The American Boy (55 page)

I eased the pencil gently from the pocket. There was still a point on it, albeit a blunt one. I looked wildly round the room for something to write on. My eyes returned at last to the corpse. I touched a corner of his hat gently with my finger. It did not move. I took a grip with both hands and lifted it, hoping I might find a label attached to the band. The wig rose a few inches and then parted company with the hat and fell back on to the bald skull, sending up a puff of dust. The movement dislodged a few yellow flakes which drifted down to Mr Iversen Senior's shoulders.

I glanced inside the hat and discovered that it had been wedged on to the head with scraps of paper. All were brittle, some had crumbled, but a few were still whole. I picked out the largest fragment and gently unfolded it. It was a receipted bill, attesting to the fact that Francis Corker, a butcher, had received the sum of seventeen shillings and three pence three farthings from Mr Adolphus Iversen on the 9th of June 1807. The other side of the receipt was blank.

I smoothed out the paper on the windowsill, holding down one corner with the platter and most of one side with what was left of the cheese. I would not have believed it possible to write with one's hands tied, but desperation is a fine teacher. Letter by letter, word by word, I scrawled this message:

I pushed the window as wide as it would go. Mary Ann still sat smoking, her face turned away from the house. I heard voices below, though whether from the yard near the house or through an open window or door I could not tell; in any case, I dared not call out to attract her attention. I tried waving my bound arms from side to side, standing as close as I could to the window, in the hope that the movement would register at the edge of her vision. Then, to my horror, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and approaching along the landing.

I had nothing to lose. I pushed my arms through the bars and let the note flutter from my fingers. As I did so, Mary Ann turned her head, perhaps attracted by a burst of laughter or a sudden movement from the door to the back kitchen. As she turned, she saw me and her eyes widened. The paper fluttered from my fingers and her eyes followed its fall.

The key turned in the lock. The door burst open. The man who had left me tied to the window shouldered his way into the room. His bloodshot eyes roved swiftly over the room, taking in the changes that had occurred since his departure. He lurched across the floor and gave me a backhanded blow that sent me sprawling across the coffin.

“Get back in there, you God-damned swab.” The words were harsh but he spoke in a whisper, as if he were afraid of being overheard, that his dereliction of duty might be discovered. “In there, I say.”

He bent down and manhandled me back into the coffin, cramming me in so I lay awkwardly on my side. He pushed my head down, catching my nose on the wood, and the blood began to flow. I heard him scurrying around the room in his heavy boots. I raised myself on an elbow. He restored the wig and the hat on to the corpse's head, sending up another cloud of dust as he did so. He did not notice the pencil. He looked out of the window, but saw nothing there to cause him anxiety.

As he turned away, however, he knocked against the outstretched left leg of the corpse. The blow dislodged the dead man's gloved hand from his thigh. There was an audible crackling sound, like tearing cloth. It was not much of a movement, but enough for the hand to hang down below the seat of the chair.

One would expect an embalmed body to be rigid. It was only some time later that I realised the significance of the movement, of the fact that it was possible when so little force had been brought to bear. The rigidity of the limb in question had already been broken. The first time, it had not been an accident.

At first, my captor did not realise what he had done. He felt the blow, of course, and turned back, looking askance at Mr Iversen, Senior as though he suspected the old man of hitting him.

The glove was slipping downwards. It was clearly much larger than the hand – perhaps the latter had shrunk – and it fell to the ground, leaving the hand beneath exposed. I saw yellowing, waxy skin, long nails, and spots of what looked like ink on the fingers. In some corner of my mind, some corner that remained remote from my present anxieties, I knew I had observed something very similar to that hand before. Then, my vision clearing, I saw with the kind of clarity which is almost like a physical pain that the top joints of the forefinger were missing. All at once I remembered the tavern in Charlotte-street, and the contents of Mr Poe's satchel on the scrubbed table top, and the maid's gasp of shock.

A rare specimen of
digitus mortuus praecisus
, lent me by the professor himself. Except that now it was no longer quite so rare.

