The American Boy

by Andrew Taylor

  “Sirs,” I croaked. “I beg you, for God’s sake leave me a candle. Tell me what this place is.”

  One of them paused, the one who had removed the gag. He glanced back. “You’ll not need a candle, mate,” he said. “Not where you’re going.”

  The other laughed. A moment later the trap-door slammed down, leaving me once more alone in the darkness.

  But not quite as before: I was no longer pinned motionless in a box. I could not doubt that they had brought me to this lonely spot in order to kill me. But at least I could make their job difficult.

  There followed one of the most exquisitely painful experiences of my life. I threw out my hat and boots to give myself more room. Slowly I hauled myself to a sitting position. Clinging to the side of the coffin, I raised myself up to a crouch. I swayed from left to right with increasing vigour until I had achieved enough momentum to pitch myself inelegantly out of the coffin. Sobbing with pain, I lay huddled on my side on what felt like damp and filthy flagstones.

  Gradually I straightened up, as uncertain as a child taking his first steps, until I attained a kneeling position. I found my boots and managed to put them on. My situation was almost as bleak as before. I feared that I had merely exchanged one prison for another, albeit a larger one. I examined it as well as I could in the darkness, which was not easy bearing in mind the fact that I was still bound at the knees and at the wrists. I paid particular attention to the stairs and to the trap-door. The latter was close-fitting but I believed I could discern a trace of light at one corner. I tried to heave it up with my shoulders but it would not budge.

  When I stepped back from the stairs, I trod on something that seemed to snatch at my foot. With a muffled cry I sprang away and there was a clatter on the floor, as though there were an equally terrified animal in the cellar with me. Reason came immediately to my aid. The sole of my left boot had caught on the point of a nail protruding from the upturned lid of the coffin.

  I knelt down and with cold, clumsy hands swept the floor until I found the lid. I ran my hand along its edge, touching the sharp points and the squared edges of the tapering nails. There were six of them in all. I brought my bound wrists down on the nearest one and began to saw.

  I scarcely knew what drove me. In the conscious part of my mind I had already half-surrendered to whatever fate had in store for me. But there was another, deeper part of my being that continued to struggle. It was this that drove me to ignore my aching knees and my bleeding arms; to rub and hack at the cord that bound my wrists with the tips and sides of the nails.

  I had no means of measuring the time. It might have been an hour before I felt the first strand part. For a time, this pushed me on to work with renewed vigour, but it was another age before I felt another strand give. I sawed the cord against the edges of the nails, I poked their iron points into the knot and worked it to and fro, and sometimes I merely snarled and tore at my bonds with my teeth, hoping if they were not vulnerable to one method then they would be to another.

  I was in so much pain from the chafing of my skin and the many times I had accidentally dashed a nail against my arm rather than the cord that I barely noticed when the rope gave way. My hands flew apart. I sat back on my heels and wept, raising my arms and stretching them as far behind me as I could, as if I were arching a pair of wings. I looked up as I did so, and for the first time glimpsed a crack of light filtering between the boards. The night was ending.

  I drove myself to work at the knot that bound my knees, which had been previously inaccessible to me, since it was at the back. I could not use the nails for this, and my hands were feeble. I had hardly begun when I heard footsteps above my head.

  I hobbled quickly to the stairs and slumped on the floor against the wall near the foot of the stairs. A bolt was drawn. With a creak, the trap-door rose and fell back against a wall. Light flooded into the cellar. The day was more advanced than I had thought. Heavy footsteps descended the stairs.

  A hand fell on my shoulder and shook me. With all the strength I was capable of, I spun round, straightening my knees, and jabbed my outstretched fingers at the face of the man looming over me. He gave a shriek, for one of my nails had caught his eye, stepped back incautiously and tripped over the coffin. I hauled myself up the stairs towards the rectangle of light with the fallen man screaming imprecations behind me.

  “Mr Shield,” said a rich, husky voice behind me as my head and shoulders emerged through the trap-door. “This really will not do.”

