Down: Trilogy Box Set (56 page)

“Then I expect you’re tough too. Come on. Let’s be tough together. Let’s go outside and face this strange new world with brave faces, shall we?”

It took longer than Delia would have liked for the four of them to cross the muddy road. Over the decades and centuries, the village men had seen the odd woman arrive before. With Emily, they had even seen a live woman, so Arabel and Delia were a spectacle but not
the
spectacle. That distinction went to Sam and Belle because none of them had ever laid eyes on a child in Hell. The men were quiet and standoffish at first sight, confining themselves to staring and sniffing, but soon they sought to block their way and some of them reached out to touch the children, perhaps not believing their eyes.

“Leave ’em be, let ’em pass,” Duck insisted. Dirk had given Duck his spare pair of breeches and, though shirtless, Delia was happier about his attire.

“Just look straight ahead, children,” Delia said, trying to take her own advice, “and keep holding hands with mummy. They’re just curious. You see, they’ve never seen two lovelier tykes.”

“They smell bad,” Sam said. “And they’re dirty.”

“Be polite,” Delia scolded. “We’re visitors.”

Arabel did not speak a single word, her face frozen in fear. She clasped her children’s hands as firmly as she could without causing pain.

When their progress came to a complete halt, Dirk came to the rescue with his club, threatening to bash his neighbors the way he’d lit into Woodbourne. The throng parted allowing them to thread the gauntlet but Sam slowed them down twice, first when his shoes, missing their Velcro, came off in the sucking mud, and second, just yards from Dirk and Duck’s house when he stopped to ask a man why he was crying.

The fellow, gaunt and sallow, wiped at the tears running into his scraggly beard and said, “It’s been so long I’d forgotten what children looked like …”

Inside the brothers’ cottage, the children played with a magpie feather on Dirk’s bed and Delia gave in and decided to join the lads in a mug of beer. Arabel sat mutely at the table, occasionally glancing over her shoulder at the kids while Delia fired off questions.

“Will we be safe in here?” she asked.

“Why, we won’t hurt you,” Dirk said, appearing hurt by the question.

“I don’t mean you, I mean the men outside. Will they try to break in?”

“Can’t say for sure,” Dirk said. “The worse ’uns, Albert and his maties, well, they’ve vanished, perhaps to the place you’ve just come from. A few of the others might get bold, owing to the sudden appearance of pretty ladies.”

“I can see the issue with Arabel but I doubt I’ll make the blood run hot,” Delia said with a chortle.

To her amusement Dirk said, “You’re not so bad.”

“I’m old enough to be your mum, if not your gran.”

“Not to fret,” Duck said. “I’ll do the sleeping in shifts with me brother and between us, we’ll keep an eye on the ruffians. The little ’uns can have one bed and the ladies can have the other. We’ll kip by the fire.”

Delia thanked them. “I think we should just stay right here, indoors. It’s a bit cramped but it’s safest. They’ll be working on a rescue and this is where they’ll come.”

“Who’ll come?” Dirk asked.

“I don’t know about Emily, as she’s had her own ordeal, but I imagine John Camp will be one of them.”

“’e weren’t too lively when he left ’ere this morn,” Dirk said.

“How bad was he?”

“Well, ’e was feverish and weak. He got run through, ’e did, by a rover knife.”

“Well in that case, perhaps they’ll send someone else,” Delia said. “But thank God he and Dr. Loughty were retrieved.” She knew about rovers from conversations with Duck at MAAC and she asked, “Do we have to worry about rovers here?”

“Everyone worries about them,” Dirk said, “but we’ve not ’ad a problem with ’em ’ere of late, ’ave we, Duck?”

“Not for a long while,” Duck said, looking around the meager cottage. “Slim pickings ’ere, I suppose, compared to other villages.”

They were all startled when Arabel spoke for the first time. “When? When will they come for us?”

“I don’t know, my dear,” Delia said gently. “I expect they’ll want to do some preparation and planning. If I know the powers that be, there will be hoops to jump through, but come they will. When John went for Emily, it was a week after she disappeared. So, maybe we’ll have to soldier on for a week.”

“I don’t think I can stay here that long,” Arabel said weakly. “We’ll want to go home very much sooner.”

“The sooner the better,” Delia said, touching her arm.

