Mr. Timothy: A Novel (37 page)

Philomela has used the interval to wrap herself in the comforter I brought along--Father's comforter. Not too far removed from the garb in which I first saw her, prowling through the courtyard. But tonight...a function, perhaps, of her newly coiffed hair and scrubbed face...the way she listens, without falter or flicker, as I delineate the plan...tonight she has the air of something antique and vanished.

She stumbles slightly on the shreds of her dress as she quits the cab, but she rebuffs our proffered arms, pulls the comforter a bit closer round her neck and waits as Colin gathers up the knapsack.

We are about to set off when a new thought occurs to me. I run round to the back of the cab. I tap the driver's boots and whisper into the air.

--If you were to have a notion to turn us over to the police, Adolphus, I'm afraid I should have to name you as our accomplice. It would be unfortunate, it would be disagreeable, but you would leave me with no choice.

Shades of the prison-house gather round his already shrouded face. He nods roughly and, with an irritable jerk, strikes a match to light his lantern. That task discharged, he takes the reins and grunts:

--Off we go.

It is hard to say who moves at a more rapid clip, the cab or the three of us, darting down the far side of Portland Place. Alongside us, the horse's hooves sound strangely muffled against the pavement, and around us, the fog grows heavier and heavier with our breathing. It is as if we were all respiring from the same lung, and this lung oscillates faster and faster as the cab inches down the road ahead of us...works faster still as the cab slows...then squeezes shut entirely as Adolphus's voice, strained to an unnaturally hearty pitch, rings through the night air.

--Sorry, Officer. Off duty.

A rough voice answers back.

--Wait a bit. You taken any fares recently?

--Not for two hours past.

--This is official business, now.

--'Course it is.

--We're looking for three persons: man, boy, 'n' girl. The girl'd be in a white dress.

--Ain't seen 'em, officers. That last statement sounds, to my ears, a bit too rushed, too prepared, and the ensuing silence seems to crackle with suspicion. There we stand, the hunted party--frozen on the opposite side of the street perhaps thirty feet from our pursuers--and the only thing still pulsing is our skin: our chapped hands, the puckered pomegranate surface of Philomela's bare foot, all of it prickling with dread.

The policeman clears his throat, a long, luxuriant rasp.

--All right, carry on, then.

That's as much as Adolphus needs to hear.

--'Night to all!

We hear his fierce "Gedya!", we hear the cab's wheels turn half a revolution...and then we hear another man's voice.

--Stay where you are.

A sickeningly familiar voice. The silence stretches round it, and in this anticipatory moment, the smallest expressions stand out as clearly as the most florid oratory: Colin's teeth grinding in rhythm; Philomela's hands reaching for her absent beads....

And now, of a sudden, it seems intolerable, worse than intolerable, to stop here for another second. We must run. We must run and keep running until the last dram of oxygen has leached from our blood.

It is a hard matter, though, to convince the other two. Without benefit of words, I can only tug on their sleeves--with a gentle persuasion at first, and then a brute force when that fails to answer. And even when they are at last tramping alongside me, their heads keep wheeling back towards Adolphus, as though they might by dint of concentration rescue him from his plight.

In short order, we arrive at the promised intersection. A true crossroads, if ever there was one: Colin and Philomela, still inclining their heads back; me casting my eyes forward; everything else compassless.

And then, like the alighting cry of a raven, comes Adolphus's high, nerve-strangled call:

--Thank you, Officer. Good night, I'm sure, Officer.

The relief of it is almost more than we can bear. Colin's mouth twitches upwards, and Philomela's shoulders unclench, and even the cab itself, as it approaches us, seems to move at a lighter, easier clip, its iron wheels slicking across the wet stones, its lantern bouncing for joy.

Only Adolphus fails to enter into the general merriment. His head is bowed sulkily over the reins, and he is mumbling truculent sentiments to his knees, and when I ask if he will take us back to Piccadilly, he waves us in with a fretful swipe of his hand.

--
Grr, blff, mmrr
.

