“You had better find her,” he said. “You had better find her. You had better find her.”
XII
Pistols above a Lake
FAR UP-RIVER, OPPOSITE TREES and fields along the Chelsea bank, the wherryman pulled steadily at his oars.
Ripples shimmered past under the white eye of the moon. The damp breeze caught at Jeffrey’s hat and wig as he sat in the stern of the boat. A very faint sound of music, intensified by loneliness, began to steal out across water from beyond those trees. At first Jeffrey scarcely heard it above the creaking of the rowlocks; then it grew louder at every stroke.
‘Give me one turn of good fortune,’ he was praying to himself. ‘Give me one cast of dice that are not cogged. If I am mistaken in this, as I probably am, Peg has lost her chance and I have failed her again.’
The wherryman grunted. Glancing over his shoulder, he steadied the left-hand oar in its rowlock; the right-hand one dipped and feathered for a turn towards the Chelsea bank.
“Easy-ho!” growled the wherryman. “Was it Hospital Steps or Ranelagh Steps you wanted?”
“Ranelagh Steps, I said.”
“Ar; I thought yer did. And there’s a masquerade at the rotunda tonight, which there is most nights when there’s no concert. But it’s an odd sort o’ cove, ain’t it, as goes to Ranelagh by water in the night-time?”
“This odd sort of cove has his reasons.”
“I bet yer have. Easy, me hearty!”,
Jeffrey, on a wire of nerves, had stood up facing a wherryman whose back was now towards the bank. And he looked left and right.
In that loneliness, with Chelsea village little more than a few houses straggling farther west, only two buildings loomed up high against a pallor of moonlight. On the left was the dark-brick bulk of the Royal Hospital, where pensioners from old wars lay sealed up in poverty and sleep. On the right rose the rotunda of Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, unmatched for splendour inside its shell.
Each was set well back from the river behind deep gardens and formal rows of trees. The Royal Hospital was dark. Even the rotunda, for all its blaze inside and its immense band of music thumping out a grand march, showed only chinks and glimmers at velvet-masked windows.
The waterman, digging oars deeper, looked up under a distortion of moonlight
“In the day-time, ay! When they visits the gardens, ay! But for a masquerade at night, when the gentlemen is mostly drunk and the ladies don’t wear much clothes, nobody goes by water that I’ve ever heard. They goes by land to the Ranelagh Road side, and straight in to the rotunda. The back gate o’ the gardens ain’t even attended.”
“Quite true.”
“I know,” the wherryman said darkly. “I know.”
He had shipped oars. The boat slid in sideways and bumped against stone water-stairs. The wherryman gripped the iron ring in the steps and held it there.
“Now get out” His voice went shrill. “That’s a pistol stuck in the slip-pocket inside your coat, ain’t it? You’re on the pad, ain’t yer? Your mate’s here already, ain’t he?”
“My mate?”
“Military-seeming cove in a blue coat and white waistcoat Nimble as a cat for all he looked thick-built. h! Recognize him, don’t yer?”
“I think I have met Major Skelly, yes.”
“Well, you rob who yer please. But I’ll touch nobody as does. Now pay the fare from Mill Bank Steps and be off.”
Jeffrey jumped out on the landing-stairs. Then, at a cry from the wherryman, he turned round.
“Here is your money,” he said, extending his hand with closed palm upwards. “Will you wait here for my return?”
“Not me! We talk o’ Tyburn, don’t we, as if ’twas the only gibbet? And yet everybody knows you can’t go in or out of town in near any direction without seeing the deaders hung up in rows for a warning; and half of ’em is footpads or highwaymen. Wait? Not me!”
“Not even,” and Jeffrey opened his palm, “for this much again?”
The wherryman began to curse with frantic greed.
“Quiet! Lower your voice!”
The cursing died to a whisper under cold river-wind.
“Whether you believe it or you don’t, I am no footpad or highwayman. I came by water from Mill Bank Steps, only a very short distance away, because I have no card of admission for the rotunda-side. Nor do I attend the masquerade in any case. My business is with one Charles Pilbeam and his wife, who dwell in a cottage in the gardens; and I shall be short”
“Old Charley Pilbeam? Cove as keeps the grounds? What’s the lay with him?”
