River's Edge

by James P. Blaylock

  Abruptly she stopped, dropped the brush, put her hand over her mouth, and began to cough, her face flushed and twisted with the effort. She gasped for breath now, looking quite pale. Gilbert saw that there was a spray of red across the partly painted tail feathers of the peacock—blood he realized, not paint. Her fit subsided. She regained control over her breathing, wiped her mouth, picked up her brush, and went on with her work.

  “Daisy has the megrims so bad sometimes that she believes her head might explode,” Sam said to Gilbert, “and a ratchety cough. It’s the miasma from the vats as does it…”

  She abruptly stopped speaking and looked downward as a voice behind them said, “Mr. Frobisher has no desire to hear about Daisy’s croup, Samantha, or for idle gossip of any nature. Keep to your station, if you please.”

  Gilbert turned to discover Charles Townover with a stormy look about him. His face was brick red, suffused with anger. He removed a flask from his breast pocket and uncorked it, waving it under his nose before swallowing a small draught. He composed himself by an act of will and favored Gilbert with a thin-lipped smile. The two men shook hands. “It’s the angina,” Townover told him, holding up the flask. “Nitroglycerine, if you can believe it.” He thumped his chest with the side of his fist. “Works very quickly, unlike most of the girls, who waste their time at every opportunity. It’s no wonder they don’t get on in the world.”

  “Ah,” Gilbert said, making an interested face. He hadn’t seen Charles Townover for several years, and had known him first at school where he had the reputation of being a prig. The two had been friends, however, and he found himself unsettled by the man’s unpleasantness now. He seemed to have undergone some sort of petrifaction as he had grown older.

  “And you, Daisy,” Townover said, “when you’ve finished painting Mr. Frobisher’s peacock you will report to Mr. Davis and inform him that I’ve released you from duty the rest of the day. The lost time will not be stopped out of your pay. Mr. Henley would like to speak to you as well. You may go straight up to the office. Do not tarry.”

  Without saying another word to the girls, he said to Gilbert, “I’ll introduce you to the other investors.” He took his arm and led him toward a frowning man with a withered-looking wife whose face was covered in white powder. “Perhaps you already know Godfrey Pallinger,” he said when they’d drawn up to the couple.

  “Indeed I do,” Gilbert said, tipping his hat. Here was another man he wasn’t keen on—a hard-horse sort of a fellow who looked as if he hadn’t smiled in an eon or so. Pallinger had made his money in coal, and it was known to have blackened his heart. Gilbert had purchased prodigious quantities of that coal over the years and so was responsible for a portion of Pallinger’s wealth, just as Pallinger was responsible for a portion of his own. The third investor, a solitary stranger named Jasper Pool, chewed a cigar and offered Gilbert a nod of the head by way of greeting.

  Having been a steel magnate in his day, among other lucrative things, Gilbert had often philosophized upon the question of taking money from investors—whether one should look carefully at the source, or whether one should take what one was offered and look out of the window. He had regretted looking out the window early-on in his life, and had subsequently discovered that it wasn’t necessary. Ill-gained money was not very much more common than honest money.

  “Allow me to show you our collection of watermark stamps,” Townover said to them, and without waiting for a reply they were off, looking over a vast display of wire filigree stamps, many of them of great age. Townover was obviously proud of the collection, and he pointed out the real gems, some of them centuries old. Each was mounted in a plain wooden frame. Gilbert himself had a tolerable collection of watermark stamps and paper, mainly Spanish. He had a particular eye for Faisán watermark paper, Faisán having specialized in bird watermarks, mostly waterfowl. He saw a good many examples of them here, and they elicited moderate feelings of greed. Samantha reappeared now, bowing demurely and silently presenting him with the colorful paper peacock.

  “You are dismissed, Samantha,” Townover said to her, and Sam put a smile on her face and bowed before walking off. The girl Daisy no longer sat at her workbench.

  “She’s a good lass, Samantha,” Gilbert said. “I like her.”

  “To the contrary, she’s lazy, and she’s a ninny if she’s allowed the opportunity to speak. Here now, gentlemen,” he said to the lot of them, and he picked up three elegant wooden boxes from one of the shelves, the boxes worked with marquetry of silver and ebony. He handed a box to each of the men.

