Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  Pyke took a step towards him but Dalling retreated slightly, holding his hands up in the air. ‘Hold on there, sir.’ He seemed jumpy and again looked up at the window of the counting house.

  The sudden powder flash lit up the immediate area and the simultaneous blast shattered the tranquillity. The shot had come from the same window Dalling had been looking at and it tore a hole in his chest and sent him reeling backwards into a nearby bush. Following Dalling’s gaze, Pyke had seen the barrel of a pistol poking out of another window and had luckily managed to throw himself to the ground just as a second blast ripped through the air, a ball-shot fizzing just above his head. He heard voices in the counting house: Pemberton, saying, ‘Did you get him?’ and a voice he didn’t recognise replying, ‘I reckon so. Or I saw ’im go down.’ Not daring to move, Pyke waited until he heard Pemberton and the other one stumbling down the steps from the counting house, then jumped up and ran in the direction of the forest. Dalling lay unmoving in one of the flower beds. Pyke didn’t need to be told he was dead.

  Without the moonlight to guide him, it was almost too dark for Pyke to see, and he had to move carefully through the trees, his hands stretched out in front of him. Certainly running was out of the question at first, but after a while the shapes of the forest began to slip into focus and he could move more quickly. Behind him, he could hear voices, and in the distance he could already see the flame of torches; his pursuers wouldn’t have the same difficulties negotiating their path through the darkness.

  Pyke didn’t know where he was heading and hadn’t yet formulated a plan, apart from putting as much distance between himself and the men who’d tried to murder him as possible. Nor did he have to worry about making too much noise; they hadn’t followed him immediately, choosing instead to round up help and come after him with torches and in greater numbers. Already the word would be spreading through the great house and the servants’ quarters: Dalling had been shot and killed, and the man who’d done it - Montgomery Squires - was now on the run. The fact that Pyke had indeed been planning to murder Dalling was beside the point. Squires would be blamed and Pemberton would have solved two problems at once: the man who was possibly sleeping with his wife was dead and the man who wanted to buy Ginger Hill was on the run, suspected of Dalling’s murder. Perhaps it was better that they’d missed him. If he had been found shot dead, too, it might have looked too suspicious. Now, in the eyes of the law, running would merely confirm Pyke’s guilt.

  To his right, the ground fell away sharply, and Pyke decided to follow it downhill as far as it took him; at one point the slope dipped so sharply he had to descend on his hands and backside, like a crab. After about two hundred yards the ground levelled out and he stood still for a moment and listened. The river was close by - he could hear it above the sound of the leaves rustling in the breeze - and so he set off towards it, scrambling down another rocky escarpment and only just stopping himself from tumbling into the water at the bottom of the slope.

  Next to the river, the canopy of trees wasn’t so thick and soft beams of moonlight easily penetrated the foliage, shimmering gently on the surface of the water. But the current was strong and the water deeper than Pyke had expected. When he stepped off the bank, it rose first to his waist and then up his chest, and then he lost his footing in the shale and mud so that, for a short while, the current carried him downriver until he realised it was taking him back in the direction of the house. Pyke tried to swim against the current, swallowing whole mouthfuls as he did so, and a few strokes later he could touch the bottom on the other side, then he hauled himself up on to the bank and lay there panting. Above him, birds stirred in the branches of the mango and guano trees. He took a moment to empty water from his shoes, wring his socks and wrap the arms of his coat around his waist.

  On the move again, he scrambled up the side of the bank, crossed the same flint track he’d ridden along the previous day and followed the line of the trees as far as the edge of the first cane field; here, he could cover more ground because the moonlight was sufficient to guide him. He ran at a pace he could maintain and every now and again he would pause, his heart thumping against his ribcage while he listened for any sign of his pursuers.

  Taking care to follow the narrow, uneven paths that had been cut along the side of the cane fields, he must have covered two or three miles before he stopped for a break. Allowing himself five minutes, Pyke used the time to tend to his feet, bursting a blood blister on the sole of his left foot with the tip of his knife and wringing the sweat from his socks. Then he set off again, this time taking a path that cut between two cane fields, heading towards the mountains and, he guessed, away from the coast. In the distance the same ragged, conical hills he’d seen from his bedroom window rose up from the earth, silhouetted against the inky blue of the night sky and the vast panoply of stars. He kept moving towards the hills but even an hour later, running at a steady pace, they didn’t seem any closer. Pausing again, he thought for the first time about the wisdom of his actions and whether his decision to put as much distance as possible between himself and the great house had been a wise one. Around him, the air was balmy. In a few hours, the sun would rise and then he would be more visible; also by then word of the murder would have spread far and wide, so Pyke would have to stay hidden until the following night or until he could find a way of contacting Harper.

  Moving northwards through what seemed to be endless fields of cane, Pyke slowed to a walk; his feet hurt too much to continue running and his whole body was exhausted. He could see a giant cotton tree somewhere in the distance and told himself he would keep walking until he reached it, but after what seemed like an hour, it didn’t appear to be any closer. He was trudging now, rather than walking, and when he reached the edge of one cane field he found a small grassy verge. He sat down, took off his shoes and lay down in the tall grass. Pyke was asleep almost before his head touched the ground.

