The North Water

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Drax crouches alone in the corner of the shadowed timber yard. There is an open storage shed running along one side and a sag-roofed, ramshackle cabin at the far end. The ground between is strewn with broken bottles, shattered crates, and planking. Drax has the bottle of brandy in his pocket; every now and then, he takes it out, licks his lips, and drinks. At times like these, when the thirst is on him and he has money enough in his britches, he will drink for a week without pausing for breath. Two or three bottles each day. More. It is not a matter of need or pleasure, not a matter of wanting or not wanting. The thirst carries him forwards, blindly, easily. Tonight he will kill, but the killing is not topmost in his mind. The thirst is much deeper than the rage. The rage is fast and sharp, but the thirst is lengthy. The rage always has an ending, a blood-soaked finale, but the thirst is bottomless and without limit.

He places the bottle carefully on the ground by his feet and checks his revolver. When he breaks open the cylinder, the bullets drop out onto the ground, and, cursing, he reaches down to find them. He loses his balance, staggers sideways, and then rights himself. When he stands again, the timber yard sways in front of him and the moon tips and wobbles across the sky. He blinks and spits. His mouth fills up with vomit, but he swallows it down, picks up the bottle from the ground, and drinks again. He has lost a bullet, but that makes no odds. He has four more left, and it will only need one to kill the Paddy surgeon. He will tarry here by the gate, and when they walk in he will plug him in the head. That will be that. No warning or chatter. If that queer cunt Baxter or his idiot slavey had anything about them, they could do the job themselves, but, as it is, Henry Drax must do it for them. Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.

The moon is smothered by clouds, and the shadows in the yard have thickened and merged. He sits on a barrel and peers out into the vague, uneven blackness. He can still make out the edges of the gate and the top of the wall running next to it. When he hears men’s voices, he stands up and takes one slow step forwards, then another one. The voices become louder and more distinct. He cocks the revolver and steadies himself to shoot. The gate creaks and begins to open inwards. He watches as they enter the yard side by side: two dark shapes, blank and featureless as shadows. One head, two heads. He hears the squeak and scurry of a rat, and feels the great thirst agitate inside him. He breathes in once, aims, then fires. The darkness splits open for an instant, swallows him, then spits him out again. The man on the left crumples and drops onto the cinders with a muted thud. Drax lowers the revolver, takes a snort of brandy, and steps forwards to check if he is fully dead or if some knife work is required to finish the job. He crouches over the body and lights a lucifer. He peers down as the yellow flame lengthens in his hand, then rocks back on his heels and curses.

It is Stevens the slavey lying dead. He has shot the wrong fucking man, that’s all. He stands up and looks about. Sumner didn’t run back through the gate — he knows that — and the walls all around are high and topped with broken glass. He must still be in the yard somewhere.

“Are you in here, Mr. Surgeon?” he shouts out. “Why don’t you show yourself? If you plan to capture me, now’s your best chance. You won’t ever get a finer one. Lookee here, I’ll even lay down my gun.” He places the gun on the ground in front of him and holds up his hands. “I’m offering you a fair fight now. No weapons, and I’ve got a drink or two inside me to help even things up.”

He pauses and peers around again, but there is no answer from the darkness and no sign of any movement.

“Come on now,” he shouts, “I know you’re in here. Don’t be bashful. Baxter says you plan to hunt me down, to hire a man to look for me out in Canada, but here I am right in front of you. Alive and in the fucking flesh. So why not take your chances when they’re offered?”

He waits a few seconds more, then picks up the gun and walks towards the cabin at the far end of the yard. When he gets close enough to look inside, he stops. The door is half open. There is one window at the front and another, smaller one, at the side. Both are smashed and shutterless. He knows for certain someone will have heard the first gunshot; if he doesn’t kill the surgeon soon, it will be too late and that will be the end of all his good fortune. But where has the sly fucker got to? Where is he lurking?