“No matter. Will you wait?”
“Ay, I’ll wait. But if I hears shooting—”
“This ‘mate’ of mine: how was he armed?”
“Like you. Sword and pistol.”
“Then there may be shooting. And it will mean your life if you should leave before I return. Do you apprehend this?”
The moon-distorted face cursed and cowered. Jeffrey threw a coin into the boat. He ran up the water-stairs and hurried along a lane past the side of the hospital gardens to the gate in the stone wall at the rear of Ranelagh.
The gate, by which day-time visitors paid half a crown to enter the gardens, was fast locked. Impeded by the sword and by the firearm inside his coat, Jeffrey climbed the wall and dropped into shadows at the other side.
There he waited, peering round.
On either side of a central greensward, at the back of which stood the open-air stage for juggling and conjuring, a double line of poplars enclosed a sanded walk stretching towards the rotunda some two hundred yards ahead.
‘Military-seeming cove in a blue coat and white waistcoat. Nimble as a cat for all he looked thick-built.’
Jeffrey took the left-hand path.
A wind went rustling and whispering, sinuously, through the tops of trees. Its noise should have been lost under the gaiety of music swelling from the rotunda. But you heard the branches’ sibilance; you saw shadows moving; you walked lightly even on sand.
Inside that rotunda, as his imagination pictured, two tiers of private boxes were set in a circle of crimson-velvet curtains round a matted floor. Mirrors and flower-stalk lamps flashed back from its central pillar, and fiddles sang under a roof of twenty-three chandeliers. The doors of each private box on the ground floor opened out into the gardens, which were kept dark for the convenience of masqueraders at romping. There had been satires written, of course, on guests who did but parade endlessly round and round the central pillar to see or be seen.
A thousand feet rustled on mats,
Over carpet that once had been green;
Men bowed in their three-cornered hats
With the corners so fearfully keen.
Fair maids, who at home in their haste
Had left all clothing else save a train,
Swept the floor clean as slowly they paced,
And then—walked round and swept it again.
And yet Jeffrey, remembering those recent verses, could be thankful the gardens were not invaded by a throng. If you sensed the pulse of heat and life inside, you saw nothing here except shadow-dapplings in an avenue of trees.
The music soared up and stopped. Jeffrey stopped too. Someone else was moving as stealthily as he.
On his right, past an opening in the poplars, he saw the long and narrow artificial lake they called ‘the canal.’ A footbridge led out to an open pavilion, with a Chinese-style roof, in the middle of the lake. Day-time visitors could sit at tables to eat cakes and drink tea there, or ride in a gondola now moored to the footbridge.
He could have sworn he heard a chair scrape inside the pavilion; and then he could have sworn he hadn’t. On his left, down another path past an opening in the poplars, stood a rustic cottage so embowered in bushes that he might not have observed it if he had not known whose cottage it was.
And then he saw.
A woman, moving in his direction down the sanded walk from the rotunda, had stopped dead too.
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“Mrs. Pilbeam!” he called softly. “Mrs. Pilbeam!”
Her eyesight was bad or she was confused by the sound of his voice. She ran straight towards him, making for the path that would lead to the rustic cottage. She was a short, stout, middle-aged woman, wearing a mob-cap and carrying a covered tray. When Jeffrey loomed up in front of her, the woman flinched and gulped back a scream.
“Mrs. Pilbeam! Look up! Look up at me! Don’t you recognize me? I was sent here this morning.”
His urgent whisper coiled round her in reassurance. Startled eyes, against the sort of face called comfortable, made an upturned shining under the moon.
“Bow Street,” she whispered back. “Bow Street!”
“Yes. Now where is she?”
“Where is who?”
There was no guilt in the voice, only fright and fierce resentment. Jeffrey drew her to one side into shadow.
“May I repeat, Mrs. Pilbeam, that I was here this morning?”
“And may I repeat,” the well-spoken words whispered back, “that we told you? If my husband keeps the grounds, and has the hire of gardeners and cleaners, does that mean he knows which of them may have been picking pockets?”
