by Caro Peacock
Since nobody was looking in my direction I went to the jetty then carefully down the ladder, skirt and petticoats bunching up distractingly, and went halfway along the pathway of planks so that I had a good view of what was happening. Amos laid the bundle carefully down on the catafalque. Tom produced a book and read something aloud by candlelight. The only words I caught were in a foreign language so I assumed it was part of the Hindu rite. Then all the men rumbled out the Lord’s Prayer. Tom was leaving nothing to chance. With a scrape of flint, somebody lit a torch and the sharp whiff of tar drowned out the mud smell. The torch flowered into a bright orange flame. One of the men was pouring something over Mr Griffiths’s body. It was probably raw spirit, because the moment Tom put the torch to the pile of timber, the whole thing flared up. Almost instantly, the body was the dark centre of a tent of flame. After burning fiercely for a while, the flames wavered. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. I held my breath, trying not to breathe it in, but it was no good. A breeze came up from the river and the flames flared again. The dark centre had crumbled to a shell. I was coughing. Crying too, and not just because of coughing. It had come to me suddenly that Tom had been away in India when our father died, so hadn’t been there to observe his funeral rites. I thought that in doing all this for Mr Griffiths, who perhaps had come to be a kind of father to him, he was performing a duty that he’d missed then.
The plank I was standing on quivered on its base of mud. Somebody was walking softly along the planks behind me, coming from the jetty. I turned and saw a figure all in white, standing out against the darkness. It was a man, in loose trousers and tunic. I couldn’t make out much of his features except that he wore a turban as white and neat as a bandage. He was walking quickly and so purposefully that I went to step aside for him, until I realized that would land me knee-deep in mud. Without hesitating he nodded to me and solved the problem by stepping on to the mud himself. Now he was knee-deep, but he kept on walking towards the group standing by the pyre, more slowly but unperturbed. Tom turned and saw him and seemed startled. The man in white said something that I couldn’t hear. If it was an explanation, Tom must have accepted it because the man moved closer to the fire. The flames were dying down now, but it must still have been hot where he was standing. His unmoving silhouette gave no more sign of discomfort than when he’d been wading in mud. He spoke in a rising and falling rhythm, facing outward to the pyre and the dark river so I couldn’t hear the words. I doubt if I’d have understood them in any case. Then everything went quiet and we all stood looking at the sinking flames with a small glowing core in the centre, where the body had been.
Small rippling sounds in the channels flowing through the mud showed that the tide had turned and the river was beginning to rise again. The man in white turned and came walking back. As he passed me, he was looking towards the shore. I watched as he climbed easily up the iron ladder and, on an impulse, turned to follow. When I got to the jetty there was no sign of him. If he’d walked away up the street, he’d be screened by Tom’s carriage beside the warehouse. I squeezed past the carriage and found myself looking at the back of another one, at the top of the short street. The man was a few steps away from it. As I watched, a door of the second carriage was opened from the inside and the man in white got in. It started to move, but slowly because it had to turn a sharp corner. When it came sideways on to me I had a glimpse through the window and saw the man in white. There were other people in there with him, in darker clothes, two of them I thought. Before I could see more, a hand in a white glove pulled down the blind over the window. It wasn’t the man’s hand. He hadn’t been wearing gloves. This was a long glove, a woman’s, and the hand inside it was small and slim.
I watched as the carriage rolled slowly away.
‘They’ll be needing a farrier,’ a voice said from behind me.
I turned.
‘Amos Legge. What are you doing here?’
‘Saw you following the Indian and thought I’d better keep an eye on what was happening.’
‘Are they with your party?’
‘No. Never seen the man before. Your brother hadn’t either.’
‘There was a woman too, in the coach. Probably more than one. Who are they and how did they know?’
‘Goodness knows. Your brother wasn’t exactly sending out invitations.’
‘Not even to me.’
‘He thought you wouldn’t approve.’