  I turned. Not four feet away from me Mr Iversen was seated in a chair by a table, with a pistol in his hand. He had changed his professional robe for a brown travelling coat. The crutches were propped against the table.

  “Raise your hands in the air, if you please,” he continued. “Climb the stairs slowly. No, no, Joseph” – he addressed the man below – “leave him alone for now.”

  I ascended with ungainly hops into a room fitted out as a kitchen, with a great range at one end and a dresser at the other. I struggled to my feet and looked about me. The place was indescribably dirty. I must have presented a sorry spectacle – unwashed, unshaven, with my coat torn and my cuffs and breeches bloody from my efforts to untie my hands during the night. I turned back to Mr Iversen.

  He was no longer in the chair. Instead he was standing, pistol in hand, in the middle of the kitchen. The crutches were still against the table. He saw the surprise on my face and his mouth twisted into a smile.

  “It is a miracle, is it not, Mr Shield? How truly edifying. You will find a pump in the yard. Joseph and I will come with you.”

  They took me out into a yard beyond the kitchen, watching me hop and stumble through the mud to the privy, which I was obliged to use with the door open. From the seat of ease I saw, over the roofs of the outbuildings at the far side of the yard, the chimneys of two large, modern buildings some sixty or seventy yards away. Mr Iversen noted the direction of my gaze. “No one is within earshot,” he observed. “You might as well save your breath.”

  “Where are we?”

  He shrugged, evidently deciding he had nothing to lose by answering my question. “We are to the north of the village of Kilburn, in the middle of a large tract of land set aside for building. This was once a farmhouse and in former times much of the surrounding land belonged to it. The establishment over there with the tall grey chimney-stacks is a madhouse. They are used to the sound of screams and calls for help. The building next door – you see it? with the belfry? – is the workhouse. It is a most convenient plan, I understand, for the inmates may pass from one to the other as their guardians see fit. This parish is run on the best rational lines.”

  I rose and buttoned my trousers. “I do not understand what you want with me. I beg of you to let me go.”

  He ignored these words. “They even have their private cemetery. Look through the gateway. You may catch a glimpse of its wall behind the limes over there. Madness and poverty share this characteristic, that they commonly end in death sooner rather than later. Consider the tender feelings of the village people, what is left of them; consider the inhabitants of the brave new streets and squares and crescents that one day will spring up on this spot: they would not care to await the Last Trump in the same burial ground as these unfortunates, would they? But with this private cemetery, everyone is happy, and everything is convenient. Admirable, do you not agree?”

  “Why have you brought me here?”

  “All in good time, Mr Shield. The burial ground has its own sexton, an admirable fellow, though not a polished one.”

  “And does he provide the coffins for his employers too?”

  Iversen glanced at me and gave a quick, approving nod.

  I said, “No doubt with the assistance of the men who brought me here?”

  “You are perfectly correct. Do not judge by their appearance.” He glanced at the man standing in the kitchen doorway. “Eh, Joseph? They are good-hearted men at bottom. They will even help the poor Sexton fill in a grave if he
is hard pressed with other duties.” He pointed at the limes. “There is a gate in the wall. The Sexton and his helpers can pass quite privately through it into the burial ground.”

  Iversen allowed me to use the pump, to splash water over my face and drink my fill. He had told me quite clearly, in so many words, that he had it within his power to have me interred in a cemetery for the poor and the insane, and I doubted if it would matter to him whether I were dead or alive when my coffin was lowered into the open grave.

  “Sir,” I said as we began our slow, halting progress back to the house. “May I speak with you in private a moment?”

  “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.” He stopped and motioned Joseph towards him. “Is the other horse saddled?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ride back to town. You should return with Elijah in the cart this evening, at about six of the clock. But first you will bind this young fellow’s hands behind his back. Then cut his legs free.”

  Joseph obeyed, and I think he took a fiendish pleasure in making the cord as tight as possible. When he had left us, Iversen nudged me into the kitchen with the barrel of the pistol.