* * *

Inside the cabin, Sumner grips a rusted saw blade in both hands. He holds it poised, shoulder high, and waits. When Drax steps across the threshold, he swings it forwards in a hard flat arc. The jagged edge strikes just above the collarbone. There is a hot squirt of arterial blood, a long repellent gurgle. Drax stands poised and upright for a moment as if waiting for something else — something better — to happen to him, then he topples back against the lintel. His head is askew. The ragged wound gapes like a second mouth. Sumner, without thought or qualm, as if moving in a dream, tugs the saw blade back, then drives it deeper in. Drax, half-decapitated, pitches face-first onto the black dirt outside; his gun clatters onto the cabin floor. Sumner stares a moment, horrified by the shape of his accomplishment, then grabs the gun and rushes back across the cindered yard.

In the silent darkness of the narrow street, he feels suddenly enormous, distended, as if his shaking body has swollen to twice its normal size. He walks back towards the town, maintaining a steady pace, not rushing and never looking rearwards. He ignores the first two pubs he sees but enters the third. Inside, a man is playing the piano, and a moon-faced woman is singing. All the tables and benches are filled, so he finds a stool by the bar. He orders a fourpenny ale, waits for his hands to stop trembling, then drinks it down and orders another. When he tries to light his pipe, he fumbles the match, and when he tries again, the same thing happens. He gives up and puts the pipe back into his pocket next to Drax’s revolver. The barman watches on but says nothing.

“I need the railway timetable,” Sumner tells him. “Do you have it there?”

The barman shakes his head.

“Which train is it you’re wanting?”

“The soonest one to leave.”

The barman checks his pocket watch.

“The mail train is likely gone by now,” he says. “It’ll be the morning.”

Sumner nods. The woman begins singing the “Flying Dutchman,” and the men playing dominoes in the corner join in with the chorus. The barman smiles and shakes his head at their raucousness.

“Do you know a man named Jacob Baxter?” Sumner asks him.

“Everyone knows Baxter. Rich bastard, lives over on Charlotte Street, number twenty-seven. Used to be in the whaling business, but now it’s to be coal oil and paraffin, they say.”

“Since when?”

“Since his two ships went down in Baffin Bay last season and he got paid off by the underwriters. The whaling trade is dying anyway, and he got out just in time. You won’t find no flies on Jacob Baxter, I’ll tell you that. You can look him over all you want to, but you won’t find nary a single one.”

“How much did he get paid for the sinking?”

The barman shrugs.

“A good deal, they say. He gave out some to the wives and bairns of them that drowned but he still kept plenty back for hisself, you can be sure of that.”

“And now it’s to be paraffin and coal oil?”

“The paraffin is cheap, and it burns a good deal cleaner than the whale oil does. I’d use it myself.”

Sumner looks down at his hands, pale gray and blood-spotted against the dark wood of the bar. He would like to leave now, escape all this, but he feels a hot animal pressure building in his face and chest like a creature grown large inside him, scratching to get out.

“How far is Charlotte Street from here?”

“Charlotte Street? Not so far. You go up to the corner and turn left by the Methodist Hall, then keep on going. You an acquaintance of Mr. Baxter, are you?”

Sumner shakes his head. He finds a shilling in his pocket, pushes it across the bar, and waves away the change. The woman is singing “Scarborough Sands” as he leaves, and the men have gone back to their games.

Baxter’s house has a row of spear-top railings in front and five stone steps leading up to the door. The windows are shuttered, but he sees a light above the transom. He pulls the bell and when the maid answers he tells her his name and that he is here to see Mr. Baxter on an urgent matter. She looks him up and down, pauses for thought, then opens the door wider and instructs him to wait in the hallway. The hallway smells of tar soap and wood polish; there is a whalebone hat stand, a rococo mirror, and a pair of matching Chinese vases. Sumner takes off his hat and checks that Drax’s gun is still in his pocket. A clock chimes the quarter hour in another room. He hears the clicking of boot heels across the tiled floor.

