T. Boyle - Water Music

♦ ♦ ♦

That was in the summer, when days were long and nights as soft as a mother’s breast.

Now, with two months of winter and the New Year behind them, things are getting rough. For one thing, they are out of money. Boyles had all of six shillings on him when they decided to melt into the shadows, and Ned’s seventy-four pounds (an amount accruing in large part from the sale of the elder Osprey’s remains on the open market and the appropriation of the junior Osprey’s wallet and other effects) has been exhausted by the demands of lodging by the night in order to keep on the move. For another thing, the weather has turned against them. A cold wave is sweeping in off the North Sea with a frightening intensity, cracking foundations, smoothing over the Thames, spreading ague, pneumonia and influenza in its wake. While pigeons fall from the sky like stones and workhorses stiffen and die in their stalls, Rise and Boyles have had to make do with cold porridge and a bed in the straw. Still worse, Osprey has refused to give up the chase, sniffing them out of every hole they manage to crawl into, setting up a fierce bloodthirsty baying at their backs, ruining their digestion, assailing their peace of mind, hiding a bogey in every bush and making a gibbet of every streetlamp.

Currently they are huddled over a fire beneath the Blackfriars Bridge, muffled and miserable, noses plugged with mucus, feet numb, stomachs growling. They sit there for nearly half an hour, hugging their sides and staring into the flames, before Ned turns to his companion and whispers in his ear. Ten other vagrants are shivering round the fire. None even bothers to look up. Out on the river the shifting ice groans like a chorus of drowned men.

“There’s a woman buried tonight up at St. Paul’s,” Ned says.

“Wot, with the ground froze?”

Ned grins. “That makes it all the easier for us, don’t you see? She’ll be just lying there atop the grave for a few days till the gravedigger can open it up for her.”

Boyles’ nose is running. His eyes have sunk deep in their sockets, like two feverish little creatures retreating into their burrows. His voice is reproachful. “You got me into this, Neddy.”

“Crump did.”

Boyles turns back to the fire, carefully clears each nostril, and lets the idea drift through the gin-impaired circuits of his brain for a minute or two. “I could sure use a cup of negus and maybe some hot soup,” he sniffs. “And I wouldn’t mind passin’ the night on a bench in a inn someplace neither.” He pauses to cough up a clot of white serum. “But can we risk it?”

“Shit. We’ll freeze to death if we don’t.”

♦ ♦ ♦

It is past three in the morning when they slip into the cemetery. The night sky is a cauldron of clouds, white, black, a hundred shades of gray. There is wind, and that numbing, headaching cold that penetrates every cell and whispers death in your ears. Ned is in a hurry. Trembling with the cold, thinking only to snatch the corpse, stash it someplace and find a ginshop where they can sleep on the floor for a farthing, already envisioning Bluestone the surgeon counting the notes out in his hand and the bed and supper they’ll have by this time tomorrow. Osprey? He tries not to think of him, need rationalizing fear — how could anyone, even the devil himself, carry a grudge so far as to keep watch in a cemetery on a deathly cold night eight months after the fact? No, if he were Osprey he’d be in bed now, with a woman to keep him warm and a fire that lit the room like Guy Fawkes Day. .

There is a sudden sharp sound at his back and he spins around, tense as a cat, until he realizes it’s only Boyles stumbling over the gate. He waits for his accomplice to come loping up out of the shadows, then motions for him to stay put. Ned slips off, the brief scare snapping him out of his rapture, suffusing him with blood and adrenalin, his heart turning over like a machine. Five minutes later he locates the coffin — a plain deal box set between a pair of grave markers at the far end of the churchyard. He crouches low and watches for a full sixty seconds or more, the wind hanging in the vacant trees, the cold creeping up his legs, then starts forward.

But then there’s another sound — off to his left — a rippling or snapping like wash on a line. He hesitates, all his instincts shouting watch out, watch out , the cold prodding him on, whispering it’s all right, make the snatch, get warm, stay alive. He takes a tentative step forward. There it is again. Ripple, flap. Something is wrong. Dead wrong. Crouching, he slips off to his left, breath sucked back, heart churning, every muscle strung tight against the bone.

The sound becomes more insistent as he draws closer, its rhythm geared to the rise and fall of the wind. Spooked, he pictures a host of the dead standing silent atop their tombs, cerements rustling in the breeze, skeletal hands reaching out in mute appeal. But no, there must be a rational explanation. . He moves closer, ripple, flap. There: the sound seems to be emanating from the bank of shadow up ahead — a sepulcher, isn’t it? Yes, a sepulcher, oblong, massive, looming over the dark ranks of headstones like the passageway to the underworld. He moves closer still, and is startled to realize that the whole thing seems to be moving, undulating somehow with the slow soft wash of a gentle sea. Too dark to see, he reaches out a hand to touch it — and comes up with a handful of cloth. Strange. Someone has draped the entire thing in black muslin. In Memoriam? Another nob laid to rest?

He doesn’t have time to puzzle over it. The cold speaks to him again and he is about to turn back to his task, satisfied, when another sound, far more arresting, takes hold of him like a clenched fist and freezes every muscle in his body. Faint and muffled, a sound of voices — from inside the tomb! This is too much. For all his recent experience in darkened graveyards he wants to piss his pants, take to his heels, creep back to Blackfriars Bridge and lie down to die of the cold. But then a sudden gust lifts the sheets and a sliver of light cuts the darkness. A new fear comes over him, far more terrible than any thought of ghosts and goblins. His joints tremble with it. He is beginning to understand.

Carefully, carefully, he slips beneath the black sheet and huddles over the stone door that gives onto the tomb. It is ever so slightly ajar. He puts his eye to the opening.

Inside, by the dim glow of an oil lamp, three men in furs are sitting round a coffin, playing cards. Their feet are propped up on iron bed warmers; clouds of suspended breath dog their movements. Ned’s view is partially obstructed by the back of the man nearest him, but when the man sits up to look at his hand Ned realizes with a start that the cardplayer in the far corner is Osprey. Suddenly Osprey throws in his cards. “Hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?” he says to the figure with his back turned.

“Aww, ‘ave a ‘eart, Claude. There ain’t nobody goin’ to be out on a night like this, not the divil nor ‘is dam.”

All the light from the lamp is puddled in Osprey’s eyes until they seem to glow with a preternatural light. He sighs, and casually draws a pistol from the lining of his coat. “I said: hadn’t you better be making your rounds, Mr. Crump?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Back at the gate Ned claps one hand over Boyles’ mouth, the other round his shoulder. He leads him from the cemetery and up a side street at a jog. Three blocks later a winded Boyles stops and spins his friend round by the arm. “Wot’s up, Neddy? Where we headed?”

Ned’s face is veiled in shadow. His voice is harsh, nagged at by the cold, muffled in the scarf drawn over his mouth and nose. “Hertford,” he whispers.