Turning the Stones (2 page)

I can feel hysteria gathering itself for an assault on my reason, but before it can pounce, the sycamore comes to my assistance. The young leaves in the topmost branches begin to rustle loudly, which draws me to stare into the green crown. With my ear alert to the excited whispering of leaves and the murmur of branches, a thought sparks in my mind.

And all at once, I am inspired to a course of action. There
is
a possibility of escape!

Withdrawing from the window, I scan the chamber for the
material I need. My gaze slides over the bloodied shape on the floor and rests on the bedstead. I dash towards it and seize one of the velvet bed-curtains. The thing resists me at first, but it is easily defeated by the rage that surges through my arm and it dives with a wrench from its fixings, its brass rings clanging against the bedpost.

But as I flounder with the bed-curtain, I hear a muffled metallic groan. The handle of the door is moving. Someone in the hall is trying to enter.

Fear flutters in the pit of my stomach. In the deathly silence of the bedchamber I have the impression that the lurker at the door is straining to make out, as closely as I, what is happening on the other side. Then there is a vague sound, which I take to be a receding footfall. Surely it is a servant who has gone now to fetch a key and a superior. In a cold sweat I spring to my task, dragging the curtain to the window. I struggle to wind the velvet around my torso, leaving my arms free. I wriggle on to the sill like an insect half-emerged from its cocoon and without thinking, and yet with an arm flung across my forehead to protect my eyes, I throw myself out of the window into the void.

I feel, for an instant, gloriously light and liberated.

Though it is a harebrained hope, I have placed my faith in the tall sycamore growing by the window. It may just possibly break my fall, but I will not be surprised if instead I should meet the paving stones below with a crash and be struck dead. That, too, would be a form of escape. It is a fate that seems likely as I pitch into the sycamore’s up-reaching arms. The tree fumbles its catch and the scrabbling branchlets in the canopy fail to detain me. With a cracking, snapping, down-rushing
sound, I slither through the branches in a blur, my hands grasping futilely at sparse leaves and springy green twigs. Fortunately the tree grows more dense towards its lower branches and the stuff wrapped around me snags on them, slowing my fall – and then all at once my tumbling ceases and I find myself lodged about twenty feet above the ground in the sycamore’s twisted arms. For a few minutes I am afraid to move.

A gentle rain begins to patter among the leaves.

Footsteps approach and fade in the street and there is the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves and the thrum of wheels, but I remain unremarked. No one turns their gaze skyward to discover what has littered the footpath with vegetation. I reach for the branch above and manage to depend from it, my feet groping for a foothold below. My velvet casing collapses in folds beneath my knees and I kick free of it, wriggling through the branches. There is a drop of about ten feet to the ground. I wait for a passing chaise to quit the street – in fact the postilion spots me, his mouth falling agape, but he must ride on – and then I let go first my shoes and then myself.

The fall knocks me off my feet and jars my knees, but I am in order, I find. I suppress my jubilation, because I must armour myself against emotion, absolutely, and I retrieve my shoes and the bed-curtain, which I drape from my shoulders to serve as a cloak.

Where should I go? What shall I do?

I stare through the drizzle at looming houses with smooth facades the colour of curds. They are much grander than Mr Paine’s house in Poland Street. Even if I could find my way back to Soho from this unknown quarter, there is no going home for me. I must accept that fact.

Suddenly I sense movement from behind a tall ground-floor window and glimpse a shadowy figure in the house in front of me. God’s teeth, how could I be so stupid! Here is the dwelling from which I have only now escaped. You fool, Em! Someone in there has seen you loitering in the street. Run for your life!

I dash towards the nearest corner.

As I round it at a scurry, a glance over my shoulder shows a person in livery emerging from the house, his head turning in my direction.

I break into a sprint up a street with a slight ascent, searching urgently for a way to duck my pursuer. I plunge into the narrow entranceway of a mews – and at once someone paws at my arm. It is a cadger, after a coin. I cry, ‘A shilling for you if you will show me shelter from the rain!’ The cadger points vaguely towards a door that stands ajar and I run towards it. The door admits me into a dismal hall that smells of ashes and mould. I have the impression of household offices at the rear of a dwelling. Pulling the door to, I shoulder past a threadbare curtain. There is a flight of stairs ahead, ending in a closed door.