  The sun seemed to grow in the clear, cloudless sky and by mid-morning there wasn’t a drop of moisture in Pyke’s mouth. Indeed, those parts of his body unprotected by his clothes - his face, neck and hands - were sunburnt and blistered. He had covered more ground than he realized, and it took him only another hour or so to cross the final part of the mountain plain. Then he was back into dense jungle vegetation and climbing again. He found a stream and fell to his knees, lapping up the pure, mountain water until he thought his stomach might burst. Following the stream uphill for about half a mile, Pyke came across a pool in the shade of a giant logwood tree. There, he removed his clothes and jumped into the clear water, luxuriating in the sensation of suddenly being cool, and for a while he lay on his back in the water, staring up at the vine-covered branches above him. For that moment at least, Pyke wasn’t thinking about his own predicament. Rather his thoughts had turned to the letter he’d found in Charles Malvern’s bedroom.

  Lord William Bedford was Charles Malvern’s godfather. More than that: Bedford had, at Charles Malvern’s behest, taken Mary Edgar into his home, so she would’ve been the mistress that Morel-Roux had referred to. Now, though, Bedford and Mary Edgar were both dead, and Morel-Roux was facing trial and likely imprisonment - or even death - for the aristocrat’s murder. This was what Pyke knew. It also made him realise that the valet had probably been telling the truth, and that Mary Edgar and Lord Bedford had, very possibly, been killed by the same person or people; their bodies left in different parts of the city to conceal the connection. For what reason could someone like Morel-Roux have had for wanting both Lord Bedford and Mary Edgar dead?

  Momentarily Pyke thought about Morel-Roux rotting away in his prison cell, but then he heard a noise, the snap of a twig, and his mind was wrenched back to his present circumstances. He looked up and there was a tall, lanky, black boy staring down at him, grinning.

  ‘I’ll pay one of you a silver dollar if you’ll take a message to a man called John Harper at the Falmouth Post newspaper.’

  ‘What message?’ A skinny man wi
th two front teeth missing looked at the other seven or eight figures gathered around Pyke, their expressions curious rather than hostile.

  The village itself was a revelation: neat, single-storey houses made of brick and timber, with garden plots at the front and rear, had been constructed along two well-maintained tracks, and at the crossroads a church was being built. The men wore trousers and shirts, not rags, and the women dresses made of linen and muslin.

  ‘That I’m here; that I want to speak to him in person; that I want him to come to your village.’

  ‘Take half a day for a man to walk to Falmouth and another half a day for him to walk back,’ another man said.

  ‘Two silver dollars.’ Pyke held open his palm and allowed them all to see the coins.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ the boy who’d first seen him in the bathing pool said.

  ‘You’ll do it, boy, but the dollars go towards the building of our church,’ another man said, pointing at the timber skeleton of the new edifice.

  A couple of the men argued for a while in a dialect Pyke couldn’t understand but finally one of them turned to him and said, ‘Dis is a free village, and we all the Lord’s chirren now, so we don’t want no trouble here.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  The man stared at Pyke for a few moments, his eyes narrowing. ‘Man told me dis mornin a white man been killed up at the big house. You know ’bout that?’

  Ignoring him, Pyke produced another coin from his pocket. ‘I’ll pay a dollar to anyone who will take me into their home, let me rest there and cook me a meal.’

  The same man who’d scolded him shook his head, as though disappointed. ‘Did the Good Samaritan ask for money to help the man beaten by robbers?’

  After a meal of boiled yams and sweet potato, which he ate on his own inside the stone and timber house, Pyke tended to his blistered feet, rubbing soothing aloe which he’d been given by his host into the cuts and blisters. Afterwards, he lay on a straw mat and stared up at the thatched roof, thinking about what had happened, how Dalling seemed to have known what was going to happen. In the end, Pyke could come up with only one explanation. Dalling had gone to Pemberton and told him what he knew or suspected: that Pyke wasn’t who he claimed to be. Pemberton had then made the necessary arrangements. He had probably told Dalling that Pyke would be killed, hence the bookkeeper’s nervous glances towards the counting-house window. Doubtless Pemberton had failed to inform the bookkeeper of his own imminent death. That way, Pyke could be blamed for his murder and be killed in the process. Later, they could tell the magistrate that Pyke had been shot while trying to escape from the scene of the crime. If the magistrate wanted to know why Pyke had killed Dalling, Pemberton could say that Pyke was, in fact, an impostor and had killed the bookkeeper to protect his cover. Pyke didn’t know whether Dalling had been sleeping with Pemberton’s wife and, if so, whether Pemberton had found out about the affair, but assuming both things were true, it gave Pemberton a good reason for wanting to assassinate Dalling as well.

  Pemberton clearly had his eyes set on keeping the estate. It didn’t matter that Pyke actually wasn’t Squires. Indeed, if Squires ever made it to the island, and heard about how his good name had been besmirched, he would put himself on the first ship back to Antigua.

  ‘You go to England to be with your fiancée,’ Pemberton would say to Malvern, ‘and I’ll stay here and manage the estate.’

