Charles Palliser (114 page)

We drove for some distance though I had no idea of how long we had been in movement before the cart drew up. I heard the clatter of tools against the lid, and then, to my inexpressible relief it was raised and I took draughts of fresh cold air through the cotton. A hand helped me to sit up and drew the ghastly covering from my head and face.

As my face came free of the cloth my eyes, accustomed to the darkness, were dazzled by a bright light very near. After a moment I realized that it came from a lanthorn which was being held aloft by someone on the seat of the cart, and that its glare was preventing me from seeing the figure of the person who had helped me to get free of the shroud.

“Shut that down, Joey, and watch out for Yallop,” came the stranger’s voice.

As the shutter of the lanthorn was lowered I found myself staring straight into the most horribly disfigured face I had ever seen. The skin was everywhere pitted and deeply scarred, the features had been brutally squashed leaving the nose a swollen lump and the lips twisted so that the few teeth that remained were exposed, and, worst of all, one eye was no more than a leering, red socket. I saw, too, that this terrible figure had only one hand: the other was an ugly hook that protruded from the sleeve of his coat. I flinched, wondering what I had delivered myself up to. It came to me that I had indeed died and that this was what lay beyond death.

My horror must have been only too obvious for the man said, in a strangely gentle tone: “Don’t be alarmed, young master. Though I know I ain’t a picter o’ roses.”

“Are you all right, Master Johnnie?” the boy asked.

I nodded and looked round, putting one hand over my forehead to try to shield my eyes from the light of the lanthorn which was still making it impossible to see him.

“Shut it right down,” my rescuer said. “We don’t want the watch to see us. I have a notion what game they’d suspect was afoot if they was to see us now, eh, Joey?

Especially with this cart and hoss.”

The light was suddenly reduced to a narrow beam as a plate was slid across the eye-hole. Now I saw that the boy holding it was indeed the youth who had come to me outside my grandfather’s house.

“Joey Digweed!” I exclaimed.

He looked at me rather shame-facedly and squirmed into place on the driver’s seat holding the reins.

“That’s right,” said the man. “And I’m his father, George.”

While I was struggling to understand the significance of these revelations, Mr Digweed helped me to clamber out of the coffin and then free myself from the shroud.

Then, to my surprise — but I was beyond being surprised — he 526

THE PALPHRAMONDS

deftly rolled the cloth up, put it back into the box and then lightly nailed the lid down again.

While he was doing this I had leisure to notice my surroundings, and saw-that the horse and cart were drawn in at the side of a wide and deserted road which was unpaved and unlit. The houses around us were in darkness except for the flickering light of an occasional early riser’s candle.

“We’ve only come a few hundred yards,” Mr Digweed explained. “Yallop roused the house by ringing the bell when he thought he knowed what we was doing, so I reckon they’ll be upon us in a minute.”

“Then why are we delaying?” I cried.

Mr Digweed laughed: “They’ll take a fair bit of time to put a hoss to the shafts at this time o’ night. And if they come a-foot, we’ll leave ’em behind soon enough.” He nodded at the coffin which, working skilfully despite his handicap, he had nearly secured by now: “But I ain’t taking this. I never stole nothing in my life and I shan’t start now.”

“Here they come!” Joey cried excitedly.

I looked back the way we had come and saw lights approaching.

Unperturbed, Mr Digweed dismounted from the cart and gently lowered the coffin to the ground.

“Give me that lanthorn,” he said and Joey passed it to me to hand to him. To my surprise he put it on top of the coffin.

“All right, Joey,” he cried and, as he jumped back on board, Joey shook the reins.

“The lanthorn will show ’em where it is,” he explained, “and slow ’em down in the bargain.”

Gunpowder — a horse, as 1 well remembered, with a mind of his own — failed to respond. Joey shook the reins again and shouted at him. I looked behind us and saw that the approaching figures were now only a hundred yards away. I could make out Yallop and two night-shirted figures whom 1 took to be Rookyard and Skilliter.

