River's Edge

by James P. Blaylock

  But all was not well. A handbill, the ink still damp, had been distributed near the river, crying up the charges of witchcraft and with a photo of the dead baby. It called for the people of Snodland to take action, since the police were not doing so, but were feeding the perpetrators beef pies and mugs of porter at the expense of the citizenry. Eggs and tomatoes had been thrown at Alice’s window, and a milling crowd had been routed by two constables, one of the officers taking a knock on the head from a bottle. Hasbro had elected to remain, standing guard in the road, just outside the window. He carried a rifle, but was under orders to fire the rifle only into the sky unless he was pushed to defend himself. When St. Ives had set out for home the environs of the jail had been peaceful.

  He heard the children speaking in loud whispers on the sleeping porch. They had been uncharacteristically serious throughout the evening, although for the most obvious reason. They had overheard him telling Mrs. Langley what he had found in Snodland, and that Hasbro had remained. He hadn’t meant for the children to hear, but he had not considered Larkin, who was too enterprising and attentive by half. He had seen them come out of Finn’s cottage after nightfall, followed by Hodge the cat, Finn calling them back to say some final thing to them.

  Something was afoot. Eddie and Cleo had become part of Larkin’s gang, perhaps. Perhaps they had drafted Finn into the gang. No one had been forthcoming when he had asked them outright what they were up to, which was tantamount to mutiny. Cleo had begun to cry and said that she wanted her mother returned to them, and St. Ives had been hard pressed to hold back his own tears. He had tucked them up in bed over an hour ago, and he didn’t have the heart to go downstairs to quiet them now. He was as addled as they were, after all, and he could scarcely require them to forget their troubles and keep mum.

  Some time later he awakened from a dream, not knowing quite where he was and panicking suddenly when he sleepily discovered that Alice was missing. He heard the children again, their voices raised now, and his mind cleared. He slid out of bed and looked out onto the moonlit yard where, to his astonishment, Larkin was running down a fleeing boy like a hound running down a fox. Eddie and Cleo trailed along behind, their nightclothes flapping. It was Willum, the boy from Pink’s, whom Larkin was chasing.

  St. Ives’s heart rose at the sight of him. Larkin, who wasn’t much taller than five-year-old Cleo, pitched herself into the air and brought Willum down. Without pause, she scrambled onto his back and pressed him to the grass with her knees, grasping both his ears so that he couldn’t turn his head. Eddie and Cleo caught up and stood over them.

  St. Ives took the stairs two at a time, holding onto his nightcap, hurtling out through the door and down the several steps to the lawn, arriving in time to prevent Larkin from pummeling the boy across the back of the head more than once or twice.

  “He had this in his pocket, sir!” Larkin said, holding up a watch on a fob. “He’s pinched it from someone. The likes of him don’t carry such an item. We found him lurking in the kitchen, eating the meat pie that was left. He sneaked into the house, is what he did, but he’s wretched poor at it—noisy as a drunk man. A right dimwit.” Willum lay still, apparently not choosing to say anything into the grass beneath his face.

  “I believe you can let him up now, Larkin,” St. Ives said to her, taking the watch and fob that she held out to him. “His name is Willum, and he and I are friends.” Larkin stood up, as did Willum, who looked desperately unhappy. “Let me introduce you to Cleo and Eddie, Willum. They’re my children. Your captor’s name is Larkin.” Willum said nothing, but hung his head.

  “Is the timepiece yours, sir?” Larkin asked St. Ives.

  “It’s Mr. Pink’s is what it is,” Willum said.

  “Mr. Pink,” Larkin repeated. “Mr. Thingamabob, like as not.”

  “He tells the truth, Larkin,” St. Ives said. And then to Willum, he said, “Is that why you ran when the constable came up?”

  He nodded his head and looked at the ground. “I’d have been hung, else, like my old dad.”

  “They don’t hang younkers any more,” Larkin said. “That was quit a long time ago.”

  Willum shrugged and began to sniffle, covering his eyes with his hand. Cleo put her hand on his shoulder and told him not to cry, and Eddie told him that he was “among friends.” Larkin said, “Leastways you won’t hang. Not for foisting a watch.”