Through the flimsy door I hear the sound of footsteps striking the cobbles in the mews. They come ever closer. Surely they must belong to the servant of the house I have just fled. The footsteps stop and I listen with bated breath to the burble of men’s voices. I can hardly hear them over the drumming of my heart. Doubtless the cadger will give me away if he is offered money. My hope is that the footman, who has left his post in haste, will not have a coin to hand.

Silence falls. Then the creak of the opening door. As a figure
darkens the doorway I form my hands into puny fists, determined that I shall not be taken without a fight.

It is the cadger, with his hand outstretched. Is there anyone with him? No, he only wants my shilling. He snatches the coin I offer without meeting my eye. In a whisper, I ask if he will tell me my whereabouts, since I am practically a stranger to London, but he affects not to hear me. Instead, he lifts an arm and gazes in consternation at a stain on the sleeve of his grimy pink suit, as if he had just noticed this taint on an otherwise spotless ensemble. Strings of damp hair cling to his pate and he has the air of a man beyond all hope. He looks nervously over his shoulder and says that he will escort me outside so that I may be on my way. But that jumpy glance has told me all I need to know. Behind the door, my pursuer lies in wait.

I push past the cadger towards the stairs. As I reach the bottom step, the gloom in the hall fluctuates. The back door has opened and the sound of violent footsteps turns my stomach to water. Up the stairs I rush and fling myself through the door into a parlour. There is a glimpse of startled faces. I tear through a grand vestibule and out the front of the house and sprint away.

I reach a street corner, gulping at the air. But I cannot get my breath, because I am confronted by a sight that causes me to gasp anew. I have arrived nearly exactly where I started: in the thoroughfare of well-bred pale stone houses. There, some fifteen yards away, is my friend the sycamore tree.

With a cry of despair, I spin on my heel and race off in the thickening rain without the slightest idea where I am going.

As I hasten onwards, my hair drooping under the influence of the rain, it occurs to me that I do not have my makeshift
cloak. I must have lost it during my wild charge, but I have no recollection of its falling from my shoulders. How unreliable is memory. Mine has locked away the events of yesterday evening and refuses to show them to me. Have I somehow brought this forgetfulness to bear on myself because I lack the moral fibre to admit to a crime? Well, here is something I will admit: I feel, somehow, guilty. As I slope along in this fading light I expect at any second to feel a heavy hand grasp my arm. I expect to be detained under suspicion.

Just now I almost cannoned into a gentleman stepping out of a print shop. He barely acknowledged the collision for his head was lowered over a news sheet that claimed all his attention. No doubt he will soon be riveted by my story, which is that of a bolting lady’s maid and a body slashed to ribbons at a patrician address. The printers will junket with my likeness and my name and no one will care for the truth – whatever that should be – or even listen to my part. If only I had the protection of the Waterlands. If only they could stand up for me and vouch for my good character – but I cannot drag them into this. Imagine the publicity. The embarrassment of it.

I am dodging and diving now among constricted streets and evening is coming on. The public lighting here is very scant and I fear that the cloaked figures appearing at the mouths of the dark entryways around me cannot be other than villains and wild-bloods. The thought of being abroad in this hard town at night adds weight to my already considerable burden of fright. It is with some relief that I discern the rumble of heavy traffic nearby and I head towards it in search of the security of a crowd.

I find myself on the edge of a manic thoroughfare watching a whirligig of carriages, carts and unstoppable sedan chairs. I hover at the kerb, shivering and panting. A long minute passes before my eye falls with a start of recognition on a red brick building on the far side of the road.

I believe I know this place! Is it not Piccadilly?

Eliza and I came here the other day with Mr Paine – it already seems a lifetime ago – to visit his peruke-maker, who keeps a shop in that building. I remember we were almost mown down by a coach coming out of the inn next door. The inn has a substantial frontage, cleft by a covered archway. As I gaze at it my heart suddenly lifts. For here is my way out of London.