  “Well? What have you to say?”

  “There is much I do not understand about this whole business,” I said when we were inside, my eyes flicking to and fro to find a possible weapon. “Indeed, at times I doubt I understand any of it. However, I know enough to make me wonder whether we need be on opposite sides.”

  He smiled at me. “That is a bold suggestion.”

  “If it is a matter of money –” I began.

  “You have many natural advantages, Mr Shield, but I do not think possession of a fortune is one of them.”

  “I believe I know a man who would pay handsomely for intelligence, for the right sort of intelligence.”

  “The little Yankee and his tame nigger?” Iversen’s vowels changed their character, became flatter and bolder. “No, I do not think it would answer.” He reverted to the cultivated speech he had used before. “We are gone too far in this business. A man does not change horses in mid-stream if he has any choice in the matter.” He motioned with the pistol towards the open trap-door. “I wish you to return to the cellar for a while.”

  I had no choice but to obey. When he had shut me up in the darkness, I tried half-heartedly to free myself, but Joseph had done his job too well. I do not know how long I sat on the lowest tread of the stairs, turning over in my mind various arguments I might advance to Iversen, only to discard each and every one of them. Footsteps moved to and fro above my head, and once Iversen sang a few lines of a sentimental ballad. On two occasions I thought I heard hooves, but I could not tell whether they were coming or going, passing or stopping.

  At length there were footsteps again overhead, followed by the scrape of metal and a rapping on the trap-door.

  “Mr Shield? Mr Shield?” Iversen called. “Pray answer me.”

  “I hear you.”

  “You may come slowly up the stairs. I have unbolted the trap-door. But no rash movements, if you please.”

  I emerged, blinking like a mole, into a room filled with morning sunshine. Iversen was waiting at a prudent distance from the trap-door. He required me to turn my back on him so that he could examine the cord around my wrists. Then he led me through the kitchen into a passageway and thence to a room furnished as a parlour according to the rustic taste of the last century. No sunshine penetrated here once the door was shut, for the shutters were closed and barred. Most of one wall was filled with a great fireplace where logs burned in a brazier. The only other light came from half a dozen candles.

  There were two people already in the room. One was Mary Ann. She was bound to a chair. Even her mouth was gagged, the mouth that could speak no words, only trill like a bird. She stared at me with huge, unhappy eyes.

  The second person, sitting with his watch in his hand on a high-backed wooden settle close to the fire, was Stephen Carswall.

  79

  “Ayez peur,” I said, and watched a glance dart from Iversen to Carswall.

  “You’ve taken leave of your senses, Shield,” said Carswall.

  Iversen pushed me to a stool opposite the settle and stationed himself by the door.

  “The connection between you is known,” I went on, pressing what I hoped was my advantage.

  “Known by whom?” Carswall said. “Noak? A man may buy a parrot, may he not? For a boy who is about to become his stepson?” He gave the last words a peculiar emphasis and shot a look of mingled triumph and hatred at me. “Why were you pestering Mrs Frant over her husband’s grave?”

  “How did you know I met her there?”

  “She told me.” Carswall stared around the room as if the ramshackle wainscoting were an admiring audience. “She sent you off with a flea in your ear, eh?”

  I shook my head. “It was Mrs Kerridge, wasn’t it? She serves two masters, you and Mr Noak. And that’s not all she told you. She learned where I lodged from Salutation Harmwell and passed it on: which is how Iversen’s bully-backs could find me so quickly.”

  Carswall shrugged. “How far has Mr Noak penetrated this business?”

  “I am not in his confidence.”

  “Let us put that assertion to the test. Have you seen a man’s hand crushed in a door?”

  I did not reply.

  “It is not a pretty sight. It is prodigiously painful, too. Yet it is so simple. One holds the hand between the fixed edge of the door and the jamb, one finger at a time if one pleases. Then one closes the door. As any mechanic will tell you, you do not need strength if you have leverage. A child could do it, so long as there were someone present to hold the hand in the appropriate position.”