  Gilbert discovered a ream of exquisitely textured, ivory-colored paper within his. He removed the top sheet and held it up to the light shining through the ceiling windows, and there, center top, was the image of a rampant hedgehog with a flailing red devil in its teeth—the Frobisher crest.

  “I say!” Gilbert said happily. He smelled the paper, felt of it, nodded deeply, and thanked his host prodigiously.

  Then they were away again, through a door in a bank of muslin-obscured windows, onto the mill floor and into a din of clattering sound and chemical stink. He heard Townover mutter a surprising curse, and saw that on one of the windows was a hastily scrawled skull and crossbones, clearly visible against the muslin beyond the glass. The bone-white paint was still shiny. A scattering of torn paper caps lay on the floor beneath the image. It was impossible to say whose caps they had been, however, because the Paper Dolls were steadily going about their business as if oblivious, all of them dressed in the requisite caps and aprons.

  Chapter 7

  You Won’t Be

  Coming Back

  DAISY SAT IN a wide rowing boat on the River Medway, making her lonely way home along the river’s edge. A man and a boy were at the two sets of oars, making easy headway. She was bound for Aylesford, for the Chequers Inn, where she shared a small attic room with Clover Cantwell and Letty Benton, both Paper Dolls, although Letty had gone to London and hadn’t returned two weeks past, so it was just she and Clover now. It was largely Clover’s money that paid for the room, which was nicely private, although it cost more than living in the girls’ dormitory in Snodland. Into her mind came the notion that in five minute’s time, everything in her life had changed.

  Daisy was three hours early leaving the mill, dismissed from her job because she was sick. It was for her own well-being, Mr. Henley had told her, but there were other sick Paper Dolls, the miasma having got into their lungs and skin, who were at their posts at this very instant. And there had been other sick girls who had been sent away—Letty for one—and like Daisy had not been allowed to say so much as a goodbye. Daisy had been hustled out the rear door by Mr. Jenks and driven in the chaise to the quay on the river.

  She was exhausted now from the shortness of breath, which came in a wheeze most of the time, more painful as the day passed into evening, and she drew in the river air gingerly but gratefully. It was clean air and smelt of waterweeds and the tar and oakum that caulked the deck boards, heated by the afternoon sunshine. Beside her on the bench sat the only other passenger, an old woman carrying a basket on her lap. She was sound asleep, her chin on her chest. Daisy gazed at the arches of the old bridge and at the steeple of the Church of St. Peter and Paul and the back of the Chequers Inn along the river, where Mr. Swinton, the fat innkeeper, was busy at some task in the garden. Swallows darted over the water, which swirled slowly past, green and clear, the waterweeds and occasional silver fish passing beneath the boat.

  She had been sent home with five twenty-pound banknotes in her pocket, more money than she had ever held in her hands before today. Mr. Henley had admonished her to say nothing to anyone about it for her own safety, and to deposit it in the Bank of England when she arrived in London tomorrow. Mr. Henley had also admonished her to be grateful, for it was a huge sum. But she was not grateful—not happy to leave Aylesford or to return to London and the squalor of her father’s house. He would quickly have the money from her in any event, bank or
no bank, and would drink it away. She had no idea where else to go, however.

  The boat touched the stone dock beneath the bridge, and the boat’s boy leapt out and tied the line fore and aft. The tide was in, the river flowing across all but the top two stairs. The boy, no more than ten years old, steadied her arm gallantly as she stepped out, and she favored him with a smile for his kindness. She wouldn’t miss the mill, but she would miss Aylesford, which was a friendly place, unlike London. She was filled with a longing to remain. But tomorrow morning, when the Paper Dolls were awaiting the ferry on the wharf in Snodland, she would be bound for the unhappy place of her childhood.

  She made up her mind in an instant as she walked up to the High Street: she would board the London train as she had been ordered, and then at a convenient station she would get off and board a return train back to Aylesford and make her way to Hereafter Farm. Henley Townover needn’t know. He was a deeply hateful, heartless man, and it was none of his business to know.