“Mr. Baxter will see you in his study,” the maid says.

“Was he expecting me?”

“I couldn’t say if he was or he wasn’t.”

“But the name didn’t alarm him at all?”

The maid frowns and shrugs.

“I told him what you asked me to, and he said to bring you right to his study. That’s all I know about it.”

Sumner nods and thanks her. The maid leads him past the broad mahogany staircase to a room at the back of the house. She offers to knock for him but Sumner shakes his head and gestures her away. He waits until she has gone back upstairs, then he takes the revolver from his pocket and checks there is a bullet in the chamber. He turns the brass doorknob and pushes open the door. Baxter is sitting in a chair by the fire. He is wearing a black velvet smoking jacket and a pair of embroidered house shoes. His expression is alert but untroubled. When he begins to get up, Sumner shows him the revolver and tells him to stay just where he is.

“You don’t need the gun now, Patrick,” Baxter scolds. “There’s no need for that.”

Sumner closes the door and steps into the center of the room. There are bookcases on two sides, a bearskin rug on the floor, and a seascape and a pair of crossed harpoons over the fireplace.

“I’d say that’s for me to decide, not you,” he says.

“Perhaps so. Just a friendly suggestion, that’s all. Whatever exactly has happened tonight, we can resolve it without the need for firearms, I’m quite sure of that.”

“What was your plan? What did you mean to happen in that timber yard?”

“Which timber yard would that be?”

“Your man Stevens is dead. Don’t play the fucking fool.”

Baxter’s mouth hangs open for a moment. He glances into the fire, coughs twice, then takes a sip of port. His lips are thin and damp, and his face is colorless aside from the faint blue bruise of his nose and the scribbles of broken vein across both cheeks.

“Let me explain something to you, Patrick,” he says, “before you jump to any quick conclusions. Stevens was a good man, willing, loyal, biddable, but there are some men who can’t be controlled. That’s the simple truth of it. They’re too vicious and too stupid. They won’t take orders and they won’t be led. A man like Henry Drax, for example, is a grave danger to everyone around him; he has no understanding of the greater good; he obeys no master but himself and his own vile urgings. When a man like myself, an honest man, a man of business and good sense, discovers that he has such a dangerous and unruly fucker in his employ, the only question is: how best may I rid myself of him before he destroys me and everything I’ve worked for?”

“So why pull me into it?”

“That was wrong of me, Patrick, I confess, but I was in a tight corner. When Drax came back here a month ago, I thought to make him part of my plans. I knew he was a dangerous bastard, but I believed I could use him anyway. That was my mistake, of course. I had some doubts from the start, but when I got your letter from Lerwick, I understood for sure that I had bound myself to a monster. I knew I had to part from him before he sank his teeth even deeper into my flesh. But how could I work it? He’s an ignorant fucker, but he’s no fool. He’s wary and he’s guileful, and he’ll kill a man just for the joy of it. A brute like that can’t be reasoned with or talked to. You know that as well as I do. Force must be employed, violence if necessary. I realized I needed to set a trap for him, to lure him away and catch him unawares, and I thought I might use you as the bait. That was my design. It was reckless and ill considered, I see that now. I should not have used you as I did, and if Stevens is dead now, as you say he is…”

He raises his eyebrows and waits.

“Stevens was shot in the back of the head.”

“By Drax?”

Sumner nods.

“And what’s become of the evil bastard now?”

“I killed him.”

Baxter nods slowly and purses his lips. He closes his eyes, then opens them again.

“Shows some boldness,” he says. “For a surgeon, I mean.”

“It was one of us or the other.”

“Will you have a glass of wine with me now?” Baxter asks. “Or sit yourself down at least?”

“I’ll stay as I am.”

“You did well to come here, Patrick. I can help you.”

“I didn’t come here for your fucking help.”

“Then what? Not to kill me too, I hope? What would be the good of that?”

“I don’t believe I was just there as a lure. You wanted me dead.”