  “You are a monster.”

  Carswall said, “Necessity knows no law. Isn’t that one of your tags, Mr Tutor? I take the world as I find it. You are a double threat to me: to the reputation of my affianced wife and to the success of a business transaction.”

  I did not speak. I clasped my bound hands and thought of the flesh, sinew and bone beneath the skin.

  Carswall nodded to Iversen, who cocked his pistol and took a step towards me.

  “Not him,” Carswall said. “The girl first. Let him see the effect of his silence before he feels it.”

  Iversen nodded and untied Mary Ann’s wrists. Leaving her bound around the legs, he hooked his arm through hers and dragged her towards the door. She was still gagged but she made a gargling noise in the back of her throat that was more painfully eloquent than any quantity of words.

  “Stop,” I said. “There is no need for the girl to be hurt.”

  Carswall leaned back on the settle and opened his watch. “I will give you a minute to convince me.”

  “Will you set her free?”

  “Perhaps. It depends how honest you are.”

  I had no choice in the matter. I said, “Mr Noak believes that Henry Frant was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the murder of his estranged son in Canada during the late war. He believes that Lieutenant Saunders died because he threatened to expose corrupt dealings on the part of Wavenhoe’s Bank, or rather on the part of Mr Henry Frant. Furthermore, he suspects but has not yet succeeded in proving that you yourself, Mr Carswall, were Frant’s partner in this corruption, and are therefore, to some extent at least, a party to Lieutenant Saunders’s murder.”

  Carswall puffed up his cheeks and blew out a gust of air. “What evidence has he?”

  “Nothing that confirms your guilt. However, Mr Noak’s investigation uncovered Henry Frant’s embezzlement since he took over the direction of Wavenhoe’s. Mr Noak took steps to hasten the collapse of the bank and Mr Frant’s ruin.”

  “But the matter did not end there,” Carswall said softly.

  “No, sir, it did not. Mr Noak struck up an acquaintance with you. His negotiations over the proposed sale of the Liverpool warehouses convinced him that you had an active involvement in the Canadian operation, though it did not prove you had a hand
in his son’s death.” I hesitated. “And then there was the business of Mrs Johnson and the ice-house.”

  I felt the atmosphere suddenly change in the room when I mentioned those last words. Iversen let out a tiny sigh.

  “It was an accident,” Carswall said with a sniff. “The Coroner said so.”

  “An accident, sir? But I think the Coroner was unaware that she was not alone. There was a man with her.”

  “I should have thought it an unlikely time and place for a romantic assignation.”

  “That was not their purpose. Henry Frant and Mrs Johnson had concealed certain items of value in the ice-house, in the hope that they would be able to build a new life for themselves after the bank’s collapse, perhaps abroad and under assumed names.”

  Carswall raised his great eyebrows. “I can conceive of nothing less likely.”

  “They left behind the ring. Or rather he did.”

  “The ring? The ring you stole?”

  “The ring you had a servant conceal in my coat, to give colour to the false accusation you made against me.”

  “False? False, you say? Then where is the ring?”

  “I cannot tell you that. But I can tell you that it will soon be delivered to your house in Margaret-street. But to return to Mr Noak: he obtained a list of the securities that went missing when the bank collapsed. They included a bill that was recently cashed in Riga.”

  “And how does Mr Noak explain this?”

  “He believes that Henry Frant contrived his own murder, and is still alive, and that you and he have come to an arrangement.”

  Carswall cleared the phlegm from his throat. “Pray enlighten me.”

  “You assist him to convert the securities and perhaps other items into ready money. Mr Frant dares not do this himself, even abroad, because not only is there the question of the embezzlement hanging over him, but also that of the identity of the man murdered in Wellington-terrace. Mr Noak has established that the bill cashed in Riga had passed through the hands of a notary in Brussels, a man you do business with.”