  “Did you follow me home?” St. Ives asked. “You must have.”

  “Aye. You stopped there in the wood, but I waited for you to go on. I don’t…” He began to cry again, and Larkin rolled her eyes at the weakness. “I l-lost my shillings,” he said, reaching into his pocket, and then fell to his knees and began searching the grass. Cleo and Eddie undertook to help him, but it was Larkin who found three of them, she having an eye for misplaced coins, although she wasn’t particular about how they were misplaced. Willum found the missing fourth.

  “You may keep the pocket-watch, Willum,” St. Ives said, handing it back to him when he was on his feet again. “Mr. Pink won’t be needing it, and I know for a fact that he owes you wages. But you must do us the service of speaking to Constable Brooke tomorrow morning. You remember what I said to you this afternoon?”

  “About the man what burnt the village?”

  “Just so. You and I will win our friend’s freedom tomorrow. It’s our good luck that you’re among us now. You’ll sleep in the company of Cleo, Eddie, and Larkin, the lot of you now being friends, although you and I must set out early in the morning.”

  “Burnt the village?” Larkin said. “That’s a hanging offense, and no doubt about it.”

  “Not an actual village,” St. Ives told her. He took Cleo, Eddie, and Larkin aside and said, “Willum mustn’t be allowed to escape. He’s our friend, as I said, and must be treated as such, but he’s on parole. Do you follow me?”

  “Don’t fret, sir,” Larkin said flatly. “He’s safe as a baby with us.”

  Within the half hour—the four children having devoured the rest of the meat pie, half a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a quantity of Mrs. Langley’s lemonade—St. Ives lay once again in his bed. He found that his happiness at recovering Willum had faded, and his mind was on Alice again. Hasbro’s armed presence, along with two constables, was enough to keep her safe throughout the night. If Pink had cooked up the photographs and produced the broadsheet—and surely it was sensible to argue that he had—and if it were certain that he had been murdered by a mysterious third party and not by Bill Kraken, then they would have taken a giant step toward bringing down the rickety evidence stacked against Alice and Mother Laswell. But there was no bringing it down until Willum had spoken to Constable Brooke.

  He awakened before dawn from an uneasy sleep and hurriedly splashed water onto his face, combed his hair with his fingers, and dressed in the darkness. He arrived downstairs to discover from Mrs. Langley that Gilbert hadn’t returned from Snodland. He had gone off last night to meet with Townover and his lawyers, with thoughts of overnighting at Windhover. Willum was asleep, although the other children were up and dressed, Mrs. Langley assuring St. Ives that all was well with them. She was wide-awake, she said, and they would put nothing over on her, not this morning, they wouldn’t.

  “I’ll roust the boy,” she said, and St. Ives nodded, discovering that he was in a desperate hurry to be away.

  Chapter 20

  Mother Laswell

  in the Woods

  ALONG THE VERY back of Hereafter farm, beyond the ten-acre meadow that bounded the rear of the property, a brook flowed through the woods—Hampton Brook, a trout stream if there were fishermen about—but a lonely stream and woods for weeks on end where the silence was broken by the wind in the trees, the calling of birds, and the rustle of animals. There were chalk hills above the brook, the chalk eroded over eons, rainwater percolating into the hills themselves and hollowing out shallow caves.

  Mother Laswell had slept in one such cave for two nights running. Its entran
ce was hidden by shrubbery and so was invisible from the path along the brook. Despite the privacy and the quiet, however, her sleep had been uneasy, and to keep her mind from swerving, she had spent her waking hours doggedly considering the speech that she meant to deliver that very morning, come what may, to the Paper Dolls who assembled on the dock to take the ferry across to the mill. They were close to walking out—all signs pointed to it—and she meant to put her shoulder to the wheel.

