The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (5 page)

That same morning, while the sun was still low on the horizon and Tubby and I slept, St. Ives followed the Tipper into the woods. It was nearly dark beneath the oak trees and the Scots pine. Steam rose from the wet leaves and needles that covered the forest floor, creating a ground fog. St. Ives carried an asbestos hat, but the Tipper told him that until they were on the very outskirts of Heathfield itself, the cap was of no value to him. In Heathfield it would be priceless. He declined to respond to the questions St. Ives put to him. He had been paid his fee to take St. Ives into Heathfield, he said, not to palaver like a jackdaw.

Soon the ground itself grew black with coal dust, and the forest opened onto a heath as blighted as the Cities of the Plain after the hail of brimstone. There were mountains of coal dug out of the pits, which descended some 150 fathoms into the depths of the earth—deep enough, the Tipper pointed out, to bury a mort of corpses. Rusting coal tubs lay roundabout, and ruined iron machinery, and heaps of firebrick, fabricated by the hundreds of tons to be shipped off to smelters, and all of it covered with black dust where the dust wasn’t washed off by the elements.

The coal pits were quiet, it being the morning of the Sabbath, but there was a low hovel with smoke coming out of a chimney, with a stream that flowed alongside it, the water running black. The Tipper led St. Ives on a circuitous route, behind the pallets of firebrick and outbuildings, wary of the watchman in the hovel. They crossed the stream on a footbridge, the morning growing darker rather than lighter, and before long a spewy sort of rain started in. The Tipper vowed that if he had known that the weather would turn on them, he’d have asked for something more than six guineas for his trouble. Out of fairness, he said, the Professor should pay him the rest of his fee at once, and not compel him to wait for it, since the result was the same in either case, and if they were discovered and pursued, it was every man for himself. If he were captured, he would be three guineas to the bad.

“Aye,” said St. Ives. “But a man with something to look forward to is likely to do his work more cheerfully, and not retire early from the field. And in the situation you describe, I’d be the one who’s three guineas to the bad, wouldn’t I?”

The Tipper lapsed again into silence, and they went on, into the forest once more, leaving the coal dust behind them. Near Heathfield, the fog rose again around their knees, with here and there patches of it ascending into the treetops. “Pray this fog ain’t washed out by the rain,” the Tipper said. “A fog is perfect weather for a lark like this.”

His prayer was answered, for the fog grew heavier as the minutes slipped away and they neared the point where they’d don the caps. The Tipper slowed, held out a restraining hand, and whispered, “Steady-on!” And then, when all was still, “Listen!”

There was a distant mutter of voices, not the lunatic voices of a village gone mad, but of reasonable men, several of them. How close they were, it was impossible to say. The fog hid the world from view and obscured sound. The Tipper turned to St. Ives and in a low voice said, “So much as a quack from your lordship, and I’m gone, do you hear me? You’ll not see me again. I’ll go back after the payment that’s waiting for me in Blackboys and tell your friends that everything’s topping. You’ll be on your own.”

“Agreed,” St. Ives said, and the Tipper muttered something about it’s not making a halfpenny’s difference who agreed with what. They moved forward carefully, keeping hidden, until they could see a road ahead, the fog blowing aside to reveal a small company of red-coated soldiers sitting beneath an open canvas tent.

“Lobsters,” the Tipper whispered. “Up from Brighton, no doubt.” He nodded toward a dense birch copse some distance farther on, which ran right up against the road. “That’s where we cross into Heathfield proper. Put that cap on. Pull it low over your ears. If you lose the cap, you’ll lose your wits with it, although you won’t know you’ve lost either of them, if you ken my meaning.”

St. Ives donned the cap, which was indeed cobbled together from a pair of gloves, the fingers rising atop like the comb of a rooster. He tugged it firmly down over his ears, deadening what little sound was left in the quiet morning. He had no real understanding of the science involved in the caps, although he suspected that the answer lay somewhere within the notebooks of Lord Busby. More to the point, he wondered how the Tipper could have discovered the efficacy of the asbestos cloth. He couldn’t have, of course. Even if the gloves were ready to hand, it wouldn’t have come into his mind to sew them into a cap. The Tipper was clearly in the hire of someone who had knowledge of such things. Busby being dead, that someone’s identity was obvious.

When would the betrayal come? St. Ives wondered, watching the Tipper scuttle on ahead toward the stand of birch. Soon, surely. He felt for the bulge of the pistol tucked inside his waistcoat. Then he reached into his vest pocket and drew out a hastily written letter addressed to Alice. He hadn’t had time to write what he meant—couldn’t find the words to say it. But if it were necessary, and if the fates were willing, he could get the pitiful attempt into Alice’s hands even if he were captured, and she might at least win free and remember him for who he had always meant to be, paving his marriage with good intentions.

He crumpled the letter into his vest again, where it would be within easy reach, and then hastened forward to where the Tipper stood a few steps back from the edge of the road. The two of them might be hazily visible through the fog when they crossed, although for the moment they were hidden from view. The Tipper mouthed something incomprehensible, but made his meaning clear with a gesture. They crept out into the open, looking carefully north, and for a moment they caught sight of the soldiers again, mere shadows in the murk, before slipping into the forest on the Heathfield side of the road.

St. Ives experimentally tugged his cap away from his ear, and instantly, as if the space within his mind had been occupied by a ready-built dream, he had the strange notion that he was at a masquerade ball. He had never been a dancer, and he loathed costumes, but now he was elated at the idea of taking a turn about the floor. He saw Alice approaching, although she was a mere wraith, which didn’t strike him as at all odd. She carried a glass of punch, seeming to float toward him atop a shifting bed of leaves. He could see forest shrubbery through her, and an uncanny white mist roiling behind her like smoke. Something was happening to her face. It was melting, like a wax bust in a fire.

