The King of Shadows, page 47
After Mac had shaved his hair off to a stubble and allowed a black beard and mustache to creep across his face for a time—in order to prevent recognition if he was sighted— he followed the procession one Saturday and found it was a shopping trip for the ladies in London, a regularity that Mac thought Buckner had agreed to after much duress from the wife, which likely put her on the eventual murder list. In any case, other than walks in the garden and a rare ride in the pasture on one of the working horses, Jennifer—dear, dear Jenny—was hardly seen out and about.
But the shopping trips … now, that was something to dwell upon, was it not?
He ate little and slept less, as his mind twisted upon the details. Some part of him pleaded to stop this, to turn back from the path he’d set himself upon, but it was a weak whisper quickly brushed aside and hereafter silenced. He knew his purpose: to avenge the evils of Giles Buckner, and only with the satisfaction of watching the devil hanged would he find peace in this world.
His beard grew bushy and unkempt and he kept his hair cropped to the scalp. His face was lined with hunger, his eyes sunken, his pallor that of the midnight prowler. And prowl indeed he did, going from one bawdy grim-dark tavern on the docks to the next, offering the barkeep a coin and the question, “Do you know two men who’ll do a job?”
After he was waylaid by a pair of skulking wilders on the aptly named Tumbledown Street and suffered a robbery and a kick to the ribs that left him coughing up blood for several days, Mac took to carrying one of his pistols in a cloth bag around his shoulder and twice nearly had to use it to save his skin. But he persisted, and in late October his inquiry at the Bell Ringer tavern for two men to do a job—in addition to coins slid across the weathered wood—was met with a narrow-eyed but interested look by the barkeep.
“What for you wantin’ ’em?” was the returned question.
“Do you really need to know?”
The barkeep grunted and scratched his scaly pate. He motioned toward a door at the back. “Got some racin’ goin’ on tonight. Ask for the Trouts, tell ’em you like mud in your soup.”
“Mud in my soup?”
“Jus’ tell ’em. They’ll get a’ picture.”
Mac’s entrance through the door was met with no regard, as in the smoky, clamorous room a dozen men were involved with hollering over the skittering progress of six very large rats along six wooden troughs toward a reward of moldy cheese. It appeared that some of these dubious impresarios had brought their own champions along in wire cages, and to add to the scene these imprisoned rodents chattered and thrashed about as if driven to frenzy by either the smell of the cheese or the untidy scents of the humans.
When that particular race was done—eliciting from some a hurrah and from others shouted curses—Mac stepped forward and loudly said, “I’m looking for the Trouts.”
No one paid a half-shilling of attention, as the next fleet of rats was placed by leather-gloved hands into their tracks. “I like mud in my soup,” Mac said, and at once two long-beaked faces framed by dirty hanks of hair angled toward him.
“Wait a min,” said one, with coins in his hand and snaggled teeth in his head. “We gots to see this ’un through.”
Alas, the speaker Trout grimaced and cursed blue hell at the end of the race, while the other remained as silent as the tomb, and then the man who’d spoken waved Mac to a table. “Alrighty,” the gent began when they were seated.
“What’s the jimmy?”
Mac took stock of these two before he began. Both were gaunt swallows of bitter liquor, with pock-marked faces and eyes like holes chewed into cheese by the very athletes of the room. At least the one who could speak had a candle-spark of intelligence in his face, whereas the other wore a blank expression with a hanging lower lip that developed a hanging thread of spittle.
Could these two do the “jimmy”? It seemed improbable, but they were all he had.
“I’m Nick,” said the speaker, likely thinking that Mac’s hesitation was due to a lack of gentlemanly introduction. “This here’s Donnie. What do you go by?”
It almost came out of him, and later he was to wonder why. “Neme—”
“Nemmings,” he corrected.
“Alrighty, Nemmings. Let’s hear the poke.”
“There’s a young girl I want—”
“We don’t do no killin’, not for no money. How much you offerin’?”
“Hear me out,” Mac said. “There’s a young girl I want—” What would be the word these two would understand? “Snatched,” he went on. “Taken and held in a safe place until I call for her release.”
“Why for?”
Mac removed from a pocket the bag of coins he had brought along. He undid the leather cord and spilled the money out across the table. Nick’s eyes glittered; Donnie’s were dead, but they did survey the treasure.
“I have a plan,” Mac said. “Are you interested?”
“Who’s the cunny?”
“Does that matter?”
Nick looked at Donnie, who stared impassively at the money. Then Nick shrugged and said, “One’s a’ same as another. This all you’re offerin’?”
“Twice that when the job’s done.”
Nick nodded. He licked his lower lip. “Interested,” he said.
And that was that.
Forty
Maccabeus DeKay closed his spyglass. He walked down through the woods from the rise he’d been stationed on, and at the edge of the road he said to Nick Trout, “They’re coming.”
It was a cold and blustery Saturday in November, the sky slate gray, the time opportune. The coach carrying Giles Buckner’s wife and daughter was about a quarter mile away, and when it rounded the bend that Mac had carefully chosen for this assault, the haywagon and two horses blocking the road would halt the vehicle’s progress. Of course there would be a bodyguard within, and there was the one following on horseback, and perhaps the driver too was a tough in Buckner’s employ but the dice had been thrown and all bets were on.