That night the men who had brought me to Queen-street re-enacted the grim charade of the morning, this time under the supervision of Mr Iversen. His presence miraculously sobered them. As they were about to nail the lid, he waved them away from the coffin, and peered down at me.

“Pray do not disturb yourself,” he said. “It is only for an hour or so. Try to rest, eh? To sleep, Mr Shield: perchance to dream, eh?”

He gave a signal, and the men nailed the coffin lid, the hammer blows pounding through me like artillery fire. They took me down the stairs and loaded the coffin on to the conveyance, presumably the one that had brought me here, waiting in the street. We drove away, moving much more quickly at this time of night, despite the darkness. At first I heard the noise of the streets, albeit very faintly, and once I distinguished the cry of a watchman calling the hour. Gradually these sounds died away, and we picked up speed.

We had two horses, I thought, and to judge by the smoothness of the ride we were travelling on a turnpike road. This suggested they were taking me either north or west because to go east or south would have meant a longer, slower journey through the streets. Sometimes the rumbling of wagons penetrated my wooden prison, and I guessed they formed part of the night-time caravans bringing food and fuel into the ever-hungry belly of the metropolis.

That journey was a form of death, a foretaste of hell. My wrists and knees were still bound; and I had been gagged again and wedged in place with my hat and boots. To be deprived of sight, of movement, of the power of action, even of grounds for hope – all this is to be reduced to a state that is very nearly that of non-existence. As I jolted along in that coffin there were times when I would have given anything, even Sophie, even my own life, to be transformed into an inanimate object like a sack of potatoes or a heap of rocks, to be incapable of feeling and fearing.

My discomfort grew worse when we left the turnpike road and jounced along rutted lanes with many sharp bends, as fast as the driver dared. At one point our conveyance lurched violently to the left and came to a sudden halt that set the unsecured coffin sliding forwards and sideways until it, too, came to a stop with an impact which left me more bruised than ever. I guessed that our nearside wheels had fallen into the ditch along the side of the road. I prayed that we had broken a wheel or an axle – anything to increase my chance of rescue. Alas, a few minutes later we were on our way again.

The first indication I had that we were nearing our journey's end came when the surface beneath the wheels changed to hard, bone-shaking cobbles. We slowed, swung to the right and stopped. The cessation of movement should have been a relief to me: instead it increased my awareness of my plight. However I tried, I could not make out what was going on around me. I grew colder and colder. My body was racked with spasms of cramp.

Desperate for air, for light, I hammered on the lid of the coffin, on the roof of my tiny cell. A memory came to my mind, of lying wounded in the dark, crushed by the weight of a dead horse, on the field of Waterloo: and I screamed as past and present glided like lovers into an indissoluble embrace. Panic was a creature in the coffin with me, an old ghost who would smother me if I let him. I fought him, forcing myself to breathe more slowly, to unclench my muscles.

There came a muffled crash, which sent a tremor through my wooden world. The coffin was dragged out of the vehicle. I heard crashes and bangs. Nausea rose in my gorge. The coffin pitched forward. I plunged feet first down a steep slope and came to rest, still at an angle, with a jolt that was worse than any I had previously experienced. But I had no time to recover, for the coffin moved again, twisting round and then descending with another shattering blow to a horizontal position.

A crowbar dug into the join between lid and coffin. The nails rose from the wood. I saw the first glimmer of light I had seen for hours. It came from a pair of flickering tallow candles yet to me, for a moment, those candles were brighter than a pair of suns. By their light, I made out two huge shadows looming over the coffin, which had been placed on the floor. Above me was a lattice-work of joists and floorboards. There was a deafening clatter as the lid was cast aside.

I tried to sit up and found my limbs would not answer. A man laughed, and the familiar smell of gin assailed my nostrils. I managed to pull myself up so my head at least was out of the coffin. I was in what seemed to be a low cellar with walls of brick. I recognised my captors as Mr Iversen's men, each with a candle in his hand. One of them stooped and picked up the crowbar. The other pulled out the gag. Then, ignoring me, they scuttled like black beetles up a steep flight of open wooden stairs to a trap-door.