“No, it does not. We were agreed upon it.”
“My husband is seventy-five. He served with Duke Marlborough’s self at Oudenarde in ’08 and Malplaquet in ’09. Every poor pensioner next door bows deeply in passing him. Hath any man ever impugned—?”
“None has or does,” Jeffrey interrupted. “But I speak of a girl named Peg Ralston.”
“Do you so?”
“She heard all this tale from Brogden, Justice Fielding’s clerk. She arrived here early this afternoon, with a cloak hiding a formal gown. If she could persuade you to hide her in the cottage by day (and not by money either, I think), then she could show herself at night when there are three or four masquerades a week. She could even go abroad in the town, masquerades being so popular in London, and none suspect her from the very paradox that she hid her face. Thus she could bide until the time she hoped I would prove her innocence and set her free.”
Jeffrey leaned forward, twitching the white damask cloth off the tray. On it was the kind of refreshment they provided at the rotunda: slices of chicken-breast, bread-and-butter cut thin, and a glass of champagne.
“I beg you, Mrs. Pilbeam, to tell me where she is.”
Mrs. Pilbeam snatched back the cloth and retreated a step.
“Lawk-o’-mercy, but haven’t Bow Street enough to do without this?”
“Without what?”
“A poor girl is locked up in her room by her uncle, and can’t get out to marry the man she loves—”
“Is this what Peg informed you?”
“She is a sweet creature!”
“Some might declare it She is also a very unwise girl and a romantical liar. She was locked up at Newgate Prison.”
The glass of champagne spilled over. Again a vast wind went rustling, whispering as though searching, through leaves as yet hardly coloured with the tinge of autumn. Yet a scent of autumn blew with it.
“Mrs. Pilbeam,” Jeffrey pleaded, “I won’t threaten you. I need not. Your honesty, and your husband’s, is unquestioned. But you are the more open of heart to the tales of a silly if admittedly ill-used girl, whose headstrong behaviour has put herself again in hazard. Therefore …”
Another voice spoke, in a furious whisper that carried clearly.
“Leave off!” it cried. “Stop tormenting the woman, can’t you? I’ll not have it.”
Jeffrey whirled round. He had not been mistaken about the scrape of a chair inside the pavilion on the canal.
Rhinestones glittered on a black vizard-mask, and the mouth below it was contorted. The wearer of the mask stood on the footbridge at the entrance to the pavilion. White shoulders rose above a white gown enclosed in colours that might have been flame-and-blue drained to grey by the moon.
“I am a fool, am I? I am a liar, am I?” Then the shoulders were contorted. Eyelids winked inside the mask, and tears shone against it. “But, O God, I am so grateful you are cornel”
And thus he found Peg.
Jeffrey ran out across the footbridge. He saw her arms open. From the direction of the rotunda, much closer now, the orchestra had soared into a dreaming melody of horns and strings. That was when the pistol-shot exploded ten yards behind his back.
Something like a fist whacked the rustic support just above their heads. Peg, crying out, was borne backwards into shadow and to the floor. Jeffrey scarcely heard the crash as Mrs. Pilbeam dropped tray and plates and glass. His sword-scabbard rattled against the floor; so did the pistol he was trying to disentangle from inside his coat. He rolled over and scrambled to his knees.
Then silence, except for Peg’s breathing. Nothing moved outside. Nobody spoke.
The moon was almost overhead; it threw dense shadow inside. The breeze blew through a pavilion entirely open, under the supports to its Chinese roof, except for a zigzag of oak panel enclosing it from the floor to a little below waist-height. Jeffrey stood up straight, looking round and round across silvery water on every side.
Still the quiet held. Mrs. Pilbeam had fled away up the path to her cottage. There was no more clamour, even, from birds disturbed in trees. The next conversation, in whispers, he would remember for all time.
“Jeffrey—”
“Don’t try to get up!”
Life, still the buffoon at moments of the sincerest emotion, had left Peg on the floor in a position half sitting, half reclining with her back against a chair. Her legs were sprawled out under a disarranged hoop. Tears of sheer indignity shone through the eyes of the mask. When she would have scrambled up, his left hand clamped round her shoulder.
