by Steven Price
Reckitt turned at the window, calmer. Sallow, the stubble along his jaw grimed, the dark eyes sunken. Foole could sense something had been decided in his absence and he felt himself withdrawing, his thoughts sharpening.
You’ll want to conceal that, said Foole quietly, gesturing to the man’s bloodied forehead.
Reckitt glanced at his niece, his expression tightening.
What.
My uncle feels this is not the job you described to him in London, Charlotte said in a low voice.
I was told you were methodical, Reckitt murmured. That you were a talent.
And I was told you would see a job through.
Meaning, sir?
Foole felt a stab of fury and swallowed it down. There was the sound of a door opening in the corridor and all three fell silent and then two men’s voices approached their room and passed by and after a moment Foole added in a whisper, Meaning if you had held to your position and used your rifle as it is intended to be used we would not be in this position.
We do not use rifles, sir, Reckitt hissed. That is not our way. We are not rampsmen.
We use what the job calls for. I’d have thought you capable of understanding principles.
Principles.
Foole lowered his voice yet further. Had you done what you were supposed to have done, they would have stood down. The guards would have stood down. We would have what we came for. We wouldn’t have failed.
Charlotte shifted in her seat, set a small hand on the rail of the chair. But there was a third guard, Mr. Foole. That is the salient point.
Reckitt blinked his slow cold eyes at her, said nothing.
A strand of hair had come loose over her face. She looked tired. Foole turned away. Think of the profits, Martin, he said. It’s never been done before. We’ll be the first.
Not under your guidance we won’t.
Foole was still holding his saddlebags in the crook of one elbow and he bit at his free glove. I can understand her wanting out. But if you cut now—
We are neither of us cutting, Reckitt hissed. We are removing ourselves from a lunacy. It is not the same thing. You, sir, are most fortunate to still have your skin. Do you know what the Boers do to bandits?
We didn’t have all the facts. That’s all.
I nearly had my head shot away. You risked my niece—
You risked your niece, Foole snapped. I never wanted her along. If you cut now, sir, do not pretend it’s because of her well-being. As he studied Reckitt in the lantern light he could see the cadaver beneath the man’s skin and he did not like the feeling it gave him.
Reckitt’s shadow twisted up the wall at a crazed angle. You would be wise to abandon this also, he said. You’re no Dick Turpin.
Charlotte got to her feet in a rustle of taffeta. Foole understood the night was ending.
I’ll have those diamonds, Martin.
Charlotte cleared her throat.
You will not, sir. Reckitt was regarding him sadly.
I’ll stay, said Charlotte.
Foole paused, thinking he had misheard. He and Reckitt turned as one and stared at her. Her black hair cowled in shadow, her eyes liquid and dark. He started to swallow but his throat was dry and all at once he did not know what to say.
I will stay, she said again. Someone will have to. Or would you rather leave Mr. Foole to his own devices, uncle?
Some viciousness flickered across Reckitt’s face, was gone.
Much later he would understand that it was not her fault. Still he should have recognized the con. The mark, the set-up, the art of the glide.
Which is what love turns out to be, when you get right down to it.
Reckitt abandoned them in the morning. Nothing could induce him to stay. The men were civil again though Foole for his part felt drained, exposed, despairing, and Reckitt appeared unmoved. Foole did not like Reckitt’s arriving back into the London flash before him, leaving the man free to spin his account as he chose. He would write Fludd but the need for caution would preclude his giving any substantial details. All night he and Charlotte and Reckitt had weighed and considered options but had determined in the end to hold to the original design as planned. Foole would journey alone to Brindisi at a languid pace with the diamonds in his luggage and there find an accomplice waiting. Except this time he had insisted that accomplice be Charlotte not Martin.
In the railway station Reckitt stood with his small carry case between his ankles, his trunk already ticketed and stowed, a gentleman thief dapper once more in his frock coat and silk hat and brushing at his sleeves in distraction. His silver hair was shining.
The news will travel faster than us, Foole murmured. The moment you read of it—
I shall book Charlotte’s passage to Brindisi. Yes.
Foole nodded.
The old thief took Charlotte’s gloved hands in his own. If you change your mind, if something should go badly, he said, I shall wire you the funds for your return. Stay safe. He gave Foole a cold look. I entrust her to your care, sir. Do not fail me. The conductor was walking the platform, calling out to the ticket holders. Bursts of steam hissed from the boiler, passengers shouted. When he lifted his face Foole saw blackened steel girders, skylights stained from the smoke, an armed Boer staring down at him from a catwalk.
Go, she was saying.
Foole had already begun to think of another way. That morning he had watched the battered stagecoach come into the city after the steamer had sailed and seen the Boer guards climb down eyes scanning the crowds and watched as they took the shipment into the post office and locked it in the safe there until the next steamer could arrive. The evening papers were rife with rumour and conjecture. American bandits from the Midwest. Australian convicts. A sophisticated work of insider fraud. But Foole had seen the assistant postmaster with his stooped walk, the veined hands trembling with age, the visor askew over greasy hair as the diamonds were moved, and something had gone very quiet in his heart.