“Sirs,” I croaked. “I beg you, for God's sake leave me a candle. Tell me what this place is.”

One of them paused, the one who had removed the gag. He glanced back. “You'll not need a candle, mate,” he said. “Not where you're going.”

The other laughed. A moment later the trap-door slammed down, leaving me once more alone in the darkness.

But not quite as before: I was no longer pinned motionless in a box. I could not doubt that they had brought me to this lonely spot in order to kill me. But at least I could make their job difficult.

There followed one of the most exquisitely painful experiences of my life. I threw out my hat and boots to give myself more room. Slowly I hauled myself to a sitting position. Clinging to the side of the coffin, I raised myself up to a crouch. I swayed from left to right with increasing vigour until I had achieved enough momentum to pitch myself inelegantly out of the coffin. Sobbing with pain, I lay huddled on my side on what felt like damp and filthy flagstones.

Gradually I straightened up, as uncertain as a child taking his first steps, until I attained a kneeling position. I found my boots and managed to put them on. My situation was almost as bleak as before. I feared that I had merely exchanged one prison for another, albeit a larger one. I examined it as well as I could in the darkness, which was not easy bearing in mind the fact that I was still bound at the knees and at the wrists. I paid particular attention to the stairs and to the trap-door. The latter was close-fitting but I believed I could discern a trace of light at one corner. I tried to heave it up with my shoulders but it would not budge.

When I stepped back from the stairs, I trod on something that seemed to snatch at my foot. With a muffled cry I sprang away and there was a clatter on the floor, as though there were an equally terrified animal in the cellar with me. Reason came immediately to my aid. The sole of my left boot had caught on the point of a nail protruding from the upturned lid of the coffin.

I knelt down and with cold, clumsy hands swept the floor until I found the lid. I ran my hand along its edge, touching the sharp points and the squared edges of the tapering nails. There were six of them in all. I brought my bound wrists down on the nearest one and began to saw.

I scarcely knew what drove me. In the conscious part of my mind I had already half-surrendered to whatever fate had in store for me. But there was another, deeper part of my being that continued to struggle. It was this that drove me to ignore my aching knees and my bleeding arms; to rub and hack at the cord that bound my wrists with the tips and sides of the nails.

I had no means of measuring the time. It might have been an hour before I felt the first strand part. For a time, this pushed me on to work with renewed vigour, but it was another age before I felt another strand give. I sawed the cord against the edges of the nails, I poked their iron points into the knot and worked it to and fro, and sometimes I merely snarled and tore at my bonds with my teeth, hoping if they were not vulnerable to one method then they would be to another.

I was in so much pain from the chafing of my skin and the many times I had accidentally dashed a nail against my arm rather than the cord that I barely noticed when the rope gave way. My hands flew apart. I sat back on my heels and wept, raising my arms and stretching them as far behind me as I could, as if I were arching a pair of wings. I looked up as I did so, and for the first time glimpsed a crack of light filtering between the boards. The night was ending.

I drove myself to work at the knot that bound my knees, which had been previously inaccessible to me, since it was at the back. I could not use the nails for this, and my hands were feeble. I had hardly begun when I heard footsteps above my head.

I hobbled quickly to the stairs and slumped on the floor against the wall near the foot of the stairs. A bolt was drawn. With a creak, the trap-door rose and fell back against a wall. Light flooded into the cellar. The day was more advanced than I had thought. Heavy footsteps descended the stairs.

A hand fell on my shoulder and shook me. With all the strength I was capable of, I spun round, straightening my knees, and jabbed my outstretched fingers at the face of the man looming over me. He gave a shriek, for one of my nails had caught his eye, stepped back incautiously and tripped over the coffin. I hauled myself up the stairs towards the rectangle of light with the fallen man screaming imprecations behind me.