This is what we have reduced him to. No remonstrance, no litany--just consonants. It will take a handsome sum indeed to restore those soliloquies of woe.

But that, after all, is the least of our worries. We are back in our cab, with Philomela perched rather awkwardly on our knees, and every hoofbeat takes us farther from Griffyn Hall and closer to our future. And as Adolphus bears right and then right again, back towards the center of town, all of London seems to clear a path for us.

It scarcely matters now that the seat chafes, that Philomela's elbow is jabbing my ribs, that Colin's knee knocks against mine. An uncanny serenity has stolen over me, as if we have left this city altogether and passed onto a smoky plain that grows more expansive the more we consider it.

And in this new environment, the whole prospect of the future loses its sinister air and begins to assume entirely new forms, forms not yet fully decipherable but enticing nonetheless. This much is evident: in some fashion, and half against our will, Philomela and Colin and I have thrown in our lots together. And if tonight is any indication, we are more powerful jointly than singly, and that being the case, why need we ever part again? Better, surely, to join hands against all obstacles, spurning Society's outstretched arm, drawing only on our native craft and will.

And if this prospect be a dream, why, pray, does it resonate more powerfully than the phantom obstacles raised against it?

Income
. Behold, I have two strong arms. My companions, the same. Among us, we may certainly scratch out a sufficient living in the modern economy. We may even be the engine of its transformation.

Food
. Every corner of London teems with meat and fish and produce. What we cannot procure through money, we will procure otherwise. What we cannot procure, we will do without.

Shelter
. Why, that is the most easily arranged of all: Mrs. Sharpe's. And if her lodgings fail to satisfy, we will move on to the next place, even if it means residing on God's green earth. The stars will be our lantern, the sun our clock, the grass our pillow. We will wake with the dew on our lashes and the wind's breath in our nostrils, and we will give thanks for each new day that drops in our laps and for the strength to embrace it in all its plenitude.

In all
our
plenitude. That is theme that resounds most clearly in my mind. We have no need of anyone else.
There is no need
! We will fortify ourselves. We will hold the world at bay, till the end of our days, if necessary. Welcome to the Cratchit family, present and future.

Ah, it is pretty, yes? My little soothsaying vision--most pretty and most fragile, too! See how quickly it evaporates at the first touch of reality: Colin's head flopping back against the seat; Philomela's unnaturally hard face, her dry, sleepless eyes.

And this, too. This square of white lace, protruding from the India-rubber matting beneath our feet.
Unmistakable in its provenance: a fragment of Philomela's dress, torn off as she left the cab. We were in too great a haste to notice it, of course, but surely no one else--no one who gave the cab even the most cursory inspection--could have failed to see it. Or to guess its origins.

And just then, Colin's voice filters into my ear.

--Mr. Timothy.

--Yes?

--Ain't we back in Portland Place?

Strange to think we are
anywhere
at present. The fog has transformed every house-front into a fading fresco. And yet there is something direfully familiar about this
space
--this feeling of grandiloquent silence on all sides. Either we have left London altogether or we are back again on London's widest street.

And that nugatory patch of grey--just ahead on the left--is either an empty parcel of land or the commanding front lawn of Griffyn Hall.

I don't know why it is that every sensation of alarm should be smothered in its rising. I think it must all go back to Adolphus. The notion that
Adolphus
could turn the cab all the way round and bring us straight back to our starting point, without our ever noticing: that's quite beyond his capacities, isn't it? And what better proof than this? The first figure to emerge from the fog is Adolphus himself--slumped on the kerb, shorn of cloak and hat and whip, his face tilting upwards at the sound of our approaching wheels, and a curious lightness enveloping his features: not relief but a kind of diabolical corroboration. Everything he most feared is at last coming true with a vengeance. He couldn't be happier.

I bolt upright in my seat, I leap out onto the dashboard and hoist myself up by the brass rein guide and pop my head above the compartment roof. And there, in the chiaroscuro of lantern light and fog, sits our driver--head no longer bent, eyes now fixed on a point just to my right, his voice calling out in that loud, unutterably familiar timbre:

--Now!