The days without Reckitt passed and passed. He saw Charlotte in the hotel lobby, saw her in the railway depot. He met her on the hotel balcony one afternoon and she took his arm and they made their way out into the white sunlight in light cotton clothes and went down to the harbour and entered a restaurant just the two of them as if they were man and wife. He looked at her and could not see the dusty rifleman standing in the low grey light reloading and aiming and firing with neither pause nor hurry. He was thinking of her theatrical work and it did not make sense.
You’ve done this sort of thing before, he said to her.
She smiled. Once or twice.
Who are you?
Miss Charlotte Reckitt. She extended her hand. Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.
That wasn’t my question.
You know how it is, she said with a smile. Why, outlawing is like drinking. She rattled the ice in her glass and gave him a sly look. After the first glass, there’s no stopping.
As his plan coalesced in his mind he began to take measures. He wrote letters and travelled out of town and posted them back to himself via registered mail and as he picked them up from the postal station he smiled and chatted with the assistant postmaster. One afternoon he was writing when Charlotte approached him, lurked over his shoulder, studied the letter.
He set down his pen. You’re hovering, he said.
She looked offended. I do not hover.
He said nothing.
Barrel has two r’s, she said.
Her ankles he saw for the first time when she descended the stairs and came into the dining room that night. He had been drinking. He looked at the blue silk of her dress and her raven hair shining in tight curls and an unexpected joy filled him.
What’s wrong? she asked.
The lightness he had felt earlier was in him again, a kind of elated recklessness. It was not the wine, or not only the wine.
He thought of her slender in the dawn with the rifle opening out before her and the clean balance of her, like a branch bow
ed out over a river. She did not eat very much. She had told her uncle she would help him as best she could and after she told Foole this there was silence as she looked at him and he did not understand what he was meant to say next. Later when she ascended the stairs he could not avoid seeing her skirts receding over the risers ahead of him like the wash of an outgoing tide. Inside her room he stood very still feeling her soft lips on his own and he did not know what to do with his tongue. She put her hot hands on his chest and pushed him slowly back onto the bed and in the darkness he saw her reach back and unpin her hair.
They met again in the morning. In the afternoon. It could not have been possible in any other city. Perhaps in Paris. She had moved into her uncle’s room at the back of the upper storey and it felt eerie to be where Reckitt’s belongings must have been. Foole would rise naked from the bed and cross to the window and rattle open the drawers of the bureau and she would watch him in silence. He wanted to give her something she had not known with any other man but he did not know what that would be. It took him a long time to understand that this longing was its own kind of gift. He took nothing from her that he could carry in his hands. He would stand over her in the soft afternoon light and pull the sheet from her damp legs and she would close her eyes and scissor her knees together and sigh.
He had not yet lost himself. In those first days he felt slaked and so drained he could not stand without a sudden weakness in his legs. A purity seemed to grow in him, a clarity of concentration. He spoke to her of the shipments from the mines, brooded and weighed and considered points of weakness. Watched the steamers in the harbour, the Boers with their rifles on the docks as the crates were loaded. She ran a hand along the sleeve of his jacket, plucked a loose thread from the cuff. He tried not to think of her uncle and what he would think to see them so. He knew there was a betrayal in this, an unprofessionalism which he would not have forgiven in an accomplice. Still it did not cease.
Through all this some part of him struggled towards a plan. Something simple and elegant in its simplicity. There were two Fooles, the man who lived his waking days, who ate and slept and made love, and the other, his shadow self, preoccupied and lean, unshaven and wild.
And that other was the truer.
And then at last a method started to make itself felt. He knew the Boer coaches arrived in the port almost to the minute with their diamonds set for embarkation to England. Those stagecoaches were heavily armed and rode the veld stopping only for fresh horses and would rein sharply up at the docks, bristling with rifles, a storm of dust in their wake. But after his failed heist he had learned the mine owners’ contingency: if late to the port, the diamonds would be locked in the post office safe overnight. He had seen that safe and knew it could be cracked without difficulty. He knew also that the weakest locations on the Kimberley road were the unmanned ferry crossings and that a cut cable could delay a stagecoach by hours. But a cable could not be cut without alerting the Boers to the sabotage and in this way ensuring their heightened vigilance.
What we require, Charlotte murmured to him one night, is an act of God.
He smiled. Shall I call in a favour?
Mm.
And then we’ll just pray that it knocks out a cable?
She rolled over and kissed his eyelids. Don’t be ridiculous, she whispered. It doesn’t need to knock out the ferry. We just need to make it look like it did.
So we wait for a storm.
We wait, yes. She pushed the bedsheet down off their thighs and straddled him and her face was ghostly above him in the shadow. She began to move her hips slowly. We wait, she murmured, and let the Boers forget about our failed enterprise at the Gulch.