Nick gave a whistle to Donnie, who was positioned in the woods on the other side of the road. He got no whistle back.
“Is he ready?” Mac asked, the nerves crawling at the back of his neck.
“’Spect so,” was the answer, and that had to do.
Mac had a pistol in hand and the brothers Trout had brought their own guns. No one gets shot, Mac had said. Hear me?
Somebody starts up, I’m shootin’, Nick had replied. Ain’t no amount of coin worth a fuck in a grave.
Just rest easy on the trigger. If this goes like it should, it’ll be over before anyone can pull a gun.
At that, Nick had given a brassy laugh. You’re a faint juggler, he’d said. Don’t you know nothin’ ever goes like it should?
With that in mind, Mac pulled up the collar of his dark brown overcoat and lifted the black bandana that would cover the lower half of his face. His woolen skullcap took care of the shaven head. Nick lifted his own bandana—as red as a wound, much to Mac’s horror when he’d first seen it on meeting up with this pair after he’d rented the wagon and paid for all the hay. Then they waited, Mac quivering with nervous tension but steeled with the desire for revenge, Nick outwardly calm and ominously running his fingers back and forth across the barrel of his flintlock, Donnie a silent entity somewhere opposite.
When they heard the coach’s driver call out “Whoa!” to his team, Mac and Nick stepped from their place of concealment and instantly things went wrong.
“Highwaymen!” the driver shouted, and as fast as that he whipped out a pistol from beneath his seat. Before he could fire Donnie’s gun blasted him in the chest, for the silent and green-bandanaed Trout had come striding out upon the road alongside the coach. The driver sprawled, clutching his injury with both hands. Then the bodyguard on horseback came flying along the road, his pistol out and up. Nick fired—the crack of the gun like God’s very shout—and he must have hit the horse because the animal gave a shrill cry of pain, reared up and threw the rider, who landed on the back of his head with a sickening crunch, his gray tricorn spinning through the air like an errant leaf upon the wind.
For a few precious seconds Mac was frozen. Both Trouts were reloading their pistols. A man’s face appeared at one of the coach’s windows, followed by the snout of his own gun. The shot that came zipped past Mac’s right ear, and then Nick put a ball into the coach that knocked a shard of wood off the edge of the window from which the bodyguard inside had just withdrawn.
“Peace! Peace!” came a man’s sudden cry from the coach. “Brother Donnie’s got the drop on that buster,” Nick said, as calm as glass. “Come along, Nemmings, let’s see the prize.”
Indeed, as Mac followed Nick to the coach, he saw that the silent Trout had thrown open the door on the far side and was standing with his pistol aimed at one of the men Mac recognized from Buckner’s visit to his father. Sitting opposite him, and huddled together as one, were the older woman and the girl Mac had seen many times at a distance these last few months. But now, seeing them so near and so terrified, some of the rage that had driven him close to madness—and perhaps for a time over the precipice—began to draw up and shrivel at the idea of taking the girl.
She was so young. Fourteen years, if that. And even in her moment of shock she was so very pretty, with light brown hair allowed to fall about her shoulders and her eyes a shade or two lighter, her cheekbones high and aristocratic, her nose a gentle slope and her mouth a perfect cupid’s-bow. It was obvious she took after the also-lovely mother instead of the odious wretch who considered himself such a titan. She was wrapped up in a teal-colored coat with a mink collar and wore a mink hat decorated with a blue ribbon, and now daughter and mother clung to each other as the so-called bodyguard cowered on the opposite seat, his unloaded pistol already thrown out to the ground on Donnie’s side.
“Hello, Jennifer,” Mac heard himself say, as if in a dream and in a harsh voice he hardly recognized as his own.
The girl—child—shivered. Her eyes, large with fright, went to the gun in Mac’s hand. He lowered it.
“Take her,” said Nick. “It’s now or never.”
Jennifer managed to speak: “Please, sir … please, sir.”
“We have money.” The mother let go of her daughter to put a hand on a leather purse at her side. “Take all of it.”
“Please, sir,” the girl kept saying, speaking to Mac.
Donnie reached in and snatched up the purse.
“Now the cunny,” said Nick. He waved his pistol back and forth. “Get your tail out.”
The mother suddenly realized what was up. She clutched at her daughter again, her eyes flashed with fury, and she thrust her finely turned chin out at the bandanaed varlets. “Are you insane? Take the money and go!”
“Don’t hurt us,” Jennifer said, and abruptly she was weeping. “Momma, are they going to hurt us?”
“No they are not! They’re going to take the money and leave us alone!”
“What say, friend?” Nick prodded. “We got to get off this fuckin’ road!”
In a horrific instant Mac knew this was wrong. Whatever hatred he held for Giles Buckner, kidnapping this innocent child was not the way to salve it. At that realization the hatred curled back on itself, coiled inward, and bit into him like the most venomous snake.
