'But we cannot be sure they did not.'
Harmwell said matter-of-factly, 'They had no reason to. Besides, if a living creature had been caught in a mantrap, man or beast, we should almost certainly have heard the screams.'
He strode tirelessly forward with long gliding steps, his legs slightly bent at the knee. I staggered after him, thinking of reasons why a boy in a mantrap might not scream: he had fainted from the pain, he had lost his voice, he was dead. The image of the mantrap filled my mind until it became an emblem of all that was cold, ruthless and inhumane, all that preyed on the weak, the poor and the unfortunate. The snow slackened and at last dwindled to the occasional flake. To the east a few stars appeared over the lake, though most of the sky remained cloudy.
'How did you know it was a mantrap?' I asked in a trembling voice.
'When one is habituated to it, the clang it produces is quite distinctive.'
'You speak with the experience of the hunter?'
He left a pause before he replied, 'And of the hunted.'
We came at length to the mouth of the defile leading to the icehouse. Our progress became slower and slower. The ground was strewn with the consequences of the autumn gales, pieces of rock, uprooted trees, and branches, all disguised by the snow and blanketed further by the darkness. Nor was there as much shelter here as I had expected, for the wind had changed direction during the evening and was now blowing across the lake and up towards the ice-house. With the wind had come the snow.
A few paces ahead of me, Harmwell crouched and again examined the ground. 'Someone else has been here recently,' he said over his shoulder. 'Perhaps more than one.'
I brought my mouth so close to his ear I felt the coldness of his skin. 'You do not mean the boys?'
'Grown men, I think. But I cannot be sure, not in this light – the tracks are confused.'
We hurried up the path until at last we came to the ice-house. The double doors stood wide.
'They are here!' I cried.
'It does not follow,' Harmwell said. 'The place was left open. The workmen desired to air the place overnight.'
'But someone has been here,' I said. 'Look at the snow in the doorway.'
As I spoke, we stepped into the passage. The familiar stench of decay, less powerful than before, swept out to meet us. Harmwell pushed roughly past and, holding his lantern high, preceded me towards the chamber. I pulled my muffler over my nose and mouth and followed.
The inner doors were open. We looked into the black depths of the pit. The light from the lanterns, feeble though it was, flowed like water into the darkness below.
'Oh God,' I murmured. 'Oh dear God.'
Harmwell clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. 'Who is it?' he said.
I did not answer. Lying on the floor of the pit was the body of a man, face-down, his head obscured by a hat. He wore a long dark coat with a high collar. His arms were outstretched, and his body was embedded in the thin layer of dirty straw and slush.
'Who is it?' said Harmwell again, and there was a thrill of urgency in his voice. 'For Christ's sake, man, who is it?'
61
There are memories that haunt the mind like ghosts: some benign, some not, but in either case one cannot avoid them, one cannot pretend they do not exist. So, though I do not care to dwell on what happened next, I shall set it down here, in its proper place.
First, the light. The only source of illumination, of course, was from our lanterns. A faint, murky radiance filled the chamber, as unsettling as marsh gas, making the very air seem solid and unwholesome. The stones, the brickwork, the slush on the floor, the thing that lay in the bottom of the pit – everything glistened with drops of moisture that reflected back what little light there was.
I glanced at Harmwell, who was holding the jamb of the door with one hand and staring down at the body. I fancied there was a clammy sheen on his black cheek. He was muttering something under his breath, a continuous mumble, perhaps a prayer.
'Who is it?' he repeated, speaking low, but his rich, deep voice rolled round the ice-house and bounced back at us like the light of the lanterns.
'I don't know.'
But I did know. That was what made it infinitely worse. I grasped the bracket on the wall, set the lantern on the threshold of the doorway, and swung my weight into the void. My foot lodged on a rung of the iron ladder. Step by step I descended, climbing slowly because of the damp flapping skirts of my topcoat. The foetid smell rose up to greet me, growing stronger and thicker with every step I took.
'Shall I lower the lantern?' Harmwell called down.
The cold was intense: it seemed to creep into my bones and take up residence there.
'Mr Shield? Mr Shield?'
I looked upward and saw Harmwell's face, the whites of the eyes shockingly vivid, poised over the pit. I gave a little shake of the head; I was reluctant to speak for that would mean opening my mouth and allowing in more of that foul air. I lowered my foot on to the next rung. No need for a lantern because I knew what I would find on the floor: a nightmare which would poison all our lives, that would fill every crack and cranny of our existence like the air itself.
My right boot splashed into the mess of straw and icy water that carpeted the floor. The body, a black, wet bundle, lay with its head near the foot of the ladder, and its feet towards the centre of the chamber. Propped against the wall was a cartwheel. I stared at it stupidly, trying to imagine what it was doing here, where no wagon would ever come. I stripped off my right glove and extended my arm towards the wheel. Where my fingers expected wood, they found the cold, abrasive surface of rusting cast-iron.
'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.
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.
