by Rod Duncan
Yet our motives seemed inexplicably in alignment. She wished to avoid a scandal. I certainly did not wish to cause one. She wanted me away from Upper Wharf Street. I wanted to be further from the border and constables who could recognise me as a fugitive. She wanted to have the case of the ice farmers resolved – though I still did not understand the reason. And I wished to see my friend again.
Thus, with a purse of money from the charitable foundation and with my father’s pistol returned to me, I set off to Ashbourne, where Julia had gone to gather information on the ice trade. I would help solve the case and Mrs Raike would pull what levers she could. If the extradition treaty was amended, I could be free again. If not, perhaps I could hope that the weight of my knowledge might motivate her to hide me.
The walk to Ashbourne would have taken less than a day unencumbered. But I was hauling a travelling case and my foot had not fully healed. I dared not risk opening the wound again. Neither would I dare the coach station undisguised for fear of the constables, who might well hope to acquire me at such a place.
Fugitives are fated to make slow progress.
Having left the warehouse via a courtyard and a flight of brick steps, I set out in the pre-dawn gloom. Dew beaded the metal railings of the empty street. There were no more animal noises from dark doorways. But once I thought there were footsteps following. And another time, hearing a metallic scrape, I swung my head to see a sewer covering askew that before I hadn’t noticed. After that I left the wharves and warehouses behind me. The streets were still shabby but my heart calmed with the lessening of dread.
Presently I found guest houses of the kind where a single woman would be asked no questions on taking a room. There were food stalls on the street outside, selling to men who trudged towards morning shifts. Most of the food looked as filthy as the hands that served it. But needing to eat, I bought two flat loaves griddled before my eyes, over a fire of smashed up furniture. I chose the middle of a row of three guest houses and paid for two nights, though I intended to stay for only a few hours.
The room was uncleaned, the linen stained and crawling with mites, the lock broken. I hefted the iron bed frame across so that it would stop the door from being opened. Then I settled myself on a wooden chair, injured foot raised on my travelling case.
I supposed it would be impossible to sleep, propped as I was. My mind darted over dark thoughts and suspicions too quickly to dismiss any of them. When fatigue at last won out, I carried those half-formed fears with me into sleep. My dreams were stalked by monsters.
I awoke stiff-necked having slept through most of the day. Motes of dust drifted in the air before my face. In the gloom earlier I hadn’t noticed the moth holes that patterned the curtain. But with the evening sun outside, each hole allowed a pencil of light to penetrate the darkened room.
The gas lamp offered but a feeble splutter. Come dusk it would be too dim to work by. So I half drew the curtain and began my transformation while the sun was still over the roofs. Working with the mirror inside the lid of my travelling case, I darkened my skin tone, laying down the gum and fake facial hair that would alter my appearance to that of a young man. I thickened my eyebrows, replaced corset with binding cloth, blouse with shirt, skirt with trousers. I let the flattened top hat pop out on its springs and extended the telescopic walking cane.
In the Bullet Catcher’s Handbook it says that of all disguises, expectation is the deepest. It was only eleven hours into the two days for which I had booked the room. Whatever suspicion the landlord entertained as he watched a young man stepping out of the door, it was not that the young woman tenant had chosen to leave. I read the thought behind his smirk – Under that respectable dress she was no better than the others. He didn’t look at the travelling case in my hand.
Ignoring him, I walked out onto the cobbled street, leaning on my cane to hide the limp as best I could. I had to force myself to keep my eyes on the road ahead and not to look back in the give-away manner of those who fear themselves followed. Paranoia breeds in the mind when you are on the run. And I, a double fugitive, running from the law of the Kingdom and the Republic.
The coach station was silent in the night. A grand iron framework supported the arch of the high roof. Underneath ran a wide road. Here, coaches would line up during the day. It would bustle with the loading and unloading of such goods and people as could not afford to travel by air and were in too much of a hurry to go by boat.
Sheltered under the canopy of the coach station were a row of squat and functional structures – the porters’ lodge, ticket and overseer’s offices, strong rooms, feed store, pigeon house, news stand, tea shop and the waiting room in which I would be spending the night.
The ticket office was empty. I pinged the counter bell and presently a sleepy young man emerged from the back and asked if I had read the opening hours. I slid a tenpence across to him by way of an apology. Having palmed it with practiced sleight of hand, he gestured to a plaque on the wall.
Derby Coach Station is recognised for
- excellence in passenger care -
“Timetables aren’t everything,” he said.
I would have saved Mrs Raike’s money, but the 3rd class waiting room would be locked until morning. So I walked away with a 1st class ticket and a copy of the timetable, which told me that the first coach to Ashbourne would leave at half past eight.
The waiting room was warm, though it smelled faintly of sausage. The chairs were clean and comfortable. I chose one furthest from the door and next to a pot- bellied stove. With my back to the wall and my case next to me on the floor, I ate the last of the bread from the street vendor and settled down for a long wait.
With the stillness pressing, my anxieties began to return. In the filthy guest house, troubles had flitted through my mind on dark wings, moving so fast that I had no way to fix onto any of them. But now, fortified by some hours of sleep during the day, I plucked one from the air.