“You cowards!” the mother spat. “Scum of the earth! You can rely on my husband to take this matter into his own—” Hands, she was about to say, but one of her own hands came up, gripped the bandana that hid the lower portion of Mac’s face, and tore it away.
He reacted in panic, by reaching up to grab the cloth, but he reached up with his gun hand, and in so doing the pistol rose beneath the woman’s chin, a pressure was applied that was not meant to be a pressure, there was a click as a spring disengaged and the bayonet blade pierced four inches into her throat. As she jerked her head back and as Mac applied the same motion the extra pressure on the trigger fired the weapon and in an instant the back of her head had blown out and her brains were splattered across the coach’s wall behind her.
Smoke whirled out the windows. Mac cried out in horror; Jennifer stared at him, blank-faced, with her mother’s blood running down her cheeks. Then, as if in hideous slowmotion, the child’s head turned and she looked at the wreckage. She made a soft sound … a bleat, a whimper, a sob … all those together, and she reached up to touch the dead woman’s red-dripping hair.
“Oh my, look at that,” said Nick, as if observing a petal adrift upon the wind. Forthwith in the next instant he turned his attention onto the still-cowering bodyguard. “I don’t like bein’ shot at,” he said, and smashed his pistol barrel across the bridge of the man’s nose. Blood spurted from the crushed face and the no-longer-so-tough slid down further in his seat weeping like a broken little boy.
“Done,” Nick announced.
Donnie pulled Jennifer out of the coach as if she was a sack destined for the washerwoman. When she staggered and fell he dragged her by one arm toward the haywagon.
“Well,” said Nick, with a cock of the head. “We ought to be finishin’ up.”
Finishing up meant Nick using the axe they’d brought to attack the coach’s wheels and turn two of them to kindling. Then he took hold of Mister Nemmings by the coat collar and half-pushed, half-dragged him to the wagon because Mister Nemmings had suddenly frozen up like the statue of a bleedin’ saint and also he had peed in his breeches. Donnie made quick work of tying Jennifer’s wrists and ankles, gagging her and covering her over with hay before he sat on her. Somehow Mac found himself perched on the driver’s board with Nick, the command of Getup was given, the team started off at a trot under the whip, and they departed the scene on their hour’s journey to London, which likely would not take an hour if the horses could keep the pace.
“Plan same as it was?” Nick asked as the wagon trundled on. From Mister Nemmings there was no answer. He jabbed the gent in the ribs. “The plan! We shove the cunny in someplace safe and put a watch on her, then we meet up in three nights at the Bell Ringer?” No reply from the sphinx. “Alrighty,” Nick decided. “That’s still the plan.”
Further on, Mac leaned over the side of the wagon and threw up. Then he tossed the pistol as far away into a field as his weakened muscles and diminished spirit would allow.
“Didn’t know you had it in you, Mister Nemmings,” said Nick.
“What?” Mac gasped. “What in me?”
“Killin’,” came Nick’s answer. “I do believe you’re a natural-born.”
Then he laughed as if at the most comical merriment.
Dark and dark and dark again.
Thus Mac measured the progress of time. Sleep was impossible. Any attempt at rest was disturbed—horrifically so—by the girl’s voice in his head that begged please sir please sir and by the scene of violence that had followed. At three, four and five o’clock in the mornings he was pacing back and forth before a low fire in the hearth, his mind twisting and turning, racing like one of the rats in their troughs, to think his way out of this nightmare.
But there was no way out.
He was a murderer. What good now was the scheme to force Giles Buckner into a confession? It was useless, all useless. Wrecked. Devastated. Lost. He found himself weeping uncontrollably, and in the next moment hurling furniture, cursing God and dwelling on the idea of suicide.
However … another image that came to mind and prevented him from blowing his brains out with the remaining pistol was the dream he’d had of Nemesis accepting the apple. There had to be meaning in that. And a meaning that he had taken the name of Nemmings on the thorn of the moment. Perhaps he had shared the rage that Nemesis displayed after the death of Andrew Glennon? And perhaps also there might be—could be, possibly be—a way of accepting his current position, of making a clean slate of it? For he saw in his dream of Nemesis—that great and noble horse first hobbled by circumstance beyond his control—taking the apple a glimpse of what might be called hope.
He made a determination. He would return Jennifer Buckner to her father and escape to the colonies. If he was overcome by grief and shame on the voyage and threw himself overboard, so be it, but for the moment that became his new plan.
On the third night he bundled up in a gray fearnaught, put a dun-colored cap upon his head and made his way through a cold drizzle to the Bell Ringer, where he expected to meet with Nick Trout. He would pay the brothers their final due with an extra five pounds for each to help him replace Jenny back on the road home, and that would be the quits of it.
But that night, no Trout surfaced.
Nor on the next night, nor the next, nor the one that came after.
“I need to know where the Trout brothers live,” Mac said, with desperation in his voice, to the barkeep who had first pointed him toward the rat-race room.
“The Trout brothers? Got no idea where they hole up. You might ask around, but I’m guessin’ them boys ain’t hardly open for social visitations.”