Mr Digweed clambered past me onto the seat to take the reins from his son, then shook them and clucked with his tongue — but still to no effect. Our pursuers, now only a few yards away, began to bellow in triumph as they saw our plight. At this, however, Gunpowder put his ears back in fright and instantly set off at a fast trot. I sat as close behind the other two as I could and described to them what was happening behind us.

Rookyard and Skilliter continued to chase us, though Yallop, who was more portly, stopped by the coffin. Mercifully, our pursuers fell steadily behind us and after a few hundred yards they gave up.

Mr Digweed turned back and smiled gleefully: “How I’d like to see Yallop’s face now.

It
will
puzzle ’em to find the coffing there.”

For the first time the grave expression on Joey’s face lightened as he looked from his father to me.

“I reckon I know what they think we’ve got on this cart,” Mr Digweed went on. “But if the watch stops us they won’t find what Yallop and the others thinks. It won’t be till later that they figure out what’s happened when they find you’ve gone and … ” Suddenly he broke off and said gravely: “I beg your pardon, young genel’man. I meant no disrespeck.”

I clasped his arm and tried to speak of my gratitude.

My face must have been more eloquent than any words, for my deliverer THE RELEASE

527

shook his head and said: “Whatever we done is all the old lady’s doing, not mine, sir.”

“I don’t know what I can say,” I managed to utter.

“Say nothin’, sir. That’s allus best I find.”

“But why have you … ?”

“I’ll let her explain, sir.”

“Here’s a coat she said I was to give you,” said Joey, picking up and passing to me a man’s great-coat — shabby but serviceable — that lay on the box beside him.

I wrapped it around myself gratefully for the night was exceedingly cold. As I did so I brushed against something hanging over the side of the cart and I recognised it as the piece of tarred sacking which I remembered so well, and which Yallop had pulled aside just now.

“But Mr Digweed,” I said, “please tell me how it is that this cart belongs to a man called Isbister of Parliament-street, Bethnal-green, a man whose trade I know to be … ?”

I broke off.

“Why, you know him, do you?” said Mr Digweed turning to look at me in surprise.

“That’s a strange thing. But the old lady will explain that, too. If I tried I’d on’y get muddled up and you’d be more posed nor ever.”

The little cart rattled at a spanking pace down the dark road. In contrast to the surrounding gloom, faint glimmers of light were beginning to appear ahead of us, for we were heading south towards the metropolis. As the darkness slowly lifted, the sky grudgingly disclosed itself as grey and overcast, but I had never witnessed a more joyous dawn.

I found myself taking pleasure in the most trivial and unremarkable sights.

Increasingly now there were lights visible in the houses that we passed and I wondered about the people in them who were getting up and washing and dressing and preparing breakfast and making ready to go to work or to school or to scavenge for food.

We were at the hour when the market traffic is at its heaviest and the cart was over-hauling one rumbling waggon after another headed for Covent-garden or Spitalfields, each heavily laden with market produce and drawn by a team of great dray-horses with jangling bells and blinkers, recalling to my mind my earlier escape from the Quiggs and the waggon which had aided me. And market women balancing their huge baskets of eggs and fowls and garden-produce on their heads and bound for the same destination were striding along at the edge of the road with the long swinging gait of country-people, which is so different from the quick, nervous walk of the city-dweller.

We passed several droves of cattle on their way to Smithfield and herded by men with dogs and long whips, and once we were held up when some of the beasts spilled across the carriageway in a kind of doomed bovine uprising, and I remembered the clumsy lumbering beasts which had crowded down the farm-lane past our garden-gate when I was a little child.

Once a mail-coach came up behind us, its guard signalling to us to pull out of the way with a long arrogant blast of his horn. And I, on a foolish impulse — intoxicated, perhaps, by exhaustion and excitement — stood up on the swaying floor of the cart, while Mr Digweed and Joey clutched my legs, and halooed and cheered. As the coach swept magnificently past, I saw the tired faces of the outside passengers — some asleep with their heads leaning against each other’s shoulders and others waking up and staring at me with sullen listlessness —

528 THE

PALPHRAMONDS

and I laughed aloud that anyone should look so miserable at the start of a new day.

