Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Webb stiffened slightly. ‘It’s what folk sometimes call rum.’

‘The captain of the ship that took Mary and Arthur Sobers to London overheard them talking, reckoned it was some kind of code.’

‘A code?’ Webb offered him a cool stare. ‘For what?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you.’

Webb continued to look at him, perhaps about to speak, but something changed his mind and he replaced the bottle in his knapsack and told Pyke they needed to get going.

The rain was light and patchy for the rest of the afternoon and they trudged in silence through field after field of mature cane plants. As Harper had predicted, they didn’t see anyone, and after six hours of hard walking, they crossed the Martha Brae river by the stone bridge — just downhill from the great house. It was already dark and the rain had become more persistent. The wind was beginning to howl now, and the palm trees on the track up to the great house were bent over, their fronds sometimes almost touching the ground.

‘I’m afraid this is as far as I go,’ Webb said, pointing at the deserted boiling house. ‘I’ll wait for you in there until morning. If you don’t come by then, I’ll take it you no longer need my help.’

They parted without shaking hands, but as Pyke continued up the track he heard Webb call out, ‘Good luck,’ and then, ‘You’ll need it.’

Pyke had read about tropical storms in books but he had never been caught up in one, nor had he ever expected to be. Still, he had to question his sanity for being outside and indeed for coming back to a place where every sentient male within a ten-mile radius doubtless wanted to hang him from the nearest tree. As he steeled himself against the blasts of wind, and from the rain which was now falling horizontally, he heard a tree trunk snap and looked behind him just in time to see a giant logwood topple on to the track where he’d just been. Farther up the track, a plank of wood whistled past his ear. A rumble of thunder and a sudden crack of lightning followed, suddenly illuminating the great house at the top of the hill. It looked like a mast-less vessel riding on the top of the tallest of waves.

Rather than approach the great house from the main track and risk being spotted, Pyke circumnavigated the hill and climbed up from the other side, so that he finally emerged near the stone counting house. There, he found the hole he’d dug a few days earlier, and the shovel and pickaxe next to it, and carried them up to the counting house. The rain now tasted of salt, as though whole swathes of the sea had been sucked up by the wind and dumped on the mountains. Still, he was a long way past caring about getting wet — he was already soaked through. The wind was now uprooting mature coffee and wild fig trees as though they were made of papier mache, tossing tree branches on to the lawn in front of him as though they weren’t any heavier than toothpicks.

The house itself had taken a terrible battering; the shutters and doors had long since been bolted and fastened but the wind had torn off parts of the roof and shale. Lead slates and even a few timber beams lay strewn across parts of the garden.

Pyke had no idea how he was going to lure Pemberton outside; if indeed he was there at all. He needed to find a way of getting to the man and knocking him unconscious. While he pondered this dilemma, the wind gathered in strength until he heard an earsplitting crack; a palm tree then snapped at its base and cannoned like a battering ram into the great house, puncturing a large hole in the stone and timber wall directly under the veranda.

It was what he’d been waiting for.

Steeling himself against the wind, he staggered out on to the lawn, trying to keep his balance. One gust almost swept him off his feet; another carried a branch of a tree to within a few inches of his head. It took him a few minutes to clear the lawn, but eventually he made it and peered into the lower floor of the house through the hole made by the tree; then he saw a lantern coming towards him and heard footsteps. He hid from view, wrapped his hands around the wooden handle of the shovel and counted to ten. ‘ Busha,’ Pyke called out. It was the name the black workers used for Pemberton.

Pyke swung the shovel through the air and caught the attorney squarely in the face with the metal end. Pemberton went down without a sound. Pyke checked his pulse; his nose might have been smashed and his skull dented by the blow but it hadn’t killed him. He picked up the man’s lantern and carried it up a flight of steps; at the top he opened the door and, as he did so, the wind, which had blown through the hole made by the palm tree, tore into the dining room, ripping paintings from the walls, knocking wineglasses and china plates from the sideboard and almost wrenching the cut-glass chandelier from its fixing. Using his back and putting his whole body into it, Pyke just managed to push the door closed and bolt it from the inside.

He found Charles Malvern and William Alefounder in Malvern’s study. Between them, they had drunk most of a bottle of brandy, and despite the foul conditions outside they seemed quite merry.

‘Do tell, what was that terrible crash, Pemberton?’ Malvern said, without even looking up. His cheeks were glowing from the alcohol he’d consumed. ‘Are we really all going to perish in the storm?’ Perhaps he hadn’t seen or comprehended the damage the storm had done to the great house.

Malvern hadn’t noticed Pyke but Alefounder had. For a moment, Pyke almost felt sorry for the man. Dripping with water, sodden, holding a shovel, Pyke must have been the very last man Alefounder had expected and wanted to see, and he reacted accordingly; his jaw went slack, his eyes bulged, and the colour fell from his cheeks. Alefounder had travelled halfway around the world to escape persecution from a man who had forced his arm into a pot of boiling liquid and now that same man had just walked into the room in the middle of perhaps the worst storm he’d ever witnessed. His teeth began to chatter, his hands trembled and his lips turned blue but in the end, he managed to stammer, ‘ Y…y…you,’ as though this was all that was needed.

It could have been a pleasant scene, Pyke thought as he looked around the room. Old friends getting quietly drunk while the elements wreaked havoc around them.

‘Squires?’ Malvern looked up at him through a fug of alcohol. ‘I thought you… I thought you…’ But he couldn’t finish his sentence.

‘That I was dead? Or that I’d been shot or arrested perhaps? Or that I no longer had any interest in buying Ginger Hill?’

Alefounder cowered in his chair like a whipped dog.

‘Where’s Pemberton?’ Malvern wanted to know.

‘I struck him over the head with this.’ Pyke held up the shovel and said, to Alefounder, ‘Have you told him yet?’

Alefounder looked over at Malvern and shook his head. He looked about as crushed as a man could be. The shutters rattled violently against their jambs but no one took any notice of them.

‘Told me what?’ Malvern put his empty glass down. ‘I demand to know what is going on.’

‘I’m sorry, Charles. I was going to tell you tomorrow, after the storm had passed…’

‘Tell me what, for God’s sake?’

‘That your fiancee is dead,’ Pyke interrupted. ‘She was murdered in London shortly after she arrived there.’ He kept his voice low and hard.

Malvern stared at him, an inane smile plastered on his face. ‘Murdered?’

‘She was strangled and her body dumped near the docks. Her eyeballs had been cut out.’ Pyke looked across at Alefounder to see how he reacted to this last piece of news but the trader’s expression remained glazed and his stare empty. Pyke placed the shovel against the wall.