We’re weeks away from the rainy season, he said.
Mm. Weeks and weeks.
He gripped her wrists and drew her down towards him.
However will we fill the time? she said into his ear.
So it began. In the second week he went alone by passenger train to Cape Town and mailed two parcels marked Urgent back to his collections box in Port Elizabeth and the following week he stopped in at the post office just as it was closing and banged anxiously on the window. The assistant postmaster was an old whist player from out of the American Midwest to whom Foole had lost several hands some weeks before and they smiled at each other as the older man let him in. It was not a bank, there were no guards. The assistant postmaster’s name was Holloway and he was stout and red-faced as a toad and Foole pitied him his part in this. But he slipped the man’s keys from their nail behind the counter all the same when his back was turned and he pressed their effigies into the ball of wax he had brought with him in his coat pocket and then he slipped them back onto their hook before the man returned.
He had formed a negative mould of the post office keys and poured out the replicas later that night on a work table balanced above the hotel bathtub, using the fire stoked to heat the water, and a ladle supplied by Charlotte, and these false keys he kept in a small box in her steamer trunk. It amazed him that he trusted her so. He would walk through the arcades without her, peering into the shop windows with his hands clasped behind his back, and he would return to her carrying paper parcels tied with string and in them small figurines, china cups, a necklace of burnished ironwood beads. The port thrummed with its business. Each day hopefuls disembarked, each day the desperate and the lost ascended into the ships. None of them knew what he knew. There were languages on the streets, in the crowds, that he would never hear again and he stood on the footways watching the carriages clatter past and feeling himself in the grip of a glorious, secret fate.
Am I a fallen woman? she asked him one afternoon.
He ran his fingers through her hair, over the shell of an ear.
I keep expecting him to walk around a corner, she said. You know that look he gets? The one that means he knows exactly what you’ve been doing?
He’s in London, Charlotte. He doesn’t know.
She said nothing.
How could he know?
She looked at him a long moment. You’re different from him, she murmured.
I’d hope so.
She smiled a wry little smile, the tips of her teeth visible, she looked away. I had no idea about you, none at all, she said. You’re like a stone when it’s held under water. All the colours come out.
Later that night she said: There’s something I need to ask you, something I need you to tell me.
Tentative fingers on his face, tracing his eyebrows, his lips.
If you lie to me I’ll know, she whispered.
But whatever it was he was already drifting into sleep with the sweat silvering on his skin and he heard her speak as if from a long way off and then he was asleep. And in the morning he did not remember the question.
They moved to a smaller hotel. A blue corner building with its name whitewashed across the side wall of its second storey. Foole walked across the battered floorboards of the lobby feeling her gloved fingers on his wrist and his heart heavy inside him and at the reception desk he signed for them both. The register was old, the leather cracked. Sunlight fell slantwise through the greasy windows, illuminating the dust in the air. The loose stairs rattled as he and Charlotte ascended to the upper floor. Their room faced the street with a view of the post office and was hot from the morning sun and when Foole opened the window for air he heard the bed squeak under Charlotte’s weight, like a farewell.
They were waiting for a storm but the weather held. In the meantime they were friendly to all, they were charming. They made themselves known. They took walks in the evenings along the harbourfront and leaned in close over shared dishes and bottles of wine. He had known women before but only ever as a transaction of currency and the desire he felt now was different from lust, a new thing. In the mornings she would lie face down on the bed with a pillow under her and the sheets kicked onto the floor and he would enter her very slowly, he would stir himself deeper. Some days she would sit in the washtub with her arms upraised as he r
an a cool cloth over the soft black hairs in her armpits, as he squeezed the grey water over the nape of her neck, her shoulderblades, and she would look into his eyes with an intensity as private as grief. Her skin astonished him, its whiteness, as if it were lit from within. Nights she would straddle him with her hair still pinned off her neck and set her hands on her buttocks and arch her back and later he could taste himself on her lips. He was young, her body was the world. He wanted all of it.
She could be coarse, vitriolic, she could be mercurial and kind. She did not always want to be touched. One night she turned from him abruptly and pulled away.
He lifted himself onto one elbow. I thought you liked that.
You aren’t even here, she said. She stood and began pulling on her clothes. You don’t see anything when you look at me. You’re thinking about the shipment.
I’m not.
You are.
I love you, he said. As soon as he said it he knew it was the truth.
She stood looking at him with an unreadable expression on her face and then all at once she seemed angry. He did not understand it. When she reached for her underclothes her hair covered her face like a sheet of rain.
Don’t you dare pity me. You think you’ve corrupted me? You think you’re the first?
Charlotte, he said, confused.
Don’t you dare, she said again.
He watched her fumble angrily with her stays.
Where are you going? he said. Charlotte. Wait.
Get yourself a mirror, she said savagely, and try fucking that.
In the morning she was sitting at their usual table and he approached her cautiously but she just smiled as if nothing had happened and set her napkin down before her.
