Riot Most Uncouth (24 page)

“What in bloody hell is that maniac driver doing?” Dingle shouted. He didn't seem to be asking this question of me; he was just the sort of man who made a habit of spontaneously vocalizing his thoughts for no particular reason.

I decided to answer him anyway, since I was a cooperative witness. “You hired him, you fat simpleton,” I said.

Dingle clawed at the iron mesh over the slit of a window near the ceiling of the cab, which allowed passengers to speak to the coachman.

“Slow it down, up there,” he said, pressing his fishy mouth against the grate. “I want to reach London alive.”

The driver responded by collapsing on his seat, so the liquefied contents of his smashed skull poured through the window.

“My God,” Dingle said as he squirmed away from the mess. Outside, there was a dull thump as the corpse slid off the roof of the carriage and landed hard in the dust.

Under other circumstances, I would have come up with something clever to say about the series of events that had just transpired, but the coppery stink of blood and brains was filling my nose and lungs, and the violent motion of the runaway stagecoach was threatening to yank my arms from their shoulder-sockets. The pain was so distracting that I could do little more than state the obvious. “We must get to the driver's seat and rein in the horses.”

“This is a prison vehicle,” Dingle said. “We cannot get out. It unlocks only from the outside.”

I twisted my body on the hard bench and began kicking my legs at the door. “Let us hope its purported security is exaggerated.” My weak leg did little damage to the wood, but I felt the boards creaking and bending beneath my stronger foot's assault.

“That is useless,” Dingle said.

The stagecoach nearly ran off the road, and my persecutor fell forward, into my lap. I considered trying to wrap my manacle chain around his throat, but I knew that doing so would neither resolve my current peril nor help me to prove my innocence later, should I somehow survive the journey to London. “Do you have a better idea?” I asked. I did not expect him to; he was, after all, a bit of a brick.

“We are doomed,” he sobbed. “Doomed!”

If I'd had time to reflect on the situation, I might have been slightly amazed by Mr. Dingle. Every time I found myself believing I might have underestimated the man, he found some way to reinforce my preconceived notions. “Perhaps, then, while you await your demise, you might employ your considerable mass upon the task of helping me smash this door open,” I suggested.

He nodded. His eyes were wide and dumb and full of terror, quite like one might imagine a cow's would look at the moment it realizes it has arrived at the abattoir. He began throwing his shoulder against the wooden door, though, to his credit. In that particular enterprise, his bovinity proved an asset. He had to throw himself against the side of the carriage only four or five times before the nails that held in the hinges ripped loose. Unable to withstand such violence, the vaunted external lock snapped off and the door flew open and broke away, smashing to bits as it hit the ground behind us.

“That was much flimsier than I was led to believe,” Dingle remarked. He seemed quite surprised that he'd been lied to. For a professional criminal investigator, he was an absurdly credulous man.

“I shall remember that the next time I need to escape from prison,” I said. “Now, if you enjoy being alive, kindly unlock my shackles so I can climb up there and rein in the horses.”

“I must not,” he said. “You are a prisoner, and will remain in your bonds until I deliver you to the court. I will take care of this myself.”

Dingle hoisted himself out through the open doorway and perched on the running board along the carriage's lower chassis. Dangling precariously over the road, he reached out for one of the ladder rungs that were bolted to the side of the cab, and he began to grunt as he tried to lift himself up onto the roof. I had about five seconds to admire his bravery before I heard a second shot, and Dingle's head came apart. I saw him hanging, ever so briefly, in midair. The top of his skull and one of his eyes were gone, and part of his nose as well. Whatever struck him had done so with unbelievable force. The thick, wet lips hung loose and sort of flapped in the wind. What remained of his face wore an expression of confusion and incomprehension; he was as dumb in death as he had been in life.

The corpse pitched off the side, fell beneath the wheels, and burst like an overfilled meat-pie when the carriage rolled over it. The force of the impact bounced the whole vehicle into the air.

