The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (2 page)

Ten minutes later we went out into the rainy night beneath umbrellas, considerably improved in spirit, although soon St. Ives fell into an anxious silence again, the awful moment approaching. Hasbro and Tubby walked on ahead, which gave me an opportunity to say something useful to my friend. “Throw yourself on the mercy of the court,” I told him. “That’s the smoothest path when it comes to making up with wives. Fewer thorns and clinkers if you take that route. I can’t claim experience, but I’ve read widely on the topic. Common sense supports my argument.”

“I intend to do just that,” he said. He walked along in silence for a time, and then said, “If Alice will have me back, I’ll…”

“Don’t talk rubbish,” I said, emboldened, perhaps, by that pudding. “Have you back from
where
? She hasn’t sent you away.”

“Not yet she hasn’t,” he said with sad defeat in his voice. “Not yet.”

“Then pray do not compound the problem by anticipating any such thing. Pardon my saying so, but you sell her short. Thinking evil sometimes invites it, and the opposite, too. I suggest that you start by assuming on Alice’s better nature, and your own, for that matter. You couldn’t simply leave Bouch to twist in the wind, after all. Alice knows that.”

He gave me a long stare and then nodded his head. “You’re in the right of it,” he said, “although that’s precisely what came of our ill-fated trip to Dundee. I’ll beg her forgiveness, though, and then steel myself for the onslaught. Perhaps it won’t come. We don’t deserve them, you know.”

“Wives, you mean?”

“Yes. Few men are worthy of the women they marry.”

“Tell her just that thing. Give her a chance to agree with you. That should cheer her up immensely.”

We continued in that vein of chat for some time, oblivious to the activities roundabout, until we were vaguely surprised to find ourselves on Victoria Street, the broad arch of the great railway station looming before us. Coaches and dogcarts clogged the boulevard, and rattled away in either direction, and there was a great noise of people coming out of the station and going in, the entryway illuminated by gas lamps flickering in the damp wind. We still had our umbrellas hoisted, although the rain had mostly stopped without our realizing it. I can’t imagine that I had said anything to St. Ives that was worth more than two shillings, but perhaps I had distracted him from himself, which was something.

Hasbro and Tubby had already entered the station, and we steeled ourselves and walked into the bustle and clamor of the crowds, the hissing of locomotives, and the smell of wet wool and engine oil. The hour had come, and Alice’s train along with it, rolling slowly into the station at that very moment, its journey at an end. The doors opened, and people descended to the platform, scores of people, from Croydon and Tunbridge Wells and points south, making their way out toward the street past heaps of luggage. For the space of some several minutes we were certain that Alice would momentarily appear among them. Then the crowd dwindled, and the platform cleared. For a time there was no one, until one last harried passenger got off—a commercial traveler by the look of him—carrying a portmanteau and with a head like a pumpkin and eyes like poached eggs. That was the end of the exodus. No Alice.

“Gents,” the commercial traveler said to us when he hove alongside and dropped anchor, “I’m in the timepiece line.” He took his portmanteau in both hands and shook it, four metal legs telescoping from the bottom. A hidden drawer sprang out, revealing a velvet-lined compartment full of tolerably dusty and tarnished pocket watches. He smiled in a toothy and unconvincing way, his shop set up on the instant and open for business.

St. Ives had fully expected something unpleasant this night—longed for it, even—but Alice’s non-arrival was beyond his ken. He stood blinking, completely at sea, loosed from his moorings and apparently unaware that the timepiece salesman stood before him, wearing worn tweeds and grinning into his face. Tubby was not unaware of the man’s presence, however, and he said, “Shove off, mate,” in a tone calculated to be understood.

