Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [20]
I stayed on a bench at the stern for most of the crossing. The smoke from the funnel blew back over it, dropping a rain of ash and smuts, but it was worth the smuts to know that none of the fashionable passengers would walk there. Strangely, though, one came quite close. It was towards the end of the crossing, dark by then, with some travellers standing at the rails to watch as the lamplit windows round Dover harbour came closer. A woman in a travelling cloak walked slowly in my direction, though not seeing me. Her head was bent and she seemed thoughtful or dejected. Then a shower of red sparks came out of the funnel and a man called from behind her.
‘Be careful, Celia.’
‘I’m quite all right, Stephen. Why can’t you leave me alone?’
A voice with an attractive lisp. In spite of her protest to her brother, she turned obediently, still without seeing me. When she was safely gone I whispered into the darkness, ‘Thank you, Celia.’
CHAPTER SIX
We’d slowed down for some reason towards the end of the journey, so the packet didn’t tie up at Dover until the dark hours of the morning. Tired passengers filed down the gangplank into a circle of light cast by oil lamps round the landing stage. A two-horse carriage was waiting for Celia and her family. It whirled away as soon as they were inside, so they must have left servants to bring on the luggage.
With no reason to hurry, I disembarked with the last group of passengers, ordinary people with no carriages to meet them. Beyond the circle of light was a shadowed area of piled-up packing cases and huge casks. I felt as wary as a cat in a strange yard, half expecting Trumper or the fat man to step out and accost me, not quite believing I’d managed to leave them on the far side of the Channel. I walked along the dark seafront, listening for footsteps behind me but hearing nothing. There were very few people about, even the taverns were closed. When I turned into a side street, a few sailors were lying senseless on the doorsteps and my shoe soles slipped in the pools of last night’s indulgence. An old woman, so bent that her chin almost touched the pavement, scavenged for rags in the gutter, disturbing a great rat that ran across the pavement in front of me into a patch of lamplight from a window. It was holding a piece of black crepe in its teeth. The old woman made a grab for it but missed and the rat darted on, trailing its prize, a mourning band from a hat or sleeve. The lamplight fell on the arm of one of the horizontal sailors, and I saw that he too was wearing a mourning band.
‘Has somebody died?’ I asked the rag woman.
I had to stoop down to hear her reply, from toothless gums, ‘The king.’
She was adding something else, hard to make out. Itty icky? I made sense of it at the third try.
‘Oh yes, so it’s Little Vicky.’
William’s niece, Victoria Alexandrina, a round-faced girl of eighteen, now Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and a large part of the globe besides. So a reign had ended and another begun while I’d been in Calais. It seemed less important than the coldness of my toes through the stocking holes.
I walked, sat on the sea wall then walked again, until it was around six in the morning and I could show myself at the Heart of Oak. It had a new black bow on the door knocker.
‘You again,’ the landlord said, bleary eyed.
I collected my bag that I’d left in his keeping, secured my cheap side room again and requested a pot of tea, carried up by the same maid who’d brought me water to wash my hair on that Sunday morning, when I’d been so pleased with myself, not quite three days ago, but another lifetime. I slept for a couple of hours then put my head out of the room as another maid