Baxter shakes his head.

“Why would I want such a thing?”

“You had Cavendish sink the Volunteer, and Drax and I are the only ones who might have known or guessed it. Drax shoots me, and then Stevens shoots Drax, and everything is neat and tidy. Except it didn’t work like that. It misfired.”

Baxter tilts his head to one side and gives his nose a scratch.

“That’s sharp thinking on your part,” he says, “but it isn’t right, not right at all. Take heed now, Patrick, listen carefully to what I’m saying. The plain fact is there are two men lying dead in that timber yard, one of them murdered by your hand. I’d say that puts you in fair need of my assistance.”

“If I tell the truth, I have little enough to fear from the law.”

Baxter snorts at the idea.

“Come, Patrick,” he says. “You’re not so innocent and childlike as to believe such a far-fetched notion. I know you’re not. You’re a man of the world, just as I am. You can tell the magistrate your theories, of course you can, but I’ve known the magistrate for some years, and I wouldn’t be so sure he’ll believe them.”

“I’m the only one left alive from the crew, the only one who knows.”

“Aye, but who are you exactly? An Irishman of uncertain provenance. There would have to be investigations, Patrick, probings into your past, your time in India. Oh, you could make things uncomfortable for me, I’m sure, but I could do the same for you and much worse if I wished to. Do you want to waste your time and energies like that? And for what end? Drax is dead now and the ships are both sunk. No bugger’s coming back to life again, I promise you that.”

“I could shoot you dead right here and now.”

“You certainly could, but then you would have two murders on your hands and what good would that do you? You need to use your head now, Patrick. This is your chance to put everything behind you, to start afresh. How often in life does a man get such a rare opportunity? You’ve done me a great service by killing Henry Drax, however it came about, and I’ll happily pay you for the work. I’ll give you fifty guineas in your hand tonight, and you can put that gun down and walk out of this house and never look backwards.”

Sumner doesn’t move.

“There’s no train until morning,” he says.

“Then take a horse from my stable. I can saddle it for you myself.”

Baxter smiles, then stands up slowly and walks across to the large iron safe standing in one corner of the study. He unlocks it, takes out a brown canvas wallet, and passes the wallet to Sumner.

“There’s fifty guineas in gold for you,” he says. “Get yourself down to London. Forget the fucking Volunteer, forget Henry Drax. None of that is real anymore. It’s the future that matters now, not the past. And don’t worry about the timber yard either. I’ll make up some story about that to throw them off the trail.”

Sumner looks at the wallet, weighs it in his hand for a while, but doesn’t answer. He thought he knew his limits, but everything is changed now — the world is unhinged, free-floating. He knows he must act quickly, he must do something before it changes back again, before it hardens around and fixes him. But what?

“Are we agreed then?” Baxter says.

Sumner puts the wallet on the desk and looks towards the open safe.

“Give me the rest of it,” he says, “and I’ll leave you be.”

Baxter frowns.

“The rest of what?”

“All that’s in the safe there. Every fucking penny.”

Baxter smiles easily, as though taking it for a joke.

“Fifty guineas is a good amount, Patrick. But I’ll happily give you twenty more on top if you truly feel the need of it.”

“I want all of it. However much is in there. Everything.”

Baxter stops smiling and stares.

“So you came here to rob me? Is that it?”

“I’m using my head as you advised me to. You’re right, the truth won’t help me now, but that pile of money surely will.”

Baxter scowls. His nostrils flare, but he makes no move towards the safe.

“I don’t believe you’ll murder me in my own house,” he says. “I don’t believe you have the balls to do such a thing.”

Sumner points the gun at Baxter’s head and cocks the hammer. Some men weaken at the death, he tells himself. Some men start out strong, then soften. But that can’t be me. Not now.

“I just killed Henry Drax with a broken saw blade,” he says. “Do you really think putting a bullet in your skull is going to strain my nerves?”

