Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal (17 page)

He sobbed for breath and spat again. The elbows were torn from his clothes already and the soot was like a refined torment on the raw and increasingly bloody joints. His right foot slipped against decayed brickwork, tearing wool and flesh until he felt the light, crawling trail of running blood. With his teeth clenched in a snarl of determination, he wrenched himself forward, feeling that the sooty bricks around him were now considerably warmer than his own body-temperature. A few feet beyond him lay what he had always expected to endure as the price of his masterpiece: the prospect of death, and of agony which would make death a blessing. At the best, he must suffer torment which made most men cry out for a chance to recant or to satisfy whatever demands their inquisitors made upon them. He knew that he would face it, and endure if necessary until the last shrieking paroxysm of death. He would endure because he was Verney Dacre, because he was more than lesser men, and because the masterpiece was greater than he himself.

The draught which touched him now, about the cheeks and forehead, was like the hottest wind which he had ever felt in India, upon the Maidan or at Cawnpore. He was emerging from his cramped tiny shaft into a round, barrel-shaped chamber at the foot of the main stack. It was several feet across with half a dozen flues entering it round the circumference of its base. The chamber itself was about four feet high, narrowing at the top to the two-foot opening of the main stack itself.

Even as he pulled himself into this barrel-shaped chamber, Dacre's eyes were closed by the scorching vapour from the other flues. Blinded, he put out his hand to save himself, touched a brick flue-entrance, smelt the burning of his chamois leather glove, and screamed at the red-heat across the palm of his hand. Crying out in the dark, he put the pain of his hand from his mind and snatched for the entrance to the shaft above him as he felt his feet swell and blister on the searing floor. Pulling himself up, his back pressed against one side of the stack and his toes at the other, he searched for finger-and foot-holds.

In his torment, renewed at every contact of the brick upon his branded palm or his blistered feet, he cried aloud. Yet the cry was both triumph and curse. In his pain, Verney Dacre shrieked victoriously against the slave mentality of his pursuers and confidants alike. He cried his contempt for religions of humility and creeds of brotherhood. The victory should be his. As he clawed at the brickwork, the blood slippery on his fingers, he shouted with laughter in his pain, with unalloyed delight at the thought of what was to come. For a hundred years men would remember this caper, and would admire. He pictured the vault, empty of its gold, and as his torn feet scrambled against the falling soot, his mouth widened in a smile. Men who had known Verney Dacre were apt to conclude that he was afflicted by a form of insanity which earlier centuries believed to be possession by a devil. Yet there was now a terrible clarity in his reaction to suffering.

He thought of Miss Jolly, picturing in the dark the sharp profile of a young Egyptian princess. She was to be a prize second only to the gold. In his clawing exultation, the foretaste of her retribution drove his own pain from his mind. Again, in the darkness, he remembered her curved over the rocking-horse at Langham Place, howling under the attentions of his two bullies. He cherished the image behind his closed eyelids. He too must suffer, perhaps as much as she. Yet he endured his agony for fame. This masterpiece must live for eternity in the history of crime. Miss Jolly would suffer in ignominy, bound like a slave, fed on her own tears of misery. In his exultation, he laughed aloud.

Through the watering of his eyes, as he tried to open them against the acid stinging of the soot, he saw a blur of grey light above him. It was small but closer than it appeared. He guessed that the places which he now found for his fingers and toes had been chipped out by the first chimney-boy to make the ascent. Even the air was growing cooler and the grey light faintly illuminated the inner surface of the stack. He clung to the sooty wall, his narrow chest heaving, and pulled slowly up the last ten feet.

The chimney opening, some two feet across, was almost the same dimension as the square stack. Dacre braced himself with feet and shoulders, just beneath it. As he had expected, iron bars at six-inch intervals were fixed across it and set into the bricks. After all, he thought, the courtyard of the Mint even contained a vat with a filter so that water from the refining process had the tiniest scraps of gold filtered from it before it was allowed to flow into the sewers. Men who were so scrupulous would hardly have left a main chimney-stack open. Indeed, they had taken a double precaution. There were two sets of bars, crossing one another to form a grill, and coated with cement.

