The Five Bells and Bladebone (2 page)

He could imagine what it had been like during the trading days of India and the East: varnished bowsprits and the rust-colored sails like bruises against a viscous sky. When he’d said to his friend Sid that all that river traffic must be like Venice, Sid had just laughed.
Don’t be so romantic, lad
. Sid had been to Venice and everywhere else Tommy had only heard of.
Venice is all gilt and blue, like a jeweled dragon. But that ship there
(and he’d pointed to one lying at anchor)
ain’t nothing but an old dog sleeping in a Gravesend doorway
.

Tommy felt a surge of guilt over lying to Aunt Glad and Uncle John, but they’d never have let him go up to London, not even for the two days. He thought he deserved at
least this chance to see Sadie, no matter what they thought of her. Sid would cover for him. He hunched even further into the black leather jacket he’d got at the Oxfam shop with some of the money his sister had sent. It was too big for him, but it was real leather, not that stiff cheap stuff that cracked when you moved. When he ran his hand over it, it felt like down.

Wapping wasn’t more than thirty miles away, as the bird flew and the London river ran. He knew the course of the Thames like the palm of his hand — Tilbury, Greenhithe, Rotterhithe, Bermondsey, Deptford. Even for these two days, he knew he would miss it, working the tug with Sid.

She’d said that someday he could maybe come to Limehouse and live with her, when she got a bigger place. But she’d been saying that for a long time now —
school, after you finish school
. Tommy tried to shrug off the painful feeling he’d got when he felt she didn’t really want him to come even now. Still, she’d sent the money. He’d never seen seventy-five quid all at once in his life.

From Galleon’s Reach came the desolate warning of a bell-buoy. A tug sounded a note of gloom in its passage toward a black ship’s hulk some distance out in the estuary. He had not left, yet he felt heartsick; felt the gloom of the passing tug, wondered how many mugs of strong tea he’d carried from the engine room to the deck.

He loved the river, but he loved Sadie, too, and one of his saddest days was when she’d left Gravesend for London. His memory of her shifted so much, was so dreamlike, he sometimes thought he’d made it all up. But he was sure he recalled clearly many incidents in their childhood days. Well,
his
childhood. She was twelve years older, but he thought he had memories of her letting him tag along, buying him sweets at the newsagent’s, chalking naughts and crosses on the pavement for him, playing in the Wendy-house.

Two more tugs spurted across the water, turning blood-brown
in the last of the sunset, a stretch on which the bald sun seemed to float and then settle. Way out he could see the tiny black figures of the tug’s crew scrambling onto the lighters to separate them, tie them to the boat, and drag them back to the wharf.

When the sun went down there was an air of desolation, of estrangement in the deserted buildings, the boarded windows of the warehouses. He watched as the tug chugged back toward the wharf, the string of lighters in tow.

How strange that tomorrow he should be climbing aboard a train to go to a place that lay only a few miles upriver, that would be infinitely simpler to reach by way of that river, where all he needed to do was step from a boat or climb down from a tug to Wapping Old Stairs or Pelican Stairs where he would like to think some sort of fortune awaited him.

But not, he was sure, like the one that awaited Marco Polo.

 • • • 

Its dish was empty; no one called.

The white cat padded round the drained pools and down the pebbled path through the formal gardens. It sat quite still for a moment and then twined through a border of viburnum. Again, it stopped beneath bushy roses, whose white petals sifted down as the white cat darted toward a flash of gray on the pebble walk. It was tracking a field mouse. The field mouse blended into the gray and brown of the pebble and stone just as the white cat blended into a border of pearl-drops, as if neither were substantial, shadow chasing shadow.

The white cat sat now in the enclosed garden by a stone figure, a young woman holding a broken bowl filled by rain. Finches and wrens sometimes lit there. The cat sat looking down the length of the rose-covered pergola, listening in the early light. It was as if it could pick, from the
trills and warbles of birdsong, the tiny threshing of mouse through yew hedge and ground cover. Light filtered through the vines and lay in pearly stripes across the cat’s fur.