Baxter’s jaw tightens, and his eager eyes jerk sideways.

“A saw blade, was it?” he says.

“Get that leather satchel,” Sumner tells him, pointing with the gun. “Fill it up.”

After a minute’s pause, Baxter does as he is told. Sumner checks that the safe is empty, then tells him to turn about and face the wall. He cuts the satin cordage off the curtain swag with his pocketknife, binds Baxter’s hands behind his back, then pushes a napkin into his mouth and gags him with his cravat.

“Now take me to the stables,” Sumner says. “You lead the way.”

They pass along the rear hallway and then through the kitchen. Sumner unbolts the back door and they step down into the ornamental garden. There are gravel pathways and raised flower beds, a fish pond and a cast-iron fountain. He prods Baxter forwards. They pass a potting shed and a fretworked gazebo rimmed with box. When they reach the stable block, Sumner opens the side door and peers inside. There are three wooden stalls and a tack room with awls, hammers, and a workbench. There is an oil lamp on a shelf near the door. He pushes Baxter into a corner, lights the lamp, then takes a length of rope from the tack room and forms a noose with one end of it. He puts the noose around Baxter’s neck, tightens it until his eyes bulge, and loops the other end of the rope over a joist. He tugs down hard until the chamois soles of Baxter’s embroidered slippers are barely touching the grimy floorboards, then makes it fast to a peg on the wall. Baxter groans.

“You stay calm and quiet, and they’ll find you alive in the morning,” Sumner says. “If you fret or struggle, it may not end so well.”

There are three horses in the stable — two are black, young and lively-looking, and the other is an older gray. He takes the gray out from its stall and saddles it. When it snorts and shuffles about, he rubs its neck and hums a tune until it quiets enough to take the bit. He turns down the oil lamp, then opens the main doors and waits a minute, listening and watching carefully. He hears the whine and burble of wind in the trees, the hissing of a cat, but nothing worse. The mews is empty: light seeps upwards from the sentried gas lamps into an umbrous sky. He swings the satchel onto the horse’s withers and pushes his boot into the stirrup iron.

* * *

Dawn finds him twenty miles to the north. He passes through Driffield without pausing. At Gorton, he stops to let the horse drink from the mere, then continues in the semidarkness northwest through the beech and sycamore woods and along the dry valley floors. As the sky lightens, plowed fields appear stretched out on either side, their deep furrows specked with brighter lumps of chalk. The hedgerows are tangled and crosshatched with dead nettle, knapweed, and bramble. Close to noon he reaches the brow of the Wolds’ northern scarp and descends to the patchwork plain below. When he enters the town of Pickering it is night again, the blue-black sky is dense with stars, and he is dazed and queasy from hunger and lack of sleep. He finds a livery stable for the horse and takes a room at the inn beside it. When they ask, he tells them his name is Peter Batchelor and he is on his way from York to Whitby to see his uncle, who has taken ill and may be dying.

He sleeps that night with Drax’s gun gripped tight in his right hand and the leather satchel shoved beneath the iron bedstead. In the early morning, he eats porridge and kidneys for breakfast and takes a heel of bread with dripping wrapped in butcher’s paper for his tea. After six or seven miles, the road north begins to rise steadily past stands of pine and roughened sheep fields. Hedgerows stutter, then disappear, grass gives way to gorse and bracken; the landscape hardens and reduces. Soon he is up on the moor. All around him, continents of dark-edged clouds dangle above a treeless unbalance of purple, brown, and green. He feels a sharp new chill in the heightened air. If Baxter sends men to look for him, he is almost sure they will not look for him here, not immediately at least — to the west perhaps or to the south in Lincolnshire but not here, not yet. He has another day or so, he expects, before the reports from Hull reach Pickering, enough time for him to arrive at the coast and find a ship that will carry him east to Holland or Germany. When he gets to Europe, he will use Baxter’s money to disappear, become someone else. He will take a new name and find a new profession. Everything erstwhile will be forgotten, he tells himself; everything that has lingered on will be wiped clean.

