“So,” Joe said during a break between gusts, “we have reached the ends of the Earth, and tomorrow I rid myself of you at last. This is our final night together, and we should celebrate.” He took a sip from his flask. “I guess being huddled miserably in each other’s laps while the rain pisses down outside is as appropriate a way as any. Cheers!”
Albert was pulling the covers higher over Ettie. “It’s not really the ends of the Earth,” he said. “There’s a community close by that—”
“—will shelter you, no matter how unusual your talents,” the old man said. “Yes, maybe. I know all about you, Albert, and your hopes for these ‘Free Isles’ of yours.”
There was silence in the tent. Outside, the wind frenzied. Scarlett, who was squeezed tight between the little girl and the awning, adjusted herself to face Joe. “You’ve overheard us talking, then, during the trip?”
He regarded her darkly. “It’s a small raft. I’ve heard more than conversations.”
Scarlett cleared her throat. “Be that as it may…does that mean you know about Albert’s abilities? And it hasn’t bothered you?”
“Why should it? I’m not some fat and pious shopkeeper cowering behind the walls of a Surviving Town. Albert carries out no eerie acts on board that I’m aware of. If I am prepared to sail with a swaggering bloodstained outlaw such as yourself, girl, why not travel with a quiet, considerate boy?”
Scarlett made no reply. Albert was somewhat taken aback himself. “Thank you, Joe,” he said finally. “That is nice to hear. And be assured you will be well rewarded for your kindness. Tomorrow you will be a rich man!”
“Yes, I suppose I will have your money….” The old man turned the flask slowly in his hands. “Albert, why do you think I want the proceeds of your crimes?”
“I assumed you were obsessed with banknotes like everybody else.”
Joe sighed; with a bony finger, he pointed at Ettie’s tufted head poking out beneath the eiderdown. “Look at my granddaughter there. What do you see?”
“A dear sweet girl, full of chubby innocence, who brings delight to all around her.”
“Yes, that’s because you are an idiot. In fact, she is a capricious minx, guileful and bloody-minded, though I love her dearly nonetheless. She is also a dead child walking.”
Albert’s eyes were round. “ ‘Dead’? Ettie? What a terrible thing to say!”
“And no more than the truth, if the Surviving Towns get hold of her. Has it not struck you that she is mute? She cannot speak! For the moment, this is irrelevant—she is three years old and in my care. No one gives her a second glance when we moor up at the quays. But when she is seven, or seventeen, and still not talking—ah, then they will whip her into the wilderness for being defective—and that’s if she is lucky. And I will not be there to guard her….” The old man’s eyes grew filmy; with an angry motion, he drank again from his flask. “If I have money, I shall find somewhere safe for her to live…. I have heard that the people of Wales and Cornwall are less harsh to their children. Perhaps I will travel there.”
“There are always the Free Isles, close at hand,” Albert ventured.
“I forget you have not seen the Free Isles yet. Well, one way or another, I will protect Ettie while there is life in my body. That’s all there is to say.”
Albert smiled; his heart was full. “When we first saw you, Joe, we assumed you to be feebleminded and decrepit, teetering on the brink of the waiting grave, yet it is evident you possess the coarse vitality of many a younger man. Ettie is in safe hands!”
Joe drank from his flask. “How kind. Well, tomorrow is momentous indeed. You, Albert, will achieve your heart’s desire. Admittedly, this will probably involve starving to death on a desolate rock and being eaten by seagulls, but it is your dream, and you will embrace it nobly. Ettie and I will have our raft back again, room to stretch out of an evening, and funds to change our destiny.” He turned his rangy neck. “And, Scarlett…what of you? I notice you’re not saying anything. How will you mark this special day?”
It was true that Scarlett had been unusually quiet for most of the journey across the lagoon. In his excitement, Albert had been distracted; he reproved himself for not taking more notice of her. She was leaning against one of the four supports of the tent, head tilted to the canvas, her red hair running down it like rain.