  She entered the inn, crossed the nearly empty taproom, and ascended the stairs to her third-floor room. She lay down on her bed and fell asleep, awakening at dusk. Clover had failed to return from the mill—had gone to her aunt’s house in Maidstone, perhaps. At eight o’clock Daisy went downstairs and ate supper, her raw throat so painful that she could scarcely swallow. She drank a half pint of porter to soothe it. Despite the nap she was utterly exhausted, and she could hear her own breathing, like a death rattle, it seemed to her, although she put the thought out of her mind.

  She asked Mrs. Swinton, the landlady, to write a note to Mother Laswell at Hereafter Farm for her: that she had been dismissed from the mill and paid off, and was going into London on the morning train but would return at the first opportunity, perhaps in time for the soirée. She wondered if Mother Laswell would have any use for her on Hereafter, perhaps in the scullery now that her sister May had married and gone to live in Poole. She gave Mrs. Swinton a shilling piece when the message was written out, asking her whether the boy Henry might deliver it tomorrow and keep the shilling for his trouble.

  “Happily,” Mrs. Swinton said, taking the coin from her. “You’re looking poorly, Daisy,” she said. “You should toddle off to bed.”

  “I’m doing just that, Mrs. Swinton,” she said, and she wearily climbed the narrow stairways, the gas-lamps hissing in their niches on the landings. She entered her room and closed the door behind her. A man stood there, staring at her—Mr. Davis from the mill, smiling in the low light. She turned as she trod backward toward the bed, which clipped her at the knees so that she sat down on it.

  “Gather your things,” Mr. Davis said.

  “Mr. Henley told me that I was to board the morning train,” Daisy told him breathlessly. She had never liked Davis, and he smelled of liquor now. But she had been told that it was Davis who would fetch her to the station in the morning, as if she couldn’t find the way herself.

  “Mr. Henley told you what he wanted you to know, Daisy. It’s a chaise you’ll be traveling in, not the train. Mr. Henley is concerned that you arrive at your destination safely.”

  “What destination? Am I to be left on the London streets in the darkness?”

  “You’ll be taken to a boarding house near St. Paul’s. The landlady, Mrs. Thomas, is expecting you, no matter how late. You can stay with her as long as you like, given that you’re a wealthy girl now. Mr. Townover has done his duty by you—ten times over, to my mind. Now pack your trunk. You won’t be coming back.”

  Daisy moved the cloth and the water pitcher and bowl from the top of her small, flat-topped trunk, which had doubled as a low table. She gathered her few belongings, putting her paint box into a compartment on the bottom, and then packing her clothing and the few articles of her toilette. She put in her coat and her second pair of shoes and her old umbrella. After she clasped the trunk lid shut, Davis picked it up, set it on his shoulder, and waved her out of the room. She put her knit shawl on as she followed him down.

  There were half a dozen men drinking beer in the taproom, and she could hear Mrs. Swinton clattering in the kitchen. Davis strode toward the door, the trunk angled across his shoulder, and it occurred to Daisy that he was hiding behind it, although at once she realized that it must be a foolish thought. Still and all, if Mrs. Swinton had known that a man had gone up to the attic, surely she would have remarked on it when she took the note. That might mean that Davis had sneaked in, and now he was leaving the same way, and she was leaving with him. For a moment she nearly bolted. But then the moment past, and the door had closed behind them.

  They crossed the road, Davis taking her by the arm now, and up a dirt alley to where a chaise was standing, the horse tethered to a tree. Davis handed her up onto the seat, and in two minutes time he had strapped the trunk on behind, and the horse was carrying them across the old bridge. She told herself that the journey into London would delay her return only slightly. She looked behind her now, the lights of the village winking out as they rounded a bend in the road and entered the woods.

  “You’re wondering where we’re bound, no doubt,” Davis said to her. “It’s Mr. Jenks that’s taking you to London. He lives in Eccles with Mrs. Jenks.”

  “Ah,” Daisy said. She had no idea that there was a Mrs. Jenks. She pulled her shawl more securely around her and wished that she hadn’t put her coat into the trunk. She dared not ask Mr. Davis to stop for it, however, for he looked particularly brooding and unhappy, and he removed a flask from his coat and drank from it. He drove at what seemed to Daisy to be a dangerous pace along the road, which was dark as the grave now that they were in the deep shadow of the woods.