The clouds close together and darken; a steady rain begins to fall. He meets a carter traveling south with ewes for market and they stop to talk. Sumner asks him how far to Whitby, and the carter scratches his grizzled chin and frowns as if the question is a puzzling one, then tells him he will be lucky to get there afore dark. A few miles farther on, Sumner turns off the Whitby road and cuts northwest towards Goathland and Beck Hole. The rain ceases and the sky turns a pale, summery blue. The purple heather is patchy and burned over on the slopes near the road, and farther off there are clumps of trees and bushes gathered in the wet hollows. Sumner eats his bread and beef dripping, and scoops brown, peatish water from a stream. He passes through Goathland and moves on towards Glaisdale. The moor turns briefly back to grassland edged with bracken, stitchwort, and low elder, then rises again and reverts to its tight-shorn barrenness. That night, Sumner sleeps, shivering, in a half-collapsed barn, and in the morning he remounts and continues northward.

When he gets to the edge of Guisborough, he stops at a stable, sells the horse and saddle for half their value, then picks up his bag and walks on into the town. At a newsdealer near the railway station, he buys a copy of the Newcastle Courant and reads it on the platform. The report of the murder and robbery in Hull occupies a half column on the second page. Patrick Sumner, an Irishman and former soldier, is named as the culprit, and there is a description of the stolen horse and mention of a large reward offered by Baxter for anyone who comes forward with useful information. He leaves the newspaper folded on the bench and boards the next train to Middlesbrough. The compartment smells of soot and hair oil; there are two women talking together and a man asleep in the far corner. He tips his hat at the women and smiles but doesn’t offer to speak. He lifts the leather satchel onto his knees and feels its reassuring pressure.

That night he seeks out foreign voices. He goes along the dockside from one tavern to the next listening for them: Russian, German, Danish, Portuguese. He needs someone who is clever, he thinks, but not too clever; greedy, but not too greedy. In the Baltic Tavern on Commercial Street he finds a Swede, a captain whose brig is leaving for Hamburg in the morning with a cargo of coal and iron. He has a broad face and red eyes and hair so blond it is almost white. When Sumner tells him he needs a berth and will pay whatever is required for the privilege, the Swede looks him over skeptically, smiles, and asks how many men he has murdered.

“Only the one,” Sumner says.

“Just one? And did he deserve it?”

“I’d say he deserved it sure enough.”

The Swede laughs, then shakes his head.

“Mine is a merchant ship. I’m sorry. We have no space for passengers.”

“Then set me to work. I can pull a rope if need be.”

He shakes his head again and takes a sip of his whiskey.

“Not possible,” he says.

Sumner lights his pipe and smiles. He assumes this firmness is just a show, a way of driving up the price of his passage. He wonders for a moment if the Swede might read the Newcastle Courant but decides that’s hardly likely.

“Who are you anyway?” the Swede asks him. “Where do you come from?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“You have a passport though, papers? They’ll ask for them in Hamburg.”

Sumner takes a single sovereign from his pocket and pushes it across the tabletop.

“That’s what I have,” he says.

The Swede raises his pale eyebrows and nods. The roar of drunken voices swells around them, then deflates. A door swings open, and the smoke-filled air shudders above their heads.

“So the man you killed was rich?”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Sumner says. “I was only making a joke.”

The Swede looks down at the gold coin but doesn’t reach for it. Sumner leans back in his chair and waits. He knows the future is close by: he can feel its tug and sprawl, its shimmering blankness. He is standing on the very lip, poised and ready to step off.

“I think you will find someone to take you,” the Swede says eventually. “If you pay them well enough.”

Sumner takes another sovereign from his pocket and places it down next to the first. The twin coins wink yellow in the flickering gaslight; on the wet, black tabletop, they shine like eyes. He looks back at the Swede and smiles.

“I do believe I found him,” he says.