The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (3 page)

Jackie!” a voice said, sounding distant and dreamlike. It occurred to me that the name was my own, or had been in some dim, earlier life. Soon after I recalled that I had eyes, and I opened them and squinted up into the worried face of Tubby Frobisher, who looked down at me, holding his blackthorn stick in his hand. My first thought was that Tubby had beaten me with it, but on second thought it seemed moderately unlikely. The train was moving along now, slowly picking up speed.

“I knocked the bugger sideways,” Tubby said to me. “Broke his wrist for him, I warrant you. But he leapt out the carriage door straightaway and disappeared. A railway thief, no doubt. The man had his weapon raised to strike you again, by God, but I put an end to his filthy caper.”

I managed to sit up now, but reeled back against the wall, shutting my eyes at the sudden spasm of pain in my skull. On the floor beside me lay a piece of rusty iron pipe wrapped in greasy newsprint that smelled unhappily of fried cod. There was a spray of blood on the newsprint—my blood, I realized. I scrabbled weakly in my coat pocket and discovered that my watch was missing, and of course my purse with it. To put it simply, I’d been bludgeoned and robbed. By now my assailant had no doubt gone to ground in Ashdown forest through one of the common gates.

If I could have felt anything past the pain in my head, I would have felt like a fool, a richly deserving fool. It was no secret that railway thieves booked passage on the South Eastern Railway for no other purpose than to waylay nighttime travelers at carefully chosen spots along the track. East Sussex is full of forests and empty heath, you see. There’s no point in stopping the train to give chase, or to report the incident at the next station, because there’s damn-all that anyone can do to put things right. In that part of the country, railway thievery is perhaps the safest line of work there is, unless you’re unfortunate enough to run into Tubby Frobisher and be laid out by a blackthorn stick.

Tubby helped me back to my seat, where my companions voiced a general concern. St. Ives probed the back of my head and announced that my skull wasn’t crushed. I’d been dealt a sort of sideways blow, to my great good fortune, he said, due to my falling away from the man even as he struck me. To my mind my fortune would have been considerably improved at that moment had I been spared the entire experience.

“What’s this now?” St. Ives asked, looking at the newsprint-wrapped pipe, which Tubby had brought away with him.

“The weapon,” I muttered stupidly, but then I saw that he didn’t mean the length of pipe, but rather the newspaper. He held it up gingerly and unfolded it—the
Brighton Evening Argus
, it turned out to be, from two days past. It was the story on the front page that interested him, and he read it in silence for a time and then laid the newspaper down and looked away. “Of course,” he muttered and shook his head tiredly.

Hasbro picked the
Argus
up again and said, “Might I, sir?” St. Ives nodded but said nothing. The salient bits of the remarkable story went thus: A merchant ship, the
India Princess
, out of Brighton, had driven up into the shallows below Newhaven and had stuck fast near where the River Ouse empties into the Channel. She was hauled free when the tide had risen the following morning, with tolerably little damage done to the hull or cargo. Virtually the entire crew had drowned or disappeared, and that was the puzzler. The ship wasn’t wrecked. There had been no storm, no foul weather. As remarkable as it might be, they had apparently leapt or fallen over the side shortly after the ship had rounded Selsey Bill, several miles from shore, the lot of them shouting and carrying on like candidates for head nutter at Colney Hatch.

The ship’s boy, the sole known survivor of the tragedy, had been asleep, and had awakened when he heard the ruckus. He reported that a fit was even then upon him. He found himself laughing hysterically at nothing and then reeling in sudden terror when his old uncle, dead three years earlier, dressed now in knickers and wearing a fright wig, descended the companionway, grinning fearsomely. In his terror the boy had rushed straight through the apparition and up the companionway to the deck, only to see the first mate and the captain, wrapped in apparently bloody pieces of sail canvas, dancing a hornpipe on the railing. The cook was beating time on an overturned tub, wearing a swab on his head, his face garish with rouge. Other members of the crew staggered about the deck singing and groaning, tearing their hair, jigging in place to the strains of a phantom fiddler. As the boy watched, the two dancing men lost their balance and pitched straight overboard into the sea. The cook, his eyes whirling, picked up the kettle and advanced upon the boy coquettishly, mouthing insanities and beating his head with an enormous galley spoon. His nankeen trousers and shirt were stained with bloody red streaks. The boy trod backward in fear, stepped into the open hatch, and plunged to the lower deck, where he was knocked insensible.