  She had hauled leaves and ferns into the cavern for a bed, and after a long night of it she was stiff and sore—very ready to pursue what might easily be her final bow. Bill was imprisoned for murder, she knew that much. If he had done what they said he had done, he had done it for her—foolishly, but out of love. She would have stopped him with a brickbat if she could have, but she couldn’t. He had been gone before anyone knew what he was about. What was done was done. With any luck—if he wasn’t hanged—they would be imprisoned together, away from the turmoil of the world. That was her final hope when she awakened this morning—to finish the job at hand and then to live out her days in a cell.

  She hoisted herself wearily to her feet and dusted off her clothing, smoothing the wrinkled material as best she could, the flame-colored fabric dimmed by dust and stains. Dawn was some way off, but there was enough moonlight so that she could see it twinkling on the water of the brook. She descended the steep bank, holding thankfully onto branches until she was on level ground. The wet sand still held Hasbro’s footprints. He had come along yesterday afternoon searching for her and had called her name several times. He was a fine, good man, and he hoped to help her, but she had business to attend to, and she meant to complete that business without any hindrance, no matter from whom.

  She knelt on a flat rock, said a prayer, and washed her face and hands in the cold water of the brook before she drank from it. There was nothing for her to eat, but her appetite had quite disappeared when the police had come for her and told her what Bill had done and had found the trash that Townover’s lackeys had hidden behind the barn. She looked back at the mouth of the cavern—what might prove to be her last home this side of prison—and she thought about Hereafter Farm: what joys it had given her over the years, and the interesting fact that she might soon be bound for another sort of hereafter, if the fiends undertook to treat her as they had treated poor Daisy. She had to assume they were searching for her.

  Savoring the smell of the dewy vegetation and the cool dawn breeze, she walked away feeling lighter than she would have imagined. She skirted the meadow, keeping to the trees so as not to be seen in the moonlight, and made her way by a circuitous route toward the River Medway, listening to the symphony of birdsong in the awakening day, a music that was both beautiful and lonely.

  Chapter 21

  Into Snodland

  NOTHING YET!” EDDIE shouted in a hoarse whisper from his place in the high, loft window, where he was nearly invisible against the early morning darkness. His narrow landing looked out toward the house and the moonlit wisteria alley. Cleo stood beside him, gripping the fabric of his shirt. A long wooden ladder rose to the landing, where there was a swivel crane and a pulley for hauling objects up and in. It was also useful if a person wanted to make a quick descent, although it wasn’t an approved caper, and the crane was most often swung inward and used for hoisting the heavy saddle onto the back of Johnson the elephant. Johnson had been saddled and ready to go out these last ten minutes.

  Two lanterns were lit in the barn, one of them casting light on Johnson’s enormous food box. Currently he was gobbling down the last vestiges of fruit, dried hops, sugar-canes, and two-day-old buns from the baker’s. He drank greedily from his water trough when the food was gone, slopping the water around with his trunk for sheer sport, and then walked a distance before defecating enormously on a litter of straw.

  “Willum has just come out,” Eddie told them. “I’ll watch for father.”

  Larkin and Finn, waiting by the barn door, waved up at him in acknowledgement. “Do you love Miss Alice, then?” Larkin asked Finn, who stood holding onto Johnson’s tether. “It’s plain in your face when she’s about.”

  “Why do you say that?” Finn asked dismissively. “She’s married to the Professor. I can’t love her. It isn’t honorable.”

  “You liar. You know what I mean. You’re soft for her, Finn. She’s a real lady. When I met her in London, she was good to me, even before she knew me, as was Uncle Gilbert, who took me in as his own. My old dad had been dead the past two years. I don’t remember my mum.”

  “Do you miss that life along the river?” Finn asked. “I don’t miss it.”

  She shrugged noncommittally and said, “Some. That’s the past, though. I don’t pay the past any heed. What I don’t like is all this talk of witches.”

  “That’s humbug,” Finn said. “None of it’s true.”

  “No one cares what’s true. I heard tell of an old man in Essex who was a witch. They dragged him in the river to get the truth out of him. He died of it, and those that done it was let off. You’ve been around good people too long, Finn. You don’t know enough of what people do to each other.”

  “I know more than you think, Larkin. I take your meaning, though. But Eddie and Cleo don’t need to hear about witches being drowned.”