In a second I have struck out, dodging pats of dung and riders who insist on bringing their steeds to a canter even in the jam of traffic. The inn is called the White Bear, I see. The schedule inscribed on its door tells me that coaches and diligences depart from here daily at five o’clock in the morning for the port of Dover. There is also a night coach at seven for Bristol and all points west. In a flash, patting at the moneybag in my pocket, I resolve to take the night coach. Dover would be more convenient for France – without an explanation for the scene I awoke to this afternoon, what can I do to save my life but flee from England? But I cannot delay until morning for the coach south. I will try for a passage from Bristol.

And yet I hesitate to enter the yard of the White Bear. Should I return to Eliza in Poland Street and tell her what has happened – or rather that I do not know what has happened? She would never take me for a murderess, would she? And perhaps Mr Paine could help. But I know it is
pointless to entertain such a notion. It is beyond their skills to smooth over such an unholy mess. Mrs Waterland could do it, perhaps, but she is two hundred miles away in Cheshire. And besides …

It gives me a queer feeling to say this, but a shiver comes over me at the thought of Poland Street and intuition tells me to stay away.

I pass under a covered entranceway into a long yard made gloomy by the rain and by dilapidated wooden dwelling houses that rise three storeys above the stables and coach houses and hinder the light. There is a straggling crowd standing at shelter in a doorway.

A voice cries, ‘Looking for a seat, missus?’ A crone in a frayed mantle and a cross-barred petticoat jerks her thumb towards a door set in a crook of the wall.

It leads to a vestibule and a booking office. Huddled up on a stool at a sloping desk in a corner of the office, next to a window glazed with imperfect glass, the book-keeper has just lit an evening candle. The atmosphere is pungent with the stink of rancid tallow. There is a large plan of London affixed to the wall with a red line running through it like a knife cut.

The book-keeper raises his head with a sideways glance that gives him a shifty look. He is a swarthy man with many chins and a twisted wig cut as close as a lawn. He says at once that he can offer me nothing, neither for Dover nor for Bristol.

I am aware that my appearance must present a slatternly sight and I fear the book-keeper does not believe I have the funds to buy a seat. But perhaps he sees my desperation, because he offers me a constrained smile and says that an outside place is available on the night coach, but only as far
as Reading. At the George Inn in Reading I may hope to connect with a morning coach to Bristol.

The inept X that I make on a page of his ledger is quite convincing, I believe, and so is the lie regarding the name I give him. ‘Ann Jones’ slips easily to my tongue.

*

The night coach west has turned out to be a disreputable piece of work. There are ten of us heaped up here on the roof like human baggage: an apprehensive woman with red, gummed hair under a white cap, holding a child tightly to her chest; a whiskery, oblong-shaped couple; and a cluster of rough men talking out of the sides of their mouths. ‘Last night was a belter, all right,’ says one of them. Another blows out his cheeks with a hoot of laughter, ‘You’re right there, Frank. Blow me tight if it weren’t.’ The inside of the coach is swarming with drovers and their dogs. They are staging up to Swindon, I hear, after selling their beasts at Smithfield. Our coach is aptly named the
Demon
 – certainly it seems to possess an unclean spirit. Two enormous lamps on each side of the body and another on the hind boot show up the deficiencies of the turn-out – the unkempt horses in cobbledtogether harness, the driver in a tatty greatcoat, and the lack of a guard. The boot is packed with bags of wool, apparently. ‘Or so they say,’ one of the men remarks with a tap on the side of his nose. I cannot make out his meaning exactly, but there is an unsavoury air about the entire enterprise and I have the feeling that our journey is likely to be exposed to every possibility of mishap.

I am riven by the fear of capture. The half-hour I was obliged to wait before the coach departed felt intolerable. I
hung about in an agony of nerves, trying to keep out of sight in the stables. But even though we are on our way now, staggering through the western precincts of London, I expect at every stage to find us flagged down and myself arrested. What a pathetic dodge it was to give a false name to the bookkeeper at the White Bear. That will not fool a determined hunter for a second.