Scarves of mist across the grass were dissolving in the sun, dew dripping from the vines and rose petals that covered the pergola. The white cat watched the progress of a drop gathering on the edge of a petal, a dot of blue in a crystal suspension, falling and dispersing before he could swipe it with his paw. The cat yawned, blinked, dozed where it sat.

A sound, a smell, it opened its eyes and perked its ears. It gazed upward as a robin left its perch in a laurel and flew off. The cat walked out of the secluded garden and toward the bank of a stream farther on. Here it crouched and watched a wren having a dust bath. Before it could pounce, the wren was away, skimming across the water. Looking into the stream, as if the bird might have fallen there, the cat saw shadows deep inside darting, hanging suspended, darting forward again. The cat struck at the water, trying to fix the moving shadow with its paw.

It yawned again, washed at the paw, stopped when it saw something skittering across the footbridge, and followed. On the other side of the bridge, it looked around. Nothing moved. The sun was nearly over the horizon now, spreading a sudden crust of gold across the lake and a shimmering light on the windows of the summerhouse.

The cat liked the summerhouse; it was cool and shadowy. There were pleasant lumpy chairs, wool throws tossed over the one nearest the hearth, and here the white cat loved to lie. It would sleep there for a day, two days, making its movable feast of whatever small things lurked in the dark corners. It ignored whistles and cries from the outside; eventually, it would leave and cross the wide lawn and long gardens and inspect its dish on the patio.

For a while it sat as still as garden statuary itself, blinking and watching the floor by the french windows. It spied a bit of shadow in the corner, separating from the darkness and skittering along the baseboard.

The white cat quivered, crouched, and went slithering across the rug to squeeze itself into the narrow space between a large
secrétaire
and the floor.

In a minute it squeezed out again and sat washing the blood from its paw. Then it walked through the open french window, down a short path, and onto a small dock. Here it sat looking over the lake, yawning.

I
N THE
J
ACK AND
H
AMMER
, Dick Scroggs could barely be called from his toils long enough to set the pint of beer and ploughman’s before his single customer.

“There’s been more activity around here in the last month than I’ve seen in a lifetime,” said Melrose Plant. “You’re expecting a lot of tourist trade, are you?”

“Got to keep up with the times, m’lord,” said Scroggs, around the nails in his mouth and over the pounding of the hammer in his hand.

Melrose imagined he was not so much keeping up with the times as with the Blue Parrot, a freshly named and painted pub off the Dorking Dean-Northampton Road. A derivative name, surely — one might say, nicked from Sydney Greenstreet, though it was unlikely that the clientele of a Moroccan saloon, imaginary at that, would go caravanning down the dirt road to the new Blue Parrot.

As he watched his pickled onion roll round his plate and tried to drink Dick’s Thunderbolt, Melrose asked, “Where’d you get that snob screen?” He was looking down the bar at a row of beautifully etched, beveled-glass partitions.

“Trueblood, sir. He watches out for things for me.” Dick, whose usual position in the Jack and Hammer was arms
akimbo over his newspaper, wiped his heavy arm across his forehead. “Thought it might add a bit of interest. No one else hereabouts has one,” he added, his tone heavy with significance.

“That’s certainly true.” Melrose adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and settled in for a session with the
Times
crossword. It was propped against his copy of Rimbaud, which in turn was positioned atop Polly Praed’s latest thriller,
The Nine Barristers
. The crossword was a little like a lettuce leaf he used to clear the palate between poetry and Polly. He was livening things up by inventing other words to fit the spaces.

All of Dick’s activity was mildly irritating. Melrose was used at this time of day to nothing but the ticking of the clock and the snoring of Mrs. Withersby. Now Scroggs had left off hammering to hurry past him with a paint bucket, on his way to touch up the turquoise trim of the Jack and Hammer’s façade. Scroggs had even taken to trying to brew some manner of beer, without (Melrose was sure, tasting the Thunderbolt) much idea of the difficulty of the process.