“He was right,” I said, vocalizing my thoughts to no one and for no particular reason, as I hung in space, tethered to my bench by chains, “about being doomed.”

And then, the stagecoach crashed.

 

Chapter 32

And there lay the steed with his nostrils all wide,

But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride:

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

—
Lord Byron,
“The Destruction of Sennacherib”

The floor became the ceiling and the ceiling became the floor, and then things righted themselves briefly before the carriage rolled again. I didn't know up from down; I lost track of the world and forgot my place in it. Then everything fell to earth, and splintered and broke apart.

Angry hunks of wood slashed the thigh of my weak leg and raked my back and pounded my side hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. When the stagecoach finally flipped sideways and skidded to a halt someplace off the side of the highway, I assessed my injuries. My ribs were bruised, but they had not caved in. The manacles had cut into my wrists, but my arms were not broken or dislocated. My head felt as if it might have been concussed, but it was in considerably better repair than the skull of Fielding Dingle. My cuts were seeping rather than gushing or pumping blood, which meant my wounds would not be mortal unless some putrefying infection set in.

I suppose I must consider myself lucky to have come through that ordeal largely intact, though perhaps I was less lucky than the millions of people who have never found themselves injured in the wreckage of a stagecoach someplace between Cambridge and London.

And I had other problems. I was still chained to my bench, and I didn't know where the keys to my shackles had gone. Either Dingle or the driver had been carrying them, and both their corpses had fallen off the vehicle, someplace back down the road.

I wrenched my arms so I could peer out through the kicked-out door, but I didn't see anything but the field I'd crashed in and the road, away in the distance. The keys could be miles back, lost in thick underbrush. And even if they were nearby, I had no way of finding them.

One of the four horses that pulled the carriage had snapped its leg. It was lying in the grass fifty yards away and bleating in agony. The other horses had broken free of the harness and bolted off.

I tried to take an optimistic view of what seemed a dire situation. If I were stuck in the wreck for longer than a day or two, I was bound to die of thirst or exposure. But before that happened, somebody would probably find the corpses on the road, or else someone would hear the dying horse and come to investigate. Until then, I could only wait.

My head throbbed and my body ached. I suppose I dozed intermittently. Several hours must have passed, though I had no sense of it, for when Angus the Constable found me, night had fallen.

I heard him before I saw him. More precisely, I heard a gunshot when he put down the injured horse. His first attempt didn't do the job, so I heard the loud crack of it, and then the animal's muted whimpering turned into a terrified, high-pitched scream, which it sustained for the entirety of the two minutes it took Angus to reload. I remember thinking it was strange that a brute animal's howl of pain and terror could sound so familiar and so human, and I thought of poor Violet and her children, who never got a chance to scream. The noise ceased only when the constable shot the horse a second time.

Then, Angus's flinty black eyes and round red nose appeared in the splintered doorframe of the stagecoach. He looked ashen and somewhat discombobulated, but he gurgled with relief when he saw I was alive. “You seem to have encountered a nasty bit of business, Lord Byron,” he said.

“I hope it is evident to you that I did not kill Dingle,” I said, jangling my shackles and showing him that I was still bound to the bench. “I have been indisposed since I last saw you in Cambridge, and have, since, endured some injury. What are you doing here?”

“I patrol the highways most nights,” Angus said. “Someone has to keep the lookout for road agents and bandits.” He proudly brandished the musket he'd used to kill the horse, and I wondered if he could have used that to shoot Dingle off the side of the carriage. He'd have needed preternatural luck to make a shot like that; and even the luckiest man alive couldn't have done it twice. But somebody had shot both Dingle and the driver, a feat of marksmanship that seemed beyond the capacity of any human skill.

