Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [56]
"Jee-zuss," said Miss McThane. "You idiot." She gave Scape a final glower before adjusting her wrap about her shoulders and resuming her interrupted slumber.
When the morning light broke over the horizon some time later, there was no longer any sign of our pursuers; they had vanished as though they had been but animate fragments of the ebbing darkness. From the carriage's window I looked out on to a passing landscape of remarkable cheerlessness and foetidity. The rising sun glinted red across weed-choked marshland. At irregular spacing though these fens, the rounded hillocks of high ground supported a few stunted, crookbranched trees and decaying hovels. Thin-shanked pigs rooted though mud distinguishable from the surrounding countryside only by intervening walls of rough stone, shaggy with ancient moss. A figure in the distance, blurred by the mists drifting up from the stagnant waters, toiled with stick along one of the muddy paths winding through the mires.
The thick, musky odour of rotting vegetation prompted me to draw my head back into the carriage. Scape looked at my appalled expression with some amusement. "Great place, ain't it?" he said with a thin smile.
I made no reply. The carriage slowed down, and I saw that we had entered a small village. Low buildings, some appearing to have subsided so far into the muck that their thatched eaves nearly touched the ground, squatted around an open space. At its centre, marked by a well that was little more than a circle of stones outlining a crumbling hole and a slanting cross-beam with bucket and rope attached, a ragged cluster of the locals stood about.
"Where is this?" My spirits, already drained by the rigours of the long journey, were further oppressed by this picture of rural squalor.
"The scenic village of Dampford," said Scape. "These poor slobs are all Bendray's tenants. His Hall is just a little further on."
As I gazed out, the carriage's wheels spattered mud across the backs of the clustered villagers. Some of them turned, tugging at their caps in respectful deference. I saw their faces and fell back against the seat, horrified. "God in Heaven!" I faintly heard Scape's and Miss McThane's mocking laughter.
The faces of the Dampford villagers were the same exophthalmic, slope-browed visages as those of the residents of that London borough called Wetwick.
The piscine physiognomies swam in my vision, those from out of the memory of that nocturnal ordeal in the city's depths merging with their apparent brethren gaping after the carriage. There could be little doubt that I had been transported to the native soil – or marsh – from which this enigmatic and ugly race had sprung. And what of Bendray, their landlord? He was not of their blood, yet he maintained some manner of proprietary concern over their cousins in distant London – I had noted the paternal expansiveness in his welcoming of them to the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe. A shiver descended the vertebral ladder between my shoulder blades as I mulled over these affairs – the faces of the Wetwick and Dampford broods had become inextricable fixtures of my nightmares, and here I had found myself amongst them yet again.
The squalid village fell behind as the road began to ascend. I pressed myself into the corner of the seat, my thoughts obscuring the sodden view as I grimly contemplated the possible explanations for my journey hither.
"Dower – how good of you to come. Yes; yes, most welcome. There's so much we have to discuss. Much, much… indeed."
Lord Bendray himself had come down the wide stone steps to the carriage in order to greet us. He clasped my hand in both of his and held it with the tender, if trembling, regard due to a long-lost relation. His rheumy eyes peered at me without benefit of the lenses of the complicated magnifying spectacles pushed up on to his brow; he had evidently been engaged in some scientific endeavour when his manservant had brought the news of our arrival. A similar