Mrs Jones, sister of Councillor Wallace Jones, was pursuing the rights of women as she saw them. Hers was a distinctly Republican approach – liberation through labour. Let us work as volunteers and our status will rise. That was the argument. Our talents will be recognised and we will enter into a more balanced partnership with men. Mrs Raike was a fiction created to drive the movement forwards and take the criticism, so that her brother could quietly support the same agenda from within government. In secret they were both lobbyist and lobbied.
I instinctively disliked Mrs Raike’s sanctimonious displays of virtue. But the illusion itself – its audacity – this I could not help but admire. I knew the ways of the bullet catchers. I had been with the greatest alchemist of the day and seen through his tricks. But here was a woman who wished to change more than lead into gold – she had set about the transmutation of the entire Republic. It was a goal which, had I thought it possible, I might have shared.
But I did not trust her.
She had claimed to know nothing about a spy on my trail. This was the thought I kept returning to. For weeks I had been noticing movements and sounds where there should have been none. At first I’d put it down to paranoia. Then, just as I’d begun to entertain the idea that I was being watched, the constables came to arrest me. Whoever was following, it seemed they had lost my trail at that point. But when I returned to the wharf, I was found again. The flicker of movement I had glimpsed through Bessie’s porthole after she was moved into the boat house – there was no explanation for it, but that someone had been outside watching.
Then I had been followed from the canal to the warehouse on Upper Wharf Street. “The asylum is full,” the woman had said. Poor creatures, she had called them. I had been too panicked to think clearly at the time. But it came to me, there had been more than one shadow following me along the street. When I disembarked from the boat, before the madness, there had been the sound of stealthy footsteps.
It was the next step of logic that I’d not been able to think about until now. Perhaps it had
been too disturbing to entertain. When I walked to the police house in Syston, I’d heard a noise from the bushes. And now again, walking to the coach station. But these times, I was in disguise. If the same person was following me when I walked in the guise of a man, the secret of my double identity had been pierced.
My thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the waiting room door. A man in uniform peered inside. But for the peaked cap, I would have thought him a constable.
“Evening, sir,” he said, glancing around the room and sniffing the air.
Without my voice warmed up, I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I nodded to return his greeting.
“Where would you be travelling?”
Digging in my jacket pocket, I retrieved my ticket and held it up for him to see.
He stepped across to me, releasing the door to swing back on its spring. It closed with a creak and a thud. I could read his badge now. Anglo- Scottish Republic – - Transport Police. He bent to examine my ticket.
“Ashbourne, is it?”
I nodded.
“Gateway to the Peaks,” he said. “On holiday?”
I pointed to my throat and then my chest. He frowned.
“Recovering from influenza,” I whispered. “A rest cure.”
He straightened himself. “Anyone been here? A woman on her own, perhaps?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I won’t disturb you any longer.”
I watched the door creaking closed after he was gone.
The fire shifted in the pot- bellied stove. Outside the waiting room, the station clock ticked laboriously. More distant and fainter still was the sound that every city makes as it breathes, even in sleep.
If I had been tailed from Upper Wharf Street, then the one who followed me must be near. I stood and moved silently to the waiting room door. Through its single glass panel, I could see the wide roadway and the arch of the high roof above it. Two barrels had been left upright next to a small pile of crates on the far side. There wouldn’t be space behind for anyone to hide. I shifted my head across to see further around the station, searching for places in which I might have positioned myself to keep watch. If I was tailing someone alone, I would need to take what sleep I could. The question was – where could a person sleep and still be sure the target would not slip away?
I gazed at the ceiling, trying to remember the appearance of the building from the outside. It was single storey, for sure. Flat roofed, I thought, with a low balustrade. That is where I would have gone, perhaps lying with one ear to the ground. A light sleeper might be woken every time the waiting room door thudded closed on its spring.
With great gentleness, I twisted the door handle. The latch clicked, sounding like a gunshot to my ear, though it can have been little louder than the clock ticking. Pulling the door inwards, I propped it open with my travelling case.
Cold night air reached into the room. I held my breath and listened.
Nothing.
If my watcher was up there and awake, he was keeping still and silent. Because the door opened inwards, he would not be able to see it. Indeed, if he wished to avoid giving himself away, he would need to keep his head back from the edge. Or she. Whoever it was had been light footed and probably small.
I counted the seconds by the ticking of the station clock. After five minutes of silence I slipped through the door and began to side-step, following the wall of the building as closely as I dared – for a touch of fabric against brick would be loud enough to give away my plan. At the first corner, I thought I heard something so stopped to listen. The sound was faint and it took me a moment to identify it as a tuneless whistling. I scanned the other side of the station and saw a movement – the transport constable in his peaked cap ambling from the back of the animal feed store. His path would bring him in my direction.
I was around the corner of the building in one quick movement. He would be with me in under a minute. He would want to know why I had left my suitcase propping the door.
Quickly now, I stepped down the side of the waiting room and round behind it. Turning the corner, I saw an iron ladder, fixed to the rear wall.