  “Mayhaps. I’m saying that if they killed this man Henry, who they say hanged himself, they’ll treat Alice the same. Don’t think they won’t.”

  “I know they won’t,” Finn said, “because I won’t let them.”

  “There it is, then,” she said, staring at him. “That’s what I’ve been saying.” There was something unsettling in Larkin’s face. It wasn’t just pluck, although she had plenty of that, it was something more dangerous than pluck, and it surprised him coming from a girl as slight and young as Larkin.

  “Here’s father now! They’re just climbing into the gig,” Eddie said in a hoarse whisper. “They’re off!” He started down the ladder, moving slowly, mindful of Cleo, who was following just a few rungs above him. Once they were on the floor they dashed to the barn door and ascended to the platform from which they climbed down onto Johnson’s saddle.

  “I’ll drive Johnson,” Larkin said, taking up the reins. “Boggs showed me how to drive a coach and four, and an elephant is much alike. Anyone can see that.”

  Finn agreed, given that he could hold the tether, and they stepped out of the barn. There was red along the eastern horizon, but it was still dark. They set out straightaway, but hadn’t gone ten elephant steps toward the wisteria alley when Mrs. Langley stepped out of the house, walked in front of Dr. Johnson, and held up her hand. The elephant stopped dutifully and stood still.

  “Don’t for a moment think that I don’t know what you’re about,” she said to the lot of them. “I overheard you plotting last night, but I thought it was play or I would have had the lot of you shackled to your beds. The Professor won’t allow this kind of lark, which you very well know—sneaking out the moment he’s vanished up the road. Back into the barn with you. Get Johnson settled and come in to breakfast.”

  Finn, much relieved, led the beast back the way they’d come, where Larkin, Cleo, and Eddie climbed down.

  “I’ll see to Johnson,” Finn said, and he set about lifting the heavy saddle from the elephant’s back with the crane. Eddie, Cleo, and Larkin trudged away. After ten minutes everything was secure, and Finn found himself alone, daylight pending in the east. He peered out past the barn door, and seeing no one out and about, he sprinted toward the road, crossed into the woods, and ran at an easy pace in the direction of the weir, where the water was shallow enough to ford. He was quickly across the stony path, his shoes dry, and moving downriver. Aylesford Village and the old bridge stood away to his left and behind him, the dawn light grey through the trees on his right hand.

  He slowed to catch his breath, but after five minutes of brisk walking he heard the sound of running footsteps behind him, and he turned to see Larkin, coming up fast. He
stopped until she caught up. He could see that she was angry for being left behind, and for a moment it looked as if she might mean to throttle him.

  “It was you who peached to Mrs. Langley,” she said. “She was watching out the window for us. I saw her plain. And I saw you bolt as soon as she was out of sight again.”

  “It was Cleo and Eddie I was thinking about. Like I told you, they shouldn’t come along. They’d come to harm, and then what? But Eddie had to think he was coming along, do you see? He wouldn’t stand for being left out, his own mother in jail and all. I knew you’d find a way.”

  “You’d best believe I’d find a way.”

  She looked into his face until he nodded, having nothing useful to say in reply, and then they set out again at a run, Larkin seeming to skim along over the ground without effort, as if she had done plenty of running in her life. In fifteen minutes they came out of the trees, the river before them, the road stretching away along it. They could see the ferry dock in the distance, people milling, black smoke rising from the chimney of the ferry. There was a gabble of noise on the wind coming up the river—a general shouting and confusion from the riverside in Snodland, and, as they stood trying to make out the extent of the trouble, the unmistakable sound of a rifle firing.

  “How far to the bridge?” Larkin asked breathlessly.

  “A mile and a half, more or less.”

  “And then down again. Three miles. We’ll be too late.”

  Farther along the weedy shore a small dock stood with its pilings in the water, two rowing boats tied alongside, belonging, no doubt, to the farmhouses visible through the trees behind. The tide was just starting to turn, flowing slowly back toward the sea. Without a word Larkin hurried down the shore and leapt up onto the dock, where she untied the mooring line of a quick-looking boat with a sharp bow.