He yanked the cap back down, pressing his hands tightly against his ears. Now there was no Alice, no masquerade. The madness had slipped in like an airborne poison as soon as the door had swung open, and then had evaporated when the door had slammed shut. And yet despite the cap there seemed to be some presence lurking at the edge of his mind, some creature just kept at bay, but straining to be loosed from its bonds. As they neared the village the capering presence in his head became more insistent. He began to hear small, murmuring voices that rose and fell like a freshening wind. Quite distinctly he heard the voice of his mother saying something about a piano. He imagined himself sitting happily on the parlor floor of his childhood home, dressed in knee breeches, watching a top careen around in a wobbly spin, its buzzing sound clear in his ears.

It came into his mind that his cap might be inferior, that it might be compromised somehow. The Tipper seemed to be sober enough. St. Ives compelled himself to put up a mental struggle, recalling algebraic theorems, settling on Euclid’s lemma, picturing prime numbers falling away like dominoes. He added them together as they ran, tallying sums. A bell began to ring, in among the numbers, it seemed to him, but then ceased abruptly, replaced by the sound of a fiddler, the fiddling turning to laughter, the numbers in his mind blowing apart like dandelion fluff. He forced himself to think of Alice, of himself having gone away to Scotland on his fruitless mission while she journeyed south, possibly to her doom.

The branch of a shrub along the path lashed at his face, sobering him further. He saw a cottage ahead through the thinning trees now, recognizing the blue shutters. On beyond the cottage lay the broad heath from whence the village got its name. The Tipper had taken St. Ives straight to the cottage, despite its remote location: clearly he knew the way well enough. He stood just ahead now, his finger to his lips.

The fog had deepened, and not an imaginary fog. St. Ives could smell it, the damp of it on the stones of the cottage, the musty leaves. It recalled the holidays of his youth, spent in Lyme Regis. Memories of seaside vistas wavered pictorially now on the fog itself, like images in a magic lantern show. He reached out to take hold of them, thinking that he might literally hold them, and he was saddened when they passed through his fingers as mere mist.

The Tipper was grinning at him, as if enjoying St. Ives’s mental unmooring. He put his fingers to his lips and whistled, and out of the fog came Alice herself, not at all a wraith, but solid now, walking slowly as if mesmerized. Her eyes were distant, gazing out on heaven-knew-what. The sight of her brought St. Ives instantly to himself. A man walked behind her, holding onto a clutch of fabric at the back of her dress and wearing one of the asbestos caps.

Then she quite apparently saw St. Ives, for she shook her head as if to dislodge the cobwebs and focused on his face in apparent amazement. This partial return to the waking world seemed to stagger her, and she stumbled forward, nearly falling. The man behind her hauled her to her feet again. St. Ives saw then that he was none other than Sam Burke, the Peddler, dressed in his familiar tweeds.

The Tipper suddenly loomed in front of St. Ives and, quick as a snake, his empty hand disappeared inside St. Ives’s waistcoat and reappeared with the pistol in it. He stepped back, shrugging. “This’ll do just as well as the three guineas,” he said. From behind the corner of the house a third man stepped into view, his right arm tied into a sling. In his left hand he held a pistol of his own, which he pointed at Alice, no doubt as a message to St. Ives, since Alice seemed to have gone out of her mind again and was indifferent to it.

A wave of anger washed the confusion from the Professor’s brain, and he threw himself forward, hitting the surprised Tipper a heavy backhand blow that knocked him down. The pistol flew from his hand, but St. Ives ignored it. Without pause he snatched the Tipper’s cap from the man’s head and shoved it into his own waistband. He clutched the Tipper’s neck with his right hand and lifted him bodily off the ground so that he hung by his own weight, his feet kicking, his mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish drawn from deep water. The one-armed man still pointed his pistol at Alice. He stepped forward now, shaking his head at St. Ives, and in that moment St. Ives knew that the man wouldn’t shoot either of them. The pistol was a bluff.

St. Ives made a sudden lunge forward, carrying the Tipper with him, clutched to his chest, the Tipper biting and lurching insanely, a low, gibbering nose uttering from his mouth. Pivoting on his right foot and spinning halfway around, St. Ives hurled the Tipper like a sack of potatoes at the man with the pistol, both of them going over in a heap. He reached into his vest and drew out the note that he had written earlier that morning, and then, rushing toward the Peddler and Alice, he yanked the Tipper’s hat from his waistband, shoved the note into it, and with both hands pulled the cap down over Alice’s head and ears, turning sideways in that same moment and bowling into the Peddler, knocking him backward and clubbing at his head with his fists.

The Peddler grappled him, strong as an ape, reeling back against the wall of the cottage. He heard Alice shout something—no sort of madness, but something sensible—and he shouted back at her, “Run! Run!” at the top of his voice, holding on to the Peddler, pressing his thumb into the man’s throat, compressing his larynx. And then his own cap was snatched off his head, and there was a shout of triumph in his ear. Abruptly he heard fiddling and laughter on the wind, a cacophony of wild noise. There was a gunshot, fearfully close, and he saw Alice running, the one armed man pointing the pistol and firing it over her head and into the trees. St. Ives looked back vaguely at the man he was throttling, confused now, and saw with horror that the man wore the contorted face of his own father.

St. Ives reeled backward, releasing the man’s neck. Smoke seemed to him to be pouring out of the windows of the cottage now, taking the form of grinning demons as it roiled into the air. The world was a reeling inferno in the moment before he was struck in the back of the head and darkness descended upon him.