River's Edge

by James P. Blaylock

  River’s Edge Copyright © 2017 by James P. Blaylock.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2017

  by J. K. Potter. All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2017 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-839-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For Paul Buchanan, friend, fellow writer and teacher, breakfast companion, and early reader of my books and stories. Cheers!

  Acknowledgements

  I’M GRATEFUL, AS EVER, for the help of my wife Viki, who tirelessly reads my manuscripts, ever on the lookout for misspellings, bad sentences, plot errors, and other literary embarrassments. And also to my friend and agent John Berlyne, who reads them with an eye toward sweeping away base Americanisms and misunderstandings and keeping me on the correct side of the river. Any errors in this book I claim as my own.

  “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which

  this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

  —William Blake

  Chapter 1

  Kent, England,

  Along the River Medway

  LANGDON ST. IVES and his friend Hasbro stood in the darkness some few feet from Eccles Brook behind the Majestic Paper Mill. The brook was fifteen feet wide and moderately deep, and it flowed another two hundred yards at an easy descent before emptying into the Medway. There was half a moon in the sky, but the two men were hidden in the shadows of immense oaks with solid, leafy canopies. A beech forest stretched away behind, the filtered moonlight stippling the trunks white, and a breeze cast moving shadows among the trees.

  The two men whom St. Ives had seen a few minutes ago had disappeared, back into the mill, or so St. Ives hoped. Although he carried his shillelagh, and could fight with it if he was pressed, fighting wasn’t sensible unless they were attacked. He had no desire to knock anyone on the head, especially watchmen from the mill who were simply doing their duty. He and Hasbro were not trespassing, but they were snooping, engaged on a mission that St. Ives intended to keep secret until he was certain he understood the meaning of their discoveries.

  They moved out from behind the trunk of the oak now and made their way down to the bank again. In his knapsack, St. Ives carried half a dozen leather-covered flasks, five of which they had already filled with water from various parts of the brook. The water stank badly of lye and bleach and other noxious chemicals, and in the brook it ran dirty-white with a brown froth. Twelve hours ago, at midday, it had been moderately clear—not clean, but the effluent from a paper mill could scarcely be made clean. Hasbro dipped a pint of foamy water from an eddy and poured it carefully into a flask, closing the stopper. St. Ives took it from him and slipped it into the knapsack.

  They walked farther along the brook-side path, St. Ives pointing out a dead fish entangled in waterweeds. He handed his shillelagh to Hasbro and stepped down onto a convenient rock in order to net the fish. It was a common chub, but it took him a moment to be certain of it, because the body was badly misshapen from ruptured cancers in the flesh. Its mouth was open wide and its eyes were a furry white. He laid it onto a piece of parchment paper that he folded carefully around it before putting it into the knapsack along with the water samples. There were already twenty or so poisoned fish preserved at home and another dozen that Dr. Pullman, the local coroner, was dissecting in his laboratory. Dr. Pullman was a chemist as well as an anatomist. Like St. Ives, he much preferred a live fish to a dead fish, unless the creature was frying in a pan.

  The dead chub wasn’t apparently different from the others that St. Ives and Hasbro had collected except in species, there being bream, carp, pike and eels among the corpses he had netted from the Medway, all with the telltale cancers. And there were hundreds of the poisoned fishes washing ashore at low tide along the Wouldham Marshes downriver, along with a half dozen species of dead water birds.

  St. Ives realized that he had strayed into a patch of moonlight, and he stepped back into the shadows at the same moment that he heard a low whistle and then the crack of a stick breaking nearby. Hasbro turned at the sound of it, raising the shillelagh. A short, broad-shouldered man rushed at him, holding a length of iron pipe that was drawn back in his upraised hand. Hasbro whipped the shillelagh around in a tight arc just as the man was upon him, hitting his wrist and knocking the pipe aside, and then swinging the shillelagh underhanded and slamming it upward between his legs.

  The man pitched to the ground, shouting the name “Davis!” aloud. There was the sound of groaning and of running feet, and Davis, a tall, lanky man with a long face and wearing a tweed cap, appeared some twenty yards away, heading at them hell-bent down the moonlit path. St. Ives and Hasbro bolted in the direction of the beech woods, running hard toward the east along a half-overgrown track, not slowing down until they were a quarter of a mile removed from the environs of the mill. St. Ives looked back and saw no one following, and they went on at an easier pace.

  Very shortly they turned down a familiar path, crossing Eccles Brook a mile upstream, where the water ran clear and clean. The path forked, the left hand angling away northeast to Kit’s Coty House, the Neolithic long barrow above the village of Eccles with its ancient standing stones. They turned southwest toward Aylesford, where the path emerged at the top of the weir near the stone bridge. Their foray tonight marked the end of their investigation into the secrets of the Majestic Paper Mill, which had clearly been damming up effluents during the day, and flushing them into the River Medway in the dead of night.

