Caro Peacock - Death at Dawn - A Liberty Lane Thriller

Miss Lane ,

You do not know me, but I take the liberty of addressing you with distressing news. Your father, Thomas Jacques Lane, was killed this Saturday, seventeenth June, in a duel at Calais …

CHAPTER TWO

Everybody knows the place in Calais where gentlemen go to fight duels, the long stretch of beach with the sand-hills behind. People point it out to each other from the deck of the steam packet. By the time the first grey light came in through the doorway of the fisherman’s hut I knew that the one thing I wanted to do was follow the route my father would have taken three days before, at much this time of the morning. I unwrapped myself from the nets, brushed dry fish scales from my dress and walked along the harbour front, past shuttered houses and rows of tied-up fishing boats. Eventually the cobbled road runs out in a litter of nets and crab pots, just above the fringe of bladder wrack and driftwood that marks high tide line. They would have left their carriage there.

No carriage this morning, nothing but a fisherman’s cart made of old planks, bleached silver by the wind and sea, with shafts just wide enough for a donkey. No pony, even the most ill-used one, could be so thin. The owner of the cart probably lived in one of the little row of hovels built of rocks and ships’ timbers, so tilted and ramshackle they looked as if some especially high tide had dropped them. The windows were closed with warped wooden shutters. There was nobody looking out of them so early in the morning, not even a fisherman’s wife watching for her husband. In any case, a fisherman’s wife would know there was no use looking out for boats with the tide so very low, almost at its lowest, the silver strip of sea hardly visible across the wide sands. Would it have been so low at first light three days ago? I thought I must buy or borrow an almanack when I go back into the town. It might be of some importance to know. Anything might be of some importance, it was simply a matter of knowing what.

Later, I’d come back and try to talk to the fishermen’s wives. It’s easier, usually, to talk to women than to men.

‘I am sorry for disturbing you, madame, but can you recall a carriage drawing up there where the road runs out, three mornings ago? Just as it was getting light, it would have been, or even while it was still dark.’

They might quite easily have arrived in the dark, perhaps waited in the carriage until that first strange, flat light that comes before sunrise, when they could see to walk along the beach. I’m sure if he had met a fisherman’s wife that morning, he’d have raised his hat and wished her good day. But almost certainly he did not meet her, the morning being so early. And even if she had met him or seen the carriage standing there, I don’t suppose for one moment she’d tell me. The men and women who live in that ruckle of cottages must be used to seeing carriages drive up in the early morning, dark silhouettes of gentlemen against the pale dawn sky walking across the sands, but I’m sure they don’t talk about them to strangers. These gentlemen and their purposes have nothing to do with the fishermen’s world, any more than if they’d come down from the moon, and the fishermen will know there is no good in what’s happening, nothing but harm and blame. So I should ask, but nobody would tell me. It was simply one of those things which must be done.

Now that I considered, there should have been two carriages, not one. But then, he might not have come by carriage. It was only a short walk out here from the town and he was never one for taking a carriage when he could go on foot. He might have slipped out of the side door of an inn while it was still dark, the horses asleep in their stalls, only the dull glow of a fire through the kitchen window, where some poor skivvy was starting to poke up the fire for coffee. I dare say he’d have liked a cup of coffee, only he couldn’t wait. So he might have walked here and seen the other carriage drawn up already and gone on without pausing over the sand.

Alone? He shouldn’t have been alone. There should have been a friend with him – or at least somebody he called a friend. In that case, they would have stayed the night together in an inn. If I asked around the town somebody surely would have seen the two of them together and be able to describe the other man. I’d do that later, when I come back from my walk.

The sand was firm underfoot, only I wished I’d brought stouter footwear. But then my escape from Chalke Bissett had been so hurried I’d had no time to go to the bootroom and find the pair I keep for country walking. Besides, when I escaped I had no notion in my head of walking over French beaches. A day or two on English pavements was the very worst I’d thought to expect. Still, the shoes were carrying me well enough. The ramshackle cottages were already a mile behind me, the sand dunes and the point at the far end of the beach in sight. Nearer the tideline, there was a gloss of salt water over the sand. My foot pressed down, making a margin of lighter sand, then the footprint filled up with dark water behind me. Salt water and sand were splashing up to the hem of my skirts, making them drag damply round my ankles. From here, if there were figures on the point you’d be sure to see them. He would have seen them – three of them – with the sun rising behind them. They would have to pay attention to that sun, be quite sure it didn’t get in their eyes. The figures would be waiting there, just where the gull has landed, and my father and the man he called his friend would have walked over to them, not slowly but not too fast either, like rational people who have business together. They’d have shaken hands when they met, I know that, and serious words would be spoken, a question put, heads shaken.

‘Since your principal refuses to offer an apology, then things must proceed to their conclusion. Would you care to choose, sir?’

And the black, velvet-lined case would be snapped open. As the man challenged, my father would have first choice. So he’d take a pistol, weigh it in his hand and nod, and the other man would take the other. How do I know? The way that anybody who reads novels knows. I confess with shame that ten years or so ago, around the age of twelve when much silliness is imagined, the etiquette of the duel had a morbid fascination for me. I revelled in wronged, dark-haired heroes, their fine features admitting not the faintest trace of anxiety as they removed their jackets to expose faultless white linen shirt-fronts over their noble and so vulnerable breasts, shook hands with their seconds (who – not being heroes – were permitted a slight tremor of the fingers) then strode unconcernedly to the fatal line, as if … Oh, and any other nonsense you care to add. Write it for yourselves and thank the gods that no girl stays a twelve-year-old for ever. But that’s why I knew enough to imagine how it would have happened three days before, at very much this time in the morning. The two pistol shots, almost simultaneous. Then the frightened seabirds wheeling and crying – unless the seagulls on the Calais sands are so blasé by now that they are not in the least alarmed by duellists’ shots. A figure flat on the sand, the two seconds bending over him, the doctor opening his bag. A little further off, the survivor with his left arm over his eyes to shield out the dreadful sight, pistol pointed to the sand, anger drained out of him; ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’

‘It really is the most appalling nonsense,’ my father said. ‘I wish you would not read these things.’

Back to being twelve, and my father – who was so rarely angry with anything or anybody – much annoyed with me. I had just twirled into the room in my new satin shoes and a fantasy of being a princess carelessly mislaid at birth – trilling that I hoped one day men might fight a duel for love of me. He’d caught me in mid-twirl, plumped me down in a chair and talked to me seriously.