Everything was a source of interest and delight to me. Why then did I suddenly become aware that I was weeping and have to hide my face in the sleeve of my new coat?

At first I thought my tears were shed in joy at my unforeseen deliverance, but then I realized that I was also sobbing for one whose death I had hardly had time to think of, and sobbing the more because it meant so little to me.

Despite my attempt to conceal my tears, Mr Digweed noticed my grief. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he said in deep embarrassment. Then he struck his forehead: “What am I thinking on!”

He reached into his coat and brought out from a capacious pocket a flask of hot coffee and a packet of sandwiches, both of which he insisted I take. Faced with food and drink, I now found myself to be extremely hungry and consumed far more than my fair share of both.

So I ate and drank as we rolled along, and Mr Digweed turned his head at intervals and smiled and nodded at me to signify that I should eat as much as I wanted, and shook his head to indicate that, no, he did not want any of the food. And as this nourishment took effect, my spirits revived again, and I began to speculate on where we were going and what I should find there. The only blot upon my peace of mind was the solemn face of Joey Digweed who, the few times he looked round to take a sandwich or a pull at the flask, stared at me with an expression that I could not interpret as anything but resentful hostility.

We had been passing down Brick-lane but now turned right into flower-and-Dean-street. A little way along it, Mr Digweed pulled up the cart at a corner where there was the shell of a burned-out house. He dismounted and led the horse down a narrow way into a little back-court of four or five low, mean dwellings like cottages (though of two stories) constructed in the rear-gardens of the big houses in the street.

As we approached, the door of one of them opened and Mrs Digweed came hurrying out smiling broadly.

I got down from the cart.

“How can I thank you?” I said, taking her hand and shaking it vigorously.

She looked at me for a moment and then suddenly moved forward and embraced me, holding me to her for an instant.

“Bless you,” she said, and then stepped back apologising for her familiarity. But immediately she seized me and hugged me all over again. She sniffed several times, then I heard her mutter something I didn’t quite catch about “Your poor blessed mother”

and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. She pulled an enormous red handkerchief from somewhere about her person and held it to her face dabbing at her eyes and rubbing her nose savagely as if it had done her a wrong.

“My mother … ”I began, but she interrupted me gently.

“I know. You don’t have to say nothing.”

Mr Digweed, who had been looking on benignly, now said: “I’ll have to take the hoss and cart back now, old lady. I said I’d return ’em before half arter seven o’clock and it must be past seven by now.”

“Very well, George,” Mrs Digweed answered in a voice that was trembling slightly.

THE RELEASE

529

So while he and Joey turned the cart and went back the way we had come, Mrs Digweed led me inside the house.

It consisted of a single chamber on the ground floor a couple of feet below the level of the yard, and another one above. Once across the threshold, therefore, I found myself immediately in a room which, though small, served as kitchen, living-room and bed-chamber. It was clean and neatly — if sparsely — furnished and altogether very superior to what I had seen of the habitations of the poor. At one side there was a wooden ladder to the room above and at the back a door which led to a tiny wash-house in a small yard.

Mrs Digweed sat me at a small deal table before the hearth and then stepped back to look at me, saying gleefully: “I jist knowed they’d work it.”

“Why have you done this? And how in heaven’s name, Mrs Digweed, did you find me?”

“All that can wait,” she said, smiling as if at a secret source of satisfaction. “It’s a long story and it needs Joey here to say his piece, too. I can see you’re fair done up, so fust things fust.”

She had some broth already prepared for me and now keeping warm over the fire and, despite the sandwiches, I realized that I was still hungry. I consumed it with thick slices of bread, and meanwhile she continued to parry my questions with a laugh and a shake of the head.

As I finished, she busied herself making ready a place for me to sleep on a settle in a corner.

Feeling suddenly tired I laid myself down and Mrs Digweed pulled some blankets over me. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was in Spitalfields — the part of London which seemed to have some mysterious connexion with my mother’s past, though her account had not made it clear. I was quickly asleep and enjoyed a deeper repose than I had experienced since the eve of the occasion, not much more than a week before, when I had been taken before the Court of Chancery.