I thought Tom still didn’t know me very well. The carriage had disappeared into the darkness. If Tabby had been with me, I could have got her to do her trick of clinging to the back of it and tracing it to a destination.
‘We’d better go back,’ I said.
Amos went first down the ladder and helped me on to the planks. This time I went all the way to where the men were standing, around the glowing ashes of the fire. The river had come up quickly while Amos and I had been away and was creeping towards the edge of the makeshift platform.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tom said.
‘Paying my respects, like you are.’
For once he didn’t argue. Just perceptibly, the platform was being to move up and down under our feet from the rising water. One of the men, speaking with a strong Cockney accent, said we’d better get back. Amos went first, then Tom and I. As the gang of men retreated, they brought the planks that had made up the pathway with them and piled them at the top of the ladder. I think Tom must have paid them for their night’s work because I heard coins clinking, then they disappeared into a dark alleyway by the warehouse. Out by the river, the funeral platform was almost afloat now, the glowing heart of the fire rocking on the swell. I stood beside Tom on the jetty until it was afloat entirely. Slowly, it began to move upriver on the tide. By the time it came to Westminster Bridge the fire would be nothing but red embers, much smaller than the glow from a steamboat’s fire. When the tide turned in the morning, the river would carry the grey ashes that remained of Mr Griffiths out to the estuary and beyond. Not Mother Ganges, but Father Thames. Or as near to that as he can contrive.
‘You did well,’ I said to Tom.
He nodded.
When we couldn’t see the red glow any more we turned and went back to the carriage. At first there was no sign of Amos, then the glow of the candle lamp came from the end of the street, with him behind it. Tom didn’t object when Amos held the door open for me to get into the carriage. After all, he could hardly leave me stranded on the river bank. The inside of the carriage was full of smells, old leather from the seats, the faint sickly smell of human corruption mostly masked by spices and, I thought, jasmine or tuberoses. Tom glanced at me but I decided not to tell him I’d seen too much to be squeamish. When he’d seen us settled, Amos gave a tip to the boy who’d been holding the horses all this time and we drove back to the bridge and across to the north side. We stopped in Adam’s Mews and Tom escorted me to the bottom of the stairs, still subdued and quiet. Amos stayed on the driver’s seat and called out cheerfully that he’d see me in the morning.
Mrs Martley had gone to bed early, leaving cold cuts on the table for my supper. I stirred up the fire and made tea, ate a little. The ceremony by the river, especially the sudden appearance of the Indian gentleman, had changed something inside my brain. I thought I’d been looking at the question of Griffiths’s death from the wrong direction entirely, as if the answer lay somewhere between the Palace of Westminster and the City of London. Wrong. Whatever had caused the killing of Mr Griffiths – and I was certain that he had been killed – came from five thousand miles and many months away in Calcutta and I couldn’t see how I could even get a foothold on understanding it.
TEN
‘Just appeared out of nowhere, like the genie in a pantomime,’ Amos said.
The flighty chestnut he was riding thought of shying at a man walking a wolfhound. The slightest pressure of Amos’s leg decided him against it. It was the morning after Mr Griffiths’s funeral and we were discussing the Indian gentle
man.
‘Did Tom say anything to you about him after you left me?’
‘Not a word. But he was puzzled, I know that.’
As well he might be. If the man had been one of Mr Griffiths’s friends in London, surely he’d have mentioned him to Tom. Then there was the question of how he’d known about the ceremony.
‘Nearly left it too late, though,’ Amos said.
‘Yes. As if he hadn’t known until the last minute.’
‘Or followed us.’
‘How would he have known to follow you?’
‘We tried not to attract notice when we put the old gentleman’s body in the carriage, but anybody watching his lodgings might have seen.’
‘But why would he be watching Mr Griffiths’s lodgings unless he knew something like that was going on anyway?’ I said. ‘And you’d have noticed somebody following, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not necessarily with the traffic like it is. South of the river you’d be more likely to notice, but perhaps he hung back then.’
