Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

"Mr Shield?" Harmwell called, and there was a curious intensity, almost excitement, in his tone. "Mr Shield, what have you found?"

"It looks like – like a cartwheel."

"It will serve as the grating for the drain," Harmwell said.

My eyes ran down the length of the body to the circular vacancy, about a yard in diameter, in the middle of the floor. One of the body's feet dangled over it. I bent and touched the long, black coat with the tip of a finger. The man still wore a flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, held to his head by a scarf tied round the chin and now tilted to one side by the impact of the fall.

From the first, I had had a powerful conviction that the man in the pit was dead. Now I saw that he could hardly be anything else: his mouth and nostrils were submerged beneath the watery slush on the floor. As Mr Noak had learnt from the example of his unhappy son, a man may drown in a puddle – that is, if he is not already dead before he goes into it. I moved my hand to the fold of bare skin above the neckcloth. It was like touching a dead, damp, plucked pheasant.

"Is he still breathing?" Harmwell said, his voice now an urgent whisper. "Wait, I'll bring down the lantern."

Nausea burned in my throat. "God damn it, of course he's not breathing."

Hobnails scraped on the iron rungs. The light swung to and fro: and for an instant my mind was adrift from its moorings, as it had been in the days when they quietened me with laudanum, and I thought that the pit itself was swaying, not the lantern, that this entire chamber was like a cold bird's cage covered with a blanket and swinging from side to side over a dark void. The black shape of the body receded into shadow, and then burst into view again.

Ayez peur, the bird said in Seven Dials. Ayez peur.

I was full of fear for all of us now, and most especially for Sophie.

"Poor fellow." Harmwell held the lantern over the upper part of the body. "We must turn him over."

We bent over the corpse. I took hold of its left shoulder and upper arm, and Harmwell clasped a massive hand round its hip and thigh. We pulled. It did not move. The wet, inert body seemed an immense weight. We pulled harder and at last the slush sucked and heaved as it gave up its burden. The body fell with a splash on to its back. Harmwell and I sprang up. There was a moment's silence, apart from the slapping and rustling of the disturbed water. The light from the lanterns fell on the face.

"No," I said. "No, no, no."

"No what?" Harmwell rasped in my ear.

No, it was not Henry Frant lying there. Instead it was the woman who had loved him.

"It is imperative that we find the boys," I said as I followed Harmwell up the ladder.

He was standing by the inner door into the passage. "You know their haunts better than I. If you wish, I will stay here to guard the corpse."

"We shall find the boys more quickly if we both look. And when we find them, they may need help."

"True." Harmwell's face was in shadow. "On the other hand, we can hardly leave Mrs Johnson unguarded. It would not be fitting."

"She will not mind, sir, not now. The boys are more important. We must search by the ruins."

His persistence in the matter puzzled me, even with the boys' safety weighing on my mind. I remembered what the foreman had told me the previous morning about the blocked drain of the icehouse, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that this was one of the few nights of the year when the building would not only be unlocked but empty - in other words, with its floor and the sump below easily accessible. Was it possible that the same thought had occurred to my companion?

I pushed past him and walked down the passage to the outer doorway. The events of this terrible night were not over. The poisoned mastiff and the clang of the mantrap were fresh in my memory. Harmwell followed me into the open air.

"The poor lady has gone beyond all mortal harm," he observed in his deep preacher's voice. "You are in the right of it – we must look to the living."

We picked our way slowly down the defile and reached the path along the bank of the lake. Here we made better speed. Every few paces one of us would call the boys' names, Harmwell's great booming bass mingling with my baritone. At last we attained the crest of the ridge that sloped down towards the ruins and Grange Cottage beyond. The smothering weight of the darkness lay heavily on the sleeping land. To our left was the dense shadow of East Cover.

"Stay," Harmwell said. "Did you hear? Call again."

A moment later, I heard it too – a high, faint response to our shouts, coming from somewhere below. Careless of danger, we stumbled and slithered down the snowy slope. As I plunged into the dark, I remembered the bright, cold afternoon of St Stephen's Day when Sophie and I had run together towards the boys.

A single voice called repeatedly: "Here, sir! Here!"

We found the boys huddled in the lee of the tallest part of the ruins. They had found shelter in a recess made by a blocked doorway. Snow had drifted over their lower legs. Charlie was slumped at the back of the niche, and Edgar held him in his arms.

"Oh, sir," said the little American through chattering teeth, "I am so glad – Charlie was so distressed – and then he fell asleep – and I thought I should fetch help, but I did not like to leave him and I did not know which way to go."

"You did quite right. Mr Harmwell, I suggest we wrap them like a pair of parcels, and carry them home."

Charlie stirred as we moved him and began to whimper. We covered him with the spare cloak. I took off my coat and draped it round Edgar. We gave both the boys a drop of brandy and then swallowed rather more ourselves. Then, groaning with the effort, I lifted Edgar on to my back; Harmwell lifted Charlie; and we began the slow, infinitely laborious climb up the slope.

I knew that our troubles were not over. Our best course was to aim for the mansion-house, for who knew what we might find at Grange Cottage? But it would not be easy to carry the boys for the better part of a mile, especially in this weather. As we were encumbered with our burdens, we could not use the lanterns to their best advantage. I was worried about the boys, too, in particular Charlie, who seemed barely conscious of what was happening, and the thought of frostbite was never very far from my mind.

As we reached the brow of the ridge, however, I heard the sound of hallooing voices by the lake, and saw in the distance the swaying lights of a dozen lanterns and torches. I turned back to Harmwell, to share my relief, and discovered him facing the way we had come with a hand cupped over his ear.

"Listen, Mr Shield. Listen."

A moment later, I heard it too. Somewhere below us, perhaps on the lane by Grange Cottage, came the sound of hooves, muffled by the snow and moving very slowly.

"Come," I said. "The boys are growing colder."

Without further words, we staggered on towards our rescuers. Charlie lay inert and silent on Harmwell's shoulder as we plodded towards the lights dancing in the darkness.

"The monk ran away from us, sir," Edgar whispered. "We did not see him but we heard him."

"What?" said Harmwell. "What was that?"

"Hush now," I replied, thinking of those hoof-beats. "We must save our breath."

After what seemed like hours, our rescuers reached us, and willing hands received our burdens. We had men enough to spare – Sophie and Mrs Kerridge had woken Miss Carswall, and together they had roused the household and the stables. At the lake we divided into two parties. One took the boys back to the mansion. Harmwell and I led the remaining five men up the defile to the ice-house. The sight of Mrs Johnson in trousers seemed to shock some of them more than the fact of her death. We brought her up from the pit of the chamber – it was no easy task, and it needed all of us to do it. We laid her on a leaf of the ice-house's inner doors, covered her face with her cloak for decency's sake and bore her away on her makeshift bier.