Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

A small, closed carriage, painted black and rather the worse for wear, was standing at the corner by the lamp-stand. As I drew near, the door opened and a swarthy man dressed in shabby black clothes leaned out and asked me the quickest way to Covent Garden.

Simultaneously, a second man, also in black, came round the back of the carriage and seized my arm. The first man grabbed my lapels. Between them, they pulled and pushed me into the carriage. The second man followed me in, shutting the door behind him. The carriage moved off with a jerk.

With three of us inside, there was barely room to move, let alone to struggle. The blinds were down and there was scarcely any light. The first man had his arm round my neck, drawing my head back. I felt the prick of a knife at my throat.

"Stay still, cully," he murmured. "Stay still or we've got a nasty accident on our hands."

As the carriage rattled and bumped through streets filled with the noise of a London morning, a ritual was acted out inside it. I use the word ritual with care. My captors knew so precisely what they were doing that there was a negligent, familiar ease about their movements. The second man tied my wrists in front of me, inserted a filthy rag in my mouth, and finally lashed my knees together.

By now I was huddled in the corner of the seat, still with the tip of a knife at my throat. Neither man spoke. The confined space was filled with the sound of our breathing and the smell of our bodies. I tried without success to bring my mind to grapple with my situation; but fear inhibits rational thought. Over and over again I cursed my own folly at remaining in the house at Gaunt-court, and not seeking refuge under another name and in another city. Once again, and in far more brutal circumstances than before, I had become a mere cypher in my own life.

We came to a halt again. I felt and heard our driver jumping down from the box, the sound of voices and of heavy gates being unbarred and drawn back. Then the horses began to move again. At that moment my head was roughly seized and a bandage placed over my eyes. The carriage door opened. A current of fresh air swept inside. One of my companions jumped down. Between them they dragged me out of the carriage. In a moment I found myself in the open air with a man on either side to hold my arms.

Owing to the bonds around my knees, I could not walk. Grunting and swearing, the men dragged me across cobbles, my boots bumping up and down, and pulled me into a place that smelled strongly of sawdust and varnish. It was at this point that my nightmare entered a still more terrible phase. Without warning my feet were lifted away from the ground and I felt myself hoisted aloft on strong arms, my body moving from the vertical to the horizontal. I was raised and then lowered. There was a glancing blow to the back of my head. It was followed by a laugh, expressive of unforced merriment and wholly unexpected in that grim setting.

"The cove's too long," someone said. "Have to cut off the feet again."

"No," said another man. "Take his boots off- that should do it."

My boots were roughly removed. I was now lying on my back, with my elbows, the crown of my head and the soles of my stockinged feet touching hard surfaces. A heavy object fell on my leg. I twitched involuntarily. Something else fell beside it and then the third item. I stretched down my bound hands and made out the shape of a boot-heel.

"Hey, lad," said the voice of the first man. "There's air holes. You can breathe. Not very big holes, though. If you was stupid enough to make a row, you'd need more air, and you couldn't get it, could you? So keep quiet as a mouse."

At first I could not understand him, for there was plenty of air, albeit laden with the scents of sawdust and varnish and an underlying tang of horse manure. Then I heard a great clatter a few inches above my head and sensed a sudden enclosing, a diminution of the light. All at once, a terrible racket broke out about me. My ears filled with the sound of hammering, so close that the nails might have been driven into me. There must have been two or three of them wielding hammers, and in that confined space, which acted like a drum, it seemed like a multitude. They were nailing me up in a box no larger than a coffin.

All at once, the terrible truth burst over me. I recalled what I knew of the dimensions of the box, and put them together with the black carriage and the rusty black clothes of the two men. I realised that the box was not like a coffin: it was a coffin.

I was to be buried alive. I had no doubt of it whatsoever. I faced the prospect of a lingering and horrible death.

My captors transferred me to another conveyance, probably a closed cart. We drove for what seemed like hours but might have been as many minutes. Time means very little without a way of measuring it.

I tried to struggle – of course I did. Yet the dimensions of the coffin, the presence of my boots and hat with me, the shortage of air, and above all the tightness of my bonds made it almost impossible for me to move at all. All I could manage was the faintest of whimpers from my parched throat and an ineffectual knocking of my elbows against the sides of my prison. I doubt if the sounds I made could have been heard by anyone sitting directly on the other side of the coffin, let alone by those in the street.

My intellectual faculties were equally paralysed. I wish I could say that I faced what lay before me with calmness. In the abstract, it is perfectly true that if you cannot avoid death, you might as well look it in the eye. But the needs of the moment swamped such lofty considerations. To continue to breathe – to continue to live – nothing else mattered.

We came to another halt. I half felt, half heard a great clatter and then a jolt. There was a knocking on the roof of my little prison. Someone laughed, a high sound with an edge of hysteria. The coffin swayed and bumped and banged. It tilted violently to a sharp angle. This, together with a series of irregular thuds, told me that we were mounting a flight of stairs. The coffin levelled out and a few paces later I heard a man's voice, but could not make out the words.

The coffin groaned and screeched: someone was raising the lid. Currents of air flowed around me. The tip of the crowbar came so far inside that it grazed my scalp. I felt a burst of intense happiness.

"Remove the gag," said a man whose voice was familiar. "Then the blindfold."

I retched when they pulled the rag from my parched mouth. I tried and failed to say the word "water". A hand gripped my hair and pulled up my head. Fingers tugged at the knot of the blindfold. Light flooded into my eyes, so bright that I moaned with the shock of it. I could see nothing but whiteness. I closed my eyes.

"Give him a drink," said the voice. "Then leave us."

A hand cradled the back of my head. A container made of metal rattled against my teeth. Suddenly there was water everywhere, flooding down my face, finding its way between my cravat and my neck, filling my mouth and trickling down my throat and making me gag. The mug withdrew.

"More," I croaked. "More."

The mug returned. I was so weak that I could not satisfy my thirst.

"Leave us," the man commanded.

I heard footsteps – two sets, I fancy – on a bare floor and the sound of a door opening and closing. There was water on my lashes, and I did not know whether it came from the metal cup or from my tears. My eyes were still screwed shut against the light. Slowly I opened them. All I could see was a sagging ceiling, fissured with cracks, with the lathes exposed on one side where the plaster had crumbled away.

"Sit up," said the voice.

I hooked my bound hands round the rim of the coffin and eventually managed to bring myself into a sitting position. The first thing I saw was a great, grey mass of hair below a black velvet skull cap, like a hanging judge's. I lowered my eyes to the face, which was on the level of my own. Recognition flooded into me with a sense of inevitability.