From every side, gesticulating black shapes swarm towards us, but in this frozen interval, they are but shadows, and only two things impress me with the fixity of truth: the terrible, erect form of Willie the Slasher atop our cab, and the flying, quicksilver form of young Colin, who, understanding our circumstances better than I, has already abandoned the comfort of his seat and hurled himself straight onto the horse's back.

It is the rashest of all possible acts--so crazed, so foolhardy that the converging shapes halt in a kind of stupefied admiration, and even Rebbeck loosens his grip on the reins.

--Hee-yaa! cries Colin.--Hee-yaa!

Seizing the horse by its harness, he pounds its flanks, kicks its arse, and heaps curses in its ear...until the horse pushes through to the other side of its confusion...whinnies and stomps and half rears and then bursts forth in a stream of outrage.
The acceleration is so sharp I am thrown back into the cab's interior, and as I scramble to my feet, I can see, on our periphery, the black shapes shouting and falling back--all but one, a small man with a bare head, pumping his arms manfully and staying abreast of us for a good ten or fifteen yards until the horse, goaded beyond endurance by its human gadfly, lets loose with another burst of speed and leaves our pursuer sinking to his knees in the street.

Past Griffyn Hall we fly, past all the neighbouring houses, past every intersection in turn...our horse no longer hewing to any particular route but flying as fast as the atmosphere will allow, and Colin lying flat as a jockey, chiding the animal on in a remorseless rhythm-- the two of them now a compound organism, punishing and responding in equal measure--and the cab behind them rattling like loose teeth against the cobblestones, tossing and buffeting its passengers so violently that the normal laws of physics seem indefinitely suspended.

The wheels jump and kick against the stones, straining against their own axles. And in some demarcated realm of my mind, I ask myself if any hansom cab has ever gone quite this fast before and, if so, for how long.

Then I hear the crack of a whip, and I look out just in time to see Colin clutch the back of his leg: a simple act that costs him all his precarious balance. Groaning, he slides off his mount-- tips half over--and were it not for the last-minute interference of the harness, he might tip off altogether, and even so, he lies there, trapped on the horse's side, a mere three feet from the pavement, hooves thundering in his ear.

From above, another lash descends, and though Colin ducks clear, the horse is not so lucky: the whip lands with an audible slap on its rump, and the animal, stung to the quick, unleashes yet another burst of speed, dragging the cab after it, and Colin can do nothing but lie pressed against the horse's side, his hair frothing with wind, his arms and knees drawn to his chest, waiting, with agonised resignation, for whatever may come next.

At that very moment, the solution to Colin's plight presents itself to me: we must give our driver fresh game.

And who better than I?

Simply managed, as it turns out. I need but push my head through the reins until I am squarely in Rebbeck's line of vision.

The first lash takes my cap clean off my head. The second catches me in the shoulder, and as I put out a remonstrating arm, the third bisects the palm of my hand.

The pain is indistinguishable from the sensation of wetness: a slow leak of blood, seeping down the wrist and burning as it passes, so that I am perfectly astonished to hold my arm aloft and find my hand still attached to it.

The relief will be short-lived, I can tell. Once again Rebbeck has raised the whip, and his face has acquired the stoniness of an idol, and his arm pauses at its apogee as if it were gathering all its powers for one final, apocalyptic blow. I shut my eyes to the doom, but the sound that jars them open again is something else altogether: a tiny explosion in the roof of the cab, as a trap door--never before suspected--bursts open to reveal Philomela, defiantly interposing her head between me and Rebbeck's whip.

--
Vaffanculo
! she cries. A pretty rage indeed, but what impresses me most is how coolly she has calculated her risk. She understands, doesn't she, the dilemma she has created for our man Rebbeck. He may strike Colin and me as long as he likes, till there is not a lick of flesh left on our bones, but Philomela? Mar that head, and he will be answerable to his employer.