When he came to consciousness he found that the entire crew had disappeared, although the boats were still aboard. His own fit had passed away, and the ghost of his uncle with it. The deck was scattered with trash and overturned kegs. The cook’s tub and most of the kitchen tools were thrown about, a cleaver imbedded in the mast. Someone had painted a grinning moon-face on the mainsail, making a general mess of the deck with red paint so that it appeared as if a bloody battle had taken place. Finding that the ship was adrift, the sails flapping, the boy did his best to take her into Brighton, but was at the mercy of the winds, and couldn’t manage it alone. The fates favored him, however, because the ship ran on up the Channel, going aground on sandy bottom without disaster. He made his way into Newhaven where he reported the incident, and was immediately taken up on suspicion of having engineered the thing himself. The following morning the drowned bodies of the captain and the cook washed ashore near Littlehampton, their costumes confirming the boy’s strange tale. It was a mystery comparable to the recent case of the
Mary Celeste
, and the maritime authorities were at a loss to explain it.

“Well now,” Tubby said when Hasbro had finished reading the piece. “Here’s another outbreak of lunacy—the third. To my way of thinking the third of anything smacks of a plot, unless this
contagion
, as they call it, is carried on the wind and weather.”

“Yes indeed,” St. Ives muttered ambiguously, and then he disappeared down into himself again and fell silent, apparently deep in troubled thought. “A plot,” he said a moment later. “Poor Alice.” Then he said, “A word with you, Hasbro,” and the two of them huddled together and spoke in low voices, Hasbro nodding in solemn acquiescence to whatever St. Ives was telling him. I could make out little of what the Professor said beyond his asking Hasbro whether he recalled the death not long past of Lord Busby, Earl of Hampstead, or the Earl of Hamsters, as the press laughingly referred to him. The rest of the talk was mere muttering. It seemed a little thick to me that I was left out of the conversation, although Tubby didn’t apparently mind, because he was asleep.

The train soon arrived in Eridge, and we abandoned her for the Cuckoo line to Uckfield, all of us but Hasbro, that is. He mysteriously boarded a London-bound train without so much as a by-your-leave the moment that we climbed down onto the platform. The four of us were now three.

“Hasbro is returning to Chingford to fetch along something that I hope we won’t require,” St. Ives said. I waited for the explanatory sentence that would surely follow, but it didn’t come. It would in the fullness of time, of course, but it was damned strange being left out of things. I was leery of playing the Grand Inquisitor, though, and anyway was too tired to speak. We had been traveling for days it seemed, with only that brief respite at the Half Toad, and the hours had heaped up into a heavy weariness. Tubby was snoring again directly we got underway, and despite the pain in my head I sank toward sleep myself, caught up in a recollection of the shocking condition of Lord Busby’s two-days-old corpse when we’d found it.

Busby had been engaged in experiments involving the production of various rays, both visible and invisible, created by the use of large, precious stones. The stones, to the value at tens of thousands of pounds, had been stolen along with his papers and apparatus at the time of his murder. Scotland Yard suspected that he was in league with certain Prussian interests, who were financing his experiments, and St. Ives was of a like mind. The Prussians, perhaps, had simply taken what they wanted when Busby’s work had born fruit, and for his efforts had paid poor Busby in lead, as they say.

I tell you this now because my mind is fresh, and because it has a bearing on our story, but there in the train car, at the edge of sleep, I didn’t care a brass farthing about Busby one way or the other, given that the man was a traitor, or had been setting up to become one. Take a long spoon when you sup with the devil, I say. In short, I faded from consciousness and slept the sleep of the dead until the train stopped in Uckfield well past midnight.

§

About our tedious trek into Blackboys I’ll say little. There was no transport to be had in Uckfield, and so, the weather being moderately clear and the night starry, we optimistically set out along the road, hauling our bags in a borrowed handcart. An hour into our journey the sky clouded over and it began to rain in earnest, and despite our umbrellas we were soon soaked through, the mud up to our withers. I was in a bad way by then, leaning heavily against Tubby on the lee side.