This bustle might have made him feel like a sluggard had he not been a sensible man who had got his priorities straight some years ago. Having swept out his titles of Earl of Caverness, fifth Viscount Ardry, and all the rest, he could settle down in his well-aired family seat of Ardry End and enjoy his fortune.

Well, it
was
spring! he thought. Just smell that air —

 • • • 

Unfortunately the air that Scroggs had ushered in when he opened the door had also ushered in Melrose’s aunt, being extremely ostentatious with her crutches, which she leaned first here, and then there, groping her way to the chintz-cushioned bench. That Melrose made only the smallest gesture toward assisting her was not because he wasn’t a gentleman, but because he knew the bandaged
ankle was pure trumpery, something she’d got the local doctor to do with many a painful and laborious sigh on both parts.

“I rang the house. You weren’t there,” she said, thumping herself down at his table with a practiced moan.

“That’s very observant of you, Agatha,” he said, filling in
D-O-L-T
where
T-O-L-D
was called for. This was fun.

“Thought you said he was coming today, Melrose.”

“Jury? He is.”

Never the one to kowtow to the needs of others, Lady Ardry wound out the little window behind her, sending down a shower of petals from the climbing roses, and called to Dick Scroggs to bring her her shooting sherry.

“Can’t see why the man isn’t in here tending to business rather than slapping on that bilious blue paint.”

A three-letter word to use in place of
tin
. Melrose pondered. “Well, since the Blue Parrot is doing such a whale of a business, Scroggs is afraid it’ll snap up all the tourist trade.”

“What tourists? That’s why we like it here. No strangers running amok tossing iced-lolly wrappers on the pavement, no screaming kiddies. What’s happened to him, then?”

Melrose looked up quizzically.

“To Superintendent
Jury
.” You stupid nit, the sigh said.

Ah! That was it! thought Melrose, his pen poised over the crossword. “He’s had a flat tire,” lied Melrose while filling in
N-I-T
. Since she seemed to think he was equipped with radar for tracking Richard Jury’s movements, it would only encourage her to guess at Jury’s arrival time.

“I knew something would happen. Always does. This is the third, no, the fourth time he’s been supposed to visit —” She broke off and demanded her glass of sherry as Dick came in with his paint tin. Dick kept on walking.

Melrose changed the subject. “What are you doing in here when you are supposed to be in your cottage resting your foot?”

“I’m making quite sure my witnesses will stick to their story. Miss Crisp is already wavering. And here comes Vivian, who certainly is no help at all.”

 • • • 

Vivian Rivington, looking like the harbinger of spring in a pale pink frock, told Agatha that she was being ridiculous, that she should forgive and forget. Vivian added, “Actually, it’s Mr. Jurvis who should forgive. You’re the one causing the trouble, Agatha. Where’s Superintendent Jury?” Any interest in Agatha’s “case” was forgotten in the light of an event that came round less often than an eclipse of the sun.

“He’s had a breakdown. No, not a nervous one. He’s had a flat tire on the M-1. Called me from one of those Trusthouse Forte restaurants.” Gleefully, Melrose found another four-letter word:
fool
. It ran through the
O
and
L
for
dolt
. Perhaps he had a talent in an unsuspected quarter, making up puzzles for the
Times
. Eagerly he filled it in and awaited the next challenge.

 • • • 

That might have been found in the appearance of Marshall Trueblood, looking like a maypole. Today a flame-red scarf was twisted in the neck of a tea-rose-yellow shirt in such a way that the ends hung like streamers.

Agatha, already in a fit of pique over Vivian’s ignoring her plight, apparently found her archenemy’s entrance a bit too much for human endurance. “Well, one knows who one’s friends are when it comes to a legal battle.” She reached, as if painfully, for her crutches.