“Of course,” the man said. “I can see you gents are preoccupied. I… Say!” he said, suddenly bending forward and gaping at the professor. “Ain’t you that chap St. Vitus? Wait! That isn’t it! St. Ives! I knew I’d get it! I had the good fortune of perusing your likeness in
The Graphic
, sir, some months back. Story about a sort of enormous skeleton…? On the riverbank, I believe it was, out in Germany. I’m honored, sir.” He thrust out his hand, looking admiringly at St. Ives. Then, slowly, his visage took on the air of commiseration. “Asking your pardon, sir,” he said, more quietly now, “but you ain’t waiting for a
Heathfield
traveler, are you? You look worn down by care, as they say.”

“What do you know of Heathfield travelers?” I asked him. I’ll admit that I didn’t like the look of him, although I myself had written the account published in
The Graphic
concerning our exploratory trip down the Danube the previous year, from which we had returned with a giant human femur and a lower jaw set with teeth the size of dominoes. At least our watch salesman had the good sense to have read the piece.

“Only that there weren’t no Heathfield travelers aboard, mate,” he said in my direction. “Not tonight there weren’t. The train went past Heathfield like a racehorse. Scarcely slowed down.”

“Why would it do such a thing?” Tubby asked. “Damned strange behavior for a train.”

The man hesitated for a moment, and then looked around conspiratorially. “They’re keeping it on the quiet,” he said in a low voice. “Mum’s the word down south, don’t you see? Some sort of
contagion
, apparently.”

He had St. Ives’s attention now. “Contagion?” the Professor asked. “What variety?”

“I don’t know the particulars,” he said. “But I’ll tell you that in my way of business I talk to some…interesting people, so to say. And one of these people let on that the village was one great Bedlam, the entire population picking straws out of their hair and crawling about on their hands and knees. Madness by the bucketful. Mayhem in the streets. I wouldn’t have stopped in Heathfield for anything for fear of getting a dose of it. And mark my words, now that I know what I know, tomorrow morning I’m going back home to Hastings, and you can be certain it’ll be by way of Maidstone, and not Tunbridge Wells.”

St. Ives seemed to reel at the news, and Hasbro put a supportive hand on his arm. We all gave each other a look, what with Tubby’s story of the recent horror at the Explorers Club still fresh in our minds.

Wait!” the man said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a loved one in Heathfield, sir?”

“His own wife,” Tubby said.

“Good Lord, sir! You’d best get her out, and no delay.”

“Anything more you could tell us, then?” Hasbro asked him, keen for information.

“Well, sir,” the man said, dropping his voice again, “you didn’t hear it from me. But seeing as who you are, and that you’re worried for your poor wife, and rightly so, I’ll be straight with you. Like I said, the village is closed down tight—roads blocked, soldiers patrolling. If you go down that way by rail, as perhaps you must, you’d best get off at Uckfield and make your way to the village at Blackboys. This chap I know, my sister’s gentleman friend, I’m ashamed to say, who does some work in the sneak thief and housebreaking line when he ain’t poaching, reckons that a man could find his way into Heathfield through the forest—past the coal fire pits alongside of Blackboys there. It’s easy pickings in Heathfield with the village in an uproar, is what he told me. ‘In through the front door and out again with the swag’—them was his very words. You’ll say I should have him jailed, of course, given what I know, but that’s not my way. What a man tells me in confidence is just that, if you understand me. Now, do you know the open country around Blackboys?”

“Tolerably well, yes,” Tubby put in. “I’ve got an uncle in the smelting way at the Buxted Foundry. Produces railway steel for the Cuckoo Line. He’s got a house there in Dicker. I’ve hunted my share of grouse in and about Blackboys.”

“Then you know something of the place.” He nodded, as if relieved to hear it.

“Why would this…acquaintance of yours chance going into the village at all?” I asked skeptically. “Never mind the authorities, it’s the contagion I’m thinking of.”