  Chapter 2

  The Majestic Paper Mill

  JUST THE ONE word, ‘strike,’” Henley Townover said to his father. “It was chalked on the east door beneath a handbill that advised employees to report troubling issues to the London Trades Council with a halfpenny postcard. Davis found it this morning.”

  Henley and Charles Townover stood in the offices that were elevated high above the floor of the Majestic Paper Mill in Snodland. Through a broad window they looked down on a room filled with Hollander beaters, the chopped cotton rags within the beaters disintegrating in a heavy solution of caustic lye. The mill workers were girls and were referred to as Paper Dolls in Snodland across the river and in the nearby villages. They moved among the troughs and machinery ten hours a day, wearing jaunty paper hats, newly folded each morning and noonday. They also wore gloves and goggles against the chemical mixtures churning within the beaters and proofing in the dye pots.

  “Davis eradicated it before the girls arrived?” Charles Townover asked. He was an old man, getting on toward seventy, although still a
pparently hale. He rubbed his hands in a circular motion now, as if he were washing them.

  “Some must have seen it, Father,” Henley said. “It’s possible that the chalk mark was the work of one of the girls.”

  “Chalk,” Charles Townover said with evident disgust, “a weak-willed, cowardly, ungrateful effort, and ineffective into the bargain. If a person is going to make threats, he had best shout them out loud when people are bound to hear. This shameful, sneaking timidity compounds the crime. Who do we believe posted the handbill?”

  “Davis observed a man talking to three of the girls yesterday evening along the footpath—a union man, he said. He was carrying what must have been a number of the handbills, no doubt distributing them to the girls.”

  “Davis was certain of this union man?”

  “Tolerably so.”

  Charles Townover shook his head. “It was inevitable, I suppose, given the success of the mill. These unions are like flies to honey, scattering their filthy liberal notions. But we shall deal with the man in our own way if we see him again.”

  The old man fell silent now, evidently considering what he had learned. He looked out at the view of the River Medway and the village of Snodland on the opposite shore. The mill, which produced good rag paper, both linen and cotton, had moved into the present quarters after months of renovation and construction. They had shifted out of London to this more idyllic location along the river, and to provide some distance from the baleful eye of the scalawag William Gladstone’s government, which elevated the worker at the expense of the Crown and the common interest. Liberals, he thought, would be improved by being taken out and flogged. “The safety of the girls is paramount, of course. I mean to keep them from doing themselves a mischief. They’re young, and they haven’t enough perspicacity between them to see through a pair of spectacles. Summon Davis, if you will, Henley.”

  Davis, the mill foreman, was a lean, ropy, red-haired man with a wandering left eye and bad teeth. He wore an old tweed cap, sweat-stained, which Charles Townover found crude and offensive. But the man did his work, and his cap was his own business. Davis stood now on the catwalk beyond the glass, looking down onto the mill floor through a pair of binoculars in order to bring the far corners into view. Skylights illuminated the enormous rooms, along with several hundred coal-oil lamps, hooded to inhibit the dispersal of coal dust from the burnt oil, which might soil the paper pulp if it found its way into the vats. Henley rapped against the glass, and Davis turned, nodded at Henley’s gesture, surreptitiously returned Henley’s wink, and entered the offices through a swinging door.

  “Mr. Davis, tell me about this man you observed speaking to the three Paper Dolls,” Townover said.

  “A union man, I don’t doubt. One of the girls—I don’t like to say, but it was Daisy Dumpel, sir—she was giving him an earful of her swollen throat and the croup and the quinsy. She was poisoned by the chemicals, she said—the same old story again. I stood in the shadows and heard enough of their talk to be sure of it. Then the other two girls went away, like they didn’t want to be a part of this, and when they were gone, the man put his hands on Daisy. I nearly stepped out and put paid to his caper, but Daisy didn’t seem to take offense, and so I hung back to see whether the man would commit himself to a crime.”

  “Put his hands on her? Do you mean to say that the man is a common ravisher as well as a union lackey?”

  “There’s hell-hounds in every profession, sir, and she’s a pretty thing, in her way, and seemed willing.”

  Through the window, Townover caught sight of a carriage turning up from the River Road, an elegant coach and four that certainly belonged to Gilbert Frobisher, a preposterously rich man, retired from business, who had a taste for fine paper. Frobisher was one of three potential investors touring the mill this very morning. The coach passed out of sight beneath the trees. “Do you believe this union man to be one of the men whom you discovered lurking along the creek four nights back, the two that set upon Jenks?”

  “Sure, it might have been. The shadows were deep, though, and they broke and ran before I got a good look.”

  Townover nodded and said, “If this union man sets foot in the vicinity again I want you and Jenks to provide him with a proper thrashing. Meanwhile, Davis, alert the constable that the man was seen molesting one of our Paper Dolls. You needn’t mention the chalked slogan or the handbills. I have no desire to imply that there are troubles here at the Majestic. I simply want the man…educated.”