Aware of the sound of my clothes moving, I started to climb. Two rungs up, I remembered to remove my top hat. There was no one else to see and anyone who had followed me thus far must already know my sex.
Two more rungs and my head was just below the cornice of stonework that projected from the top of the wall. I took a final step, bringing my eyes to the edge. And there crouched a figure with his back to me. He peered out from the front of the building. It was a teenage boy. A ragged coat hung loose from his malnourished frame.
I did not need to see his face to recognise him. His name was Tinker and we had met before.
But the constable would be returning. I was down the ladder in three steps and dashing back towards the waiting room door, knowing the boy would hear. Braking hard, I rounded the final corner in the semblance of a relaxed stroll.
I had misjudged the time. The constable was standing barely two paces away.
“And what,” he said, “might you be doing?”
Chapter 17
Wealth flows from the grinding mill of industry. And from wealth comes refinement. But nothing upsets the refined quite so badly as the smell from a factory chimney.
From Revolution
Tinker – a small-framed boy in outsized clothes, self-orphaned, adrift in a world of men. A year before he’d been a stable hand on a grand estate in the Kingdom. His mother had a fondness for drink and his father was free with the belt. So the boy latched on to a kinder man. And when that man ran away to join a travelling show, Tinker followed. It might have worked out, but Tinker’s adopted parent had been spiralling towards destruction. Thus, for a time, the boy mistakenly latched onto me. When we said goodbye, I’d not thought to see him again. But there he was, on the roof of the waiting room.
In front of me stood the constable, running his fingers around the peak of his cap. “Well?” he demanded.
I coughed into my fist, trying to loosen my throat. “Air,” I whispered.
“Air? What?”
I coughed again. “I needed air.”
He leaned forwards and peered into my face. Expert though I was, my disguise wouldn’t stand the long scrutiny of suspicious eyes. He stepped closer. I tried to get past him and back into the waiting room but he put out his arm to bar my way.
“Let me through.”
“Where’re you from?”
“North Leicester.”
“Whereabouts in North Leicester?”
“Glenfield,” I said, picking a pleasant suburb at random.
“And what do you do in Glenfield?”
He was so close now that I could smell his breath and knew who had cooked the sausages in the waiting room. He was tall. Even with the lifts in my boots, I would’ve had to angle my head upwards to look him in the eye. And that I couldn’t do without letting the lamplight shine fully on my face.
I took a step back. He closed the distance again.
“What do you do?” There was iron in his voice.
“Tinker!” I blurted, the word coming too loud from my mouth. Too high pitched.
There was a faint scuffing sound from the roof of the waiting room.
“What did you say?” demanded the constable.
“I tinker,” I said, hoping that the boy would understand my message.
“I’m going to have to ask you to open your case, sir.”
He gestured towards the waiting room door. An image flashed into my mind – the bloomers and skirts that would expand outwards as the lid lifted.
“Why?”
“We’re searching for an escaped prisoner.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter who. You’re behaving in a suspicious manner. I’m an officer of the Transport Police. I–...”
“Is he dangerous?”
“It’s a she not a he. And yes, she’s dangerous. Royalist spy named Eliz
abeth Barnabus. Now – open – your – case!” He pushed me between my shoulders and I stumbled towards the waiting room door.
It was then that Tinker chose to act. There was a loud thud from above – the stamping of a foot on the flat roof. The constable froze. His eyes darted upwards. I could see the thoughts tumbling over each other in his mind. Then he turned on his heels and sprinted around the building to the back. His boots clanged on the iron ladder.
A sack thumped to the ground next to me, followed directly by Tinker himself, landing cat-like. For a fraction of a second, wide blue eyes shone up at me from a face that would have made a coal miner seem clean. His white teeth flashed in a broad grin.
“Ashbourne,” I whispered.
He grabbed the sack and sprinted off down the road.
Seconds later the constable had scrambled down the ladder and was sprinting back around the waiting room. The last I saw, he was pounding away in hot pursuit. Watching him go, I wondered why I’d blurted my destination to Tinker instead of taking the chance to slip away.
The coach rattled along Derby Road towards Ashbourne. Ignoring the other passengers, I peered hungrily through the mud spattered window glass. I was further north than I had ever travelled. Every detail was of interest to me.
The air had sweetened as we left the city. Now, having passed through the rolling countryside for some ten miles, I could again smell the occasional tang of smoke, though more from wood than coal. The shops and houses displayed virtuous modesty, their fronts narrow and understated. Many were built of uneven grey stone instead of terracotta brick. They lacked the resolute order of the city. I liked them more for that. Plainly but expensively dressed women and men were out taking the air. They strolled between tubs of scarlet geraniums, which dotted the roadside. Nature, it seemed, was allowed to flaunt.
I saw but one factory as we rolled through the main street. The sign proclaimed it to be a manufacturer of corsets. The workers around the gates were neatly clothed and clean. The streets grew narrower but there were none of the signs of poverty I had witnessed in the city. Window glass reflected the liquid gold of the morning sun. Even the black painted doors and window frames were bright.