“I will be happy for Albert if he finds sanctuary,” she said. “Happy for you and Ettie. Me? I’ll take an old road north, hitch a lift on one of the convoys. Head for Northumbria, maybe. I hear they have banks up there.”
It gave Albert a pang to hear her talk like that, to know he would not be with her. They were so closely crammed in the tent, he could not easily view her thoughts. But he sensed her remoteness; in her mind, she was already on her way. He remembered her as he’d first seen her on the bus—she’d been remote then also, eager to be gone. Yet, in between…
But everything had a beginning and an end.
“You’re going to spread some carnage up north, are you?” Joe said. “Yeah, that figures. Tell me something, girl. I’ve met outlaws before, seen them hanging in the gibbets at Windsor docks. Most of them, they’re outcasts for a reason: birthmarks, missing limbs, deformities of one sort or another. That’s why the towns rejected them in the first place. But you—you hate them more than any, and I don’t see any deviation in you.”
“Oh, I got a deviation,” Scarlett said. She tapped her chest; the sound was hollow beneath the howling of the storm. “It’s in here. And it’s reason enough for me to live the life I do. All the militiamen and Faith House operatives ever born won’t make me throw my guns aside and go back to live in a town.”
Joe waited, but she said nothing more. He shrugged. “I understand. Well, good luck to you. A life of solitude and violence isn’t for everyone, nor is dying in a hail of bullets, but I can see you know what you’re doing. Do you want some more whisky?”
“No. I’m going to turn in. We’ve got a whole heap of excitements tomorrow.”
With much soft grumbling and cursing, Scarlett shuffled into a prone position. One after the other, the old man and Albert lay back too. Albert looked up at the lantern swinging from the tent frame, felt the pull and strain on the raft timbers under him.
“Scarlett,” he said.
“What?”
“Thank you for getting me here.”
“Sure. Course, you’re not here yet, strictly speaking, and tonight we’ll probably get swallowed by a fish.”
“I expect so.”
“That would be just like our luck.”
“Yes, wouldn’t it?…Scarlett?”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Should we turn the lantern out?”
There was a yawn beneath the blanket. “We’re miles out. Who’s to see?”
* * *
—
Time passed. The rain drove down on all four sides of the awning. They were in a black box with walls of wind and water. Wedged close as they were, Albert did not find it easy to go to sleep. The old man snored, the little girl wriggled. Next to him, by contrast, Scarlett lay still: almost too still—she might have been dead or made out of stone. As always, she slept in her boots and with her gun belt on. Albert had to admit he found her proximity disconcerting. Maybe that was why he couldn’t drift off. But no: his head felt funny—not quite right, whether because of Joe’s whisky or the storm or some other reason he couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was because of what was going to happen tomorrow. His parting from Scarlett. As their conversation had ebbed, it had left anxieties strewn behind it, scattered like pebbles in his mind.
But it was all right. He would not need her in the Free Isles. Things would be different there: welcoming, secure.
The downpour eased; the water walls receded, and they were connected with the night again. Albert’s ears rang with echoes
of the barrage. The air was cold, and it was still raining, but he suddenly felt he must get up. His head hurt and he didn’t know why. He rose, trying not to disturb Joe or Scarlett, shuffled his bottom forward, ducked under the tarpaulin and out into the rain. He was soaked through in moments, but it didn’t concern him. Taking care not to slip on the wet boards, he moved toward the edge of the platform, past crates and deck chairs, and looked out into the dark.
The lagoon was very black. The raft hung in a void. He looked where he guessed the Great Ruins were—and, far off, through the rain, saw a grouping of yellow lights low down, clustered like a pile of fallen stars.
Despite the cold and the wet and his pulsing head, Albert Browne smiled to himself.
The Free Isles! He was almost there.
Soft boots pattered on deck boards. Patches of darkness flowed forward, drew near the lantern light, morphed into rushing forms. Albert’s smile faded; he began to turn. Arms seized him, lifted him off his feet. There was a blow to the stomach, a ferocious compression to his chest, another around his neck. He heard a crackling of leather, felt bristles of beard hair harsh against his neck. A familiar odor doused him—the sweat of frightened men. It was the first time he’d smelled it since the bus.
