Ian McGuire - The North Water

“I’m the only one left alive from the crew, the only one who knows.”

“Aye, but who are you exactly? An Irishman of uncertain provenance. There would have to be investigations, Patrick, probings into your past, your time in India. Oh, you could make things uncomfortable for me, I’m sure, but I could do the same for you and much worse if I wished to. Do you want to waste your time and energies like that? And for what end? Drax is dead now and the ships are both sunk. No bugger’s coming back to life again, I promise you that.”

“I could shoot you dead right here and now.”

“You certainly could, but then you would have two murders on your hands and what good would that do you? You need to use your head now, Patrick. This is your chance to put everything behind you, to start afresh. How often in life does a man get such a rare opportunity? You’ve done me a great service by killing Henry Drax, however it came about, and I’ll happily pay you for the work. I’ll give you fifty guineas in your hand tonight, and you can put that gun down and walk out of this house and never look backwards.”

Sumner doesn’t move.

“There’s no train until morning,” he says.

“Then take a horse from my stable. I can saddle it for you myself.”

Baxter smiles, then stands up slowly and walks across to the large iron safe standing in one corner of the study. He unlocks it, takes out a brown canvas wallet, and passes the wallet to Sumner.

“There’s fifty guineas in gold for you,” he says. “Get yourself down to London. Forget the fucking Volunteer , forget Henry Drax. None of that is real anymore. It’s the future that matters now, not the past. And don’t worry about the timber yard either. I’ll make up some story about that to throw them off the trail.”

Sumner looks at the wallet, weighs it in his hand for a while, but doesn’t answer. He thought he knew his limits, but everything is changed now — the world is unhinged, free-floating. He knows he must act quickly, he must do something before it changes back again, before it hardens around and fixes him. But what?

“Are we agreed then?” Baxter says.

Sumner puts the wallet on the desk and looks towards the open safe.

“Give me the rest of it,” he says, “and I’ll leave you be.”

Baxter frowns.

“The rest of what?”

“All that’s in the safe there. Every fucking penny.”

Baxter smiles easily, as though taking it for a joke.

“Fifty guineas is a good amount, Patrick. But I’ll happily give you twenty more on top if you truly feel the need of it.”

“I want all of it. However much is in there. Everything.”

Baxter stops smiling and stares.

“So you came here to rob me? Is that it?”

“I’m using my head as you advised me to. You’re right, the truth won’t help me now, but that pile of money surely will.”

Baxter scowls. His nostrils flare, but he makes no move towards the safe.

“I don’t believe you’ll murder me in my own house,” he says. “I don’t believe you have the balls to do such a thing.”

Sumner points the gun at Baxter’s head and cocks the hammer. Some men weaken at the death, he tells himself. Some men start out strong, then soften. But that can’t be me. Not now.

“I just killed Henry Drax with a broken saw blade,” he says. “Do you really think putting a bullet in your skull is going to strain my nerves?”

Baxter’s jaw tightens, and his eager eyes jerk sideways.

“A saw blade, was it?” he says.

“Get that leather satchel,” Sumner tells him, pointing with the gun. “Fill it up.”

After a minute’s pause, Baxter does as he is told. Sumner checks that the safe is empty, then tells him to turn about and face the wall. He cuts the satin cordage off the curtain swag with his pocketknife, binds Baxter’s hands behind his back, then pushes a napkin into his mouth and gags him with his cravat.

“Now take me to the stables,” Sumner says. “You lead the way.”

They pass along the rear hallway and then through the kitchen. Sumner unbolts the back door and they step down into the ornamental garden. There are gravel pathways and raised flower beds, a fish pond and a cast-iron fountain. He prods Baxter forwards. They pass a potting shed and a fretworked gazebo rimmed with box. When they reach the stable block, Sumner opens the side door and peers inside. There are three wooden stalls and a tack room with awls, hammers, and a workbench. There is an oil lamp on a shelf near the door. He pushes Baxter into a corner, lights the lamp, then takes a length of rope from the tack room and forms a noose with one end of it. He puts the noose around Baxter’s neck, tightens it until his eyes bulge, and loops the other end of the rope over a joist. He tugs down hard until the chamois soles of Baxter’s embroidered slippers are barely touching the grimy floorboards, then makes it fast to a peg on the wall. Baxter groans.

“You stay calm and quiet, and they’ll find you alive in the morning,” Sumner says. “If you fret or struggle, it may not end so well.”

There are three horses in the stable — two are black, young and lively-looking, and the other is an older gray. He takes the gray out from its stall and saddles it. When it snorts and shuffles about, he rubs its neck and hums a tune until it quiets enough to take the bit. He turns down the oil lamp, then opens the main doors and waits a minute, listening and watching carefully. He hears the whine and burble of wind in the trees, the hissing of a cat, but nothing worse. The mews is empty: light seeps upwards from the sentried gas lamps into an umbrous sky. He swings the satchel onto the horse’s withers and pushes his boot into the stirrup iron.

* * *

Dawn finds him twenty miles to the north. He passes through Driffield without pausing. At Gorton, he stops to let the horse drink from the mere, then continues in the semidarkness northwest through the beech and sycamore woods and along the dry valley floors. As the sky lightens, plowed fields appear stretched out on either side, their deep furrows specked with brighter lumps of chalk. The hedgerows are tangled and crosshatched with dead nettle, knapweed, and bramble. Close to noon he reaches the brow of the Wolds’ northern scarp and descends to the patchwork plain below. When he enters the town of Pickering it is night again, the blue-black sky is dense with stars, and he is dazed and queasy from hunger and lack of sleep. He finds a livery stable for the horse and takes a room at the inn beside it. When they ask, he tells them his name is Peter Batchelor and he is on his way from York to Whitby to see his uncle, who has taken ill and may be dying.

He sleeps that night with Drax’s gun gripped tight in his right hand and the leather satchel shoved beneath the iron bedstead. In the early morning, he eats porridge and kidneys for breakfast and takes a heel of bread with dripping wrapped in butcher’s paper for his tea. After six or seven miles, the road north begins to rise steadily past stands of pine and roughened sheep fields. Hedgerows stutter, then disappear, grass gives way to gorse and bracken; the landscape hardens and reduces. Soon he is up on the moor. All around him, continents of dark-edged clouds dangle above a treeless unbalance of purple, brown, and green. He feels a sharp new chill in the heightened air. If Baxter sends men to look for him, he is almost sure they will not look for him here, not immediately at least — to the west perhaps or to the south in Lincolnshire but not here, not yet. He has another day or so, he expects, before the reports from Hull reach Pickering, enough time for him to arrive at the coast and find a ship that will carry him east to Holland or Germany. When he gets to Europe, he will use Baxter’s money to disappear, become someone else. He will take a new name and find a new profession. Everything erstwhile will be forgotten, he tells himself; everything that has lingered on will be wiped clean.