In a tiny voice, Belle announced she was thirsty.

“Do you have any water?” Delia asked.

Dirk pointed to a wooden pail by the hearth.

“Is it clean?”

“It’s not muddy,” Dirk said.

Delia inspected it and cupped some into her palm. “Tastes all right.”

Belle said she preferred juice but Delia cleaned out a wooden mug the best she could and offered it up. The girl thumbed her nose at it and commenced whining. Arabel began to apologize to the girl that there wasn’t any nice juice about but Delia cut her off with a calculated demonstration of tough love.

“She’ll drink when she’s thirsty enough. She’s going to have to quickly adapt to survive. We all will.”

They heard a horse whinny and clop off through the mud. Dirk opened the door to have a look.

“What was that?” Duck asked.

“Someone’s rode off.”

“Anything to worry about?” Delia asked.

“Doubt it,” Dirk said. “Comings and goings, is all.”

The day dragged on.

For Delia, the first order of business was further explaining their predicament to Arabel who grasped they were in a strange land, but was unprepared for just how strange it was. Notions of Heaven and Hell existed in Arabel’s religious ethos in a soft-focused way. This Hell was far removed from the fire and brimstone construct in her mind. What little she had seen of it was grimy and gritty, primitive and bleak. With Arabel lying on one of the beds, Delia left it to Duck and his brother to tell the rest, urging them to speak in hushed tones to spare the children. Using their own short lives as illustration, the murder they had done, their hangings, they explained the sad consequence of their actions. The eternal suffering. The interminable afterlife. The impossibility of salvation or deliverance. The absence of children, of procreation. The lawlessness and danger of the countryside, especially at night when the rovers were about. The pathetic, feudal subsistence of the people and the power and cruelty of the crown. With each revelation, Arabel seemed to become smaller, her shoulders drooping, her knees pulling more tightly to her chest. When she could bear to hear no more, she turned away, facing the splintery wallboards, and let the conversation pass over her.

Delia seemed to find strength by doing what she did best as an analyst—gathering facts. She interrogated the brothers to fill in as much detail as possible about their new environs. She had gained a good amount of intelligence about their world during her month babysitting and questioning Duck but now she attempted to learn the minutiae of village life. She sought the stories of each resident of Dartford and their personalities. She learned about the sources of food, water, and firewood. She asked about nearby villages and towns, about dangers from outsiders and within. She wanted to know more about the king’s soldiers and the dreaded rovers.

The children weren’t hungry enough to eat anything from Dirk’s stewpot but eventually they both got thirsty enough to drink the water. By evening, they had stopped complaining about being taken out behind the cottage to go to the bathroom in the weeds. They even seemed to enjoy the adventure of camping rough, as Delia put it to them.

Arabel finally pulled herself from the brink of catatonia and absorbed herself cutting strips from a ratty deerskin and fashioning them into belts, laces, and straps to correct everyone’s wardrobe deficiencies. Delia sacrificed a cardigan sleeve, stuffed it with grass and tied it off with hide to make a dubious-looking doll for Belle. Duck, seeing jealousy from Sam take hold, whittled a small boat from a piece of firewood and told the boy that if it rained in the night they’d find a puddle and set it afloat in the morning.

When it was time to put the children to bed they complained about the lumpiness of the mattress and the sharp hay poking through but before long they were sound asleep.

When it was dark Arabel and Delia crammed onto the other narrow mattress and they too dozed off.

Left on their own, the brothers sat by the fire, drinking and whispering.

“I’m right happy you got to meet Delia,” Duck said to Dirk. “I mean I would’ve told you all ’bout ’er and all but I never could have painted the right picture. She ’elped me get through my spell there. She was kind to me, very kind indeed. At first I had a good fright at all the strange things, though I did get more than accustomed to the excellent grub and the soft bed and the fancy clothes and the cartoon vids, which I must tell you about, and the things what you sit upon to crap. There was only one thing I missed.”

“What was that?” Dirk asked.

“Why it were you, you old sod. I missed you something awful.”

Dirk beamed and poured his brother more beer. “Well, you got me back and I got you back too.”

Dirk took the first watch but it had been an exhausting day and his resolve was limited. Soon enough he was snoring away beside Duck. There was no warning when the door burst open and soldiers with torches crammed inside.