He twisted his head violently side to side; he knew what they were about to try, that they were going to do it quick, before his power broke free inside him.
He had barely seconds.
The first go, the metal loop missed the crown of his head, and the side barbs dug along his scalp, making him cry out. Good. The pain helped. The Fear erupted in his mind. He heard a man beside him shriek, heard the crack of breaking bones—
Then the band passed over his head.
No mistake the second time. They’d got him.
And now Albert himself screamed—and kept screaming. The pressure was still building uncontrollably, so it felt his skull must burst. But the band was on, the force was bottled up, and there was nowhere for it to go.
The growl of wolves, the snap of twigs, the soft click of a gun being cocked: in the course of her career, Scarlett had developed the habit of waking instantly whenever she heard certain noises in her vicinity. Unearthly screams were on the list too. So it was that she went from horizontal sleep to upright action in a heartbeat, and only the fact that she collided with the awning and got her revolver caught in a guy rope prevented it from being the perfect response to sudden danger. But she was still fast enough to dodge the man in the black coat, who lunged at her outside the tent. She ducked low beneath his swinging arm, twisted, struck upward with her gun butt to crack it hard against his jaw. As he staggered sideways, she turned from him, kicked backward with the heel of her boot, extending her leg so the full force of it struck him in the chest. He toppled away over the edge of the raft, out of the sphere of light, and with a splash was gone. Scarlett turned her head—
—and found herself looking into the muzzle of a gun.
“Hey, sweetie,” a voice said. “How’s your hand?”
She straightened carefully, a strand of hair plastered to her lips. The lantern light made a hole in the darkness; rain slanted across it, striking the side of her face. A young bearded man stood beside her, holding the handgun. Bright teeth, red trousers, long checked jacket; his green bowler was parked at an angle above one eye. Leaving aside the effects of the rain, he looked much the same as he had on the cliff top ten days earlier, when he’d put a knife through her palm.
She grinned at him. “My hand’s getting stronger all the time. Put the gun down and I’ll show you.”
“Sorry.” He gestured; Scarlett dropped her revolver to the deck. The young man kicked it over the edge, then stepped backward along the side of the awning, motioning for her to follow. As she did so, there was a commotion inside the tent. She heard Ettie squeal and old Joe give a cry of pain. Scarlett flinched, but she kept her expression blank. This was not the time to give anything away.
When she came out on the open deck, she saw another man bending at the starboard side. He had ropes in his hand that led out into the darkness and was tying them to the gunnels. Scarlett was close to the lantern and could not see out onto the lagoon, but she knew they must have several boats there, must have rowed up silently through the rain.
He was not the only person on the deck. A dead man lay on the spot where she often placed the prayer mat. His limbs jutted at strange angles; one eye glinted blackly like a piece of broken glass. Not far away two other bowler-hatted men were standing. They were rigid with terror and very much alive.
In front of them was a thin, still form.
“Albert?” Scarlett said.
She saw at once what they’d done to him. He had a metal circlet around his head, a heavy band jammed down just above the eyes. It was similar to the restraint she had in her rucksack, but thicker, and there were shark-tooth barbs along its edges, which projected inward so they dug into Albert’s skin—and would dig deeper still if he sought to remove it. Blood was already trickling down in several places at his temples. The band was fixed in place by a vertical metal rod that hung down the back of his neck and continued along his spine; his wrists, pulled behind him, had been clipped to this with two separate lengths of chain. Albert stood artificially upright, his head and body and hands bound together in this way, and with the rain and blood running down the sides of his face. His eyes were wide open, staring past her into the dark. He didn’t acknowledge her or seem fully aware of anything about him. His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear the words. What with the drumming of the rain, it was impossible to know if he made any sound at all.
“Albert?” she said again. He gave no answer.
“He’s gone.” A soft voice spoke behind her. “It’s OK, everyone. Relax. We’ve got him safe now.”