  “I understand completely, sir.”

  “As for Daisy Dumpel, the girl is too frail for real work. We’ll send her home before she makes trouble. See to it, Henley. Give the girl a generous sum—one hundred pounds. That should be enough to make her quite happy. Make it a bank cheque with a note of provenance. We don’t want her robbed. She’s to negotiate it on Threadneedle Street, at the bank itself, so put her on the train to London without delay. Who was with Daisy?—the other two girls?”

  “The girl Clo. Clover Cantwell,” Davis said, “and Nancy Bates.”

  “Clover’s name is familiar to me, but I cannot recall why.”

  “You’ll remember,” Henley told him, “that the girl has an aged aunt in Maidstone, the old dowager who attended the soirée when we opened our doors to business, quite down on her luck at present. It was she who requested that we give her niece employment.”

  “Yes, of course. The girl had been in some trouble in London, I believe.”

  “She was taken up for petty theft, but was shown leniency—the intervention of the dowager aunt again.”

  “Good. The girl is in a tenuous position. She’ll be biddable, I believe.”

  “Surely she would be grateful if we did her aunt a service of some sort, a small show of generosity. We might profit from having a willing agent among the girls, so to speak.”

  “Excellent notion,” Townover said. “Call Miss Cantwell upstairs, Davis. And the instant that Daisy Dumpel is put aboard the London train and difficult to recall, report this union man’s outrageous behavior to the constable, along with the sad fact that Daisy chose to return to her parents’ home, no doubt in fear of her safety at the hands of this fiend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And one more thing, Davis. Is all in train in the lobby? The Paper Dolls are dressed suitably, paper and paint at the ready, refreshments at hand? The prettiest of the Dolls is to see to Mr. Frobisher. Not too slight of figure, if you take my meaning.”

  “They’ve been ready this past half-hour. The Archer girl with the blond ringlets will see to Mr. Frobisher.”

  Davis left the office and moved downstairs toward the deckle room, where frames containing wet slurries of paper were coming out of the vats. When he was well out of earshot, Townover said to Henley, “It grieves me to think that it was one of the girls who scrawled the message in chalk. It’s simply ungrateful. I don’t like it at all.”

  “A percentage of the population is born ungrateful,” Henley said.

  “You’re in the right of it, unfortunately. Too many bad apples these days. Why don’t they come to me, though? If it’s a matter of wages, we can find them another shilling or two. I’m not an unreasonable man. Discover what you can from Miss Cantwell.”

  “I believe that we can learn a great deal with the encouragement of a ten-pound note.”

  “Which will never see the inside of her poor aunt’s purse. This is exactly my point, Henley. In my day people were encouraged to do the right thing because it was the right thing to do, not because they smelled a ten-pound note.”

  “Times change, Father. Loyalty has fallen out of fashion. Bank notes will never fall out of fashion, I assure you.”

  Chapter 3

  The Paper Dolls

  ON THE FLOOR of the mill, Clover Cantwell immersed an empty, wood-framed deckle into the slurry in the rectangular vat in front of her. She dipped out a porridge of wet paper pulp, which at once began to settle on the tightly woven wire mesh within the deckle frame
, the liquid leaking through the mesh and back into the vat. There was a rising cloud of stink from the mixture of bleach and lye, although she scarcely noted it any more—a bad thing, maybe, since the chemical reek was rumored to poison the senses. She wore goggles over her eyes, and heavy india-rubber gloves and apron, and yet after six months of working the deckle she was all too familiar with chemical burns.

  She shook and shifted the deckle, draining off the remaining liquid and settling the pulp evenly over the bottom, and then handed it off to the coucher—Elspeth today—who turned the wet paper out onto a felt blanket and covered the paper with yet another blanket to keep it damp until it could be placed in the watermark press. She handed the empty deckle to the runner, the girl who waited on the vat-men, although there were no men among the Paper Dolls, only girls, who were called vat-men out of long tradition. Clover was sick of the stinking slurries in the vats, although the job was better than her first position, tending the oven that roasted bones for the making of bone-brown pigment. Nothing stank worse than burning bone, not even bleach and lye.

  Breathing in the stench from the vats would make you sick—she had seen it often enough: the hoarse voice and scalded throat, the blisters on your hands that turned to open sores, and after a time, hair falling out in clumps. The gloves and mask couldn’t keep it all out. The dye-making was worse, though. Her friend Mabel had lost her fingernails. Mr. Davis was supposed to move you along before such things happened, but that was just happy-talk. Mr. Davis moved you along when it suited him.

  With any luck, Clover would be given a step soon and allowed to work the watermark press, as had happened to Daisy when she got sick, except that Daisy got worse in spite of being shifted from the deckles. Clover amended her definition of luck as she dipped another deckle into the vat: with any luck she would find a rich man to marry, and the mill could cram itself up its own fundament.