Delia was the first to wake and she shouted out in alarm rousting Arabel and the brothers but there was nothing anyone could do but cower.

The soldiers stared at the beds and began murmuring in amazement.

The last to enter the hut was the man who had cried at the sight of the children and it was clear enough he had been the one who rode off in search of a reward.

“I told you it was so, I told you,” the man said to the captain of the guard. “There’s the living women and there’s the children. I still can’t believe my eyes. Children.”

“I swear I’ll have your ’ead on a spit,” Duck hissed at the man. “It’ll be just desserts for treachery.”

“I want protection for what I done,” the man told the captain. “Arrest the brothers. Don’t let them return to the village.”

The captain tossed a couple of coins at the man and told him to protect himself. The coins bounced off his chest. He stooped to gather them up and ran out into the night.

Delia and Arabel stood protectively in front of the children’s bed. Sam and Belle were still sound asleep under an animal skin.

“Please leave them be,” Duck implored.

Dirk saw him glancing at the fire poker and warned him off. “Duck. Don’t. I only just got you back. I need you to stay with me. Understand?”

“I’m sorry, Delia,” Duck said mournfully. “You’ll ’ave to go with them.”

“Come along,” the captain said. “Wake the little ones and bring ‘em along or we will.”

Arabel couldn’t hold it back. She began to cry.

“Where are you taking us?” Delia demanded.

“Don’t be asking questions,” the captain warned.

“I know where you’re going,” Dirk said. “It’s to …”

“Not another word,” the captain said. “Or you’ll be finding yourself in a rotting room missing large bits of your body.”

By the light of the torches Delia searched Duck’s face. He seemed to be struggling to find something to say that wasn’t going to land them all in greater peril but he wasn’t finding the words. Finally he pushed forward, saying he wanted to give Delia a good-bye kiss. Before a soldier pulled him away and tossed him to the floor he managed to whisper in her ear, “I know where they’ll take you. When they come, I’ll tell them where you are. You can count on good old Duck.”

A hospital room was an unusual venue for a strategy meeting but all the participants acknowledged there was no such thing as a conventional place to plan a journey to Hell. John took the meeting sitting in a recliner hooked up to his IV antibiotics. Emily and Trevor sat on the bed. Ben Wellington pulled up a visitor’s chair.

John had spent the opening minutes listening to Trevor vouch for Ben as a “good bloke” and “one of us” and learning how they had tracked and captured Brandon Woodbourne. But he wasn’t going to automatically warm to the fellow on a testimonial. He didn’t like the public schoolboy types who ascended the ranks of the British security services. He’d met a boatload of them when he headed up security at the US Embassy in London. If an operative wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool soldier, he had trouble getting John’s respect. But despite this he quickly warmed to Ben. He found him smart and straightforward, lacking the dreaded air of superiority and omniscience that, as far as he was concerned, permeated the ranks of MI5 and MI6.

“You’ll do,” John finally said with a thumbs-up.

“That’s a relief,” Ben said, mock-wiping sweat from his brow. “I feel rather sheepish that the three of you are heroically volunteering for this mission and I’ll be staying behind minding the store. If it weren’t for my wife and children …”

“No excuses necessary,” John said. “Someone’s got to round up the Hellers. I don’t trust Trotter to do it.”

“He seemed awful,” Emily said.

“Slimy bastard,” John agreed.

“Want to know his nickname?” Trevor asked.

Ben lightly protested that he’d told Trevor in confidence but Trevor brushed him off with a laugh and revealed it.

“Perfect,” Emily giggled. “Fits like a glove.”

Reaching for a pad he’d been scribbling on, John launched into the planning. “Okay, I’ve been thinking about things we can do to get prepared. We need currency, something of value to trade for. Information, cooperation, you name it. We know we can’t bring metal or synthetics with us. All we have is what we can carry in our heads.”

“Fortunately, John possessed quite a handy knowledge of metallurgy and munitions,” Emily said.

“How’d that work out?” Trevor asked.

“Whatever knowledge I had was good for barter,” John said. “I remembered how to design a nineteenth-century cannon which outperformed the ones they had. I remembered that Swedish iron ore made the best steel. I jerry-rigged hand grenades to detonate with a flint striker. It was enough to give us leverage here and there. But with preparation we can do a lot better.”