At some level, she had known the business in Lechlade to be unfinished, that there would be a final resolution with Mr. Shilling. Nor did it surprise her that he was just as trim and fastidiously attired as ever. She could see a glimpse of bandages beneath the lapels of his coat, marking where one of her bullets had struck. But there was no sign of damage from the explosion at the wharf. No burns, no bruises. He’d chased them the length of the Thames without creasing his trousers or needing to adjust his cuffs. His neat round glasses hid his eyes. He had the same mild countenance as when talking with the Brothers, Pope and Lee; the same as when shooting them both dead. Right now he carried an open umbrella, antique, ivory-handled, black as ravens’ wings, and there wasn’t a spot of rain on his hat or coat.
With the gun in his other hand, he nudged Joe and Ettie forward. Joe limped on stockinged feet; he seemed dazed, clasping his head. Ettie was sluggish too, still half asleep. The little girl disliked the chill of the night air. She turned, tried to scurry back to the safety of the tent. At once, Shilling raised a boot and kicked her tumbling to the deck.
Joe gave a cry. Scarlett’s jaw clenched; with an effort, she controlled herself and didn’t move. On the far side of the deck, Albert jerked forward, straining at his bonds. The men beside him, bulky, bearded, each more than twice his weight, gave little jumps of agitation. Sweat glistened on their faces; their teeth glinted, the whites of their eyes shone wide.
“It’s all right, boys,” Shilling said. “He can’t do anything. You did fine.”
Joe was bending to his granddaughter, helping her upright, holding her by the hand. His gaze met Scarlett’s. Her face remained emotionless, but she tried to convey a message in her stare. Wait.
“Got to say, girl, it’s been quite a journey.” Shilling passed Scarlett with brisk steps. “Really didn’t think we’d meet again. But I’m awful glad we did.” He nodded at the man who had just finished mooring up the boats—a small-boned, white-skinned person with a big bowler and nervous, darting eyes. “Guard these two, Paul. Keep the brat quiet. And, George”—this to Scarlett’s bearded captor—“I don’t need to tell
you to keep a mighty close watch on her.”
So saying, Shilling returned his gun to his belt, took out a snub-nosed tube. Moving his umbrella aside, he held the tube aloft. There was a dull thump, a burst of smoke; something rocketed into the sky and exploded soundlessly into stretching fingers of crimson flame. The raft and its occupants and the sea around were brightly illuminated, stained as if with blood.
“And now that’s done,” Shilling said. “She’s coming.” He tossed the flare gun away. Stepping over the corpse, he walked to where Albert stood in the middle of the deck. Shilling brought his face close, contemplated him a moment. Then he reached up and patted his cheek twice. “You just sit tight in there, chum,” he said. “There’s a lady wants to see you.”
Albert’s eyes rolled in his head. His lips were moving. His body gave little jerks and twitches. Blood ran down the side of his cheek. His legs buckled; he almost fell.
Shilling turned away. “What a vile specimen. It’s disgusting to see.” He spun the stem of his umbrella between his fingers, and a carousel of raindrops flew out across the deck. “It’s a crime he should ever have been able to set foot near honest folk. He’s a beast worse than any wolf, a monster in a floppy jumper and big shoes.” He came to a halt by Scarlett. “But he doesn’t know any different. He’s just made wrong. You, far as I can tell, don’t have that excuse. Yet you and these two beauties have been abetting him all this way.”
“Not them,” Scarlett said. She cast what she hoped was a contemptuous look over at the old man and the shivering child. “We hijacked this boat, forced them to carry us. Look at them. They’re pathetic. They’re nothing to Albert, nothing to me.”
“That why you were all cozying up in the tent together?” Shilling shook his head. “No. You’ve paid them. River rats like this will do almost anything for cash. Which reminds me.” He signaled to one of the men beside Albert. “Matthew, be so good as to search around. Any bags or packs you find, put them in my boat. We don’t want to leave anything of value, not where this raft’s going.”
The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne Page 24