We cantered for a good stretch, but it didn’t clear my mind.
‘I’d give a lot to talk to him,’ I said.
‘I’ll see what I can do, then.’
I laughed.
‘Amos, even you couldn’t track a perfectly ordinary carriage you’d seen just once on a dark night. It could have come from anywhere in London.’
But when I glanced across at him he had that expression which signalled something up his sleeve.
‘One of their bays had a shoe loose,’ he said. ‘You could hear it clinking on the cobbles. Then when they turned the corner, it wasn’t clinking any more.’ Amos tapped three beats on the pommel of his saddle, the fourth one softer than the others. ‘So it had been cast.’
On these matters, Amos was as accurate as a musician. But still . . .
‘We can’t go hunting all over London for a horse with only three shoes. Besides, they’ll have it at the farrier’s by now,’ I said.
‘That’s the whole point.’
He glanced across at me, grinning.
‘Well?’
‘I went up the street and found the shoe he’d cast. Not difficult. They wouldn’t see many horses in a little street like that.’
‘So you’re planning to take the shoe all over London until you find a horse it fits, like Prince Charming and Cinderella?’
‘That fellow could have saved himself a deal of trouble if he’d thought of asking the cobblers.’
I gave in and asked him to explain.
‘Take a shoe to any shoemaker and he’ll tell you who made it,’ Amos said. ‘Just the same with horseshoes. Every farrier’s got his own little tricks of the trade. Show him a shoe and ten to one he’ll recognize it. Maybe something as simple as the spacing of the nail holes, the chamfering of the edge, even the colour of the iron it’s made out of. They’re all different.’
‘Are you telling me you can look at that cast shoe and know where the horse was shod?’
He shook his head. For a minute I’d hoped. Then I saw he was still grinning.
‘I can’t, but I’ve got a friend who can. A farrier I have a drink with now and then. He reckons he can tell where any horseshoe came from within a five-mile radius of Charing Cross. Never known him wrong.’
I thought he was being too confident. Amos never liked admitting that there might be things he couldn’t find out. Still, I wished him luck. I wanted to meet the Indian gentleman and, almost as much, the possessor of that small gloved hand that had pulled down the carriage blind so smartly. On our way back, I turned the conversation to Tabby. Amos had seen her courage and recklessness at close hand, and took the business about the knife as seriously as I did.
‘If that one was after me with a knife, I’d be careful where I walked.’
Since Tabby was a foot and a half shorter than Amos and probably less than half his weight, that was a tribute of a kind.
‘Did she ever talk to you about hating rich men?’ I said.
‘I’ve seen her spit in the gutter once or twice, when somebody tried to come high-handed, but nothing particular.’
‘Or traders in stocks and shares?’
‘Didn’t even know she knew about them.’
I could tell he was turning it over in his mind and before we parted he delivered an opinion.
‘She’s not stupid, that girl. She’d know you couldn’t change who’s rich and who’s poor just by stabbing one man.’
‘As a gesture, perhaps?’
He shook his head. Perhaps he was thinking of the kind of gestures Tabby sometimes made at men who shouted remarks at her.
‘If she’s thinking of putting a knife into somebody, it’ll be somebody particular she’s got in her mind,’ Amos said. ‘Somebody intending harm to you.’
This wasn’t reassuring.
‘But she’s angry with me.’
‘She’d be a good sight angrier with anybody wanting to hurt you.’
‘I don’t know of anybody intending harm to me,’ I said. Then thought again. ‘No more than usual, at any rate.’
‘See what I mean? The things you find out, there’s bound to be some people wanting to even the score. If that girl heard that one of them was planning mischief, that might explain it.’
‘But why wouldn’t she tell me?’
He shrugged.
‘Maybe she didn’t want to worry you.’