“Stay where you are. The oak should be proof against a pistol-bullet at this distance. Did you see who fired at us?”
“No, no, no! I—I saw a flash beside a tree in the poplar-walk. Who could have done that? Who would have done it?”
“I believe it was a certain Major Skelly, Hamnet Tawnish’s friend—and Madam Cresswell’s.”
“Well, why does he wait? Why can’t he show himself or call out?”
“The good major thinks to terrify or goad us. Let him wonder, Peg; let him be the first to act.”
“Can’t we run from here?”
“Only across the footbridge or wading deep in water as targets. He has had time to reload the pistol.”
“But you yourself have a—”
This time the hand clamped round her mouth.
“May I remind you, madam, that sound travels across water?” Then again he gripped the bare shoulder. “And stay where you are, I say!”
“I’ll not stay where I am. My gown is filthy! This floor is filthy! There are tea-stains, and wine-stains, and blotches of cake too.”
“Most distressing, no doubt. Still, better a grubby backside than a bullet through the head.”
“Oh, dear God—” whisperingly Peg appealed to the roof—“but how loving-sweet this man is! I had as lief be enamoured of a bargee on the Thames.”
“No gestures; draw your arm down! It is like—like Venus’s in the painting; it may be seen. And remove that mask; the rhinestones catch any light. Have you your cloak here?”
“It is on the table here beside me.”
“Pull it across you. The most part of your gown is white.”
Peg touched neither mask nor cloak. But her voice began to tremble as she watched him look round, his right hand with the pistol going behind his back.
“Jeffrey! What would you do?”
“I can’t meet him with the sword. But he may not know I am otherwise armed. If I could draw his fire, so that he missed a second time …”
“Foh! You’d not shoot him dead from cover?”
“Most willingly, if I could. But we can’t hit anything in such a light and at this range. He could not. It must be done at close quarters.”
“Come back from that doorway! N
ot on the bridge; not in the moonlight. O God, these fools who have no caution …”
Jeffrey recoiled. The fury of whispers, striking at his back when he had expected a shot from behind a tree, brought the sweat out on his body. But the trees remained quiet; the music sang from the rotunda; the gondola swayed at its mooring. He slipped back into shadow, a stifled volcano of curses.
“Not that I care, Mr. Jeffrey Wynne. And don’t pretend it’s for me. When was I ever helped when I had need of it?”
“Now, damn your eyes, which are the loveliest I ever saw—!”
Peg, snatching off the mask, looked up at him. With eyes grown accustomed to the dark, he had never been so conscious of her face and body. “You had better hear this now, my vessel of stupidity. The trouble is that I have loved you far too much, and still do.”
“Could you not say so?”
“I do say so. Hold your tongue and listen. Last night I was resolved to rob and to do murder if need be, save that you intervened at the old woman’s rooms. This morning I did rob, or thought I did, so that I might have you in the role of wife that will so ill become you.”
“You robbed? Who?”
“I said I thought I did, until I examined the carved chest with the parchments in it. And whom should I rob but a dead woman, Grace Delight?”
Now, never ceasing to peer round and round, never ceasing to watch the banks of the canal, he flung the whispered words above her head.
“You did not see the painting that showed her in youth, with a great web of diamonds round the throat. You did not know her husband had been a cabinet-maker. You could not have guessed how truly and completely she had been a miser all the days of her life, though you sensed it.
“Other matters I told you or demonstrated before you. My grandfather spent all our fortune on her, and decked her with half the jewels of Golconda. If a treasure of jewels had been concealed anywhere in those rooms, I thought, it must be in a false compartment in the bottom of the chest beneath those parchments.”
“Jeffrey, what have I done? Please, please, what have I done?”
“Hold your tongue, will you?”
“But …”
“Someone, as we saw, could easily have climbed up to the Thames-side window from the footway on London Bridge to murder and rob Grace Delight. And, shortly before you and I entered together, this is what the murderer did. Having killed her—”
The Demoniacs Page 16
