secure the cellar. There’s enough life left in this leg of mine to help you get the good chairs upstairs. Take any bedchamber you prefer, Edith, and … now, what’s got into
them
?”
He was talking about the dogs, whose yapping was swiftly turning into loud, angry barking, and he turned back from his survey of the tavern to see what they were up to. He saw Toby’s face first. It had set into a mask as hard and as dark as quarried slate.
The blue eyes flickered in Jim’s direction and then returned to the west, and the water. The pink tip of Toby’s tongue ran once around his lips to moisten them, and he said softly,
“We just ran out of time, Jim. And out of luck.”
Chapter Twelve
A boat was sliding in from the sea. It looked like a whaler’s longboat, Jim thought, and the two men at the oars were skilled. The sea was calmer than it had been in days, and the run of the tide did not seem to trouble them much as they brought the craft in. It grounded out when its keel hit the path, and one of them hopped over the side. His boots were rolled right up to the thighs to keep out the water as he forced his way through, cutting the shortest line for the tavern door. Wisely, Mrs. Clitheroe beat a swift retreat. Jim heard the squeal of a hinge as the kitchen door closed halfway over.
“Nathaniel Burke,” Toby said very softly. “He always fancied himself the skipper of our company. Don’t misjudge the other bastard, Jim, but of the two Burke is the dangerous one, because he’s intelligent.”
“And the other?”
Jim asked in the same undertone.
“Joseph Pledge.
Joe to his friends and enemies alike.
Keep a wide berth between the two of you … he likes to hurt. To Joe pain is hilariously funny, so long as it’s someone else’s agony.” He whistled softly to Bess. “Come here, girl. Stay close, now.” He gave Jim a sidelong glance. “He’ll hurt any of us, if he can, and the dogs are fair game.”
“Boxer – here, lad.”
Jim slapped his thigh to bring the ratter to him, and watched Pledge disentangle himself from the oars and step over into the cold swirl of the water.
Of the pair, Nathaniel Burke was also the more physically imposing. He was a tall man and big through the shoulders, with white scars on his face, neck and hands, visible from a good distance away. His expression seemed to be set in a permanent grimace, as if he had worn the look for so long, it has set in place. He was not a young man, Jim saw; ten years older than Toby at least, and he wore his years with less grace than Toby. In his day he must have been passable handsome, but now the stubble clinging to his cheeks was white, the bags under his eyes were the size of a seaman’s chest and his nose had been broken, set off-
center
, so it angled toward his right cheek. His clothes were well worn but just as well repaired; his tricorn was black, set at a rakish angle at odds with the slope of his nose.
With their weight out of it the boat floated off once more, and Burke and Pledge dragged it up to the gravel and pebbles marking the edge of The Raven’s old foundations. If the tavern had not been built on the
leveled
ruins of a previous building, it would have been flooded already, and Jim knew how lucky they were. Biding his time, keeping silent, he studied the strangers.
Joe Pledge was short, as rotund as he was muscular, oily, with yellow teeth which were bared in a grimace of effort as the keel scraped up onto the pebbles and refused to be moved any further. Under a battered tricorn, his brown hair hung in greasy ringlets about a face as square-jawed as a prize fighter; his skin was sallow, where Burke wore a mahogany tan, and as his coat shifted with effort Jim saw the butts of a pair of pistols in his belt. Like Burke, he was not dressed well, and he had none of Burke’s sense of style. The tricorn was crammed down over his eyes, the coat flapping, the waistcoat unbuttoned, the shirt beneath stained by pickles and the same tobacco juice that had yellowed his teeth. Jim took in all of this with one glance which lingered on the pistols.
Another pair of almost identical pistols rode Burke’s own broad belt, and Jim remembered what Toby had said – they would be loaded, even if Pledge’s were not. The coat pockets of both men bulged. He knew the look of shot and powder bags when he saw them.