Dacre snorted with delight. In their enthusiasm to secure the opening it had evidently not occurred to these worthies that the cross design meant reducing each bar to half-thickness where it crossed another. Better still, Dacre judged that under the thin protection of cement the bars would have been riveted together at their crossing. It needed only two tiny, opposite cuts to reach the rivet-holes and sever the bars.

The file which he drew from the courier-belt next to his skin was more than equal to the task. The cement was flaked and loosened by the heat and fumes of the shaft, yielding easily at the first application of the steel file. Then it was a matter of mere patience, working gently and skilfully at the eight intersections until the bars, except for the twelve embedded stubs of iron, now projecting inward from the sides of the shaft, could be lifted clear. Dacre hung the freed grill gently on the projections at one side. They had been embedded so far and, no doubt, with so heavy an iron bolt anchoring them deep in the wall, that they were capable of supporting considerable weight. Dacre grasped two of them in his fists, releasing his purchase on the brickwork gradually until he felt himself hanging from the butts of the two bars with not the least sign of their yielding. The strength with which the guardians of the Mint had secured their treasure was now his to use.

He waited until a clock, somewhere over Independence Square, struck six. Then he raised himself slightly and looked cautiously over the top of the stack. The cloth-wrapped wooden ball lay in the gutter about three feet below, just where he had thrown it the night before. Over the pitch of the roof he could now see the telegraph pole and the nearer curve of the banner, GOD BLESS . . . Beyond that there was a partial view of the tenement roofs, and the garret window, behind which Joey Morant-Barham shiveringly awaited his moment of glory.

Joey Barham watched the sky grow dark over Chestnut Street and the river. The noise was thunderous from the main thoroughfare and he thought at first that the crowds must be cheering the Prince of Wales on his way from the railroad depot to the Continental Hotel. He caught a glimpse of carriages with men standing on their roofs, moving slowly in procession with lanterns waving and placards brandished aloft. But there were shouts of disapproval and noises of a struggle. What sounded like shots but must have been firecrackers thrown under the horses' hooves followed this. Joey Barham saw the entire crowd surging and hurrying after the coaches. Somewhere a pipe band was playing
Yankee Doodle
with shrill spirit. Morant-Barham caught sight of two placards being carried on poles by followers of the procession:

LINCOLN AND THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF! FREEDOM IN THE NEW TERRITORIES!

From the general jubilation of the crowd he guessed that the expected Republican victory in Pennsylvania had now been confirmed. The confusion was welcome to him. Under its cover the arrival of the Prince of Wales would be a tame affair, and the precise arrangements not generally noted.

As twilight came, he went down to the lower room and opened the window. Verney Dacre had been right. With the aid of his gold-topped stick, Joey was able to unhook the loop of cord holding the banner on the telegraph post and draw the end of the canvas round toward the window by the thin wire attached to it. The banner would look lopsided to the few passers-by who bothered to glance down Juniper Street but that would hardly concern them. He pulled the wire harder and from within the tube of canvas a further length unfolded and stretched toward him. By the time that he had drawn it as far as it would go, the banner formed a canvas tunnel, ten or twelve inches high, running from the telegraph post on the far side of the street into the room where Joey Barham stood. He looked into the darkness and waited.

In the deep silence of the heavily-draped boudoir, where he was alone with the two girls, Bull-Peg surveyed Jennifer, moist-eyed. Like a Moslem Venus, she lay on the bed with her back to him. Her head, propped on her hand, was half-turned towards him. A little gold-coloured chain, the sole ornament of her nudity, circled her waist. Bull-Peg slipped his fingers under it at the base of her spine, feeling her warmth against his knuckles. Stroking and patting, the naked pugilist had no time to look into the opposite mirror, which reflected the motionless hatred in the girl's dark eyes, as she looked away from him, receiving his caresses in silence.