Or maybe, I thought, she’d been too annoyed with me about the wretched dog kidnapping business. Too annoyed to take me into her confidence but still risking her life to protect me. That would be just like Tabby. For once, talking things over with Amos had made me feel no better.
Tom didn’t visit that evening, so I had too much time to think over what Amos had said. I went over all our cases – the list was not so very long – and made a mental list of people we might have left desiring vengeance. For practical purposes, it came to no more than half a dozen. True, that left some pretty big omissions. Quite recently we’d been involved in a case that had spoiled the plans of a major European power. I still wasn’t quite sure which, though I had my suspicions. But governments and their secret agents tend to be practical. If a scheme fails, they don’t waste time in personal vengeance, and soon move on to another one. There had been a mad old baronet who would have liked to spill my blood, and Tabby’s as well, but I knew on good authority that he’d died in a private asylum a few months before, to the relief of his family.
Some of our smaller cases had offended people in society. There were several ladies who’d cut me socially at a reception, but would probably draw the line at cutting throats in an alley. In two cases, our investigations into missing jewellery had proved that a family member was responsible. A son had been sent into the army, a female cousin packed off to live abroad. It was just possible that either had returned to plague us, but not likely. There was only one likely case I could think of that left somebody vengeful enough to be a threat. A man had tried to trick me into giving false evidence so that he could divorce his wife but keep her money. I’d discovered something so foul about him that I’d gone over to the wife’s side and provided her with evidence that allowed her to separate from him, keep her children and not give him a penny. I knew that the husband would gladly have seen me dead, if he’d had the nerve for it. The objection to that theory was that Tabby had known very little about the case and, to the best of my knowledge, never met the man involved. Once I’d seen the direction things were taking, I’d been determined to shield her from it. I decided that Amos was wrong for once and looked out to the yard, hoping against hope to see a light in Tabby’s cabin. Nothing.
Early next morning, Tom Huckerby arrived.
‘Found your printer, I think.’
‘Wonderful. Where?’
‘Not so far from me, it turned out. Just round the corner from Ludgate Hill. Elderly gentleman arrived three days ago and asked him to print a pamphlet in a hurry. Paid in advance, of course, otherwise the printer wouldn’t
have accepted the work, not knowing him. Title: “Some Observations on the Trading Practices of the East India Company and Related Matters”. Does that sound like your man?’
‘Yes. Was there an author’s name?’
‘The Griff.’
‘Did you get a copy?’
‘No. It was still being proofread, then they had to get it stitched together. He wanted five hundred copies done.’
Tom suggested we should go to the printer and see if a copy was ready. He took it for granted that we’d walk there. He resented spending money on coach fares and about the only time he travelled in a horse-drawn vehicle was when police or duns were arresting him. He knew every street, alleyway and short cut from Hyde Park corner to St Paul’s and had a story to tell about all of them – usually of some injustice or brutality suffered. I suppose we looked an odd couple, Tom Huckerby in his unbuttoned jacket and shapeless felt hat, striding along, talking nineteen to the dozen and flinging his arms around for emphasis, I in my blue cloak and bonnet trying to keep up. We attracted some amused and curious looks, but Tom was unconscious of them and I tried to be too. Still, it was a relief when we arrived in the street off Ludgate Hill. Tom pointed to a large sign hanging over a doorway: SETH ROBINSON, PRINTER.
‘You’d told me your man was new to London, so I thought I’d take a walk round and look for the printers with the biggest signboards out. I reckoned that was what he might have done.’
Seth Robinson was a small man, his printer’s paper cap perched on a totally bald head, his hands large and capacious in proportion to the rest of him, as if made for handling heavy galleys of type. A smell of warm glue as well as ink hung over the workshop. Several apprentices were working at the back of the shop, half-screened by sheets of copy hung on lines for the ink to dry.
‘I told you, not till tomorrow,’ the printer said, as soon as he set eyes on Tom.
‘What about a proof copy?’ Tom suggested.