News of the peculiar shipwreck had by now changed the general view of things, putting an edge on it, as the knacker would say of his knife. Something was afoot that apparently had little to do with a mere prank involving poisoned punch at the Explorers Club. Tubby, game as ever, was enlivened by the nearness of our goal, and was edgy with the desire push on into Heathfield immediately instead of bothering with Blackboys, and the Tipper be damned. Probably the man was off robbing houses at the moment anyway. It was common sense, Tubby said, that the raid had best be carried out in the early morning hours, when vigilance slept and darkness was an ally.

But I wasn’t up to the task. Tubby’s idea was that I could bivouac well enough in one of the huts near the coal pits, while he and St. Ives slipped into Heathfield and made their way to the niece’s cottage, situated, as it was, on a country lane. The relative isolation of the place would tip the whole business in our favor. They would fling Alice into the back of a hay wagon, and the niece in with her, and spirit both of them out of the village, by stealth, bribery, or main force. They would gather me up and run south, going to ground at Tubby’s uncle’s place in Dicker.

I was a wreck by then, and far too weary to object. A dark hut near the coal pits would be a welcome thing even if it were crawling with adders, so long as it was dry. I half thought that St. Ives would agree with Tubby, time being of the essence, but about that I was wrong. Instead of seizing the moment as Tubby advised, he reminded us of the asbestos caps, and it was those hats that carried the day, since there was no going into Heathfield without them. He honored us for our loyalty, he said, but it was the Tipper or nothing.

And so it was an hour before dawn when we fell in through the door at the Old Coach Inn on the High Street and roused the innkeeper, still in his nightcap, and moderately unhappy that he’d been deprived of his last hour of sleep. It was wonderful, though, to see what money can do to improve a man’s spirit, for he took ours happily enough in the end, and, being short of accommodations, stowed us in two closed up, empty rooms with pieces of dirty carpet on the floor to serve as beds. We’d slept rougher, though, in our time, and the rooms were at least dry. The Professor took one of them, and Tubby and I the other, ours having the added luxury of a solid shutter across the window to block out the day.

Once again I fell into the arms of Morpheus without so much as a heigh-ho. It was several hours later that Tubby arose to heed the call of nature, stumbling over me in the darkness and nearly crushing my hand. I cried out, as you can imagine, and that was the end of sleep. A morbid sun shone through the chinks in the shutter. We rapped on the door of the adjacent room, but apparently the Professor was already up and about. Tubby and I put ourselves together and hastened out into the inn parlor to find our friend, who had solicitously let us sleep—odd behavior under the circumstances, it seemed to me now. The clock began to toll the hour: nine o’clock.

St. Ives was nowhere to be seen, and in fact the inn parlor was generally empty of people. Somehow the journey down the hall from our room had reminded my head of that iron pipe. There was the smell of rashers and coffee leaking out of the kitchen, which on any other morning would suggest the smell of heaven itself, but which gave my stomach an unhappy lurch. I sat down heavily in a chair by the hearth. “I’m all right,” I said to Tubby. “It’ll pass.”

“Of course it will,” Tubby said, a little too cheerfully. “That piece of pipe would have knocked the sense out of any other man alive, but you haven’t any sense to begin with, Jack, and that’s what saved you.” He bobbed up and down with silent laughter and then headed toward the door, meaning to look for our companion. But the door swung open in that very moment, nearly banging into him. A boy of about ten crept in—the stable boy, as it turned out—and stood looking from one to the other of us, twisting an envelope in his hands as if he were wringing out a towel. He was a long-faced lad with a shock of hair that stood up on his head as if he had taken a fright. He touched it to his forehead by way of a greeting.

“Begging your honors’ pardon,” he said, “but is one of you Mr. Owlesby? Mr. Jack Owlesby?”

“One of us is,” I told him. “In fact, I am the very man. Who might you be?”

“John Gunther,” he said. And without another word he handed over the envelope, which bore my name across the seal: Jack Owlesby, Esq. I could see at once who had written it. St. Ives’s curious back-slanted script is unique. “The man told me to give it to you personal, sir,” John Gunther said, “when it was nine by the clock, and to show it to no one else. And I was to give you these.” From his pocket he took three guineas and handed them to me. “And now I’ve done my job and done it fairly, sir.”