11

Verney Dacre waited until the last flush of daylit cloud began to die from the western horizon. Blue-black, the night above the city reflected only a shallow gas-lit glow. It was a little after eight o' clock. He pulled himself up, lying awkwardly over the coping of the chimney, feeling the fragments of stone and brick on the ledge as they shifted and scattered in a thin rain of dust. The wooden ball wrapped in cloth lay in the gutter beyond his reach. Using his long steel file, he was able to pat it towards him, until he could curl his fingers round the soft shape.

He lifted it slowly. Any break or dislocation now in its precious thread would destroy his scrupulous plan. He slid back until he found toe-holds which would keep him upright in the chimney with the rim of the stack at breast-height. Then it was a matter of infinite patience, pulling gently towards him the thin wire which connected the wrapped ball with the end of the banner. As on Joey Bar-ham's side, the wire pulled out a further length of canvas which had been folded back into the double banner. When Dacre had drawn it fully out, he was holding the end of a canvas chute which ran from his vantage point, down over the roof of the Mint below him, across Juniper Street in the banner of welcome to the Prince of Wales, and into the opposite window, where Morant-Barham waited. Dacre let out a long breath of tension.

Now that the canvas was unfurled at its full length, there was something else at his disposal. It was the end of a thin, strong rope, whose length ran backwards and forwards several times within the banner, making some two hundred feet in all. At regular intervals of about twelve inches, wire had been twined into the hemp thread and bent to form convenient hooks, which might carry two or three pounds weight each. Dacre made one end of the rope fast to a row of three iron stubs, the remains of the iron grating where it had been set into the wall. Then he dropped the rest of its length into the dark tunnel of the shaft and began to ease himself down cautiously, hand and foot.

The fires had been out for almost three hours, and though the black and foul brickwork held some residual warmth, the danger of being caught in a searing blast of air was now over. Verney Dacre faced only the perils of capture and the hangman's noose, which must inevitably follow. But he was more than prepared to encounter such hazards as those. Lucifer and Cowhide would surrender him to save themselves, at the first sign of trouble. He had never thought otherwise. 'A fellow ain't to peach on his chum,' Morant-Barham had insisted stoutly. Yet Dacre counted on Joey's desertion of him too. Indeed, he could have borne it all, the noose, coarse and slack above his unbuttoned collar, the prison chaplain's blathering. He could have borne it with a smile of delight if he knew that the stolen gold was irretrievable and that, somewhere, Miss Jolly was howling naked under the attentions of Bull-Peg and Raoul.

Dacre paused in his descent. Though it was long past sunset, there was light coming from below him, its rays faintly illuminating the rough chimney walls. It was not the light of fires but the harsh brilliance of gas. It was nothing to him. He had expected that the workshops and vaults of the Mint would be lit during the night, even though none of their guardians could get beyond the time-lock. There might be secret windows or gratings which gave a view of these areas and he made a mental reservation as to the need to detect them. The sight of an intruder in the sealed rooms would presumably have a brigade of troops surrounding the building at once.

On this occasion, Dacre made no attempt to follow the flue down to the furnaces of the refining-shop, where he had entered it. There was another branch of the chimney shaft, broader and easier, which left the main column higher up, about fifteen feet from its top. This broader shaft led to the furnaces of the rolling-shop, much closer to the stronghold door with its figure-lock. By using this route he shortened the distance over which the gold must be carried, and diminished the chances of being spied upon.

Carrying the rope with him, Dacre slithered down the broad shaft, his clothes snagging and tearing on the rough surfaces. By the time he reached the opening, he had paid out some fifty feet of rope, while three-quarters of it still remained in a coil. He laid this down in the dark opening of the boiler furnace and looked about him.

He was between the massive upright ovals of the iron coining-presses, which stamped the designs on to the blank gold planchets, and the empty weighing-room with its forty or so tables, all deserted, and the double-pan scales upon each standing idle. Having calculated his route so carefully, he had only to cross the weighing-room and pass down a few yards of the opposite passageway to come to the great steel door of the stronghold with its single conical knob. Yet in that distance, of about forty feet, there might be a grill or concealed window through which he could be spied on. It would be pure chance, since the guards beyond the wall would hardly bother to look more than once in half an hour.