“It’s a brain fever, you see. This fellow I’m talking about has fixed himself a cap out of those great heavy gloves they wear at the kilns. Lined with woven asbestos, they are—
amianthus
some call it. Split open and pulled down over the ears, it’ll keep out the lunacy molecules like leather keeps out the wind. If you’re in the mood to go into Heathfield, he’s the fellow you’ll be wanting to see down in Blackboys. People call him the Tipper. He’s a small man, not above so.” He held his hand waist high. The man was apparently a dwarf. “He’s not unacquainted with the Old Coach Inn, there on the High Street. If you look him up, tell him you’re a friend of Peddler Sam Burke. Give him this.” He dipped into a pocket in his coat then and pulled out a card with his name on it: “Sam ‘the Peddler’ Burke: Watches, Jewelry, and Pawn.”

And with that he once again became the man “in the timepiece line.” He said loudly, “No one fancies a pocket watch, then? Very fine works. Austrian made.” But he was already folding up the portmanteau, knocking the legs back in, having lost interest in us. He walked off toward the ticket counter without looking back.

“My God!” St. Ives muttered, knuckling his brow. “Here it is again. Madness springing up like a plague.”

Tubby gave me a hard look. “Poisoned punch, forsooth!” he said.

“Should we send to the Half Toad for our bags, sir?” Hasbro asked St. Ives, who nodded decisively.

“If you’d like another hand,” Tubby said to Hasbro, “I’m your man. I know the way of things down there, and I’ve always got a bag packed and ready. I’ll bring my blackthorn stick, if you follow me.”

“A generous offer, Sir. There’s a late train south—an hour from now, I believe.”

“I’ll need half that,” Tubby said over his shoulder, already hurrying toward the street, bowling through the slow-footed like a juggernaut.

“I’ll fetch the tickets,” I said, and went along in the direction taken by the Peddler, who had apparently purchased his own return ticket and gone about his business by then. I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have given him two shillings for one of his “Austrian-made” timepieces. His consorting with thieves didn’t recommend him, either.

The man behind the glass sat on a high stool, reading a newspaper. He glanced up at me without expression. “I’m looking for a gent,” I told him, the idea coming into my mind at that very moment. “He might have got off the last train. Large, round head, sandy hair, red-faced. He generally dresses in oatmeal tweed, perhaps a little on the shabby side. He might have tried to sell you a pocket watch before buying a ticket to Hastings.”

“You’re three minutes late,” he told me. “Your man’s out on the street by now. And you mean Eastbourne, and not Hastings. He bought a ticket on tonight’s train, the Beachy Head Runner.”

“Beachy Head?”
I said stupidly.
“Tonight’s train?”
He scowled just a little, as if I’d accused him of a lie, and so I sensibly let the matter drop. Perhaps the Peddler had meant Eastbourne by way of Hastings. Perhaps he meant anything at all. Probably he was the fabulous liar of the world, about as genuine as his timepieces.

An hour later the four of us were bound for East Sussex on the very train that the Peddler himself had bought a ticket for, although I hadn’t seen him board. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I thought. In Eridge we would abandon our train for a seat on the aptly named Cuckoo Line, into Uckfield, where we’d strike out overland on foot toward Blackboys if it was too late to hire a coach. With any luck, the mysterious contagion would evaporate, as it evidently had at the Explorers Club, and our sojourn would amount to nothing more than wasted hours.

I was deeply asleep, my head bumping against the window, before we were out of London.

§

When I came awake in the dim coach, we were sitting dead still, the night outside dark and lonesome. For a moment I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there, but the sight of my sleeping companions brought me to my senses, and I sat in the lovely silence for a time and gazed out the window. I saw that I was looking out on a heath, and I could distinguish a line of trees in the distance, and a star or two in the sky, which was full of scudding clouds.

It came into my mind that I’d soon have to find the necessary room, which was situated aft. I arose quietly and made my way down the aisle, passing into the darkness at the back of the car, and trailing one hand along the wall to steady myself, expecting at any moment that the train would start forward and pitch me onto the floor. Abruptly I ran out of wall, and my hand fell away into a void. I lurched sideways, temporarily off balance, and at once heard a shuffling noise and was abruptly aware that someone—a shadow—was standing near me, hidden by the darkness. A hand gripped my arm, I was pushed sideways so that I spun half around, and before it came into my mind to cry out, I was knocked senseless.