  After ten minutes’ travel he reined in the horses suddenly, although they were still a good distance from Eccles, and there were no houses roundabout, just trees and empty country. Away on the right stood a broad meadow up in flowers, and in the middle, black in the moonlight, were three standing stones, very ancient. A man stepped out from behind the stones, leading a horse, and her fears rushed back in upon her. It was the man Jenks. She saw him clearly enough to be sure—a short, brutish man who never had a kind word for the girls.

  “I’ll ask you for the packet of banknotes that Mr. Henley gave you,” Davis said.

  She looked at him, unable to speak, and a rush of bile rose in her throat. “Why?” she asked, knowing it was a foolish question, and in the next second she turned and threw herself off the edge of the seat. She felt Davis’s hand paw at her back, and her shawl come away, but she was already running, gasping painfully. She saw Jenks pull himself into the saddle as she ran toward the tree line, holding her hand against her side where the banknotes were pinned to the waist of her dress. Jenks would cut her off. She saw that clearly, and she looked back and saw that Davis was still seated on the chaise, merely watching now, the outcome assured.

  She ran on, hearing the horse’s hooves, and she knew she was lost. Her shoe caught in a rabbit burrow and she was flung down, catching herself with her hands. She tried to scramble to her feet again, but Jenks’s hands latched onto her clothing and she was yanked upright. She turned, swinging wildly at Jenks with her fist. She clipped him on the cheek, but he merely grinned at her. Her last sight on earth was of the moon in the sky above his shoulder and his closed fist rushing at her face.

  Chapter 8

  The Metaphoric Island

  THE SUMMER SOLSTICE wasn’t until tomorrow, but when it came to celebrations, neither Langdon St. Ives nor his wife Alice was a stickler for dates. The solstice was one of St. Ives’s particular favorites, carrying with it the promise of long evenings spent in the garden, the children playing outdoors until after the badgers had come out of the sett and were busy in the evening dusk. He relished the reappearance of birds and animals that had been away for the winter. Just yesterday he had seen a honey buzzard, and last week a spotted crake. The world was particularly active in the early summer, when there was copious evidence that nature was going sensibly about her business, the earth abidi
ng. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee had opened in London, but he wasn’t tempted by it—had no desire to see it. The fish and birds and creatures of the woodland were oblivious to royalty and fanfare and so was he, the lot of them engaged in a never-ending jubilee of their own.

  That thought brought to mind the several ringed plovers, summer bird visitors to England, which he and Hasbro had found dead on a shingly bank of the River Medway near Wouldham. Alice, a particularly avid fisherman, had caught two pike in the weir below the old bridge in Aylesford last week, both of the fish disfigured by tubercles and furry, discolored flesh. The effluent from the paper mill was heavier downstream, especially along the edge of the Wouldham marsh, but it was carried upstream to Aylesford as well, the Medway being a tidal river. He was thankful that the pond on their own property was fed by a spring, flowing since time immemorial, which provided water to irrigate the hops fields and the gardens. They were living on a variety of island, it seemed to him. And yet, St. Ives thought with a certain amount of nostalgic sorrow, islands were fragile things.

  Their island, in fact, was changing its character. Hasbro and Mrs. Langley were to be wed in two week’s time. For years Mrs. Langley had been the St. Ives’s cook, housekeeper, and more recently nanny to the children. And now she was to become Mrs. Hasbro Dodgson. Hasbro himself, once St. Ives’s factotum—literally a man who might do anything and everything—had simply become his friend and companion. The years had done away with the idea of his being a servant of any variety. Given that he had independent means, St. Ives was happy that Hasbro and Mrs. Langley had elected to remain nearby. St. Ives could see the ragstone façade of their new home through the trees beyond the pond.

  Mother Laswell’s husband Bill Kraken, followed by Gilbert Frobisher’s driver Boggs, emerged from the barn carrying a long, wooden table to add to the one already set up on the green along with a dozen or so chairs. Bowls of strawberries and shelled walnuts sat atop the first table, where Mother Laswell, dressed in a voluminous saffron-colored garment, sat opposite Gilbert Frobisher, a bottle of beer in front of each of them.