  That would give him everything he wanted.

  Pyke guessed that Pemberton had been trying to run the estate into the ground to deter potential buyers. And when they weren’t deterred, as in this particular instance, he had taken a more direct approach.

  With his belly full and his feet rested, Pyke drifted off to sleep, and when he woke next, it was dark outside and he was still alone in the house. Standing up, he put on his shirt and went outside. He could hear noises, talking and laughing in a nearby house, but otherwise the village seemed deserted. This would have been the kind of place Mary Edgar had grown up in and it would have felt like home to her, yet she’d died on the other side of a vast ocean, alone and friendless in the very best and worst city in the world.

  What had she been thinking, Pyke wondered, as someone, a man, had put their hands around her throat and squeezed? Had she thought about her home, this place, an island that seemed as alien and unknowable to him as London had doubtless seemed to her?

  Pyke felt a mosquito land on his neck and went to swat it. Back inside the house, he sat down on the straw mat and thought about Felix, trying to quell a rising swell of homesickness. There was nothing to do apart from wait.

  At dawn, he was woken by a rooster that insisted on crowing directly outside the house. Hot, sweaty and alone, he dressed and wandered down to the bathing pool. The cold mountain water felt glorious against his naked skin and the early morning light was soothing on his eyes. Up above, the sky was overcast and the air felt cooler, as though a change in the weather was on its way. He heard the clopping of horses’ hoofs coming up the track, so climbed out of the pool and dressed quickly.

  John Harper had ridden from Falmouth with a companion and was berating one of the villagers when he looked up and saw Pyke walking towards him. ‘Thank the Lord, you’re still here,’ he said, bounding to greet Pyke, his giant legs covering the ground in just a few strides.

  He embraced Pyke with a hug, as though they were old friends, and then waited for his companion to join them. ‘Allow me to introduce Isaac Webb. I think you might already have met, under less pleasant circumstances.’

  As they shook hands, Webb smiled and said, ‘T’anks for the rum, by the way.’ He was a good-looking man with smooth walnut-coloured skin, lithe, with the kind of eyelashes, cheekbones and lips a lot of women would have coveted.

  ‘I came as soon as I got your message,’ Harper said, slapping Pyke firmly on the back. ‘I brought Isaac with me because no one understands Ginger Hill better than him.’

  The villagers seemed to know Webb better than Harper but their welcome to both men had been muted. They brought their new arrivals fresh coffee and rum, served in pots carved from wood, but treated them warily, so when they finally left them alone, Harper tried to explain their reaction. This, he said, was a free village built on land acquired by William Knibb and the Baptist church; in return for a plot of land and the loan of sufficient money to build a house, the villagers were expected to renounce their heathen ways and embrace a new life of hard work and sobriety. When Pyke pointed out that it didn’t sound as if Harper approved, the big man snorted and shook his head. ‘White Baptists like Knibb might pretend to be our friends but what they’re offering is just another form of slavery; be good Christian men, just like them, or clear off farther into the mountains. Knibb’s a good person, in his own way, but he’s never stopped to ask what we want.’

  After they’d drunk their coffee, Harper and Webb listened, without interruption, while Pyke explained what had happened to him. When he’d finished, he looked at Harper and said, ‘But, of course, you knew something like this was going to happen. Or you hoped it would. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Harper took a swig of the rum and handed Webb the bottle. ‘Even if that were the case, and I’m not saying it was, your injuries don’t look too bad.’

  ‘I still can’t work out what was in it for you. You knew for a fact that Pemberton would try to make my life difficult, because he’d done the same thing to all of Malvern’s prospective buyers. So let me guess: you were hoping I’d retaliate and do your dirty work for you in the process.’

  Harper glanced over at Webb. ‘Pemberton and the Custos whipped my friend here to within an inch of his life, and it wasn’t the first time he’d done it, either. You blame me for trying to seize an opportunity to get back at him?’

  ‘Using me to do it?’

  The big man shrugged. ‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’

  ‘But even as we speak, I’m quite sure half the island is looking for me: the white half anyway. Troops, police, any
one they can round up.’

  Webb handed Pyke the bottle. ‘Billy Dalling’s dead and a white man killed him. Dat’s what the Custos think. Point is, us black folk can’t be held responsible.’

  Pyke took a swig of rum and contemplated what he’d just been told. He was starting to see it. ‘So when Pemberton and maybe a few others turn up dead, this same white man can be blamed for those murders, too.’

  Harper turned to Webb and grinned. ‘I told you he was a sharp one, didn’t I? Sharp as a nail.’

  ‘Meanwhile a Mr Pyke from London - nothing to do with the trouble at Ginger Hill - will already be at sea and headin’ for home.’ Webb returned Harper’s grin then looked at Pyke. ‘We get you as far as Kingston; you make the arrangements from dere.’

  ‘And when the real Montgomery Squires turns up?’

  The big man just shrugged. ‘It’ll just add to the mystery. But they’ll still be looking for a white man.’

  ‘I’m glad I could play my part.’

  ‘You went to Ginger Hill for your own reasons; no one forced you to go,’ Harper said.

  ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that you used me.’