A musket's barrel is quite a bit wider than its bullet, a necessity for fast reloading through the muzzle. As a result, the ball has a tendency to bounce around in the tube on the way out, which makes it impossible to control the direction of the shot with any degree of finesse. Muskets are effective when a lot of them are fired simultaneously in the general direction of a large group of enemies, but a single musketeer facing a single enemy would make himself an immeasurably greater threat by affixing his bayonet, or simply drawing his saber.

I didn't think Angus could have killed both men with only two shots, or even with twenty. Maybe he could have if he were a vampire; some of my texts said the undead possessed monstrous strength and extraordinary reflexes.

“Ever find any road agents?” I asked the constable.

“No,” he said. “They strike sometimes on the highways around Cambridge, but I've never arrived at the scene of a robbery in time to apprehend the bastards.”

“What will you do if you find them?” I asked.

“Kill them,” he said. “I'll kill every last one.” This was a ridiculous proposition, and if I'd been in my usual state of boozy levity, I might have laughed right in Angus's thick, earnest face. But there was something distinctly unfunny about his tone, a strain or a hitch, as if he was trying to flatten some swell of emotion.

“You think road agents waylaid this carriage?” I asked.

“Wouldn't reckon so,” Angus said. “Little profit to be had from robbing jailers or prisoners. And when I found the bodies up the road, nobody seemed to have rummaged them. I think the gunman is the killer from Cambridge.”

He began to climb down into the wreck, but I shooed him off with a roll of my shoulder. “It's no use. I'm chained in here quite securely, and I've no idea where the keys went.”

“I've got them,” he said. “Had to dig them out of Mr. Dingle's waistcoat pocket, but I knew you might be trapped someplace.”

He worked the key in the heavy iron padlock, and I was free. With his assistance, I climbed out of the overturned vehicle, and sprawled my body out upon the grass.

“Are you in much pain?” Angus asked.

“I can only hope that no one has confiscated my laudanum,” I said.

“It's good to see you've maintained your humor.”

“I've got no other solace in these dire circumstances.”

“Well, it could have been a good deal worse for you, I daresay,” said Angus. “This carriage is only tipped on its side. If it had collided with something at speed, like a tree or a house, it would have been smashed to bits. You're lucky the horse broke free of the harness when its leg went, or else it would have got tangled in the wheels.”

“From inside, it seemed as though the stage rolled end over end before it stopped,” I said.

“It didn't. There are no gouges in the earth to indicate such, nor is there dirt or grass on the roof of the vehicle.”

He reached down with his meaty hand and pulled me to my feet.

“You can see the track here, where the stage veered off the road,” he said, pointing to the thick wheel-ruts that the carriage had cut into the earth. “The carriage just sort of ran into the grass, bounced around a bit, lost speed, and fell over. Laid you down quite gentle, I'd say.”

“It certainly didn't feel gentle.”

“Well, you just rest for a bit and get your bearings. After I found the driver, I hired a boy from the first farmhouse I saw to ride back to Cambridge and fetch Mr. Knifing. He should be along shortly to examine the bodies. Hopefully he'll arrive in a stagecoach. I don't suspect you're fit to walk back to town, nor would you want to sit horseback in your condition.”

I didn't really care one way or the other about Knifing or the bodies right then, though I was possessed by a rather fearsome desire to be carried to my bed, where I could ensconce myself snugly with my bear and consume lots of drugs. “Have you got any whisky?” I asked. The fine red webbing etched upon Angus's face gave me reason to hope he might.

“I've been known to carry a little nip to gird meself against the wind,” he said, confirming my suspicions. He handed me a dented flask, and I drank from it without even bothering to wipe his spittle off the mouth of it. It was cheap stuff, and it tasted like the wormy grain it was made of and the old, rotten barrels it was fermented in. But I could barely taste it, as my nostrils were filled, anyway, with the stink of blood; the horse's or maybe my own. And sometimes, a man needs a drink.

 

Chapter 33

If solitude succeed to grief,

Release from pain is slight relief;

The vacant bosom's wilderness